Cyberpunk 2077 [split from video games]

[Ran]

20 minutes ago, Fez said:

Rather than GTA, I'd strongly recommend Sleeping Dogs. It's certainly GTA-style gameplay. But it's got better writing (IMO), and, it feels a bit cyberpunk-y simply by virtue of being set in Hong Kong; even though its in our 2012.

I actually have it, and played it for ... 18 hours, Steam tells me. I admit I forgot about it when we were discussing games earlier. I even still randomly quote the pork bun vendors on occasion:

I recall liking it a lot but I had some issues with the gunplay. But then again, I was using it with the Steam controller, and that was probably the issue as it was a game that didn't really respond well to it. Should try it with mouse-and-keyboard, or alternatively invest in an alternate controller when the Steam controller isn't getting along with a game (worked great on Hades, though, have to say).

Though would have to start over, I guess, because it's been long enough I barely remember anything about the story up to the point where I stopped. I definitely had the sense that it had a richer attention to detail and storytelling than any GTA game, from reviews I saw of it when I wanted to learn about it, and the angle that your character is an undercover cop (classic Hong Kong action film trope) made being involved in criminal doings a bit easier to swallow.

I did briefly try Saints Row when I got one of them for free somewhere or other -- maybe as a promotion with a graphics card -- and those are just too over-the-top silly to push my buttons.

[sifth]

2 hours ago, Fez said:

 

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I like those sections a lot too; but it feels like such a let down that the big climax isn't actually the climax. Especially after how long it took to get there. I think a better solution would be that Geralt and Ciri don't go directly to Kaer Morhen after he finds her, but rather they are on the road for a bit doing those things together; and then have the Kaer Morhen battle. Or cut the battle, and have all your allies from across the game show up for the fleet fight at the actual end. It's just weird pacing as is.

I think your understating just how long The Witcher 3 is. Just doing the main story and side quests took me 80 hours, and that was ignoring all the monster contracts and nearly all the random ?s on the map. CP2077 took me 60 hours to main story and side jobs. I'm sure doing all the gigs and NCPD side hustles up the time a lot, but so would TW3 monster contracts and points of interest.

 

I think I spent over 120 hours with the Witcher 3, by the time I was done with it, both DLC's included. That being said I got through the DLC's rather quickly. I think it only took me about a week to finish both of them. I think I probably enjoyed both DLC's over the main game, but the main game itself was very awesome in it's own right.

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, Fez said:

 

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I like those sections a lot too; but it feels like such a let down that the big climax isn't actually the climax. Especially after how long it took to get there. I think a better solution would be that Geralt and Ciri don't go directly to Kaer Morhen after he finds her, but rather they are on the road for a bit doing those things together; and then have the Kaer Morhen battle. Or cut the battle, and have all your allies from across the game show up for the fleet fight at the actual end. It's just weird pacing as is.

Rather than GTA, I'd strongly recommend Sleeping Dogs. It's certainly GTA-style gameplay. But it's got better writing (IMO), and, it feels a bit cyberpunk-y simply by virtue of being set in Hong Kong; even though its in our 2012.

Also better than the GTA games are the Saints Row games; especially III and IV. But they go far enough into a superhero-but-not style, especially IV, that the gameplay is rather different from anything in CP2077.

The three latest Assassins Creed games are basically The Witcher 3-lite in writing, and are maybe actually slightly closer to CP2077 gameplay. Since in all 3 stealth and ranged fighting is somewhat viable builds, whereas Geralt is in-your-face melee all the time.

I think your understating just how long The Witcher 3 is. Just doing the main story and side quests took me 80 hours, and that was ignoring all the monster contracts and nearly all the random ?s on the map. CP2077 took me 60 hours to main story and side jobs. I'm sure doing all the gigs and NCPD side hustles up the time a lot, but so would TW3 monster contracts and points of interest.

Sleeping Dogs is absolutely superb and it's a shame they didn't continue the series.

