T w e n t y S i d e d
So Cyberpunk 2077 is here. Sort of. I mean, CD Projekt Red released it, but it feels like we’re still waiting for the rest of the game to arrive. Even in the occasional moments when the game isn’t exhibiting obvious bugs, the experience is full of these odd moments where it feels like there’s something missing.
I want to talk about these odd moments and about my impressions of the game so far. If you’re worried about spoilers, then be aware that I’m going to mention the names of major characters and discuss some quests in the prologue. These spoilers are limited to the early parts of the game, but if you need to play through completely blind then you might want to skip this.
Anyway. I’m on my fourth-ish playthrough. Sorta.
What I’ve Done
Game #1: Female V. (Nomad) I played through the prologue and got a little ways into the main story. But I was nagged by doubts about some of the choices I made and really curious about the various roads not taken. Also, my build was a bit at odds with how I wanted to play the game and there’s no respecActually, I’ve heard there is, but I didn’t find it. In any case, I wouldn’t have been able to afford it in this playthrough.. So I started over. This is pretty common for me in complex games. I usually abort my first playthrough and start over once I get a feel for the mechanics.
Game #2: Female V again. (Street Kid) I went through quickly and mostly stuck to the main plot, although I did spend a few hours with Judy and Panam without reaching the conclusion of their stories. I went for the first ending available to me, which is where you basically give yourself to Arasaka and end up living as a lab rat in space. It’s pretty obviously the “worst” ending. I mean, I gather all of the endings are a little dark / bittersweet because that’s how things go in this genre. These stories don’t generally end with sunshine and rainbows. But it was clear I could have found a better resolution to the conflict if I’d put in some more effort and gained a few more allies. In any case, it was a great ride and I really loved Goro, Panam, and (especially) Jackie.
Game #3: Male V. (Nomad) On this trip I really took my time and did tons of side content. Unlike Mass Effect, I don’t really have a preference between male and female V. They’re both good. I went for the ending where you team up with the Aldecaldos, and I did the connected romance. The game creates a handy pre-ending save, so after that ending I jumped back and did the ending where you let Johnny Silverhand take control, which is confusingly the most sedate of the endings. In 2024 Johnny was a full-tilt terrorist psychopath, but he’s incredibly calm, mature, and circumspect after the events of the game. I get the sense that this is less about getting the “best” ending, and more about just seeing your choices play out for good or ill.
Game #4: Female V. (Corpo) The corpo character gets the least interesting story in terms of characters and drama, but you do get a really cool ride over the city in a flying car. Kinda reminded me of the intro to Prey 2017. In the previous games I just focused on being tanky. This time I tried a stealth build and then realized I hated it. This game doesn’t give you a way to return to stealth after being spotted, which means once you’re spotted you can either go guns blazing or reload. The load times in this game aren’t outrageous, but they’re not short enough to support trial-and-error stealth.
After all of this, I have a sneaking suspicion that this game doesn’t reward min-maxing the way other games do. Maybe it’s better to grab the low-hanging fruit from every skill tree rather than investing heavily in any one tree? I’m going to experiment a bit and see what I find. We’ll see.
I’m Not Complaining.
During these various playthroughs, I’ve noticed a few odd design choices where it seems like the developers did a lot of work for very little benefit, or where systems feel rudimentary and incomplete. I can’t help but think that these moments are the result of cut content.
I want to stress that these gripes should not be taken as demands. Sometimes you get reactions from fans that go like this:
In the E3 preview three years ago you showed the protagonist with a red hat and chewing gum, yet there are no red hats in the game and you can’t chew gum. YOU LIED TO US! YOUR GAME IS A FRAUD! YOU OWE US RED HATS AND GUM!”
I believe that games are better if companies can show parts of them to us while they’re in development. The developer can see what gets people excited, what worries them, and what makes them curious. It would be a bad idea to let the audience design the entire game for youThe audience doesn’t care about your budget and will happily demand the moon if you let them., but it’s a really useful source of information and can help you spend your limited development resources more wisely. But part of this deal is that the audience needs to be okay with the idea that things will changeAlthough you still need to make sure you don’t over-promise, as No Man’s Sky illustrates..
Back in the early days of Left 4 Dead, Valve was fairly free in talking about their future plans. They talked about new maps, weapons, and game modes. These comments were off-the-cuff remarks from designers who enjoy thinking out loud. But some people took these comments to be a solemn and binding public oath.
At some point Value realized that they had so much new content and so many disruptive gameplay changes that it made more sense to make a sequel rather than pushing the changes into the original Left 4 Dead. The original game had plenty of bonus content and updates by now, and it was time to make a clean break.
And then fans threw a fit and accused Valve of “lying”, because now they had to buy a sequel instead of getting more free updates.
As a result, Valve got very quiet for future projects. Now the creative people at Valve don’t interact with the public except through prepared, vetted, approved-by-legal statements. That sucks.
The point I’m getting at here is that I don’t feel we’ve been misled by CDPREr, not on any of the things in this article, anyway. The way they handled reviews and the last-gen build of the game was obviously very shady.. It’s fine. I don’t think the company OWES us this stuffThey DO owe us some serious bug fixes, though!. I’m just listing these things because this is an incredibly ambitious game and it’s interesting to think about how much MORE ambitious it was before project management problems drove them into months of delays and crunch.
Anyway, below is my list of cut features. This isn’t comprehensiveLook on YouTube if you want to see TOP X FEATURES CUT FROM CYBERPUNK 2077!. This is just what I personally noticed and found interesting.
Wall Scaling / Wall Running
Back in the pre-release demos, the developers showed us that the player would be able to wall-run and scale walls using arm-blade implants. At the time, I thought this was an incredibly risky feature and I’m not at all surprised to find out it was cut.
In a generic Ubisoft-style open-world game, this kind of stuff probably isn’t a big deal. But in a dialog-heavy story-driven RPG, crazy traversal mechanics can be a nightmare for level designers to deal with.
We need a little dialog exchange to happen when the player reaches the garage in a warehouse. The dialog is supposed to begin the moment they approach the objective vehicle. The player’s friend will make a fuss over how the vehicle looks, so the player will understand that this thing is their goal. Except now it’s possible for the player to hop or glide over the trigger if they happen to be using a fancy movement ability. We can’t count on them standing where we need them to stand, and we can’t count on them looking where we need them to look. We can put in a doorway and force them to walk through it, but now that means we need to somehow put a choke point doorway in the middle of a warehouse. One doorway like this isn’t a problem, but if we have a lot of dialog triggers then it will kill the flow of our level. The player will wonder why we gave them these cool powers to move vertically if they’re going to spend all their time in stupid narrow hallways.
Either that, or we just take the lazy way out and grab their camera for a cutscene every time we need to make sure they stand in the right place and look in the right direction. (Yuck.)
It’s not that you can’t make a dialog-heavy game where the player can get around using unconventional means. It’s just that it makes this already-complicated job that much more complicated.
Train / Subway
Here is another casualty from the pre-release demos. Early videos showed V riding a subway, which then emerged from a tunnel to offer us a spectacular view of the city.
Now, technically you don’t need a subway in this game. You’ve got vehicles for transport, and if you’re in a hurry the game is fairly generous with its fast-travel kiosks spread around the city. The train isn’t needed in a mechanical sense, but it does seem like something they intended to have. Someone went to a lot of trouble to build one for that E3 demo.
Shamus, how do you know they planned to have a train? Maybe the train ride was just for the demo?
In the shipped game, you can see the tracks overhead. Also, there’s a fully-working elevator that will take you up to a train platform. It looks like you could board from here, but when you try to enter the platform it just opens up the fast-travel screen. The only reason to build that elevator and train platform was if they planned to use it. Also, the elevator is a complex object in an already complex area of the city. If they never planned on having us ride the train, then they would not have added this pointless elevator in such a high-detail, high-traffic area. The elevator could have been a simple facade, or even omitted entirely. It’s not like the area would have looked strangely incomplete without it.
Police Chases
As the game exists now, the police “simulation” is an embarrassment. If you break the law, then the police teleport in directly behind you and proceed to start shooting. That makes them pretty dangerous, since you’re instantly being shot in the back by adversaries that far outlevel you. On the other hand, they’re completely incapable of chasing you. You just need to drive a block or two and all is forgotten.
I really appreciate the terrible police system, since it offsets another terrible problem. Sometimes the asset loading can’t keep up and I’ll drive into a low-poly areaLooks like this bug was fixed in a patch last Friday. I don’t run into this anymore.. Objects seem to be missing from the scene and the textures are mud. I’ll slow down in confusion. Then the game finally catches up. The stuff around me finally materializes, and some civilians will appear directly in front of my bumper. So they get run over. The police spawn in, but I just need to drive a couple of blocks to clear that up. If every asset-loading mishap resulted in a full-blown police chase, it would get old fast.
On the other hand, a proper police chase in response to actual player shenanigans would be a lot of fun.
This game does have vehicle chase sequences, but they’re all highly scripted affairs that are part of story missions. These sequences have you leaning out the car window picking off pursuers while one of your allies handles the driving. These sequences are fine by the standards of the genre. Grand Theft Auto does this sort of thing all the time. But the game is unable to create a chase organically.
I’m willing to bet that somewhere in the Cyberpunk 2077 codebase there’s a huge block of chase-sequence code that’s been disabled because it was too buggy to shipAnd considering the state of the rest of the game, that’s saying something!.
