f13.net

Here's the very first trailer beside that amazing teaser from a few years back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X2kIfS6fb8&feature=em-uploademail

No gameplay, no release date.

After seeing what the move to scifi did for Gothic/Risen/Elex...I'm extremely excited for this one. Witcher 3 was just so damned good, this one is going to be amazing.

"When it's done" has always been the best release date.

in discord i called it, i believe

5th Ghost in the Grand Theft Cyber Element

I'd agree for the most part (Star Citizen being a notable exception). But they never should have announced this game back in 2012, especially since the hidden message in this trailer mentions that pre-production didn't fully start until after Blood and Wine was done (which released in 2016). So kindly fuck them for announcing a game four years before actually starting to work on it, and then expecting me to get excited over a trailer that doesn't actually show the game. That said, there's a good chance I'll love the game when it comes out.

Fantastic trailer. I noticed there are complaints mentioning it's not grim/Blade Runner-esque/rainy enough, too bright etc. While I never played the original PnP RPG back in the day, from what I understand it's a slightly different vision of the future, influenced by the 80's and not so much by Blade Runner or Neuromancer (although it can't escape some kind of inspiration, of course).

Hopefully it's everything Warren Spector dreamed about back at the end of the 90s when he (along with others) conceived Deus Ex and couldn't do because of hardware limitations.

That looked great to me. It definitely feels like an updated Cyberpunk feel, still with some of that "what the future will look like from the '80's perspective" but with some updated ideas.

William Gibson does not like Cyberpunk 2077 trailer. I see his point, although I liked it.

 https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2018-06-11-
william-gibson-was-bang-on-about-cyberpunk-2077-and-grand-theft-auto :heartbreak:

Well, William Gibson fucking sucks. I didn't really care either way about the trailer, but seriously, Gibson is an overrated hack. He writes utter nonsense.

I liked Gibson's Bridge trilogy. As for the trailer it seems to just show the world as you'd expect if it's based on cp2020 with zero info on actual gameplay mechanics.

Some gameplay will be shown today in the afternoon (USA)/evening(Europe):

https://twitter.com/CyberpunkGame/status/1006552481973850113

Personally I don't expect a big departure from the Witcher 3 *overall* gameplay structure, especially regarding exploration, dialogue, choices. The setting, of course, will dictate some changes, like ranged gun combat and maybe deep weapon customization.

We already know there will be character creation and classes, and will be possible to choose between a male and female protagonist.

From the hidden announcement included in the "boot-up" sequence before the trailer:

this is (just) america

releasing this during the trump presidency feels like a mistake

That's my feeling (and hope, it ain't broke). I could see the tech stuff slotting into alchemy easily, mixing chemicals and implants and whatnot. I hope the weapons get a pass to improve on the simple slot system. The questing and dialog should take care of itself, really looking forward to the change in setting, as I said earlier. Easy pre-order of the game + DLC pass.

Thank you. I have been of that opinion for decades. I'll put Harlan Ellison in that bag too.

And even if you like his writing you really should admit that he is now an old fart who shouldn't be gone to for opinions on video games.

if you like his writing then you like bad writing

seriously

dude writes garbage

fan fiction of a genre that doesn't exist

Ok, I'll bite.  All I've read of his was the Sprawl trilogy, which I overall enjoyed.  Mind you, I should say that I really liked Neuromancer, and thought the other two works were mostly enjoyable if forgettable.

So I guess, did you really hate Neuromancer that bad?  Because I thought it was a great read, with writing that painted a vividly dark world, with a perfect mix of action and thoughtful depression.  Though its been.... a long time since I read it, so that could be a factor.

the only good thing that ever came out of gibson was johnny mnemonic and that required Robert Longo and Keanu Reeves to not be total garbage

edit: how long since you've read it, because teenage me didn't think anne rice was garbage (spoiler: she's garbage)

Never liked his writing, but I liked the world he imagined and described.

From Jessie Cox's twitter feed:

https://twitter.com/JesseCox/status/1006596942896349184



And more at the thread I linked. From another post, it seems that there are no loading screens between the (six) city districts.

One more thing (full articles will start trickling out soon, I guess): it seems that the game is in first person, unlike the Witcher series (already read some grumblings about it but hey...That little game called "Deus Ex" was in first person too :P)

Length of demo (played by the devs) is about 50 minutes, from what I read.

yea i mean

it's either true Deus Ex 2 or it sucks

i think we've all been operating off that assumption

More info I got from the following link (mentioned during the Gamespot stream...Can't watch right now):

https://www.resetera.com/threads/cyberpunk-2077-details-first-person-rpg-w-shooter-elements-classes-up-new-screenshots-demo-info.48630/page-15#post-9142084

>You don't pick a class
>Look at all this class nonsense

That shit is more confusing than the bethsoft dedicated server nonsense

I think it just means that, at the beginning of the game, you only get to choose your gender and name, then there is probably some sort of story-driven prologue that will eventually determine your class and backstory.

Yeah I get that

But you watch, after the tutorial you're totally gonna be presented with a trinary set of dialogue options and actions that have you picking a class.

Yep, that's a possibility (of course let's hope for something a bit more innovative and less straightforward). Devs should talk about the game shortly on IGN live show:

http://www.ign.com/events/e3

DON'T TELL HIM WHAT IT MEANS!

I will cut you *




* I am honor bound to defend Gibson since he retweeted me a few weeks back  :awesome_for_real:

Honestly though- I thought The Peripheral was his best work since the Bridge stuff. Loved it.

I'm not honor bound to defend him, and I thought that book was god awful and a missed opportunity at writing something interesting and unique instead of aping Stross.  I'm still excited for Cyberpunk at least though  :oh_i_see:

I liked his earlier books, his writing gets worse over time.  I slogged through some till finally giving up half way through Spook Country.

I'm not surprised Gibson hated the trailer, he seems to pretty much hate everything.

I have such high hopes for this game I am sure to be disappointed.

I'm a big William Gibson and Cyberpunk fan (obviously), but Gibson's "modern-day" trilogy was pretty bland. Way too much interest in fashion and much less in anything else.

That was definitely the worst of his writing. That is probably why I was so excited about The Peripheral- it was more a return to his sci fi/cyberpunk roots.

Yeah, fuck that. The sprawl trilogy is still the fucking tits.

48 minutes long gameplay reveal (narrated):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjF9GgrY9c0

Spoiler: day fucking one

Yep. Mind is positively blown. Wow.

Yeah, gameplay shows some linked, very engaging quests, in  true Witcher-style fashion; knowing the style, tho, when truly played, what has been shown is just a minor, 5-hour detour in the grand scheme of things :D

It's rare I agree with Mr Schild on 'Be There', but it looks like I will indeed Be There.

Stunning.

First person shooty bits > third person long hair swordy bits

Was there any doubt, though? I prefer the 3rd person swordy to 1st person, but meh. Doesn't matter, really.

Also, dude sounds a lot like Mr Bad Ass, Danny Trejo. Which would be awesome.

Yeah. Completely in.

Watched most of it now...if it wasn't CD Projekt Red, I'd be so skeptical. But it is, so I'm excited.

Well, shit.

That looks better than I was expecting.

i would hope so it's been in production longer than star citizen

At least they're spending their own money and not fleecing whales investors.  Also, I thought we were boycotting this since they used "did you just assume their gender" in a tweet and are therefore transphobe, putting aside the fact that CDPR is thinking of making so you can play something other than male/female.

wat

Who fucking cares?

God fucking damn, this looks fantastic   I had high expectations and what they showed just blew them the fuck away.

All in/day one/whatever just gimme now.

Yeah, Day One. The wife is gonna be pissed.

I might actually get past the first 30 minutes of a CD PROJEKT RED game with this one.

a million times this

Gamersyde posted the non-compressed, Full HD version of the gameplay video, available for download (17GB):

https://www.gamersyde.com/download_cyberpunk_2077_48_minutes_of_gameplay-42749_en.html

+1

It's not the first 30 minutes that bothers me, it's when I play these games religiously for a week, then forget about them, then come back 2 years later with zero fucking clue of who I am, what I was doing and where I've been.

Literally used some of my holiday last week looking at Fallout 4 and Witcher 3 ;  logged in, got very fucking confused and then logged out since I knew I would have to start again.  The worst bit was seeing the previous saves where I'd already done this twice.  I felt like Guy Pearce once he's killed Joe Pantoliano.

This, however, looks like it might keep my interest to some kind of conclusion.  I can only hope.

I found Witcher 3 slightly easier to get into again after a break, because the game is so amazing I just kind of go along with 'now who the what is where?' stuff. But I mean after 60 hours or whatever, it's moot in my book.

I couldn't get past the tutorial. *Snore*

This video made me so happy in the pants.

I loved almost everything about that video.

Except for the John Wick 3 Mook they stuck in there as a sidekick.

I already want to shoot him in the face.

I'm sure he dies quickly.

(https://media.giphy.com/media/DXSz15kgmQ96E/giphy.gif)

I'd always wanted to see a representation of Trauma Team and now I have.

I haven't really been following so it will be interesting to see how much character and build diversity there is. I assume the needs of the narrative and encounters will limit both.

I watched about 2 minutes of the trailer, and then closed it down.  Looks stupid good, don't wanna spoil it.

New cinematic trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIcTM8WXFjk&feature=em-uploademail


Spoiler: Keanu Reeves is in it.

Coming out April 16th, 2020 (4 years, 11 months after Witcher 3).

Main trailer guy looks like right out of the Mass Effect character creator.

But I guess that makes sense as it's what your typical 20-year old man that had access to enhancements would go for....

Edit: Also holy crap! Do you remember that first great trailer? It came out 10th January 2013.

I am feeling old.

April 16th, 2020.

It's one year away but there's already a collector edition. Mhf.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwr6TlEbiuU

Fuckin’ Keanu as Johnny Silverhand? If I wasn’t already signed up, I’d sign myself the fuck up. Preordered The collectors edition.

not being able to get the CE on PC is some

bull

shit

Edit: Oh looks like that's coming it's just not orderable yet.

Yeah, it would be a real shame if PC players didn't get a chance to drop $250 on a useless box of crap.

"Stick with the prod, JC" :awesome_for_real: :awesome_for_real:

https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/you-can-finish-cyberpunk-2077-without-killing-anyone/

Any recent gameplay vids? I have been out of the loop with the E3 news and stuff so I might have missed it. And I am not putting confidence in cinematics anymore - Games rarely measure up.

A new gameplay video will probably be published after E3 or during Gamescom (August) just like last year. As far as I know, At the E3 booth, they're showing two gameplay videos, one behind closed doors for the press, one public for the plebs.

It's First Person camera only right? FPS gameplay videos tend to look all the same. In a good way. I'm very happy about the First Person camera.

Press already had the chance of taking a look at the new gameplay, no one mentions third person camera, so it's safe to assume it will stay first person.

[psst, Falc, very detailed gameplay report from Lega Nerd (italian language): https://leganerd.com/2019/06/11/cyberpunk-2077-anteprima-e3-2019/]   :why_so_serious:

One of the comments that flies around after trying the demo is "It's like Deus Ex with a 100000x budget".

Yes, definitely (another exhaustive report...some spoilers about Keanu Reeves' character):

https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/cyberpunk-2077-e3-2019-gameplay/

While some are already criticizing the tone of that article, the author is basically saying  that they're not trying to push forward any genre or reinventing the wheel; they're simply getting even more in-depth with the game systems compared to their previous efforts (notably, The Witcher 3). And, like I said one year ago, that's perfectly fine for me, also being a "storyfag" sucker for well told stories  :grin:
---

Also consider that, one year ago, they mentioned we should expect nothing less than what was offered in The Witcher 3 when it comes to both free and paid DLCs (which was a lot and of great quality). Maybe sneak in another interesting mini-game like Gwent and we're all set.

...And then we have excerpts like this one from RPS:

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/06/12/cyberpunk-2077s-e3-demo-has-weak-gunplay-and-unimaginative-stereotypes/


gawd.

Stop it. My penis can only get so erect.

It's not the intensity that gets you, it's the duration.  :awesome_for_real:

I wish I could ignore these things, but I can't. Let's wait and see.

I'm super happy we had RPS's hipster white guy to tell us how we should feel about racial issues.

(https://i.imgur.com/XUlAGkp.png)

What a honky cuntface. You know that dopey hair is going into a manbun right after the photo was taken.

(I feel all commentary here is beside the point, since the game is clearly must-buy on the heels of arguably the best rpg ever made)

He looks nice and punchable.

In any case, while I do agree such problems exist, I also don’t want to hear it from a honky cuntface.

Regardless of who wrote that, I'm afraid I'd feel the same way. And I couldn't help wondering what are these fucking devs thinking?

TBF to Hipster McCuntface up there, it isn't like the entirety of the Cypberpunk franchise of RPG books is clear of such "problematic" depictions. It's very '80's action movie in that regard. However, being that Mike Pondsmith is the creator of the franchise, has been heavily involved with it in all its iterations, is heavily involved with this one and is also African-American, it's safe to say that he's ok with problematic depictions and everyone else should just calm the ever living fuck down.

 :uhrr:

But, but....videogame drama!!  :ye_gods: :drill:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He09JaBVZdE (Letitia in Deus Ex: HR)

Not to mention the attacks toward Warhorse Studios (Kingdom Come) and the fact they didn't include any black person in their game (because of *researched* historical accuracy, as far as I know).
-----------

EDIT: BUT WAIT...There's more!

https://www.polygon.com/e3/2019/6/12/18662443/cyberpunk-2077-trans-advertisement-cd-projekt-red-e3-2019 (this was already touched upon by the above mentioned RPS author; an in-game ad featuring a trans model)

TBF, the Kingdom Come dev was a racist shitbag regardless of what he put in his game or didn't. Or at least that's my understanding.

Why can't we just shoot bitches in the face not based on the color of their skin, but by the content of their character?

#allvideogameNPClivesmatter

It's great we have you in here to go looking up some jouno's pic so you can take potshots about how he looks. You add so much value.

On the game itself. I tried to love TW3, but couldn't. If this is more of the same I'm afraid it probably won't work for me still.

We really need to stop with this Political Correctness bullshit. We are talking about a fucking game where you play criminals in the seedy underbelly of society, and people are whining about unfair representation? I hope Trump kills us all soon with his idiocy, we deserve it.

Edit: Now with 50% less fucks given in the statement, for the children.

Eh, I'm becoming immune to clickbait bullshit.

The true crime was that someone was reading RockPaperShotgun.

+1 for not giving a shit about PC culture in my video games.

My biggest complaint about Witcher 3 was the awkward third person movement; since this is first person, I hope I don't have that problem.

So, apparently Keanu Reeves has the 2nd most lines of dialogue in the game behind only the PC. That's surprising. I thought he'd be in it but not that much.

Info came from this article here: https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/06/14/cyberpunk-2077-keanu-reeves-has-the-most-dialogue-of-any-character-besides-you (https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/06/14/cyberpunk-2077-keanu-reeves-has-the-most-dialogue-of-any-character-besides-you)

He says 'woah' 1,486,973 times.

That joke is about 2 decades out of date.

Aren't we all.  Aren't we all.

As an optimist, I prefer to see it as 58 years before its time.

Lol, well played.

I was thinking of getting this on PS4 (pro) because my pc's 970 and older cpu will likely cough on it...

...then I realized that it's fps and I hate fps with controllers (I prefer them for 3rd person).

Just some food for thought for the other grandpas.

I don't know why but I like watching people play fps but I can't stand playing them. I don't think I ever knowingly bought a fps in my life. Was EQ1 first person? That may have been my first and last.

Same here, can't play FPS with a controller, while I enjoy it with a 3rd person game.

By the way, CD Projekt will upload the E3 gameplay demo during Pax West, running August 30th - 2nd September. Two more months!  :ye_gods:
https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/cyberpunk-2077-e3-2019-gameplay-demo-will-be-made-public-at-pax-west/
-------

One last thing: FWIW, here are the PC specs for the E3 demo:

https://wccftech.com/cyberpunk-2077-e3-2019-demo-specs/

them: titan rtx
me: oh no

Hah, went to double check min specs...no specs released yet on gog


ohno



eta: on the upside, I guess I can get the GotY version instead, assuming I upgrade my pc by then.

My 1080 Ti is still devouring everything I throw at it on a 1440p monitor 60fps minimum , and I expect it will do so with Cyberpunk too (with RTX turned off, of course; out of curiosity I tried it with Metro Exodus and is a big no-no, as expected). Best graphic card I ever owned (yeah, ok, no shit :P).

It's a CDPR game. I fully expect it to be unoptimized at launch with loads of UI issues and mediocre controls that get patched over the following two years and are fixed by the time I buy the Cyberpunk 2077 game of the year edition. Just like the Witcher 3.

Looking forward to Trump visiting Poland some day and being given this as a State Gift.

CMON scooped up the IP for a card game: https://cmon.com/news/cmon-announces-cyberpunk-2077-afterlife-the-card-game

Sorry, schild.

i don't know what you're sorry about, i don't really have fucks to give about licensed card games

The writers are not bad. I like most of Lang's stuff. And Chiarvesio, in spite of being Italian, made Kingsburg which is not terrible.

this has nothing to do with CMON or the designers, I just don't care about licenses in board games

Oh yes I agree. I have zero interest in this. I just meant that it's probably not gonna be terrible although almost certainly forgettable.

I am way more interested in this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJML6ZpD_ZQ

Hard to get usable impressions from someone who has never played a tabletop game.

Apparently they'll be releasing an actual 2077 tabletop RPG. I played the 2020 version a long, long time ago. I didn't enjoy it a lot but part of that was the GM. He was a friend of ours who made pregens and purposefully gave each of us characters that were way out of our comfort zones. My character was a mechanic, who talked a lot and was super social but didn't know the first thing about guns. At the time I was in my "mostly quiet gun-fu" phase for cyberpunk and modern style games. Anyway, I seem to remember not being super impressed with the ruleset mechanically either.

I've been playing Shadowrun 5e over the last few years, and the newly-released 6e (and, honestly, Catalyst itself) is such a shitshow that most people are either sticking with 5e, or jumping ship to Cyberpunk RED. In fact, one of the SR communities I play in just did a playtest of the Jumpstart kit and it went really really well...

Of course this may all change when the core rulebook comes out, but (at least post-gencon) the hype is strong.

I never played the Shadowrun tabletop RPG but didn't like the dice pool mechanics of it. I ran a Cyberpunk 2020 campaign for years with my buddies. The 2020 ruleset was decent - I liked that it was d10 instead of d6, but there were definitely some moments of my friends finding just super-maximized combos. My buddy ended up making a Prowler character that was more deadly than just about any Solo, so I ended up having to constantly put them in situations where his strengths were nullified (or just have them wake up naked). They all had fun with it but like most tabletop RPGs, even the best systems can be shit up by a dickhead GM or min-maxing rules lawyer players.

CD Projekt Red can't win for losing. They got bitched at for their transgender ads in the games. So they decided to make the character creator more inclusive. Now, instead of a binary male/female choice you choose a body type and a voice. Needless to say right-wing gamers are losing their shit over it. "What? I guess now I can just pretend to be a woman so my character can walk into women's bathrooms" and such is what you'll see in sites that allow comments and/or on social media.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/cyberpunk-2077-drops-binary-malefemale-options-in-/1100-6469446/ (https://www.gamespot.com/articles/cyberpunk-2077-drops-binary-malefemale-options-in-/1100-6469446/)

Step 1: ignore comments and social media.

I'm serious. Don't give these fucking morons any attention.

(full disclosure: I think gendered bathrooms are a stupid idea and cringe that apparently it's the only thing stopping conservatives from raping women and girls)

Trump voters aren't going to buy the game anyway.

You know the first thing that is going to happen in any cyberpunky world is some dude is going to get a vagina implanted in his arm so he can fuck himself, or something random like that.  So the whole idea of nonbinary genders does fit in with the genre.

That last gameplay trailer was fucking rad.  April can't get here fast enough.

For lazy ones
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FknHjl7eQ6o

Yeah, you already had my money, but please, take more of my money SOONER.

This is going to require an Nvidia RTX 5000000080000000 isn't it?

As good a reason as any to upgrade from my launch 980 GTX.

Four of them, running parallel and eating all your standard slots plus an enclosure built specifically for one more.

And external power sources, too, like the cancelled Voodoo5.

The latest "controversy" is that cutscenes are almost entirely first person it seems. I don't understand why they have such a boner for pure first person in this game. While I think it's silly for people to be upset over it i do get the comments that go "so what's the point of the detailed character creator if I rarely see my character?" I'm not going to lie. I like designing my characters and have been known to choose armor/clothes for looks over stats from time to time.  If I have the option I always play 3rd person because I like seeing my character. Yeah, I'm that person. Sue me.