With The Witcher 3 I can only go by the amount of time I spent on the game: 88.2 hours on the main quest, side-quests and monster and treasure contracts in the base game and all DLCs. I didn't go after all the armour sets and there's still a ton of "?s" left on the map. I did make the mistake of playing on Easy though (after The Witcher 1's psychotic difficulty curve which made Normal on that game like Nightmare on almost anything else; shades of Metro 2033), which made combat almost trivial though, so I can see the cumulative impact of making every fight in the game even moderately tougher pushing that up a fair bit.

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Apparently Yakuza: Like a Boss is pretty amazing in a lot of ways. 

Like a Dragon? I tried Yakuza 0 two or three months ago and found it borderline unplayable. The graphics, physics and combat felt like a PS2 game, and in fact I got confused and thought it was Yakuza Remake (a remake of a 2005 game), which made sense. I was pretty horrified when I found out it was a brand-new game released in 2015 because it did not feel like a game from this decade or even borderline this century. The gameplay/cutscene ratio was also insane (I had 5 hours ingame, with maybe 45 minutes of actual gameplay) with a very, very strange three-tiered cutscene/conversation system that felt totally unnecessary.

Like a Dragon is a big improvement in graphics and combat, but a lot of the other problems sound like they've endured and carried on. The series does have a lot of fans but it's very idiosyncratic and absolutely nothing like any other open-world game I've played (the open world areas are so tiny they're barely worth the name).

[Mr Fixit]

Judging by Ran's and Wert's comments, seems 2077 is well worth playing. Apart from obvious glitch galore and other assorted issues, would you say that there's a certain bandwagoning when it comes to trashing the game? By reading and listening to quite a few people and outlets, one could be forgiven for thinking that the gane is an abysmal disappointment on multiple fronts. 

[Ran]

I saw some video from the Yakuza games. Looks bonkers, but reviews suggest that after a strong start it gets super-grindy towards end game. Also seems a bit too much on the silly side for my tastes.

 

@Mr Fixit

Part of the bandwagoning is absolutely legitimate: the state of the game on previous gen consoles was atrocious, has been mitigated somewhat by hotfixes, but still needs work. Console players were rightly pissed off. CDPR messed up badly. 

But on PC, no, I think people who attacked it either believed it was something it wasn't (I've literally seen people trashing it because what they wanted was 'GTA, but in the future' and they convinced themselves that a company not called Rockstar was giving them that) or had unrealistic expectations about how polished it would be, re: bugs and AI and such, given that CDPR's history of basically never releasing a bug-free experience. Game-breaking bugs on PCs are generally exceptionally rare -- I think in over 120 hours of play time I've only loaded up a previous save twice (because I managed to get a vehicle stuck in such a way that I couldn't get off it and couldn't move it) or saved and reloaded once (when a deliberate glitch effect never went away).

Like, yes, the AI is kind of brain dead when you stealth things -- you can reboot optics of a group, strangle and dump the body of the person they were just talking to, and when they see again they don't wonder where their friend went -- and so on. It can be improved. But if you get into a legit firefight, IMO, it can be a really good challenge. My Nomad is focused on shotgun and going direct at things, and at the start of the game it is _very_ hard going. My first attempt to take out an Organized Crime location (one of the tougher open world challenges as it can involve a dozen enemies) took numerous retries before I figured it out (pro-tip: always find the netrunner and take them out as quickly as possible because overheat hurts!)

If you liked Witcher 3, you will absolutely like this, IMO. You may not like it as much, I can't say, but you'll like it. It has lore, it has story, it has characters, it has amazing visuals.

[Mr Fixit]

In the process of buying a new PC after which I definitely intend to play it. I am a big RPG fan and have been for over 20 years. Unfortunately my piece of trash from 2010 is so bad that it can't even run Witcher 3 so... Yeah... 

[RumHam]

I did not realize this was getting some form of multiplayer, do we have any idea what it's supposed to be? Have they ever made a multiplayer game before? 

[Luzifer's right hand]

I like the game but I expect the MP to be a Fallout 76 level bugfest. 

[Fez]

2 minutes ago, RumHam said:

I did not realize this was getting some form of multiplayer, do we have any idea what it's supposed to be? Have they ever made a multiplayer game before? 

Just now, Luzifer's right hand said:

I like the game but I expect the MP to be a Fallout 76 level bugfest. 

