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2 hours ago, Relic said:

Dont bother playing Cyberpunk on a base level Xbox. It's fucking horrible looking

It really is something to behold. At times it looks like a bad cel shaded movie. This distance of NPCs from your character seems to determine if they look like they belong in an N64 game or a 360 game. Then when you get real close they sorta look ok. 

Do the vehicles seem super slow and janky in the other versions? 

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2 hours ago, Werthead said:

8 hours in and I haven't really advanced the main storyline. I decided to go super-focused on doing the side-jobs and quick jobs to level up and they're both extremely entertaining (even if the "Moderate" difficulty description is doing a lot of heavy lifting) and there's an absolute monster amount of them. Which is handy because the skill tree is absolutely colossal in size, so you need a lot of exp. It is a little frustrating that you can't see all the missions at once though. You unlock new jobs as your Street Cred goes up, so as you complete missions, more appear, rather than going down.

I'm seeing why there's such huge variance in playing times in the main reviews. If I'd focused on the main story mission I'd be almost halfway through it rather than barely started (I still haven't seen the title card, and zero sign of Keanu yet).

Some of the missions are quite varied and entertaining.

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Dealing with a quick-moving blade specialist proved quite tough until I found a rapid-firing power shotgun, which slowed her down enough for me to actually hit her. Getting into a knife-fight with a guy armed with a flaming katana was something else. And rushing a guy who'd bought a faulty prosthetic penis which was literally on fire to a doctor was fairly gruelling. "It feels like it's in a pencil sharpener!"

My first, serious, meeting with DeShawn took place with two gangs going completely apeshit and blasting one another with machine guns and grenades in the background, which kind of dented the mood (until the car drove off anyway).

But yes, the cars handle even worse than the ones in GTA4. You have to leave a lot of turning space for them.

I got completly side tracked by going from side mission to side mission. 

I'm thinking about restarting though as I made some leveling mistake(throwing knives... ). 

Maybe I will try the female voice although I don't mind the male voice.

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2 hours ago, Ran said:

So, this particular queue was bad, but I'm not really mad about that -- that's the one downside for using a streaming service, especially when it's offering 2080+ equivalent graphics for approximately 1% of the price of such a card. However, when you select a game, you select which service you own it on -- Epic, GOG, Steam, in the case of Cyberpunk 2077 -- so after, literally, three hours of a queue... the Epic store version of Cyberpunk popped up, and promptly kicked me and had to queue all over again.

So, if you use GeForce NOW, do use the Desktop Shortcut feature it has, so that you can use that to tell it to go to the game in the correct service.

Fortunately for me, mornings look much easier to get on to the game, and it's mostly mornings when I play, so genuinely not fussed. Was mostly just planning to play around with photo mode to get a shot of my version of V anyways, but eh, I'll wait until he has some nicer threads anyways.

I haven't had any issues at all getting into the game this afternoon/evening.  Obviously last night was something of a shit show, but the game has loaded pretty much immediately both times I went to play it today.

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I put another 4 hours into Cyberpunk today, and feel like I've got a better handle of things now. I like the game, and it looks good on my PC. Have only had 1 or 2 really minor bugs too. The open world is not perfect by any means (for one thing, the NPC driving AI feels like something outta 2009), but it feels like a good backdrop to the story. I'm still really early in the story, but I'm liking it so far; and I think the brain dance mechanic is pretty neat (though I hope it doesn't get overused).

I am a bit disappointed that so far all the side jobs and gigs (and what's the difference between them exactly?) have been little vignettes at best, but some of them have been entertaining. I hope there's some deeper side quests at some point though (and maybe have them put under 'Main Jobs' so they don't get lost in the journal). I'm also hoping I get some deeper dialog trees at some point, and some real choices in what I say.

I'm playing on Hard (and also gimping myself by sticking with the best looking clothing rather than the best stats), and combat feels reasonably good. Though I feel like I need to decide what kind of character I'm going to be pretty quickly, the skill trees are too big to be a jack-of-all-trades I think. So far I'm doing a blades and pistols combo thing and its not that effective, been burning through med items. But somehow I have over $10k already, which means I can stock up on med items and just use them constantly.

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23 minutes ago, Fez said:

I put another 4 hours into Cyberpunk today, and feel like I've got a better handle of things now. I like the game, and it looks good on my PC. Have only had 1 or 2 really minor bugs too. The open world is not perfect by any means (for one thing, the NPC driving AI feels like something outta 2009), but it feels like a good backdrop to the story. I'm still really early in the story, but I'm liking it so far; and I think the brain dance mechanic is pretty neat (though I hope it doesn't get overused).