I think this game is going to be awesome but I do think CD Projekt needs to get a handle on what information is released and how it is released. We keep seeing developers make comments in interviews or on twitter that blows up. Also, and I hate to say it, but it feels like some games journalists have it in for this game for some reason. Like that Rock Paper Shotgun guy a few pages back. These guys fellate anything Rockstar does but they're going out of their way to find things wrong with this game and it's annoying.

It's like a space sim not having starview glamcam or whatever which is pretty easily changed (or modded...maybe? Bueller?). There also seemed to be an on-model preview for equipment so people can fashion it up. The ice bath scene was pretty fuckin' cool though. :grin:

I'm the complete opposite; I couldn't get into Witcher 3 because of the 3rd person camera plus janky movement controls. If I could have played in in first person with 1:1 movement I'm sure I would have loved it, so I'm glad they're going first person with this game.

There are some scenes that need the cinematic feel that third person brings. There are others tat probably won't. If the game can make me feel like first person works, I'm there.

I'm over first person for just about everything but minecraft (which has 3rd person as needed tho). It's just limiting and weird.

Shooting feels so much better in first person though, always.

Yeah, if the game is partly or mostly shooty, it has to be first person.  There are only really a few successful exceptions to this rule, no?

Reticles are reticles, yo.

Hmm...for run and gun gameplay not sure I agree.

no

Not even a little.  But you know that already.

I will concede this may be a personal preference. Games are great because in RL, guns don't have reticles and you almost always hit what the dot is on.

This is me too.

Loved everything from the video except the narrator. He sucked deeply.

(https://i.imgur.com/EBDQwK3.png)

Good. I'm sure the Internet will lose its collective mind about that announcement, but I'm firmly in the school of 'when it's done.'  If nothing else, the Witcher 3 shows they'll deliver something pretty special, and they know we're all thinking that.

I'm wicked torn, because I love the convenience of my PS4 and want to get it on there...but it's 1st person with guns so I want it on the PC for mouse aiming...but my pc is bordering on ancient now...gah.

Nah, they just wanted to give Nvidia more time to put out their "3000s" cards, c'mon (which might very well happen, now).

Does this apply to Star Citizen as well?  :why_so_serious:

As an aside Square Enix is breathing a big sigh of relief. They just announced a delay of FFVII Remake from March to April a couple of days ago which had put it in direct competition with Cyberpunk 2077.

The rate at which entertaining games, TV and movies come out these days, delays no longer bug me.  I already have more shit to get through than I will ever manage, and the pile just gets bigger.

Exactly. In fact, I am happy as so much stuff is coming out in March/April. Final Fantasy 7, Last of Us, Wasteland 3, and New World, all coming out in those 2 months.

Animal Crossing in March.

Steam or it didn't happen.

Man I bet the team really wishes it could have polished this up earlier. That said, this will come out just in time for wave two to hit I suspect.

At this rate maybe not... Pushed back to November now.

https://www.tomsguide.com/news/cyberpunk-2077-just-got-delayed-but-could-launch-with-ps5

The hype levels and presale campaign for this game are utterly stupid. I've been a cyberpunk literature fan since the 1980s and as a student newspaper editor I published a cyberpunk-themed edition before you could even publicly access the internet. I've obsessed over Deus Ex and Altered Carbon and everything to do with William Gibson, jacking into a matrix and any product finished in chrome, but I'm not going anywhere near this game until it's released and reviewed.

I think the anticipation here is at least based on track record rather than something like No Man's Sky where it was about the extravagant way it was imagined and described. (Though much respect to the NMS people because they eventually made good on a lot of it.)

But yes, I kind of feel like this is now putting an insane burden on those guys. Witcher 3 was as good as it was partly because they had a super-rich canvas already painted to work with. Maybe that's true here too, but I dunno.

Based on track record CDPR has worked on one franchise in their history up and built it up from being janky as hell to eventually AAA. Their team and their budget now is much stronger now than it was when they made the first Witcher. At the same time, I'm not taking it as a given that they've made a smooth transition to working on a Cyberpunk game.

The Witcher 3 is still janky as hell, it's just much less janky than the previous 2.

I am OK with jank if thr writing is good

Like, I'm not sure what the non-jank gold standard is then.

For what, precisely?

I think he's asking why Trippy would still consider Witcher 3 janky. Personally, I didn't experience any real jank that I can remember when I played it on the PS4. Compared to other open world games the stuff Bethesda puts out is usually an order of magnitude more janky than Witcher 3 was for me.

witcher series always felt like it had a touch of the eurojank, but it's not like, peak eurojank or anything

it's just there, swimming in the background, reminding you the game is trying its best

The first Witcher was janky enough that I stopped playing it a couple hours in due to a quest item bug that kept me from completing a quest (and this was long after the game had released).

There are dozens upon dozens of games that have better 3rd person melee combat systems than The Witcher 3. Movement is also bad with its stupid acceleration/inertia system where you constantly overshoot your intended position requiring multiple tries to get into position to interact with things. The default sets of question marks on the maps are really lame, killing almost all sense of exploration and immersion (the ones that appear when you find clues and notices in the world are fine and helpful). It's also hard to see stuff in "detective mode" and the menuing UI is atrocious.

However the game has old-school BioWare-levels of voice acting, quests, and general storytelling so that makes it compelling to play despite its game play issues.

Yeah, the combat jank is the entire reason I never made it anywhere in Witcher 3.  I even tried to pick it up again two months ago, got dropped into some cave in a saved game, and uninstalled it 20 minutes later.  The combat is best describes as Not Fun.

See, I think the combat jank in Witcher 3 is a frustrating but smart attempt to model the source material's odd and very particular thinking about combat and it really works. I especially appreciate that you can't just go kill some of the monsters with your awesome twitch but that in fact you actually have to got to understand what the fuck you're dealing with.

Witcher 1 is of course fucking awful in almost every way as a game, including combat and Witcher 2 is jankola. But I don't think Witcher 3 is like that.

The jank that Trippy talks about in 3 stopped me playing more than 20mins each time I tried.


Yes, they've made deliberately unfun combat systems in all their games in order to stay true to the source material.

 :oh_i_see:

I've cleared the Witcher 3 at least 3 times and I'm not sure what you all are talking about. The combat has a rhythm that you fall into and I tend to wade through most fights except a couple bullshit boss fights. But even those are easy with the right signs.

Has anyone played the 3 games side by side? I think TW3's combat is still janky, but they probably made a huge effort to make it smoother as it has always been one of the biggest flaws of the series. Not familiar with the books but I thought that combat in the games is inspired by the books, though the interpretation was still up to CD Projekt Red.

The combat was always the worst part of the Witcher games if you come from the TRPG side. In 3 it was manageable and with the right signs and potions could be easily cheesed to victory. While there wasn't a Witcher game where the combat improved the experience, it at least didn't distract from the game in 3. Boss fights even had the meticulous planning once expected from a Witcher monster hunting encounter.

This. I played 2 all the way to the end and I never liked or got used to the combat.

I was used to 3's combat and really quite liking it pretty quickly.

If the swordplay isn't your jam, just max out everything about Igni until you get the enhancement that lets Aard freeze enemies and respec fur pure Aard to breeze through the rest of the game.

What 3rd person fantasy rpgs have better combat?

Every single one from From Software. The end.

I disagree with what you've said. Caveat: I haven't gotten into a From Soft game since Demon's Souls.  :awesome_for_real: They're just not my thing.

Is the recent God of War a RPG? Horizon: Zero Dawn? Spider-man? Dead Cells?

Witcher 3's combat was probably the best of the 3 Witcher games. The first game's combat was really odd and limited parts of the game severely. 2's combat was garbage on launch and was OK after a year of fixes.

By a mile.  Might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is surely better than Witcher combat.

Witcher 3 combat is the least janky western rpg combat I've experienced from a guy who generally gets bored of other third party "sword and sorcery" games. What has "good" combat than?

That really is a matter of personal taste. For me I say fuck all twitch-based combat in RPGs and give me tactical combat, preferably turn based. Others would disagree and think memorizing attack patterns is fun and never explain why they want to play RPGs for that.

Since I can't answer the question for anybody else, I'll say the Gold Box Series had good combat  :awesome_for_real:

Since apparently it's not obvious to some that there are better 3rd person melee combat combat systems out there let me explain better.

Falconeer brought up the FROM Software games which are an obvious example. And the 3rd person clones and "inspired by" games that I've tried have good combat too so you are already in the dozen or so count of games with better combat. However those games typically have much more "deliberate" combat pacing (button mashing generally will get you killed) and are optimized for 1-on-1 combat (multi-target combat is awkward at best) so don't really match the style of combat The Witcher 3 is going for.

Monster Hunter: World (and it's derivatives) is similar. It has a great single (very large) target combat system but isn't really designed for multiple (mostly) humanoid-sized targets. As an aside there's a special event quest in MH:W that let's you play as Geralt which is fun diversion and also quite challenging.

On the other extreme are games like Devil May Cry / Bayonetta / God of War (pre-PS4) / NieR: Automata with their flashy combo-based mixed melee and ranged combat systems. Those are also much better than TW3 but aren't as grounded in reality as TW3 is. The PS4 God of War that Rasix mentioned, is more like that though, and would be interesting to see how it might play with a zoomed out camera.

Next we have the recent Assassin's Creed games Origins and Odyssey which ditched the previous "counter-based" synced-animation combat system(s) for a more traditional direct attack hit-box based system which looks and feels better to play TW3 I would argue, though they are pretty similar in design.

There's also something Dragon's Dogma which is more "flashy" but has it's own jankiness so it's maybe a wash.

And finally the combat system TW3 should've adopted, in my option is the one in the Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor/War games, which were inspired by the Batman Arkham games.

E.g. watch this Shadow of War sequence* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzmApOWnGes&t=1m15s

and also check out one the Netflix show combat sequences (warning graphic violence): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biZwR6CzVzs

Now compare that to TW3 with a similar setup to the above ME:SoW clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8NWRYEjZJo

I mean it's fine? But it is clunky and awkward and very same looking compared to ME:SoM/SoW.

Here's also an AC: Origins arena combat sequence to compare to as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRtpY9NIing

* Shadow of War came out after TW3 but Mordor was released before

I like turn based combat in general but I grew up with JRPG's whose combat system is "skill does thing" and "maybe don't stand over cliff" when it comes to the turn based strategy jrpg's or memorizing rock, paper, shotgun.. I haven't and maybe will never get into the D&D inspired combat systems... I did like dragon age inquisition (which you can force to be a turn based game with religious pausing) but going by the western rpg crowd apparently that game isn't "deep enough".

I am decidedly late to the council generation party and triple AAA gaming in general so about half the games mentioned are on the list. Generally I draw from my experience in Shadows of Mordor (good), Witcher 3 (also good), Dragon Age Inq (can be clunky but mostly good) and Horizon Zero Dawn (good but eh??..)

I can say shadows vs witcher 3 combat is an interesting debate but i lean toward the witcher due to the fact that the rpg mechanics doesn't make the game extremely easy in one game, but it really really does in another. Me personally I don't have a big boner for c-c-combo's, as nice as they are, against purely npc's opponents so generally what i look for is whether i had to do some thinking before i murder something at a reasonable difficulty and not just A attack move or B dodge roll to the giant bum.

If I had to name a game where the combat is itself very satisfying to me personally, I might come up with Mount and Blade. (Bannerlord too, I guess, but so far everything else about Bannerlord, um, needs work).

To me the From Software games almost remind me of Dragon's Lair, in an odd way--you have to time everything right, remember some patterns, respond with great precision. They have a choreography that is built on repetition and rehearsal that I really don't enjoy, though I appreciate the challenge level at times. It's odd, I think I like those games for their aesthetic more than I do the combat. When combat isn't turn-based tactical, I frankly appreciate a kind of looseness and a forgiving feeling to it. Witcher 3 is one of the few where the rehearsed, precise nature of the combat felt genuinely story-based and genuinely meaningful in narrative terms, and where most combats felt like they mattered in a distinctive way, even the kind of "ok, so you're in a swamp and there are some drowners here". I will give FROM's games this: they *also* don't feel like it's just waves and waves of trash monsters that you just button-mash at, which is maybe the worst of all worlds from my perspective.

SoW/SoM combat on a game with the breadth of W3? That's exciting stuff to imagine.

Agree

Trippy's list is interesting. Most of those games are combat games  with a thin veneer of RPG stuff on top in some cases, and none at all in a few. A lot of those games you play for the combat systems. If it has a good story and RPG stuff, great! Bonus! The Witcher 3 is the opposite. I generally enjoyed the combat in it but it was not the focus of the game. Oddly, I enjoying playing as Cirila much more than I did Geralt. Her playstyle is the type of combat I tend to enjoy. She was faster and her attacks flowed better than his did.

Out of all the games Trippy mentions, I personally feel AC: Odyssey comes closest to straddling the line and having the best of both worlds. An RPG style game with great combat. Sadly for me I played Origins after Odyssey and had trouble getting into it because it was a huge step back for me personally and what I enjoyed.

I still don't see Witcher 3 combat as "janky" but clearly it can't compete with games that are built from the ground up for 3rd person combat.

This.

I'm sorry I even asked at this point.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyqToveJqcs

Also trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTRRJkfo5Xs

And the analysis I was looking for (From Digital Foundry): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9-n3_xZnfY

Sorry. Duplicate.

Its weird bringing up From Software because Witcher 3 combat is generally regarded as "easy dark souls". So long as, during combat, you aren't running everywhere there its pretty jank free. You die when you don't know enemies attack profiles and the dodge type. You succeed once you do. When they attack you dodge and then hit them. (or use a sign) When in doubt you keep dodging.

Lots of dudes on the Internet suggesting this might be delayed again.

It's fine. The more they delay it the less patches it will need.

*cough* Star Citizen. *cough cough*

 :why_so_serious:

They have a ways to go before they're in that territory. The only issue here is obviously a): the longer it takes, the higher the expectation and b): it's important to remember that it took them three tries to get The Witcher to be a really great game, even granted the technological gap between the first game and the third one.

Development still sounds like it's going smoother than Bloodlines 2 at least so I'd put money on it beating that game to market.

Amazon has the pre-order on sale for $49.94 on all platforms. Not sure how long it will last though.

Delayed. December 10th.

I'm guessing this game is Witcher 2 levels of buggy/unbalanced at this point. Going to be an interesting time playing this at launch. Expect a "mea cupla" 2.0 patch/director's edition in a year or so.

I'm still likely going to buy it at launch. I'm weak.

Release delays only make me feel better about waiting to build a pc  :grin:

I don't think so on Witcher 2, honestly--there's such a quantum leap in terms of skills and design between 2 and 3 that I think this is likely to have entirely new problems of bugginess and imbalance.

The tweet makes it pretty clear that the issue is releasing on so many platforms at once. I think they got over ambitious with it personally. I'd have left off at least Stadia and the Switch for now if it was me.

Speaking of tweets that hint at some problems... (https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1321140689309175808)

The hands on previews a couple of months ago had some big red flags in them.

Worryingly no one seemed to be finding bugs, just describing the gameplay as kind of empty and generally meh.

any dev at CDPR can get a job in 5 seconds anywhere in a pandemic. I don't want to victim blame but the game went gold, you've got the credit. Get outta there.

Just because they make good games should not excuse that CDPR is pretty well known for abusing the crunch mentality in the gaming industry.

People pre-ordering a game en masse is a massive red flag.

There are just waaaaay too many decent, good or great video games in existence to really give a shit if one fails to live up to expectations.  If it turns out great and takes another year to do so, fine.  If it is a broken, unfixable unfun mess forever, fine.

I still find it bemusing that in this day and age, people are surprised, SURPRISED, I TELL YOU! that working in game development is like playing russian roulette but with five bullets instead of one in the gun as far as earning a free trip to the rape shack goes.

Watching fans rage at Gamespot for giving it 7/10 (buggy, full of superfluous content, has some good side quests, characters and RPG mechanics, but otherwise disappointing).

PC Gamer is like "it's coming apart at the seams with bugs... play it in a few months" ... review score 78%.

Kotaku's write-up is basically "I played it for 40 hours and still don't know whether it's good or bad, but it sure is big and I'm tired."

Adding to the confusion is the claim by CDPR that some/most/all of the reviewers weren't on the "Day One" patch (of which there are at least two of to my knowledge, one of which is basically downloading the entire game all over again) so therefore all the complaints about the massive amounts of bugs are invalid. Oh and also none of the console versions were allowed to be reviewed, and the reviewers weren't allowed to show *any* of their own in-game footage. So basically a review clusterfuck of CDPR-proportions.

On the bright side the game releases at 4 PM tomorrow (Wednesday, Dec 9) in the Pacific Time Zone so I know what I'll be doing at that time tomorrow* :awesome_for_real:

* making a character for a few hours and then not playing again until the "miracle miracle" patch is released

I'm going to grab it for PS4. I'm not expecting miracle game, but I expect it to be fun.

You gotta watch Kotaku - they get on a kick of really hating some games. They've been trash talking this game for months, so I fully expected them to be biased. CDPR doesn't make it easy - many of Kotaku's complaints are in regards to the business. The game should be reviewed on the basis of the game though, not the business practices of the creator.

I'd have considered picking up the PS5 version at some point, but recalled that it's not coming out until sometime next year now. On the plus side, CDPR might actually get the game playable by then.

Way to cherry pick.  It's got a 91% on metacritic. Most reviews are glowing even when they mention bugs. Kotaku has had a massive hate-on for the game for months now. I mean the entire first paragraph of the review is nothing but a summary of how bad CDPR is and how racist and sexist they are but "I guess I'll review this game now." I mean, even as a liberal it made me roll my eyes.

That's kinda cherry picking also.

Look, even the positive reviews like the ones on metacritic with the glowingly positive perfect scores acknowledge the severe amount of bugs:


From TheGamer (5 out of 5 stars) (https://www.thegamer.com/cyberpunk-2077-review/)



Translated quote from Play Zine (translated) (https://play.co.rs/2020/12/cyberpunk-2077-review/)



The Digital Fix (https://www.thedigitalfix.com/gaming/review/cyberpunk-2077/) gave the game a perfect score and then sectioned off comments about bugs and why they didn't affect the score in a separate article. (https://www.thedigitalfix.com/gaming/news/on-cyberpunk-2077-bugs-and-patches/)


From the 9 out of 10 review from Game Watcher (https://www.gamewatcher.com/reviews/cyberpunk-2077-review/13251)



I'm just saying let's be real here. "Reviews" like Kotaku or Polygon aren't even scored (and thus aren't affecting the Metacritic average). I'd say most of the "glowing" review scores aren't reflecting the text of the actual review. Regardless of how awesome one thinks the city is, or the story, or even the gameplay is if everything worked right, I'm baffled at people who can say that a game has dozens of technical issues but is a 9 or 10 out of 10 game. There's plenty of games/movies/books whatever that I love despite their flaws but I'm also honest enough with myself that I wouldn't score them that high were I to review them.

I mean....if a game is amazing and full of bugs at the same time, I don't think that compares with a game that actually kinda sucks but is perfectly constructed.  Both of those games should not be a 7 out of 10.  I want to play the former, not the latter.

Obviously the other issue is that while games can improve over time with patches, review score rarely change to reflect that. Which makes sense to a large extent of course. I mean how much sense does it make to have writers who are presumably getting paid go back and put substantial time into playing a game again and updating reviews whenever a major patch comes out?

With Day 1 patches being the exception rather than the rule these days, I don't envy reviewers who have to try to take into account that the game they're playing isn't necessarily the one the game the public is going to be at launch. I know this has been a consideration for many years now with reviewers having to decide just how much leeway to give a game when it comes to pre-release bugs.

Despite how long the game has been in development, maybe the last couple weeks was somehow enough time for CDPR to fix a sizable percent of the biggest bugs and glitches in which case, great! Kinda sucks they didn't just delay the game a few more weeks then. Or maybe the day 1 patch fixes a few things, breaks a few other things, and there's a much longer road ahead to get this game in good shape. Right now I fall more on the skeptical side. CDPR not giving out console review copies, or allowing reviewers to show any video other than b-roll footage provided by CDPR doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

Everybody who buys a CDPR game on a console can blame nobody but themself anyway, though.

This game in particular has a "best played on a 3k dollar gaming machine" written all over it.  I can already imagine the crying over console performance is going to be big.  Like....duh?

imagine ever going to kotaku

i'm not sure what to do with this title. wait for patches. wait for dlc. wait for new pc. buy it full price to show support but don't install it?

mega hype SP games at launch seem so pointless. its single player. i can't miss out on anything.

Yep, pretty much.  I never buy any AAA single player titles at release these days, since they almost all need some patches, and I can wait for a steam sale.  For that matter, I don't really play multiplayer games anymore.  So I guess the only games I tend to buy release day or janky indie games on steam?