It's hard to know what to expect; they've been very quiet about the MP. The things we do know are 

1) That at one point CDPR was advertising positions for developers with MP experience, so this might be being developed by a mostly separate team from the base game (though, knowing how CDPR operates, they might currently have gotten pulled into an all-hands-on-deck to help patch the base game).

2) Even prior to CP2077's release, and the resulting scheduling delays it may cause to CDPR's plans, their publishing division head said “2021 appears unlikely as a release date for the Cyberpunk multiplayer"

3) CDPR CEO referred to it in an investor call as "It's a separate dedicated production, a big production. We think about it as a standalone product." No idea yet if that means it'll be a separate purchase though (like Thronebreaker is a different purchase from Gwent), or if they just mean that it'll be a big thing.

So I'd expect something big, maybe overly ambitious (much like the original plans for CP2077) and likely a ways off.

[Ran]

@RumHam

Gwent is multiplayer, but no, they've never done a third-person/first-person multiplayer game before. It'll be a big challenge. Always surprised no one has created a kick-ass, modular net code system that anyone can just drop into their games easily. Unreal Engine comes with netcode, but it's not exemplary, and in any case it's for UE games. CDPR will have to create theirs from scratch, I guess, for Cyberpunk 2077 Online or whatever it will be.

I assume it'll be something like GTA Online. I find it hard to imagine they're thinking of doing something more like an MMO, but I guess we'll have to wait and see.

[sifth]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

@RumHam

Gwent is multiplayer, but no, they've never done a third-person/first-person multiplayer game before. It'll be a big challenge. Always surprised no one has created a kick-ass, modular net code system that anyone can just drop into their games easily. Unreal Engine comes with netcode, but it's not exemplary, and in any case it's for UE games. CDPR will have to create theirs from scratch, I guess, for Cyberpunk 2077 Online or whatever it will be.

I assume it'll be something like GTA Online. I find it hard to imagine they're thinking of doing something more like an MMO, but I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Multiplayer games can be a very fun experience, when done with friends. For example one of the few highlights of being stuck home with these lock downs in 2020, was being able to play Blood Born and the Dark Souls trilogy with my friends. It was a very fun experience. One friend even started turning our "adventures" into video after a while.

 

[Werthead]

4 hours ago, Ran said:

@RumHam

I assume it'll be something like GTA Online. I find it hard to imagine they're thinking of doing something more like an MMO, but I guess we'll have to wait and see.

I'm wondering if they're looking at the online game being more like the P&P experience, so 3-4 players join forces to take down a common challenge.  A bit more like GTA Online's heists rather than the "blow shit up randomly" part of the open world. You could also may have something where a bunch of other players takes over the role of guards or gang members defending a location, which would make it more challenging, since at the moment the AI isn't good enough to stop a single netrunner let alone a team of four. Having human-controlled characters who can hack back, take back control of turrets etc would be cool.

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Apart from obvious glitch galore and other assorted issues, would you say that there's a certain bandwagoning when it comes to trashing the game? By reading and listening to quite a few people and outlets, one could be forgiven for thinking that the gane is an abysmal disappointment on multiple fronts. 

I think there's a lot of people who've been sharpening their knives for CDPR for a decade and were very happy to join in the hate-fest. There's certainly a lot CDPR did wrong with the game, from a truly insane amount of pre-release hype (72 official preview videos in two years was overkill) to releasing the game on previous-gen hardware that couldn't handle it, but in many ways the game's no worse than any other big AAA release of the last few years. Compared to Skyrim, Fallout 4, Red Dead Redemption 2, Horizon Zero Dawn and Assassin's Creed Valhalla, the PC version of CP77 is pretty much fine on most rigs.

A lot of the hate I see the game getting is exactly the same problem that every other game has. The power curve in most games can be reasonably manipulated so you get a lot more powerful than the AI even on the hardest difficulty levels, which is true in CP77 but is also true in RDR2 (where combat is so utterly trivial that it's never even remotely a problem) and the Deus Ex and Watch Dogs games (in both of them and CP77 your hacking skills can become so OP that you basically turn into Neo), whilst if you specialise in stealth you can almost float invisible through rooms killing people without them being aware you're even present. So those complaints are all weird.

