Saturday Morning Gaming: Cyberpunk 2077 First Impressions
This will contain spoilers for Cyberpunk 2077’s First Act.
Okay. I’ve played the game. This first impressions thing will talk about everything from character creation to the end of the First Act (basically, the point at which the game opens up). This will include some spoilers. Now, none of the spoilers involve the overarching mission of the game (I’m not sure that that has even been revealed to me yet), but if you don’t want to know *ANYTHING* about the game, I’ll just say that you should press the back button after the 5th paragraph. (I’d also wonder why you opened this post in the first place.)
The game has a *LOT* of overhead. I have heard multiple stories of people having the game crash on them, having the game run slowly, having the game run with an awful framerate, and so on. The computer system that I built this year runs the game and runs it well. I have only crashed once (so far). So, it’s a game that a Dream Box will be able to run well. But if you’re idly asking, “I wonder if my system will play the game?”, it might not. You have to be well into “I’m pretty sure that my system will play the game” to be sure that your system will run the game.
The character creation has a lot of limitations. I was not able to make a character that looked like me. Not just the “I wanted to make a chubby guy!” issue, but also there are only but so many eyes, so many noses, so many forehead ridges… they had my hairstyle, and they had my eyebrows, and they had my beard. So that’s something, I guess. I understand that there are a number of complaints from women that the makeup options are horrid as well. (I suppose I could argue that this isn’t really *THAT* big of a deal because, for the most part, you don’t look at your character. There’s a couple of places where you have the ability to look in a mirror but, for the overwhelming part of the game, you do not see your character. You know, in your heart, what your character looks like and that will have to be enough. But I still wanted one that looks like me.) When I go back through my mental rolodex of the games that I’ve played that allow character creation, I’m thinking that the two absolute best ones were for Wrestling games. You know, create a wrestler. This let you create a person between 5’5″ and 6’10” and you could then pick how hefty you wanted them to be. Did you want someone built like Lex Lugar? Did you want someone built like King Kong Bundy? Somewhere in between? You can’t. All you can get is a bunch of body parts that will clip out of your outfit.
Also, I have a gripe about the keyboard and mouse controls. You dodge by double tapping your WASD key in the direction you want to dodge. So, if you want to dodge left, for example, you just quickly tap “a” twice. What this means in practice is that you will be sneaking around, and you will get where you want to go, you’ll stop, then you’ll press in the same direction again and WHAMMO YOU WILL STAND UP AND DODGE IN THAT DIRECTION. If you’re moving forward? You’ll bump whatever you were sneaking toward right in the butt. “DANG IT!”, you’ll yell as you reload. (I imagine the first mod I download will be named something to the effect of “You Cannot Dodge While You Are Sneaking”.)
And let’s talk about glitches. We’ve all seen the glitch where, if you pick the convex genitalia and choose the largest size, it’ll clip outside of your pants. If you insist on seeing an example, please take a moment to make sure that there are no children in the room, that you are not on your work’s LAN, and that you are not on a Zoom call and look at this tweet here (warning: Not Safe For Work). The game is chock full of graphical issues like that one. People clipping into vending machines, people clipping into cars, people popping up as you walk through the city… but if you wanted an example of the funniest one, there it is. (We can call it the “nickel pitcher night at Gilley’s” glitch.) I also understand that people who choose to have large breasts have similar clipping issues with those. There are *TONS* of glitches. *TONS*. It will be a year before there is a mod bundle that fixes them all. At least.
Okay. Those are the things I can talk about without getting into spoilers. After this part, there’s going to be spoilers.
The game has three life paths for you to take: Corporate, Nomad, and Street Kid. My assumption way back in September was that it’d be somewhat similar to how Dragon Age (the first one) did it. That is: the first chapter of the game will be devoted to you being a Corp, or a Nomad, or a Street Kid. You’ll be part of a job and the job will go sideways. And then the game proper will begin. Now, my assumption was that the three chapters would be very, very different. The Street Kid and the Nomad and the Corp would all be on different sides of a deal that goes wrong. All three of them would have a different perspective on the deal itself. But the deal went bad and now we’re starting chapter 2. That doesn’t seem to be quite it.