Sure, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they always planned to build this massive city at this incredible level of graphical fidelity and then program in a police simulation that’s less sophisticated than the one in the original 1997 version of Grand Theft Auto. It’s possible, but it doesn’t sound likely to me.
Which makes me wonder what the original design was, how far they got with it, and if it might make it into a future patch / DLC.
Braindances
In the world of Cyberpunk there’s this thing called a “Braindance”. The concept should be pretty familiar to fans of the cyberpunk genre. A Braindance is a recording of someone’s sensory data. You can put on a headset and play back their BD, and it will let you experience everything they did. You’ll see, hear, taste, smell, and feel it all. Obviously this gets used for sex, but there are lots of other uses. They can be used in crime scene investigations and espionage. Sometimes they’re used for other thrilling activities. There are also underground snuff BDs of people being murdered, because apparently some people want to experience that sort of thing. You get the idea.
The story makes a big deal about this. Early in the game there’s an extended tutorial where you try a couple of these. You learn to control the playback, rewind, examine the data for subtle environmental clues that the original user might not have noticed, and so on. The game explains the technology, the business, and has you meet multiple people involved in the creation of BDs. One of them gives you a headset so you can view a BD anywhere you go, instead of needing to come to their porno palace to view them. The whole sequence takes a solid 30 minutes. A third of a movie!
So it feels like BDs are going to be this really important mechanic, like Batman’s detective vision. But then it… isn’t. It crops up a couple of times in future side missions, but never again in the main plot. It’s not nearly as relevant to the story / gameplay as this setup would lead you to believe.
Also, you can walk into stores that sell BDs. But these are “incompatible” with your hardware so you can’t actually play them.
Why allow the player to buy them at all? Elsewhere in the game if you walk up to a shopkeeper that sells things you don’t need, the game will have them greet you without opening up a store interface. If there was a fishing pole salesman in the gameSpoiler: I haven’t found any., he would just ignore you. He wouldn’t open up a sales window where you could purchase a fishing pole you’re not able to use.
So why does the game sell you BDs you can’t view? My guess is that the original design intended for you to actually be able to view these things. Maybe this was a collection minigame, like the booty cards in the original Witcher, or maybe this was just for cheap thrills like picking up prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto V.
I don’t know, but the attention-grabbing introduction and the inexplicably useless BD chips makes me think there was a lot more to this system that was cut.
This next section has spoilers for the prologue. Feel free to skip it.
The Missing Backstabs
While setting up for your first big heist, you have two missions: One has you obtaining a special robot from a gang of nutters, and the other has you meeting with Evelyn Parker for the Braindance introduction I talked about above.
The mission with the gang is full of choices. You can pay for the bot with your own money and walk out without firing a shot. You can refuse to pay and kill the gang leader in negotiations, forcing you to fight through his crew. Before the job you can optionally meet with a corpo, and she’ll give you money you can use to pay for the bot. Or you can start shooting as soon as you get in the door, so instead of killing the boss in dialog you’ll have to face him in a mecha suit at the end. Along the way there’s a hidden option to liberate the previous gang leader they’ve locked in the closet. At the end you can end up spending $10k of your own money, or you can end up $10k richer by keeping the corpo’s money, or you can break even.
That’s a lot of outcomes for such a simple mission!
Meanwhile, the Braindance mission acts like you’re making big choices, but none of them matter. Evelyn Parker asks you to betray Dex, your fixerHe’s basically a talent scout / agent for mercs.. If you refuse, she keeps trying to convince you and you’re given a second chance to accept. Later when you meet with Dex, you’re given the option of revealing Evelyn’s treachery. It feels like you’ve got tons of choices, but literally none of this matters. It never comes up again and the events of the story render the entire exchange moot.
This, along with things that happen to Evelyn after the heist, make me think that these choices were supposed to lead to different outcomes.
During this questline, your best-buddy Jackie shows up with a fancy motorcycle. When you ask him how he got the money, he evades the question. Maybe this was foreshadowing for another backstab that never made the cut.
In-Game Appearance
Once you create your character, you’re done. Once the game has started, you can’t change your look at all. You can’t even get a haircut!
In a world where people can radically alter their appearance at will, it feels really strange to not offer any cosmetic alterations to the player. In other games this would be a “nice to have” feature, but in the world of Cyberpunk it feels really strange to not have it.
Above I said that I don’t think that CDPR owes us any of this stuff, although I do feel like this one ought to appear in a future DLC. Even if we just get the option to change out makeup, tattoos, and hairLetting the player change their gender and body type might break something, since some characters will only romance V if the player is a certain gender. If the player can change at will, then it’s possible to have begun a romantic plot and now be trapped without the recorded dialog to continue it., it would be really nice for all those players who realize they hate their chosen makeup. This is a long game, which means there are dozens of hours for you to experience second thoughts.
Also, I think this would be a boon for people looking to roleplay. I can imagine a Nomad V rolling into town with a beard and mullet, and as the events of the story unfold he goes native by getting a mohawk and tattoos, and covering himself in makeup.
Hookers
There are two prostitutes in the game. Both are in Japantown, on Jig-Jig street. One is male, the other is female. Either one will bang V regardless of player gender. You just pay some money, and you get a short sex scene with your chosen joytoy.
It’s pretty raunchy, but also totally appropriate for the setting. The only thing I wonder about is the limited choice. I could see a player saying, “I’m into guys, but not THIS guy!” It seems like it ought to be straightforward to have other joytoys available, even if it’s just the same animations and the same filthy hotel room.
The thing is, there are other pairs of prostitutes around the city. It’s the same deal: One male, one female. Both offer you a good time through spontaneous dialog when you walk by, but there’s no interface to respond or accept.
I really suspect these other prostitutes were supposed to be as… interactive as the first two, but got cut for time. In the grand scheme of things, this is probably for the best. I’m sure some players will be unhappy with the current selection of hookers, but this sort of content has got to be pretty far down the priority list.
Wrapping Up
I guess I’m part of the problem. Even with the bugs and missing features, this is still the best game I’ve played since Prey in 2017. If they came out with another half-baked RPG a year from now, I’d still be there to hand over my $60. This game fulfills my desire for cool conversations with interesting characters, and I haven’t been able to scratch that itch since the death of BioWarePart of my problem is that I am sick to DEATH of medieval fantasy, which is where most RPG come from. I just… I’m so tired of swords and kings and pastoral landscapes. I’d rather play a big dumb shooter than put on another set of stupid chainmail. That’s it. I’m burned out. Done.. So CDPR can release a half-baked game and still count on preorders from folks like me.
Still, the state of this game is crazy. They thought they were going to ship in March 2020. Then it slipped, and slipped, and slipped, all the way to December. And the team had to crunch. And yet despite that massive investment of additional man-hours, it’s obvious a huge amount of stuff was cut near the end.
How bad is their project management? I know it’s really hard to make accurate projections on large complex projects. I get that. But how can you be off by this much? They had nine extra months, more work from the staff, they cut a bunch of content, and they still couldn’t ship the game in an acceptable condition? Why was a March 2020 launch date EVER under consideration?
This needs to change. Not just for the fans, but for the overall health of the studio. I can understand that it’s hard to give firm dates when you’re making ambitious games at a massive scale, but this mess doesn’t do anyone any good. It’s bad for the consumers who feel ripped off, it’s bad for the critics who have to try and review an unstable gameIf there’s a Day 1 patch then you can’t really review the game the players are buying, you’re reviewing some earlier, buggier version., it’s bad for the employees who have to work long hours for months on end, it’s bad for the company name, and it’s bad for the industry as a whole because it further exacerbates the existing animosity between publishers and consumers.
Footnotes:
[1] Actually, I’ve heard there is, but I didn’t find it. In any case, I wouldn’t have been able to afford it in this playthrough.
[2] The audience doesn’t care about your budget and will happily demand the moon if you let them.
[3] Although you still need to make sure you don’t over-promise, as No Man’s Sky illustrates.
[4] Er, not on any of the things in this article, anyway. The way they handled reviews and the last-gen build of the game was obviously very shady.
[5] They DO owe us some serious bug fixes, though!
[6] Look on YouTube if you want to see TOP X FEATURES CUT FROM CYBERPUNK 2077!
[7] Looks like this bug was fixed in a patch last Friday. I don’t run into this anymore.
[8] And considering the state of the rest of the game, that’s saying something!
[9] Spoiler: I haven’t found any.
[10] He’s basically a talent scout / agent for mercs.
[11] Letting the player change their gender and body type might break something, since some characters will only romance V if the player is a certain gender. If the player can change at will, then it’s possible to have begun a romantic plot and now be trapped without the recorded dialog to continue it.
[12] Part of my problem is that I am sick to DEATH of medieval fantasy, which is where most RPG come from. I just… I’m so tired of swords and kings and pastoral landscapes. I’d rather play a big dumb shooter than put on another set of stupid chainmail. That’s it. I’m burned out. Done.
[13] If there’s a Day 1 patch then you can’t really review the game the players are buying, you’re reviewing some earlier, buggier version.
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
How to Forum
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
Skylines of the Future
Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this series go next, and what changes would I like to see?
