karaddin

16 hours ago, Werthead said:

Less pleased that they otherwise haven't fixed the races at all, so you can still outgun sports cars in the Beast and leave them in the dust (!), and now without the teleporting trick you simply win each race by around 30 or 40 seconds.

Also, I'm trying to work out how the difficulty works (playing on the second-hardest difficulty this time, pretty sure I played on the second-easiest first time). I definitely feel more fragile than I did in my first playthrough but so do the enemies, much less bullet-spongey than before, so it kind of just evens out rather than actually is more difficult.

Bit odd this time around to have Panam as the love interest and Judy as best friend for life, which is the reverse of how it went down in my first playthrough.

Weird on the race front - my 1.6 play through I was in a Quadra and the Caliburn in the first race was way faster than me, especially on acceleration. It suddenly slowed a few checkpoints before the end which was amusing, but without that it would have been unwinnable.

I wonder if the difficulty interacts with the races now, I've been playing on very hard since 1.5. That's the patch that made you much less tanky as well by nerfing armadillo mods and it feels appropriately difficult for a lot of the game, even with a tanky build you can get dropped so fast if a shotgun enemy unloads close range or a sniper lines you up. 

I did finally do a male V run on fake NG+ with a mod and just doing main quests + Panam. I guess I'm a gay girl because the Panam stuff didn't engage me at all the way Judy did so that fits lol. No disrespect to the voice actor but I also just really wasn't feeling male V. Gender dynamics are such a huge part of how I interpret so much of this game and flipping it to a guy makes it a perspective I really don't resonate with.

On 10/14/2022 at 10:16 PM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Kid arrested for “rolling up his window suspiciously” his dad who is later filming from the sidewalk is arrested for “blocking the roadway”… I’m not sure where this happened:

I particularly like the "stop stop stop" while going back to spraying the guy that's already face down on the ground with another cop on top of him and handcuffed not doing anything after you've already sprayed him once. They really do think that's a magic word that lets them do anything.

The case I've really been taken with is the LA cops that brutally beat their colleague to death in a "training accident" when he just so happened to investigating several cops, including one of the ones present for his murder, for a gang rape. It's so blatant it seems pretty clear that the "training" was training other cops to never ever look at their own.

And excessive American fear of "rising crime" has been going on for as many decades as the left has been pointing out that it was actually falling, I don't think a single year increase justifies a significant budget increase for these organised crime gangs. If the budget was paired with mandatory reform being imposed by an independent body it would be a better argument 

4 hours ago, IlyaP said:

I wonder if...oh what's his face name, @karaddin? Calibear? Kalbear? The forum member here who works in videogames? I'm blanking on his name and now it makes The Ilya a sadpanda.png! :\

 

You're not blanking on his name, he's just changed it lol. The poster formerly known as kalbear currently goes by @Kalnestk OblastOblast

Ran got the term I was trying to think of, the TAA stands for temporal anti aliasing and apparently it does poorly with large numbers of somewhat transparent strands that are all on top of each other and moving constantly. So I guess a case of trying to do it better (ie actually rendering individual hair strands) can result in worse initial results on some measures than the easier options games have often used.

4 hours ago, IlyaP said:

There's so much talk about the graphics, and yet...I am still frustrated by how hair (be it beard hair or head hair, etc.) looks nowhere near as realistic as, well, nearly everything else. Why is hair such a challenge? 

There's a specific term for what's happening with hair in it but I forget it lol. It improves a lot at higher resolution. It does improve at higher resolution but doesn't go away

https://www.reddit.com/r/LowSodiumCyberpunk/comments/xw568t/this_game_literally_makes_my_graphics_card_scream/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

I've said the same thing before regarding paying Brazil to leave the Amazon alone. If their natural environment is critical to the health of the planet then it's something we're all using and we should be recognising that, it would also help put a price on some of the externalities that artificially deflate fossil fuel prices.