I played the Corp. I spent about 30 minutes as a Corp. I was gaining my composure in the executive washroom when my boss told me to come to his suite down the hall. I took some relaxants, steeled myself, then went to visit my boss. Along the way, I had a conversation with an old associate whose recent deal went well (the jerk), stopped by my shared office where I was asked to make a judgment call and I made it, then went into my meeting with my boss.
He asked me to make another judgment call. I made it. He told me to go do a thing that was against the interests of the VP whose job he was gunning for. I said, sure, I’d do the thing. I went to the favorite hangout of my most trusted Solo associate (Jackie) to enlist his help and, while there, I had the VP’s henchmen come over to me, tell me that I was fired, and they left. DANG IT. (There was some cool stuff involved with getting fired. Like, all of my corporate cyberimplants were turned off. I lost my HUD. I lost my stock ticker. I lost my news feed. I lost my biofeedback. I lost my hormone stabilizers. I was stuck using my body.)
That took about a half hour. After I got fired, Jackie told me “hey, now you’re free of the corporation!” and he and I spent the next few months doing deals on the street in a sweet cutscene before we got to the part of the game where it mattered whether my hands were on the controller or not.
I was not playing a Corporate. I was playing an Ex-Corporate. They didn’t give me his last day on the job. They gave me his last half hour on the job.
So… I don’t know about the Nomad or Street Kid, but I spent a half hour as a Corp before I became a guy who was wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and a ball cap as I walked through Night City. I don’t *KNOW* but I *ASSUME* that the Nomad and Street Kid starts are similar. A half hour with your role. A meeting with your best bud Jackie. Some bad news during that meeting. Jackie telling you “hey, you still got me!” and then a sweet cutscene to the same spot as my Corp found himself in.
And then you’ve got the exact same game as my Corp played.
Well, I suppose that that isn’t *ENTIRELY* fair. I had a number of conversations that had options that were Corporate options. Like, I had a meeting with a Corporate Lady who recently had a deal go bad. In my negotiation with her, it gave me the option to choose Assertive Statement, Apologetic Statement, or Special Corporate Option. I took the Special Corporate Option. I’m sure that if the Nomad or Street Kid was talking to her, they’d only have the first two statements to give because the Special Corporate Option had insight that I had as a (former) Corp. I doubt that the Nomad/Street Kid would have anything close to that. (I could be wrong, of course. I guess I’ll find out in the coming months. I’ll let y’all know.)
So, what choosing a lifepath means, as far as I can surmise, is this: You get a different 30 minute opening in the first moments of the game. You get different conversation options that aren’t available to the other two paths. That’s it.
I found this personally disappointing. I was hoping for something like Dragon Age where the opening took a good long while and changed your experience of a large chunk of the subsequent missions in the game. (I mean, re-wandering through the Dwarven homelands as a former Casteless was completely different from re-wandering through as a former noble… and playing as a Human Noble had different things be important when you were speaking with Arl Howe than if you were, for example, a Mage). I imagine that the Nomad or Street Kid have similar conversation options (though likely in different conversations)… but otherwise, more or less, the same emotional experience of interacting with the city as the former Corp.
After going through the (optional!) combat tutorial, we have our first mission where we can shoot guns and then we have our first meeting with a ripperdoc who does us a solid and *THEN* Act 1 starts in earnest. We can run around the city, drive our car and scrape it against curbs or concrete barriers, have mini-missions that we can do for the benefit of the cops or local fixers, or visit various stores and get new clothes and new weapons. (Or just sell the valuable junk that we pick up that, inexplicably, is not nailed down.)
They do a good job of establishing that Jackie is your best bud. You like him, he likes you. He’s got different goals than you do but that’s okay. He’s your best bud.
And now you hear about a Big Score. You start investigating and doing missions and exploring the absolutely amazing city…
Well, it’s around here that I realized that I was not playing Fallout 3 or New Vegas or Vampire: Bloodlines. I was playing a game much more like The Witcher.
Now, in Fallout 3 or New Vegas or Vampire: Bloodlines, you were playing *YOUR* character. Choices were offered to you and they were meaningful choices. Each of these games had several missions where you had to get a MacGuffin. There were different ways to get the MacGuffin. Some were good, some were evil. Some left the world a better place. Some filled your pockets. But, in each, there were multiple ways to get the MacGuffin and you always felt like you were turning down real options as you pursued your own.
