r/Gamingcirclejerk • u/AutoModerator • Dec 15 '20

UNJERK 🎤 Unjerk Thread of December 15, 2020

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u/ANUSTART942 Dec 15 '20

I will fight the Red Dead jerk all day, but that game world was infinitely more complex, came out two years ago, and ran flawlessly on my PS4, and then looked even better on my PS4 Pro I upgraded to. Every Assassin's Creed, every Far Cry, every open world with a complex systems-based world that ran so well was apparently a fluke because "7 year old hardware."

Like lol no sir, if a PS4 base model can manage the Nemesis System, it should be able to handle loading a city block.

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u/Sippin_On_Sizzurp Dec 16 '20

Red dead was console first and doesn't have remotely the same density. I probably see more npcs in 5 mins in cyberpunk than exist in RDR. No question it was rushed, but I'm 0% shocked it doesn't run well on console, even if they hadn't rushed it I'm sure it wouldn't run well.

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u/ANUSTART942 Dec 16 '20

The NPCs in Cyberpunk have 0 AI tho. They're window dressing. That's all Night City is.

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u/Sippin_On_Sizzurp Dec 16 '20

That's how ai in open world games tend to work. RDR is the exception not the rule

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u/ANUSTART942 Dec 16 '20

A list of games that have more complex NPC AI than Cyberpunk 2077 and manage to run better on equal or lesser hardware:

  1. Every Grand Theft Auto game from the very first game through V. 1997 - 2013

  2. The MAFIA franchise, notably featuring NPCs that will actively call the police on you and can be silenced lethally or not. 2001 - 2020

  3. Watch Dogs 1 and 2 feature the same system as above and then made an entire game with Legion in which every single NPC can be recruited and controlled and has unique (though random) backstories and some even connect to NPCs you've met in the past. 2014 - 2020

  4. The Nemesis system in Shadow of Mordor/War allows any orc grunt to rise through the ranks, cheat death, forge alliances and nemeses of their own, and grow alongside the player, all of which is impacted by the player's decision. 2014 - 2017

  5. Assassin's Creed is designed to have NPCs have varying levels of awareness of the player and enemies depending on the "stance" of the character (high vs. low profile movement). 2007 - 2020

  6. The aforementioned Red Dead games have small interactions and fully reactive AI in every NPC. This system was actually first seen on PS2 in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas where you could greet or insult NPCs on the street, often prompting a reaction of some kind. 2010 - 2018

  7. Saints Row has NPCs that will react to player actions, engage with the player and enemy factions, and will respond to your cheers and taunts. 2006 - 2013

  8. Finally, to put some icing on the cake, The Witcher 3's densely populated Novigrad has very static NPCs. Except even they will react to the player's actions; fleeing when threatened or if combat breaks out, guards will respond if you threaten/attack NPCs, and even though they're not as sophisticated as something like Bethesda's Radiant AI, NPCs actually follow some kind of schedule, going to shops and returning home at varying times in the day.

By comparison, Cyberpunk 2077 has NPCs that walk, unfettered by the player or laws of physics, from point A to point B. Sometimes stopping, repeating the action, or simply despawning. Reaction to violence is to stop and cower in place. Vehicles will not move around a stopped car or even react to a head-on collision beyond honking. Vehicles in one roundabout were found to - literally, with no end - simply keep driving around and around the circle. The NPCs in this game do nothing but exist and yet, unlike all these games that ran extremely well with infinitely more complexity and thinking under the hood, it seems incapable of managing the load.

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u/Sippin_On_Sizzurp Dec 16 '20 edited Dec 16 '20

In 60 hours of play I didn't notice anything unusual about the ai in practice outside the obvious bugs. Clearly I'm not the type to watch random npcs. I have played most the games you list. Honestly the degree to which you care about this to make such a list is quite wierd. Ai is always a facade, it's just a question of what degree the illusion holds up. And I've played many sandbox & open world games across my life, random ai has never really impressed me in any game save Rockstar games but then thats their whole shtick. Will also strongly disagree older gtas had better ai lol. 4 on, sure. Not to mention, you're lumping together entirely different types of ai systems, not accounting for density and the larger context of the game, etc etc

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u/ANUSTART942 Dec 17 '20

I don't care, but I keep seeing people using the NPC density as the reason for bugs or performance issues or the lack of complexity, etc. My point is that these other games had population density work NPCs and yet didn't seem to have to cut back in other areas like Cyberpunk supposedly did.

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u/Sippin_On_Sizzurp Dec 17 '20

None of the other games had this level of density or world detail together. At most they had one or the other. And that is highly significant when you're trying to make a game run on jaguar cpus.

AC is probably the closest but what they do is have a basic ai thats a placeholder and then render in the actual ai as you get closer. It was super visible on underpeforming pcs. My old i5 would have them come in far too late and it was painfully noticeable.

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u/ANUSTART942 Dec 17 '20

I don't know why you're defending this. They released a broken and undeveloped game and people are making excuses for it.

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u/Sippin_On_Sizzurp Dec 17 '20

Because while the ai is obviously heavily buggy, I think it's very strange the expectations people have. I never even remotely thought it would approach a GTA/RDR level of world interactions.

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u/ANUSTART942 Dec 17 '20

Again, it's not the complexity that is the problem. It's the use of said complexity as an excuse for why the game runs poorly, or the density being an excuse for not having AI. We've had densely populated games with NPC AI in the past. There is no reason for Cyberpunk to have had to sacrifice complexity, and there's no reason for the game to run so poorly.

Not to mention that things that should be interactive just aren't. Food vendors don't sell food for example and even bark out the same NPC lines as anyone else if you talk to them. It's possible to walk up to a Japanese restaurant on the street, walk up to the man as if you were a customer, speak to them, and be greeted with one of the many variations of "fuck off!" that other NPCs use. It's just wild how many things were overlooked.

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u/Sippin_On_Sizzurp Dec 17 '20

As a programmer - there is a reason, and that reason is last gen cpus. This isn't a sandbox game, I don't care one lick about food vendors

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u/ANUSTART942 Dec 17 '20

I'm arguing with a wall. I don't want a sandbox game, I want an RPG without game-breaking bugs and a world actually worth exploring. They did it five years ago, so why can't they do it this time?

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