Cyberpunk 2077 - CDProjekt's New Joint

No apology needed. Sorry for coming off as a jerk.

Hey! No apologies and common decency between people on the internet. That’ll earn you an ejection.

Ha!

It’s easy, I think, for emotions to run high on this particular game, regardless. A lot of disappointment for a lot of folks (me included) who had very high hopes.

Personally, I’m hoping to go back and give it another chance maybe in 2022 with absolutely fully re-calibrated expectations.

I think this is a very fair assessment. But I have also seen modders do wonders with some games and completely transform the underlying systems, so I’m not ruling out that the developers with access to source code couldn’t do the same. As always in such cases though, it will likely come to whether someone in charge who’s high up enough will want to stick to the original vision and/or if further development costs in that direction would be justified.

I also agree with @Destarius that the perceived waste of potential hurts more than what is actually wrong with the game.

I’d rather recommend Control for that. It’s as ambitious as it wants to be and ray-tracing is very noticeable there. Most importantly, limited focus in level design makes the game perform fine with RT in 4K on something like GeForce RTX 2070 Super and it looks good. With Cyberpunk I had uneven performance even without RTX. I’ve only played the release version so maybe performance is better now, but I’m not sure.

Thinking now about this game after completing it on release. It’s impossible to overstate how buggy it was, even though 95% of bugs were harmless, but it took you from the experience constantly. I made an experiment screenshoting every visible bug and got something like 10 screenshots in 10 minutes, and on top of that I had sound bugs, AI bugs, weird movement through walls etc.

CP2077 really made me appreciate modern boring open-world AAA games. They are unimaginative, made by the book, predictable, empty… But they learn. In 2015 Witcher 3 put to shame most open-world games with its good writing and tech. But since then things changed. I’m playing Far Cry 5 right now when my brain is too burned for something decent and it’s a good example of what I’m talking. It’s similar to CP2077 but worse in many regards like writing, art, world design. But it’s still OK to great in all of those areas. It’s tech is less impressive but CP2077 doesn’t get to brag about it till it’s bug-free. More importantly it works even without bugs. People focus too much on those bugs and miss the fact that the core gameplay loop of CP2077 is flawed beyond fixing.

Loot is unsatisfying and boring. The economy isn’t interesting as there isn’t anything good to spend money on except some augmentations maybe - and even augmentations that sound interesting (double jump) do not give you any real advantage or open possibilities. Your stats barely affect your playstyle - I know cause my character was the worst sniper in the world yet by the end sniper rifle was my most effective weapon. People have figured out that a lot of perks just simply do not work. And with dumb AI and teleporting enemies fighting is just isn’t interesting. Back in 2008 when I played Fallout 3 I was blown away by a proper open world RPG being stitched to a crappy shooter, and CP2077 basically does the same. Witcher 3 combat and loot weren’t something to write home about either but it was simple and it worked. CP2077 is much more ambitious in terms of gameplay but unless you’re playing stealth melee character you’re playing a subpar looter shooter with a decent (but unfocused and uneven) story.

It is odd, that after all this time they still have not fixed most of the broken perks. You would not think this would be a difficult task.

Maybe they are tied to systems that are not actually in the game? That would be one reason.

Interesting point; while I would assume all the needed libraries are there, I could picture some minor dependencies for proper operation getting missed as incomplete/broken content was excised just prior to release.

There’s a potentially really good game in there, but I’m waiting to pick it back up as the bugs hurt my immersion.

My assumption is they would not release a game where they had a perk that say let you fly or turn invisible when such things were never implemented. I consider a bug when you have a piece of code that is supposed to work, but has some flaw in it causing it to work improperly. However, if its not even implemented: void turnInvisible() { // TODO: implement functionality }
Then that is fraud. They least they could do is disable the ability to spend perk points on perks that are not even made yet.