I think there's an update to Cyberpunk that needs to happen to fully unleash the 4090 as well? I think I saw that the 4### series will support multiple bounces in the reflections with an update to RTX rather than the current 1 bounce. I suspect that improvement from that is going to be harder to pinpoint in a screenshot but be really solid for the subconscious feel of the graphics.

@Jeor I also think Turnbull was significantly left of the majority of his party while Albo at this point is pretty in step with the majority of the Labor caucus. Historically he has been more left but I don't think that's true of where he is any more.

If you want to talk about alternative taxation streams I'm very on board with discussing a land tax that scales with the number of properties owned!

If I was inclined to prayer then I'd be thanking God the Australian people seem a lot less interested in the culture war than the American people are. I agree completely on the coalition thought they could cover a lack of substance with that shit and it completely blew up in their face to the point of it playing a significant role in the loss of multiple blue ribbon seats to the teal independents. Most conservative voters don't want that shit here, it appeals much better to the people that still seem to think they need to protest the no longer existent covid restrictions.

I feel my chances of getting right are much higher if Chats had the same impression, but I don't put much weight in just myself lol. On a first read it's all about getting into the emotional space of the characters, not being analytical.

Yeah I think I have had more of those bugs I'd class as minor in 1.6 than I had in 1.3.

Granted I've got a new graphics card and monitor since then so now I'm playing 1440p with ray tracing and some of the bugs do seem related to when the game is pushing your hardware further, so some of it might be down to that rather than the patch. 

They're the sort of bugs I notice but don't bother me as they don't disrupt game play really.

Disclaimer that I'm not familiar with this youtuber and think he's catering to the overblown hate at the start of the video, but I think this one makes a good point about why Edgerunners functions really well as a primer on Night City that makes the new player experience a lot smoother

Actually on the subject of the prison, we have absolutely no idea who is imprisoned there which seems a bit weird. John refers to it as a decoy facility in Ht9, but no one from the other houses has ever indicated knowledge its even there. 

There was some discussion of the moon idea on Reddit as well with someone bringing up some passages from the start of Gt9 talking about Drearburh/the drill shaft. The main bits I remember were that the atmosphere inside the shaft varies in thickness and visibly so, the atmosphere is pumped in so it's not a natural feature of the celestial body it's on, and I think the atmosphere was giving the sky a non black colour.

I'd taken the atmosphere thinning to imply that the shaft isn't actually sealed, but the atmosphere is kept in the shaft by gravity which felt... Unsafe lol. But with your suggestion of a dome at the top causing lensing it makes a lot more sense, the shaft does not have an adequate amount of atmosphere to fill it so you get thicker atmosphere at the bottom and where the vents are blowing it out and thinner at the top.

I'd also been inaccurately picturing the prison facility above Drearburh as being hovering or low orbital, but these same passages also makes it sound much more likely that it's about half way down the shaft and is where the atmosphere starts to really thin.

I'm really liking your idea that it's lensing from a dome that's making Dominicus look further away.

I'm fine with a couple being like that, but I could have used one or two more that are "good" gangs. The Valentinos are treated by the narrative like they are, but there's some dissonance with the gigs involving them not showing them as being much better. There's a hint of it in the Gustavo Orta quest, but just not enough of it.

Maybe they're all always going to look bad when you're always interacting with them in the context of them being antagonists but that's where having them as the client rather than the antagonist could have really helped. And I do wish there was a reputation system with them as well. Have the Tyger bosses we interact with actually reach out through Wakako and give us a couple of jobs. Have us help the Valentinos out. Let me join the Mox and protect working girls. 

I clearly love this game, so I don't think the lack of these things makes it bad - just that the inclusion of them would make it even better.

But always, in every iteration, fuck the Scavs. They're getting killed every time I ever see them in any play through, but their evil is explicit in the actual main story missions rather than just what you get from the gigs. Their entire existence is built around slaughtering people for parts. Scavs and Nomad Scavs, aka the wraiths, are the only ones I always kill though - apart from things like that gig I mentioned before I take a more variable approach to Maelstrom etc. It depends on what they're doing.