I am a bit disappointed that so far all the side jobs and gigs (and what's the difference between them exactly?) have been little vignettes at best, but some of them have been entertaining. I hope there's some deeper side quests at some point though (and maybe have them put under 'Main Jobs' so they don't get lost in the journal). I'm also hoping I get some deeper dialog trees at some point, and some real choices in what I say.

I'm playing on Hard (and also gimping myself by sticking with the best looking clothing rather than the best stats), and combat feels reasonably good. Though I feel like I need to decide what kind of character I'm going to be pretty quickly, the skill trees are too big to be a jack-of-all-trades I think. So far I'm doing a blades and pistols combo thing and its not that effective, been burning through med items. But somehow I have over $10k already, which means I can stock up on med items and just use them constantly.

I imagine you need to get out of the prologue before you start getting to the real meat of the game regarding side quests.  I don't think the little jobs you get (like from Regina) are legitimate side quests.  I think they're just a means to earn some extra scratch and gain street cred.

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My Cyberpunk 2077 review

"Capitalism, capitalism never changes."

Cyberpunk 2077 is a game that has been hotly anticipated for the better part of nine years. Delayed by both the mammoth juggernaut that was The Witcher 3 and its DLC plus the inability to get it to work on current generation consoles, it was finally released in the tail end of 2020. The people here at Grimdark Magazine were hotly anticipating this game and I had to fistfight the others to see who would get to review it.

Cyberpunk is the purest expression of the grimdark science fiction series. It combines noir, moral ambiguity, a nihilistic worldview, and genre tropes to create a world where doing good is possible but only on the individual level. Most of its antiheroes don't even bother with that, only caring about their next paycheck and their partners (if even that). On the Keanu Reeves scale, they tend to be Johnny Mnemonic and John Wick over Neo. Which is good because this game stars Keanu Reeves as your inner Tyler Durden.

I'm familiar with the world of Cyberpunk 2077 from my experience with Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk 2020. Crafted in the Eighties, it was never the biggest seller among tabletop roleplaying games but it managed to combine Mad Max, Akira, Blade Runner, Max Headroom: The Series, and a half-dozen other sources to create a fully realized dystopian world that went on to inspire dozens of other settings. If you think about a generic cyberpunk world, as if such a thing could be, you're probably actually thinking about Mike's vision as it could do anything from the movies you loved.

A brief rundown for laymen is that the United States has broken up into several new countries due to the collapse of the economy due to a combination of corporate malfeseance as well as depleted resources. Environmental devastation means that much of the Midwest is now ruined wasteland with feuding nomadic clans, cities have become overcrowded urban hellscapes, and corporations now wield the power of nations. Technology has flourished, though, with cybernetics becoming ubiquitous even for healthy able-bodied people and space travel is commercialized.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a future extrapolated from Mike Pondsmith's future of 2020, not our time so some people may be confused by this. Either way, it is a world that is still relevant due to the fact our 2020 is pretty much a hyper-consequence of the policies enacted in the 1980s. Many of the same greedy materialist corporate executives who rose to power then are still in power today, looting the economy and feeding the masses a steady diet of propaganda.

Cyberpunk is inherently political and this game manages the careful balance of making its points clear while not feeling the need to lecture on what is self-obvious. When you ask whether the marketplace shrimp is fresh and the vendor says, "Absolutely. It's all raised in the aquarium downtown. None of that toxic crap from the bay." You know what it's saying without sounding unnatural. The game touches on everything from for-profit health care, police brutality, corporate malfeseance, rising poverty, defunded social services, and the treatment of sex workers. All within the first few hours and it uses these to tell interesting stories.

The plot of Cyberpunk 2077 is an interwoven set of crime-based stories around a central narrative that is about a miraculous peace of technology gone horribly wrong. I'd call it "Ghost in the Shell meets Fight Club." The stakes are very low in Cyberpunk 2077, at least compared to most Triple A games with it being more science fiction Dragon Age II than Dragon Age: Origins or Inqusiition. This is about personal stakes and protecting your small corner of Night City rather than anything world changing.

Gameplay-wise the game ranges from being excellent to a mess. It basically plays like Skyrim with guns, cyberware substituting for magic. There's also elements of Deus Ex and Watch_Dogs with the ability to sneak up on enemies to auto-kill them or hacking security cameras. Honestly, it doesn't exactly mold all of these divergent gameplay styles together perfectly but feels more like a Frankenstein's Monster combination of whatever they thought was cool. There's just too much going on with looting and shooting, gathering armor types, cybernetics, and hundreds of perks. Gameplay would strongly benefit from being much simpler and closer to Deus Ex or even just the tabletop game.