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
DM of the Rings
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
You know you can upgrade your clothes? So you can keep the stuff that looks good. That only really clicked for me a couple of days ago. Essentially, once you feel like you have enough money, break down everything you loot and use it to upgrade the good stuff.
Upgrading not even being tied to the crafting skill feels like them realizing that people might want to stick with a set of clothes that look good throughout the game.
Upgrading is tied to a level requirement of some sort though. I’ve upgraded enough that it tells me “you’re not high enough to do it more.” I’m unclear whether the level is character level or crafting/engineering skill level.
It’s your level, so you can’t upgrade gear to the point you don’t meet the level requirement.
That’s why the special “levels with you” equipment like Skippy can’t be upgraded, they’re already at your level.
Did this actually work for you?
Upgrading costs rise exponentially, much faster than the strength of common gear you find. 4 upgrades later you can’t afford the next upgrade step of your 30 armor jacket to 32 armor, when literally everything that’s dropping has 100 armor.
well, you can do it, but it’s extremely expensive and grindy at times, especially if you like some really low level gear. You don’t really see yourself all that much unless you use a bike, so i just stopped bothering with it.
Plus i heard too much crafting can corrupt your save file
The way I heard it is that the game crashes if the save file reaches a certain size and crafting increases that size.
That feature falls flat as soon as you have an amazing item of epic or legendary quality, because then you need materials of the respective quality as well, which naturally are rather rare. I had the option to buy a really good legendary pistol, but it was nowhere near max level and I doubt I would ever get enouch epic and legendary materials to upgrade this one through the rest of the game.
Not really feasible beyond a few levels as the crafting requirements increase with every upgrade. The increase is exponential afaik. But I did not invest in the crafting tree so maybe if you spec for crafting it’s better.
It’s not
Thank you. This is one line of criticism I truly think is misguided. “I dressed my character for reasons other than aesthetics and now I look stupid!” Well, yeah.
While the game doesn’t hold your hand, upgrading your armor rating (through direct crafting upgrades, mods, and cyberware) is pretty trivial if you make the effort. And at that point you can actually focus on making yourself look good. Given the sheer volume of different clothing items in the game, there number of amazing looks you can put together is almost infinite.
Sorry reposting a comment I made on the last post:
I’m pretty sure my wife has bought me Cyberpunk 2077 for my standard (early, 1TB) PS4 for Christmas. I *could* return it, but that would upset her. It’ll run on a pretty old TV which isn’t even full HD (when I upgrade my TV I’ll get a PS5), and I don’t tend to play for hours at a time. Does it seem likely I’ll be able to play it at all, are patches ongoing?
Given the blanket return policy, is there a possibility that this version for PS4 will be abandoned and not patched in future? Or are we expecting patches to continue until the game is adequate?
I have not seen it run on PS4 in person, but all footage I’ve seen and stories I’ve heard, plus just the idea of running the game on 2013 hardware, would suggest that the game is basically unplayable. I wouldn’t want to play this even on a PS4 pro, and definitely not on a regular one.
Not sure how likely this is to get “patched” either, the game as-is just seems like it shouldn’t have been released at all for what is now considered last-gen consoles.
What’s with this narrative of “running on 2013 hardware”? My base PS4 run Horizon Zero Dawn, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Ghost of Tsushima really well, and those are all big, impressive looking games, two of which my better than average PC had trouble running. CP2077 runs like crap because it wasn’t optimised for consoles, not because the consoles are too weak.
well, usually console exclusives have the luck of having to run ONLY on that hardware, this way they can fine tune optimization to the max.
CP77 came out for pretty much every commercially available console you could think of and it’s from a pc first console maybe developer.
Optimizing for base ps4 is something you can only afford to do if your main target from the get go is that hardware
Speaking only for myself, I’m playing CP2077 on base PS4 right now and it’s really not that bad. Newest patches made some huge improvements. Sure, it doesn’t look as good as PC version, but it’s still visually impresive and it’s definitely playable. Framerate is now pretty stable. Still really buggy though.
Thanks Zgred. Yes I see patch 105 was released yesterday, and of course patches to games are released on PS4 regularly in general. And TLN seems to be a year or two out – I bought the PS4 in November 2015, and it was pretty current then? If it’s playable and stable I’ll give it a go, and it clearly won’t look as good as a 2018+ spec PC, but I can live with that, as noted the TV is pre-2015 after all, so will be forgiving.
I mean, I’d still wait for more fixing though. It’s pretty buggy right now. CDP promised to release new, substantial patches in january and february, might be a better time to try. There are a couple of missions that might not end – even if they should – and the game still likes to crash from time to time.
Hearsay from a friend suggests that the Xbox One X can handle Cyberpunk perfectly well.
Have no knowledge about the PS4/Pro situation.
I’ve had this problem for years now. A few weeks ago a friend was talking about the positives and negatives of Tolkien’s influence, and a big part of the negative was that everyone was just so enamored of his stuff that they did the same over and over and didn’t bother to push the fantasy genre in different directions.
I mean, people are desperate to hear news about the new Elder Scrolls game and I really couldn’t care less. At least Final Fantasy has bothered to mix things up with current/futuristic stuff, but every other fantasy franchise seems stuck in the same place. It’s a bit telling that they’ve announced a new Mass Effect game and I’m actually excited for it despite the fact that I have no faith in the studio.
So yeah, I’m part of the problem too. Here I am knowing that I’m likely going to be giving my money to EA after years of saying I wouldn’t do it again only because they are at least scratching this particular itch that few seem to care about.
Fucking hell. I still can’t believe Square Enix canceled the new Deus Ex for that shitty Avengers game.
Oh, yeah, there’s that too. If there’s one way to convince me not to buy that new Mass Effect is to make it a “live service” game. I have my limits.
But new cool fantasy games do come out, just bit in AAA space. I really enjoyed Greedfall, Masquerada and Remnant: From The Ashes, to name a few.
I’m having fun with the game, but the whole thing feels like it was reworked too many times, and there was ultimately too little focus and not enough time to fix it. The AI is broken in general. Gameplay isn’t properly balanced. Stealth is one element, but different combat styles are stupidly easy compared to others. The economy is ridiculous. It will take you quite a while to make enough money to buy cyberware and hacks (if you go the cybermage route). Meanwhile, you’ll have an endless list of vehicles you will never be able to afford. Crafting is pretty useless, and good luck finding enough materials to make any epic gear…at least until the late game, which I haven’t reached, and by which time, I doubt I’d want to craft anything.
I also expect you’re only scratching the surface of cut content. You can feel it all over the place in the game.
It would be if the driving wasn’t so shit, it’s actually a relief that there are no dynamic car chases since simply handling a car in this game is like going on the most intense rodeos.
Just change the models from cars to cyber-bulls – problem solved!
Motorbikes are the only way to travel in Night City. They handle totally differently to cars, and are actually usable.
Also because the rest of the traffic barely goes above 30 and you might want to actually get to places ever.
It’s an actual western RPG, complete with the horrific launch and ambitious attempts at innovating with the gameplay that fall short but the well-written characters, main story, and side quests ultimately make up for it. Cyberpunk 2077 is no New Vegas or even The Witcher 3 but it’s a step above The Outer Worlds. It’s not great but it’s a decent RPG (I refuse to use the word “solid” until they patch most of the bugs).
Funny you mentioned Prey (2017) here. I just watched this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxihcQJUCDc
To be fair, in the previous video, the guy admitted that CP’77 isn’t his game
Cyberpunk 2077 was hyped up to be like a combination of Red Dead Redemption 2’s open world, Deus Ex’s immersive sim design, and The Witcher 3’s story and writing.
From my playthroughs, it only properly fulfills the last aspect however the first two seem to be what the majority of people were hyped for because a lot of videos and posts complaining about the game commonly cite the artificiality of the open world and simulation elements but dismiss or even ignore the most of the quests.
Did you really find the writing on par with Witcher 3?
There are some great bits, but IMHO doesn’t come close, neither in depth or scale, and certainly not in consistency.
I would be interested to hear why you think so, especially as you make the same excuse as lot of the reviewers do.
As someone unrelated to who you asked – there are parts of the game that are very well written, or realized. Specifically the quests related to the ‘romanceable’ NPCs (without giving too much away).
The main quest, however, I think the game was too dragged down by the Nuking of Arasaka building event (circa 2020) in the lore. Basically everything revolves around it, and it feels like a lot of people had to make some very stupid choices just for it to happen that way. The world twists and turns to present this situation and place you in it.
In the end it’s more a story of two very different people coming to know each other and finding common ground (or not, depending on your roleplaying) – which is fine in itself, just not very cyberpunky.
Too much Johnny, too little… philosophy? Human condition and the nature of sentience, the value of life? Those things are in there, but they take a back seat to the buddy cop movie.
Of all the complaints leveled at CP2077, the ones that have the least traction with me are the criticisms that the game doesn’t “explore the themes” of Cyberpunk – what it means to be human, what separates man from machine, how do we deal with AIs, what does gender mean in the future, etc.