I think I'll enjoy this game, but in no hurry to purchase.  Almost 5 years later, I am right now playing through Witcher 3 for the first time (ironically), so happy to wait till they patch this into it's final best form, then enjoying it.

Even as someone who ran a PNP Cyberpunk 2020 campaign for years, I am in no hurry to get this game. I'll likely grab it at 50% off next year when the giant, game-breaking or plain annoying bugs are patched the fuck out of it.

Same boat. I was hoping for at least a couple pre-order bonuses to lure me in, but I didn't see anything other than soundtracks, posters and shit.

I would've bought it if humans could buy 3080 cards or even a PS5. I can wait to experience it in better quality, though probably not defer it long enough for the GOTY version or w/e.

Reading Kotaku for games reviews is like reading f13 for Star Wars reviews. Nobody hates games more than a game reviewer! So much meta, so little childlike joy left in the rotted, angry husks.

It's not going to stay that high. There's a lot of 100 reviews from smaller outlets up right now currently. The score will likely fall down to the low 80s after more reviews are out from the bigger outlets.

I imagine I'll buy this specifically because I have a 3080. But I don't expect to be able to play it properly for a month or three. That would be madness.

Well, I'm in it and all ready to go at 1am (Centraul Europe Time) so you'll have my worthless first impressions in a few hours. Luckily I am not paid to write reviews, but I am for the most part never bothered by bugs so unless they are game-breaking they won't factor in my take. Also, my PC was about $1400 18 months ago (I have an RTX 2070), and yet I am pretty confident that it'll handle the game well. I'll report about that too.

I'll be playing it. I'm super bored. If it ends up being a Witcher 2 situation, I'll just put it down for a while and check on it after some serious patching.

I'm holding off to see how the Day 1 patch looks; if I hear good things over the weekend I'll buy it on Monday, if only to test out my 3070.

My old-ass PC is below spec for this game. I'm wondering how GeForce Now would handle it. An extra $5 for a month or two might tide me over while we get through the gpu glut.

PC and PS4 version $10 off on Amazon right now. (https://www.amazon.com/Cyberpunk-2077-Xbox-One/dp/B07T8BP118/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&th=1&linkCode=sl1&tag=sec2002-20&linkId=6bc8540b8bd1cea5dd3d4859258d675b) Believe PC is a GOG key.

Edit: sounds like they ship the key physically for some reason.

PC "Day 1" patch via GOG is 10 GB and the download rate is pretty slow currently so plan ahead if you want to play at unlock time (in ~3h 30m).

Not much to do about it on Steam, as it doesn't look like we would be able to patch until "Unlock time".

Not unlocked on GOG yet (10 minutes past announced time) :awesome_for_real: :oh_i_see: :uhrr:

Edit: needed to restart GOG launcher to get the 3rd (4th?) "Day 1" patch for it to launch

1 hour in, I'm liking it. It feels like a Bethesda Fallout in Cyberpunk skin, but that's not a terrible thing for me as I liked Fallout 3 and 4 a lot. I also like the driving so far, but that's also not news as I am a driver both for work and for fun IRL.

Performance wise, it's clearly a heavy game, but there are so many switches that can be turned on and off that it didn't take me long to find a sweet spot between fps and quality.

It doesn't take a genius to see that this game will polarise opinions like crazy.

These punks aren't going to cyber themselves

The jank is strong with this one.

I'm ashamed to admit that I got FOMO bad for this one. Absent the hype, I would let this one fallow for six months. But everyone is playing it, and that includes all my friends who will be talking about it non stop.

I'm gonna wait at least four or five days to get a real sense of how consequential some of those bugs are. I still have some ground to cover in AC Valhalla anyway.

I've had a few bugs. Jackie bugged out in a conversation and ended up having two pairs of chopsticks. I got stuck crouching in a story area. AI got a little wonky in a fight. Some kids really didn't like me accidentally bumping into a cop and were terrified of me. Right now it's all little things, but there's a lot of it. So if that annoys you, I might lay off until some of the easy stuff is handled.

It's kind of a Eurojank Deus Ex, but way more interesting. I am going to play this shit out of this. There's just so much here and it's all very interesting at the moment.

Gotta say, this is the most immersed I have been in a world in a long time. i just sat and listened to some of the radio reports because of how interesting they were.

Ok. So I set my Xbox to NZ time and played it at 7am local time and lost track of time and stopped playing at 5am.

The gameplay is sort of a slow build. I found combat, stealth and hacking to be annoying at first because it was all hard. But a few hours in and my skill points started adding up. I don't have much cyberware yet but I did upgrade my deck so I could hack more easily and it's made a huge difference in the hacking game as well. I've noticed my skill with pistols is really starting to turn around and I recently stealthed through a whole area and only got into a massive gun fight towards the end after I'd wiped out most of the level with hacking after being able to see them through cameras.

The good:

Story
Characters
Customization options
Just options in general. I've had missions I was like "I can't do this" then I'd poke around and find a new way to approach it and pull it off with ease. It's like Deus Ex turned to 11 in that regard. Sometimes I'll get into a huge firefight then poke around looking for loot and find a backdoor I could've used if I just looked around more.
The city. OMG the city. I've played 22 hours now and still feel like I've barely touched the city.
Immersiveness

The bad:

Bugs. I've had a few crashes. I had a time where my cyberdeck wouldn't swap out programs but a full restart of the game fixed it. I had a visual glitch during a very emotional cutscene. I have pauses where the game stops responding for a few seconds. I think that one is the game streaming in new areas of the city and the Xbox barely being able to keep up to be honest. It almost always happens when I'm driving. Considering what the reviews said I expected much worse. I think the day 1 patch really did nail a lot of them. For example, I haven't seen T posed NPCs yet or anything.

The AI won't win any awards but it's not nearly as bad as the reviewers made it seem. It's worst about stealth. It tends to forget you fairly quickly if you play right.


Overall. For me it's easily GOTY. And the best RPG I've played since the Witcher 3. Sadly, there's not a lot of competition in that area anymore. I know Schild will poke his head out and say "DISCO ELYSIUM" but that game I played a single time and found mostly extremely pretentious if fun and this one I already know I'll play more than once to try out different character builds and stuff.

Anyone running this on an original PS4 or am I to be the sacrificial lamb? I have the game installed but haven't cracked it open because work meetings all day today. But I am looking forward to seeing just how loud the fans get in the PS4 later tonight. Was flirting with the idea of just putting the PS4 outside on the balcony and running the HDMI back thru the window... to keep it cooler and not have to listen to it wailing.

Base PS4 is going to be rough. Here's the Digital Foundry comparison of PS4 vs PS4 Pro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5pHpQqhmR4. Skip to 8m:00s for the start of frame rates. Also, spoilers.

Since I'm holding off for "NEXT GEN" hardware, I broke my usual spoiler embargo to watch a youtuber play the first bit of the game. He went over the systems and options, which was nice, and watching him run through the tutorial was helpful to get the gist of the game mechanics...but holy shit the dude just constantly ran past interesting stuff, conversations, npcs, side quests, just nattering on about how excited he was to be playing and wow the graphics...and he's one of the lesser annoyances in the tubeworld.

Aaanyway, in a way I was happy he skipped it all, because I was impressed by the world and how much longer his 1h vid would've taken me to play through, heh.

I'm also perversely entertained (my favorite kind!) by playing janky ol' Empyrion while most are enjoying this feast :D

Mmmm....there’s definitely stuff that’s interesting to stop and look / listen to but much of world I’ve seen so far (which is very limited) is extremely superficial and if you stop and observe it closely you’ll notice it’s just a poorly done facade and the immersion will break. To give a basic example there’s a background event that takes place when you first leave your apartment with some cops checking on one of your neighbors with dialog and animations and stuff. But if you explore the apartment complex for a bit and then return to your apartment the cops are still there just standing there, mute. Another simple example — most of the food stall / cart vendors I’ve seen you can’t actually talk to or buy food from. They are just there as non-interactive decoration which destroys the illusion that Night City is a living city.

I just reached the part with the BrainDance and let me say that now I am officially grabbed. I was slowly getting into it, liking it, but this whole section, the characters, the gameplay-technology of the BrainDance and how you are guided through it all of a sudden got me on the game AND story parts at the same time.

About consoles, now THIS is weird: https://kotaku.com/cyberpunk-2077-is-surprisingly-fine-on-stadia-1845853147

Apparently the game is better on Stadia than old-gen consoles. Worth considering buying it there if PS4 version sucks so bad. I mean, the price is the same.

I'm sure this game is fantastic and I look forward to playing it...


...around this time next year after I build a new system, they've patched out the bugs, and it hits a Steam sale.  :grin:

I enjoyed SkillUp's review of it: https://youtu.be/HJKeBbk-9YA

Playing it on a PS5, even though it doesn’t fully take advantage of the hardware and the updated version won’t drop for a few months, I’m digging the shit out of it so far from a story perspective. It did crash to desktop once in the first hour but it’s been solid since. I think I spent a good 45 minutes customizing my character. No random nakedness yet.

Played a few hours.

Didn't notice any bugs.

Game is very pretty - far and away the best rtx implementation I've seen, can't really imagine playing other than stealth/hacking though, and the driving bits are... bad.

Mostly the game feels like a conversation simulator.

We call those...RPGs. Where have you been for the last 30+ years?

Played about 90min from character creation through the corp intro. Surprisingly, my PS4 is not screaming like it does in other games. Game doesn't look all that bad either to me, but I am not a WARGGGLLL 4K!!! type of person.

I think one of the reasons others are finding it a bit of a facade, while I have been sucked right in is that I am a major audiophile. I value what I am hearing over what I am seeing for vis a vis immersion. Maybe its the old pen and paper rpger, who played back in his friends parents game room on the pool table.

I'm not saying graphics don't mean shit. they have to meet a minimum standard, enough to get thier message across, which i hear they are not in many cases. But listening to conversations fade in and fade out on the street, to listening to the radio (thank God for the death metal station) has been a treat thus far.

And I know this isn't the politics section: but it is nice playing a game that has something to say. From peoples journal entries on overly private health care, to corporate run armed forces, to people on the street ranting about cybernetics.

I'm not sure it really has anything to say.

'The sinister global mega-corporations with no apparent motivations or sources of income are bad mmmkay' isn't exactly biting political satire or an insightful opportunity for self reflection.

It definitely has aspirations of being deus ex, but haven't seen anything like augmentation debates from that game.

Early stages though.

No it isn't the greatest political treatise, I'm just commenting on how it actual says something. Rather then duck and hide from any shred of what could be considered a political arguement.

To be clear, I'm not impressed at it because it is saying what I want it to say, but because a place like Night City with this level of technology without politics would be immersion shattering.

Does anybody know where I can read the "shards" I pick up in the world? They seem to be snippets of lore of different kind. Most of the time I don't want to read them but I may want to explore them later, and I can't find them.

EDIT: Found it. "Shards" tab under Journal.

Man the UI is messy. So many submenus to keep track of, and I am just mucking about with the first tutorial trying to get a handle on hacking shit. I'm sure it is part of getting oriented with the new game, but still, there is a ton of info that pops up and still not sure what to focus on and what is just there for show.

A TON. I haven't felt this overwhelmed by a game and the amount of stimuli it throws at you in what is a clearly chaotic environment in a long time. And yet I think it might be on purpose. It fits the theme.

The hacking tutorial is not great. I had some issues with that section. I still don't wholly get the breach mini game. I haven't managed to correctly do a double line hack yet.

I  just now got past the title card. Just a word of warning, 'The Heist' mission is very long. Sucker kept me up later than I wanted to be.

Really enjoying this game and the setting in particular. I'm also pleasantly surprised at the performance I'm getting on my PC with how great it all looks.

Agreed. I have to get used to where the important stuff pops up and what section of the screen I need for what piece I am doing. But still, there is a ton to micromanage which is going to prove to be a huge learning curve for a lot of people I guess.

Hacking in this game is jank city. Yikes.

Pretty sure Jank City is the first DLC.   :why_so_serious:

does this mean i can play stealth in this game with way less of the effective prerequisites for stealth in other games (i.e., "rapid and continuous savescumming")

Patch 1.04 is out for PC and PS4/5:

https://www.cyberpunk.net/en/news/37043/hotfix-1-04

How so? Hacking is super smooth when I play it? If you're having problems with breaches, keep in mind, the timer doesn't start until you make your first selection so you can plan your route. Quick hacking is super easy, just target the enemy, select the hack and then turn off scanning, it'll finish on its own.


It's like anything else in the game. You're gonna suck at first but after you put some points in it gets much easier. I damned near gave up on stealth then suddenly seemed to get much better at it after putting points in cool and getting some skill level ups.

17gigs...sheesh.

Welp, downloaded their new patch. Now I literally can't launch the game. Just crashes.
It feels like shit to use. On PC I have to hold down weird buttons and go into too many sub menus then wait like 20 seconds for me to distract a guard for a sec. I'm not too worried about it, as I put no points into hacking. It just feels too clunky for me to want to use even in an ancillary way.

This game is addictive. You sit down for a quick session, ten hours later it's 3am and you have completed exactly one quest.

yeah at every turn it's just feeling like this game is, unsurprisingly, the product of great care and overindulgence in raw depth

i halfway wanted to be able to grouse about it some as the latest AAA disappointment but i mean honestly they need to make more games like how these people made this one (and not be afraid to delay thrice)

I don't know about the menu stuff. On Console you put the cursor on a bad guy and a list of options pops up. You select one and bam hack starts. Same with various objects in the world you can hack. The 20 seconds thing is probably you making the same mistake I did at the start.

Scan bad guy.
Select hack.
Wait forever for it to load.
Release scan, see what the hack did.

The correct way to do it is:

Scan bad guy.
Select hack.
Stop scanning which slows the game world to a crawl. Watch hack happen in like 2 seconds while you do other stuff.

I can now clear whole areas with nothing but hacking and stealth if I play it right.

On PC you hold the scan button (which you should map to something on your mouse) hold over the bad dude and the quickhack menu appears.

Not sure what sub menu is being referred to.

Not sure if anyone missed it, but you can toggle scan mode instead of button hold with caps lock instead of the tab button.

Thanks to secret santa, I've got this game. I was a bit worried about playing it on my 970, but it looks fine. Not sure why people are losing their shit. My processor is from 2011, ffs  :why_so_serious: Playing mostly on medium settings, targeting 30fps so I do notice it being a bit sludgy during heavy action, but honestly the music is more distracting than the dips in framerates. I did go through DF's settings guide, but so much of it is not even noticeable, I turned them down lower or off (ambient occlusion, distant shadow geometry, etc). Very playable, especially compared to my cpu getting slaughtered at a heavy POI in Empyrion, which has, em, less graphical fidelity  :drillf:

The keybindings are wonky af, though. And I'm still at my dilemma about controls. I prefer GTA-style games with a controller, especially driving...but for 1st person and shooters in particular, I prefer m+k. So I'm using the m+k but driving sucks so bad with a keyboard (shitty driving > shitty shooting). These are honestly my two main complaints (three if you count the obnoxious combat music, but I haven't looked to see if there's a discreet setting to reduce or ditch that).

I finished the game last night. Non-spoilery: I really liked the ending I got. It felt fairly fitting for how I played my version of V and had a bit of a melancholic but hopeful vibe that I think fit. From Googling it appears I got the closest thing the game has to a "good" ending.

Specific spoilers:

14 hours played now. Once I couldn't loot things anymore, once I was stuck in the Scanner mode graphics. Both vanished after a reboot.

Maybe I was lucky, maybe the people making out CDPR to be the new Bethesda are exaggerating a little, maybe the bugs will come later in the game. Doesn't really matter to me, though. I loved the old Bethesda games as well, bugs and all.

Better this than a bugless borefest.

This is my biggest problem with playing GTA and the thing I'm most worried about here; I only scratched the surface of the tutorial and haven't had to drive so far, but I hope it isn't as bad as it was in GTA.

I've gotten used to the driving. I prefer getting around on a motorcycle, but had an interesting bug where I got my bike stuck in a guard rail.  Luckily you can just go a little bit away and summon it.

Having a lot of fun with this still. Game is also performing rather well on my system (1070 TI) and load times are super short.

The Nomad background made me think of Deacon St John from Days Gone, so I'm roleplaying some weird mashup where Deke is the protagonist in this game and making my choices according to how I played that game. I wish he could have the colors with the nomad tag on a jacket, though.

My initial thought was to go for a corp ninja hacker, hope the game is good enough to revisit for the GOTY version with better hardware and explore that playstyle. As it is, guns blazing is the way.

One question: is there a light? Lots of dark scenes where I literally can't see where I'm going. Not sure if that's intended or just my tv crushing the darks (or both), but coming from janky ol Empyrion where I have both a helmet lamp and nightvision...weird to be a cyborg that can't even see in a dimly lit corner...

You can, in theory, use both -- controller for driving and M+K for the rest.

There's a gamma slider (that's labeled backwards, higher gamma values mean things are "brighter", CP2077 has it the other way around).

Sony started offering refunds for digital purchases of the game a few days ago which is very very rare. That's how buggy, crash prone, and poor performing the console versions are. The PC version is buggy but rarely crashes, at least, and the graphic settings can be tweaked enough to get okay performance.

Edit: is

Yeah I like the motorcycles better. They seem to induce less vertical "camera snapping" that cars/trucks trigger and they are much easier to powerslide* to make those >=90 degree turns that show up way too late on the minimap and should really be displayed in your view as a HUD given the game is 50 years in the future and you have ocular implants. They are also easier to weave in and out of the remarkably sparse traffic given the size and supposed density of Night City. Also Wakako Okada's motorcycle for purchase (https://holdtoreset.com/how-to-get-the-akira-bike-in-cyberpunk-2077/) is cool looking and has some nifty sound effects.

Edit: * To clarify doing a powerslide isn't actually easier to trigger on motorcycles but because they are a lot smaller, when you powerslide you are less likely to slam into something or worse somebody and trigger an instantaneous NCPD response and chase.

Edit 2: the sport bike linked above also feels like it has much better brakes making it easier to make sharp slide turns.

Playing on an original PS4 and have had a few snags here and there, but overall:

• lower graphics - quality is similar to looking at HD vs soap opera. PS4 is the soap opera. not game breaking for me, but YMMV
• graphics will pop in and out - with all the stuff, I can understand
• 3 hard crashes after long play sessions - couple hours and transitions to new area will end in a sony bug report screen
• controls go fucky at times when going in and out of the menus in a busy area - clears up without reboot...feels like it is lagged out in the menu after exiting it.
• settings reset to default - this one bugs me the most since I have tailored things the way I like and poof.... everything is back to default. Can't nail down how to stop it. Save game, main menu exit, sometimes gets reset. PS button to close app out, settings reset more often. really odd.
• really needs 3rd person option, not just in a vehicle

Game is fun for what it is. I am avoiding the main story and having a blast just moving about the area practicing best approaches and trying stuff out.

I can't help thinking that as 'wow cool city' is the game's main thing, the ultra rtx marketing means you really aren't getting what was advertised unless you have at lest a 20 series PC.

It is an OK rpg without it, but just not the thing that was being sold.

I'm a few missions in now, and thinking it might be time to stop until they make the game better.

It is fun but unremarkable once you've stopped thinking of it as a tech demo.

That gamma slider is your best bet. One thing I noticed, it has the usual "adjust until the image on the left is barely visible." By default, the image on the left is completely hidden from view so the game defaults to darker than what the gamma slider suggests. Trust me, you're gonna want to fix it. There are a few missions where you'll just be stumbling around in the dark if you don't.

Actually had an odd bug with this yesterday. I paused the game right before the first mandatory mission right after you do your little backstory intro. I helped the wife with something for 30-45m and came back and hit resume and the screen just got progressively darker and darker until it was back to default setting for contrast. Very strange...

It seems a bit weird to play a character with ocular implants and have to turn up gamma rather than install something into V's eye...or get a simple flashlight for when I need it so I'm not blinded by the daylight to see in the dark...

I had the same thought. "When can I get night vision for my cybereyes."

I really like the game but there are some places where it is obvious corners were cut to meet the release date and this is an example.

PC graphics settings guide from Digital Foundry: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC25ambD8vs

There's a lot about the game and setting that makes it not feel like you are actually 50 or so years in the future.

I mean yeah, shouldn't have played Outer Worlds either.

um, what are these bugless borefest options again?   I'm sick and tired of buggy crap. I might actually be interested in a boring game that doesn't have a habit of crashing on me mid-flight, getting me stuck in geometry, causing me to die due to sudden lag spikes, bad pathfinding or simply crappy UI, losing my items, filled with broken quests, having multiple crafting systems or component sets obviously designed by different teams/individuals that couldn't be arsed to communicate or coordinate and thus don't interact well with each other, corrupting its saves, using a consoleified UI that takes 16 clicks to get to what should be a simple maybe two step selection and which can't even be arsed to go where the crosshairs point (or more accurately, put the crosshairs over the actual spot you are pointing at/heading towards), and all the other symptoms of sloppy code written by underpaid and inexperienced cheapest available labor with clueless management, using poorly understood tools or engines, and producing products rushed prematurely to release because all the development funds got spent on flashy artwork, marketing and parqour animations while the engine and content development tools are still buggy POSs held together with chewing gum and promises and the engineers who might possibly be able to fix them are deemed too expensive, and the game designers were only halfway through reinventing all the triangular wheels that have been tried and proven failures by every designer before them.