The character creation engine is pretty robust with the option of making characters ranging from the absolutely gorgeous to the supremely ugly. Much has been made of the power to make characters of trans identity but this hasn't been anything new since Saints Row 2. Your pronouns are also tied to your voice, which is a cheap fix that kind of undermines the benefit. Still, I had a lot of fun making Agent G from my cyberpunk novels and playing him. You get to choose an origin for your character but these scenes take about ten minutes to resolve and aren't really that interesting.

Generally, the game consists of you traveling around Night City and shooting up the place at various gang bases while also performing various investigations on behalf of clients. V is a mercenary and criminal for hire so they don't need to justify why they're doing 90% of the missions they do. The writing is top notch with virtually every type of corruption available. Sadly, their character is a bit pre-set with often very little variation on their responses. V is a likable character but, unfortunately, the straight man to a lot of the more eccentric character's reactions.

The game runs pretty smoothly on Playstation 5 and the newest Xbox iteration but is a pretty buggy mess at launch for Playstation 4 and Xbox One S. It was actually hard to see in places due to the lighting too with it moving from atmospheric to, "how the hell do I get out of this room?" Patches have already improved a lot of the most glaring flaws but long loading times, clipping, and the occasional floating head. Still, I had a lot of fun just shooting up Night City's gangs and breaking necks like a cybernetic Punisher or Solid Snake and that worked just fine.

In conclusion, this is a solid and entertaining game but people should adjust their expectations. The amount of bugs and somewhat confusing overcomplicated gameplay hurts the overall experience. If you're using a last generation console, you're probably best to either wait a month or two for patches but current gen should definitely buy this right away. It is a fantastic setting, characters, and full of amazingly written stories. I also feel it is a game with many strong opinions that are presented with a world that makes them fun to hear. Plus Keanu Reeves is awesome here, proving himself the undisputed god of non-literary cyberpunk. Maybe co-god with William Gibson of the entire genre.

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16 hours ago, Werthead said:

Argh, Large Address Aware restrictions on games from that era are really annoying (Fallout 3 and New Vegas had it as well, and I believe the first Mass Effect). They locked the amount of memory the game could use at the level of the PS3 and the X-Box 360, so PCs which were typically rocking 4 or more times as much memory couldn't benefit from it. The LAA patches are a godsend for making the games run decently on modern hardware.

There's also some spectacular texture mods and updates out there for all the Dragon Age games (and the Mass Effect ones).

What are your specs? There's a lot of surprise from people that the game is running really well on lower-end hardware. One person was reporting getting a playable 30 FPS+ running at Ultra at 1080p on a 970, which is pretty impressive. I'm running High on a 2060, since my cooling is not as great as it could be and I don't want to cook a burger whilst playing, but it looks pretty stunning.

Funny Mass effect has been mentioned so recently. New Trailer for Mass Effect...4? Speculation that it's set soon after ME3. https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/10/22168974/mass-effect-teaser-the-game-awards

This article says the Mass Relays are all destroyed at the end of ME3 no matter what choice you make. But of course that isn't true. Because you can choose to let the cycles continue, so the Reapers don't destroy the Mass Relays with that choice. 

I am assuming technically the game will be a lot better than Andromeda. But in fear they are going to try to double down on the Anthem style.

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5 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

This article says the Mass Relays are all destroyed at the end of ME3 no matter what choice you make. But of course that isn't true. Because you can choose to let the cycles continue, so the Reapers don't destroy the Mass Relays with that choice.

I think that, as of the Extended Cut, the relays aren't necessarily destroyed in some of the other endings either, only temporarily damaged (at least, the Extended Cut adds scenes of them being repaired in some scenarios).  And there's a final scene suggesting Shepard survives in the high EMS Destory ending, too.

(Also, pedantically, the relays don't "allow inter-galaxy travel", for obvious reasons.)

In any case, I assume that any post-ME3 game will have to just make one of the possible endings canon (presumably the Destroy ending, since that leaves a galaxy most closely resembling the setting of the games).  Which I think would be fine, honestly.  The endings of ME3 weren't written to have any sequels, but they're also a pretty terrible bit of writing, so why not just ignore them as much as possible?

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1 hour ago, Plessiez said:

I think that, as of the Extended Cut, the relays aren't necessarily destroyed in some of the other endings either, only temporarily damaged (at least, the Extended Cut adds scenes of them being repaired in some scenarios).  And there's a final scene suggesting Shepard survives in the high EMS Destory ending, too.

