The point is that these vehicles are significantly faster than going on foot. When you create an asset pipeline for an open world game, you depend on two things: the camera and character movement speed. Character angle and distance determines how well will assets look to the player, and how detailed they should be. Character speed determines how fast you need to load different assets in the background. As far as I know, all games that have both first-person camera and vehicle movement, like Far Cry, have much simpler art style and a less dense world.
(Disclaimer: although I have worked in game development for almost 14 years, I have never worked on a AAA project, so I really don't know how qualified am I to talk about).
Both GTA 5 and RDR 2 have optional first person cameras, in addition to third person. They handle streaming pretty much seamlessly, and with no apparent bugs. This game is just incapable. Objects sometimes don’t get streamed in. Sometimes it takes 20 seconds for them to transition from low LOD mode to high LOD model. Sometimes the high LOD model loads but the textures remain of the low LOD model. And that’s even when walking on the street, with an SSD. Driving exacerbates the issue further.
> Both GTA 5 and RDR 2 have optional first person cameras, in addition to third person.
This is technically true, but these are not cameras that players primarily use, and these are not cameras that art assets and their quality, texture resolutions and LODs are primarily optimised for and benchmarked by.
> They handle streaming pretty much seamlessly, and with no apparent bugs.
Yes. This, I completely agree with. But they are built by a studio that has built and QAed these systems for 20 years (or longer, if you include 2d GTA games). And in game worlds that are significantly less visually complex than Cyberpunk.
Don't misunderstand me. RDR 2 and GTA 5 are fantastic, stunning games. I loved these worlds. But from strictly technical standpoint, Night City has drastically more completely different assets next to each other.
I don't necessarily agree. 2077 fails at streaming at the macro level, not just the micro. Entire basic structures fail to load sometimes. And if modding has thought us, at least on PC, the Rockstar streaming engine is capable of streaming many more assets than initially designed (or optimized) for. W3 was OK at streaming, but obviously not at this scale. So, in my opinion, what is going on is that they stressed that system to the breaking point, and instead of rewriting it, or at least optimizing it, they called it "good enough". In my book, streaming open worlds is a solved solution in modern times. Certainly in the days of GTA3 and Driver, it was a novel concept and there was a lot more leeway for LOD issues and streaming problems. Consoles and PCs also had much less memory and slow spinning disks. But we are not at those times anymore, so I don't see any reason why we should give them slack just because they dreamed big bug failed completely at the technical level. It all boils to the overall issue, which is why they released it at all, if it's so completely broken, and so completely cut of promised content. Just delay it until it is done; it's not like the Witcher cash cow didn't provide enough cash.
(Disclaimer: although I have worked in game development for almost 14 years, I have never worked on a AAA project, so I really don't know how qualified am I to talk about).