The turbulent launch of Cyberpunk 2077 will soon become a master class on what not to do when starting a game, as more details surrounding the game and its development seem worse on the surface.
Aside from glitches, bugs and other technical issues, it has reached a point where players are exploring the full mechanics of sports trailers that haven’t made it into the final product over the years.
After comb through E3 2018 trailer highlights, First Gameplay trailer That same year, and from other official sources, we found many items left on the floor of the cutting room that could help keep the game alive until the hype.
What happened to Deep nada customization system?
If you watch that original 2018 gameplay trailer, the first minute-and-a-half of Vth Kathru shows and describes a comprehensive customization list, giving the player the perfect rule to create a Vine in any image they want. The UI showed different types of faces, put colors in a grid that could be followed, and the amount of options for things like hairstyles and tattoos seemed astronomical.
The final release, however, does not offer all the options. Customization has boiled down significantly, losing a lot of things that made this impressive in the first place. V, the player’s performance on what it looks like is still good, but it’s not close to the original that was promised. Granted, the trailer makes it clear that “nothing is final,” but the idea of harassing us with that customization suite and then launching what we got leaves a bad taste in the mouths of many players.
In fairness, the fluid class system where players simply determine certain qualities and points that the class does not like was delivered to the final product, so everything was not lost.
Where did the destructive atmosphere go?
Original gameplay for Cyberpunk 2077 Showing the game’s dynamic cover system, which still doesn’t exist, but also showed how temporary it is to get any cover. Destructive cover and atmosphere were a major consumer in the beginning, which gave the battles a more realistic feel as V was forced to move from one cover point to another.
Unfortunately, the catastrophic cover just doesn’t exist in the game that started. Hiding behind a cover has no imminent dangers around it; Unless you turn around or stand accidentally during a firefight, you can fight turtles through fights without really thinking about them. The lack of destruction won’t be a really big deal on its own, but it’s hard to overlook blending in with everything that’s missing in the game.
No more third-party cut-scenes
After transporting the patient to the trauma team (a scene that remained virtually unchanged from the 2018 gameplay demo outside of some dialogue) Jackie and V share the conversation in the elevator that plays into the interactive part with a third-person perspective. As we watched Customized V talking, smiling and communicating with Jackie out of his eyes, the demo driver gave us a second chance to see the crafted antihiro.
Seeing these scenes in the third person is completely removed from the final product, although in this particular case the end result may be seen as some more immersion. Everything now plays in real time, allowing players to look around while engaging in these scenes, and the transition between scene and gameplay is seamless. Not all cut materials are detrimental to the final product, and here we have an example of a design change that can be seen for the benefit of the game in the long run.
NPCs rich in detail no longer exist
Knight City’s NPC, with two excerpts from the GameExover statement, were the main focus in the gameplay trailer:
“We’ve greatly increased our crowdfunding and community systems to make it the most trusted city in any open pun-world game to date.“
“The streets of the city, with all day / night cycles, all aspects of life, are all buzzing with the crowds of people living their lives.”
The NPCs currently based in Knight City, however, do not appear to be displaying any of these qualities. Pedestrians are always standing out of sight of the player, multiple copies of the same NPC can sometimes appear, etc. In some cases the players have followed a citizen crossing the street, only to find that the only way to pass is often backwards.
When a player tries to attack an NPC on the street, any player immediately disappears into the line of sight, clearing an entire city block with a 360 degree turn. Most of the NPCs during the playthrough can be ignored Cyberpunk, but that doesn’t change the fact that their capabilities have dropped significantly in the two years since the trailer came out.
The graphics on the console are far below expectations
If we do not talk about the difference in graphics output between the PC and console versions, we will get rid of, which is noted at a very length from the beginning of the game. The Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 have their own focus with this game, but things are starting to change quickly as we dig into the last pay of the console.
The characters appear in thin air, their faces and features fading into the scene in real time. The 1440p / 4K experience is promised in all consoles reduced to 900p in some cases. Scenery washed out, the character M Was Dello who appears something outside of the PlayStation 2 era, the list goes on. The game is very vague on last-gen hardware, especially base models Dello, and those who still own that console should wait to upgrade before entering Night City.
Never promised, but never delivered
Gameplay trailers like a CD project Red showed us in 2018 that often due to time constraints and technical limitations of budget and target hardware those games will perform better than they can deliver themselves.
That said, the CD project is a bitter pill to swallow after seeing all the things that were included in Red’s final release. The trailer showed us a world full of potential, and the end result is definitely less unlimited.
If there’s a lesson here – and it is – that’s what we got for Cyberpunk 2077 (and No Man’s Sky, etc …) The early game trailers are that developers dream of amazing worlds, but the final product is skeptical … if it comes from a developer with a strong previous record.
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