Saturday Morning Gaming: Cyberpunk Finally Gets DLC
Hey, remember Cyberpunk 2077? We reviewed it here. A year later, we looked back on a year of Cyberpunk. Here’s the money quote from the latter:
CD Projekt has delivered exactly *ONE* piece of DLC. And it’s a skin.
Well, on Tuesday, two big things happened. The first is that the Edgerunnner DLC *FINALLY* dropped. Read all about it here but if you just want the high notes?
It gives you three new gigs, six new guns, five new melee weapons, and (FINALLY) the ability to have the perfect outfit *AND* the best armor. You no longer need to choose between the parachute pants that look good and the armored ones that make your butt look big. Put on the armored ones and choose one of your *SIX* preset outfits. Look good on the street! Look good in the club! Look good while shooting up a bar!
There is also a list of quality of life improvements as long as your arm.
I just checked and you *STILL* can’t make a fat guy, though. Pity.
Let’s not dwell on that. Back to the good news: they also dropped the trailer for the *BIG* DLC. The one that will introduce a new district and a brand new storyline.
Huh. Okay. I’m in.
So the game might finally be in a playable state now. When the DLC comes out, I’ll play it again. See how it holds up.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is *MY* V. Screenshot taken by the author.)
I’ve been playing Cyberpunk recently, actually, and it’s very playable and very fun. The world itself is still amazing to just run or drive through and look at – it’s really disappointing the developers screwed up the launch so bad. It should have had another year or more in the oven. I’d recommend playing at this point, either on your existing character or rolling a new one to see how it feels.
It’s disappointing there will only be a single DLC, but if it’s at the scale of Blood and Wine for the Witcher, I’ll be happy.
I’ve also been playing Mass Effect 1 since I got the legendary edition for free a couple of months ago. I’ve previously played the 2nd and 3rd game long ago, and now I”m making my way through the first. Even with the updates, it’s a bit clunky, but the story is interesting.
I’ve also been playing “Old World” which is like a cross between the Civilization series and Crusader Kings and made by one of Civ’s former developers. I think it’s quite good, but it is still rough around the edges and can use some more balancing. It sits at a nice point in terms of complexity between Civilization and most Paradox titles, but it takes some getting used to for those who are used to traditional empire-building games because it does quite a few things differently. The soundtrack is great too.Report
When I booted up the game to check out if you can change body types (beyond, you know… *THAT*), I found it singing a siren’s call to me.
I’ll be back to play it.
Just not yet.Report
I’ve really been caught up with Honkai in recent months, and given I don’t have a PC, I’ve been on mobile. Mobile gaming has come a really long way. This was recorded on my tablet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PSHw2Lf3WM
It’s kind of crazy how good it looks.Report
Holy crap. That’s unbelievable.
I figured that mobile gaming would work best with Angry Birds level stuff still. Turn-based, vector stuff that doesn’t rely on good controls.
That’s friggin amazing.Report
Note that I’m running that on a fairly high end tablet, so people won’t get those results on an. average smart phone, but still. I think it comes down to the East Asian games market. Gaming PCs just aren’t as common there, but the market for mobile games is huge — like very huge. Thus it shouldn’t surprise us that East Asian companies are pushing the hardware to the limit.
That said, it’s still pretty impressive that I can run Honkai at 60 fps on a tablet. Genshin runs at 120 fps on newer ipads. It’s kind of a new age.
I wonder if we’ll see western devs jumping on this. So far they’ve seen to largely ignore the mobile market, at least for flagship games.Report
I idly wondered “do they make tablet game controllers?” and the answer is “OF COURSE THEY FREAKIN DO” and so that pretty much means that any given tablet out there is now capable of running pretty much any given game. If a high-end tablet is, effectively, a gaming machine from 2016 or 2017, you can be playing Dark Souls III on those things now.Report
I’ve been replaying Dues Ex Mankind Divided and Human Revolution. I’ll be getting a new gaming pc soon and the first game I’ll play is the upgraded Witcher 3 that’s coming out EOY. Maybe after that I’ll try cyberpunk again.Report
I’m still mad about the Human Revolution boss fights.Report
Yeah, I feel you.Report
Interesting to compare this to “No Man’s Sky”, another project that was panned at launch for missing several highly-hyped features but is kind of coming back due to continued support from the studio.Report
Well, this continued support came out of the dang blue.
They received a great deal of criticism in the past for coming out with a timeline of updates that contained zero dates and maintaining a *LOT* of radio silence.
I’m pleased that this came out but I seem to recall No Man’s Sky having a lot more communication about what was going on.Report
I will probably get around to checking out Cyberpunk, but at this point I’ll probably wait until it’s “Game of the Year” edition, or whatever.