The Witcher, by comparison, had you playing Geralt. You were always playing Geralt. Geralt is an established character who had a personality before you got there. Your choices were whether you were going to play Geralt in a cranky mood, a generous mood, and whether he was feeling particularly randy that day. Did he want to get in a fight? Or did he want to try to avoid getting in a fight before he got in the fight? You’re going to get in the fight no matter what, it’s just whether you’re itching to get into it with these guys or whether you’re doing it more in sadness than in anger. (If you’ve never played any of the Witcher games, think Grand Theft Auto V or Red Dead Redemption 2… you’re playing a particular character.)
Same here with my Corp. It feels like I am playing The Corp rather than *MY* Corp. A Geralt variant. A Michael Townley variant. An Arthur Morgan variant. A guy with a backstory written in stone before you got there. You just get to pick what kind of mood he’s in today.
THIS IS NOT A CRITICISM. I’m just noticing that I was disappointed because I wanted to play *MY* Corp instead of *THE* Corp.
The good news is that The Corp is an interesting character to play. Sure, I’m limited in my choices with him… but, let’s face it, if he wasn’t in a very tight set of parameters, he wouldn’t have made it to his level of the Corporation before I took him over. He’d have been stuck outside. Maybe as a Street Kid. Maybe as a Nomad.
All in all: I’ll say that it’s an awesome game that has grabbed me despite its limitations and disappointments. The city is *AWESOME*. Hacking is interesting and frustrating. Sneaking is a lot of fun (excepting the dodging thing) if you’re not into combat (and, if you prefer combat, there’s a lot of awesome options to pick from). I can already see myself wanting to replay as someone with an emphasis in Body rather than Intelligence/Cool on my next playthrough.
If you’re someone who wants to play a *FINISHED* game that isn’t as buggy as, say, Skyrim when it got released? I’d suggest you wait at least a year. Use the time to consider getting one of those new video cards the kidz are talking about. Maybe a PS5 if you’d rather spend that money on a complete system instead of merely a part for one.
If you’re willing to put up with tons and tons of bugs and you can look past that you’re playing the game’s character rather than your own, I’d suggest you get this game right now. If you’re not (and who can blame you?) then you should know that this is a game that will give you a much better experience once the modders have had a year to come up with body parts that don’t stick out of your outfit, face options that allow you to make a character that looks just like you. But if you’re willing to put up with bugs, this game *FEELS* like it’s in the ballpark of the game we were hoping for.
At least… Act 1 does.
And Act 2? Oh, my goodness. If you remember playing anything from the old Cyberpunk days, you’re going to *LOVE* Act 2.
So… what are you playing?
is this a licensed IP explicitly based on the old games, or just thematically similar?Report
This is a licensed IP. It takes the tabletop game as a starting point. For example, when you create a character, you distribute points in Body, Reflexes, Technical Ability, Intelligence, and Cool.
(When you created a character in the original Cyberpunk back in the 80s, you distributed points in Intelligence, Reflexes, Cool, Technical Ability, Luck, Attractiveness, Movement Allowance, and Empathy.)
You will recognize the world from the old Cyberpunk 2020 book. They had to make a handful of changes and a handful of allowances for the differences between the theater of the mind and the theater of the monitor, but it’s as Cyberpunk 2020 as Neverwinter Nights was D&D.Report
Well, I started playing this game Friday. I’m still in the prologue I guess. I’ve not gotten tot he point where I get the chip. I’m wandering the world taking out criminals for cash, loot, and clothes. I totally missed the eye color and stuff in character creation….certainly the huge wang.
I’m running a “60-755” better than minimum spec box and I’ve had 1 glitch in a covo with Dex (I think..the fat black guy in the limo) I’m also running the performance on “medium” setting. The dodge stuff is kinda wonky and I constantly use the tab button–cause that what you used in Witcher 3 IIRC–but what really annoys me is that driving cars is not smooth…the steering is really hard with the keyboard.
Is this an immersive compelling game? Meh, not so much. It is good so far and I’m enjoying playing it.Report
I edited two words out of your comment that would have counted as a spoiler for me.
