Nitpicking but San Andreas does have AI where police chases work and NPC do not feel completely brainless, and cars do not only follow tracks, it does not feel empty and lifeless.
San Andreas was also, what, the third GTA game in the GTA III engine? It's a comparison between the first urban game in an engine (and the first ever for the developer) to the third game in an an engine that had years more polish (and at least the fifth urban game from the developer).
It's interesting how many of the current comparisons made to Cyberpunk are to sequels and much later iterations in various franchises (GTA, Saints Row, Crackdown, etc) and people have rose tinted glasses of the launch issues and bugs of some of their first titles.
"It's like they jumped back in time X years ago" should be the expected case for any game series because the games industry is one that notoriously doesn't have a lot of knowledge transfer, nor shared source/shared libraries, between developers and intentionally reinvents the wheel over and over again with almost every game/new game engine.
If gamers want a steadier sense of progression from game to game, studio to studio, they want a different game industry that reinvents fewer wheels between games. Expecting a single developer to somehow side step that industry problem is counter-productive to that goal. CDPR had no way to call up Rockstar and "borrow a cup of sugar", nor would they have probably been interested in doing that even if it were possible because it's less of an interesting problem full of engineering challenges to be "passionate" about to answer "how do we build Cyberpunk 2077 on top of the GTA engine?" than "how do we build Cyberpunk 2077 on top of the Witcher engine where the fastest vehicle is a horse?"
WorldMaker|5 years ago
It's interesting how many of the current comparisons made to Cyberpunk are to sequels and much later iterations in various franchises (GTA, Saints Row, Crackdown, etc) and people have rose tinted glasses of the launch issues and bugs of some of their first titles.
"It's like they jumped back in time X years ago" should be the expected case for any game series because the games industry is one that notoriously doesn't have a lot of knowledge transfer, nor shared source/shared libraries, between developers and intentionally reinvents the wheel over and over again with almost every game/new game engine.
If gamers want a steadier sense of progression from game to game, studio to studio, they want a different game industry that reinvents fewer wheels between games. Expecting a single developer to somehow side step that industry problem is counter-productive to that goal. CDPR had no way to call up Rockstar and "borrow a cup of sugar", nor would they have probably been interested in doing that even if it were possible because it's less of an interesting problem full of engineering challenges to be "passionate" about to answer "how do we build Cyberpunk 2077 on top of the GTA engine?" than "how do we build Cyberpunk 2077 on top of the Witcher engine where the fastest vehicle is a horse?"