I don’t want to say people were setting their expectations too high – but maybe too high-brow? You can, of course, explore all these things in the cyberpunk genre. But Cyberpunk the game, based on the table-top series, which completely admitted to following the “rule of cool” and cleaving more towards style-over-substance than the opposite, doesn’t have this obligation that people have foisted on it. A little detour into these themes would be pleasant and welcome, but I personally never had the expectation that the game itself was going to be *about* Cyberpunk itself. It’s more of a setting and a flavor for cool things to happen than it is a manifesto. I personally expected a more personal story in a cyberpunk setting, which seems to be what I got. Unlike the Deus Ex series, I’m not anticipating or pining for more heady discussions about “What makes a good government” or “Can man replace God with his own construct” – and it should be noted that even those elements were tucked away in the folds of Deus Ex’s main plot, which was mostly unravelling a giant conspiracy.
Which isn’t to say CP2077’s story can’t be criticized, or that it might have been better off leaning into more chin-stroking territory. But personally speaking, I expected motorcycles, armblades, ICE, and cool sunglasses, and that’s what got served up. And I’m starting to chaff at some of the tut-tutting (from the press as well as more vocal fans) when a video game declines to ~*say something*~.
PS: Just giving my personal opinion. I don’t think anydody’s wrong to criticize the plot for being a bit more mundane than they expected. More curious as to where the expectation comes from. Marketing? Other people?
>> Part of my problem is that I am sick to DEATH of medieval fantasy, which is where most RPG come from. I just… I’m so tired of swords and kings and pastoral landscapes. I’d rather play a big dumb shooter than put on another set of stupid chainmail. That’s it. I’m burned out. Done.
Out of curiosity, what about a pure historical game? Like Kingdom Come Deliverance?
I am myself prefer more modern or sci-fi settings, so I do get where you’re coming from
Oooh, Shamus should really play Kingdom Come. I loved how it pretty much mixed an immersive sim with open world sandbox gameplay. One of my favourite games of the past decade.
KC:D is actually the reason for the “Sick of medieval times” comment. I saw a YouTube vid where someone said it was more systems-driven and open-ended like Morrowwind. I already owned the game. Just needed to install it.
Then once the download was finished I saw the image of a guy on a horse and I was like… ehhhhhh.
I’m sure I’ll come around eventually. In the meantime, I’m really glad we got a little Cyberpunk this year.
Well. For what its worth, it’s a historic game with no magic (and uses real events of that time as a backdrop). As for it being open ended… I guess it’s closer to TES games, but not that close. At least, systems are good
For me, it was like playing an acctually good eurojank rpg. What I mean is that there were many interesting ideas (like the condition of your clothes impacting how NPCs perceive you) that I expected to have marginal impact on the game or to not work altogether… but they actually DID work, and were important! The game felt incredibly fresh because of that. It has kind of a steep learning curve, as it’s combat is actually somewhat skill-based (especially archery) but both the game and the story expects you to be terrible at it in the beginning, so it felt earned when Henry became an unstoppable badass by the end. A bit like the original Deus Ex, although it always felt weird just how horrible JD Denton was at shooting – as he didn’t start as an illiterate peasant, but an elite secred agent .
Oh yeah, the game’s good and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Just not sure if I’d personally compare it to TES games.
My personal favorite part of the game is alchemy. The way its done, it’s like you’re doing it yourself.
Hey Shamus, considering your thoughts regarding the current state of Bioware, are you planning on getting the ME Remaster? What about ME4 (name pending)?
I may be extremely naive, but I’m excited for both. Despite its irritating flaws, I enjoyed the ME Trilogy and would love to play the first game with current tech improvements.
As for ME4, I am more cautious, but at the same time very intrigued.
I know it’s probably a logical fallacy, but a (very optimistic) part of my brain tells me that after the flops of ME3’s ending and Andromeda, they must have learned some lesson. They have to release a good game because they have no other choice. The future of the franchise depends on it. The whole “once you hit rock bottom, the only way is up”
Any particular reason you’re calling the announced sequel ME4 instead of ME5? Andromeda was the 4th game in the series, after all, even if it wasn’t numbered. Or is it because you’re assuming this will be more of a narrative follow-up to the Shepard trilogy, given the appearance of Liara in the announcement trailer, while Andromeda was more of a spin-off?
To your actual point, I’m reluctant to expect too much lesson-learning from Bioware at this point. Pretty much all the creative leads who ran things during those problems have left the studio now, and while they’ve brought a fair amount of talent back, none of them were decision-makers. The only real point of continuity is that EA is really running the show, and they have a LONG track record, as a company, of failing to learn from their fundamental mistakes.
I’m sure that they will pick a much more irritating and confusing name than either ME4 or ME5.
Mass Effect: the Milky Way Saga Continues Part 4 (by EA)
I’m sure some of you can come up with better, but there is no way they will miss the opportunity to screw this up.
ME the Rise of Shepard?
Mass Effect: Origins.
M4ss Effect V
Mass Effect 4/5: You Are (Not) a Slave
My personal guess: Mass Effect (2025)
Given how confusing that would be with a remastered original out there, this is almost certainly the leading candidate.
Good lord Misty’s hair looks awful in that screenshot. I’m assuming her look is supposed to be an homage to Pris, from Blade Runner? Still, it manages to look even worse in screenshots.
I haven’t played the game yet. Usually I play these things like a year after launch, when there’s a good sale. Unfortunately the more I read, the more it seems like this isn’t the game for me, unless some really big patches or DLC change things.
My head canon is that Misty saw Blade Runner as a teen and fixated on Pris (unsure if the movie exists in the world).
However she strikes me as either getting too old for it or not rich enough for cosmetic surgery.
I like her, but she seems to be fading away, making enough to live on, but not heading up. Unfortunately in Night City, if you’re not heading up, you’re heading down. I get the feeling it’s not going to end well.
It actually looks worse in game, if she gets close enough to other objects to cast shadows.
I think you meant “best,” but “better” would be better.
I vote “on beat”.
Copying this from the other thread, since it’s bound to get lost in there.
Chalk me up in the “I don’t have any (serious) issues, I think Cyberpunk is great” crowd. Game has crashed to desktop twice in the 45 hours game time, and I haven’t been stopped from progressing a quest ever.
The problem, I think, was expectations (“HYPE”). When I heard about cyberpunk the first time, I thought – “Neat” and then not following the development at all over the years. And you have to understand – I love Cyberpunk as a fiction genre (Sprawl trilogy, Altered Carbon). I just don’t want to simp over product years before release. I noticed the Keanu Reeves reveal event, and then continued to not pay attention. Two months ago, it actually looked like the game was being released, so I figured it was time to upgrade my machine to run it. And my new machine runs it well enough.
I have specifically NOT been sitting on reddit or youtube following each leaked detail. CDPred may have said “there will be feature X and Y” at some point, but I wasn’t paying attention – meaning that I have no investment in feature Y and will not be twitter-raging if Y isn’t included in the game at launch.
That’s the secret to enjoy things. No (or few) expectations. I am free to enjoy Cyberpunk 2077 for what it is rather than hating it for what didn’t make it into the release. Hype is the destroyer of fun. Nothing has ever been made better by hype, and hype being such a big part of modern marketing is a big step in the wrong direction.
Early on, some hype may serve to gauge player interest and help the devs deal with publishers, but once the hype reaches critical mass, it’s like being chained to a moving train. No room for maneuvering, just focus on running until the train stops.
On the PC, the main problem is high expectations due to misleading previews. On old-gen consoles, the main problem is that it doesn’t work properly. (Or so I’ve heard.)
The initial mission about obtaining the robot felt really good. Unfortunately, none of the things I’ve seen later managed to get close to that.
The main story (especially all parts with Goro in it) feels like a particularly railroaded idiot plot.
Then side chain missions like those with the Peralezes or Delamain start out really promising but endings feel rushed, incomplete, and flat. I had to restart the last Peralez mission twice due to scripting bugs, and the way the plot leaves you hanging afterwards without any chance to follow-up (which you absolutely reasonably should have) is just terrible.
The last Delamain mission (his garage) is so infuriatingly poorly designed/tested that I almost quit the game right there. Not to mention that it (the Delamain mission) ends with a literal ending-o-tron that doesn’t bother at all to discuss the choices with you. So obviously rushed.
(Note: I haven’t reached the ending of the game yet, I stopped before the “you have last chance to wrap all side quests” gate. I can’t finish 2 important quest chains until they patch a script problem in Totentanz.)
Oh and don’t even get me started on enemy AI. It’s right on par with the original Deus Ex. “Reboot optics” is particularly hilarious.
I’m sad and disappointed. I can’t even agree with reviewers saying that there’s a good RPG under the bugs. There is no player character agency anywhere in the plot, you just blindly follow crazy plans that other characters come up with, characters that you have no reason trusting in the first place. In a setting that should be first and foremost about suspicion and hidden agendas, your only option is to play a straight trusting puppet of others with an occasional “choice” (to be happy or grumpy about following them). Then in most side missions the “choice” is of the “Spec Ops: the Line” style, either following with a very sketchy path or abandoning the mission right there.
I felt zero immersion in the plot.
Heck, I was really hoping 2077 would have a decent ability to roleplay. I guess it makes sense, since the development costs are so high, that everything’s totally railroaded. I’m in desperate need of a good cyberpunk roleplaying game; Shadowrun returns had pretty silly storylines, and very little changes if you played a different type of character. I guess I continue to wait. :)
Yeah, DF and HK really improved on the roleplaying compared to SR.
Haven’t played Returns, but I thought Shadowrun: Dragonfall was great and generally people seem to agree it’s a huge improvement over the base game.