I mean, I avoided spoilers to the point where getting the chip BLINDSIDED me.Report
Good write-up, a few thoughts,
I mentioned before that I was having terrible input lag. It turns out it was actually a terrible framerate. The game looked fine with a low framerate oddly so I didn’t think it was framerate, but the combat was impossible. I ended up having to change to the lowest settings and bumping the resolution down to about 720p. I’m running on a two-year-old budget gaming laptop (was about $800 new)- one that has a decent (for its time) dedicated GPU. This is the first game that’s really choked like this for me. But with the smaller laptop screen, the lower resolution is fine and now it runs pretty well. Related to that I was annoyed there’s no option to show FPS in the game, so you have to use a third-party solution.
As far as the life path, I chose Nomad because I wanted to be an outsider to night city and the nomad background seemed more like me than the other two options. Won’t spoil it for you (though if you’ve watched pre-release footage over the last year, you’ve seen a lot of it already) but the intro is definitely short and involves you getting into night city, after which you get the cutscene. The intro felt longer than 30 minutes but I didn’t time it and there were some mini-tutorials on driving (you start with a car), shooting, and car-passenger shooting.
Dialog options for Nomads were as you described for Corpo. I’m a bit further into the game than you and it seems they are significant enough to open up other paths to completing a quest on occasion.
I agree with you regarding the character-creator. But it doesn’t really bother me too much since I never see him. I tend to prefer driving on a motorcycle to a car (easier to get through traffic and handles better IMO), so I just see his backside with no real detail.
I have not experienced many bugs and have had zero crashes. All the bugs were weird graphics glitches that were distracting and annoying, but not game-breaking. The new 1.04 patch seems to have fixed some of that and I’ve got slightly better framerates from it.
I haven’t tested this, but it seems like the Act 1 sequence is largely set in stone and it doesn’t appear that your dialog and other choices have a long-term effect – at least not yet – nor can they significantly alter the path. Which is fine I guess since so much of it functions as a tutorial in a sense.
Now that I’m out in the open world I’m really enjoying myself. The city is amazing even with the annoying vehicle AI and civilians apparating in front of you. After watching some non-spoilery tips videos I’m not burning through the main questline since a big difference between this and the Witcher, for example, is that “side jobs” have a major effect on the possible endings and are tied into the main story. The game doesn’t make that clear at all and I’m sure many have assumed they are like side-quests in other games. This is something I quite like since it rewards non-linear play.
Overall I’m really impressed with the game and am really enjoying it, although it is certainly far from perfect. I do feel really bad for console players though, and they are rightly angry that CDPR shipped the game on console in its current state and also purposely hid the problems from console players and reviewers. Part of that blame belongs to Xbox and PS4 though, for forcing CDPR to make the game available on the older consoles. Given how my relatively new laptop performs (my middling hardware blows away the original Xbox and PS4), I’m not sure how the game will ever perform well on the original consoles.Report
One thing about MacGuffins. Not too far (no spoilers here) into Act 2 there is a situation where you need to get information from someone. There are a lot of dialog options with the key person who has the information. The dialog options you get depend on a bunch of factors – information you found previously, what skills you have, your life-path, etc. I played through this sequence multiple times to see what (immediate) effects they would have. If you were thorough and spent time searching the location, you’d find key information to use as leverage. There were options where you could avoid violence but, for me at least, most paths led to violence, which turned out to be fine with me as this character had some great loot if you killed him. But after escaping the building following the fight, my Act 2 “companion” informed me that I’d burned a bridge and likely made some enemies.
And I loved that – having at least the potential for real choice and consequence. I don’t know what the effect of killing this guy will be, but I’m looking forward to finding out.
I’m sure there will soon be guides that explain the optimal sequence of events for these interactions, but it’s really nice not knowing.Report
Oooh, nice. I’m not there yet. I finished the mission that involved meeting Jackie’s mom and am now running around the world finding stuff.
I got a smart gun, for example, that had a conversation with me. I won a shooting contest. Now I’m off to steal some leather jackets for some ripperdocs.Report
I do not have good enough technical ability to steal leather jackets.Report
Maybe start with synthetic fabrics?Report
Pretty sure it’s synthetic leather. Doesn’t matter to the ripperdocs, though.
In any case, I’ll just do some other missions and go up a level or two. Hey, I know! I’ll go pick up my car!
