[karajorma]

Except of course if the point is that no one cares about protesting the horrible world they live in.

Spoiler:

Hence the juxtapose between the "terrorist" Johnny Silverhands who hated the entire corporate world with a passion and V who starts out pleased to finally make it into the big leagues.[/quote]

[Luis Dias]

Not saying something is never the same as saying that this something isn't being said.

Not saying something is, always, just not saying it.

But, at the end of the day, I don't think this game has a whole lot to say for itself. It's at the same time overly ambitious in its tech and not ambitious enough in its writing; where Rockstar took the canvas of Red Dead and spun an epic morality tale where every single scene was infused with that game's themes, Cyberpunk ends up as a portrayal of life in a dystopian, careless future -- and with no real energy behind its protesting of this dystopia.

This strikes me as completely on par with my expectations for years now, by merely watching the trailers and the discussion around the game.

This has also been my main reason for skipping this game entirely, its meaninglessness and washed-up recycled aesthetics that just exist by and for themselves, an aesthetic that had political meaning before I was even born and is now just a cool retrosynthwave cool neon thing.

I might agree with Karajorma if the main point of the game is to show how everyone who enjoys this game is as shallow and hopelessly driven to shiny shallow meaningless neon things as the game itself is, a kind of self-deprecating big joke, a 2020 irony engine fueled by synthwave.

I'd even argue that the "consumers" know this as well, given the amount of ironic disdain and distance they keep from their shiny new product they were just gushing over for years on end, spreading memes about its technical failures and bugs. I have yet to encounter just a simple wholesome CP2077 meme. No, it's just people mocking it, its shiny colorful raytraced bugs. They may resent the reviewers who were "meh"-ing the game with death threats all they want, but their resentment betrays the disappointment.

[karajorma]

The point were someone who hasn't even played the game thinks they can comment on it, is the point where I decide there's little worth listening to in their comment.


The memes I've made or spread have also been mocking the technical bugs cause they are ****ing funny! The game might be buggy as hell but I'm absolutely loving it. I'm not spreading positive stuff cause it would be massively full of spoilers. And this game should be experienced, not talked about. There are plenty of missions with as much if not more depth than stuff in Witcher 3

Spoiler:

The second missions with the married politicians or with River are both missions which I started playing a little late and then kept me glued to the game far later than I planed to stay up playing it.

I honestly have no idea what game The E is playing but given that he isn't interested in modding his character, he might actually be completely the wrong audience for this game. First thing I did was give myself mantis blades and high jumping ability and bound along the rooftops as a new breed of superhero. I'm not here to play shiny GTA. I'm here to mod the hell out of my character like you should in a cyberpunk game.

[The E]

(in response to luis)

Don't get me wrong, for all that I am criticizing this game, there still are good things to find in here. The characters are very well written and drawn, and there are some stories in here that are good fun.

But those things can't hold up a game that is plagued by this many issues, both in terms of genuine bugs and baffling design missteps. It kinda reminds me of Dontnod's Remember Me: It, too, promised a lot and delivered not a whole lot (Although it has to be said that Remember Me was probably a more successful game in terms of what it wanted to be vs what it actually turned out to be than Cyberpunk is).

I don't wish CDPR ill, I really don't. But a release this bad, this outright deceptive should absolutely be taken as a springboard to question these notions of them being a "good" developer, a "gamer's first" developer, cos this game is about as broken on about as many levels as Mass Effect Andromeda was, and last I checked we haven't forgiven Bioware for that yet, have we.

Spoiler:

The second missions with the married politicians or with River are both missions which I started playing a little late and then kept me glued to the game far later than I planed to stay up playing it.

These are absolutely highlights of the game. They're great missions, great stories!
They should just be in a better game.

I honestly have no idea what game The E is playing but given that he isn't interested in modding his character, he might actually be completely the wrong audience for this game. First thing I did was give myself mantis blades and high jumping ability and bound along the rooftops as a new breed of superhero.

