Gang war and various obvious world interactions. Corpo citizens should have insurance with Trauma Team, their injury should result in a Trauma Team callout involving extreme violence. There should be private fire services that fight one another for fires in the city. There should be significantly more potential random interactions with world and city. Just expand the sandbox. Should Trauma Team meet cops getting in their way? What happens? Private corporations and cops? Different groups and how they interact. All of them should have different responses and different possible outcomes depending on what they randomly encounter in the world while going about their primary duties. The more of these things you add the more interesting and spicy any world things become for the player as emergent gameplay outcomes start occurring.
Add random crimes to the world too. Someone robs a civilian, what happens? How do other civilians react to it? How does the nearby gang react? How do the cops react? Trauma Team? Fire people? Etc etc etc. Different things for different crimes. Random corpo things too.
Right now they’re just events at designated places in the world. It’s a diorama. A very very pretty diorama waiting for you to interact with it. It doesn’t live, it doesn’t do its own thing.
You stand in a street in GTA or RDR and let the world go by and random shit starts happening when interactions kick off. A fender bender turns into a homicide turns into a shoot out with the police turns into ambulances showing up and so on and so forth. This shit seems trivial but it really gives life to the world and stops everything feeling like a bunch of cardboard cutouts neatly arranged into scenes.
It would be so funny to see a car pileup occur, fires break out in the cars, multiple fire services show up and then proceed to have a massive shootout with each other over claiming the fire and rescue for themselves. In the meantime any civilians caught in the shootout that get wounded start triggering traumateam callouts. Literally all hell breaks loose. Trauma Team goes to war with all the fire services. Top tier of militarised police get called out. Shit seriously goes down.
This is the kind of emergent world gameplay that COULD exist in a cyberpunk city setting. You can make that shit absolutely complete and total mayhem and it fits the world.
Don’t forget having News crews show up. They don’t have to do anything other than just be a presence.
Have the local gang come put the fires out while the private fire services fight each other to the death lmao. Cementing why local people put up with having the gang around as they generally benefit the residents more than the cops or city services.
None of this is in there because cdpr are a bunch of PiS voters that collectively can’t decide whether the setting is aspirational or atrocious. So these horrific ideas of the kind of hell the city should be don’t fit their team’s ideology.
You could do some really cool shit with sex workers and various NPCs at the bottom of society too that could all be emergent but there’s just no passion to do anything with it that isn’t directly in a quest.
Just little vignettes like that were one really obvious thing that was missing. There were a handful of places where you could see like the cops at a scene or the apartment down the hall with the guy on the ground, but there were only a few of those and they never changed; that same guy was still down on the ground in the hallway days or weeks later. Making things happen that have nothing to do with the player is a great way to make the world feel alive, and there are so many fun options for that in a cyberpunk setting.
They’re not, they just fucked around or prioritised other things thinking that they could coast by on the same formula that Witcher 3 had. The thing is that the diorama works fine in Witcher 3 because the player has no expectation of how a dark fantasy village should work as a sandbox. It’s just a bunch of small village people milling about. Works fine. More or less the same for the medieval city too. The shallowness of the world doesn’t hurt it.
A modern setting though? And with expectations of the genre? You can’t claim to be making AAA and then not really meet the standards that even small studios have met.
Gang war and various obvious world interactions. Corpo citizens should have insurance with Trauma Team, their injury should result in a Trauma Team callout involving extreme violence. There should be private fire services that fight one another for fires in the city. There should be significantly more potential random interactions with world and city. Just expand the sandbox. Should Trauma Team meet cops getting in their way? What happens? Private corporations and cops? Different groups and how they interact. All of them should have different responses and different possible outcomes depending on what they randomly encounter in the world while going about their primary duties. The more of these things you add the more interesting and spicy any world things become for the player as emergent gameplay outcomes start occurring.
Add random crimes to the world too. Someone robs a civilian, what happens? How do other civilians react to it? How does the nearby gang react? How do the cops react? Trauma Team? Fire people? Etc etc etc. Different things for different crimes. Random corpo things too.
Right now they’re just events at designated places in the world. It’s a diorama. A very very pretty diorama waiting for you to interact with it. It doesn’t live, it doesn’t do its own thing.
You stand in a street in GTA or RDR and let the world go by and random shit starts happening when interactions kick off. A fender bender turns into a homicide turns into a shoot out with the police turns into ambulances showing up and so on and so forth. This shit seems trivial but it really gives life to the world and stops everything feeling like a bunch of cardboard cutouts neatly arranged into scenes.
Love this. They really should have leaned into the Snow Crash side of the genre more.
It would be so funny to see a car pileup occur, fires break out in the cars, multiple fire services show up and then proceed to have a massive shootout with each other over claiming the fire and rescue for themselves. In the meantime any civilians caught in the shootout that get wounded start triggering traumateam callouts. Literally all hell breaks loose. Trauma Team goes to war with all the fire services. Top tier of militarised police get called out. Shit seriously goes down.
This is the kind of emergent world gameplay that COULD exist in a cyberpunk city setting. You can make that shit absolutely complete and total mayhem and it fits the world.
Don’t forget having News crews show up. They don’t have to do anything other than just be a presence.
Have the local gang come put the fires out while the private fire services fight each other to the death lmao. Cementing why local people put up with having the gang around as they generally benefit the residents more than the cops or city services.
None of this is in there because cdpr are a bunch of PiS voters that collectively can’t decide whether the setting is aspirational or atrocious. So these horrific ideas of the kind of hell the city should be don’t fit their team’s ideology.
You could do some really cool shit with sex workers and various NPCs at the bottom of society too that could all be emergent but there’s just no passion to do anything with it that isn’t directly in a quest.
Just little vignettes like that were one really obvious thing that was missing. There were a handful of places where you could see like the cops at a scene or the apartment down the hall with the guy on the ground, but there were only a few of those and they never changed; that same guy was still down on the ground in the hallway days or weeks later. Making things happen that have nothing to do with the player is a great way to make the world feel alive, and there are so many fun options for that in a cyberpunk setting.
Yeah exactly. That shit ends up making it feel like a model train set. Beautiful and well made but not alive. Just a carefully crafted scene.
Yeah, I agree. I honestly don’t think these things would be that hard to code or intense on your computer either.
They’re not, they just fucked around or prioritised other things thinking that they could coast by on the same formula that Witcher 3 had. The thing is that the diorama works fine in Witcher 3 because the player has no expectation of how a dark fantasy village should work as a sandbox. It’s just a bunch of small village people milling about. Works fine. More or less the same for the medieval city too. The shallowness of the world doesn’t hurt it.
A modern setting though? And with expectations of the genre? You can’t claim to be making AAA and then not really meet the standards that even small studios have met.