I’ve played them all. If your attitude toward Shadowrun Returns is that the combat was mostly fine but it’s a shame the main storyline was so linear and mostly predictable and that the dialogue didn’t have enough of what felt like roleplaying and it might be cool if you had actual party members instead of hiring randomly generated mercs and kickstarter backers, then Dragonfall and/or Hong Kong is indeed worth a go.
Follow-up: apparently the LP archive recently posted a screenshot LP of Dragonfall. So if you’re at all on the fence, one approach may be to start reading that and see if the thoughts “I’d rather play it myself than continue to spoil it” or “this doesn’t look interesting” come through your head. You can see the added impact of skillchecks/dialogue branching early on, and the only big thing that doesn’t become obvious quickly is that the main “storyline” nearly always has multiple available missions (it’s not freeform or openworld but it’s also not “come back from your one mission to find out the next one available mission” the way most of Returns was)
https://lparchive.org/Shadowrun-Dragonfall/
I wish I’d known about this sooner – I was so bummed out by the original game, that I barely even looked at the DLC and sequel. Thanks!
Having played all of them, I’d strongly recommend Dragonfall. Returns was reeeeealy undercooked, and while Hong Kong was still really good, personally I felt it was overwritten. I spend more time talking to NPCs between missions than on the actual missions. The dialogue was good, but it was just too much of it. Dragonfall, however, falls perfectly into the sweet spot, and is simply a great game with some really memorable characters.
Yeah, Dragonfall was pretty darn good, even if it didn’t really do anything new. Just a solid game.
The game actually does follow up on Peralez, Jeffeserson contacts you during the credits where you can see he’s still trying to uncover the conspiracy and is slipping further into paranoia. You can also get a creepy message where he’s freaking out about “them” being in his home.
You also meet who was behind the Peralez brainwashing in the “Sun” ending,
the guy who hires you looks exactly like Jefferson but now with glowing blue eyes (he’s also identified as “Mr Blue Eyes”) implying he’s possessed, further supporting Johnny’s theory about Rogue A.I.s being responsible.I personally believe this is actually a setup for one of the upcoming DLC expansions, the Netwatch guy believes he’ll be working with you again hinting that one of the expansions will be about dealing with these Rogue A.I.s from beyond the Blackwall. Overall, I enjoyed the questline and I liked how the game sprinkled these little hints without directly pointing them out.
In western RPGs, I usually make my first character fairly tame and normal as a testbed for the game’s mechanics and in this game it was no different.
Typo patrol:
Prologue, unless you’re talking about the programming language.
Pursuers.
Haven’t most MMORPGs and other RPGs already solved this by instead of having an automatic trigger making the player click on something to trigger the event? For a dialog-heavy game, it only makes sense to click on someone to start a dialog, but you can get the player to click a door if you want someone to call out to them to start the event. And on the plus side if the world is more open-world then it won’t accidentally trigger the next story quest if you’re wandering by to do a side quest or go shopping.
Another tool they could have used, would be having conversations over head-set. Shamus didn’t include much details about the scenes, so I don’t know why a few convos couldn’t happen with a voice in your head. :)
That’s fine for “start the quest” events, but not for stuff that happens in the middle of a quest, like Shamus’s example of “have the support character comment on the objective when the player gets close to it” Or worse, what if you want to have a surprise event, like an ambush? You can’t exactly give the player a dialog option of “Trigger Ambush? Y/N.” But now you have a problem if the player can bypass the intended ambush zone with their traversal power, or enter it from the wrong direction and shoot the bad guys before the ambush starts.
(And you don’t want the ambush to trigger in a cutscene, because players get really upset when a cutscene makes their character forget about all their cool stealth powers and walk through the front door like an idiot. Deus Ex: Human Revolution got a lot of flak for this.)
One option that’s fairly flexible with player positioning is to make the event trigger when the player has line-of-sight to their goal, but that can still mess up. I’ve played a few games where the support character has been like “Look, it’s the Golden MacGuffin!” and then I look around and don’t see anything, because the event triggered on a momentary glimpse of the MacGuffin through a window across the map.
Allowing the player to bypass ambushes seems like it would be a good reward for picking increased mobility options instead of some other cyber-powers. For missions that need the ambush unskippable, they could have security guns to keep out players climbing around a building.
That’s a good point.
In fact, I would take it up a notch and say that whenever they need an unskippable ambush that they should rewrite the entire scene so that they no longer need an unskippable ambush.
They could always limit the movement tools in some way. Like, maybe you could only scale concrete walls. So if you really need player on the ground, they enter a room with steel-covered walls. It might sound annoying, but games are full of arbitrary limitations, and you could add some interesting gameplay thanks to it (like adding a strip of concretethat allows players to get to an advantageous position in a heavily guarded part of the zone, or creating two tiers of limiters (e.g. steel walls and wet surfaces) and then allowing players to circumvent one of them (like turning of a fountain to allow climbing on in, or buying an upgrade that lets you climb slippery surfaces) while keeping the other limiter (steel walls) for design purposes. Most times having unrestricted freedom is just boring, just try turning on no-clip.
That was actually the take I was going to give on it: there’s no reason to have an automatically triggered unskippable ambush in a game, and so no reason to let those things stop you from implementing interesting movement options. A lot of times in movies and TV shows in order to increase tension they actually have the character approach and check something out and THEN get ambushed while their attention is focused on that element. That’s a far more interesting sort of ambush than simply having a group of people standing around waiting for the MC to ambush. And for chase scenes and the like once the chase has started then the player is probably going to catch up to that thing somewhere. For the most part, if unskippable ambushes will stop you from doing something else you want it should be pretty easy to redesign the encounter so that the unskippable ambush isn’t required, usually in a way that makes it more interesting,
My experience in the (non-gaming) software industry says that if the deadlines are crazy unrealistic, even the low-level employees know it’s crazy and management are attempting to motivate people to work harder (read: put in unpaid overtime).
My experience has been that crazy deadlines happen because someone wants to hit that date, usually for some nebulous business reason that sometimes is accurate and sometimes isn’t. The worst cases are when the higher ups are at least being misleading about when things are needed in the hopes of getting it out in time and avoiding people slacking off on it thinking they have plenty of time (essentially, they want it as soon as possible but know that “as soon as possible” doesn’t get people working as hard on it as they could and so it will come in later than possible).
During development of Witcher III CDPR was infamous for “fake milestones” – perhaps April (not March) release date was the same thing.
I have heard rumors that the game was heavily reworked very late in development so they could increase Keanu Reeves’s role in the story. No real proof, obviously, until Jason Schreier writes the inevitable story. But it would explain why the game was released in such a sorry state after so much time supposedly in development and after so many delays.
People found a lot of details that support that theory in older footage. Stuff like mentions of Johny Silverhand dying of old age (instead of some crazy blaze of glory), and his character being way less relevant to the world in general. Also sqome quests that now feature him heavily were about about other people. But I believe that they had very little in terms of interesting story framework to begin with (I saw early footage of the game during various industry event, and the story was always very basic and uninteresting), so reworking the story to focus on Johnny might have been a decision independent of casting Keanu in the role.
Wasn’t Johnny’s death an event that happens in Pondsmith’s tabletop books?
I believe only in Cyberpunk RED, which was specifically written in conjunction with CDPR to fill in the gaps between CP2020 and CP2077 (and retcon the hated Cyberpunk v3, which moved to a much more post-apocalyptic setting – RED still has post-apocalyptic elements, but these seem more a way to explain why the world of CP2077 looks so much like the world of CP2020 than anything else).
All the Johnny Silverhand flashbacks were adapted from Cyberpunk 2013 and 2020, specifically the adventurebooks Never Fade Away and Firestorm Shockwave respectively. I don’t think Johnny even appeared in Cyberpunk Red.
“after so much time supposedly in development”
Development did not start in earnest before 2016, because CDPR was working on Witcher 3 and DLC. 4 years is still a lot of time though (assuming the game was not scrapped and rebooted at a later time).
The thing is even if it’s true it could explain things like quest scripting issues or abrupt endings to some storylines but it doesn’t address problems with the underlying systems, like driving, police, physics, or visual glitchiness.
As you said, you’re part of the problem. Rewards for bad behavior doesn’t result in good behavior.
I’m just hoping another games-industry crash will reset everything again. ^^;
But with most things going digital these days what will we bury in the desert next to the E.T. cartridges to be exhumed ~25 years later?
Ubisoft Montreal?
The other part of the problem is that there’s a huge market the modern AAA industry mostly refuses to recognise exists. The reason Cyberpunk was so hyped and so preordered (aside from the marketing and being made by the Witcher guys) is because people are desperate for in-depth open world RPGs that aren’t made by Bethesda, and these days there’s literally years between games that promise to provide what they’re asking for.
Unfortunately people caring so much for short-term gratification that they don’t consider the long term harm they may be doing is not limited to the gaming industry alone. (See also EGS, BG3, FIFA,…)
That’s a little hyperbolic, don’t you think? CDPR certainly bungled several aspects of the release, but they made a good game!.
It may not be the great game that the hype led us to believe it was, but anybody who was being honest with themselves knew damn well that no game could ever live up to that hype.
I am not at all sorry about the money that I spent on it.
The problem is that people are implicitly condoning all the crappy things that they’ve done (e.g. mistreatment of it’s employees, releasing clearly unfinished games for full price) by continuing to support them.