(note I'm not saying Cyberpunk 2077 has any of these characteristics, I've never even seen the actual game, I have no idea other than what I've read on the intarwebs of what all corners were cut and flaws were ignored in the rush to release before the whole company cratered. I'm just super leery given CDPR's and the industy in general's history.)

Game feels like you are playing in what people thought it might be like 50 years in the future, 30 years ago.

Which is fine.

Edit : or more specifically, what they thought the designers of Deus Ex and the fifth element would think 2077 might look like.

Or, ya know, what the creator of Cyberpunk 2020 thought the future of that setting might look like.

I'm near skill tree paralysis already. Not a huge fan of no respec in games like this. The trees seem pretty oddly broken up, and with a cap on it I'm finding it pretty difficult to put together two builds (one for my current run, one for a future run) that stand alone without stepping on the other build. Only being able to max 2 (maybe 3 if you really minimize 2) reduces options quite a bit. Seems the perks have some natural overlap that one work in a few ways, and unless you want to go noncombat, you are required to get either body or agility.

I dunno, I've pored over this for quite a bit and can't find anything that really fits the two ways I want to run through the game. First is my current, ex-military biker. I could probably make a decent one, though I'd have to cross over a bunch of stuff with my other (stealthy ninja hacker). Having stealth, blades, and hacking on 3 trees seems odd.

I'm leaning towards Body and Tech, because Deke did alot of crafting in Days Gone, and I used a lot of shotguns/LMG and baseball bats. But then that gives me tech weapon advantage, which seems to pair better with sniper rifles, so I'd lean toward giving tech to my ninja guy except he won't have enough points to spec into it.

I guess it's considered a good thing to have to make these choices? It's just been pretty frustrating whenever I get a point it means I spend another fifteen minutes trying to figure something out before saying 'fuck it' just dropping points and moving on. Which seems like not a good system.

You can respec perks at specific ripperdocs with Tabula E-Rasa @100k... so it can be done but not sure it is worth it in early game at that pricepoint. Attribute points aren't spec eligible.

Right, I was talking about the skill points. And I agree about the cost of respec, coming from AC Odyssey a couple weeks ago where I've respecced just because I got a new epic bow or whatever. It's a money sink, but not so much that it's ever untenable throughout the game (scales with level).

Boggles my mind whenever stuff like this happens in a single player game. At the very least, a simple console would be nice.

I'm a bit confused by your reply here. Skills aren't limited by other skills. They go up purely through use. Do you mean attributes? Cause, yeah, you have to make some choices there.

Perks.

Perks can be reset at Ripperdocs as noted.

You're being willfully confused, I'm clearly saying the one that cannot be respecced sucks. Sorry I forgot whatever random term this dev used.

Midichlorians should be able to be respecced. And the cost of respeccing Dilithium Crystals is way too high and should scale with level.

 :oh_i_see:

edited to add: and my main point is on allocations of Dilithium Crystals that is making it hard to choose a single build that I like, I don't really understand how they're supposed to work together to make a loose 'class'. Lacking the ability to easily try things out and then respec if it's not as listed on the tin...two sides of a problem.

The game has 3 things:

Attributes: Body, Tech, Reflexes, etc. They give bonuses and are required to unlock some of the higher tiered perks. Limited to 50 total I believe. These cannot be respecced as far as I know. No idea why not.
Skills: Handguns, Crafting, Breach, etc. These also give bonuses and sometimes free perk points. These raise simply by doing them and cap out at 20. They are also independent of each other and your level, purely using them is all that matters.
Perks: Gained on level ups and from leveling skills from time to time. I'm not sure what the maximum here is as I'd have to look over each skills. 50+however many you get from skill levelups. These can be respecced at a Ripperdoc.

You mention skill trees in your post but I think you mean attributes. I'm not sure why they can't be respecced other than they have some specific uses and they don't want you playing the system? For example Intelligence and Cool come up a lot in conversations. Tech is used to lock pick doors. Strength can tear open some other doors. Reflexes, well, I haven't seen a special use for it yet besides shooting stuff in the face.

They are independent of each other, but they are not really independent of your level. A skill can never be higher than it's related attribute. As an example, if you leave your intelligence at 3 then your breaching skill can not progress past 3.

This is the core of why the non-respeccable numbers are bad. Who cares if some kids want to ruin their own game by constantly respeccing to overcome attribute checks? Good for them, it's a goddamned single player game. Now I'M looking for a cheat to refund my attribute/skill/perk/dildo points so I don't get stuck with a build that sounded good but doesn't work for me.

Honestly, if the game just had a simple console so I could /respec, I would be fine with that.

I hate respecs in games, even single player, so this is a different strokes for different folks thing. Respecs trivialize build planning and careful choice of perks/skills/whatever, which is something I enjoy a lot. If you can respec easily, you just pick whatever and make a new build every 5 levels.

I sort of understand this perspective from a CRPG perspective (you made a choice and should have to live with it), but on the other hand these attributes/skills/perks are way out of balance. E.g. The Spiffing Brit has a video up showing how broken pistols are and SkillUp complained in his review that Crafting was useless cause he was finding better items than he could ever craft at any given time. It would really suck to spend points on attributes/perks and then find out later they are basically useless with no way / easy way to redo the allocation.

I didn't know that! Learn something new everyday.

It's true there are two (at least) different playstyles competing here, "hardcore", "choices matter - even if you aren't given enough information to make an intelligent choice" vs "easygoing", "experimental/experiential - if it looks interesting, try it and switch if you don't like it".  The problem with a game without respec is, it absolutely prevents the latter style of play. Period. Can't be done. Game is not for you, go home. A game *with* respec, on the other hand, still also supports people who don't want to respec.  Unless it's some bizzare Hideo Kojima design that somehow forces you to respec as part of it's mind fucking, but that's not the case here. It's the exact same problem as permadeath vs respawn, or pvp vs pve and other competing play styles. And it has the exact same, easy, low-cost solution: game modes/difficulties/options. I mean, we're not talking hard stuff like balancing systems for both pvp and pve, or making NPC AI smarter or dumber.  It's a simple reset your character's scores and let you respend them, in a single-player game where the only way other people are impacted is if their epeen is somehow measured by comparing their willingness and cleverness at putting up with bullshit and having to research out of game or replay the game repeatedly to find out what actually works for them.  Smarter developers let the player choose which style or what difficulty they prefer, be it through options settings or game difficulty levels or hardcore vs easy modes. Asshole "my way or the highway" DvP (Deveoper vs Player) developers don't.  It seems to me the assholes are leaving money on the table by not catering to a big share of their potential market with something that is truly easy to the point of trivial to implement, so I guess the joke's on them?

I'm just tripling down on Body and going full Ahnald.

This might sound crazy, but on a whim I tried running the game at 720p. I had been running at 1080p on my 970. Ran well, so I bumped the preset up and up and, well, Ultra 720p might be a better experience than Medium/Low 1080p, at least on my 4k qled.

Downsides mostly aliasing, smallest text loses sharpness but is legible. Upside is image quality is dramatically better while still running smoother. I'm sure I'll run into some issues with it (my guess is textures given the vram) but I played for around an hour after changing the settings and mostly forgot I was in 720p. And that was mostly run-n-gun, so a decent test run.

I'm actually having a lot of fun with this game, but this game design is not at pushing any boundaries. The world is super cool, but the missions design is, well, a borefest. I've done a shit ton of side quests and other various minutiae, and it is all really just MMO variety quest design. I was expecting a bit more than what we got on this front. The perk system is nothing special either. It's a good thing killing people with blades is fun as fuck.

By far my biggest disappointment though is the cops. Holy shit they are a badly designed mess. Kill one hobo in the dark, in an alley you have ensured no one saw and there are no cameras? boom instant cop attention. And that could be tolerated, if the mother fuckers didn't just spawn at your location no matter what. In elevators you have just gotten out of, in alleys they werent in seconds ago, or my favorite, in V's own apartment (even though they dont actually aggro you there). I had a case where I had a corner behind me, but like about 10 feet to the back of it, and they fucking spawned there. Like, I can take cops being more powerful and crime being punished severely, but honestly cops in GTA 1 had more organic ways of showing up and confronting you.

You don't even have to kill somebody for that to happen. If you have your weapon out at the wrong time you'll get the same response. And there's no easy way to switch to unarmed mode, at least that I've found. Meanwhile there's random acts of violence all over the city that the NCPD ignore (and actually pay you to clean up) but if you walk around armed it's instant multiple hunter seeker death drones.

On PS4, double tap the Triangle puts weapons away where single tap brings out the weapons. Should work the same on PC but not sure.

Double-tapping Alt puts the weapon away on PC, but I'm not sure if that counts as "unarmed" or not.

Finished up the game, having done most of the side quests.

Game is quantity over quality in every regard, from quests to game systems. If they had learned when to cut some things so they could put focus more on others this game could have been something. I went in expecting a technical mess and it was much better than I expected in that regard (though still shouldn't have been released in this state). Instead it ended up being a mess of design and gameplay. It's overly-ambitious in that it tries a lot of things that don't play to CDPR's established strengths while also not being ambitious at all in the way it cobbles together worse implementations of things from other games like GTA and Deus Ex.  It's a solid 6-7 out of 10 game but I'm past thinking that 6 months to a year of bug fixes will make it amazing. The problems here are foundational.

Yeah, fuck GTA5.... that game is my yardstick for what a game should look like and how it should be supported by the company. They are still coming out with new heists and DLCs and vehicles. It is maddening.

So I'm just starting, but here's the thing that I think is going unremembered about Witcher 3. Witcher 3 was as good as it was because:

a) Geralt finally became a genuinely iconic character (worthy of his book inspiration) and his story finally became really compelling.
b) The setting finally fully gelled.
c) The POI quests were great up to Skellige, at which point they became fine.
d) The Bloody Baron arc plus the witches was so good that it kind of overrode every other so-so experience you might have had.
e) The combat and other systems (like Geralt's Witcher vision) became at least kind of fun and made coherent sense and meshed with the questing.
f) The grand arc of the plot was epic.
g) The minigames like Gwent were fun.

But in the end, it was not an Elder Scrolls open world, it was more like the absolutely best Assassin's Creed game ever. It was POIs, side quests, minigames, cut scenes.

So I think everyone who is like "This is not a genuine open world" or "oh it's just POIs and quest hubs" is definitely someone who imagined they were getting a different game than what they were always going to get. I will wait to see whether it's a game where the writing is not very good or the world is not very interesting, which would be disappointing, but I never thought this was going to be "Cyberpunk Skyrim" because this isn't what this company has done when they've done their best work.

I mean, look at CDPR's substantial catalogue of hype material for the game. The phrase "next gen of rpgs" was even used at one point. By them. There was specific claims about many different facets of the world and gameplay that just are just not there. I enjoy this game, but it is a whole gen behind, in some places two.

Are people saying  "This is not a genuine open world" or "oh it's just POIs and quest hubs"? Because I think the opposite. It is an open world and it's not really quest hubs Each district has a fixer that offers "gigs" but those are the slightest bits of content aside from the crimes you pass by when you're going down the street. Beyond being restricted on where you can go in the first act, you aren't going to want to stay in one district and clear out all the content there or anything.

As to everything else, I can only speak for myself but I had very little in the way of expectations for this game. I did not watch any gameplay videos, and Witcher 3 is the only CDPR game I've played more than an hour or two of let alone finished. I also recognize that it's the product of them refining the series across 3 games. Cyberpunk is their first attempt at shooing. As far as I know it's their first attempt at stealth gameplay. The cyberdeck stuff is more extensive than their previous magic systems. Witcher 3 had a horse but this is their first attempt at having driving in a game (and things that entail like having traffic and pedestrians working in a believable way). Like I said previously, there's a lot here that's not in their usual wheelhouse and boy did they not nail it.

Even the things they're known for, like the writing and dialogue options seem a bit off. There's a ton of superfluous dialogue options that don't have any substantial differences. Pretty much all the dialogue options that are gated by having high enough attributes are just flavor text and don't unlock any sort of extra options or paths for you. There's an odd, poorly defined stat/mechanic that gates off some of the endings. Some of the writing is bad, particularly for Keanu's character. Some story sequences could have been heavily edited down as they just run on too long. Without going into spoilers, there's a character who can die midway through the game but can also apparently be saved but it's very much not apparent (and that seems to be the common consensus from what I can see, not just me).

There's bits of gameplay that I still can't tell if they're broken or working as intended. Tech sniper rifles are supposed to be able to shoot through cover (if you see enemies red outlines from pinging them or marking them). However they'll literally shoot through any or all layers of cover. Multiple layers, from across the map. Like as long as you can see their outline, you can shoot them. I realize it's not entirely different from being able to pop into a camera system and start hacking people with dots and instakills, but it's so much faster and doesn't even require you to find a camera or manage your mana RAM.

It borrows the Bethesda model of having tons of useless junk around the world to pick up for no reason. You can break stuff down into crafting materials but aside from spells daemons you can never really craft any weapons and armor that are going to be better than the stuff you're already finding and aren't going to swap out in a few levels anyway. So what's really the purpose of having all this useless trash around that makes it harder to pickup stuff you actually want? I don't know, other than it's one more thing to extend gameplay out as all the loot will have you poking around through every room incase some actually useful might be in there. Or maybe it's just in there because that's what Bethesda does. All the consumables other than the health packs are mostly pointless. The health packs you get so many of, I don't even know why they're there really. I think I finished up with over 100 of one kind and like 290 of the better kind.

I could go on and on with stuff like this. Like why, in a game where you can snipe people through walls or using hacking to get them to shoot themselves with their own guns would you want to spec into a melee or grenade-focused build (obviously some people will just feel like doing it, and you're all crazy but have fun). If they were going to borrow from Deus Ex, why didn't they learn from the director's cut of Human Revolution where the developers realized that maybe they could tweak the boss fights a little to give more options for people who didn't build their character for pure combat?

I'll stop now but I could literally keep going on this for about 20 more paragraphs and I don't even hate the game or anything.

Yeah it does. Thanks!

The whole loot system is so weird. It doesn't work on the immersion factor, but then it also doesn't work as a real loot system. Like, I'm wearing a flak vest, but then a windbreaker drops with higher armor than it, simply because it is a higher level. So, unlike say, Skyrim, where going from 'normal' armor, to elven, to daedric (roughly speaking, it's been 6 or so years) made sense, here I can't equip a pair of jeans because I need to be 3 levels higher? And that is after we drop the idea that certain baseball caps are better than their peers by being blue or purple. But then, leaving aside immersion, it doesn't work as a normal loot system either. I spend a portion of the evening doing a "very hard" side gig, and the dudes drop level 12 loot. Only I can't equip it, because I am level 4, and by the time I get to level 12 I will have been flooded with enough level 12 crap that this loot will mean nothing. Like, cmon man. Baldurs Gate 2 had me staying up all night to cheeze beat certain encounters, with the loot that dropped being commensurate with the effort I put in. And the game was confident in how I found my fun that it didn't care if I was overpowered after that.

I dunno man.

Thus far the main thing bugging me has been the aggressive culling for street traffic/peds. The tech seems to be more Spider-Man or early GTA console versions, but it's a bit jarring to see a cool outfit, turn to check it out and the person has vanished completely. Those little things I feel can be cleaned up and a sequel would likely nail (it took Rockstar a while to get it feeling better, and they still have a long way to go for a lot of that tech and it's basically all they've done for decades). But things like that, the AI driving, police notification and spawning, those need to be put back on the design board (and it's already being done better, so it's not like they have to invent something new).

Nothing that actually bothers me about the game itself, though. The map? It's useless except for setting waypoints, and the path the gps chooses can be...interesting.

Had a mission turn-in, and the drop box thingy it sent me to was in the middle of an enemy gang zone. I go trotting in, ready to call it a night and time slows and music starts pumping...aww, man. Sorry you all had to die so I could turn in that side gig.

My big beef with the map is the fact that: on PC, to open the map you press M. So far so good. But press M again to close the map, like we have done since, well games with maps, and no that just kida zooms in the map. You have to press Esc, but that still just brings you back to the character menu. WTF?

Also zooming in on the map zooms in where your cursor is pointing not where the map is centered nor where your character is located so zooming in where your character is is a tedious process of carefully locating where your icon is buried under a sea of other icons (yes I know there’s a non-obvious key for locating your character) carefully pointing the cursor over your character and then zooming in.

Yeah I been up against this loot disparity as well. Was wearing a heavy cotton shirt and found a silk pull over shirt with 20 more armor on it.... only it makes me look ridiculous. It's the subligar fiasco from FFXI. What I really started becoming aware of is the exact scenario you've outlined, stomp thru a higher level mission and you get a bunch of blue and purple items at a higher req level but with armor values around what is dropping normally for my level (lvl8 and getting lvl 12-20 items). I was waiting to equip a cool blue item with great stats and armor when I was level 3 and needed req lvl6. Once I hit 6, the grey/green stuff was 5-10 armor points higher so the blue piece was irrelevant. Now, I could upgrade the item, but the cost is so god damn out of whack that finding a piece you want to keep is next to impossible to upgrade as you go with the escalators in crafting mats required. So I guess it sticks to RPGs of old where you look like a fucking hobo until level cap and then you pull the armor sets together.

Yeah it's kind of a good thing most of the game is in 3rd person because the gear you get throughout the game generally makes you look pretty "special". I don't know why they ran so far with the thrift store aesthetic when it comes to the gear, especially when none of the supporting cast dress anything like that so they can't even write it off as being the style of that setting.

It's especially weird cause the game has a clothing mod system already. They could've simply had all the armor and other stat bonuses applied via mods so you could dress the way you want.

I finally started. I went Nomad.

I was frustrated that I couldn't kill Jackie when he stiffed me on my payment. V's dialogue doesn't feel that right to me a lot of the time.

But it's fine overall. It's not RPG Jesus, but I'm not feeling hatred or anger either. Only glitch so far is Jackie left some chopsticks floating in air while he ate with another pair of chopsticks.

Heard on the BBC world service on my way to the grocery store a bit ago "Sony has pulled Cyberpunk 2077 from the Playstation Store due to complaints about bugs."   :why_so_serious:

Yeah.

https://mobile.twitter.com/AskPlayStation/status/1339737360184078336

https://www.playstation.com/en-us/cyberpunk-2077-refunds/

Aaaaaand it 404s.

I couldn't even get emails to CDPR; they bounced as server not configd yesterday.

There's a mod called the armadillo mod that adds tons to your armor. So just get some good looking stuff with mod slots and use those mods and you're good to go. You can find the crafting spec for it (search on Youtube for a guy getting a corpo suit armor set, goes by ESO, he mentions where to find the crafting spec)

Saved game possible file corruption at >= 8MB:

https://old.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kg47yz/psa_your_save_file_is_capped_at_8mb_on_all/

On PC saved games are located in: %userprofile%\Saved Games\CD Projekt Red\Cyberpunk 2077

It should only be a problem for dupers. I have tons of crafting mats and stuff and am just fine. But dupers are making hundreds or thousands of items and its swelling their save files.

Still amazed at how good this game is at 720p, especially given how large my 4k monitor is (83). Screenshots look ok, but don't really capture how good it is in motion. I feel bad for base console owners, but lol pc masterrace coming back from the distant past (11 yr old pc, 6 yr old gpu) to kick some tail.

My main graphical gripe is actually SSR aberrations  :why_so_serious: Normally I don't really notice, but the graphical fidelity is so high on ultra that it kinda sticks out.

I'm enjoying it a lot. The art design is great.

Yes, it feels very stupid to have a shirt in my inventory that I have to be level 12 to wear, but I assume the basic idea is "you're not cool enough yet to wear that without having random pedestrians shoot you in the face".

FYI, a big hint. Well, two of them.

Save scum when you see armor you like to max out its mod slots.

Mods matter more than the base armor. I haven't upgraded my armor at all but have around 5k armor on my current playthrough. Once you know this, you can usually find armor you like the look of and just craft mods for it or buy them.

Are there crafting recipes for mods? I haven't seen any for weapons or armor.

There are. I found a couple rarities of the armadillo mod.

There are. They always spawn in the same place too so if you want to find one, take to Youtube.

I need a refresher. Why are people screaming about this being bad, except for it not working well on PS4/Xbone?

I feel like it's pretty amazing.

