4820

Skippy is broken tbh.

4821

I just did a gig, ‘The union strikes back’ and I liked the level design, very open. I counted a few ways to enter, very much in Deus Ex style:
-by the front entrance, side door for the employees, and killing everyone.
-using my cyber jump to climb to the ceiling, then jump down to an area that gives you access to an open window. Stealth or combat from that point. I could do it stealthily without problems, even without using hacks.
Distracting the receptionist and getting access key, this gives you three new entries:
-Opening the main door with it and using some hacks to distract a guard that is in a bad position.
-Using the access key to open a side entrance near the toilets in the public area, but you also need a fairly high body check (12, 13?)
-From behind the building, using the access key to enter through the garage and maintenance area, but there is a security guard with a decent los.

4822

Lol at the name of that jacket.

4823

Jim Sterling knocking it out of the park as usual…

4824

I’m fairly sure no one owns that song at the beginning other than Jim Sterling.
Fucking Youtube is such a shitshow.

4825

I’ll lay good odds that company is CDPR! :)

4826

Probably a mine. I died a couple times to that before realizing what was happening.

4827

It ended up being literally nothing. The game was just killing me for no reason. Restarting or the patch apparently fixed it.

And there are no mines when it happens fighting street thugs, but that’s a whole other issue and there at least some of the time it could be something explosive (like I charge into melee and start swinging or whatever), but I’ve had it happen to me on top of a roof miles away while sniping. Street Thug with rifle looks at me and I lose 350 health instantly.

Whatever that second example is, the game does literally nothing to explain it and it makes combat kind of stupid once it starts happening.

4828

Nah, I’ve basically played through every side quest in the game. I’m sitting at level 33 with maxed street cred. Got around 83 hours in the game currently.

4829

The one thing I do like a lot is how Johnny sometimes gives the player really shitty advice on what to do in a quest because he’s a jerk.

4830

I feel like Johnny’s character evolves quite a bit as the game proceeds.

At one point it becomes clear that the construct isn’t actually Johnny. You learn this from the biochip blueprints and stuff that Alt says. He essentially has all of the original Silverhand’s memories, but is only around 85% the same person as the original. And he evolves throughout the game as you interact with him. I liked his commentary on a lot of the side quests… like the one with Bez Isis is a good example.

4831

I am almost 80 hours in, still haven’t met Panam, still enjoying the sidegigs and am not running into any significant problems other than occasional glitch. I am preferring stealth overall, with some hacking and if it goes sideways, smart shooting. The game’s atmosphere and gameplay carries even the less imaginative gigs well enough for me. Of course, proper sidejobs (like I did yesterday with Judy) are significantly better.

One thing that does suck is the fightclub quest, the mechanics are just not good enough. But it can be somewhat cheesed, I threw couple healing items on the floor and with their help defeated Cesar and Rhino without significant issues.

4832

I’m about 50 hours in at the same point in the story. I feel like I’ve been encountering more problems lately after that last big patch. The biggest is one Cyberpsycho quest that seems totally broken, but I’ve also had to reload a save a couple of times when I lost the ability to jump.

But I’m still loving my time with the game, and I’ll probably spend at least another couple dozen hours before I turn my attention back to the main quest lines. It was a nice breath of fresh air to get out of downtown and out to the suburbs to the southeast. That’s been my favorite region so far.

4833

Nah, I did everything I found, except some of the blue icons, but I did a large amount of those as well. However it sounds like you stopped before doing the larger, more impressive side quests. At the end I was lvl 47 and maxed out street cred a long time ago.

I really loved this game - I am surprised how PC people are calling it broken. I crashed once, which makes it twice as stable as most games I play for this long, which was 88 hours. Played through two endings, which apparently are the major choices if Tom is right? I thought there was a third but haven’t done it so may just be a minor modification of the first two - I know both of those were wildly different.

I did run into a few quest bugs. Twice I had to reload about 5-10 minutes and then everything just worked, once I had to google the solution because I broke the quest by doing it out of order. Compared to Skyrim back in the day I felt it was in much better shape on the PC.