Thank you for talking about the evidence of cut content. Another sign of it would be (spoilers for the extended prologue) the character of
T-Bug. If you go back and rewatch the cinematic trailer (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIcTM8WXFjk), you’ll findshe’s present in the No-Tell Motel and working with Dexter when he betrays V. Obviously, this is not the way it happens in the final game, whereshe gets killed way earlier, off-screen, in a very abrupt and anti-climactic way.That makes a lot of sense. She was so stand-offish it was weird. V and Jackie talk about what they’ll do after retirement and she has no interest in ever seeing them again. Even if that’s how she feels, it’s an odd thing to openly ADMIT during their last job together. The writer is making sure we dislike the character, which is an odd choice for someone that’s about to die. And like you said – she dies in one line of dialog and we never get any closure.
It makes much more sense that she was being set up to betray you. I wonder why it was changed?
I guess it’s another casualty of cut content. It looks like this mission was supposed to be a clusterfuck where everyone was planning to backstab everyone else. Even if the job hadn’t gone wrong due to the surprise cameo, it probably would have ended like Reservoir Dogs.
Really? I saw that moment as a major
death flag for T-Bug, she says she plans to retire and wipe her slate clean to take a personal break. She was never really passionate about being a Netrunner and only saw it as a job which is why she says she never plans to go back into cyberspace ever again. I interpreted all that as the writer telegraphing that the heist will go terribly wrong because peaceful retirements are rare in these kinds of stories.“I am looking forward to spending more time in the dirt.”
There’s also a scene in the sound proof room where V is asked what Eve wanted. When you lie, T-Bug and Dex look at each other in a knowing way… I really thought that would would mean something, that they knew more about it you… but it all lead to nothing.
Obviously this is a clever jab at the electronics / computers industry. You can’t run a HousePort BD on a FruitCo machine! Didn’t you read the FAQ? :P
I was thinking this was a straight forward DLC hook. That way they could justify a completely different style of area (space! underwater! etc) that a player could access at almost any time, and more immersive than a “please buy the DLC” NPC or door.
So the satire and the reality converge, and no one can tell the difference any more. Very cyberpunk!
“Oh, is your Braindance unit an Olfactular Rend rather than an RJL Revivifier? Tough luck, dude! You can’t make software that runs on different hardware, that’s crazy-talk!”
You know, as a software engineer I’m sympathetic to overruns: the first 90% of the project takes 90% of the time and the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time.
But as a gamer/consumer, on a more meta-level, I can’t help but notice that AAA publishers have a relationship with their customers eerily similar to the semi-abusive one Apple has with theirs. They do something that isn’t necessarily bad but has obvious negatives (i.e. tradeoffs) like abandon OpenGL not for Vulkan but for their own homespun API, or change core C libraries, or change the default shell, or drop 32 bit support, or insert-thing-here. And you think “wow, that’s inconvenient and annoying but there’s still a lot of utility there”. Or Google. Or Facebook. Or Amazon. And Microsoft’s relationship with its customers is just plain tragicomically bad as chronicled here on twentysided.
And it’s not that you don’t care about those things, they’re just straws and until they break the proverbial camel’s back the company doesn’t really get feedback.
I mean sure people complain and moan on twitter/forums/blogs/whatever, but they do that no matter what. It’s really hard to separate signal from noise. So the interesting question is whether that dynamic is intrinsic to large tech companies.
I haven’t played it yet but I’ve watched some streams and whatnot. Here is my issue that I haven’t seen other people bring up and I’m wondering if it’s just because I haven’t played it – it seems like they forgot that the cyberpunk future is supposed to be a dystopia. There are bits and pieces of lore about the world if you really look, like that all the animals are extinct or that a nuclear war destroyed the middle east, but you have to pay attention to find them. Everything else about the game, from the advertising to the trailers to the bizarre in-game trailer after the tutorial, to the way people talk about it, focuses on how the future is one big wacky party. Everyone’s wearing crazy clothes! Everyone’s having wild sex and doing drugs! Everyone’s driving cool cars! When people talk about the city they sound like urbanites talking about how much they love New York even though it sucks.
In the words of Mike Pondsmith, Cyberpunk is supposed to be “a warning, not an aspiration.”
Some quick googling on the wiki and for videos, seems to show the Heywood district is a relatively poor slum area, with garbage bags on the street, less flashing lights on the streets and buildings, and more concrete architecture. So if this city is relatively affluent, that seems reasonable to me. Although, having a few missions in some neighboring run-down cities or something, would be an improvement. :)
They’re pretty open about how bad the world is- police and gang members openly discussing evidence tampering on the street corner a block from your apartment building, open reference to how murder filled the city is and how brazenly apathetic the cities mechanisms are about those problems unless you have the cash to make them look into it, and the fact that CEO’s of the megacorps are treated like royalty such that the mere hint of them looking your direction will end with your gruesome public demise (with the full understanding that no one will step in to protect you, innocent or not,) among people openly discussing how horrible things are going for them, where people salvaging implants from people they kidnapped and murdered is common, never mind the gang violence on nearly every street corner, the actual tent cities and rotting buildings that people still try to live in……
(The mere existence of the JoyToy job and how people end up in it…)
Night City is beautiful and awful, and the game makes no effort to hide this.
The world is owned by corps, literally covered by trash and marketing material, and is a blood-soaked hellhole to the point that anywhere you go in the game is primarily “policed” by a local gang or corp enforcement squad.
This game is clearly not painting an aspirational picture of the future.
Reality is going to turn into the internet.
As Shamus, I also thought that there was definitely something odd with the main quest of the Prologue (what the game actually calls Act 1). In short, I think there are two different versions of the story colliding: one in which V knows what the object of the gig is, and another one in which they do not (below there are spoilers for Act 1 and for the very beginning of Act 2):
First, when V meets Dexter DeShawn, they are not told what the objective of the heist is (i.e., stealing Relic). Similarly, when, after the gig goes badly, V is being treated by Victor, they say something like: “I know what this is, this is the biochip they were talking about on TV!”, as if they are just realising what they stole. Especially the part with Victor makes me think V was NOT supposed to know what Relic was until the end of Act 1.On the contrary, when V first meets Evelyn Parker, they already know what Relic is. And when they talk with Saburo Arasaka’s bodyguard at the start of Act 2, they even know the identity of its inventor! Even the bodyguard is surprised by that. When asked about it, V simply states that they studied Relic in depth in preparation for the gig – something which is not shown at all to the player.I believe that this disconnect shows that the Act 1 quest was heavily reworked – the clearest sign is that, immediately after talking with
Dexter DeShawn, V is told by Dexter himself that the target is Relic via a text message, This is quite jarring, and was likely a late addition to explain how V already knew about Relic when talking with Evelyn.This reminds of Fable 2 and how when I found out there was a sex change potion the first thing I did was marry someone who wasn’t bisexual and then drink it to see what happens. (Answer: It’s surprisingly easy to stay in a stable, happy, sexless marriage)
The “junk shops” marked on the map are places you can buy miscellaneous non-functional knick-knacks (sex toys, tourist souvenirs, guitars). So it’s not just BDs.
Maybe this stuff is all a cheap(-ish) way to do some world-building, with objects you can purchase and have in your inventory, but which don’t do anything? Do they have lore, descriptions, icons or photos to show what they are?
Each of them has a short description and a unique icon, I assume it’s just for a bit of additional flavour. Possibly you get some useful materials if you break them down, I never tried.
“Part of my problem is that I am sick to DEATH of medieval fantasy, which is where most RPG come from. I just… I’m so tired of swords and kings and pastoral landscapes. I’d rather play a big dumb shooter than put on another set of stupid chainmail. That’s it. I’m burned out. Done.”
Obviously I’m biased since I love fantasy and history while having no strong affinity for sci fi and outright aversion to modern day stuff, but eager as I am to see more fantasy RPGs that aren’t D&D derivatives (D&Dd!), I’ll happily take Forgotten Realms 5321.12 over Generic West Coast City as Stereotyped by European Dudes with Maybe the Odd Cyborg.
An extremely pedantic pet peeve of mine is the popularity of the term “medieval fantasy.” D&D isn’t medieval and neither is Tolkien. Actual medieval fantasy is fairly rare, and I wish folks would stop saying “medieval” when what they mean is “vaguely pre-industrial.”
Red hats? Is that a subtle take-that at the CentOS situation?
I bought the game, downloaded it, and then returned it without even playing it after seeing the state of things. I’m sure I would probably still enjoy it even in its current condition, but two big things in particular led me to wait:
1. The police system. Maybe it’ll never get fixed, but it’s worth it to me to wait 6 months and see what comes of it. Teleporting enemies is a rage trigger for me ever since Dragon Age 2 when additional waves of enemies would literally drop from the sky. Sucks me right out of the game.
2. Broken quests. I have a mild case of completionism, so broken quest triggers that result in a quest remaining in my journal, knowing that I literally *cannot* complete it makes my eye start to twitch. Also, I don’t want to run the risk of one of those being a quest I really like, in which case not being able to see it concluded is doubly upsetting.
Those are two things that would seriously sour my experience, and I have so little time for games anymore (Shamus has played this FOUR TIMES?!) that it matters to me to play the most complete and stable version possible, so that my potentially one shot at the game isn’t marred by a bunch of bugs and broken systems. The fact that I kinda want to try out this ray tracing thing and GPUs are unobtanium at the moment also factors in.
