How are CD Projekt's side quests so good? Cyberpunk quest designer says they reject 'over 90%' of their pitches
How are CD Projekt's side quests so good? Cyberpunk quest designer says they reject 'over 90%' of their pitches
Just use the good ideas. Simple as.
Meanwhile, other games just pick 5 basic templates then make 200 side quests based off those.
I do not understand how people can still play assassin’s creed.
Let's not pretend that the vast majority of CP2077's side quests are not that type of C&P'ed filler crap.
They are.
What is significant about CP2077 is how a dozen or so side quests are incredibly stellar, far outdoing even the main (non-expansion) story quest. They're incredibly good. That's just a few ones sadly, but they're big and have lots of interactions and cool moments though, they almost feel like the main quests in a lot of ways.
I do not understand how people can still play assassin’s creed.
Ok its not loading properly on my phone so i accept i might have to eat my words here, but i remember the vast majority of quests in cyperpunk being "go into a building and kill some guys".... Not exactly ground breaking stuff
There are two tiers of side quests in cyberpunk. Gigs and full on side quests. The gigs are all pretty short ‘go to place, shoot / rescue someone’ stuff but the main side quests are generally more involved, including all the romance options etc.
The gigs can be skipped without missing much, but skipping the side quests misses a ton of story IMO.
Even the gigs have a thread running through them, though. You can puzzle together stories by doing them.
And not just that, you're a mercenary. There's only so many types of tasks you get hired for. CDPR did a really great job differentiating gigs from eachother IMO.
Sure some of them are cookie cutter, but there's a story behind them and sometimes you can link that story into the overall world. Sometimes there's choices to make that impact the outcome. Usually there's multiple ways to approach it. And very few of them have the same layout.
There's 89 Gigs in the base game. I didn't at all feel ripped off that some of them are similar. I'd rather the gigs feel similar than have them encroaching on the side quests in feel.
Still better love story than Twilight.
That bit about "every designer or artist has a bunch of shit ideas and just picks their best 5%" is SO TRUE. Remember this when you're doing something creative and don't feel great about it. Just keep doing it.
Forget who said it, but: "Kill your darlings."
Photography, painting, writing, jokes. You produce a lot, you cut most of it, you gain practice along the way.
This being said, there are people with inate genius who produce 90% gold.
I gave up on cyberpunk 20 or so hours in. The lack of interesting side stories is a part of the reason why. This feels like the article is gaslighting
I did some research on quest system design and found a Unity plugin that reduced them down to basically eight core tasks, which means you treat it like data entry. Just have the writers draft up the elements at each part of the timeline and fuck it. Have to think more holistically and probably do the writing first, tasks once you're happy with where to go.