Saturday Morning Gaming: Cyberpunk 2077 First Impressions

Jaybird

Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com

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44 Responses

  1. Brandon Berg says:

    is this a licensed IP explicitly based on the old games, or just thematically similar?Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Brandon Berg says:

      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

  2. Damon says:

    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

  3. Andy says:

    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

  4. Andy says:

    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

  5. Fish says:

    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

  6. Saul Degraw says:

    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

    • Jaybird in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      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

  7. Jaybird says:

    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

  8. Jaybird says:

    Car Issue: Resolved. I changed camera and, holy cow, driving has gone from being a chore to being a delight.Report

  9. Jaybird says:

    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

  10. Saul Degraw says:

    The game is superhard and I can’t tell what quests i am supposed to do whenReport

    • Jaybird in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      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

      • Jaybird in reply to Jaybird says:

        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

    • Jaybird in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      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

      • Andy in reply to Jaybird says:

        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

        • Jaybird in reply to Andy says:

          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

  11. Jaybird says:

    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

    • Brandon Berg in reply to Jaybird says:

      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

      • Jaybird in reply to Brandon Berg says:

        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

  12. Andy says:

    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

    • Jaybird in reply to Andy says:

      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

      • Andy in reply to Jaybird says:

        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

      • DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird says:

        “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

        • Jaybird in reply to DensityDuck says:

          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

  13. Jaybird says:

    (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

  14. DensityDuck says:

    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

    • Jaybird in reply to DensityDuck says:

      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

  15. DensityDuck says:

    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

    • Jaybird in reply to DensityDuck says:

      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

      • DensityDuck in reply to Jaybird says:

        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

  16. DensityDuck says:

    Tycho’s review of the game. He is…not interested in Dad Rock.Report

  17. Jaybird says:

    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