Cyberpunk 2077 - CDProjekt's New Joint

Yep, it’s running in back compat mode. Update should load faster and offer some RT reflections, looking more like the truly spectacular PC version.

The more they push the release of next-gen, the more my PS5 sits idle. I’ve just too many PC games to occupy me and Cyberpunk was the only game that could get me to play on the PS5, but I’m not doing it until I have the game built for it.

I’m still on the PS4 but I haven’t touched it ever since I got a decent PC. I’m sure I’ll get a PS5 eventually for the exclusives and all that, but my PC is more than enough.

I can imagine most people being happy with their PS4s these days. I really only lucked into a PS5 through casual checking and figured I planned on upgrading anyway so why not, but there was zero urgency to it. I don’t regret it; the consoles last a long time and I’ll more than get my money’s worth out of it. I’d only like a decent RPG to get me on it, which is why D4 is still the game I’d time-travel to play.

I caught up on 731 posts in this thread. There wasn’t anything interesting, sorry everyone!

Question for any players who remember-- I’ve barely started the game and am in the scene where V and Jackie (?) are in the car and he asks if I want to do the VR training, so I figure I need a tutorial and say yes.

The basic combat tutorial goes fine, but then the hacking tutorial seems to be buggy because it never explicitly told me how to scan something. I finally figured out it was the left bumper on the controller but before that I was mystified at how I was supposed to proceed. Was this always broken or did it happen recently in the patches?

So I’ve played through Act I and a couple of missions after and stalled out a bit. They’ve made a city, but it all looks the same. I just follow the map from one location to another and I might as well have stayed where I was. I kind of like the missions inside the buildings, but they’re not anything amazing. Should I keep playing?

Eh, it gets better, but never really reaches super highs or anything. It’s all content polish, and no gameplay polish. They also seemingly completely ignored all advances\common player conveniences in open world game design and UI. Some of the side quest chains are really good, and the game is occasionally really impressive, but there’s a lot of non interactive bits (which is somehow more annoying when you’re in first person), and a looooot of driving around (in a city where the driving sucks).

It’s amazing that it’s been ~10 months now and they’ve basically done nothing to improve the game.

Best excuse, for them, is that the ransomware attack really fucked them.

Unimpressive patch…

They are trying, I’d bet there are at least two people working on post launch support!

I don’t think it’s lack of effort. I think it’s most likely that they backed themselves into a corner and can’t really change the things we’d like changed without effectively redoing much of the game. The fundamental systems and design are problematic, not just the bugs.

I think it’s likely that they have a small core team on immediate bug fixing, and another team making a bigger content update that will be released next year.

It seems they work on technical debt fixing bugs. Like rewriting huge parts of the code so that they can show the game for 5 minutes without dumb embarrassing bugs. Bugfix like “now people aren’t twitching randomly in story cutscenes” are harder to sell than something like “dude won’t talk as if you completed mission if you failed it”, but the latter might take an hour to fix and test and the former might take weeks.

The environments really do get much more varied. The beginning of the game has a lot of missions in a small area, but the game includes a variety of urban, suburban and rural areas. Tank farms and warehouses in an industrial area, small auto yards in a rundown suburb, fancy houses in the hills, ramshackle farmhouse on a country road, motel on a dusty highway to nowhere. The transitional areas between the environments feel very natural as well. The physical spaces are really the stars of the game.

Yeah, the environment is great. Much of the enjoyment I got out of the game was simply going around and doing whatever in the cool environments.

Yup, just roaring along on my bike with the jazz station on. Made for a great film noir feeling.

Oh I haven’t been on much. Been busy with work etc, and I know Jm is grumpy with me for criticizing his streams (god bless him). Just sayin though … I ended up sorta liking this game. NOT finished but …there were some moments where it was sublime. And that’s the best any game can be in my opinion.

I resumed my old playthrough a few days ago and have to say I’m rather enjoying it now - the game still screams lost potential though.

The biggest issue for me is that the game isn’t really what I expected - I wanted more Deus Ex, Shadowrun, Blade Runner, etc; big, sprawling corporate sponsored conspiracies - and outside of main quests the player barely gets a glimpse of this. Corps in the game come across as shell companies that have a PO box registered somewhere and nothing else. Yeah sure, Militech and Arasaka have a few random cars positioned at POIs, but they’re just the same as all the other faceless goons out there - absolutely no flavour on any of the factions. 95% of the game you spend as an errand boy for some dodgy fixers doing pointless quests, it’s terrible. Some of the more fleshed out side quests where you help the more prominent NPCs (River, etc) are a little better though.

And the way the game treats its resources is simply appalling. The soundtrack is pretty good - IF you listen to it outside the game. You get banging songs like this:

But whenever you hear it in the game it’s over some shitty radio that is either too loud or too quiet, or plays at the worst possible time, in scenes where it’s completely out of place. The audio mix in general is super bad, frequently the NPCs sound like they’re talking from another room when they’re riding in a car with you. I often shoot at radios and speakers just to get a break from it. And the beautifully textured vehicles - great, until you call them and they drive over (fortunately by this point you’ve learned to stay still after being ran over them 50 times) and make this cartoony stop and beep, it’s so out of place it hurts.

Or how trying to do literally anything but staring at the NPC as they talk leads to some awkward situations, such as UI getting stuck, NPCs frozen after a sentence, or cancelling the line because you wanted to crouch to pick up an item.

The game had insane potential, but looking at Witcher 3 I doubt it will ever be fully realized. The quests will not be re-written, and CDPR has demonstrated that they are not up to the task when it comes to UI and game balance. Still, the combat is somewhat enjoyable, so it’s not a total loss. It’s not like we’re drowning in first person sci-fi RPGs.

But like @Belisarius said, it’s embarrassing that the game is still mostly in the same state after 10 months as it was at release.

It’s so stupid that quest progress seems to be on a timer. Just now I had to load and save and jump the time a couple of times to trigger “Pisces”, with absolutely no indication that is even going to follow. I’ve cleared the entire open world minus one bugged gig and have nothing but the main quest (at point of no return) to do or to twiddle my thumbs before the NPCs decide to progress their side quests. Sigh.