Saturday Morning Gaming: Spoiler Theory (with regards to Cyberpunk 2077)
Okay. Cyberpunk 2077 has a release date of November 19, 2020. Remember when we first mentioned it? It was back in March 2013. We thought the game would be coming out in 2015. How young we were!
Since then, I’ve wandered from wanting to know absolutely everything about the game to kinda trying to avoid finding information. As such, it was only recently that I found out that there are three different “paths” you can play in Cyberpunk 2077: Corporate, Nomad, and Street Kid. Awesome, I thought. Then I remembered the 2019 Cinematic Trailer (content warning: strong language, graphic violence):
Okay. That’s the Street Kid storyline. Or a hint of it, anyway. And that got me thinking about video game theory. Let’s say that you want to write a main storyline and have a couple hundred side-quests that are available to everybody who plays the game BUT, at the same time, make the game replayable as heck?
Well, one thing to do is to tweak the emotions of the player. It’s not how you do the quest, it’s how you FEEL about the quest. How you FEEL can be new and fresh even though you’ve done this quest before.
Let’s go back to Dragon Age (the first one). They had six (SIX!) different starting chapters. A Dwarf from a Noble House. A Casteless Dwarf. A Human from a Noble House. A Human (or Elven) Wizard. A City Elf. A Dalish (forest) Elf. Sure, the main storyline had you fight The Blight… but that starting chapter changed how you felt about every single person you interacted with for the rest of the game. If you started off playing as a Casteless Dwarf (as I did), you had very strong feelings about Dwarven Society and you really didn’t give a fig about Arl Howe. I mean, sure, he was a jerk and you had some quests that involved him but, really, he was just this Human Noble who did Human Noble things the way that Human Nobles do. What you cared about was making things right back in Orzammar. When you finally do wander back there, there are a bunch of quests that have you pick sides between your old friends and your old enemies… and, of course, now you are several levels higher in skill than you were back then. And you can pick who you end up helping.
When you replay the game as a Human Noble, you are quickly thrown into an attack on your ancestral home by the wicked Arl Howe. Oh, gosh! How you hate him! He killed your family! He stole what was rightly yours! And, by Andraste, YOU WILL HAVE VENGEANCE! And as you wander the world doing the main quest, you find yourself wandering through Dwarven lands and there’s all kinds of bickering between the various houses there and, jeez guys. Lighten up, right?
And so, with that in mind, I rewatch the Cyberpunk trailer.
You’re a Street Rat. The corporation killed your friend. Your old fixer contact stabbed you in the back even though you got him what he asked for. Now it’s time for you to get revenge. You start at the bottom but, hey, that’s where you’ve always been. No place to go but up from here. You wake up outside. Keanu Reeves is there. How do you feel about things?
So then I thought… well, what about the other paths? Corporate is easy. The trailer mentions the corporate cops that killed your buddy. So… if you’re playing as a corporate, you’re the corporation in the deal that went bad. It went bad under your watch. You had it on easy street but then these street rats came in and didn’t know how to do a deal and you’re left holding the bag after making your boss look bad. You’re Fired. You get kicked to the curb for one friggin’ mistake made and then you get stabbed in the back. Keanu Reeves is there. How do you feel about things?
The Nomad, then. Well, the Street Rat had a deal with someone else, right? Hey, let’s make it the Nomad. This Street Rat comes in, steals YOUR stuff even though you went to all the trouble to make the Corporation your guarantor and everything. The Street Rat gets away, the Corporation flubs everything up, and now your stuff has been stolen and you’re out of luck. Keanu Reeves is there. How do you feel about things?
All of the above is nothing but pure speculation, of course. The only information that I have is the information that you also have (and it’s quite possible that you have more than me, because most of my information comes from the widely-released trailers but not, you know, digging for information in the various forae and subreddits. Because I know that, if I do, I’ll start thinking about video game theory and start spoiling myself.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is “Carbon Fiber Spoiler” by tom@hk and is licensed under CC BY 2.0)
That trailer looks fantastic.
