At release, the police mechanics were the most immersion breaking part for me. They would just appear randomly when you were wanted and disappear if you turned around.
>Updated PC system requirements. A SSD is now required to run the game
Check the game again, they updated the game recently that revamped and added a lot of features (Cop AI, vehicular combat, clothes arent armor) that should've been there at the start.
This is my main complaint. What's the point of having an open world if there's no mechanics. I can shoot a cop in the face and walk half a block a way and they'll just give up.
The police chases are there, but A) there's an intentionally significantly reduced police presence than a GTA (which makes sense from an environmental storytelling sense: Night City having fewer overall cops implies a certain lawlessness to the city; it's also a staple of the genre, with fewer but worse cops a Cyberpunk "tradition"), and B) yeah it did launch buggy, and was one of the earlier things corrected in patches but not early enough for a lot of people that wanted police chases.
That is a great example of an actual bug, that ALL players saw, and many didn't notice at all.
The police seemly doesn't have an AI, people actually believed they didn't.
But a player happened to see a police car with cops inside (extremely rare to see that), and saved his game near, and ran several tests.
He found out if you piss off the cops, using a car (on foot they just exit the car and never climb back on), and then you hit their car with yours (shooting them doesn't work, they just go away following a pre-programmed path), they start chasing your GTA-style.
So this means they DID code the cop cars to chase the player car, but a sequence of bugs make the only way to see this content to be go out of your way to do it (you need to see cops in a car spontaneously while you are inside a car too, then run over a pedrestrian, then hit the cop car with your car).
The game is missing systems and features that were promised. Can you count missing consequences or police AI as bugs? How about driving physics? No NPC schedules? Gun down a gang night club and the same faction doesn't care in another area. What are security cameras for? How about traffic AI...
I think maybe a few additional details should be mentioned.
1) GTA was originally envisioned as a racing game.[0] You would race against other players in inner-city settings, but this meant you could end up ramming other cars, running over pedestrians, etc. If that happened too many times, cops would pursue you.
2) The cops were supposed to come out and pursue you if you did too many bad things and, as you said, do it "gently". The bug in the cop AI, however, made them insanely aggressive to the point that they would also hit other cars, run over pedestrians, and cause just as much damage as the player in pursuit of pulling them over.
3) The devs thought the "psycho cops" were so hilarious that they didn't just keep them in--they reoriented the entire game around the concept of causing mayhem (rather than racing).
My favourite story about a bug in a game is GTA. The police cars were supposed to stop you nicely by braking right in front of you. But a small bug cause the cops to crash into the players car at full speed. End of the story: they decided to keep the psycho cops.
It's never been "good", I played since 2013, Xbox 360 and later repurchased the game for PS4, the online load times were not just annoying they outright broke the game for me. To be having fun and then have a many minute delay while being pinned to the screen (because after loading from a mission you're never in a safe place).
Looking down on the ground through the clouds at the san Andreas's streets with that wispy air sound while waiting for those large thud noises which could come randomly will forever be etched into my memory as something which completely broke the fun I was having, especially when playing with friends and trying to do Heists later in the products life.
And because of this: getting people to play was really difficult, the combination of huge updates which took hours to download (PS4 has slow access to it's drive even if you upgrade to SSD) and the insanely long loading times once you have the patch culminated in many hours of lost gameplay.
I remember a quote from Steve Jobs which fits here: "Let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"[0]
I really was thinking that it was intended... I remember watching GTA V on Xbox 360 and being impressed by how good it looked, how it performed in such a "limited" device, so something like this would resonate in a team so good. But it was almost 6 years ago, so probably a good part of that team has moved on to other companies, and the ones left, maybe are in other projects, hopefully, GTA VI.
Glad to see Rockstar addressing this; I will try the update once it is released, and maybe I can play some online games without getting frustrated.
I wanted to jump right into exploring the city and driving cars around, but instead it threw you into this scene full of terrible characters and forced you to murder a bunch of people. There is literally no way to start playing the game until you prove you know the shooting mechanic by executing a dozen police officers.
I’m normally fine with violent games, and I had a blast with Vice City and San Andreas, but this intro was so awful that I just put the game down and didn’t come back.
After I found out that in GTA5, bad code loading a large JSON file made boot time jump from 2m to 6m, up to 15m. The JSON file was for in-game purchases, aka useless.
As someone who played gta online a lot, here’s some thoughts:
- the behavior of npcs is way more complex here. They’re not just running off scared. The ones at the registers have a way more complex animation than the current gen game.
- the cops seem to have a more refined line of sight and search pattern. They don’t just come at you.
- there is way more use of interiors here, in the current gen there are very few interiors other than instanced garages and stuff.
Nothing else really stood out but it’s clear that even if the graphics are not updated they’ll still have plenty of improvements to gameplay mechanics and world depth.
I find this the most jarring thing with Rockstar Games, and it was particularly noticeable to me in Red Dead Redemption 2.
It provides a beautiful, immersive world that is ridiculous in its attention to detail. The amount of stuff to do, accurate flora and fauna, weather effects, and NPC behavior, is ridiculous.
But the moment you start a mission, things are on rails and you lose that freedom. Or the moment you commit a crime even without witnesses the law will find you like a homing pigeon. Most entities in the wild (trees, animals) are just elaborate props and there's nothing emergent about them, and random encounters are not random at all, but just selected from a pool of missions.
They're still great, but for me it did mean having to let go of the 'immersive sim' expectation and instead approach it as a ridiculously detailed version of a 'typical' GTA-style non-emergent game.
I'm sorry, the game on PC was a crappy bugfest. And as for being "impossible" on consoles... Isn't it effectively GTA in a different setting? GTA managed to run fine, and Cyberpunk could, but they weren't able to reach it.
I heavily played GTA: Vice City during the time I learned how to drive. After I got my driver's licence, I remember one instance where I clearly noticed how my brain drifted into GTA mode while I was driving through town. I had to actively remember myself that this is a real environment and that I cannot just drive over the street lamp post without anything happening. I talked to a classmate about this and he had had a similar experience, but with Mafia (which had a very realistic car handling, you could even activate an expert mode where you had to shift manually iirc).
>Updated PC system requirements. A SSD is now required to run the game
lol they finally gave in
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