Anyway, I do want to replay this, but only after the core gameplay has been mostly fixed. I was hoping I could do another run during my christmass break, but at this pace it may be years until its ready.

That is really my biggest heartburn with this whole fiasco. There is something like 2 or 3 dozen perks that either don’t work or don’t work correctly still lingering out there. Stuff like add a percentage to something… I can’t conceive of why something like this isn’t fixed yet.

Do you need perks to beat and/or enjoy the game? Nope but it does detract from my enjoyment of running through with different builds.

Bought this one on the XBox Series X a while back on a nice amazon deal ($17 - used), but bounced off it pretty hard. Not because of any bugs, but just because I wasn’t in the mood for a dystopian cyberpunk game.

Will eventually come back to it I think. Just needed something a bit lighter and less involving.

Mind you, I am not alleging that this is the case, only suggesting it may well be one of the reasons. I believe some of the perks in the game at release, like the one referencing using human shields, were tied to systems that were not in the game (as in, you could not take an NPC as a human shield, hence a perk for enhancing that ability was sort of null). But I do not know where the game is at this point on stuff like that. And it was seemed a lot more like an “oops” than anything intentional.

The only explanation I have is that there’s just that many bugs higher in the priority queue. Which really says something about the state the game was in when it shipped.

Curiously, apart from the start and end of the main story, the game itself is rather light-hearted. Nothing says cyberpunk like helping the cyber police to deal with some punks!

As an aside, I’ve been re-re-reading Gibson’s seminal cyberpunk trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) and one, it still holds up amazingly well; two, Gibson can freakin write; and three, it’s clear that translating the mix of grit, glitz, and gore that lies at the pulsing neon (or maybe LED) heart of cyberpunk to a game space is not easy. The Deus Ex games did perhaps the best job of it overall, though I’m sure there are other ways to look at it. Cyberpunk 2077, all discussion of its other characteristics aside, nails a lot of the visuals, but little else about the genre in my admittedly biased opinion.

I think Shadowrun games do a good job too. It complicates things with magic which is probably a bit excessive. But it successfully presents you a world where some people have problems transcending beyond the human shell and some have nothing to eat and suffer from organized crime and corrupt police.

Latest Deus Ex (Mankind Divided) was a letdown in that regard. They’ve tried to show a cyberpunk future in an old city instead of skyscraperland, but failed properly showing Prague (it felt like a faraway boring suburb of a European city. Maybe that was the idea but I’d expect them to show great bridges and cathedrals and monuments contaminated by technology, not some sleeping quarters) and dangers of technology. The game talks about the divide but you personally almost never have to face oppression or bigotry even though you play as the most augmented person in ther world.

CP2077 looks right and the ending is properly dystopian, but for the most part it isn’t. It really undermines the main conflict and the character of Johnny Silverhand, who talks as if the world around is Bladerunner while it’s no more depressing than GTA cities.

I found this quite surprising in my time with Cyberpunk 2077. Not only is the world filled with radiant missions of helping the police gun down people in the street in an extrajudicial manner, but at the beginning of the game during the cinematic car ride with Jackie you watch as some police airship just slaughters people in the street and Jackie mutters, “Eh, they probably deserved it.” A lot of that felt tone deaf to play in 2020, but also completely misses the meaning of the punk part of the genre and the intentions of its godfathers.

2077 is a sharp contrast to the anti-authoritarian and anti-establishment storytelling template that Harebrained Schemes laid out in their excellent Shadowrun games.

Sure, it looks cool driving around in 80’s style cars in the neon-soaked rainy city, but sadly 2077 misses much of the subtext of the genre. It delivers the surface level aesthetic in spades

Not to mention that it makes you think you’ll have some cool encounters with those flying cop squads, but nope. Never seen again. Same with the combat medics.

I believe the elite cops do teleport in if you cause severe mayhem now. They patched that in later on. Of course you can just run two blocks away and they give up.

Right, but you don’t see the flying cop cars again.