What reviews are you reading that have you so worked up? This wasn’t the consensus at all. Reviewers still found plenty of the heart they’re known for even if the writing wasn’t as good as The Witcher 3.
I suspect this is a part of it because I feel it myself and said so before the reviews came out.
You mean all the ones fixed in the patch? Haha. I mean maybe they didn’t fix them all and there are still plenty of issues, and maybe the console versions are absolutely hopeless. But I feel like I’ve woken up to a new feeling of despair. Let’s take a deep breath and see how it goes.
I saw the shoulder shrug article at RPS and I thought this was interesting:
Tom’s Hardware tried to get away with it by calling it a preview, but I guess they still got smacked down.
I’m not worked up, I’ve just gone from a “definitely playing this day one, built a new PC in part to play it” to “I think I can wait for more patches”. But, to be specific, Waypoint, Giantbomb, PC Gamer and Eurogamer. The general sense is that the sidequests are usually more fetchquesty than The Witcher was, while the worldbuilding has all the flaws of its source material, and doesn’t really have anything to say about that source material. None of them say it’s a bad game, just disappointingly and strangely unambitious, design and writing wise. Bugs and mechanical/UI issues I was prepared for. Weak writing and quest design I was not.
Who knows, because they don’t actually say what they’ve fixed. I’m not going to run around screaming “Literally unplayable”, but equally I’m going to hold off until people confirm that at least some of these major progression killers are gone.
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Just sent a link to my wife to grab this from Amazon for me for Christmas. I’m exercising an amazing amount of restraint here by not grabbing it myself. Also, I hope it doesn’t suck on ps4.
If you pick these four specific sites and base all your impressions on those, I can see how you might come to that conclusion. Different sites, particularly international ones, have a very different impression of these aspects though.
That said, if the writing and design really does suck, at least we can look forward to new Techland RPG, where some of the best CDP writers went.
I mean, I didn’t pick them per se, they’re just the ones I’ve read/listened to so far, and they’re ones whose critical voices I generally appreciate. I’ve yet to see any source say the writing compares favourably to TW3, or that the sidequests are consistently as good. Feel free to point me to them if they exist and I’ll give them a read/listen.
The funny thing is if you break down TW3 quests to the lowest mechanical level, they were actually pretty terrible. Go here, use Batman vision, go there. What made them great was the writing.
In fact, I’m not sure how they could physically be more fetchquesty than that. Maybe the veneer of writing was lost and made it more obvious, because the writers left like Paul mentioned.
I mentioned them upthread, but e.g. Gamestar
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https://www.gamestar.de/artikel/cyberpunk-2077-test,3364844.html
I know you’re getting impatient because you finally want to get to gameplay. But there is one more thing I have to talk about about the quests: How fantastic they are across the board. CD Projekt stages the main missions so brilliantly that the story of what is probably the second best cyberpunk film in recent years could be edited (Blade Runner 2049 simply doesn’t hit anything). You just have to believe me now because »No spoilers«.
I can go into more detail with the side quests. I don’t know of any other open world game with such good side missions.
Or IGN Japan
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https://jp.ign.com/cyberpunk-2077/48777/review/20202077
People may be confusing the side quests (which are supposed to be pretty involved and with choices) with the gigs, which are a new category of ‘quick jobs’, that yeah, they can be more fetch-questy, like go to A and kill some guy or escort a civ to point B. But I see these new gigs as the filler content equivalent to cleaning up bandit camps or getting the chests in The Witcher 3.
That’s a good point too. But I expect even those gigs to be at least somewhat interesting.
Even within the gigs, expect some funny lines or some amusing moment, it isn’t like its going to be ‘go kill 20 goblins’.
edit: yeah, that.
I’m glad you mentioned this because these do sound pretty lame. Expectations set.
I dunno, right after that bit you quoted, he says:
Doesn’t sound particularly fantastic to me. Not bad, but not out of the norm either. Sounds pretty Borderlands-y, to be honest. He also seems to be mainly comparing it to open world games, which, fine, but I was expecting RPG quality quests/writing, not Ubisoft quality.
I’m not writing the game off by any means. I’m definitely going to play it, and I am pretty confident I’ll enjoy it a lot. But there is a pretty consistent theme across much of the criticism, with plenty of examples, which suggest that maybe TW3 was to a certain extent lightning in a bottle.
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My Piggyback CE Guide shipped at 3am this morning.
Sorry but that’s nonsense, when TW2 was written equally well (if not better) and TW3 expansions were also written just as well (if not better, particularly HoS) then TW3.
You can’t judge a quest like that from few sentences when you haven’t played it. His point is that even quests that look like fetch quests are somehow interesting. Which is exactly what TW3 excelled at. Do you remember the black pearl quest? It was probably the most basic fetch quest in the entire game. Literally just “bring me a pearl”. And I still remember it 5 years later because of its writing.
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That is a nice looking CE Edition!
Are those all signatures of the dev team members? No idea if that amount of them would be the right number for something like that. That is really cool
TW3 was part of a line of games generally lauded for their writing and story, that is definitely true. I do think though that part of the backlash against Cyberpunk is due to the tendency we have to expect a sort of curve of excellence from a series of products from a particular provider. That is, because the Witcher games had such good narrative and writing, that many would say got better with each iteration, people expect this game to be something of an improvement over TW3.
Even though this game is in an entirely different setting, and certainly is created by a team that is I would gather rather different the one that created TW3, and is actually a somewhat different type of game mechanically, with a radically different setting, some people may well be judging it not on its own merits.
Or maybe it sucks. I hope to find out tonight! This is a game about which I have read nearly nothing, and don’t even really know much about the mechanics, or the story, or the classes, or anything. I suspect I will enjoy finding out.
It’s nice that @Paul_cze and @TimJames are willing to pre-emptively jump to the defence of a game they haven’t played.
Personally, patch or no patch, I still expect a ton of bugs and hopefully to have fun regardless. But I don’t believe their first foray into cyberpunk is necessarily going to be as polished and interesting story and quest wise as genres they have more familiarity with. I hope to be proven wrong. I expect that the DLC CDPR will release will improve the game (just like for TW3) and make it better and better though.
Yep, they are, and you are right that it’s a really cool touch. These folks are proud of their achievement, and I suspect that pride will be warranted :)
All I meant is that judging a game prematurely based on few specific reviews when there are many more that disagree is…well, premature.