A lot of my game time lately has been spent on Xenoblade Chronicles 3. I knew nothing whatsoever about this series, but I kept seeing good reviews about it, so I decided to jump in blind. The game tends to be a little heavy on cut scenes at times, which I’m not a fan of, but I like the actual gameplay. It has quite a few systems that I have not seen before.
You have a static party of 6 with a 7th slot that can be filled with recruitable heroes you meet along the way. Character classes can be swapped freely, and when you reach rank 10 in a class, you can choose it’s skills as a secondary set. You get new classes from the recruitable heroes.
Combat is real time with auto attacks and skills with cooldowns. There is a Chain Attack gauge that fills up over time. It’s not typically relevant during short fights against typical enemies, but it usually has enough time to fill up against Unique foes and the Boss Fights. When it fills up, time freezes, and you get to select characters and attacks and do powerful chain attacks.
Another feature is that each character is paired with another, and they gain the ability to Interlink, combining into what looks like an Eva Unit which has stronger attacks, but it can only be used for a short time. Each character has it’s own skill tree for the Interlink form, choosing which skills are available and enabling the form to stay active longer.
It’s a long game. I think I have over 10 hours in it, and it’s still introducing new features. I’m not sure when I will be exposed to all of the systems. That being said, the do a good job of giving you time to get used to a feature before you learn the next one, so it doesn’t get overwhelming. Having everything dumped at once would probably be overwhelming.
The world itself is a sci-fi/fantasy hybrid. The people (who must age rapidly, it’s not clear yet) only live 10 years. If they don’t die in battle, they have a homecoming where they dematerialize and their soul goes somewhere. As you play, it become clear that there is more to the story, but the secrets have not yet been revealed.
Overall, so far, I feel the game has lived up to its hype. Give the length, I worry I might not finish it. Sometimes, if a game goes to long, I will suddenly lose interest, but so far this one has kept me hooked.Report
Definitely get the GOTYE when it comes out. I had an absolute blast playing the game and while I had *SOME* disappointments, the majority of them were expectations-based rather than flaws with the game itself (the big one: you’re playing an established person like Nico in GTA4 or Arthur in Red Dead Redemption 2… or, of course, like Geralt in The Witcher and, as such, you aren’t playing a blank slate character like in Fallout 3 or New Vegas and your choices (and you do have them!) are constrained by your existing backstory/personality).
As the story revealed itself to me, my jaw dropped because, holy cow, it’s an *AWESOME* cyberpunk story. But I was lucky enough to go into it (mostly) blind.
So avoid spoilers, get the GOTYE, and be surprised that they managed to screw up the launch *THAT* badly.Report
Yeah Xenoblade 3 has done really well. I haven’t played it, but I’ve seen quite a bit of it on stream. It’s a solid game with a really well thought out story.
The cutscene thing is pretty much a staple of JRPGs, so you get used to it if you play a lot of them.Report
I have played a good amount of them. I still don’t like that aspect. I deal with it, but I find it annoying when I spend several minutes with no interaction with a game, especially when I first load up a game and I have to wait through a mini-movie before I can actually play the game.
In this case (and others) the gameplay is good enough to deal with it.Report
It depends on quality. Like for Honkai, which I’m currently playing, the major cut scenes are treated as an event by the fanbase. Of course, they have massive production value and great music. Also, the game is basically a visual novel with combat sections interspersed, so cut scenes don’t break the flow.
It’s the sort of thing where I will literally go back and rewatch the cutscenes on you tube, like frequently. Partly it’s just that the music is so good, but also it brings back the emotions I felt when I first play played, and dammit that game is a tearjerker.
That said, I actually dislike cutscenes in more traditional games. My pet peeve is when I see some loot I’d like to grab, and the way toward the loot I suddenly trigger a cut scene. The problem is, my ADHD brain is still focused on the loot, and thus I don’t get immersed in the scene. (Genshin is the worst offender, as their cut scenes are in-engine, so I can literally see the loot in the background.Grrrrr!)
The Tales series have this neat feature where much of the intra-party dialog is put in these little visual novel sequences, but they don’t auto-trigger. Instead, an icon pops up and you can watch them if you want or just ignore them and keep playing. The only drawback is you can miss them, which kinda sucks because they are very cool — on the other hand they sometimes run longer than they need to, which is an entirely different issue, when you know there is cool story stuff you want to engage with, but it just takes too long to get to it.
The point is, I guess it depends on the game and the quality of the cut scenes. If it’s just an in-engine dialog section which takes control of your movement and camera, it can be pretty annoying, especially when it auto triggers just from walking around. On the other hand, if it’s integrated into the flow of the action, like if it triggers when you open a door or beat a boss or something, then it’s less grating.Report