Followed by…
“Why is everything an ordeal?”Report
Street nomad start is a little different. You’re having a conversation with a friend who’s in deep with a shark. You have a relationship with the shark, so you go talk to him and strike a deal where you do a job for the shark and all is forgiven. Some other guy tries to take the prize from you and you both get arrested. You manage to talk/bribe your way out of law enforcement’s clutches (off-camera) and you and the other guy become best buds. Long cut scene/montage of you and your buddy pulling jobs, getting high, having fun, getting into fights, etc. Then you get the controls back and are in a car waiting to do another job and you get access to the tutorials. And then your first job.
That’s as far as I’ve gotten. I’m too distracted by other things to really focus on the game but I hope to change that soon. I think the game has a lot of promise, though, and I love the visuals and the music.Report
I got it for the PS4 and played a bit last night as a Street Nomad (F). You start coming back to town after a two-year hiatus in Atlanta. Your first job is an attempt to swipe a car to pay off the debts of a barkeep you like. It fails but you meet up with Jackie. Then the game begins with tutorials after a montage of six-months.
There are lots of buttons to press and remember. I am still getting used to the first person look which was never my favorite and sometimes disorients me in a game. Modern games also seem to assume you have a very big screen TV which i do not because my old digital TV works fine. It crashed once but it took me a long time to do the tutorial because my small screen cut off some of the instructions.Report
Okay, the Street Nomad backstory does a better job with your relationship with Jackie than the Corp one does. (Apparently, I’ve been friends with Jackie for a decade? I lived under his roof? I suppose that does explain why he’s my main man, I guess. But our lives diverged pretty hard.)
Are the graphics bugging you at all?Report
Welp, this got dark.
I am working with the AI in charge of the Taxi company to find his missing cabs. (He’s lost seven of them across the city.)
No spoilers but… jeez.Report
Car Issue: Resolved. I changed camera and, holy cow, driving has gone from being a chore to being a delight.Report
Details please….Report
Just changing the camera from in the cab to 15 feet behind the car has changed how it feels to drive the car. It’s easy now.Report
It’s “easier”. Now i’m using a keyboard, and it’s still a bit hard to control the car smoothly..but it’s better.Report
I’ve never been able to play a driving game in “cockpit view” mode. (I do wonder how I’d do with a 3D headset display.)Report
Okay. I’ve played a little bit of Act 2 (I’ve done a mess of sidequests.)
This game is a Sandbox. There are approximately one bajillion sidequests. It’s Red Dead Redemption 2077.
If you were hoping for a sneaker, there are a bunch of sneaker areas. If you’re hoping for a driving game, it’s got that in spades. If you want combat, oh goodness, do we have combat!
And you will spend more time running around finding errant AI taxicabs than doing the main quest.
But if you were hoping for the Sega version of Cyberpunk, this isn’t that. It’s closer to the SNES one. Yes, even with the hacking.Report
The game is superhard and I can’t tell what quests i am supposed to do whenReport
Okay. This probably deserves an essay in itself.
The game will do stuff like have a character tell you “You’ve got an urgent event that you have to take care of… OR ELSE YOU WILL DIE!”
This is for dramatic effect. You won’t die. Well, not yet. The main thing is that you need to know the stakes. You are now free to run around and do sidequests until the cows come home. Collect all of the cards. Join a boxing tournament. Go to a shooting contest. Help an AI get all of his runaway taxis back.
It’s okay.
When you are done doing the side quests, look at the main quests again. Move forward on those when you feel like it.
Now one thing I want to point out. Go to your journal page. You see each quest? Underneath it it’ll say something like “Danger: Very Low” (this is for the people who want to sell you cars, mostly) or “Danger: Moderate” or “Danger: Very High”.
Avoid Danger: Very High if you can. Go do some Danger: Moderates. For some of those, I never even had to pull my gun. Just had to navigate a conversation. Or sneak around, in and out. Once you get the hang of things, start looking at the “Danger: Very High” missions and pick the ones that sound the most fun.
(And don’t feel like you can’t nudge the difficulty down. It’s a game. Not a contest.)Report
ALSO! There is a handgun out there called “Skippy”. This is a Smart Gun. One of the first missions you do in Act 2 is to get an upgrade for your hand that will allow you to use smart guns. For free.