One of my favorite components was the level design. No matter where I went there were many different ways to approach a building. I found the skills to be short cuts in most cases, if I didn’t have the appropriate one then I had to spend more time looking for another way in if I didn’t want to go guns blazing. But I very much appreciated how each location felt very unique and more vertical than any game I ever played, especially given the volume.

Story wise it’s not RDR2, that game broke my preconceptions for good a game story could be, but it wasn’t a country mile off either and far better than most games I have played. I cared about more than a few of the characters and really have to give a nod to their actors and directors. In this case I mean both voice and mocap, because more than a few times I was watching the actors faces and could read their emotions. In one event I watched a bright, happy, smile very subtly just melt away, and the conversation followed course.

I do disagree with any criticism towards Night City when comparing it to other game city implementations. Comparing the density and verticality of Night City to something like Crackdown, Spider-Man, and Agents of Mahyem I find to be flat out baffling. Defending that statement though would take a lot of work, so I am not going to get into it, so just chock it up as a vote in the other direction.

Now if you want to talk about the game play, then I can only agree with all of Tom’s criticisms. Like Deus Ex I get why some people don’t care for it, but I very much enjoy it even when I know it’s objectively broken. By the end, even on very hard, I was a walking god of death, one shotting everything with either my pistol or a hack and killing entire crowds with contagion. That’s without spec’ing into the completely overpowered skills for pistols or trying to boost my crit chances much. I don’t know why they don’t spend more time balancing the game and it’s upgrade systems, but I thought the same after TW3 as well. I very much want a reason to keep playing but I need things to upgrade and improve that actually matter. Once those disappear so does my interest if the story is done.

4834

One thing that I’ve found…
There’s a weakness to the hacker/tech heavy build.

In many situations, it’s supremely strong. But there are a few where it suffers.

Specifically:

In one of the final quest chains, you break into Arasaka tower… Being cyber heavy made getting through the tower itself very easy. Basically sleep/suicide everyone before they even see you.

But eventually, you get to a part where Adam Smasher shows up like koolaide man, and you don’t have the option to use your “big guns” of hacking, so you gotta fight him straight up.

This is…challenging… if you have made a character like me, who is based entirely on stealth and hacking. Essentially, my dude is a glass cannon, based on killing bad guys before they see me. That means I’m very delicate, and Adam Smasher breaks delicate things.

Some might level a criticism at the game, which was also leveled at Deus Ex, that it’s bad to force me into this kind of situation… but I don’t think so. I mean, hey, I busted into a freaking heavily fortified tower, knowing that I was likely to die. Sometimes shit happens. You need to be able to improvise.

4835

I think that it may be related to geometry killing you… I’ve encountered some weird one-shot deaths from seemingly nothing, and I think that it’s caused by something bumping you and causing you to phase through the terrain a bit, which then insta-kills you.

In some cases, it actually doesn’t fully kill you, and instead just throws you really far… I’ve had it throw me like 400m while I tried to climb in through a window once.

4836

After bumping the difficulty up, I think I’m at a pretty good sweet spot for me with my hacking build. I’m absolutely deadly as long as I remain hidden, but it often only one or two shots to wipe me out.

And I’ve also decided to (mostly) ignore stats and choose my clothing based on looks, so that’s helping keep me from being too powerful.

4837

I found Adam Smasher to be super easy and I had basically the same build, except hacker/cool. Maybe the crit improvements from cool were what made it so easy? I used a revolver and popped it in the head 5-6 times with only 3 perk points into the pistol tree. My hacks did damage, but not much and only when they crit.

I stopped trying to break the system when I realized just how broken it was, because I was doing 200k+ crits all the time. There were still a ton of skills I could have taken plus augments and clothing choices I just ignored because it was completely unnecessary.

4838

I know the encounter you’re talking about and I had a similar build. What difficulty are you playing on, out of curiosity?

4839

If I get an attribute up to 20, is there any advantage to continuing to pump it up rather than putting points in another stat?