I do sympathise more with the complaints about the city aspects/police not being properly implemented/driver AI being crap. Although CP77 is an RPG, not an open-world action game like GTA5, it sure looks a hell of a lot like one and that was always going to be the reference point for players (or if not that, at least something like Watch Dogs or Sleeping Dogs), especially when CDPR themselves started talking about it as more of an action game. If you want to do a silly GTA-like thing of pulling out guns and shooting up the street and escalating things crazily (even if you're just going to reload), CP77 doesn't even try to set up any kind of illusion of police showing up, it just throws tons of drones and hyper-armoured dudes at you out of nowhere, and they don't have cars or are capable of driving after you.

CDPR did manage to snooker themselves on representation. During development they went for an "edgy" marketing campaign that seemed to be mocking trans people and minorities, at least until their social media manager was fired, but even their pro-minority representation comments and ideas seemed a bit clumsy. Then the game itself is incredibly LGBTQ+ friendly, your character can be male, female or non-gender-specific, you can have straight, gay or lesbian romances, friendships etc, and there's a very prominent supporting character who turns out to be trans and it's no big thing. The game has relatively nuanced ethnic depictions (some of the street-level gangmembers are a bit cliched, but the major characters of Haitian and Japanese background seem reasonably well-done), and it was interesting seeing the gangs that were supposed to be very one-note actually being quite diverse (i.e. white guys as members of the yakuza-like Tyger Claws or Haitian-led Voodoo Boys). Of course, that's enraged a certain subset of people who have been raging about the game being a "SJW fest" and "so woke it broke the game" and all that kind of tiresome bullshit.

So you have a lot of people who'd probably enjoy the game having heard it's hugely racist and transphobic from a lot of commentators (most of whom haven't played the game, apart from one reviewer who spent a lot of their review decrying the game for having no trans characters which just goes to show they didn't play very much of the game) and are refusing to play it, and a some people playing it because they did hear it was those things and are slamming it for being quite the reverse. That's quite the trick CDPR managed to pull there.

Oh, and the crunch thing as well. Clearly CP77 was made at least partially under a certain amount of crunch, but by European law that extra time was compensated and there are hard legal limits on it. Certainly any level of crunch on the game should have been avoided, but the level of crunch Rockstar forced their employees to go through on RDR2 was far more insane, for far, far longer, and it goes completely unmentioned in almost every article, including the same periodicals giving RDR2 "game of the year" awards in 2018 and 2019 (even a few in 2020, as RDR2 launched on PC right at the very end of 2019) who have been dumping on CP77 for crunch. The double standards there are odious.

[Slurktan]

18 hours ago, Werthead said:

I do sympathise more with the complaints about the city aspects/police not being properly implemented/driver AI being crap. Although CP77 is an RPG, not an open-world action game like GTA5, it sure looks a hell of a lot like one and that was always going to be the reference point for players (or if not that, at least something like Watch Dogs or Sleeping Dogs), especially when CDPR themselves started talking about it as more of an action game. If you want to do a silly GTA-like thing of pulling out guns and shooting up the street and escalating things crazily (even if you're just going to reload), CP77 doesn't even try to set up any kind of illusion of police showing up, it just throws tons of drones and hyper-armoured dudes at you out of nowhere, and they don't have cars or are capable of driving after you.

CDPR did manage to snooker themselves on representation. During development they went for an "edgy" marketing campaign that seemed to be mocking trans people and minorities, at least until their social media manager was fired, but even their pro-minority representation comments and ideas seemed a bit clumsy. Then the game itself is incredibly LGBTQ+ friendly, your character can be male, female or non-gender-specific, you can have straight, gay or lesbian romances, friendships etc, and there's a very prominent supporting character who turns out to be trans and it's no big thing. The game has relatively nuanced ethnic depictions (some of the street-level gangmembers are a bit cliched, but the major characters of Haitian and Japanese background seem reasonably well-done), and it was interesting seeing the gangs that were supposed to be very one-note actually being quite diverse (i.e. white guys as members of the yakuza-like Tyger Claws or Haitian-led Voodoo Boys). Of course, that's enraged a certain subset of people who have been raging about the game being a "SJW fest" and "so woke it broke the game" and all that kind of tiresome bullshit.

