I’m right there with you. W3 was too much story, too many cutscenes to get to the meat, and then the combat was unsatisfying. CP caught me immediately, my only big complaint is that the open world stuff is a little thin on throughlines and the power curve is a bit too quick to become godlike, but the city and the views are incredible.
Moment to moment exploration, movement, fighting–all that is great in Cyberpunk 2077. The main story is a matter of taste, but overall well executed IMO. Bigger side missions are often good. Gigs and filler missions are mostly bad. I’ve put over 433 hours into the game so yeah I do like it a lot, but at this point I’m done until new stuff.
Progression for instance is sort of wonky. The first time, it’s pretty cool. After that, though, you can easily max out level and street cred long before you max out the storyline missions, at which point all that’s really left is completionist stuff which is generally meh. In fact, the game sort of encourages you to max everything out before the point of no return, in a lot of ways (mostly around combat and skills).
I took to Cyberpunk instantly though; it took well over a year or more before I could finally make W3 click (but when it did I loved it too).
I certainly have issues with a lot of the game’s systems. It’s impossible to get most skills to lvl 20 unless you grind enemy spawn loops. With just natural gameplay, if you do every mission and stick to one weapon type, maybe you’ll hit level 18 with that. Just forget Athletics. The only way to level that is to drain your stamina meter. Every 5 times or so you get 75 XP, 90 if you slept. There are good skills in that tree too.
The only skill I got to 20 was crafting, and that’s because you can exploit crafting to get infinite money. Buy supplies, craft, sell for profit, skip time in game and repeat.
I also agree that many of the gig missions are filler. The NCPD ones are even worse. At least those are stop, murder everyone, get some cash and XP. They don’t take a lot of time unless you’re trying to 100% those.
The main story missions are where this game shines. They went above and beyond with those. The Johnny flashbacks are fantastic too. Seeing how the world changed, even if it’s just in small slices, was really cool. They created characters I actually care about and I felt like I was a part of their lives.
Or, as the case may be, didn’t change. A lot of it is about the tension between needing to resist and the futility of resistance.
I think the things that keeps it from earning that fourth A are simply a longer main mission story and having all the side missions have actual impact. I loved every second I was doing something, but ultimately they were unimportant other than stat pumping and item collecting. The main mission I felt was perfectly fine but needed to be at least 2x longer.
I suspect it was supposed to be longer, with full origin story integration and probably a lot more stuff with the city itself. As we now know though, mistakes were made…
Yeah, but didn’t it have some ridiculous production cost like 200 million? FFS, hire some writers.
The best quest/mission/whatever in the game involved a vending machine.
As is often the case, apparently it was a matter of mismanagement and not lack of resources. They seemed to have had plenty of labor, not enough direction or something.
There a known good way to skip the game launch/intro videos and get right to the main menu? My Google-fu fails me.
I believe if you’re using Cyber Engine Tweaks it also has setting(s) for that.
Happy 10th anniversary to this thread. 10 years to the day since Cyberpunk was first teased.
Oh, lol. Good one.
I’ve been firing it up again the last few days (Got a new SSD so it’s installed again) and it really is an amazing looking game.
Holy crap you weren’t kidding.
Finally finished today after 86 hours - near as I can tell I left no mission un-mished (only worked on main story when there wasn’t anything else to do). There’s literally handful of RPG(-y) games in my years and years (and years…) of play I can say I finished. Only other ones come to mind off-hand are Oni, NWN 1 & 2, and Control.
All the NCPD jobs were unmemorable, as were majority of the fixer jobs. But they managed to hit me right in the feels (absolutely wrecked me a couple times in the final stretch) more than once in the main story and featured character side jobs. I’m gonna miss this gonk. I think Jackie would’ve been proud of him at the end. He shook the Pillars of Heaven Arasaka.
A strange assortment!
That’s umm, quite the outfit. :-) I went with a female V-- I’ll post a pic soon.