Okay, that's cool. One question though: Did that open up any gameplay routes for you that weren't open before?
With upgrades like that, I would expect the mission design and level design to take them into account, to reward you for making that investment in some way. If I spec into wall-punching in Deus Ex, I know I'll be getting access to a bunch of routes I wasn't able to get to before; Does installing a high jump mod do the same here? Not to the best of my knowledge.
My complaint here is that the game is terrible about communicating the benefits of a given upgrade. Everything in it, every single encounter, is balanced around the player doing nothing but the bare minimum required to invest in these systems (that the AI is terrible and frequently glitches out or doesn't react to your presence at all does not help); as a result, the only reason to invest in these systems is for the cool factor of "my arms are katanas now".
I'm absolutely interested in modding characters, that's always cool to do, but doing so here doesn't convey much beyond pure self-actualization. I would like some game design to go with my upgrades, basically.

As for me being the wrong audience for this game: Please. I absolutely love myself a huge slab of open world game with good writing. I fundamentally like Cyberpunk 2077 despite all its faults, I do not regret buying or playing it, and I am interested in seeing what CDPR are going to do with it in the future.
I just feel that it could have been much better, and that its faults show a .... carelessness in game design that other studios operating in roughly the same realm have done a much better job with than CDPR did here.

[mjn.mixael]

I played about 1.5 hours worth. It didn't hook me. I'm not saying it's a bad game, by any means. I'm sure there's plenty of fun to be had... but for all the hype, the first 1.5 hours made it pretty clear is your standard AAA open-world game with a cyberpunk sheen. The_E's in-progress review confirmed my suspicions.

I suppose it doesn't help that within the first few minutes of actual play, I turned left out of the garage instead of right... and since I had the gall to turn around using a small drive that had people sitting near it who yelped a little bit, I got brutally murdered by some bad guys who apparently have it out for exactly me within about 30 seconds.

Meh.

I went ahead and requested a refund. Maybe I'll give the game another chance in a few years and buy it again when it's on sale.

[Colonol Dekker]

So it downloaded today while I'm working in Hull, got back to the hotel to find it runs splendidly on ultra at 19(something) x (something) without any Raytracing.  With a DS4 plugged in its like a dream. 


Performance aside,  I'm yet to get to anything resembling open world.   But that's due to time constraints,  I've only got so much free time per evening after writing up real world work and calibrating equipment for the next days endeavours.

I'm sure after an hour or two a day for the rest of the week (not counting Friday) I'll be able to offer better insight into my opinion.

I went Corpo BTW and didn't go silly on the character creator. 😂👍

[karajorma]

Okay, that's cool. One question though: Did that open up any gameplay routes for you that weren't open before?

I'll ask you a counter-question. When did any upgrades in Witcher 3 do that?

But in answer to that question. Yes, it did. I can get up on rooftops and into positions I could never have gotten into since I became Spring-Heeled Jack. I haven't tried a stealth mission with them yet, but I expect it to be completely different since I am no longer limited to the old paths I had to follow.

[Rhymes]

[/quote]

I'll ask you a counter-question. When did any upgrades in Witcher 3 do that?

But in answer to that question. Yes, it did. I can get up on rooftops and into positions I could never have gotten into since I became Spring-Heeled Jack. I haven't tried a stealth mission with them yet, but I expect it to be completely different since I am no longer limited to the old paths I had to follow.

Never. That's not a strength of Witcher 3 either. Weak character leveling systems is kind of a pattern in CDPR games. And I have bad news for you: those upgrades don't open up any actual mission paths that you couldn't get to some other way either. I guarantee you that you could get to those rooftops (or at least the ones that actually have some new pathway accessible from them) without that upgrade, since there's basically always something that can be mantled to get up onto the roof.

[karajorma]

Never. That's not a strength of Witcher 3 either. Weak character leveling systems is kind of a pattern in CDPR games.

Which is kind of my point. E argued This is really bad for a game as big as this. It speaks to development ressources being spent on systems for the sake of having systems, with no real game design or mission balancing going on. So was it really bad in the Witcher or was it not much of an issue there?

And I have bad news for you: those upgrades don't open up any actual mission paths that you couldn't get to some other way either. I guarantee you that you could get to those rooftops (or at least the ones that actually have some new pathway accessible from them) without that upgrade, since there's basically always something that can be mantled to get up onto the roof.

Yes, you could have spent points in strength or tech upgrades to open doors which would allow you in there. At this point I'm kind of lost as you what you're trying to argue. Are you trying to say that more of the game should require a replay to ensure you have a certain augment at a certain point in the game? That more of the game should be inaccessible unless you have certain upgrades?