I'd argue that CP77 is much more of an open world action game than it is an RPG but your mile obviously varies on that which is cool.  The problem if you see it as I do is that the gameplay systems are not particularly good at being an open world Action game that came out in 2020.  I'd say they would be ok in 2005.  Maybe, although still bullet spongey and the driving would be considered bad in 2005 too. 

EDIT:  I haven't played Watch Dogs but rather than RDR2 a far more apt comparison for CP77 is the latest few Assassin Creed games.  It plays much more like them.

I very much like that the game world is so LGBTQ+ friendly as that's how to me it should be.  However the character being male, female or non gender specific is honestly irrelevant.  Yes there are romance options that require certain character combos but those romances wouldn't have to have been changed at all if they were for any character. Quite frankly they should have dialed back the character creator all together to some choices as your appearance is irrelevant now to character models other than if it has breasts or not.  (You can pick a penis in character creator but in game it is not there as they made only one size of clothes for male and female and so penises/large or small breasts are removed/set back to default in game so they do not protrude from clothes as was happening until they patched that on day 1.

[Fez]

I've been trying to pick at least some different dialog options in my replay here and there (though still going for Judy when the time comes), and I just discovered that with one different choice there's this whole long scene with Takamura that I had completely missed my first time through. 

[Ran]

I'm on my second play-through as well, this time on Very Hard. Which, given that I've decided that my kickass Nomad woman eschews stealth and prefers blowing things up real good with a shotgun posed some real difficulties to begin with:

Spoiler

I've now gotten past the title after going guns-blazing through The Heist's escape... and I realized how much _faster_ and easier it was to just shoot the hell out of everything rather than trying to (almost) perfectly stealth it. Jackie and I even killed the Arasaka mech, me with a shotgun and him with whatever flotsam he picked up. And then for good measure I took out all the Arasaka goons outside in the garage, though it took awhile as I had way too few shotgun shells. I did also make sure to pick up Yorinobu's pistol and Saburo's sword, although I don't plan to use them; once I get my Tech and Shotgun skills up to where I want, I'll load up on the Street Brawler and Cold Blood perks to more readily whip the competition in the boxing.

Big differences in my game so far: I ended up knocking out Royce and freeing Brick... but this seems to have left Gilchrist with the upperhand, so I guess Meredith Stout's promise to herself to never have her heart broken again shall remain intact as she swims with the fishes (I guess I needed to make sure Royce was dead). And then I decided to tell Dex that Evelyn Parker wanted to cut him out, which amusingly got me a promise of a 40% cut (presumably he intended to take it out of Parker's End), whereas in my "canonical" Corpo, male V run I hid the truth from him (I think my V had the hots for Evelyn...) and then argued about the risks we were taking and managed to go from 30% to 35%. (I also noticed how much more nervous Jackie was this time around, when the details weren't new and I could pay attention to the characters a bit more. We also had a new line of conversation, based on some Nomad-related dialog, where Jackie laughed way too loud and long over something Dex said.  Really like how they emphasized how he knew he was in way over his head but was just so hungry to get into the "major leagues"...)

This will definitely remain a more focused run, but I'm at like level 15 and it still sometimes takes three-four shots with a double-barreled tech shotgun to kill even basic mooks. Given that you have a hard cap of 100 shotgun shells, it can make some of the tougher fights dicey unlike I pick up some shells from defeated enemies. So I may bum around on side quests and so on in Watson until I'm at level 20 or so and start opening up more blue weapons. 

ETA: I'm building towards a build using a legendary bit of cyberware that will heal 10% of health whenever a fully charged weapon is discharged... but it seems like each pellet in a shotgun blast does it, so a shot that hits every pellet will theoretically give a 100% heal. Think I'll have all the perk and stat points I need by the time I'm level 25, give or take.

Guessing Lizzie's tech pistol, which has double shots, would also work pretty well for such a build. Said cyberware tech comes from Charles, the ripperdoc who works with scavs. I've kept him alive ... for now.

