Might get worse for CDPR....

[Chazore]

Alby_da_Wolf said:

The shiniest possible graphics look like the worst resource guzzler, leaving only the crumbs for deeper aspects of games like gameplay, AI, interactivity, openness, multidimensionality and nonlinearity.
The other enemy for games aiming at such deeper goals is how much time and money they can cost if the wishlist gets out of control, like in Star Citizen, if we want an example of a game where they try to fulfil the promises, but keep on promising too many new things and get caught in a neverending vicious circle, or like in Duke Nukem Forever, where 15 years of promises were actually fulfilled with a giant pile of dung. All this frightens both execs and investors, and the latter cannot really play innocent as if execs took the easy, shiny and sloppy, but financially safest choice by themselves.
The only solution could be to decide the deepest aspects of a game first, ensure they are viable on the HW they are expected to run on and only at the end decide the level of graphics that will be viable too on top of them, but this will make pure graphics whores unhappy. But both Ninty and the best CDPR past games, and many other excellent games and devs teach us that really good games don't need to please graphics whores first to succeed.
I don't think last gen computing power was the problem: 7th gen had powerful enough CPUs and GPUs, but really not enough RAM for the largest and most interactive worlds, unless devs devised clever and as smooth as possible ways to dynamically load limited portions of an open world at a time, a thing that in a very coarse way was done even during 6th gen, for example in Morrowind (with the added compromise of separating with non dynamic loadings single indoors environments from the large, dynamically loaded oudoors), but 8th gen was totally capable of managing games with vast interactive worlds.

Star Citizen is mired with tacked on promises, but at the same time, it is being handled by possibly the worst guy in history, with peter and Todd howard right behind him. Roberts mishandled his old games, his movies and even his current game project for now a decade. The man is not fit for overseeing the dev of the game at all, and I'm surprised hardly anyone here even knows of Robert's previous dev history.

CDPR was supposed to get the scope of the game sorted within the first two years, concepts at least drawn up and finished within 2 years at the least. It feels like they wasted 6 years dicking around with concepts and other ideas for 6 years and the last 2ish years spent cobbling together demos and what is apparently a "final product", but it's obvious that management was the lead cause, because devs do as they are told when you're in a AAA style company.

I do strongly feel like 2077 should have targeted current gen and PC, instead of last gen, last gen refresh systems, because that's just adding more tasks to getting the game out the door. We know what happens when a game is cross-gen, it ends up looking half n' half, because it's designed for the weaker hw, and those limitations end up being tacked onto hw that should be more than capable of running said game.

Like this new gen for example, I fully expect us to finally move past super poor shadow/object LoD's, because last gen on PC ports basically had shadow/object LoD's having the game worlds look like a slideshow (seeing shadows and object LoD's like in GTA V practically drawn into view within 1-2ft and that's jarring to someone like me, even when driving in those games). If we cannot move past last gen limitations with current gen, it's going to be another scenario of "slightly pretty, but more of the same", which means we're stifling once again, when we shouldn't.