Get this upgrade. Get a smart gun. You no longer have to get stuff in the cross hairs but merely close enough for jazz.
Skippy has saved my butt multiple times. Get Skippy.Report
Skippy is super fun and hilarious. And also a bit OP with some handgun perksReport
To this point: I just had a conversation with This Guy who told me to meet him at the Street Market.
He finished the conversation with “I am on my way there. Do not make me wait.”
This is bullcrap. I’m in the middle of doing sidequests for my 4th favorite fixer. This Guy can enjoy a skewer or two and a can of Red Bull. I’ll get there when I get there.Report
I understand the need for that from a gameplay perspective, but it still an annoying incongruence in most games (not just this one).
How is the game going for you?
For me I’m still enjoying myself. I think the quests, particularly the developed side-quests for major characters (Judy, Panam, River etc.) are very well done. Panam’s was a lot of fun, the ones for Judy and River were emotionally engaging. In between those I’ve been doing Witcher 3 style clearing the map of “?” to earn money and experience. Pretty soon I’ll need to get back to the main questline.
Oh, and there is a series of side-quests that involve a trans character. I’m not quite done with them yet, but so far it’s interesting. The portrayal is not sexualized at all and the character’s motivations are familiar themes in this universe – loss, and vengeance.Report
I’m having a blast. I absolutely love the game and the worst thing I can say about it (so far, anyway) is that too many of the sidequests are generic. (Reading the flavor text helps, of course… but I’d have preferred another two months of studio session time for the voice actors to read this stuff while I’m walking instead of stopping, reading text, starting up again.)
The main quests are amazing. Absolutely. I love how there are three main questlines that intertwine and interact and I alternate between wanting to beat the game RIGHT NOW and wanting to savor it slowly over the upcoming Christmas break.Report
Okay, something I keep noticing:
When I play the sidequests, I’m playing Grand Theft Auto 2077. The game I wasn’t particularly daydreaming about.
When I play the main quests, I’m playing the game I was hoping to play. I just did the quest where you’re trying to find a former associate, the one who got you intel for the heist that went sideways at the tail end of Act 1.
One of the places you look for your former associate is a CyberBrothel where you have a meeting with a very nice person (you’ve your pick of one of two people) who will give you what you need based on the algorithm.
No spoilers: The opening line used by the very nice person grabbed me by the throat. Holy crap.
I went upstairs to tell Maribou about the scene she was nodding and using her phone and “That’s Nice, Dear”ing until I told her the line. She put her phone down and looked at me and said “whoa”.
Yeah. Whoa.
Half of this game is, if not disappointing to me personally, a game that I could see many others being disappointed with.
The other half? Exceeds my wildest expectations.Report
As a rule, I don’t buy AAA games until all their expansions are out and the whole package is available for $50 or so.
It’s a system that’s served me well lo these many years, and I’m sticking to it. But damn, that’s going to be bugging me for a long time.Report
If you are used to mature games that have had their worst bugs stomped flat, you will find this game unpleasant.
I was having a conversation with my partner (who was smoking a cigarette) and, as he moved his hands around in the conversation, he left little cigarette artifacts in the air in front of him. At the end, he looked like he had a force field that caught and held cigarettes that other people threw at him.
I’m able to be amused for a half second and then look past it and ignore the fact that I’m talking to a cigarette porcupine for an important in-game conversation. I absolutely understand that there are people who can’t do that and I shouldn’t expect them to.
But the conversation was a good one. Well-written. Well voice-acted.Report
I’m sure I spent too much of this past weekend playing (my wife was very tolerant, but she knew what was coming), but so far I’ve still found it to be a thoroughly enjoyable game but with some pretty big rough edges.
I completed a series of romance quests and they were very much felt like romances in the Witcher 3 – success or failure depends on doing the person’s side quests and answering dialog choices the “correct” way. For me playing a male character romancing a female character it was pretty straightforward but I did have to reload a couple of times. Now that the romance is complete I don’t have much opportunity to interact with her – presumably, she will come in later along in the main story similar to the Witcher 3 and help out in some way. Right now it’s an occasional text message.