Because it tries to do a ton of things and doesn't do any of them particularly well.

Edit: I mean, I don't want to try to talk you out of liking the game or anything, but even beyond the bugs do you really not see all the broken or poorly implemented things that other people have issues with? I listed some of my issues a page back and didn't even get into the broken tooltips on some perks/cyberware (hope you don't buy Gorilla Arms because the description mentioned being able to open locked doors), how bad the AI is in many situations, the police who spawn out of nowhere when you get a crime rating (a system that adds nothing to the game), the number of places you can fall through the environment because they provided double jumping through cyberware but didn't seem to always design the world with that in mind, and on and on.

I had tons of fun for the first couple of hours playing E.T. on the Atari 2600 when I was 7.

Cuz it's boring. It's a mile wide but an inch deep. Every side gig/criminal activity/??? is the same. Go here, kill the dudes. We will give you 5% more eddies if you stealth some of them. The loot system is complete ass. It's only point is to hover your inventory and equip the green arrows. No point in challenging yourself to kill higher level stuff, it will level lock you for loot anyways, so the thing may as well just upgrade your stats any which ways. The world is cool but has no depth whatsoever. Nothing you do has any impact on it. The combat system and perks are meh. Does the job but nothing to write home about. The cars suck wank to drive. A complete after thought. Good thing then that the cops are so horrendously programed that you can outrun them after driving 100m in a straight line. Assuming they didn't just magically spawn behind you that is. There is no meaningful dialogue choices at all. The "lifepath" you take is a complete joke which all lead you to the exact same place 20 minutes in. The "conversation options" they open are laughably meaningless. The UI is gob shiite from 10 plus years ago, and basic things like button remapping is not possible. And the bugs and critical glitches are by no means limited to the console versions. Currently the game's last advocate in my friend group cannot play the game after their latest patch, as it crashes every minute, to cite a random example.

The story seems cool. I don't really like it, but others do. And the characters, aside from Keanu's, are actually pretty good.

That's cool that you like the game, many people do, but those that don't can't help but feel how last gen, or even two gens ago everything is. Saint's Row 2 of like 11 years ago had more creative and fun shit to do in the city. GTA had more depth to it's AI civiliians, cops, and baddies. Deux Ex has has better world affecting impact. Red Dead Redemption 1 more depth. And I can go on. Is Night City gorgeous and immersive to tool around in? Hell yeah, when a Bethesda level bug doesn't intrude on that. But it's just a painting, and nothing you do changes it in anyway at all, right down to your character's dialogue only giving you 3 different ways to say "yes please!" to being kicked in the dick. Yeah, there are one or two times where they let you think it's not that way, but that is a complete facade.

Really? I think playing that game taught me to know despair. I thought all games had redeeming qualities before stepping into that turd.

Oh, yah, Cyberpunk. 40ish hours in, and I think I'm at the last mission, but there's a lot of side content still available. Game's fine, IMO. Probably could have used another year in development, but I've got my money's worth. The bugs I'm hitting are mostly cosmetic and ignore-able, although some have made me reload an earlier autosave/quicksave. The Delamain quest bug was pretty annoying, but apparently they fixed it in 1.05, but by then I was already done with it. Writing and story are my favorite parts. Cruising around town listening to the rap or cholo station can be worth it. The combat, character progression, and gearing are pretty forgettable, and I'm not sure they can be "fixed". At least it's not a Witcher 2 situation where the game is just too fucking hard on top of being clunky (and buggy as fuck).

I'll likely finish it, then do another play through once some of the bigger patches hit. There's usually 12 month "we're sorry our game was a buggy fucking mess" patch for every CD Projekt game. That should be when it's mostly done and ready for consumption.

edit:
It's not a completely fair comparison, but this game is kind of like Elex for me. I'm here for the whole package, jank and all.

After that two hours I went into a homicidal rage because I realized it was literally impossible to get out of the pit. I never played it (or really enjoyed the movie that much) again.

I'm having fun with it, but Velorath has it right.

My biggest specific complaint is that I wanted an RPG similar to Fallout: New Vegas and what I got was an open world game that feels closer to an Ubisoft title or Grand Theft Auto. The combat is fine, and probably the best thing about the game. The graphics look great on my 3070, when they work, but they are undercut by the near-constant visual glitches. The stealth is bad like most games of this type, worse than Assassin's Creed and about on par with Skyrim. None of the sidequests have presented any interesting choices in terms of completion, and there don't appear to be any factions you can choose to side with or eliminate. I also dislike the way your Skills and Perks are both gated by your Attributes, but that might just be a personal thing; if you're going to have use-based Skill progression, just do that. The loot is very shitty, and I think I've only found one item that made me go "Wow this is cool!" in the ~40 hours I have logged; it's better loot than GTA but worse than in a real RPG. Speaking of loot, the UI for dealing with items is a mess. You should be able to sort weapons by type (Pistol, SMG, Sniper Rifle, etc.), as well as by raw damage (instead of just DPS). The UI can't even remember whatever sorting option I pick, and goes back to Default every time. :uhrr: Oh, and not to be that guy, but for a game where I had to choose my dick size and with porn ads all over Night City there is surprisingly little sex.

Right now I'd probably give the game a 6 out of 10; after a year of patches I can see them polishing it to an 8/10, at best.

I hear a lot of this, but I feel like there's quite a few side quests with actual stories attached and a lot of them are good. I expect every open world RPG to have some number of side quests that are "kill a bunch of guys at this POI" and for that matter to just have POIs where if you stop to check it out, you're going to be in a fight with NPCs who hang out there--Skyrim had plenty of those. Every open-world RPG I can think of has them--Breath of the Wild, RDR 1 & 2, Fallout, AC.

I do wish there were more interior spaces that just existed as interesting and atmospheric locations rather than quest locations.

I have really only run into a relatively few minor glitches.

The driving is terrible. The loot system is pretty annoying, yes. The game very very much needs transmog or it needs to decouple clothes from armor effects.

The cop behavior is definitely weird and annoying at times.

I definitely wish there was some kind of faction system, which might incentivize you to stealth play/nonlethal engage more often (e.g., deaths of particular faction members would make them hate you/hunt you). The Tyger Claws should definitely have a bounty on my head.

I wish junk was more meaningful--like you could decorate your apartment with it the way you could decorate a house in Skyrim.

But I honestly am enjoying it and think it's a pretty well-designed open world on the whole with considerable immersiveness. I guess I've always been able to shrug off UI annoyances if the world is good enough (I'm not actually remembering an open-world RPG where I loved the UI enough to have that be part of what I liked about the game).

The only gameplay-related bug I've had was a certain model of Sniper Rifle (the ones you can charge up) would sometimes become unable to fire. Clicking did nothing, and you had to throw it onto the ground from your inventory then pick it up and reequip it to get it to work. But I see weird clipping issues all the time, NPCs walking down the streets just like stop and spin 90 degrees with no animation, cars visible in the distance popping-out when they get close, cars hovering a foot or so off the ground until you get into them, and so on. None of them are bad, but they all scream a lack of polish and prevent me from becoming immersed.

I only mentioned the UI here because it seems to be actively fighting me. If the loot was better and incremental upgrades didn't drop constantly it would be less annoying (or if you could just auto-dismantle white guns), but every time I clear out an area I have to remember to re-sort the listed guns to figure out which one is the best. The number of times I've put on an upgrade and applied scopes/mods, only to scroll down and see a purple hiding at the bottom of the list is too high to count. :mob:

While we're at it, here's another thing that really let me down (spoilers for Act I):

I have had the "sniper rifle won't fire for no reason" bug a few times, yeah. And yes, I've seen some pedestrian and pop-in glitches. In NPC scenes, if they're holding something like a cigarette etc., it's a near-guarantee that it will be left hovering in air while they make hand gestures.

I agree on the backstory not doing anything besides dialog options (that don't seem to make a difference). In general, the dialogue trees need to sometimes create branching outcomes and as far as I can tell they really don't ever--you almost always end up being forced to say all the dialogue options you're offered and the order in which you say them doesn't matter at all. That's a design flaw that's fairly substantial and it undercuts the whole game. I wish there were consequences sometimes in the way you resolve fixer quests--I let the guy out of the Russian dude's car trunk and Wakako let me know she was very displeased but that's all I've heard of it since--it would have been great if the fixers were rivals and you had to decide which ones to favor and disfavor and your choices opened or closed certain questlines and changed your relationship to factions. If they end up making a sequel eventually that would be a major subsystem they should add.

Trying to think of the gameplay bugs I've had:

- Loot I can't pick up for whatever reason. I assume it's because it has clipped into the environment somehow. Also not a bug, but it's annoying that sometimes I have to move a body to be able to pick up a dropped weapon.

- Getting trapped in parts of the environment. Once it was because I clipped through a wall after hitting it while on a motorcycle. Other times like I mentioned was because I double jumped up somewhere. Like when I was trying to figure out a way into the Delamain building I went all the way to the back side of the building and jumped up and fell through the roof. Thought maybe it was a random bug, but I tried a couple more times and it happened each time. I could actually see the outside of the area the end of that quest takes place in. Sometimes I was able to clip through the wall to get back out on the street, but at least once I ended up falling through the world.

- I had one side quest where I couldn't interact with an access point. Wasn't sure exactly what I was supposed to be doing so I was looking around this open lot for around 15 minutes. Had to look at a video to see what I was supposed to be doing, and realized I wasn't getting the button prompt for the access point. Had to reload a previous save and then it worked.

- I've completed parts of quests that then didn't check off the objective list. Fortunately the next step would end up listed each time so I'd have to go into the quest log and manually set the tracker to the next part of the quest each time it hit a new step (otherwise it would default back to the step that was already cleared).

- Enemies have gotten stuck in place or just stopped doing anything. Most notably one of the Cyberpsychos literally just stood there while I headshotted her a bunch of times.

- Have had random enemies become completely invincible. Damage numbers don't appear for them, they don't die no matter what I do to them, and they'll still attack.

- Dead enemies who continue to repeat their one line of dialogue over and over.

And trying to open the map from the character menu or quest menu doesn't do anything. And vice versa.

My main gripes are

1) Fixers do not remember what you have or have not done for them. You kill a dude you're not supposed to kill and they're displeased but then they call you up five minutes later "V, Baby, the only one i trust for this stealth mission!" and I am like "yea, i stealth-ed the last mission with about 50 grenades but sure i will totally try on this one"

2) Jobs are on the map. This one really brings me out of the world, instead of calling my fixer, getting a job, and then going and doing it. Or getting a call randomly (wherein i then can decide to do the job right then and there if its time sensitive) i go to the job on the map because I am psychic and then once i am there my fixer calls me and is all "yo i got a job for you"

I'm mostly fine with that stuff. Certainly it's better than how every Fixer apparently has a side-hustle working at a car dealership and loves nothing more than to call you up to tell you about this ride they want to sell you. Because why spend your cash on something like Cyberware when you can buy another shitty handling car that presumably is only cosmetically different from the stuff you get for free, which you'll also avoid using as you unlock more and more fast travel stations?

The game needed to have the balls to let players failures cost them. I did a mission where I was supposed to stealth into a temple and plant a bug, but, being more Ellen Ripley than James Bonds, I went in like Donald Rumsfeld's "Shock and Awe" was on my family crest. There is no fuckin' way anyone in their right mind would have a sensative conversation in there anytime soon. But I encountered the icon and clicked F, so I completed the mission without anything worse than a light admonition from my fixer, like I turned in my homework a day late. Then, as Goum mentions, they phoned me right up the next time I passed a (!) like I hadn't left a temple a smoldering ruin (well not really, you literally cannot even shoot out TV screens with an end game shotgun). If my fixer had of told me to fuck off, and closed off several missions in the region, I coulda dug that. Or if two fixers hated each other, and you had to pick one, I coulda gotten behind that too. You wouldn't be missing out on too much by having some of your (!) missions turned off in an area, and it could have been a bit of world building.


It's funny you mention Skyrim, because I've said since about day 2 of playing it that this is the closest comparison. Pre mod Skyrim, to be clear. Gorgeous, immersive, expansive, varied, but also buggy, samey quests you run into (towers with mages at the bottom were identical in Riften, as in Solitude), and lacking any depth in character reaction, or effect upon the world. And that might have seemed like an awesome comparison 9 years ago. But we have moved on, and even the lazy Ubisoft conveyor belt of open world games have evolved. And this is not what we were told to expect from the very game's developers themselves.

Which leads me to my next point. Khaldun I recall you saying that you hadn't observed any of the hype this game put out, correct? If so, it makes sense. You went out to the store and bought a pepperoni pizza, and a decent one at that. But for those of us who did follow the hype went out to buy a gourmet 4 course meal, but we given the same pepperoni pizza as you. Yeah we can eat it and be full, but that is not what we were told to expect.

And yes, this is the part where you guys get to chastise me for believing in hype. Oh trust me, no one is kicking me harder than I am myself at the minute. At least half of my disdain for this game is transferred from anger at my own self. Anger for falling for hype from a company I thought was different than EA, Acti-Blizz, Bethesda, Bioware, etc. What a fucking chump. I wasn't expecting robot jesus/nixon to save us all, but I was expecting things a little more advanced than ten years old games.

This board is largely smart, so I am not sure I even need to add the part of "don't let me take away your enjoyment". If you dig the game, the funnest part is going to be in the world, and some cranky whiners on an anachronistic forums are not going to change your mind. But you did ask why people were upset with the game.

You can definitely see where stuff was cut or just published as-is, for sure. Nobody is going to make excuses for a lot of this stuff. None of it is a deal breaker, but just a constant little irritant, losing a car when the aggressive culling gets a little too happy is probably my main complaint from a gameplay standpoint.

It's still a fun game. I'm having a great time messing around in it. Sure, it's repetitive but what isn't these days? It's the same deal as TLOU or Days Gone or AC, where a lot of the content is just using your toolbox to mess around in POIs.

But at the end of the day, I don't think they can patch in the rest of the game, I think it's just fundamentally flawed. Which sucks, because if they had gotten the basics right, it would've been legendary and possibly the best rpg of all time.

Which, again, doesn't make it a bad game in my book.

So yeah. I did just have one mission get stuck because I did the things (predictably!) out of order from how the devs imagined it ("Dream On"). That is something that is absolutely a QA failure.

I really do wish there were consequences for not doing certain missions the right way up to fixers refusing to call you when you're at their POIs. It would be nice if there were fixers who were not geographic but specialized in certain kinds of mission types and if you fucked up on something they ghost you out for a while or forever if it's bad enough. That might create a tighter fit between playstyles and content--and make a replay make sense. That's just basic good game design and it's completely within reach of this design on a basic level. I agree this isn't something they can just patch in--it's a missed opportunity.

I understand why the disappointment from you all. I guess I just never assumed it would be RPG Jesus because I worked to ignore the hype (and waited a week to start) and because I don't know that I've actually HAD a four course meal yet. E.g., I don't see the "things have moved on" in open world games. RDR 2 maybe is close but the difference between RDR 2 and this is polish, an even richer range of character work and narrative writing, and somewhat better POI design and AI, etc. I don't know that I can think of an open-world game that otherwise establishes a post-Skyrim standard that is still genuinely open-world, e.g., go anywhere and do anything and mostly don't get stuck playing the character that's been pre-written for you.

I'd be curious about what RPGs you all think move the needle past Skyrim that have feature sets or designs that this game ought to have while having all of the level of art design detail etc that this game has. RDR 2 and Breath of the Wild would be the only two I could even slightly think of. If you have others in mind and I haven't played them, I need to play them yesterday.

Not really disappointed on my end. Didn't follow any of the pre-release marketing. Hadn't seen one bit of gameplay footage. Liked Witcher 3 well enough but only played the first Witcher game for a few hours and quit after a bug wouldn't let me progress (well after launch to the point that I think Witcher 2 was already out). And as mentioned I liked this game well enough to play all the way through it completing most of the side quests.

Mostly I'm just trying to look at the actual game that's there. Yes there's bugs. I've laughed at a lot of the compilation videos, although I would suspect a lot of those were probably early on after release and I know there were some people out there intentionally playing without the day 1 patch also. It's absolutely buggier than just about any AAA game I've seen get released, but for how bad it actually is, YMMV.

The game is the game though and even after most of the bugs are fixed I don't see how any reasonable person is going to take a look at it and think that this is good game design. One can argue that it's greater than the sum of its parts or that some broken or unbalanced aspects of the game make it more fun and there's certainly no argument against any of that. The game is a mess though, and everything that has leaked out from CDPR suggests that development was very clearly rushed. Even beyond that though there are very base level design decisions like pretty much everything they borrowed from GTA that I just don't think this team was going to be able to get right regardless.

Fallout 3 and fallout New Vegas were two others. Neither of those games was as pretty as this one, sure, but they weren't so far behind as to be tossed aside. Both of them had attribute systems like this one, but those interacted with the way you played, the conversations you had, and what you could do and unlock in their worlds in ways that put this game to utter and complete shame. The Witcher 3 had so many different things you could do in quests that led to different outcomes. In the above games my buddies and I would literally talk for hours at the pub about the decisions we made in those game. "Oh man, you let the ghost out of the tower? I smacked that bastard back to hell as he stood? What about you Chris? You found his old doll then he inhabited the body of that little girl in town? Sweet."*

It's also funny that we are comparing it to Skyrim, when modded Skyrim itself had done some things I wish this game had done at its base (and am still hoping mods can do). Such as making joining the Stormcloaks or Imperials an actual weighty decision, and you could influence their struggle in the region, in ways you could plainly see, by what you did.

You also left out the GTA series, an inescapable comparison to this game. A game with a city as good looking, in depth, and immersive (although not as cool because, hey, not in 2077), but with AI that actually had some weight behind it. And with missions that had more fun to them. People didn't just park their cars behind yours until the sun left the main sequence because they actually had driving programmed in. And when you got bored, you could run over some people and play cops and robbers for a bit in a way that

And to be honest, as much stick as Assassin's Creed Odyssey got, and it fucking deserved all of it, it's combat was just way more fun than this game's. While still being a pretty to look at, but much samey-er than this one open world.

*This is what I was hyped about from this game more than anything in the world. It could be way uglier, have ten times the bugs, but if i had gotten this from it I would have sworn up and down how great it was.

I think by any metric other than graphics (by virtue of having come out the most recently) Cyberpunk is worse than any Bethesda or R* open world game since 2007/8. Ok, maybe it's better than L.A. Noire and Fallout 76. I wouldn't even give Cyberpunk a nod for art design.

A gsme that was just a mugger that robbed you for 60 dollars would be better than release Fallout 76.

I did not follow any of the prerelease hype for CP2077, and only played Witcher 3 for 20 minutes before ragequitting in the tutorial because of the shitty movement; never played 1, 2, or any other CDPR games if they exist. So I'm not disappointed about the hype, I'm disappointed because it's easy to imagine a good game somewhere that they chose not to develop (or didn't have the resources for).

Fallout New Vegas is the game I constantly compare this to, because it's the perfect mix of open world and actual RPG with meaningful choices. The world in 2077 is much more open, but they've gone so far in that direction that they ended up near GTA. Unfortunately, they are not as good at making open world games as R*, so there isn't the amazing breadth of content you have in GTAV. Instead, we ended up somewhere in the Ubisoft realm, where you can go anywhere and do anything, if by anything you mean clear out very similar areas full of very similar mooks with only the occasional alteration in objective (stealth if you feel like, escort the guy out afterwards, click the object at the end, etc.). It's not a great RPG, it's not a great open world RPG, it's not even a great open world game; I'm not sure it can be patched into any of those things, either.

So... I honestly could give zero fucks about the open world aspects, I mean, they're half-assed yeah.

But the goddamn story. The story. It's there for me. I played the everliving SHIT out of the pen and paper cyberpunk from first edition to 2.0.2.0 to Cybergeneration and even a shot at the meh third edition. The fidelity to some of the story beats from those versions makes me happy to be in the world again. Hell, I even headcanoned that V was the kid of one of my P&P second gen character's chooms and the shit fit.

Could it be better? Hell yeah. But I'm good with what I played.

Fair enough on the gigs but absolutely untrue on the side jobs. Some are better than others sure but there's been lots of side jobs I never even pulled a weapon because it was pure investigation or RP or whatever.



Sort of true, sort of not. You can play like that. Or you can hunt down mods and super easily keep them upgraded. Find the armadillo mod, for example, and it only takes a few white and green components. Make some once in awhile and your armor is super high. Admittedly, to make this work you need to go down the tech tree but it's super undervalued. All my gear is crafted iconics and/or legendaries and I one-shot stuff with my pistol, and rarely die even in the biggest firefights.


Yeah, this one is fair. The world doesn't really react to you though the main story will. Some endings, for example, are only possible if you make the right choices in some side quests.


