I don’t claim to know much about this but I guess it pulled a No Man’s Sky and patched in everything that needed to be fixed or added. And it’s half off on steam right now so I’m considering pulling the trigger. Should I?
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For half off definitely give it a try. It’s long been patched and when i played it early this year my only problems were two times the game randomly closed.
Gun play is extremely satisfying, sound design included.
Driving is… better than in watch_dogs, worse than in GTA. But traveling through the world is a bit disappointing. Rich map with little life.
Side missions are fun and fill up the time nicely. The missions are creative and not necessarily “go from point A to point B while killing waves of enemies”, but those are there as well.
Adding a post here to encourage people who haven’t played it yet to wait until Phantom Liberty drops. It looks like it’s going to massively improve a lot of the base game. That’s what I am going to do.
I’ve been very curious about the state of Cyberpunk since it’s launch. I didn’t get super on the hype train as I’ve learned over the years you never know what a game is like until it’s out and you can play it for yourself.
It’s been interesting to observe all the post-launch changes from a distance in No Man’s Sky fashion. I found it pretty hilarious to read CDPR went from multiplayer and multiple DLCs to one DLC 3 years later, but it does seem as if that DLC will include exhaustive gameplay system changes. That workrate is still hilariously low.
I guess when you rush out a big budget project and pressure your staff massively to get it out on a deadline, they get burned out to they point want nothing to do with it once it’s out the door. That’s definitely the sense I get. It’s a shame considering how massively hyped it was in the lead-up only for it to be generally seen as a rushed disappointment, but I guess it’s a lesson for CDPR to learn for the future alongside other AAA developers.
Anyway, Cyberpunk fans - how would you describe the state of the game at present? Outside of the performance issues, what is it in Cyberpunk’s marketing that was missing from the released game? What are it’s pros and cons? Have the gazillion patches “fixed” the missing expected features yet? Does it seem as if the DLC features are wrapping up the final missing features?
I played it when it came out after I found it in an underground chest on a desert island and got probably halfway through. I didn’t really mind the performance issues (they were BAD, don’t get me wrong) but I hated how the game was broken to its core. It wanted to be both an open ended RPG and a narrative action adventure game, resulting in something I like to describe using this metaphor: if the game was talking to you, it would sound like “YOU CAN BE WHOEVER YOU WANT, CHOOSE YOUR PAST AND WRITE YOUR FUTURE! But actually no, you’re a predetermined character with an established personality and traits. BUT YOU CAN CHOOSE HOW YOU INTERACT WITH THE WORLD AND ITS CHARACTERS AND WATCH THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR ACTIONS UNFOLD! But not really, choices slightly change the way you get from point A to point B, except maybe in the sidequests”.
Regarding the open ended “write your own story” RPG aspect of it, It’s INFURIATING choosing to have a certain attitude towards a character when the game gives you the option just to see the protagonist act in a completely different (and totally unambiguous) way in the next line of dialogue, but the game creates this kind of contradictions even by itself. I remember that in the beginning of the game you see V freaking out when they realises that Johnny is in their head, insulting him and screaming and asking him to leave their head. Then you start playing, go in the street and not even 5 minutes later you can trigger a cutscene from a side quest where you see the two of them getting along like two good old friends. That shouldn’t happen, and it’s just completely broken narrative design that spoils me the evolution of the relationship between V and Johnny. They could have avoided it by simply unlocking the side quest after a few main missions.
On the Action-RPG side of things, everything’s great on paper but with deeply flawed execution. I wanted to be an hacker, and after not even half of the game I could kill EVERY enemy in a building before even entering it. The same goes for the shooting, where you have a classic resistances and weaknesses system (e.g. if I shoot fire bullets enemy A will get x.5 damage and enemy B will get x2 damage) that is literally useless. After a while I stopped paying attention to it and it didn’t make a difference, not a noticeable one at least (and it would have been useless anyway since I could kill people just by staring at them through walls).
Overall, performance aside, it felt like an alpha version of a game, where you have some systems that kinda interact with each other and that not only need to be smoothed but often times reworked from the ground up. It is (or at least was at the time) a game without internal coherence from a semiotic point of view: it kinda knows what it wants to tell you but not well enough to not completely fail in how it tells you.
Of course they patched it since, and it looks like this dlc could address some of these problems, but I think that the criticism focused on the wrong things.
The city is beautiful though, probably the only time I felt like walking in a real city, and the game still kept me hooked for 20-ish hours so it probably isn’t completely terrible. It’s also worth mentioning that I was, using accurate and scientific terminology, hyped as fuck for this game as if it was the second coming of Christ and this surely impacted my judgement of it.
Also almost all Characters are huge assholes that constantly make the worst possible decisions possible, while the game tries to sell them as cool and badass.
Yeah, sometimes it feels as if what the developers (well, the writers to be fair) want to say is “look how cool this world is”. Or at the very least as if they wrote the game without subtext or thematic coherence: again, as if they produced a game that’s still in its preproduction stage
I think some of it comes from their earlier games. The Witcher games also have some really edgy dialogue, it is one of the reasons I never finished the second game. But they are also adapting an old ttrpg and the tone and themes of that game is shining throug. Which would not be a problem if Cyberpunk 2020 (and most cyberpunk media today) was not stuck in the 80s as much and someone actually bothered to update the themes for today.
Which would not be a problem if Cyberpunk 2020 (and most cyberpunk media today) was not stuck in the 80s
This is something I almost never see discussed, but it’s probably what made me tired of cyberpunk stuff. It became a parody and a part of what it was supposed to criticize
Your reply was kind of exactly the type of thorough breakdown I was looking for! Thank you for all that detailed information. It certainly sounds like theres some ludonarrative dissonance going on given the open world design vs linear storh.