There's also some other gigs that can be done very quickly but I insist on killing everyone at the scene so never take advantage of it. Like a certain father/son duo in one of Regina's gigs

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Instead of entering where the map guides you, you can walk across the road and open a door (forget if it's body or tech check) and double jump up a broken stair case straight to where they are, you don't even see Maelstrom if you do this and leave the same way, but I've got to make a statement about that business so they all die.

Just to be clear I think the obvious location is the most likely one, this alternate theory is a crackpot that I think has some potential but a long way from being sure its right haha.

2 hours ago, felice said:

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It seems unlikely they're in exactly the same location (that would make getting into Drearburh impossible, surely?) but I wouldn't be surprised if that's where the tower came from. Though at least the opening of the shaft is square, not round.

 

I'm not doing a good job of describing it because I'm not sure how to even conceptualize what I mean

Decided to check that, top 1% is $246k so not as comfortably as I assumed! The obscene amount of wealth buried at the top of that 1% really just dominates everything, of course they have the power to fuck over countries to their own gain.

Which means that the 180k we were discussing getting genuine advantage would be something like the top 4-5% of the population. Very fairly distributed clearly, that's your core voter base right there Labor.

2 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

You will have no aspirations, you will rent shit holes, and you will be grateful for your lot in life you whining ingrate!

Or something like that.

But "just get a better job". Clearly 100% of the population can have jobs that pay in the top 1%! I assume at the actual 1% point you can actually afford to buy a home.

Ah Bugbear. One of the many gigs that have become very streamlined from my repetitions lol. I try to vary my approach on at least some of the gigs and I'm still finding new things every time, but for some of them it's so fast and easy I tend to blast through with the way I know.

Gig can be done in a couple of minutes like this lol. And then her rescue car will knock over some pedestrians leaving which is worse than my driving.

I remember looking a few years ago and I'm pretty sure $120k is in the top 10% of the country. It's also still utterly inadequate for buying a house in Sydney if you're paying rent because rental costs are basically the same as a mortgage but you've got to scrape together a deposit while paying someone else's mortgage for them. If you get an inheritance or something that gifts you the deposit, then yeah - it's ok to service the mortgage.

All of which is to say the problem there is, for the millionth time, the housing market. You don't fucking fix that with tax cuts, 120k does not need tax cuts. This country needs a tax hike on 120k, not cuts.

And the above is meant to be agreeing with Pax on focusing on the people that actually need it. If you can't afford buying a home on a top 10% income then how much worse is it for someone on the median income.

Oh yeah, the NFT transfer between games thing was transparently laughable to me haha. I guess my question was less "is it easy" but rather "acknowledging its still a lot of work, is that going to be easier than starting from scratch in the new engine?"

I guess even if they start from scratch, the actual architecture of the city etc is still something they can go back to even if making new assets for it. On that note, I just had this interesting video pop up in my recommendations about the architecture of the 4 apartments they added in 1.5, found the comments about how they made it clear the Glen apartment had structural supports retrofitted onto it was a really cool detail. On the whole they really did their work of making the city itself tell so much of the story.

Also in the comments on the video that could be easily missed is some of the credits for who actually did the structural designs:

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Massimiliano Bottega
1 day ago (edited)
Hey, I'm Max, the guy that created the V's apartment in the motel. The rest of the apartments were created by my extremely dedicated and skilled colleagues at Treehouse Ninjas, a studio in Budapest that assisted CDPR in creating nearly a hundred locations in Night City. We had pretty much total freedom on what to do with the spaces they assigned us for the apartments, so we feel al to of ownership to them  Working on this title was a blast, and we really appreciate your in-depth review. Like everyone else at CDPR, we put our hearts and blood in this project, so it's really nice to hear some good words about what we did  Cheers!

As much as all the people, vehicles etc are good, the biggest thing to me is retaining the city itself (assuming the sequel is set in Night City). They must have put a ton of work into designing the urban landscape and the buildings themselves and you wouldn't want to throw that out and start from scratch. Surely those sorts of objects could at least be imported in a reasonable fashion?

