rei
5241
Wow that was annoying. Johnny’s electric guitar riff loop played endlessly over some cyberspace scenes and into the normal world after until I restarted the game.
Bateau
5242
I think that’s a common misconception regarding the blowback on this title. I had next to no expectations and hype going in becaue I’ve been avoiding the pre-release materials, but I knew that I’d likely be in for a decent open world game that’s up to industry standards, since it was coming from a major player in this field. As in, I’d have been fine with something that was on par with a bog standard Ubisoft map clearing title. But this isn’t it. The first few hours were amazing and then it falls of a cliff and all you are left is generic open world content and critical path and side quests that you can easily tell were cut to the point that some don’t even make sense anymore. And as high as my tolerance generally is for bugs I have to say the sheer amount of them that I experienced in Cyberpunk was too much in the end. But worst of all were the clearly underbaked and poorly thought out systems that permeate the entire game. I’m willing to forgive a lot of things, but poorly thought out systems cross the line.
All in all, Cyberpunk is Wasted Potential: The game for me, and I suspect for many others. Mostly because titles like this come out once a (console) generation and to have it be mishandled with such incompetence feels like a kick in the nuts.
(I’m sincerely happy that some of you are getting your fair share of fun out of the title though, so don’t read into my post too much)
rei
5243
Example of broken or incomplete system: that damned phone book mechanic
I feel like that as well, 17 hours into the game. I did have fun in those 17 hours - most of them - so I guess I’ll uninstall and come back when the “enhanced” edition comes out.
It’s not that expectations were too high, but that many people expected something particular in their own minds that was no guarantee. For example, you expected an industry-standard open world game. I never did. I figured the only sure thing was their great cast of believable and likable characters. Even then I started to doubt that due to the setting.
My biggest problem is probably the fact that I don’t like V, and there aren’t a lot of options in terms of making the playable character my own, so to speak. So I have this character who is, on one hand, a somewhat established character with a personality and tone I don’t connect with, and on the other hand a void that I can’t really fill because the game doesn’t give me the tools to do so. Cyberpunk 2077 might be an enjoyable game but it is a terrible RPG, at least in its current state.
Totally non-important question about PS4 bugs: so, is the fact that almost all haircolour-choices look the same a bug, or did they just pretend that the colours were different?
You capture many of my sentiments.
I am really surprised that people found the open world immersive in any way. I tried that and broke away from the central story path for a while and just did side missions, gigs, and stuff I found in the world like gang fights. I couldn’t get immersed at all. The food vendors were pointless and cluttered up your map. I continually saw duplicates or triplicates of the exact same NPC model all walking together and doing the exact same actions. I would park my motorcycle on the sidewalk and that would back up traffic for miles despite being nowhere near the street. I would watch NPCs cross the street, get to the other end then immediately turn around and cross again among all kinds of other pointless tasks on repeat. There was no immersion, just a lot of obvious seams of rushed content and illusionary facades that fell apart if you weren’t driving by at 70 mph. I stumbled across a YouTube channel that was doing ‘Day in the Life’ vignettes of NPCs and they were hilarious like when one bum was pissing on a dumpster then another one walked up right behind and started pissing on/through him almost looking like they were humping each other.
I wanted to see the quality of the side missions so I did every single Delemain cab recovery task (partially to shut him up) and found them repetitive, tedious, and likely playing out the exact same way if done again on another playthrough. The writing for them seemed to think it was far too clever and funny for its own good. They started draining my open world motivation.
I’m not sure what expectations I had going into this as I barely followed this game before release, but I guess I at least thought CDPR would meet Witcher 2 or 3 levels of open world quality. Seems like medieval villages, forests, and swamps are much easier to make immersive over a dense city. This doesn’t even come close to scratching the immersive qualities of their previous games in my humble opinion.
I think different folks find immersion in different ways. I would agree with all of the criticisms about Night City as an open world environment. I still got immersed in it, though definitely in my own way. For me, I was able to overlook the sometimes quite egregious failures of the game environment because what I found immersive–in the sense of pulling me into another place for experiences that engaged me and were interesting enough to keep me coming back for more–was the stuff that had nothing to do with the city as a living thing. Or, for that matter, with realism of any sort. I just liked having a big playground with lots of verticality and nooks and crannies in which to roam about doing the things I can’t do (and would not do) in real life. Namely, act as a one-person death squad harvesting hoodlums for fun and profit.