Maybe I’ll wait for a few months after the already confirmed GOTY edition, see how it plays after that, then add the inevitable mods improving the core gameplay systems if I want to. Fingers crossed they do a better job with the sequel.
Always has been 👨🚀🔫👨🚀
(On PC).
it ran like absolute shit on PS4 and Xbox One, but on current gen and PC the game has always been great. The backlash was overblown and was mostly from people who didn’t play it.
Was there bugs? Yes. People clipped into walls and cars flipped suddenly, but no worse than your average Bethesda game. I didn’t have a single game breaking bug my entire playthrough. Just some funny ones.
While some elements were deeply overblown, a lot of it was pretty bad and deserved. Don’t downplay what happened, the game was delayed and then delayed again. Only the final release date had been for after current gen hardware and they obfuscated the awful performance. Early eviews of the game had also required stock footage. And that’s just from the fiasco around launch.
Plus a lot of features were missing from the game that we expected when we pick up Cyberpunk 2077. Vehicle shooting battles (other than the start of the game), mantis blades to climb walls, and so forth.
I think it depends on your opinion of what was “wrong” with Cyberpunk to begin with. If your issue was the bugs, it’s a lot more stable now. If your issue was that the story was unengaging and player actions lacked weight and consequence, adding more of the same isn’t going to do much good.
Much like your No Man’s Sky example - if you thought the core gameplay loop was lacking before, you probably haven’t changed your mind no matter how many little goodies the devs have added since launch.
I don’t think its a No Man’s Sky situation. Cyberpunk 2077 suffered the most from high expectations and lies told while advertising the game. The game is decent, I personally enjoyed it a lot when I bought it for 20€ a year after release. But they did not go back and add things they promised but didn’t deliver on.
The performance on release was also atrocious, but that was fixed a while ago.
Now that you mention it. There was a big refund happening on PlayStation 4, I think? Because the game was basically unplayable on console.
I wonder how these things happen sometimes. Someone must have noticed, right? How did they even do any sort of testing on these versions?
I think they developed for PS5 / Xbox Series but promised backwards compatibility with PS4 / Xbox One.
The backwards compatibility just didn’t work. The hardware couldn’t handle it as written and they scrambled to strip it down.
But they did not go back and add things they promised but didn’t deliver on.
Not yet, anyway. There are a lot of improvements coming with the DLC, supposedly. The police overhaul on its own has the potential to add tons of replayability. Getting a wanted level & running from the cops was like 90% of my GTA IV time.
I am excited for the DLC and hope that it will be good. Its best to not buy promises tho. If the things CD Project Red promised are what is needed to make someone want to buy the game, they should wait until these things materialize.
I bought it later and haven’t had any issues and have been enjoying the story. And in September, the DLC, which is more like a complete overhaul, is coming.
I played long after release after a big patch. I knew the launch was a disaster but I hadn’t followed the game closely so I didn’t have huge expectations. I absolutely loved that game when I finally played.
I’m one of those game tourists who hardly ever finishes anything. I don’t have enough time to game so I’ll just drop a game if I’m not really into. Cyberpunk was one of the few games I’ve finished in recent years.
The gameplay was really satisfying, I enjoyed the story, and I loved the characters. There are a few you get to spend a lot of time with and I found myself actually caring about them. For me, it was reminiscent of how I felt playing Mass Effect. It’s one of my all time favorites for sure.
It’s definitely worth a play if it sounds like something you’d be interested in.
I’m one of those game tourists who hardly ever finishes anything. I don’t have enough time to game so I’ll just drop a game if I’m not really into. Cyberpunk was one of the few games I’ve finished in recent years.
I guess I never really thought of it that way, but I’m in the same boat. I even have trouble finishing games I really enjoy, like Outer Worlds. Cruised straight through Cyberpunk though. The quickhack + sniper gameplay was endlessly satisfying for me.
If you like story driven RPGs with insanely op hacking, and beautiful grafics you should buy it. The game is still very buggy, but nowhere near as it was when it came out. To make sure that you won’t lose your progress save frequently and don’t do the diving sidequest with Judy.
For me it was good since the beginning, but it had its issues. Now it is a much better experience, that is true too. There is also a pretty good modding scene, so many parts that are still not ok can be modded out. Personally, I will probably play it again when the DLC releases in September.
Does it matter where one purchases the game in terms of modding? Is it easier to run mods on Steam version vs GoG version for instance?
I havent had any issues with mods on my GoG version. I’m using https://www.nexusmods.com/ / Vortex application to install mods.
Cyberpunk’s honestly a really good game (although a lot of it does come down to if you click with Keanu’s character or not), but since you’ve waited for so long already then you should wait till the expansion comes out with all the new overhauled features before diving in.
It’s an incredible game imho! I’ve got around 250 hours in it by now.
Snatch the base game when you see it on sale (I think there’s one now) and get the DLC when it arrives! Not sure if you should play it right away or wait for the DLC though.
Then again, I’ve already played it a few times and going to start a new playthrough when the DLC drops!
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I played the game in version 1.0, on release, on a barely capable 1070 graphics card, and It’s still to this day my favorite RPG ever made. The gameplay was janky and it was full of bug, but the world building, story telling, characters and quest design was on a league of its own, nothing even comes close. Buy the game, and play it only when you’re ready to immerse yourself for hours at a time. It’s a fantastic game.
I played it fairly early after release and thought it was good even then, though there were some minor performance issues that seemed to get ironed out somewhat quickly. Worth a play.