There are meaningful dialogue choices, they unlock some endings as well as romances though the romance ones are easy to guess. The perks are...odd. On the surface they see meh but if you spec right you can become a god in the game. The combat system is better than a Bethesda RPG but not as good as a dedicated FPS or pure action game like AC. The cops, yeah, the cops are eye rolling bad. The lifepath is purely for RP sadly and other than having a single side quest each they don't impact the game, it's true.

One, frankly, dumb thing they did, was hide some cool stuff in odd ways. For example, some of the coolest items in the game require high crafting and going to random police encounters to find blueprints. This is how I got my pistol that holds only a single bullet but the bullet explodes on impact so does AOE damage and on my gun does something like 5k damage which is doubled because I took the perk that does double damage if you only have 1 bullet in your clip so I can crit for something like 40k damage. The coolest quick hacks? (Suicide, detonate grenade and cyberpsycho?) They're random drops off of netrunner enemies and if you want to insure you get them you need to grind. It's easy to do but requires mindless killing of respawning enemies since they have like a 5% drop rate.  That's something you see in an MMO, not in a single player RPG!

Huh, so interesting.

Yes, I would say Witcher 3 is way better but...structurally it's very similar only with more polish (after bug squashing) and with a more vivid protagonist. V has a bit of the Bethesda/Bioware squishiness--he/she is not quite as defined or specified as Geralt.

New Vegas seems like a great example of an open-world RPG that has factions implemented in a very sophisticated way that's wholly lacking from this game. So that's a good example of "you should build in this". Mass Effect 2/3 also.

I left GTA V out simply because I absolutely cannot stand to play the protagonists in that game but yes it's clearly another benchmark to shoot for that this doesn't achieve.

I just think that first, the gameworld here grabs me; second the writing on the key quests and characters really grabs me; third, the ambition at the level of scope forgives many errors of execution.

Could I wish for more? Sure. I am just thinking that doing everything right with an open world game is insanely expensive and conceptually difficult, so I do not think it's simply something that I expect people to get better at as if this is improving on a basic technical design. I think this is more like expecting that a company having made a Rolls Royce means that every luxury car will outdo a Rolls Royce from this point onward.

FWIW, I never finished the GTA V single player because like Khal said, none of the protags made me give a shit.

Yeah, that's the general knock against most of the R* games is that almost all their protagonists fall somewhere between psychopath and sociopath. John Marston in the first RDR is the only one I've really liked in any of the games I've played. I think Niko in GTA IV has been the one I disliked the most because there's such a disconnect between the kind of person it tries to convince you Niko is vs. the stuff you actually have to do as you're playing him.

More like expecting the next luxury car to have at least as fuel efficient an engine as a 60s Rolls Royce, and to not inexplicably have pre vulcanized tires. Especially after the car company marketed it explicitly as "the next generation Rolls Royce".

Agreed. I can play around for awhile in the GTA games but find the protagonists so unlikeable I've never finished one. I finished RDR1 but stalled out on RDR2 because of some annoying shit that happened when I played and my realization I didn't like anyone in the game.

I guess I'll have to be bizzaro Jerry here. I loved the protagonists and their stories in GTA5, and same with RDR2. In CP 77 I don't really care about the story. I'm not saying it's bad, it's just not grabbing me at all.

Story in games only really immerses me when my choices matter, and nothing turns me off more than games with only the illusion of choice. I'm not quite at "skip all the cutscenes" levels but I actively avoid the story missions because everything feels so on-rails.

Witcher 3 also has a series of books and 2(+) other games to help flesh out the world

Yup, made a huge difference.

dat crafting tho

 :ye_gods:

Beat it. Worth playing. Again, I'll probably hold off a bit before giving it another go.

This was a better experience than Witcher 1 and pre-apology-patch Witcher 2. Game had a lot better pacing than 2, but the overall narrative wasn't as strong once Witcher 2 was less of chore to play.

But, fuck, man...

Finished it too. Story was absolutely fucking solid. And the end actually got me a bit emotional. Have to play through a few more times for the other endings now.

The romance options are bit odd in that all the NPC characters seem as if they could plausibly be straight or gay but they're exclusively for one orientation only. But they're all appealing characters, which is an accomplishment.

(BTW who said there's almost no sex in the game? There's more of it than almost any other RPG I can think of and it's pretty explicit. Plus I think the whole point is that it's a world full of commodified, misogynistic images of sex but is otherwise a really joyless world.)

There's a fair number of sidequests in the end that are fully written or aren't just "kill everybody". I appreciate that if you're trying to do stealth (which isn't easy) there are paths through most enemy areas. I was very amused by finding Skippy the Pistol last night.

I also appreciate by the way that the racial gangs/stereotypes are much less dire than they could have been--there's some depth to the subcultures they're fronting and some great visual variety/elements to the areas they dominate.

I have 45 hours logged and, other than the hookers, I've seen one sex scene (which I just saw last night). That one was pretty lewd, yea, but the scenes with the joytoys were pretty tame and I haven't seen anything else.

My character got a call out of the blue to meet an NPC that had been involved in one quest at the No-Tell Motel, which was a kind of unpleasant and sordid sex scene (as it should be). The sex scene with Panam on the other hand is pretty explicit and erotic and not at all sordid. The flashback sex with Johnny Silverhands and Alt is also fairly explicit. That's already about as much sex as The Witcher 3 (though I never pursued the side witch in that game). I would guess the scenes with Judy and River are about that explicit if you have a character to match their orientation.

And I really do think the point of the gameworld is that most of what makes life human has been commodified and emptied out of joy and meaning--it's sort of the point of River cooking the jambalaya for his family. So I think having tons of options for the character to bang everything that moves wouldn't make sense. Modders are probably going to add all that anyway eventually--I mean, you can play porn Skyrim or porn Conan Exiles all day long if you want.

Johnny and Alt is the one I've seen. I think I sided with the other NPC for the first scene you mention, and haven't done much with Panam yet. Wrong character for Judy and River (who I also have not met yet) unfortunately. I just assumed that with all the weird sex ads in-game (dog food boobs, the lady with three mouths, etc.) and the amount of time you spend interacting with strippers, hookers, digital and physical brothels, there would be a bit more.

Overall, the game feels a lot like Breath of the Wild for me; I like it a lot, I'm having a lot of fun, but I can't argue with the people who don't.  There's plenty to dislike.  Glitches, double tap to dodge, press C to skip dialogue, the weird difficulty curve, the AI.  But the story and the setting are really fun for me, so far.  I would love to see a sequel that cleans it up a bit.


Yeah, that is kind of weird.  It would be one thing if there was NO sex in the game, I can see that.  But putting in, like, one explicit sex scene, which doesn't take place in the marathon of weird brothels and strip clubs the main plot takes you through, and nothing else, seems weirdly constrained.  It's like they didn't want people to play it FOR that, but they still wanted it in the game for... some reason?

BDs felt kind of the same, like there's a whole game mode where you can view recordings of stuff that would be perfect for some short fiction pieces. As far as I've seen, though, you can't actually choose to watch anything yourself for fun ever; on the rare occasion you get to use it, it's always some plot related thing like a two minute clip of an office meeting where you need to scan the UPC code on some guy's coffee cup.

Exactly. It was the scene at Clouds where you're with the doll and instead of sex it's a therapy session that had me really think about it. Then I get the one with Keanu and Alt and it just confused me. Either make a game with a lot of sex and smut everywhere or don't.

Braindances seem like a feature that they wanted to make into a big thing but ran out of time for. They already had enough of them built into the main story, though, that they couldn't cut them entirely. So instead you get this elaborate tutorial for them that only applies to maybe 15 total minutes of gameplay. They sell a ton of them at the stores, but they're just Junk and don't work or do anything.

Even the BD’s that are in the game hold your hand so much that I feel like it lessened what could have been a cool mechanic. Instead of just free roaming and looking for clues it tells you when and what layer all the clues are on and then makes most of them visually obvious as well (including the sounds). It made sense for the tutorial but I was disappointed with every BD after that.

BDs definitely feel like an underused mechanic. But if you think of the comparison, which is Geralt's Witcher senses, think of the rather limited occasions you can actually use them effectively in Witcher 3--they're highly scripted and prepared for. There are plenty of more generic examples where you should be able to use them and you can't. BDs are in some sense more comprehensible--you can only use one if someone made one deliberately. Still, I was also struck that they don't come into play more often.

I think the comparison to the Witcher senses in this game is definitely scanning not BDs. Though I do sort of get your point. The weird thing is you can buy BDs in the game. They'll even go into your grenade slot. But they don't do anything. I think for sure they had more planned but it didn't get implemented. Perhaps one of their free DLCs will do something with BDs.

Also, one thing I've noticed, you can find some hidden stuff in the game that hints at how they were probably going with open world stuff but didn't have time for.

In your apartment you can get a cat, display weapons and I got a little collectible action figure to put on my table. I also repaired a roller coaster and rode it with Johnny. If the game had more of this stuff I think people would be overjoyed but there's not a lot and you have to hunt for it.

The scene with Judy, while explicit, is a stark difference from the hate sex in the Johnny/Alt scene.

And I can now not unsee Panam’s scar.

I'm 40+ hours in and this is a really good game.

Did it really take 8 years and a shitzillion dollars to make a game that's barely more stable/reliable than New Vegas was on release (Which was a CTD-fest even after patches), which was made on a $10 budget and tiny fraction of the timeline comparatively? It's a pretty embarrassing launch and the previous-gen console versions are inexcusable- to the point the refunds for those versions should just have been automatic. On PC for me though, it's still been less fucked up than every single post-Morrowind Bethesda title I've played and I've played all of them minus Fallout 76. I've had quest scripting break twice, I had my bike spawn under a car and throw it into the air, and I've had a few weird dialog/sound bugs during quests that didn't effect being able to complete them. I feel like everyone forgets that Oblivion and Skyrim were a mess on release even on PC because they've been out for years and the fans were able to immediately unfuck it because Bethesda continues to use the same shitty engine for everything.

https://youtu.be/B7trmEmI5Js

It's still really good on PC and tbh nearly every single person who is absolutely frothed up to shit on it just seems mad about something other than the quality of the game itself. As a story/world with characters in it, Cyberpunk is head and shoulders above most of the big-budget open-world stuff I've touched in the last decade even in the face of being an obvious incomplete mess.

I like:
-The world. Fallout 4 with the exception of Far Harbor was fucking dismal to look at and boring to walk around. Skyrim had a handful of cool vistas. None of the 3rd-person open-world games short of RDR2 felt like an actual world with people in it, or a world I could just ride/walk around in to take in. Most of Night City just kinda stuns me even at optimized settings to where I'll get a side gig done and walk out onto the street and just look around and just go for a walk because I want to keep looking at it. I don't use quick travel in this game, where I live by it in others.
-The way that conversations are blocked and handled in first-person is good enough that I will not except anything less in any game after this. It handles pauses in conversation well, it doesn't teleport you to the Todd Howard Dialog Time Dilation Dimension, actions/interrupts are regular.
-A lot of the characters are great. If I'm going to judge the writing, voice acting, and the animation I'm gonna call it a success in that it made me care about Jackie in the space of about 30 minutes. It does a similar job with the more prevalent side-characters. I unironically got excited when characters would literally just text me to hang out for some of the interstitial stuff in their various questlines.
-The more involved side-gigs and jobs that actually have their own stories and dialog have all been great. The one with the guy who wants to make the uh, interesting BD is probably one of the best shots I've seen at writing something with the intent of having your confusion match your character's confusion.

Okay:
-The gameplay works. It's a better shooter than any of the 3d fallout games but still a worse shooter than any actual shooter. The melee is more engaging than any of these first-person open world game's has been, and again, worse than any actual action game.
-Stealth works better than again, any Bethesda title's stealth ever has. I can also just turn the enemy's eyes off and walk by them, or literally de-aggro them with hacks, which takes the edge off the times it doesn't work.

Dislike:
-Perks are boring, stats are boring. The dialog choices from stats add flavor or let you do cool stuff off and on, but interactions with the world are boring. If my number is high enough doors and fences and grates just kinda magically open because they clearly didn't have time to make their use even LOOK interesting. There are perks that are quite literally useless.
-The numbers aspect of armor/weapons/rarities are about 80% pointless until you hit endgame because as you're leveling and burning through content it's like MMO/ARPG leveling content where rarities don't matter because in 2 levels you can pitch that legendary pistol you found for a rare and none of the piles of numbers on it matter except the DPS and the weapon type. You can tell they just gave up on armor (which is good, since it lets you dress up how you want) by just letting you craft auto-scaling +armor mods for basically nothing in material components.
-The only interesting Cyberware is insanely expensive.
-Where the gunplay and melee can be interesting mechanically, combat quickhacks are boring because you just look at people and they catch on fire or whatever and numbers flash over their heads.
-The side-gigs with actual dialog/plots/fun stuff in them are lost in a sea of generic Shooty/Stealthy gigs that are there for you to grind levels/gear/money on. There's so much good shit that people are going to miss in this game because you cannot tell the cool stuff apart from the "do this while listening to podcasts"-tier shit.
-They could tone down the shit where 200 different fixers are calling me every 2 minutes.

Not-Applicable:
-The Driving is bad, but the driving/riding in every single one of these games that has had it is bad. I have yet to see a single open-world game do it well. I don't know why it's so difficult to do right.

The GTA comparisons kinda bounce off me because I didn't really enjoy GTA4 and GTA5's protagonists and world were so fucking joyless/misanthropic it was just tiring to play. Like I could've give a shit about GTA5 having better NPC driving AI or whatever because in the end I noticed it about as much as I noticed CP2077's which was not at all.

One thing that I'm particularly with you about is that this feels like an actual city. An actual huge city, in fact. That's amazing. I can't think of any RPG ever that has done that. I mean, ok, so there's a bunch of storefronts that are perma-closed, nobody could expect Shenmue at the size of a postmodern New York City, but...there's hundreds of interior locations that feel pretty real, there's a huge range of body types walking around the world, the look of clothes and postures and movement types is appropriate to particular districts or areas (I mean, Jesus, that's a lot of work), there's at least some overheard atmospheric dialogue AND tons of atmospheric sound work. That part at least I'm in awe of and I cannot even begin to think of anything that approaches it.

As with all these games, it's a facade- but a really, really well done one. I think the majority of what's so impressive is the verticality.

Once you get the leg implant that allows the double jump you really begin to see it.

All of this. There’s some. Really. Solid. Writing in some of the side quests. I actually really did give a shit about Jackie. And his mom and Misty. Judy’s storyline is heartbreaking.  The politics of the Aldecaldos, hell even the depth of Johnny, a dude I kinda knew was a dick from the P&P but still, Keanu owned that shit.

Was this an utter shitshow on last gens? Fuck yeah it was but that’s fucking life in Night City. And hell, life in game development in general. Wear a helmet, get your fucking refund and put it toward a better fucking rig.

lol what

Also, T.S. Eliot reference was, *chef's kiss*.

You know exactly what I mean. We've all been doing this shit for how long now? Playing games that actually choked the shit out of our machines and then playing the catch-up game with hardware. Software vs hardware has always been a goddamn arms race between lazy coders who got their hands on top of the line hardware and hand waved the lower specced shit thinking their optimization was far better than it actually was and hardware developers that positively threw the newest and latest at them to say, "it runs on our shiny new shit"

The cycle's been that way since at least fucking Quake and the fact that supposed gamers are still surprised by it is fucking ridiculous.

...

You're comparing it to MMOs? That's silly. The game's fun. Some people don't like it. Shit happens but seriously, comparing it to MMOs? That's just plain silly. This game really only had 2 major issues that are impacting how people feel.The stupidity with old consoles and how their hype machine got out of control and promised stuff the game couldn't fulfill.

CDPR released Cyberpunk on platforms where they knew it would run like shit, and this was after making public statements that it was running better than expected on those platforms. They didn't send out any review copies of the console versions, and even for the PC version they prohibited reviewers from using any video other than stock footage provided by CDPR. It was scummy as fuck and beyond "wear a helmet" shit.

For PC gaming, sure. For consoles, I'd disagree. And I place the blame as much on Sony and Microsoft for extending the console generation to the point that games developed for end-cycle machines ran poorly on early-cycle machines. The strategy seemed to be working ok until the next cycle starts... MS in particular I've heard has been particularly dicky about 'it needs to run on all xbox one cycle hardware'. It's a laudable goal to get your console to the point of PC scalability, but it failed spectacularly here.

I mean, I'm playing perfectly fine on a 2011 PC...but I've used my sneaky PC mastery to upgrade to SSD (albeit SATA) and the gpu is from 2014 (a year after Xbox One launch consoles). The graphical settings really make the game pretty nice at what I guess is extreme low res these days (720p), but the lighting and materials and whatnot look amazing in motion.

So it's partly on CDPR for not scaling down to that old shitty hardware but also on console manufacturers for requiring devs to support such ancient shit. I think even a 720p/medium settings mode for 1st-gen consoles would've worked fine to make it playable and avoid a lot of the kerfluffle (there's plenty of valid kerfluffing to be done, but this particular fluffled ker has made it out to be the antichrist of all games ever created, I guess).

If developers can't get their games to run on the base PS4 or Xbox One then they should just release the game on next-gen consoles only. CDPR didn't have to release Cyberpunk on previous-gen consoles but with the next-gen versions apparently not ready yet the clearly didn't want to pass up the money. Bottom-line, CDPR knowingly released the game in the state it was in. I wouldn't even give a fraction of the blame to MS or Sony here.

The Previous-Gen versions were inexcusable and shouldn't exist tbh. They should've just cancelled them and sold it only on PC and next-gen.

Thing is there is nothing in cyberpunk game design that shouldn't run on older consoles, CDPR just needed to turn the settings down further. If I was running CDPR there is no way I could justify not releasing this game and taking the money.

lol have we gone this soft?

-so you are too poor to own the new gen console or gaming pc
AND
-too ruled by hype to wait for the game to release and for word of mouth to tell you if its truly good (review embargo is meaningless bc you should never trust vg "journalists" ever)

in what universe do i feel bad for any of these children? how many games that could have been good/better have been ruined in order to dumb shit down for console?

polish my armor with their tears moment for me for sure.

I think it's more a sign of going soft when you start making excuses for the companies rushing development, releasing busted products, and misleading customers. Clearly nobody is holding a candlelight vigil for the poor people who only own a base PS4.

Whoa... what? Sure there is too poor to own a next gen console, buuuuuut.... you can't really find a PS5 anywhere but eBay for a 100% mark up atm. And the PS5 version of the game is not even out . So I guess we have gone soft, but there are other variables affecting this.

Greed and hubris combined to result in a software development company trying to do more than it could afford to do well with the manpower it was willing to pay for and ending up releasing too soon and in a state even worse than the average bugtastic shit barfed out these days.  Surprising? No. Sign of the apocalypse? No. Excusable? Also No.

This is such a bizarre game. You can clearly see the masterpiece they were working on, but then there are so many cuts. A lot I can understand, clearly their scope was beyond their ability (edit: I mean in the time available!)

But for Legendary crafting clothing options, you get lamé hotpants. Luckily you also get a couple jumpsuits to hide your kinky little booty. But the lack of a simple themed outfit as the default unlock for crafting tiers is just absent-minded. It would've taken exactly the same amount of work to get it right. I'm also bummed that NPCs don't drop their outfits, missed a fun collectible minigame there, but I get that would actually require more work... I wonder if the outfit slot in the inventory that I've used 0 times in the last 100ish hours was for a cosmetic option?

Another cosmetic system that looks like it existed once is for weapons. Every now and again I find this cool-looking weapon (paint job, flames or w/e). So there had to have been a system scrapped for customization. I hope CDPR is able to recover from the public indignation and flesh these systems out in patches/expacks. So much cool stuff sitting just outside of the periphery.

The truly bizarre part is how good the game is despite all the cuts. Imagine if RSI had to ship after 4 dev years!

Most of you have probably seen this already but a an alleged dev has talked about the game and some of the behind the scenes shit that went down and cut content and such.

https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/kpl567/alleged_cdpr_dev_talks_about_the_state_of/ (https://www.reddit.com/r/GamingLeaksAndRumours/comments/kpl567/alleged_cdpr_dev_talks_about_the_state_of/)

Highlights:


I don't think this is right. I think they'll put out patches in January and February for face saving if nothing else. That said, those first few patches went a long way with bug fixing so if later patches are more intensive it might go back to March.


I'd be interested to see if dataminers can back any of this up as I'd assume that dialogue would still be in there somewhere. The idea of an underground would be cool. I suspect it may have needed lots of work. If this is legit I could see it getting added back in as an "expansion."


Hmmm...there is a side quest with some monks in the game right now. If this is all true it sounds silly that it was cut out.


More "if this is true it sounds good" stuff. I think if we see police fixed relatively quickly it'll make this post more believable. Anyway, grain of salt and all that.