Don’t have too much to say about Cyberpunk. I was never really interested in it, as it is definitely not my style of game (same with GTA and Saint’s Row). I dislike what I have heard about the company and their practices though, so I have sorta ended up with some measure of generalized distaste for Cyberpunk. Then again I had issues with the content I read about in the Witcher games, so I have never had particularly positive feelings about the company anyways. They clearly are marketing games to very different people than me.
Wanted to say, though, I am the exact opposite of Shamus in terms of fantasy burnout. I can’t ever get enough fantasy. I always want swords and sorcery and armor and supernatural creatures (though I do like to mix up the tech level of the settings at least). Whereas sci-fi type stuff has just never been as interesting to me. Even if it weren’t for thematic issues with the game, I doubt I would have cared to play Cyberpunk. Cyborgs are kinda neat and all, but there’s nothing about the game that really grabs me.
Don’t really know why, but it’s always been that way, ever since I can remember. Star Wars didn’t fascinate me the way the Hobbit did. Modern style toys (like GI-Joe) didn’t grab my attention the way fantasy toys did. All of my favorite books were fantasy, and I got into DnD from a young age as well. I sometimes wonder what it is that makes people react so differently to stuff without any major life-changing things. I’m sure it has to do with genetics and the way the brain responds to stimulus, of course.
Anyways glad you enjoyed the game Shamus, hope to read a retrospective about it at some point!
Trying to figure out why I always gravitate to medieval fantasy settings, and I’m thinking part of it is because democracy ruins villains.
Medieval times are the times most heavily associated with rigid social structures. You have your king in the high throne. What keeps him there? Tradition and birthright. That guy can be blatantly, unapologetically evil, and then you beat him and the next guy is super nice and you get a happy ending. Big, solid lines for what victory looks like.
But then you move to a modern setting, or a future setting. What keeps the king there? Now it’s a happy population. Now he has to hide the evil stuff, and sneak around in the back alleys, like a rodent of some kind. Or worse, the population agrees with him, so beating him doesn’t actually win; the next guy will be the same level of evil with a bit less charisma. You can’t break the system, because who’s going to make a game where the hero tries to destroy democracy? So victory is a muddy halfway thing.
President Lex Luthor would like a word with you.
Superhero stories recreate that hierarchy. Why is Superman the Superman? Birthright powers.
Doesn’t that just prove that villains can work just fine in democracy? Whether Superman has birthright powers or not doesn’t change whether President Lex Luthor works as a villain.
Or suppose we changed it up: Superman is missing, and it’s Batman who has to take down President Lex Luthor. Does that story suddenly no longer work?
Or let’s do something completely different: a congressman has written a bill that would ruin a beloved local business in exchange for a big corporate bribe, and the town has to convince the legislature not to pass the bill. Does this villain not work?
Or we could even not even deal with the government directly at all: make the villain an oil company, a mad scientist, a domestic terrorist organization, whatever. They operate within a democratic country, but they all could work, and have worked. Democracy didn’t ruin villains. It just changed the parameters.
(I haven’t actually read President Lex Luthor, but my immediate take is “that’s unbelievable and dumb.”) Yes, Batman taking down a president doesn’t work as well, because you end up with Vice President… whoever it is, Kingpin I assume.
The congressman example is a good example of the difference; the victory condition becomes “appeal to the masses, who were always capable of solving the problem if they knew about it.” Companies and terrorists still have to hide themselves from the almighty masses. Maybe the mad scientist could beat them with super tech, but that’s supervillains again. So you get smaller villains, who either always have to be duplicitous, or be sub-structure stories, like employees taking down the Head of Personnel at MegaBusiness.
Having a different victory condition doesn’t ruin villains, though, it just makes them different.
Now, if your argument is that you just don’t like these types of villains, then that’s a statement of personal preference, and it can’t be wrong. But there’s no inherent problem with trying to make a story with villains under a democracy. And while some sorts of villains may not easily translate from one setting to another, the same is also true in reverse.
That’s what monarchs want you to think. What actually keeps them there is the collective will of the people they nominally rule, same as any democratically-elected leader; tradition just gives them a little more inertia before people take up arms.. Any newly-installed monarch is going to be walking on eggshells until they’ve managed to build up their legitimacy in the eyes of powerful nobles and commoners alike (unless they inherited a high legitimacy legitimately). To be fair, it’s a convincing façade; I only realized after hundreds of hours playing Paradox games why “legitimacy” is a resource in Europa Universalis IV, and such a critical one as well. Have a low enough legitimacy (in game or in real life), and people will take up arms to overthrow you. Probably the clearest historical examples of this are all the imperial dynasties of China overthrown by popular uprisings when the legitimacy of the ruling dynasty took a nose-dive due to unfavorable circumstances, but see also the French and American revolutions.
And the Russian revolution, plus the many in Eastern Europe.
These also show how revolution almost always leaves revolutionaries in charge, who are usually rather worse than the Evil Empire (TM) that they overthrew…
Your Mileage may vary, but for me the ability to drive across town without starting a 5 star Police Chase no matter how many pedestrians jump in front of your Car, (stay off the sidewalk if you can’t get out of the way!), is a feature, not a bug!
– You’ve said a few times that the prologue ends after the heist, but IIRC it says “Act 2” after that. The end of the prologue is before or after the Scav job.
– About the wall running, we’re actually very free right now. With the double jump I often do a lot of sequence breaking. The game handles it Borderlands style, if I’m not near the quest giver they just talk to me over the radio. Or sometimes it just deactivates the double jump entirely (which I dislike).
– What really bugs me about the police chases is that the algorithm to elegantly pop a car outside of the player’s range and have it come to them is already there, for when you summon your car! They could have done the same thing with patrol cars!
– What I feel is really missing in game mechanics is a faction system. Between the gangs, the fixers, the cops and the corps the game is just begging for it. At some point I remember a guy asking me to deliver a tribute to the Tyger Claws because he had been blacklisted by them, and it made me realize that it was weird they didn’t attack me on sight or even send death squads after me considering how many of them I sent to the hospital. Bad rep would make factions hostile, good rep would make factions lower the price in their shops or even send reinforcement once in a while and in the case of cops just look the other way when you understandably run over someone because the driving is terrible.
Someone on reddit observed there does exist a faction reputation of some sort. After killing enough random members of a gang on the street, they’re no longer regarded as neutral and will actually aggro on them.
Now, I’m only on my first playthrough, so take it with a grain of salt, but even on hard the game quickly got extremely easy (and yet still very deadly, mistakes are randomly quickly punished…) once I figured I’d just min-max into reflexes and handguns for a while. I can now literally just pull out my revolver and shoot people through solid walls, through which I can see them. Making people’s grenades go off in their pockets or system resetting them is just what I do for fun.
I think the game wants you to pick one big thing and, once you have the majority of stuff from there, pick the juicy low-hanging fruit of other trees to cobble something cool together.
Actually, the chase scenes in this game fascinate me, and not in a good way. There are so few of them that I sometimes forget they exist, but not only were they very buggy on release (sound issues and always respawning in the driver’s seat… even when there was already a driver sitting there), there is something really funky going on: the game cannot for the life of it communicate wether they’re “real”, wether you actually have to hit enemies to progress, wether enemies are doing damage. During one chase I realized I didn’t actually have to shoot anyone, because the enemies all died in scripted collisions, anyway. In the other, I kept failing because after a segment where everything was scripted and enemies literally could not die, it suddenly expected me to kill enemies before they kill me.
Yeah I get that. The only place where I do any fantasy nowerdays at all is in wacky DnD/MtG settings for the Pen&Paper group I DM for.
That said, while I have no idea if you, Shamus, will ever read this comment, considering it is likely pretty far down and rambling, but do you still play Pen and Paper games? I fondly remember your blogposts recapping your DnD campaign (man, I was literally a teenager when I read that, I think…), but since I generally don’t like podcasts, I have no idea if you’ve mentioned the hobby there.
My original tabletop group graduated high school, went to college (some of them) got married (some) and had kids. The blog keeps me pretty busy these days, so I haven’t played a tabletop game in years.
That’s too bad. Your D&D campaign write ups are what got me to try out D&D for myself and I fell in love with it. I spend more time with tabletop games than with video games these days!
Boo, scripted-outcome chases! At least with a cutscene, the player knows they’re not in control!
I found your comments about traversal options causing headaches for the designers interesting, because despite wall climbing being cut, the game still has the cyberware leg upgrades that let you jump really high which can be used for a lot of the same functions. There are loads of places where you can skip combat or take obviously intended shortcuts (e.g. being able to reach a window on an upper floor of a building and jump straight in). Given how easy it is to climb up just about anything with a little bit of persistence (buildings have enough air conditioning units on the outside, balconies, fire escapes and the like that you can still manage to climb them with the existing leg upgrades), I don’t see what the devs really gained by cutting out the ability to climb.
There are even a handful of locations/quests in the game where it’s directly referenced in dialogue by your companion NPCs if you use your jump ability to skip an obstacle encounter (e.g. saying something like “I guess you’re not a door person.” if you bypass a locked door by jumping in through a window instead), so even if they cut more extensive traversal options, it’s clear that some of the skeleton of this is still left in.
