Timex
5542
It means you are about to end the final sequence of choices and missions, and you won’t be able to get back into the open world until you are done.
However, one nice thing is that it’s essentially automatically saving stuff for you. When you beat the game, it’ll put you back at this point, right before the point of no return… usually with some additional loot you got from doing the missions.
So it’s kind of like an auto save point, but with the benefit of preserving some select loot from what happens after.
It makes it reasonably easy to check out all the various endings.
Not sure if this is allowed or not, feel free to delete the post, but can if you have some photo skills I’m looking for some hi-res shots of the city at night for a personal art project
Kadayi
5544
I think the engram aspect is intriguing. The idea that a person’s identity is captured, flesh to code, but then, of course, it no longer suffers from one of the human brains greatest deceits, which is how it continually re-imagines, re-edits and re-contextualises past events over time. Your memories are not your memories
In the case of Johnny. He doesn’t suffer from that. His memory is crystalline at the point of his death. But that then begs the question without the ability to recontextualise, does an Engram grow? Does it change. Or is it merely a more sophisticated version of the Dixie Flatline in Gibsons Neuromancer? Like a wasp caught in Amber, perfectly preserved but immutable.
stusser
5545
Johnny was “questioned” while an engram, and sat around presumably in endless torture or sensory deprivation, assuming his engram was conscious at all, but he doesn’t remember any of it after he gets slotted into your head. But once that happens, he definitely shows the capacity to change.
schurem
5546
And Johnny knows. He feels he’s not alive, not real. And then in the end, you, the player get caught up in this as a party as well. Who are you controlling? And who’s decision is it anyway? I found that absolutely delicious. But I’m easy.
rei
5547
His memory is unreliable and he’s an unreliable narrator as Formerly-Alt suggests. His memory where you play him 1-shotting everything in Arasaka tower with his gun later is proven wrong when you get the gun and it’s underpowered. Plus, there’s a gap right after he meets Smasher and almost escapes to the choppa. The pen and paper game have Johnny as a useful idiot for Militech while it’s actually Morgan Blackhand and Adam Smasher who duke it out on top of the tower.
Kadayi
5548
I’m not sure we can take the mechanics are proof positive of Johnny’s being deceitful (in the net, you’re experiencing his memories, but there’s no sense he’s feeding them to you, versus you searching). The gun might have been the bee’s knees in 2020, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily as formidable in 2077. 57 Years later.
I’m pretty sure his gun not being as great as it is in the flashback is just due to the jank way loot works. Almost all the “iconic” stuff you can get during the campaign missions pale in comparison to the regular legendary loot you can get at high levels.
And again we don’t know if something is “right” or not because there are bugs all around, or balance is out of whack. It ruins more than just “gameplay”, see? It hurts meaning and storytelling as well. :(
Bateau
5551
CDP is notoriously bad at this stuff. I still remember that (relatively) epic quest chain in Skellige that rewarded you some named ‘legendary’ sword that was pure vendor trash.
jpinard
5552
Do bad guys respawn? I’m running out of stuff to level up my skills.
It’s not just CDP, though. Balance is tough, especially given the demands of narrative. The story often has you looking for or hearing about epic gear that turns you into a one-person killing machine or allows you to take on dragons or whatever–it’s fantasy tradition. In game terms, though, you can’t give the player something like that because then they won’t use anything else. Unless you are doing an ARPG like the Diablo games or PoE, where there are many different specific niches to fill so something that is uber in one area will be useless in another, you are kind of stuck.
rei
5555
the ones denoted by the blue explosion bubble and fixed placement of gangsters
It seems like there might be solutions to that though. The iconic/legendary gear doesn’t need to be game/mechanics breaking, but it should be interesting when you obtain it. If a piece of gear is called iconic couldn’t the stats be set to scale based on the player’s gear at the point of acquisition? Say have the weapon be 15-25% better than the best piece of equipped gear when the player receives it. At least then it would retain some excitement.
When I was playing 2077 I kept finding ‘iconic’ or super rare weapons that had worse stats than some piece of junk I just picked up off of a dead body. I know you can do upgrades and such to improve the weapons, but the system sure made finding special weapons about as exciting as a coupon for a free Happy Meal.
Bateau
5557
Baldur’s Gate 2 managed just fine. Still the gold standard for loot actually being epic and worth the hype it gets. Not to mention the things you have to do to obtain some - those items feel like proper rewards at the conclusion of epic quest chains.
Except Robe of Vecna lol.
jpinard
5558
The ones with a blue star? Or something else?
Then there’s the problem of giving great loot at the end of the game. Hey, here’s the best sword ever. Thanks for playing, kthxbye!
I played a lot of BG but my enthusiasm waned pretty long ago I must say. I think though it is a bit easier in a game like that, with a bajillion classes and items and spells, than in what is effectively a shooter. Giving someone a bad-ass gun that is clearly badder-ass than anything else means pretty much they will use just that gun. In most cases it seems harder to create a diversity of situations where one weapon to rule them all won’t eclipse all else in FPS type games.
Those enemies were level -140 because it happened 50 years before 2077. In 2077 even steel pipes are made much more damaging than that pistol, and high level steel pipes can probably one-shot tank from our time.
What I mean is there’s clear gameplay and story segregation. Just like Fallout New Vegas the game makes a big deal of you being shot in the head and then you are in a world where everyone can survive a dozen headshots.