I usually time my PC upgrades to meet the system requirements of whatever upcoming game I want to play (XCOM and XCOM 2 both triggered upgrades). Due to a processor failure a couple of months ago, my system is already more than capable of running CP2020. But what struck me is that the minimum requirements recommend an SSD.Report
I’ve never had a Gaming PC (I always looked lovingly at the Alienware ads in the computer game magazines) and by the time that I had a job that put Gaming PC money in my pocket, Costco off-the-shelf PCs were mostly strong enough to play the games that I wanted to play (that is: Not First Person Shooters) and anything that was sufficiently beefy was also available on console.
I’m thinking that the first version of the game that I’ll get will be for the PS4.
Which, I hope, won’t be cut off at the knees.Report
IIRC, Alienware PCs were always far more expensive than the sum of their parts, so that you basically ended up paying a thousand dollars or more for an Alienware case. Furthermore, the parts were often past the sweet spot on the price-performance curve, so you were paying a lot of money for only marginally better performance.
Game developers rarely make games that will only run on top-of-the-line PCs, because they want to sell a lot of copies, and you can’t do that if only 5% of PCs can run your game. I built my PC for about $1200 in parts 3 1/2 years ago, and it almost meets the recommended requirements for Cyberpunk 2077 (more system RAM and better CPU than recommended, while my video card has the same GPU but less VRAM than recommended).
This is fairly typical; a $1200 PC will usually run the next 3 years worth of games at medium or better settings. I know that not everyone can afford to spend $400/year on keeping a gaming PC up to date, but I think it’s reasonably within the typical middle-class entertainment budget.Report
Next week’s post will be about building a PC.
But what struck me about Alienware every time was that even the entry-level ones had specs that were nuts. “Who would ever need 256 megs of RAM?”, that sort of thing.Report
There should be a “law” that says code and data will always grow to twice the size of available memory.Report
Dude, let me advise you NOT to buy an Alienware game pc. I did. And I’ve had the motherboard and graphic card replaced TWICE. One time was in warranty, at least. My machine burns up the boards due to the heat it generates.Report
Oh, I’m not doing the Alienware thing. I am building one myself from scratch. (But we’ll get into this next week.)Report
Makes sense. Loading from a magnetic drive is slow, and loading from an SSD is fast. If a game needs to load a lot of data, as is typical these days, an SSD is going to greatly improve the experience.Report
I’ve been getting deep into Hades. It’s very good, the action is tight and fast, and despite being a roguelike there’s this plot that slowly develops as the game goes on. I’ve just “beaten” it for the first time, but its clear the game is nowhere near finished.Report
I’ve picked it up. I’m not so sure about the control scheme. Too much Diablo in my past.Report
Yeah, it’s a lot faster than Diablo, so a mouse-click control scheme would be too slow.Report
I am playing my way through the hardest level of Shadow of the Tomb Raider for the first time. I’d actually replayed it before with the difficult turned way way up, but there’s a special difficulty level that locks the game to all the way, and you can’t change it mid-game…and the difference with this level is it has no autosaves so you can only save at campsites.
It makes some sections really annoying if you end up having trouble near the end of it and it’s like a twenty minute combat+platforming+puzzle solving to slough back through there..and promptly die again.
And you always think ‘Well, I can just backtrack to the campsite and save, right? Kill these enemy, go back, save. Solve the next puzzle, walk back through the dead enemies, save. Etc’. That was my original plan.
Well…it is pretty obvious the game was specifically designed not to allow you to do it. A _startling_ amount of main game sections start with you either getting trapped behind something or having a one-way path, where you cannot go backwards.
The psychological pressure starts to creep on you, about ten minutes in you’re like ‘Where the hell is the next damn campsite so I can save? I don’t want to do all this again.’.
OTOH…I’m doing a lot better than I thought I would. Seriously, some sections I just breeze through, first time. I do tend to die in difficult fights the very first time, but the next time I’m mentally prepared and often make it. I think the most I’ve gotten hung up is a bit I had to try five times. So I’m pretty impressed with myself.Report
leaves from the vine
falling so slowReport