Your example above mentions dialogue triggers that could be broken if the player jumps/climbs around them, but my experience was that the game quite often uses scanning an object as the trigger to progress (or the trigger to start dialogue), which is quite a neat and convenient way to allow the player to approach an objective via whatever method they want without limiting the environments too much, as the player will still need to scan from fairly closer range to progress the quest regardless of whether they walked across the room, jumped through the rafters or climbed in through a window.
I’d also like to note that having finished a playthrough with a stealth/hacking build, there are a number of stealth tools that help with the issue you mention where stealth feels very binary and you don’t have recovery options, but these do require significant investment into hacking (one of the only skill trees where it actually feels like you are getting anything good from the higher tier perks), and I’m not sure if playing pure stealth as a non-hacker is that viable:
– There’s a hack that stops enemies reporting you to their friends if they detect you (meaning you have only one hostile enemy to deal with and can then go back to stealth)
– Another hack resets the alert state of an enemy when they are already hostile. The upgraded version resets the alert state of all enemies in the area, giving you a reset button to go back to stealth
– One of the breach protocol upgrades puts a debuff on enemies that blinds them for a few seconds the first time they would otherwise detect you, which gives you a lot of room to make mistakes without anyone starting shooting. Since you’re probably going to use breach protocol on a group of enemies as soon as you first became aware of them anyway, once you have this ability it feels like something that is practically always turned on passively.
Overall this was a really interesting post, discussing the game from this particular angle isn’t something I’ve seen much of since it launched.
Nice! Good to see the game allowing you to bypass stuff, and acknowledge it to the player! :)
As you allude to at the end, Shamus, I think the bottom line is CDPR needed more time. I don’t know whether it was due to COVID lockdowns throwing a wrench into their progress (although that’s kinda doubtful considering they originally planned to ship in March 2020, when here we are 8 months later and the game is still obviously in a parlous state), or there was some colossal F-Ups with project scope and management along the way, or whether, as some of my friends have speculated, there were external factors that essentially pressured CDPR into having to release in 2020 even though the dev team knew the game was still nowhere near finished. Nonetheless, I think we can all agree that even with the release date pushbacks, it’s obvious that CP2077 was not ready for release. It probably needed at least another year to work on bug fixes and polish.
What’s frustrating is that from what’s currently available, it’s obvious how much POTENTIAL there is in CP2077. I’m sure that, 6 – 12 months down the line after much needed patches, CP2077 will truly be something to marvel over, but right now, all we can do is wince at the bugs, the rough edges and the occasional gaping hole created by cut content and muse sadly over what could have been. I honestly feel like CP2077 could have been one of those watershed games that defines a generation, like Doom 1/2 did for shooters, or World of Warcraft did for MMOs.
One more jewel shattered on the sacrificial altar of 2020, it seems. Damn you. :P
I almost feel guilty about how much I’ve enjoyed the game so far and how well it’s been running for me. I’m not a big CD Projekt fan (I liked the first Witcher game a good amount and thought the other two were mediocre – I know, heresy), so I didn’t have any hype going in, and the only reason I bought the game is because I wanted to experience the Big New Thing with the Internet for a change and see how being part of the zeitgeist feels (usually I come in 2 to 4 years later when the game costs half as much and my experience is colored by knowing whatever the Internet narrative about the game was when it came out). It’s by far the CD Projekt game I like the most so far, though I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a “great” game, just a pretty damn “good” one. It’s been running really well on my PC (which is about a year old, so pretty powerful) as well, with the only bugs being of the magnitude you’d expect from any open world game (NPCs walking into walls, dialogue overlapping, corpses I’m carrying clipping into the camera, my car being launched into outer space for no apparent reason, stuff like that), and I’m finding the core gameplay loop of “go to marker, get given objective and backstory, do a mini Deus Ex level to solve it your way” to be pretty enjoyable, plus I’m really digging the main story (it’s a bit thematically vapid, but they’ve got the aesthetic and mood down pat). I just can’t help but feeling bad for enjoying this game I only had a mild interest in when it’s the biggest release of the past few years and people are overwhelmingly feeling let down. To some extent it’s the usual Internet game discourse problem of hype rising to levels where no end product could match it, but I still wish it were the people who had a lot of investment in this that were satisfied and not some band-wagoner like myself.
FYI, typo
While I’m too old to entirely fall for hype, and too old to yell BETRAYAL on message boards when the game isn’t perfect I can’t help but feel a little…………. disappointed in Cyberpunk, not for the game is it, which is overall fine, but for the game it could have been (and kinda feels like it should have been).
I must admit I bought into the hype a little bit, a lot basically on a combination of CD Projects rep and their marketing.
The Witcher III was a fantastic game, a masterpiece, but there was really very little “interaction” or “inventiveness”. By that I mean……… for quests you pretty much just did exactly what you were told to do, there was very little opportunity to approach them in different ways (inventiveness). Likewise, aside from shopkeepers no one really outside of quests really talked to you or interacted with you, they were just “background”.
It looked from the promo material that they were purposely making a very different game to the Witcher 3, basically taking the Bioware/Obsidian “Different talky options” routes and the Deus Ex “Multiple ways to approach a mission” stuff and combining it into one game.
We all remember the early mission to get the spider bot and the multitude of options that offered you (not coincidently this was used for promo material), pay for it, pay for it with the corp chip, fight your way in, say you’re going to pay for it then fight once you’re in there. The way the promo *appeared* to suggest, was that there were essentially infinite options. Maybe you could hack your way into their computer network and find the time and place when they were going to sell the spider bot to a third party and hit them during the deal……………… you know stuff like that.
Unfortunately that mission seems to have been purpose made to kind of………. show us that. Outside of that particular mission there’s very little of that sort of choice or flexibility. Most of the dialogue options lead to exactly the same point, and normally most missions simply have “the way” to complete them.
It kind of feels sad that they had the template for that sort of game, but didn’t seem ambitious enough to pull it off. I know people are going to be shouting “Not ambitious enough?!?! This game is way too ambitious! That’s why it’s so buggy….”
But is it really? I mean what does the game do that say GTA5 or Red Dead Redemption 2 hasn’t done? Most of the systems in GTA5 are more complex and work better (driving AI for a huge one).
Overall a good game…………. with a lot of polish and patches might even be a great one, but I don’t think it can ever be a masterpiece like I hoped, oh well.
It’s interesting to me that Shamus, who is usually a big of a nitpicker liked this game a lot despite its obvious shortcomings.
And I actually agree. Despite all the problems, I really enjoyed my 70 hours with the game. It wasn’t a stellar experience, but a large portion of it was very compelling.
But apparently the fans and the critics rip it apart, when they were much nicer to Andromeda or Skyrim, and those games are so much worse it’s not even funny to compare. GTA 5 and RDR might be less buggy, but they were as deep as a puddle: They do not come with any RPG elements at all (neither character builds nor story choices), and the only thing they do better is driving physics. If I wanted to play a driving game, I’d play a driving game.
Both of them are much worse on the open-world front, where quests all but happen in a parallel dimension.
Note that I didn’t care about the hype. I avoided the news around it because I wanted to go in blind.
I don’t know if I would go so far as to say Cyberpunk is better than those games but I definitely feel this sentiment. Cyberpunk to me feels like a really good game that wasn’t finished. Loads of half baked systems and a general lack of polish all around, and that’s not including the bugs. Which for me brings the game down a lot. If I ignored everything that seemed unintentional or unfinished then yeah, I’d say it’s an amazing game that has a lot more heart and probably some of the best story and characters in any game but judging the product as is it just doesn’t hold up.
I understand that this is not the most important issue, but there are not two, but four joytoys in the game. There are two in a bar that you unlock after completing some of Kerry’s missions. Same deal (one male, one female), but with a price hike to 3000 eddies.
Okay, I skipped this entry until now because I wanted to finish the game with no spoilers.
Your comments about Left 4 Dead ring completely untrue to me. I mean, I have no idea what you’re talking about in regards to bonus content and stuff. Are you talking about the slightly modified survival maps? Other than that there was only community-made content. I was actually really involved in the game’s scene at that time. L4D was released Nov 17, 2008. L4D2 was released Nov 17, 2009. The last content was released in Sept, 2009 for L4D1. I didn’t even expect them to release stuff for free but no one develops a new game in a single year whilst releasing actual content for the old game. It doesn’t happen…
In the same way I was super-pissed at ME3’s ending, I was super pissed at L4D2’s release – not because of promises (because I wasn’t really paying attention) but because they put nothing into that original game that they could have. 1 year between releases? Dropping all compatibility? It killed the original game. It was a big FU to all the fans and players. Quite frankly, I still don’t believe that they couldn’t have folded the advances in L4D2 into the core game with patches/or what we now know as seasons. The only other franchises which do this sort of thing are sports games and nobody congratulates them on their behaviour.
Anyway, I guess I’m just one of those few fans that accused Valve of lying instead of expecting them to support a game they put out instead of jumping ship a year later.
That BD mechanic sounds like the memory remix mechanic in Remember Me – it was used so sparingly despite seeming like it was the main point of the game.
Hopefully Beyond a Steel Sky can go somewhat towards this.
And failing that, whatever D.Karpyshyn, J.Ohlen and co. at Archetype Entertainment end up making.