The combat has become a lot less punishing now that I have some levels, perks, and gear. I think the game is poorly tuned in this regard, at least at normal difficulty. There are some weapons that are quite overpowered even without having perks that support them – with perks you can be pretty much unstoppable unless you get too careless. The beginning of the game was quite different and much more difficult in terms of combat. Only the high-level enemies present any sort of challenge now. But some of the “cyberpsycho” mini moss fights are interesting and challenging with better AI and mechanics you have to actually work around or think about.
After about 30 hours of play (yes, I know), I am just now starting to use fast-travel in some instances, though I still prefer to drive. It’s still fun to walk and explore and find new things. One example is that I found Dexter Deshawn at the last location we saw him at the end of act 1 – he’s still there (hope that’s not too spoilerly).
I’m currently on a very dark and unsettling series of quests involving a child serial killer. They are disturbing enough I’m not actually sure I want to finish them since I get the sense that it won’t end well given there seem to be few happy endings in this world. Violence against children is something that triggers me more than anything and it bothers me a lot even in fiction.
But overall to enjoy the game I think one has to look past a lot of the current technical defects and compromises which I’d sum up thusly:
– Poor character creator
– Various graphics glitches, issues
– A few gameplay issues that require quitting and reloading. For me, some keyboard commands like sprint and crouch stop working and I have to quit the game to fix them.
– The poor AI for NPC’s generally
– The police/warrant system where if you accidentally or intentionally kill a civilian, police start spawn right next to you and don’t stop until you run away or are dead. Another annoyance is that there are police occasionally in various areas that act gang members in terms of mechanics – if you get too close to them they will warn you to get away and if you don’t they’ll just start shooting.
– The player power curve and balance
– A big oversight, IMO is the lack of a tutorial on the interface and game mechanics. As an RPG vet, I was able to figure them all out eventually, but the systems are not simple. New players are likely to struggle to understand how to make the character they envision. Also, it appears that attribute points are permanent – it’s possible to reset perks with a huge amount of money but not attribute points.Report
The game probably needed another year in the oven, sad to say. We’re beta testers.
The game is one that I would (and did!) pay full price to beta test and I don’t regret spending that money for a second.
But everybody who is pissed off about the game? Yeah, they got a point.Report
It definitely could have used more time in the oven, even for the PC version, but I’m not unhappy with the state of the game currently. Would I like more features AND fewer bugs? Sure. But 7 years is already a long time to develop a game. I suspect they would have delayed further but ran into contractual and legal issues if they didn’t ship this calendar year. Not that I have much sympathy for CDPR.
It was pretty clear last year that they had to make development compromises when they said it would be first-person only. Of course, their stated reason was not true – that the first-person perspective was more immersive – the reality is that a third-person game with thousands of gear and character combinations would be a huge hog of development resources. It’s telling that even looking at yourself in the mirror is basically a cutscene.
But I don’t really miss third-person mode. It was good and necessary in the witcher but is not nearly as critical for a gun-play based game IMO.
They’ve now apologized and come out with a plan for a major patch in January and February. That’s a long time to wait for console players. Yet another reason I’m glad to be part of the PCMR. But I think this game is only going to get better over time. The anger and unmet expectations will eventually adjust. Frankly, I think expectations were too high to begin with.Report
“But everybody who is pissed off about the game? Yeah, they got a point.”
Which is an interesting contrast to No Man’s Sky, which came out missing a number of heavily-hyped features, like multiplayer, or content beyond “here’s a completely-randomly-generated system, look at all the things in it”. And the response to criticism of it missing those features was “well if you GO BACK and LOOK at the ACTUAL ADVERTISING COPY it doesn’t SAY it’ll have that stuff, making a game is HARD you MIDWIT PHILISTINE, you don’t DESERVE a refund”…Report
There were a handful of people defending NMS like that, but there were also the folks pointing out that you could explore billions of planets: The Blue Planet, The Pink Planet, The Green Planet, and, if you were lucky, The Red Planet.
“Where are the sandworms?”
“What sandworms?”
“The ones in the announce trailer.”
“Making a game is hard.”
I have no doubt that there were a *LOT* of people out there who psyched themselves up and out about Cyberpunk. One of my co-workers is a redditor and he told me about a particularly weird meltdown over motorcycle physics. The guy was a motorcycle aficionado and was the type who could explain how taking a turn works differently in a car versus in a motorcycle at high speeds for 2000 words. Like, for fun.
