4478

Finished it, just under 58 hours, as I noted in the spoiler thread. I went a mostly balanced but skewed towards guns build, with Intelligence no higher than 6 and reflexes up to 11. As @TurinTur notes, a balanced more general build puts less strain on the game’s somewhat fragile balance, which is by no means a justification, just an observation. I found combats on Normal to be a mix of trivial and challenging, with nearly all of my deaths being the result of my own haste or stupidity.

I agree 100% with @Bateau about the shard spam. Holy Hell, don’t they have spam filters on their holodecks? I would love a toggle to switch off all car ads, and all random world shard pickup notices, with maybe a setting that would flag mission or story critical ones. In the middle of combat I’ve been barraged with fixers and their inane prattle. Ugh.

The interface/UI needs work. On PC, the use of the mouse wheel to both zoom the scanner and select from the attacks means half the time I can’t select the right thing for the right target on the first try. The smart weapon targeting square is super intrusive, and useless. Aim down sights functionality is wonky, with some guns only getting a sort of “gangsta” treatment and others giving you an actual sight picture. And the whole inventory/mod/crafting situation is a shitshow.

Much of this ends up being small potatoes, and I have really had a lot of fun with the game. But, yeah, soul it has none. It tries, goodness knows it tries, but the pieces do not come together well. I think @Bateau said it well: it is a linear story game masquerading as an open-world experience. When the credits rolled, I had done a tiny, tiny fraction of the stuff on the map. Hell, there are many places I’ve never visited. The way the ending plays out (PSA: it sucks), too, does not exactly make the best platform for continuing on. At least the Assassin’s Creed games like Odyssey and Valhalla segue you naturally into continued play. I have no idea how they will integrate DLC into this thing, given that they’ve written themselves into something of a corner.

4479

Yeah, most shards/notes you find are uninteresting to read. They feel (like all the games that use them) so much like a crutch, they exist to give a very minimum, obvious context, like yeah these gang members were thieves, or this person is a netrunner. They are boring to read.

Another way TW3 is the better game, there were notes in that game, but not so many.

4480

To me – this is the best story game I have played on a long time
It helps that I like futuristic settings - future combat is cool t0 me and I have innunnity t0 bugs

(s0rry ab0ut the zer0es - nny keyb0ard have a few br0ken keys)

4481

And of course a lot of things are told by Dandelion, who is a wonderful framing device.

4482

I am level ~35 now and no, not really. I think all of the missions left to me are now moderate. When I did a very hard mission it just meant I had to pause for 5 seconds for my RAM to regenerate instead of just instantly dropping contagion with no wait time on everyone.

And if you upgrade the Ping quick hack to legendary you can target through walls, so yeah, clearing out a mission is pretty ridiculously broken.

What I want is a rebalance like the Horizon mod for Fallout 4. I like being forced into having to explore everything just to survive, rather than not needing food, drinks, or hell even gun and quick hack upgrades anymore.

4483

Speaking of framing devices, I dislike the framing device used by so many quests here. The figure of the fixer. Getting the missions through a short call from a fixer and a sms feel much more impersonal and formulaic than in TW3 where you talked to people face to face, and this theme of ‘you are a merc hired by fixer’ feels limiting in the type of missions you play. It’s as if they tied themselves too much to that fiction.
In TW3 you were a monster hunter but you ended up playing a pretty big variety of quests, from detective cop to researcher, to diplomat, to heist planner, to explorer, to theater producer to family advice expert . It was ‘unrealistic’ but obviously the game was better for it.

4484

I’m starting to see how hacking is OP, yeah.

Yep. At first hacking is only good enough to supplement normal combat or stealth so it’s ok but once you reach a decent level and decent cyberdeck, baam, you are super OP.
I think that fundamentally, it isn’t a balance problem but a game design problem. If you allow the player to hack enemies at a distance and killing them effortlessly (even more through cameras), then the enemies should be able to defend and counterattack in a similar way. If I spec into shotguns and machineguns I can be a god with them, but at least the player has to be on the thick of things, playing on an even field, and having interesting gameplay (FPS combat) while doing it. You shoot them, they shoot you. Same if I spec into melee. It isn’t the same with hacking once you are good enough.
In the game if enemy netrunners or cameras have LoS they can hack you to detect you or to use some offensive hack like overheat, but that’s a poor solution. Not every location has an enemy netrunner, and just moving to end los isn’t interesting gameplay. It needs something more engaging gameplay in the attack/defense/avoidance areas when hacking.