[Rhymes]

 I would argue that the weak character systems and the stuff for its own sake was really bad in The Witcher as well.

The difference is that in a game like, say, DXHR, having a different build will open up and close off different parts of a level depending on the abilities you have available. In Cyberpunk, you're going to get to the same exact place and just pushing a different button. Forcing a door open with your bare hands because you're a high-strength character does not produce a different outcome than hacking it open with a netrunner build--it's literally just "do I have to hold the button or press it to get through this door?" Jumping up and going through the window will put you in the same place.

Like, take the police station in Detroit in Human Revolution as an example. If you're not good at social and you blow the conversation with Haas, you can't walk around the police station--you have to sneak in and the whole thing goes hostile if you get detected, which effectively closes off large parts of the level. If you're not skilled in hacking there's entire parts of the building that are locked down or otherwise guarded that you can't get into without setting off the alarm--especially the armory. And because of how DXHR is balanced, if you trigger that alarm, you probably die, and even if you don't there's (limited) narrative consequences for shooting up the police station. 

See the difference? There's essentially a bunch of completely different versions of the same level that change entirely depending on how you choose to solve the problem. Cyberpunk doesn't do that. There's multiple ways to get past any individual obstacle, but the level path is the same no matter how you choose to do it.

[The E]

Which is kind of my point. E argued This is really bad for a game as big as this. It speaks to development ressources being spent on systems for the sake of having systems, with no real game design or mission balancing going on. So was it really bad in the Witcher or was it not much of an issue there?

You'll note that I haven't mentioned the Witcher series at all so far. Reason being that, for one reason or another, I repeatedly tried to play Witcher 2 and 3 and ultimately abandoned them as those games didn't grip me enough to make me continue playing them. I played them enough to know that these are generally good games that are just not for me; I don't have an in-depth critique of them the same way that I do for Cyberpunk because I lack personal experience with them.

Also, this criticism of mine you quote there applies to pretty much every system in this game. The leveling system is super granular, and thus shares the drawbacks of granular systems like this in that investing a single point in any given attribute doesn't make a tangible difference to the way your character plays. There's a huge difference between a Level 1 character and a Level 20 one, but the difference between Level 20 and 21 is tiny. Similarly, the perk system, while more consequential than the attribute system, also has you making tiny steps forward.
In an RPG, leveling systems are part of the game's reward loop: Doing activities awards currency that you can invest in things that make your character better at the things you find fun; This provides goals for players that drive motivation to play. I think this loop doesn't work well, here.
The crafting system faces issues too: To get to a point where the things you craft outperform the things you find, you need to invest a lot of ressources into this particular area of the game, and doing so means you are foregoing upgrades that have a more tangible and immediate effect. This, at least, is something that I feel could have been fixed relatively easily by removing random loot from the game; this would allow crafted items to be immediately superior to world drops, and would make the acquisition of crafting blueprints a much more chaseable goal.

It's curious to me that many of the criticisms I have for CP parallel my criticisms of Mass Effect 1: ME1's levelling system was also far too granular to be impactful; its gear also system encouraged rapid swapping of loadouts whenever you found a better gun or piece of armor, and as a result everything felt very samey. Bioware was able to fix these things in ME2; I hope CDPR can fix these things here too.

Yes, you could have spent points in strength or tech upgrades to open doors which would allow you in there. At this point I'm kind of lost as you what you're trying to argue. Are you trying to say that more of the game should require a replay to ensure you have a certain augment at a certain point in the game? That more of the game should be inaccessible unless you have certain upgrades?

Yes! That would be a good change that would make the experience of playing, replaying and discussing this game much better, I feel. It's a hallmark of the immersive sim genre, and Cyberpunk would have benefitted immensely if CDPR had dipped their toes into that pool rather than staying in the CRPG one.

[Luis Dias]

The point were someone who hasn't even played the game thinks they can comment on it, is the point where I decide there's little worth listening to in their comment.

That's perfectly reasonable, and henceforth I will do better, I will improve myself and will have zero thoughts in my head about anything that I haven't experienced in a 100% way. #BeBetter.

