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Cyberpunk quest director Pawel Sasko explains why there are no police chases

cormack12

Gold Member


Quest Director Pawel Sasko got asked this on one of his recent streams, and the first portion of his answer pushes back against the idea that “all” open world games have a system like this. He brings up the upcoming Sonic open world game and Elden Ring as open world games that won’t have police chases. He cites GTA and Watch Dogs as two of the only games he can think of that have that system.

The second part of the clip that got caught off does get into an actual explanation of why they didn’t have a police chase system. Sasko says it was a combination of the technical limitations of the engine, and not enough time to make it work before release, so it was something that they eventually just gave up on, which is how we got the current system which teleports police to you, and never has gangs chase you down outside of the little clusters you can provoke on the map.

Some rumors about what Cyberpunk 2077 has planned for the future indicate that an overhaul of this system may be in the works. Though that could be a range of things, like more police/gang aggression, and it’s hard to imagine we might reach a point where we have actual car chases, a mechanic that is 100% absent in the game currently.
 

ParaSeoul

Member
"He brings up the upcoming Sonic open world game and Elden Ring as open world games that won’t have police chases.''
Confused Wait What GIF
 

reksveks

Member
"He brings up the upcoming Sonic open world game and Elden Ring as open world games that won’t have police chases.''
Confused Wait What GIF
Think he is referring to hostile npcs that won't chase you and go around the world. Its a dumb comparison but it kinda works for most open world games afaik.

I don't play many open world so happy to learn about games that do.
 

GHG

Gold Member
Think he is referring to hostile npcs that won't chase you and go around the world. Its a dumb comparison but it kinda works for most open world games afaik.

I don't play many open world so happy to learn about games that do.

Watch the video in the OP.

There are dozens of games that do. Pretty much every open world game with an urban setting has this mechanic, dating back to the 90's.
 

reksveks

Member
Watch the video in the OP.

There are dozens of games that do. Pretty much every open world game with an urban setting has this mechanic, dating back to the 90's.
Yeah, it's alot more than I thought. I clearly haven't played alot of T2 open world games or Ubisoft’s (dropped AC after 2 and haven't touched watchdogs). It seems like those two devs have it down.

But yeah, there clearly is a engine issue here for them.
 
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They screwed themselves by hyping the game as GTA Cyberpunk. If they had kept people's expectations realistic - ie, this is more like Deus Ex than some kind of GTA-like open-world sandbox, it would have been much better for them. But of course, then they wouldn't have sold 13 million copies in a month (though they still would have sold a lot based on their reputation).

I still remember one of their final trailers, which got everyone hyped, and really tried to make the game look like the kind of experience it just fundamentally wasn't.
 

STARSBarry

Gold Member
I still think they aimed for too big, should of made a game about a single district and had that filled out like they promised with a self contained story about you establishing yourself within that part of night city, before adding additional districts via expansions.

They aimed far too big and even with an experienced team with a huge success behind them, just could not clinch it.
 

SJRB

Gold Member
How this team made The Witcher 3 baffles me.

In fairness Cyberpunk is infinitely more complex in terms of mechanics and systems that need to work together, but from everything that has come out it seems CDPR was both too arrogant and ignorant to realize this until it was too late.

How you can work on an open world crime game for 8 YEARS and not have a police chase / wanted mechanic in your game is beyond me. "Not enough time", lmao. Get outta here. I love how he admits they literally went "Welp we can't get this to work, so let's bail on it". Speaks volumes of the mindset and to me explains why the game is riddled with these half-baked, unfinished or poorly implemented elements. They went balls deep and only after promising the world they realized they couldn't deliver.
 

RoboFu

One of the green rats
I can see how it would be hard. You have all these random cars on the streets with lots of random people on the sides to deal with. It’s hard enough for the player to drive down the road let alone having an ai do it without stoping every 10 ft.
 

buenoblue

Member
I mean yeah it's a shame about the car chases but rockstar and Ubisoft have bin making these style of games for years, maybe decades. Is cyberpunk perfect? No of course not but it's decent and I applaud any dev pouring money time and effort into a new IP. Unfornuatly the backlash towards this game and stuff like dragonage and battlefront is just gonna scare devs from trying.
 

Notabueno

Banned
When you have to bullshit that hard to save face, holly shit you've (as in CPDR) fucked up.