4485

Known bug relating to action blocked and I had that issue and saw a fix (which worked).

Drop a weapon and equip it directly. It should clear right up.

4486

Cool, thanks. Now if I can recall how to drop a weapon…

4487

Get a high caliber pistol, and put a PAX mod on it. Then you basically have a stun gun that you can headshot folks with from stealth, and take them out.

Alternatively, the other thing you can do is run quickhacks to take them down.

4488

Heh, yes.

At this point, I am essentially an invulnerable god. I can kill everyone in a building super fast, without them even knowing what is going on. It just turns into the bridge of the Event Horizon, and then I walk in through the front door, stepping over all the corpses.

4489

Yes I’ve been saying that all week. The question is whether you find that fun.

I like the feedback of bursting someone’s head like a grape with a high-powered silenced sniper rifle. Holding tab, selecting “overheat”, and watching them die isn’t as satisfying. The quickhacks are magic spells without any animations or visuals. Overheat is a fireball that just silently makes people burn. Contagion is Death Cloud without the cloud.

Sadly there are no silenced sniper rifles in this game, and all the silencers reduce your damage by at least 15%. That’s stupid. They should have added other muzzle modifications that add damage and/or range and have the downside of the silencer being that it does nothing but silence. Synapse thingie is magic missiles without the missiles.

4490

Is the sniper rifle shooting through walls thing a weapon feature, a perk, chrome, or something else?

4491

It IS fun.

Oh, see the stuff I’m doing has a lot more feedback than what you’re talking about here.

The main hacks I’m running now are:
(I’ll spoiler this, just in case someone doesn’t want to know anything about what hacks exist)

Cyber Psychosis
System Reset
Suicide
So, with those things, what I’m doing is sneaking into a building, or sometimes just jumping onto the roof, or looking in through a window, and start hacking folks.The legendary deck I use also makes the effects automatically spread.

So the way it goes down, is something like this… You open up with things like breach protocol, and you get various benefits to your ram regen and reductions in cost… then you can hack everyone fast.

Open up with system shutdown… folks kind of twitch and pass out. Then folks come over and say, “What’s up with this guy?” and then you hack them with suicide… which is fun to watch, because they use whatever weapon they have to kill themselves. If they got a knife? They cut their own throat. If they got a gun, they shoot themselves in the head.

That will sometimes cause folks who witness it to panic and just run away… but folks who stick around? They get hacked with cyberpsychosis, and then the real fun starts. They start murdering everyone around them, and the whole place breaks up into a huge clusterfuck.

At that point, I just chill out, and usually use a silenced pistol to pop people’s heads while they are hiding behind cover to try and avoid getting murdered by the psychos who are now rampaging through the building.

That’s not how it always goes down… but it’s a decent go-to playbook, especially when going up against large numbers of skull level enemies.

Sometimes, I’ll play it more traditionally, sneaking through and popping heads, and using the cyberhacking in emergencies if I get spotted… And ultimately, it’s not all without risk, because my focus in the tech and intel trees has made me weak and mushy… so I can get killed easy if I’m not careful.

4492

All tech weapons can be charged up to shoot through cover.
( with the exception of tech pistols, which don’t seem to really work the same way.)

The real hotness is the tech precision rifle… basically half way between a sniper rifle and an AR.

4493

I went heavy hacking but I love that thing. Vreeep-boom, dead.

4494

You can pry my plaid Fedora from my cold dead head.

4495

The one Panam gives you is silenced. It just doesn’t sound like it.

Where are you guys getting these high-end hacks? Legendary Ping? What? I wonder if what the vendor sells is based on your INT, because mine is low.

4496

The story filler ones are kinda meh for the most part but I read all the “lore” ones to help me recall and filling blanks since it’s been over 20 years for me :)

4497

Crafting, for me. You can upgrade Green->Blue->Purple->Legendary.