(Also, pedantically, the relays don't "allow inter-galaxy travel", for obvious reasons.)

In any case, I assume that any post-ME3 game will have to just make one of the possible endings canon (presumably the Destroy ending, since that leaves a galaxy most closely resembling the setting of the games).  Which I think would be fine, honestly.  The endings of ME3 weren't written to have any sequels, but they're also a pretty terrible bit of writing, so why not just ignore them as much as possible?

Personally, I would prefer to have a cycles continue ending be canon, and the game picks up with you being a species that is discovering the mass relays for the first time (after several other species had already settled into the citadel) kind of like the humans, but perhaps at about 49,500 years into the cycle and you not being the last species to join the party and being the upstart heroes. Maybe about 1,500 years into a the equivalent of the Council Era, which is about 600 years before humanity got on board. And you are the one who finds Liara and Shepard's messages and the diagrams for the Reaper killing device. But of course everyone, even your own people think you are full of shit. And maybe there is a secret message from Shepard saying he/she chose to let the cycles continue because the current dominant species did not deserve to rule the galaxy and the hope is the next lot will be better.

Though I guess what they might do is play out the what if scenario. Just like what if Thanos was right, what if the Reapers were right? And not too many years after the Reapers are toasted things start going to shit, and more Haestroms start popping up around the place and other things that seem to be creating galactic instability are happening. There has to be a big bad of some kind, right?

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Has anyone played Cyperpunk on an Xbox One X(the upgraded version of the previous generation)? Getting good info seems difficult as even gaming sites seem to confuse the different console versions. The people responsible for naming these consoles need to be fired... 

I think getting a new console be it a PS5/Xbox whatever might be better than buying the game on the old one. 

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2 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Personally, I would prefer to have a cycles continue ending be canon, and the game picks up with you being a species that is discovering the mass relays for the first time (after several other species had already settled into the citadel) kind of like the humans, but perhaps at about 49,500 years into the cycle and you not being the last species to join the party and being the upstart heroes. 

But that gets into the same mess Andromeda had (among other messes). It's not Mass Effect anymore. It's a whole new Sci Fi setting.

I'm glad it appears that they're pushing past the Mass Effect 3 ending and making a direct sequel. It's basically the only thing that could get me remotely excited for this game (and I'm still only at a maybe '2' on the 1-10 scale; Bioware needs to prove they can still make a game).

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Playing a weak stealthy hacker street kid on hard difficulty on Cyberpunk. I haven't gone very far yet, but the combat hacking seems fun. Breach is a bit clunky to use in the middle of a firefight as it kind of pulls you out of the action in order to complete a mini game, but it's fun to shut down enemy optics and use items in the scenery against them, then blast the fuck out of them. Intended to be more stealthy, but kind of being forced by the early mission to mix it up in combat. I heard there are many options later for stealth, so hopefully that is the case, but right now I'm kind of being railroaded in to becoming a combat hacker. Lowered the cost for combat hacks as my first perk.

Want to play the other paths, but just don't have the time and might not for many months. Also, this game is making me want to eat cheap burritos. The future can't be all bad if there are vending machines everywhere dispensing enormous burritos.

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Much easier to get into the GeForce Now servers, as @briantw kindly reported (this site, GeForce Later, lets you drag you upload your debug.log and it'll tell you your exact position in the queue, and uses the aggregate of logs it receives to show how quickly things are moving. From being in queues 300+ long, it seems now queues are running more like 20-30 long and wait times are much shorter) .

Tweaked some of my settings, both for GeForce Now and for CP2077, and running buttery smooth now. Decided to just run around Watson district before doing any jobs. Found Twitch streamer CohhCarnage (Garry the Prophet) right next to the next main story mission, but then went off to find trouble. Went from little cash to nearly $10k eddies just breaking up assaults in progress, and ended up crafting a nice sniper rifle that can shoot through walls.

Ideally I want to have enough eddies to upgrade the cyberdeck significantly before I decide to progress things.

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5 hours ago, Fez said:

But that gets into the same mess Andromeda had (among other messes). It's not Mass Effect anymore. It's a whole new Sci Fi setting.

I'm glad it appears that they're pushing past the Mass Effect 3 ending and making a direct sequel. It's basically the only thing that could get me remotely excited for this game (and I'm still only at a maybe '2' on the 1-10 scale; Bioware needs to prove they can still make a game).

But it really is still Mass Effect: Mass Relays, The Citadel, The Milky Way, Reapers. Even Shepard and Liara still get to be in it, albeit in virtual form.

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