I call this genre of game, "Illusion of choice" games, but to be fair to cyberpunk 2077 it still does it better than any other games of its type.
If you think of it as a tree and each decision point branching out to millions of possibilities and outcomes then you'll be extremely disappointed, but if you think of it the other way, of a strong narrative that has a funnel of lots of different ways to reach the same outcome you'll find there is an impressive amount of ways to interact with the world.
If you suspend your disbelief and never play through a second time, then you may even come away feeling like your choices had severely important consequences.
That's about as good as you'll ever get from the genre. If you want full world simulation then you'll ironically end up with a boring game, because if all choices have genuine consequences, then it becomes impossible to tell a narrative, and you end up with something like rimworld or dwarf fortress. Impressive games in their own right, but are story generators not story-tellers.
Haven't really played CP2077 so I can't tell, but I was always of the impression that CRPG works best for fantasy or apocalyptic (System Shock, Fallout) genres because the world is typically much less complicated and the information doesn't travel easily, so it doesn't have to be fully simulated (especially in terms of consequences to your actions).
That I believe was always a problem for true cyberpunk games. In cyberpunk stories, information is everything. I am not sure I have seen a game that does cyberpunk really well by leaning into this complexity.
I enjoyed the game for the reasons you mentioned. I'm even able to enjoy the completely scripted and linear railroad shooters just like I'm able to enjoy a Hollywood blockbuster when my mood calls for it.
I have some issue with the initial marketing and the discussion surrounding the game though: choose your own backstory? Absolutely no impact at all, except some pre-recorded wingers in dialogues. RPG with a skill-tree? Absolutely 0 impact, you always have a way to get to a closed room, regardless of the perks you pick. And even if you pick non there is a vent open.
As long as you are aware that you are getting into what is basically a linear story in an open world, instead of another CD Projekt RED game _à la_ Witcher 3 which involved side stories that are as fleshed out as other full-sized games, yes it can be enjoyable.
It still one of the most amazing open-world futuristic games I have personally explored, which is a shame considering the rest of the game.
That is such an old school way of describing dialog trees. This isn't how it's done anymore. You're going to see more NN's making the decisions than fuzzy matching. That said, I think CDPR kicked the can when they didn't add more "lived in" scenarios in CP2077. The story was good but the world was hollow.
coming... What you have today is the result of 5 years ago of decisions. Give it time to catch up. There's a couple on the horizon that are going to blow you away. However, there are a few indie titles that have already incorporated some of this in smaller, unique ways. OMEA for example, or Wanderfolk.
From what I see these games simply use LLM apis, not some kind of sophisticated NN mechanics handling the decision trees.
They are not new in that, I have seen a couple of games that were basically slop (and terrible games, judging them as games) wrapping chatgpt.
Wanderfolk seems does not seem particularly inspiring, even the trailer has terrible audio mixing (there are times you cannot hear the narrator because of the game sounds, it is either fully made by an llm agent or by humans that do not seem capable of making a game if they cannot even make a proper short video) which does not make it feel very promising. Everything seems ai generated in general, and more like slop.
OMEA seems a bit more decent, and I would be curious to try it, but I do not like its visual art very much (it is ai generated "and curated by an artist" and it actually shows), and in particular the ai generated images of humans. Irrespective of what I think about ai image generation in art in principle, I think there is a deeper problem here as a game in (broadly) the visual novel genre must imo have a distinctive visual style, and their images just reads as ai generated (before I even read whether they are ai generated, it is that obvious). In general, I find this style of ai generated images of humans very offputting/uncanny (other assets, backgrounds etc I dont get bothered aesthetically as much) and I think I will find it hard stay engaged for long with such a game. Regardless, it seems a more decent attempt than most others I have seen. They do employ writers etc at least to create narratives, so it is probably not a total slop (otherwise, I can just roleplay with chatgpt directly or whatever).
In any case, these games are closer to being "llm wrappers with a certain harness" than having some actually new and sophisticated way to handle decision trees. Another issue with these games is that they do not even use some finetuned local llm, but use apis to providers, with which I am not that comfortable either.
I think you are taking things way to literally. Walking around in GTA and in RDR2 was a NN trained in bipedal locomotion (Dynamic Motion Synthesis - NaturalMotion Euphoria). LLM api's are how many are going to use the GPT's without wasting 6GB of VRAM on your GPU for a language model. No, there won't be some novel local neural net powering your next video game but there will be a neural net trained on the games narrative to provide you a more robust experience.
People are finding ways to include it in existing games but its going to take some time for the game devs themselves to release the games where narrative and dialog are more free-flowing.
Outside of that, there's also a huge huge opportunity in the TRELLIS.2 / Pixal3D space for quickly generating props and 3D assets.
I don't disagree with the points you made, I just never made it clear that upcoming games that utilize AI like this are not exactly how you would picture it. Still, expect some deeper integrations in the years to come.
My biggest complaint about the story is that it basically robs you from player agency. You are the side character in story of someone else. It is fully forced on you. And not in traditional I say acceptable manner. I understand if you are playing story of set character. But with Cyberpunk it feels like you are not. You are just carrying someone else around.
Side content itself is fine. I can pick to do it or not and approach it at least in some ways. With main story I only get to choose how to suffer.
Yeah, I wasn't a great fan of the story - it felt like they put a lot of emphasis on Keanu Reeves given he's a big celebrity and helped promote the game.
Hopefully, the sequel (which I believe is already being worked on) won't have such a story.
That said, I really liked the story in Phantom Liberty. In fact, that entire DLC was really well done.
Interesting. When I was playing I didn't care about Johnny and anything related to him. He was basically, mostly a politely treated hallucination for me.
It's basically WRPG vs JRPG. I think it's safe to say based on historical game performance/sales that most people prefer the "railroaded" story format of JRPG than WRPG role playing.
For most people, video games are about relaxing/unwinding, not embarking on a creative DnD roleplay with "real" consequences.
This is also why linear stories are so much more popular than "choose your own adventure" or "audience participation".
I agree with that, and there was another thing that really bothered me: The combination of "realistic" graphics and weaponry with "RPG-style" hit-points and combat mechanics simply doesn't work. It can't possibly work. When you empty a magnum revolver's cylinder directly into somebody's face, and they're just fine, still fighting you at 100% capacity -- there's too much dissonance between what you see and what you must expect to see.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution got around this by making gunplay genuinely dangerous, especially to your enemies. (Okay, much-maligned boss fights aside...)
In CP2077, the majority of enemies were just bullet-sponges, though. It was frankly terrible.
And, yeah, the world was disappointingly empty and lifeless. I don't think that the aesthetics were bad -- the game hewed closely to the fairly generic 2005-2015 "cyberpunk" tumblr aesthetic, and didn't do anything too interesting or take too many chances, but it was okay for all that. The setting was just vacant and boring, though.
Depends what you mean by "immerse". If it means driving through Night City on your bike and enjoying the view, sure.
If it means role-playing as a character and building it your position in the city via meaningful choices with consequences, really not.