Hah, if NPCs always dropped what they were wearing, I would be a much bigger murder hobo than I am already.

But yes, crafting is fucking weird and underthought.

The game seems so right also for a reputation system both with NPCs and factions--you really feel its absence as time goes on.

The depressing thing is that some of what's not complete or right probably can't be modded in or DLC'd in.

Does anyone know how to tell what your reputation with Johnny is? I feel like I should qualify for the "secret ending" but it doesn't seem to trigger for me.

Your rep with Johnny is the middle number at the top when you go into the screen where inventory and such is. If it says "You Only Live Once" you qualify for the secret ending. Left is your street rep, middle is Johnny and right is how close to death you are though it doesn't really seem to affect anything.

So much of the UI is ??? I thought that was progression through storylines. I'm also a bit baffled by status icons, I just noticed them recently since they're almost too unobtrusive. Still, no idea what is what and I just kind of ignore them completely.

100% of that is believable since CDPR is always content first, quality like, fifth

I hope this leak is false because "We were going to have more rooms of useless junk to loot", "We made a big area like the agreed upon worst part of that old Vampire game", "We were going to have some AI", and "The dog ate our police pathfinding" don't exactly send the message that there's a better game in here they can bring out.

i said content first, not good content first

i've never seen *anyone* talk about X great scene or set piece in any of their other games

just lots of "why are geralts feet so baby smooth" and "hah goth gf"

I get that you enjoy hating on things that are not Disco Elysium but come on. Witcher 3 is raved about constantly and is the main reason this game had so much hype. That game regularly gets cited as the best RPG of last decade in various polls and articles. It doesn't just make the list, it's almost always in the number 1 spot. People still talk about quest writing such as the bloody Baron quest and how good the characters are.

So for you to say that you've never seen anyone talk about great scenes in any of their games is just laughable. It's only possible if you literally avoid any talk of gaming that isn't on this board.

Peak hipster nonsense.

ah

To be fair, the Bloody Baron quest is pretty much the one example that gets posted pretty much every single time Witcher 3’s story gets praised. I get that there are a lot of people who love the story in the Witcher games (they’d have to love it because it’s sure not the gameplay that’s carried that series through 3 games), but having played through 3 myself I’m hard pressed to actually remember anything about the story. Granted I’ve played maybe a combined total of 2 hours of the previous games so these are not characters I’m heavily invested in.

There are definitely big story moments though some of them only really hit hard if you've played the previous games and/or read the novels. The events before, during and after the Battle of Caer Morhan for example. The Bloody Baron is definitely the go to example for "look atr how great this game is" but it's not like it's the exception and the rest of the game is mediocre it's just one of the quests that really stuck in people's minds for various reasons.

The point of my reply to Schild was his silly comments about how no one talks about great moments in their prior games. You only have to spend like 5 seconds on Google to find that that's far from the case.

nobody googles "great moments in games"

my point wasn't silly, you can find anything if you go out of your way to find it but this isn't like fuckin deus ex, people don't praise their shit unprompted or outside of a place where people are doing explicitly that

basically, their stuff isn't *that* good and the gameplay is like, well velorath already said it.

I think we don't as much around here because that's more the kind of conversation people have with relative strangers on really huge forums. I mean, if I were going to start going fanboy on Witcher 3, I'd mention how good a lot of the sidequests are in terms of writing too--each smaller monster fight is excellent in terms of the sequence of investigation, the backstory, the specificity of the things you have to do to beat the monster. I'd mention quite a few of the story arcs once you get to Novigrad, too, though those sometimes had an annoying fetch-quest structure to them. The questline that finishes off "The Last Wish" and resolves Yennefer's relationship to Geralt is great. I think also I just like the degree to which even the minor characters seem to belong to the world in terms of mood and feeling. I think the grand story of the Wild Hunt and Ciri is pretty good if a more standard sort of thing. Skellige is fine but more conventional.

I think with Cyberpunk a lot of the POI quests surprised me as being rather good and more detailed narratively than I expected them to be.

You don't have to go out of your way to find people heaping praise on the Witcher 3. Like I said, it consistently gets mentioned as one of , if not the best RPGs of the last decade. It outdoes games from series like Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Pillars of Eternity and Divinity Original Sin consistently in both player polls and gaming articles. You personally may not like CDPR or the Witcher 3 but you're heavily outnumbered. Either you're wrong or they've somehow managed to seduce the majority of players, critics and journalists into thinking the Witcher 3 is the RPG of the decade. It is *that* good. Your opinion on the matter notwithstanding.

It doesn't just win Game of the Decade when placed against other RPGs, it sometimes wins even when put up against ALL games though not as consistently.

(https://i.redd.it/qth984e9jy941.jpg)

Sadly, they pissed it all away with the Cyberpunk marketing and issues on last gen consoles but oh well.

Both of the DLC quests for Witcher 3 were fantastic as well.  Poor vampires, man.

But also, it's like a great ending, you know? An actual retirement to grow wine and have sex with a sorceress, etc.

Post Disco Elysium, nothing is *that* good. Not even Deus Ex.

I barely remember Disco Elysium other than "kind of fun but so damned pretentious." Perfect game for a hipster. It practically wears a beret and smokes clove cigarettes.

At least for me, the Witcher games were always "I endure some parts of the game like the combat system and quicktime-like action scenes (fuck you, Dragon) for the excellent world building and story" deals for me. Cyberpunk 2077 is exactly the same for me, the combat is a 100 times better than the Witchers, for that it is glitchy as hell.

CDPR patched passable combat into Witcher 2 after the fact, I have the utmost confidence they patch out the glitches of Cyberpunk as well!

I hit my first really bad glitches in the Aldecaldo-connected ending, by the way. Vehicles popping in and popping out in the yard before the drill, at one point a Militech troop got knocked down and fell through the floor where he was untouchable but I couldn't progress without killing him, so had to restart. Couldn't touch my inventory a few times, dialogue skipped, the stupid fucking tank spontaneously flipped over on its back like a turtle so that when I got in it I had to spend ten minutes trying to coax it to flip again, etc.

I might try a melee-based playthrough in May or June if there's a bunch of new content or patching. Gunplay combat was pretty good? I never bothered with richochets and all that stuff, and the smart sniper rifle I made late in the game was incredibly boring to use (instakilled anybody I pointed it at, but reloading on every shot). The pacing of the ending felt kind of off generally.

I didn't have these issues thankfully but we're probably on different platforms or something. Except the dialogue. It was there but the VO wasn't playing so without subtitles on I briefly thought the game had frozen or something.

The one other quest that completely glitched for me was the one with the Delamain cabs--I didn't chase the one that wants to commit suicide, so it showed as being at the trash dump it plows into but it wasn't interactably there and I could never get it to actually appear. There's one cyberpsycho quest that's also fucking annoying--I had assumed I'd just glitched that too but it only goes off after 8pm.

my general take on this game is that it's actually good and it'll be worth following along its expected DLC/expansion trajectory

but it's packaged with a bunch of shit that rightfully pisses gamers off for actually good, reasonable, important reasons and these guys shoulda known better

and also it's basically only worth playing on PC, and only then if you can roll the dice and find that your rig does not, for whatever inscrutable reasons, offend the fae gods that dictate if your game bugs out like fucking crazu

Nah, I played it on my Xbox One X and it was great after the first patch cleared up my crashing issues. (Was going to play on PC but the spouse wanted to watch so there you go). It's even better now that I upgraded to a Series X.

That said, it absolutely shouldn't be on baseline Xbox Ones or PS4s.

Same for PS5 and PS4 Pro. Worked just fine on both of those.

Working through my second full playthough now and my third ending. The core story works and is an actual tear-jerker in a lot of cases. Some of the side missions are pretty damn engaging too. will it get better? Yes. Was the rollout to lower-end consoles dumb? Also yes.

It's still a good game.

Add me to the bunch who consider it a really good game. Show stopping bugs suck, if you get them. But unless this, or that, or that, is not your cup of tea, like always, the game itself is very good.

And it's working for folks like you pushing through the story and folks like me just dawdling around. I'm still at the part where the story splits into 3 questlines (Takemura is one I forget the other two because it's been a minute). I did finish Judy's quest line, that was awesome. I have a screenshot from a later mission that's so beautiful I want to paint it :D

However, I'm most of the way through the NCPD POIs. I mostly just cruise the city between them, checking stuff out. I leave the 'Psycho Killer' mission tracked, as it doesn't have a yellow WP to distract and looks good in teh save menu since I'm basically playing a psycho killer for the ncpd.

I actually had one crash last weekend, but I give it a pass since I was in hot combat and tried to do several things at once, so it was likely some odd combination. Rock stable otherwise, most bugs I've seen are just visual stuff or stuff I feel will get switched back on at some point (police AI, traffic).

I loved Disco Elysium, but that's a different kind of game. As much as I'd call that one of the best rpgs of all time, I like open worlds where I can come home for lunch and blast some bad guys and then chill in the evening with a story mission. Games like this are right down the fairway for me.

Yeah, I was actually surprised at how in depth some of them are (some of them are terrible, too).  There was one quest where Wakkado asked me to kill someone for unspecified reasons, and the client asked to come along to witness the deed.  Chased the target down and shot him, mission complete, but the client died, so I decided to re-try it to try and keep him alive.  Mission went ENTIRELY differently the second time, turned in to a multiple part quest after that with a super dark ending and is probably one of the most interesting dilemmas in the game.  And in some parallel universe, there's a version of me that just shrugged their shoulders when the client died and never thought twice about it.


How do smartguns work, exactly?  Unless I swapped guns without noticing it, I lost my crosshair when I installed the smartlink and now I can't aim for shit with it.  The gun itself is long since obsolete and can't one shot enemies even with a head shot, so it's not really interfering with my game, it's just that I feel like I don't understand how it works.  Did a search and everything just seems to be either vague "it helps you aim" or instructions on where to buy the link.  So I've got a sniper rifle that I can't aim which does garbage damage.

Can't get rid of augments, either, which is annoying, since if you have an arm implant, you can't activate your blood pump due to a glitch, and I really don't like the nanowire that I installed.

Smart guns only work with the smart link cyberware. Install that at a ripper and get a smart gun and the gun will display a wide bluish-gray screen instead of a reticle. Just put the screen over the target and the bullets become guided missiles. Aiming the gun further and moving it up a bit will target the head more often than not and will target the head if you are using the sniper rifle. Think about the shots like golf shots... as long as the target still has a small red circle on it, move the barrel and hook your shots around their cover, or over it so the bullets dive over the cover.  I use them on my netrunner since I usually wipe most of the chaff mobs out with contagion and only need it to clean up the remainder. The smart shotgun is my go-to for that because it is just stupid at closer ranges.

Have still yet to use a smartgun. Just get the optics on some heavy shit linked to my cyberware and target enemies from behind cover and shoot at the heads of the painted silhouettes through the wall. No muss, no fuss. They never even see where the shots come from.

I tend to use tech guns but Skippy is a fun smart gun if you can find it. It has an AI that talks to you and it acts as a smart gun even if you don't have the cyberware installed. If you make the right choices it becomes a smart gun that ALWAYS shoots the head and does massive damage if you're specced right. The AI is kind of fun though I did find it both amusing and annoying when it'd sometimes pop off a round and say something like "I'm sorry, that never happens to me."

It seems really hard to upgrade though? But crafting is so opaque at times that I can't always tell why I'm not being allowed to upgrade a particular weapon. One thing I think I learned is never ever breakdown an iconic weapon--even if you have the crafting spec, it seems like you have to have an actual copy of the weapon to make a better version of it. (e.g., you may have the spec to take a rare iconic and make a legendary iconic but if you broke down the rare ironic, you're fucked).

Yea I didn't realize that early on and lost a bunch of cool guns because of it. I saw the crafting spec but didn't realize I needed the original.

Iconics, yeah, you need the original to upgrade. The recipes should unlock automatically for you, though. The only other requirement for upgrades are parts and level. If you have all the parts, you should get a message telling you that you need to be (some messed up lvl(0) msg that means you need to be a level higher to upgrade again).

The purple maxdoc will break down into all but legendary parts for the cost of common and uncommon, which you can get from junk and beverages. It's more efficient to make grenades, though. A purple flashbang costs 1 grey and 1 green but will give you back blues and purples (but no grey/green).

There is a green flame jacket that is good for money grind early on. As I was exploring and doing POIs, I just emptied all the soda machines as I passed them (¢$10/can). Then break those down into parts and craft those jackets, which sell for around ¢$500/ea. It's grindy and limited by money at each vendor, but it's a nice way to get a car or a nice mod or weapon early on.

When the blue tier unlocked, there is a synsilk jacket that sells for around ¢$1k but adds some blue and purple parts to the recipe, which becomes the bottleneck and is a bit more grindy (adds step of making grenades/heals and breaking those down for blue/purple). BUT they also have a slot, which has a chance of having a Legendary mod (+15% crit change or 30% crit damage) that you can choose a perk to get back when you recycle the jacket. Then you can break that down and get legendary parts. The whole process works and makes good money, but is just past my tolerance for grind. But if you are using it for parts and save scum when crafting Legendaries, it goes far enough in a pinch. And monetarily, even without grinding a ton (mostly using it to get back money when I buy something expensive at a vendor), I'm sitting at around ¢$550k at level 32 without having done most of the story.

Speaking of mods, pay attention to the stat panel. A lot of the mods don't stack. Only 1 each of the aforementioned crit mods will apply to the Stats page, even though it looks like they stack on the clothing. This goes for mods on the same item, as well as all items combined. Further confused by showing a successful stack on the item tooltip (pants with +60% crit change over 4 slots had me so excited, too, but nah).

When crafting mods, there is a weird thing with just the Armadillo mod. All others seem to be a locked value (+7 damage for instance), but the armor mods seem to craft randomly at 3 levels (grey/green/blue) and increase total armor buff as you level (so a level 10 mod will be better than a level 9 mod). This only seems to apply to armor mods, but they're so cheap it's worth grinding out a bunch when you need some. Slot the blues and recycle everything you don't use. Making sure to keep these mods up to level and having points in tech, the armor really starts to pile on. I can mostly just walk into shotgun fire to smack someone with the pimp cane (I also have a speed demon build that stacks more armor buffs, it's pretty OP imo).

I'm using a legendary non-iconic smart shotgun with an 8 projectile shot. In the gun's HUD you can see little red circles on the highlighted enemy, this is where the gun will attempt to hit. As a speed demon, it takes some practice to get enough space and the correct angle, but it's a pretty crazy weapon for when things get a bit too hot for the pimp cane. The targeting stuff may be from the eye mod or a perk, though.

As a shotgun/blunt build, this game really seems to favor pistols and rifles. I've found so many more iconics, smart guns, and in general better drops across the board. I was using a blue autoshottie for the longest time because I never get a decent shotgun until I was at least in my 20s!

Lest this get too long harhar, one final note about Body build: LMGs are broken. Something's wrong with the slots and with a 4 slot LMG I could only slot in the top mod. So I stopped using them and switched to mostly melee.

Skippy? You don't have to upgrade it. It levels with you.

Well that would explain why I couldn't ever upgrade it. :)

I read there is something with Skippy...it locks out whatever primary mode you've been using at some point when it levels up. Look into that if you're leaning on Skippy as your primary weapon.

I guess Skippy is gone once you give it back to the questgiver? Because I want all those quests gone so I had to. The fact that all those car sale offers clutter my map is bad enough for my OCD.

I've heard of a settlement in trouble, General. I'll mark it on your map..

That's what my spoiler covers. It's a bit of a trap if you don't know what it does.

Can't you just slot in the optics mod that makes all your guns non-lethal no matter what if Skippy locks on lethal?

I slot that thing in and out every time I'm going after a cyberpsycho.

I'm doing a second play though I doubt I'll finish it through, just curious about a few things, and I'm trying really hard to do most things stealth and non-lethal. Now this is something where there should be some difference in how people treat you but I can't see it--it really only seems to matter on those missions where the fixer says "please try not to kill people". Otherwise you can kill the fuck out of everything, as far as I can tell, with no difference in how anybody in the world sees you. I wonder if it affects how Johnny sees you? I'm trying to think where it was in the game that some NPC made a crack about how many people you've killed--I wonder if that would change if you somehow managed to kill no one?

Aside from a difference in dialogue, I'm not entirely sure it actually matters much if you kill a cyberpsycho or not. I've seen mixed reports on whether or not it fails a quest, on whether or not lethal damage actually kills them or if you have to shoot them again after you've downed them to actually kill them. Even then it's hard to tell what's a result of the mechanics and what's just a bug.

I'm guessing there was probably supposed to be more with the whole lethal/non-lethal stuff in the game but as implemented I'm not sure there's any functional different in the game really.

My MO for all those missions is to use the tranq dart with the cyberware projectile launcher - knock them out, find the info, text Regina and finish the quest, then double tap headshot with my sidearm while they lay there and collect the NCPD reward. WIN-WIN

I've gone lethal on three cyberpsychos and miraculously failed to kill them all. Finished mission as expected.

All attacks on cyber psychos seem to be non-lethal until they drop.  I've dropped them by shooting them in the face with my explosive pistol and they are still alive. They only seem to die if you shoot them after they've fallen.

If You will not kill any psycho there will be a few lines more from Regina on final step of the quest. I dont remember getting any additional award.

I don't use that mod yet it seems that I have to clean up every POI by going around and finishing off chooms rolling around on the ground. Seems almost random whether they die or get knocked down (not out, as they're rolling around in apparent pain...except for the ones that don't, but still aren't dead...).

I was kind of hoping there was an achievement for cleaning off all the NCPD POIs, just finished the last few last night. More to know I got them all than any whoring.

Hands down my favorite quickhack is Cyberpsycho, especially with a few perks to promote spread. Ironic that I'm hunting cyberpsychos, but I've made hundreds of them. I still mostly go for visceral melee/shottie action gameplay, but it's nice to take a breather and watch a couple psychos fight everyone until they blow their own brains out.

The cyberpsycho questline feels to me like one of those that got semi-cut in the rush to release, in the sense that if you read all the shit you pick up after taking one down, it starts to feel very clear that there's an actual cause and it actually matters. Including the quest with the guy who stole the drugs who isn't yet a cyberpsycho and who suicides if you talk him down. It's a real letdown when you do the whole damn thing and Regina's like oh well thanks for all that help guess we'll never know. I would assume that's a DLC in the making--probably something that takes you into Militech and other corps, etc.

I agree, and that was a nicely done vignette with the neighbor.

But, to reiterate...I'm making new cyberpsychos on the regular, soo....the real villain was V all along.

Zigacktly.

So. Getting to the part of the main plot where you work with the Voodoo Boys (I said I was playing slowly heh). I probably missed the 'good' way to stealth through the level, but in 2077 can a hacker download a damn map for stealth levels? Anyway, ended up cyberpsychoing everyone as usual because I ended up in a dead end and was tired of sneaking after a loooong and slow creep across the map. Problem is, by then it was late and I was going to bed and I hit an almost half-hour sequence of story without any saving.

First time I was actually annoyed at the game. Partly for keeping me up way past my beddie-bye, but also because I rushed through the story parts that I had been looking forward to. Boo to long unskippable unsaveable passages in anything ever. For a second I was longing for the old Playstation button to just sleep the game.

Placide seems like another character that they likely had more interactions planned with once upon a time--there's enough effort put into his character model etc. that the limited interactions you have seem odd.

I was also slightly annoyed that V wasn't allowed to put two and two together in terms of who had been behind Evelyn in the first place if your V went ahead and read all the shards they'd been collecting up to that point. Brigitte is in there under another name. If you're attentive you already know a lot about her by the time you meet her. That's another thing that is kind of underwritten in the game--you don't get dialogue branches that reward your acquisition of information.

I've seen that you can side with NetWatch but it's pretty damn hard to stealth past Sasquatch plus Sasquatch drops something good.

You can still side with the Netwatch agent after killing her. I stumbled on her while my cyberpsychos were cyberpsychoing, it was a pretty challenging fight to go into unprepared with low ammo weapons. I tried three paths with him (two were the same outcome, but the first time I just jacked him immediately, in hindsight I liked the interaction with Johnny after that the best).

And for sure they need to put in flags based on collected knowledge from the world.

Yea I killed Sasquatch then sided with Netwatch. That was one of the few questlines that seemed to have multiple paths through it that actually changed things.

I have to say for a game with an adjustable penis as a selling point there is a rather big chastity belt surrounding the main character.

But beyond that the game was pretty meh. I think there was one side quest with a mayor that sounded like it was going someone and rapidly went nowhere. The main story was rather bad and the lack of an affective reroll option means that the games only good part "being able to do janky shit with the combat system" is basically walled off until someone release a mod. Overall my only real regret is not catching this on a steam sale for 20 bucks.