 

 

[Luzifer's right hand]

I dunno if anything beats Skippy if you are going to use bullets. I use it in my current melee run to level handguns the get the perk points for other stuff as I have 20 reflexes and it is surprisingly deadly.

Melee is still lots of fun and only skulled enemies do not melt as soon as I get in range. I think they have massive damage reduction. 

On a side note I just sold hundreds of granades and now the weight system does not seem as bad as I thought. They have weight unlike consumables...

I'm not sure but I even the lowest level of short circuit does massive damage to mechs and robots. Although mantis blades with the electric damage mod are more fun. 

[Ran]

4 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

I dunno if anything beats Skippy if you are going to use bullets.

Yeah, Skippy is terrific fun. I used him to melt the final boss in my first run. I always jump when he asks for it to show my satisfaction. I don't plan to use him in this current run, though. The thing about Lizzie's gun (which you can get in the lower level of Lizzie's Bar) is that it fires four rounds per bullet... but if you have it fully charged, it'll unload 20 rounds (or 5 bullets). Which, with the legendary cyberware and some relevant tech perks, means you can pretty much never need a Max Doc or Bounce Back again.

4 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

Melee is still lots of fun and only skulled enemies do not melt as soon as I get in range. I think they have massive damage reduction. 

IIRC, blades apparently either ignore or reduce the impact of armor. I'm thinking of eventually using some blunt weapons besides my fists for fun, once I can get Street Brawler up, but I'm not sure what to do about armor's effects. OTOH, brawler has perks that do a lot to boost damage, increase stun chances, etc. 

4 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

On a side note I just sold hundreds of granades and now the weight system does not seem as bad as I thought. They have weight unlike consumables...

Yeah, grenades are the thing that secretly chew away at your carry capacity. Worth clearing them out every once in awhile.

4 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

I'm not sure but I even the lowest level of short circuit does massive damage to mechs and robots. Although mantis blades with the electric damage mod are more fun. 

Especially if you have good crit. My first 5-digit damage numbers were on robots and drones with short circuit.

Legendary short circuit has a passive that adds its damage effect to any critical hit with any weapon, and that effect can in turn crit. Pumps those numbers up.

[Luzifer's right hand]

3 minutes ago, Ran said:

Yeah, Skippy is terrific fun. I used him to melt the final boss in my first run. I always jump when he asks for it to show my satisfaction. I don't plan to use him in this current run, though. The thing about Lizzie's gun (which you can get in the lower level of Lizzie's Bar) is that it fires four rounds per bullet... but if you have it fully charged, it'll unload 20 rounds (or 5 bullets). Which, with the legendary cyberware and some relevant tech perks, means you can pretty much never need a Max Doc or Bounce Back again.

IIRC, blades apparently either ignore or reduce the impact of armor. I'm thinking of eventually using some blunt weapons besides my fists for fun, once I can get Street Brawler up, but I'm not sure what to do about armor's effects. OTOH, brawler has perks that do a lot to boost damage, increase stun chances, etc. 

Yeah, grenades are the thing that secretly chew away at your carry capacity. Worth clearing them out every once in awhile.

Especially if you have good crit. My first 5-digit damage numbers were on robots and drones with short circuit.

Legendary short circuit has a passive that adds its damage effect to any critical hit with any weapon, and that effect can in turn crit. Pumps those numbers up.

Skippy said something like "most murders are commited by men. Good job girl!" as I was killing some low level enemies... 

[Ran]

7 minutes ago, Luzifer's right hand said:

Skippy said something like "most murders are commited by men. Good job girl!" as I was killing some low level enemies... 

Okay, I may use Skippy a little...

[Kalbear]

Skippy is absolutely amazing. I showed the kids, and they continue to giggle about him. He's not as strong as some of my other weapons, but damn if he isn't super super fun. 

I did a set of missions downtown culminating in the takedown of a major corpo who killed nomads as guinea pigs for her failed antibiotic tests, and I gotta say that was a DAMN satisfying set of missions. I do think there aren't nearly as many morally ambiguous missions in this as there should be, but the flip side is sometimes it's just really great to end those specific people.