You seem to disregard the key phrase I used, which was "when we consider how incredibly hyped it was." Therefore the fact that some games in the past were also open world is irrelevant. My main point wass that relative to the hype surrounding CP2077, their design template is extremely limited, and indeed "ancient". For a game of this calibre, using systems and decisions which were okay in the pioneering times is not okay.
I'm not sure what you mean here. That the TW and Skyrim were open worlds? As you yourself have just stated, it’s nothing new. And Ultima and others did pretty well too.
Perhaps you're referring to the "oh my, nowadays every game has to be open world" trope, then okay, but this has been always a false moan, easily demonstrated by looking at any bestseller or release chart.
Meanwhile, Cyberpunk is an open-world, furthermore advertised and promoted as a cutting-edge one, so there are some expectations that go with the territory. And it ended up being so backwards in that regard that literally 10-20 year old year games have more advanced systems. R* games have the same problems but at least there is more chance to make your own fun, CP2077 couldn't even implement a simple police system.
You are confusing the fact that some games are linear by design and that is fine (I have no problem playing the likes of RE, Dark Souls, etc) but others are not and should try to push the envelope, even if only by little steps. That response to this meme (which is often exaggerated and unfair, btw) shouldn't be more linearity but developing complexity, reactivity, true choice and consequence, etc.
Well, yeah, Cyberpunk did "try" to push the envelope. On paper. They talked about a lot of stuff that seemed groundbreaking at the time. But that stuff never made it into the game because the management was awful. Look, I enjoyed the game, but the vanilla version was full of evidence that the development was chaotic and
lacked a coherent vision about what it should have been from the start. Like the perks about underwater combat, when underwater combat isn't a thing in the final version of the game? Some of the stuff hyped was added on the fly by the management, and when the devs told them that it wouldn't 't be possible to add with the time constraint that they have, they told them, "We are CDPR. Figure it out". Management would talk a bout a feature to a journalist, and then tell the team that they should add the feature afterward.
Phantom Liberty is much closer to what the game should have realistically tried to be. Considering the time and the experience of the studio for that kind of game. The Witcher gradually improved: the first two games were closed worlds, but the 2 drastically changed the combat system. The third refined the combat system and had the open world setting as a novelty.
If you look at the last two open worlds that had a massive success, Elden ring and Zelda Breath of the wild, they carried with them a strong foundation refined across years, and the open world was the novelty.
By comparison, CP2077 had too many new elements to afford to be that ambitious. The first step should have been: "figure out how to make a fun first-person action RPG in an urban setting".
Once you nail that down, you can work on a refined, bigger-scale, more ambitious version. CDPR main strengths are strong storytelling and world design. They've never really been cutting edge, but they tried to be on a game where they would have to start everything from scratch.
So yeah, my opinion isn't that CDPR didn't try hard enough, but rather that they tried to do too much in one go. What's sad is that tons of people are enjoying the game for what it actually is. They would have avoided so much bad press if they had been more realistic. The point that I was trying to make was that being smaller in scope and focusing on a strong, fun gameplay first would have been more beneficial to CP2077. It would have avoided that whole Frankenstein state of the vanilla version.
Doing too much in a single go is one of the many reasons why AAA games are struggling to make a profit. So much money is spent on development, and then you hear them say that they probably need to raise the price to 100$ to survive. And sometimes you don't even understand where that money went when you see the end result.
Speaking of which, two or more things can be true at the same times, so conversely some of the things about this game are so good that they are it's saving grace, but that doesn't mean we should excuse or rationalize its key failings. This history is already repeating itself: I had a good chuckle watching the Witcher 4 tech demo, where the narrator tries to hype up the "reactive" world because Ciri bumped into someone and he moved out of the way. Dear God, thsi has been done in the first AC already. This is just a little example but it's symptomatic of the trend. I wish I was wrong but I predict that for all that big talk TW4 will be exactly as rigid as TW3, just with somewhat better gfx.
I don't know how long it's been since you've played TW3, but that was already in there. Run into someone who's holding something ( besides someone holding a baby, or a guard), and they will even drop what they hold. The TW4 demo just had more detailed physics and animations.