There are sooooo many data shards with dialog. I was collecting them all at first but the time investment to locate them and read them just got to be way too much for me.

Stuff like what you all are talking about is the biggest sign that they were pushed to get the game out. Had it had more time I think it'd have been much better.

Developer's response:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3V4UBZmC9o&feature=emb_logo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3V4UBZmC9o&feature=emb_logo)

Apparently the release issues with old consoles weren't noticed in testing... somehow... and they were confident they'd get the stuff they did notice fixed by release.  Console versions were "rapidly improving" at that point, which was why reviewers weren't given console review copies until later.

Also claimed that nobody is being forced to work overtime at the minute or in future projects, due to the backlash over forced crunch time in the run-up to release.

Roadmap sez: stability and technical fixes incoming in the next ten days or so, free DLC is still on track for 2021 but probably not until Q2 at the earliest.

Is that like the previous time the powers that be at CDPR said there wouldn't be mandatory crunch (which they went back on as soon as they decided they needed mandatory crunch)?

Edit: Would have been better just saying that they fucked up, they're sorry, and that they know they have to earn trust back. This bullshit about the console issues though... not seeing the problems is an excuse that maybe works when you're talking about PC since nobody can test every PC build someone might be using. That shit doesn't really fly though when you're talking about a console. If they didn't see all the issues, they either weren't looking all that hard, or are just full of shit.

Or the testers were lazy and rushed and only did a few pre-scripted things and management was honestly (but still culpably) clueless about the actual state. Which still comes down to bad management, no matter how it's spun or what actually led to the debacle.

The problem is, NOBODY is willing to pay what it actually costs to make good software anymore. It's just too complicated, and requires too much time from too many expensive highly experienced specialists of a dozen different types.  Art is cheap.  Even merely relatively bug-free software is anything but.

I read somewhere they weren't able to work with their usual 3rd party QA people due to Covid so that may have played a roll as well.

I know I am going to get pilloried for this, but I genuinely believe that they would have been better off* using almost any other actor for Johhny Silverhands. The character comes off better to me when i have the sound off and am just reading the captions, then when Keanu is talking. JS is such a dynamic and out there character, and Mr Reeves is not.

*Except for the obvious hype value.

Are there people who think Reeves did a good job in the role?

I personally would've gone with Mickey Rourke, but I fuckin love me some Mickey Rourke with 'tude.

The thing about Keanu Reeves is that he's not a good actor. Never has been. What he's great at is reading a script and understanding the production of a movie. I watch most Keanu Reeves movies, not because he's good but because he picks great movies to be in. I feel the same about this game.

He's an actor that if a movie fits him, he can be very good. He was great in the Matrix. Bill and Ted of course. He's very good as John Wick as well. Most other stuff he's...alright. I think it's most accurate to say he seems to be a super likeable genuinely kind man who is an actor who doesn't have much range but when used correctly he can be great.

I think Keanu is generally a pretty good actor, but he doesn't have a ton of voice acting experience. I don't know who CDPR has direct their voice actors, but it doesn't necessarily surprise me that a Polish video game development studio maybe didn't know how to get the best performance out of a famous actor. I can understand how maybe there wasn't someone there who was able to say "try delivering the line this way" to him.

That said, I also think Johnny is one of the worst written characters in the game both in how the actual dialogue is written and in terms of his character arc and how it plays out throughout the game. He has to be a completely over the top, abusive asshole, and a sympathetic character you could conceivably be willing to sacrifice yourself for and everything in between, and he doesn't necessarily go from one to the other in a straight line, especially depending on the order you do things in.   

I would have liked to see Peter Stormare - but he doesn't have the same star power.

Keanu is definitely not a great match for the actual character, who is pretty interesting. The actual character is a cynical, violent, passionate, romantic, contradictory person. I think he does ok with it? But there are a good ten to fifteen actors I can think of who would have been considerably better.

Jackie's voice actor is great. Male V is sort of, eh, ok? Not bad. Haven't played female V yet.

Panam and Judy's voice actors are fantastic, with great model work. River's voice actor is very good.

The fixer voice actors are ok at best? But I did think the Voodoo Boys voice acting was quite good. Placide's voice actor fills the character out really well.

Female V is much, much better than male V. Though I've noticed this is a trend in games with a choice in protagonists to be honest. The female VA is almost always better than the male. I think they just work harder or something. I pretty much agree on the others.

Female V is leaps and bounds better than Male V, who sounds like an Irish guy trying to play a New Yorker. Panam's weird non use of conjunctions bugs me at times, but her voice acting is pretty solid overall. Judy's acting is just the best of the bunch.

Keanu is fine as Silverhand. Johnny was a dick but an aspirational one and Keanu's disaffected, world-weary "fuck it all" sold it for me. 

My problem with Male V is the same problem I have with a lot of Male VAs honestly. He sounded like he was trying to hard to be tough or something and it just made me roll my eyes.

Accurate assessment.

I'm almost cringing at a lot of the male V line deliveries. That's one of the problems when you make it 1st person, at least with 3rd person I feel like I'm controlling this weirdo and then watching what he does in cutscenes. And seeing a decently animated delivery in a cutscene goes a long way to elevate the VA's performance (I'm thinking of Days Gone in particular here, as I didn't care for the VA at first and he really grew into a full character that I cared about by the end....getting NONE of that in 2077).

I like Keanu's performance better overall thus far than the male V.

Silent protagonists are best protagonists.

Yeah, Male V not only doesn't seem right in terms of delivery, his lines don't feel right in the setting a lot of the time. He seems naive in strange ways, tough at incongruent moments, etc. He doesn't feel completely open-ended like an Elder Scrolls main but he doesn't feel as specifically realized as Geralt or Shepard or a lot of other RPG protagonists. But at least some of that comes down to the voice acting for the character, which is just kind of meh.

I think is voice acting is fine if you start him as Corpo but only as Corpo.

The slightly weird mix of situations he sounds confident and naive in, doesn't feel right for the other 2 prologues.

Started off as street and he... was a mix bag. On one hand V is supposedly this harden criminal/mercenary who knows how to significant players in this games under world, but on the other hand is he is a complete and utter moron when it comes to not trusting people. It really doesn't feel like V is your character but it also doesn't feel like V is his own character. Like splitting the difference between a player insert and someone intended to have a narrative your suppose to care about.

Female V corpo was still my best play through. Male V street kid kinda worked but still felt like he was faking the funk. Mulling which sex to do a nomad run with now.

Finally decided to start the final sequence. Debated on clearing the map first, but was curious and kinda want to walk away for now - and finishing the storyline gives me a nice break point. Story was pretty solid...wasn't Horizon: Zero Dawn, but I don't see anything knocking that off the top of my list.

Hopeful they can clean up the game more and I'll probably be back for the DLC...but only on PS5

Nothing will top Horizon for me at this point either. But this? Not fucking bad.

Horizon's ending was kind of interesting. I don't know that it's my favorite of all time or anything, but I liked the conceptual twists, they weren't what I was expecting.

This one went kind of the way I expected. I'll wait for some DLC and patching and I'll probably play through to try and get the suicide run ending.

I'm almost tempted to try melee except that I didn't much care for it when I was doing my first guns-based playthrough.

Horizon’s ending worked so well for me because it was Aloy coming to terms with who and what she was and then fulfilling that void she’d had since childhood by finding her “mother”.

Of the three endings I’ve gotten so far with Cyberpunk, the Aldecaldos one was the only one even approaching hopeful.

Horizon's whole story stuck with me. It was the first game to really motivate me to learn what the hell is going on and pursue the details... rather than just a forgettable dialog on top of the shooty/slashy bits.

Cyberpunk is ok... but there is SO much shit to read that I don't really care to. Lots of cool abilities and toys in a meh game.

HZD also hit for me because it's one of my favorite tropes (primitive society with an advanced tech society underneath).

Meanwhile Cyberpunk taps into a lot of stuff I find obnoxious. Any game that has a prominent soundtrack is bound to split the playerbase unless they can cover a lot of bases. I listen to a very wide variety of music and I can dig a few tunes here and there, but overall it's just a horribly niche soundtrack and significantly impacts the game for me (A lot of GTA's longevity is just cruising around listening to tunes because the soundtracks (and talk radio!) is SO good).

I guess they forgot about Dre.

I did the Aldecaldos ending and I thought yeah, it's kind of hopeful? But it's cyberpunk and the genre is not big on upbeat endings. Can't really think of anything that qualifies as cyberpunk that ends on a positive note, really.

That's it. Simply surviving is optimistic in cyberpunk. The fact that you've got possibilities in the aftermath is as optimistic as it gets.

That said, my headcanon still says in that ending, V ends up connecting with some of the powers that be in my p&p cyberpunk campaigns who had worked out cloning/serial genetic manipulation.

I was thinking that maybe corpo V ends up putting his own engram on a Relic chip and taking over someone else's body...(maybe even someone willing to allow it).

Riding the wasteland with my homeless girlfriend in search for a new homeless shelter is pretty hopeful. My issue with the game is that the endings are basically the same regardless of what you do, the choices are pretty "take red pill or blue pill". V not getting away scot free is pretty abrituary considering that V kinda sucks as a character.

V's pretty much a blank slate you project your own shit on. If he or she sucks as a character, that's kinda on you, cochise.

That said, I found a pink hat with bunny ears, goggles and shiny bows. I now run around night city setting punks on fire while wearing it. Female V with the "Tell Me I'm Cute" hat is now canon.

(https://i.imgur.com/724MlyY.jpg)

Having him voiced really makes that untrue, although 2077 is less bad than Mass Effect was in that regard. As others have said, V is kind of in between Dragonborn and Shepard and it's mostly fine, but he's not a blank slate by any means.

I was originally trying to head canon a 'Deacon from Days Gone is now a Nomad' thing (I mean, being a Nomad was a big part of his well-developed character). Not only did the mess of story cuts and thin options throw that out the window, but the voice acting brings me out of any head canon I may have brewing at any particular time.

I still haven't been back to play it since I finished up poking around the map, due to my primary issue with the game: I've been held hostage in un-saveable story missions twice now, and that's not acceptable. My playtime comes in chunks, and when it's time to duck out, there's no wiggle room (back to work on lunch, get to bed on time, etc). It's pushed me to rush through those segments when I'm pressed for time, which kinda ruins it.

If I had it on PS4, I could use the magic button to pause it, but the pc version is sol.

Except there isn't enough variety in V's decision making matrix for his decisions to be mine. There is enough variety to the reactions to my dialogue choices for V story to be mine. I just wished they went all in on making V an actual person instead of half assing it.

Fair. Though, I did find that if you dicked around and did all the side content before progressing through the main story and got to a higher level with more experience, you had a few more conversation options to work with.

And that Dream On side job? Solid writing. I want more shit like that.

That's the one with the mayoral candidate? That's the best-written quest arc in the game, I think--good choices, complicated feelings, expresses the gameworld's mood. If they'd built out from it more (there are other quests that hint at connections to it that feel under-explored) it could have been the Bloody Baron of this game.

The mayor quest was the biggest case of blue balls in gaming. I was looking for one quest, just one side quest as good as the ones in the Witcher 3 and the moment they have one they literally say "nope fuck you hahaha"

Here was my corposlut playthrough (modded)

(https://i.imgur.com/1p314uV.png)

It's only been a handful of months, but mods have steadily allowed the removal of almost all annoyances (crouch vingette, double tap to holster, double tap to dodge, hairsytle/character edit, custom vehicles).  Love the RP flavored mods like Turn Off computer screen.

It just feels sooooo damn obvious that these cyberlimb visual enhancements should have been in the game.

(https://i.imgur.com/lTMZTcP.png)

Just look at how cool that shit is!!

My only hope now is that they release full mod tools so that the modders would keep this world alive for the coming decades.

The next gen console/new update dropped yesterday.

It's not bad. The graphics update on the PS5 is spectacular. Driving now uses the haptics in the new controllers and the the little story tweaks, like the extra texts from the people you romanced is worth it.

I'd go so far as to say it is almost literally game-changing. The game feels different in a very good way. It's much more immersive and the changes to perks and such make it feel much more like a true RPG. If they'd launched the game in this shape I think it's reception would have been much more positive to be honest.

It's mostly positive with over 400k reviews all-time on Steam. I think the reception ended up pretty fine. I returned it once, but I might rebuy it because of this patch. I don't know. CDPR just doesn't seem to make games for me.

One of the little things that stands out is how much trash loot they removed - a heck of a lot. It really cleans up the experience.

Panam sent my male V a naked selfie and Judy's Abuela interrogated my female V via text. shit is good. if it wasn't for Forbidden West and Witch Queen, I'd start another run from scratch.

Since my last comment was about cut-scenes and other sequences turning off the save system for long periods of time....this was also annoying me again over the weekend. Once again I ended up rushing through a lot of story just so I could turn off the game and cook dinner.

But the real beef is the continued lack of respec for abilities. Turning the fun minigame of designing character builds into agonizing decisions with irreversible wrong choices.

I enjoyed the game the first time I played it and made pretty good progress through the story. Now, with full RT effects on the pc, it looks amazing, I think the gameplay tweaks mostly work, it's a good experience. Until it comes time to spend an ability point.

As a side note, I feel like raytracing delivers such an improved visual it's like the first time seeing shaders or normal maps. It just elevates the experience and pushes the verisimilitude of it. Just have to wait for the hardware to catch up, I'm playing at 1440/30 and using dlss...but all quality stuff is cranked and runs smooth af at those settings (I could probably push the res but I like to keep my thermals well below redline in my shitty pc case).

I went with a tech/body/agility build for the run where I ended up going Nova with Johnny. It got me through with no real issues.

And by endgame, I had more than enough eddies to respect a few times if I needed to.

Respec perks, though, not abilities (unless there's a late game mechanism I am unaware of?). It's not about 'getting through' the game. I made it a good way through the plot the 1st time I played with some 1h blunt + speed build that was insane, even with a lot of trash points because of the lack of respec, that was keeping me from a few perks I wanted.

There's just no reason to punish people at this point in gaming. I like my character build and was thinking of that original character when I rolled this one, having to restart the entire game just to respec the points I initially put into Body is just stupid (at the time I had strong regerts it was maybe a dozen hours into the game).

They've improved a lot, so it's an even more glaring omission. That, and cosmetic gear. Pleeeease stop the cyberhobos.

Phantom Liberty drops in September

John Carpenter's Escape From Night City and you're V Plissken.

https://youtu.be/reABCMNGM3w

I had the exact same thought! Not that I mind really. I'm intrigued by the near total overhaul that's apparently coming, like all the skills changing and stuff. And the expansion apparently adds a new ending to the base game according to one of the devs.

I've justifiably given this game a lot of shit, but with the DLC trailer from Gamescom (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBrkG3aeWCc) they dropped a couple weeks back, I'm actually pretty hyped to dive back in soon. A lot of the improvements mentioned in the video are apparently getting added to the game in the 2.0 update which doesn't have a date yet but they've said that it will release at some point prior to the DLC launch on the 26th. I don't want to get myself overhyped for this thing (again) but it does look like it has a shot at finally living up to its potential.

(https://images.pushsquare.com/f3bdfe25c8e29/cyberpunk-2077-2-0-update-changes.900x.jpg)

As long as I can drive a car without feeling like I'm Peter Dinklage peering over a monster truck dashboard, I'm in for it.

But no, I'm really into this--I liked the original a lot anyway and never understood what all the hysteria was about.

They were a victim of their own marketing. They made the game look like the most amazing RPG and Cyberpunk game ever made. Instead it was...good after lots of patches.

They should have ignored the Xbox One and PS4 and let it bake for another year or so so it'd have a smoother, more polished launch. And their marketing department should have toned things down.

I don't think marketing had much to do with it. The game had legitimate issues. A lot of them. I managed to have some fun with the game despite the myriad of issues, but the myriad of issues were there. We don't need to rehash all of them (just reread the thread, or better yet read through all the previous patch notes), but the game released almost 3 years ago and they had to spend all that time fixing and improving the base game and are only just now going to release the first (and what seems to be only) paid DLC. They didn't spend all that time fixing the game rather than selling new content because there was some sort of irrational hysteria or because they didn't set expectations properly, they did it because realistically the game was released a couple years too early.

It's fantastic that they might have finally helped the game reach its potential, and I'm absolutely looking forward to a new run through and seeing all the improvements. I'm anticipating this more than I'm looking forward to playing Starfield when that releases on XGP in a couple days. I'm not going to revise history though and say that the game was great all along and people just didn't realize it or had their expectations set too high.

Expectations were super high, and the fuckups were disastrous enough that it probably should have bankrupted the company. After all, I'm one of the biggest fans of Cyberpunk 2020, and was very close to pre-ordering the game. I was planning on buying it upon release, and all the negative press about how fucked up the game was kept me not only from buying it on release, but buying it period. I didn't finally knuckle down and buy it until 2 years later, and I bought it on a half-price sale. The game I bought and played is absolutely most of what should have been released, and they should have realized that when they decided not to delay it. Fuck's sake, they had to pull the PS4 version because of how fucked up it was. I'm glad the PC version didn't have quite as many issues but even to this day, it still has issues I wouldn't tolerate in other games I'm less interested in.

The vehicle handling is so bad, I haven't bought any new vehicles, and what's worse, I spend most of my vehicle time on Jackie's Arch bike, the first motorcycle you get. There are parts of the game where it stutters and slows to a stop because the game can't render those parts (my computer is 6 years old, so that's understandable). It's mostly large open areas with lots of water or vegetation such as the city center park and the indoor garden in Arasaka Tower near the end. There are times where I seem to cross a boundary that loads new terrain and my character will just skate out of my control until everything loads. I still get pop-in in places and some crashes. It's only because of the quality of storytelling and atmosphere that I haven't totally slagged it off.

Knowing that, I still plan on buying Phantom Liberty when I get a new computer, and I'm super happy that they ditched the Red engine for future Cyberpunk and Witcher releases in favor of Unreal engine. It won't magically rid them of fuckups, but at least they won't be developing an engine underneath a game.

I never drove anything but a motorbike after launch, but I'm not salty about it.

2.0 drops on the 21st, and they also put out some more trailers include some where devs talk about some of the possible new character builds. One showed the ability to remote hack a car and then send it speeding into someone. Clearly not something that's going to have any use for indoor missions but damned if it doesn't look like a fun thing to do. That's my thought on a lot of the abilities they've shown really, especially most of the melee stuff. A lot of it seems like really fun stuff to play around with, but if you're min/maxing I don't know that there's anything that's going to top the efficiency with which you could just kill people with various hacks or guns. Nothing wrong with adding a bunch of fun options though, especially since most people playing are going to be on their 2nd playthrough minimum. And hey, it's nice to get to play around with 2.0 for just under a week before deciding on if it feels worthwhile to buy the DLC.

Did you look at the character builder they mentioned? I did and it's convinced me I might need to do a whole new playthrough to experiment with the new builds. There are some big changes. I already knew there would be but they're even bigger than I anticipated. Pistols and sniper rifles are under cool now, for example. Technical no longer has any crafting perks that I saw and is all about grenades, tech weapons and cyberware.

There are enough changes that I might start an all new playthrough just for patch 2.0, let alone Phantom Liberty.

https://www.cyberpunk.net/en/build-planner?a=33333&b=&r=&i=&t=&c=&e= (https://www.cyberpunk.net/en/build-planner?a=33333&b=&r=&i=&t=&c=&e=)

I've glanced through the character builder but haven't really started to put together any builds yet. IIRC you need to get to some point in Act 2 to get to the DLC stuff so I plan to at least get a playthrough that far in the five or so days before the DLC launches.

Yeah you need to be in Act 2 and I think you need to have done at least some of the Voodoo Boys main quest missions.

I wonder how the DLC will fit in a complete new run for someone who never played the game. Basically, if going through the DLC stuff would confuse the main story or they are separate enough that you can play the game without knowing what's DLC and what was vanilla and not notice seams or inconsistencies.

I think it's meant to fit in seamlessly at the same level of completeness as the romance/companion options (Judy, River, Panam, and Kerry). All of them are optional but a really involved quest chain. Dogtown is supposed to be the same way.

I think Mister Hand is the fixer for Dogtown so my guess is once you're at a point in the game where you can do the DLC he'll call and say something about a mission in Dogtown. I suspect you'll get some generic seeming mission that takes you there and then you'll get dragged into the rest of it somehow.

I think the trigger is the President's plane goes down over your head while you are doing a mission in Dogtown.

So I finished the new expansion and the new ending it adds. The expansion was pretty darn good and really showed what the game could have been if they hadn't made the assinine decision to launch it on the Xbox One and PS4 as well as next gen consoles. (and let it bake for a year or two longer!) The new ending is pretty good and feels fitting except for one bit of character assassination of a major NPC.

Fucking great.

Sounds like you took a different path than I did towards the end.

Phantom Liberty and the 2.0 rework are really good.