I think it's much more connected to the game than Arcane actually is to League. Yeah, it's not an adaptation of the story in the game but it's so clearly the story of another gonk you could have run into in the Afterlife if you were a year earlier, especially given V is actually 10 years older than David.

Arcane is a fantastic story set in the world of LoL that happens to explain the back story of some characters, but it's just so disconnected from the game play it feels less like an adaptation rather than just another work in the same universe. Which is not a criticism, just musing on the differences - Arcane is also one of the most gorgeous things I've ever seen.

On the Cyberpunk front, I'm also impressed by how strong they managed to make the short video clip to 'Let You Down' (the song that plays over the end credits for Edgerunners). A succinct little tragedy with the terrible thing in her past feeling far too realistic than it should, her decision to sacrifice herself being entirely relatable while also exactly the opposite of what her mother would have actually wanted. They're certainly doing what they need to build on this IP that they invested in.

1 hour ago, Poobah said:

Regarding the current methods it seems that Stele travel is implied to be instant but only goes to pre-made anchor points (there's a comment about this in Harrow about setting up these being an important Lyctor job since they can go wherever through the river), and yeah it does feel like there must be some slow but useable method for BoE to get around under the noses of the houses.

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All that said I am wondering how much information we lack given the crazy shit going on with the river and those undead things. Is it all him and his existence and power and all the evil planet killing and soul manipulation/eating he's doing that's creating these problems? Did killing him however temporarily start some kind of chain reaction / release some of this evil that's been building up? So when/if death finally sticks to him how many more problems will there be to deal with? Is necromancy the only solution? Is there a better way? 

I can't remember if it was here or on Reddit, but I did see someone say

On the Stele travel front, I thought when Ianthe freaks out about how useful river travel would be to the cohort there's an implication it's better than Stele travel due to more reasons than just not needing the infrastructure already in place. Although she does talk about fuel so maybe those two advantages were all.

1 hour ago, Xray the Enforcer said:

One thing that's been bugging me in Nona:

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We see that the ecosystem of the planet they're on has been ravaged. Characters have to wear masks outside, it's implied that they're going through their own global climate catastrophe (too hot during the day), the sea walls can't open and the harbor is clogged with venomous stinging jellyfish, etc. How TF did that happen? How much of the population is living in poverty? And what does that say about humanity as a whole that they keep having to get evacuated off of planets after they destroy them? (that alone suggests to me that the timeline is much longer than 10K years.) What is Tasmyn trying to say about humanity in general? 

I mean, like, John sucks. But honestly it sounds like humanity is destroying as many planets (with the consequent human misery) as the Lyctors are, they just aren't creating RBs when they do it. 

 

You've just made me realize

On 10/3/2022 at 3:18 AM, Maia said:

Yea, but Blood of Eden moved their troops and operatives from planet to planet  without necromancy  fairly quickly. They wouldn't have been much of an opponent for the Cohort otherwise.  And of course there are/were all these planets inhabited by non-ressurected humans, and though theoretically they could have gotten there via sublight, 10 millenia probably shouldn't have been enough for there to be so many. So, some form of non-necromantic  FTL travel must exist and communication between planets ditto. Additionally in Nona:

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Escaping ships were able to leave the solar system - and John's grasp, within hours/days. He described holding the last ship with his power and then it winking out of his grip.

I'm not even convinced that true FTL travel is good enough to explain the spread of non-Nine Houses humans in 10k years, I get the impression their populations are significant and they are *very* spread out, so its going to need to be a lot more than just FTL but its clear from As Yet Unsent

Where I'm going with this is that given what John says about it in Ht9 I won't be surprised if it turns out that BoE FTL, at least the initial version, threw them back in time and humanity has actually been spreading for a lot longer than just 10k years. Or something else along these lines.

Also (Nona spoiler)

Interesting idea from a reddit thread regarding