The memes I've made or spread have also been mocking the technical bugs cause they are ****ing funny! The game might be buggy as hell but I'm absolutely loving it. I'm not spreading positive stuff cause it would be massively full of spoilers. And this game should be experienced, not talked about. There are plenty of missions with as much if not more depth than stuff in Witcher 3

I'm happy that you like it, I really am, the annoyance that is playing out in my head is more due to the cognitive dissonance between the entire internet hype about this once-in-a-decade game and its actual reality, not that it is a terrible game or whatever. At least people are having fun and appreciating the game. Having said that, I will also remind the board that the last time I've seen all this fun and laughter at a game's bugs was in Mass Effect Andromeda. Wasn't that fun!

[CP5670]

I want to play this but was going to replace my old 1080ti with a new video card first, which is basically impossible to find in the US right now. Looks like I'm not missing much with all the bugs. I prefer to play games 6-12 months after release anyway, once they have fixed all the issues. If it's even half as good as Deus Ex HR or MD, I will love it, but I'm not expecting to be blown away. To be honest, AAA games with massive budgets in today's era are never going to try a lot of new innovations. Even the original Deus Ex is not a game that any big company would make today.

[karajorma]

I've been way too busy playing Cyberpunk to respond before. But in answer to the complaints from others, yes, changing your spec absolutely opens up completely different gameplay options. One of my friends told me about his build and it sounds like the way he's playing the game has been completely different from mine.

[The E]

I've been way too busy playing Cyberpunk to respond before. But in answer to the complaints from others, yes, changing your spec absolutely opens up completely different gameplay options. One of my friends told me about his build and it sounds like the way he's playing the game has been completely different from mine.

Been digging deeper into sidegigs and side missions, and yeah, those are clearly designed around the idea of different access paths being tied to different character builds. It's there that the systems do start working better and the benefits of getting certain upgrades and skill/attribute levels are communicated more clearly; I will still maintain however that that's not consistently the case for the main quest and some of the major sidequests.

[Colonol Dekker]

I've had a fair few random sudden exits to desktop.   It's quite disconcerting.

[Aesaar]

I'm so glad I completely avoided nearly all the news about this game starting in 2017.  It allows me to enjoy what a good game it is without the overhype baggage.  It's a cyberpunk Witcher 3, which is what I was expecting.  A lot of the same problems, a lot of the same strengths.  Considering I love Witcher 3, I'm extremely ok with this.

And I haven't had a single crash and only minor graphical bugs in 13 hours of playing.  Making this game for 2013 consoles was a mistake.

Also I wish this game was a Shadowrun game.  Shadowrun best cyberpunk setting.

[RangerKarl]

Good game or bad, I think we can all agree that this game could use less streamer tie ins. Goddamn, I like Alanah and all but it's just glaring to see a face you recognize in a video game.

Also I wanna see a space expansion, it's really sounding like the proto-Expanse up there and I want in on that action.

[Nyctaeus]

Played through 70% of the story, currently level-32 corpo with precision rifle, sniper rifle and mantis blades.

Short review: It's a solid game but it's unfortunately not cyber Witcher 3. It's a crude mix of GTA and Witcher 3 with unique vibe. It's not awesome. It's not even very good. It's just good game. I expected much, much more from CDPR.

[CP5670]

I've played through about half the game now and like it a lot. I paid zero attention to the hype around it, but like this type of game in general and am a big fan of Deus Ex and Fallout. It's more of a linear, story-driven FPS set in an open world with lots of linear side quests, as opposed to an RPG where your choices and character build matter, but does that quite well. The story is great for what it is, not particularly deep like Deus Ex but has memorable characters and decent writing.

I started playing it as a stealth game but the stealth mechanics and AI are clunky, and quickhacking enemies becomes boring quickly (and the hacking minigame is lame). It plays better as a straight FPS with a sniper-oriented build. The world is amazingly detailed and straight out of Blade Runner, and is fun to just explore. The cars and driving are fun for a while but feel tacked on, and is not what the game is really about. I just fast travel to quests. You keep getting slightly better guns and armor all the time and there is rarely any reason to invest in one gun for long. There are still many little bugs and glitches with floating or teleporting NPCs, and I did get one or two crashes, but none of it is major.