This game WAS going to be a shit result from the start. Yes, because no matter how good the promise and even some of the intent sounded, they didn't correctly conceive, design and plan the production, it's awfully bad work and is absolutely telling of the company, the governance/management and the leaders...so it was always going to be failed opportunity.

Unfortunately big companies are led by impostors who will never get it and continue self-destructing themselves, CPDR is one of them with several billions of revenues lost on CP2077.
 
How this team made The Witcher 3 baffles me.

Yes and no the reality is that many of the witcher 3 veterans left the project when it was rebooted mid development.

You can thank Adam Badowski the CEO for that one so the team that ended up finishing cyberpunk was not the same team that completed the witcher 3.

They used a lot of contractors from outside the company.
 

MadAnon

Member
Like it wasn't obvious from the beginning. Said this exact thing multipe times in other threads. The lack of police mechanics goes actually way deeper than just "We didn't have time". You can't have a police if your open world AI is totally broken, or more accuretly non-existant. So it's just not police. There's 0 possible interaction with anything in their open world. You go hit some tough looking guy on the street and all he does is either run away and disappear, or crouch and cry like a lil bitch.

My only question is what were their AI programmers doing this whole time? Or they simply outsourced it to some indian dude?
 
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Guilty_AI

Member
How this team made The Witcher 3 baffles me.
What baffles me more is how people think The Witcher 3 is any better than cyberpunk.

-Broken at release? check
-Janky? Check
-Nonsensical mechanics and terrible rpgs systems? Worse than cyberpunk
-Story that you don't have much input on how it plays? Check
-Mission design? WItcher is miles behind cyberpunk, in fact CP's mission design is way better than many other similar AAA games in the market
-Barely dynamic open world with little to interact with? Check

Cyberpunk has some of the same shortcomings than witcher while improving some other aspects. If anything it feels like a natural evolution.
 
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Ezquimacore

Banned
I enjoyed the game but the police system of the game can ruin your whole experience. I had to play like a good citizen just to not deal with the police and that's lame as fuck.
 
What baffles me more is how people think The Witcher 3 is any better than cyberpunk.

-Broken at release? check
-Janky? Check
-Nonsensical mechanics and terrible rpgs systems? Worse than cyberpunk
-Story that you don't have much input on how it plays? Check
-Mission design? WItcher is miles behind cyberpunk, in fact CP's mission design is way better than many other similar AAA games in the market
-Barely dynamic open world with little to interact with? Check

Cyberpunk has some of the same shortcomings than witcher while improving some other aspects. If anything it feels like a natural evolution.
Couldn't disagree with you more. To me Witcher 3 was better crafted and was a much more consistent and coherent experience even at launch, and it only got better with subsequent content updates. But hey, art hits us in different ways.
 

Ezquimacore

Banned
What baffles me more is how people think The Witcher 3 is any better than cyberpunk.

-Broken at release? check
-Janky? Check
-Nonsensical mechanics and terrible rpgs systems? Worse than cyberpunk
-Story that you don't have much input on how it plays? Check
-Mission design? WItcher is miles behind cyberpunk, in fact CP's mission design is way better than many other similar AAA games in the market
-Barely dynamic open world with little to interact with? Check

Cyberpunk has some of the same shortcomings than witcher while improving some other aspects. If anything it feels like a natural evolution.
For real, I love the story of the Witcher 3 but the gameplay was mediocre and even the last 3 assassin's Creed games have better open worlds.
 

Guilty_AI

Member
Couldn't disagree with you more. To me Witcher 3 was better crafted and was a much more consistent and coherent experience even at launch, and it only got better with subsequent content updates. But hey, art hits us in different ways.
Witcher 3 was broken as fuck at launch, it amazes me how easily people forgot this, probably because many of its current fans only played a long time afterwards. To this day there are still some broken quests which i had to fail on purpose because they couldn't be progressed further.
Overall mechanics and game design were also highly improved in cyberpunk, Witcher 3's gameplay was a complete joke.
 
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Fredrik

Member
How can they NOT implement something like this technically? This is like 1995 level of technical prowess, makes me think how did they manage to make The Witcher (3) work and be successful.
Yeah it’s a dumb excuse. Driver had advanced police chases on an open world map in 1999 on PS1. Nothing after that has been as awesome though.
 
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