It’s like a theme park, albeit admittedly in this case kind of like one during the day time, when too much of the sausage making is visible. It’s definitely not a movie, or a LARP experience, and certainly not Westworld.
You did the Delemain missions to experience what side missions were? That was the worst one. I did Delemain missions only if they were convenient and I was in the area. There were much better lines of quests.
But is it too funny to be accurate… or too accurate to be funny?
I am sure I missed some decent side missions and content within the game. The thing is, I interpret that along the lines where people say you need to play so-and-so game for 40-60 hours before you get to the really good part. If the front-loaded content and most of the stuff I have to wade through to get to the better higher-quality parts is not working for me or is of poorer construction then I start feeling like the game is not respecting my time and move on to games that do a better job of that.
Edit: Also if the Delemain missions were the worst of the bunch why did the game take so many pains to push them and repeatedly highlight them? After you get into the second act the Delemain missions were all listed as individual side missions and took up the vast majority of the ‘Side Mission’ list in my journal. Delemain keeps calling you about his Taxis to the point of overriding other phone calls or conversations you are having with main characters and talking over them. And the Delemain taxi service featured prominently in the first act of the game during scripted events. All of those taken together present a sense of urgency and importance to that Side mission chain that really has no big narrative payout. I thought man this is a big chunk of side content that the game keeps prioritizing, let me check it out; maybe it loops back into the main story path.
jsnell
5255
Not sure where you’re getting the “40-60 hour until you get to the good parts” strawman. You’re plunged straight into the good parts, and the game allows you to mainline them with basically no gating or having to grind through filler. (And let’s be clear, the game has tons of low quality filler. But you do not need to interact with it in any way to get to the “good parts”.)
But if the main story quests are not working for you, no amount of playing the other content will make you like the game. There’s good side stuff, and some of it it will enrich the main story in various ways, but it’s not orders of magitude better or anything like that.
I didn’t articulate myself well. I meant the phrase 40-60 hours as sometimes used for other games (like an MMO I guess) and not that you needed 40-60 hours specifically in Cyberpunk. I was just applying that rough sentiment to this game as people keep saying there are some good side missions buried amongst the filler.
Delemain quests suck, plain and simple. Then again, that is partly due to the horribad quest/holo/message system and UI, as well as the quests themselves. The idea is cool as hell. The implementation? Not so much.
A lot of reviewers have noted how short the critical path is, which is a fair criterion. Maybe others play things this way too, but I generally try to avoid critical path, main mission stuff in large open-world RPGs as much as the game will let me. I always end up being overleveled if the game lets you, or at least better equipped and skilled than intended when I hit up the main quest stuff. In Cyberpunk, on my current nomad dude I’m trying to see how much I can do before absolutely having to do the Heist (or until I get so bored with the same crap that I voluntarily go through that again).After that milestone, it’s a challenge to see how much I can do before finally starting the point of now return bits. Last time, on my corpo, I got to like level 40 before doing it.
I believe that was a design choice, due to data showing that so many players never finished the main quest in Witcher 3. They therefore pushed the Main Q/Side Q content ratio a bit towards the latter.
That’s perfect for my playstyle. I always avoid main quests as long as possible. I want to see all the content and marinate in the gameworld for a while before rushing to the end.
Yeah, that’s me too. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that many games have much better side quests than main quests.
Yup, I love this design decision, it means when I start to get tired of the game I can actually wrap it up before it becomes complete drudgery.
As far as immersion – it’s obviously completely subjective. For me, it checks the boxes. I love the environment and I love just driving around the city (haven’t even bothered to check out the fast travel stations). Frankly, I’m more immersed in the game now than after my first ten hours. I can totally see people not being immersed if what they wanted was to be able to go into tons of shops or have every food vendor be different, etc. I guess I don’t think that’s possible in a video game based on a large city, hell even towns in RDR2 had just a few building in each town you could actually go into. Certainly there are tons of little things that could be done to increase immersion more but for me it’s fine and does enough to let me suspend my disbelief.
Anyway – it’s just kind of a head scratcher for me as very rarely do I love a game that so many people think is a complete disaster. Hell, I even love Johnny popping up and saying completely ridiculous things. I’m not sure it’s supposed to be funny, but the lines and delivery are something else :)