I’m sure you’ve met variants of this guy.
Anyway, he talked about the importance of getting these physics *RIGHT*. Like, it was important that motorcycle fans play this game and feel like they’re riding a motorcycle when they’re riding a motorcycle.
He wasn’t angling for a job consulting with them. It’s just that he was hoping for Ride 4 level physics in a Cyberpunk game and he’d be upset if the game didn’t have them.
I heard about motorcycles in Cyberpunk and I thought “why are they talking about vehicles so much? How much driving am I actually going to be doing?”
As it turns out, they were talking about vehicles so much because you’re going to be doing a lot of driving. Huh. I should have seen that coming.
So the question then comes: Was the guy who wanted Ride 4 physics in Cyberpunk being somewhere in the ballpark of reasonable?
It’s not a motorcycle sim, after all. They should have different levels of tilt, I guess, based on how fast you’re going and how hard you’re turning… but more than that?
That doesn’t strike me as particularly reasonable.
“What about the hacking mechanics?”
NOW LOOK HERE YOU LITTLEReport
(I imagine the first mod I download will be named something to the effect of “You Cannot Dodge While You Are Sneaking”.)
It is, in fact, called “Enhanced Controls“.Report
Two thoughts, based on reading people’s comments about the game:
1) I think they very clearly developed this for a PC and ported to consoles, and also very clearly ported it to a PS5, and were told only late in the process that they’d have to be on PS4/XBone, and I wonder if that latter was the reason for the sudden “oh wait we’re delayed” because they had to flog it through testing and console-specific optimizations.
2) in the end this seems more like “Witcher Only It’s The Future” than its own thing, and that wasn’t really what people were expecting from a game that grabbed an existing IP.Report
If you go back and read Neuromancer (you should! It’s still good!), you’ll see that there are some seriously big scenes that take place in the intertubes. The scene with the Dixie Flatline ROM, for example, that takes place in the ‘net is the one I’m currently thinking of.
If the game did something like that, it’d be like the scenes with Delamain. You’re talking to a screen that says it’s doing this-or-that on the ‘net. The character on the screen is a ROM rather than a regular old NPC. It’s flavor text that makes the conversation with Delamain different than a conversation with your fixer.
But, gameplay-wise, you’re picking one of two or three conversation paths to wander down. It makes no difference whether the game says you’re talking to a fixer or a ROM. Because, in real life, they’re both ROMs.Report
Heh. Found this one in the archives. Not entirely relevant to CP2077 but I thought it worth bringing back.
When Duke Nukem 3D came out…
…we were still trading the first levels of games on floppy disks.
…it was typical for an entire game to be distributed on floppy disks.
…many people honestly believed that the future of computer gaming was picking between video clips “choose your own adventure”-style.
…the idea of a video game with a multimillion-dollar budget was ludicrous fantasy.
…”copy protection” consisted of looking up codes in the hardcopy game manual.
…multiplayer was a frivolous distraction that was thrown in as an afterthought (heck, I think that the original Duke3D let you give out copies of the “multiplayer version” for free!)
…consoles would always trade away flexibility and raw capability in favor of stability and performance (and, of course, you’d never need to worry about ‘patching’ a console game; in fact, this was seen as a mark in favor of consoles!)Report
Neuromancer (for the Commodore 64 and Apple II computer) came out in 1988.
Shadowrun for the SNES came out in 1993.
Shadowrun for the Sega came out in 1994.
Duke Nukem 3D came out in 1996.
I don’t know whether the PS5 and X Box X or whatever the hell it’s called will be the last consoles but it’s finally time to start asking questions like “will this be the last console generation? Or will the next one be the last console generation?”Report
I say that “consoles” were basically over once people allowed that you could download patches for console games. At that point there’s basically no difference between a console and a pre-built PC.Report
Tycho’s review of the game. He is…not interested in Dad Rock.Report
Welp, that’s that, I guess.
It is now officially a failure that I happen to be charmed by rather than a flawed masterpiece that isn’t for everybody.Report
For the next 60 hours or so, (it’s 7:30PM, Mountain Time), GOG.com is giving away Prison Architect.
If you have ever been tempted to play a game that could well have been called “Sim Prison”, hey. It’s free.Report