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Cyberpunk 2077 [split from video games]


C.T. Phipps

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Finished my second playthrough... and, uh, that took over 100 hours too. Oops. And I swear I wasn't trying to be completist at all! For 60 euros + 12 euros for a GeForce Now, that comes out to 0.36 euros per hour of gaming. Pretty good!

Will be very interested to see what QoL and balance changes we'll see in the next year. May revisit and play a street samurai type with katana or mantis blades, to mess around with high reflexes and the Kerenzikov, once there's sufficient changes or additions via DLC to make it worth it, but I'm pretty satisfied. 

Regarding "The Star" ending:

Spoiler

I was, again, over-levelled at 50 with an essentially immortal build, but the build -- tech shotgun + legendary Feedback Circuit means full health after every shot -- was so god-like that I suspect my previous build, maxed out pistol + legendary quickhacking, would actually have taken a little longer and been more interesting. At the same time, waves of Militech mooks against the Aldecaldos felt... I don't know, less cool than sneaking through Arasaka Tower with Rogue and Squama, and definitely less cool than a suicide-run solo as Johnny cheers you on. 

I did like the complications they gave to the Aldecaldo leadership situation, though. Mitch was painted, to my surprise, as overly-cynical and not fully grasping Saul's decision making, to the point that my V basically echoed him. But Saul was genuinely trying to maintain family unity, and if it meant doing a crazy thing because Panam really wanted to help you... well, fuck it, he was going all-in rather than split the family apart. Good guy, in the end. And Panam remains probably the most "ride or die" character in the game, excepting possibly Takemura towards Arasaka and Hanako (sadly, I disappointed him yet again... couldn't help myself but rescue him from the apartment.)

The Judy romance is very cute and feels very earned and honest. "Pyramid Song"'s a lovely way of giving insight into her character.

  It was really interesting playing a run where you have practically no affinity with Johnny (I didn't follow the Rogue/Kerry quest chain this time, and I believe I cut off the "Tapeworm" heart-to-heart very abruptly). I got the option to be very smarmy and very much an asshole when telling him that it was time for him to pack up and leave.

ETA:

Agree with @Fez that the Street Kid path works really well with "The Star" ending, for reasons he stated:

 

Spoiler

Having watched the Street Kid intro, the fact that you were gone from NC for a couple of years suggests you were already tired of the place, and the fact that you came back because you were chased out or botched something in Atlanta feels like settling for less than you want. Street Kid V is already disilussioned by the city, so his/her ultimately abandoning it after a go at it with Jackie turns to disaster makes sense. Nomad V, OTOH, is disillusioned by Nomad life to start with, and sees in NC all that she wants... and then turns away from it after everything turns to shit. 

 

 I feel like my Nomad going back into the fold would have had a bit more weight if, like my Corpo V, she ran into one of her old Bakker clan in a mission. It was fine as it was, mind you, but there could have been a bit more poignancy to it.

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So, wanted to share a few random thoughts before wrapping up my time with the game:

1) Music - There's sort of three distinct parts of the soundtrack: the original score, the original songs commissioned for the game, and the licensed songs on the radio. I love the industrial-electronic sound of the score, with "V", "The Rebel Path", "Cyber Ninja", and particularly the melancholic finale "Been Good to Know Ya" really standing out for more, but there's a whole lot of great pieces of music in the official soundtrack. As to the commissioned, "in-world" songs... punk isn't really my normal thing, but the connection to the story found in the SAMURAI/Refused songs really made them work. "Black Dog", rumored to have been Johnny Silverhand's last song, really has that vibe of a suicidal man heading to his death. "The Ballad of Buck Ravers" is pretty great as well, to say nothing of "Never Fade Away" which really gets a whole lot of focus in the game as it captures a lot of what really motivated Johnny (see Alt Cunningham's epitaph at Colombarium, or its repeated use in some key moments of some of the epilogues, and the cover-ish closing title song). Do wish we had gotten "Archangel" as a surprise track rather than the just a few chords of it.

On the radio... Grimes's "Delicate Weapon" is, IMO, more interesting and definitely less weird than "4AEM". Really great one to listen to when you're cruising around the city at night, rain falling, streets empty. But of the non-Samurai commissioned songs, the one that really popped out for me was Let's Eat Grandma's "I Really Want To Stay At Your House" -- never heard of them, but definitely intrigued by this and what I've read of the young British synth-pop duo- Not so much a fan of the distorted chorus of this song, but everything around it is just lovely.

As to the licensed stuff, it's a mixed bag for me. Kind of appreciate the Jazz station, but more often than not it's Morro Rock with Mike Pondsmith DJing and throwing out wild conspiracies, and all the SAMURAI tracks as well as some other rock pieces. 

2) Johnny - He really grew on me, especially as the contradictions in his character and his motivations were laid bare, and his most glaring flaws as well (especially the overweening narcissism that boiled everything down to him). You get it right from the start, really --

Spoiler

Saburo Arasaka calls him out as lying about his motives to him and seemingly to himself, V thinks about how angry and how much he hated... well, everything, his fans, his music, his friends, Night City, everything leading into the raid on Arasaka Tower. 

His last words to Smasher in the Rogue raid ending really kind of drive at it. He started his rockerboy career ready to kill and die to preserve what he thought was beautiful (which was inevitably anti-corporate, anti-establishment)... and now what's left is just killing in the memory of what had been beautiful, because it's gone and dust. A final, sad realization.

Also, "For folks like us? Wrong city, wrong people" was a great line. So noir.

I've seen a lot of angst about the lack of an unalloyed happy ending in the game -- "The Star" is as close as it gets for V, although objectively you've killed off the Aldecaldo's long-time leader and a few of his clan to get it -- but this feels exactly right for the setting and story of the game

Also, the whole question of his memories... I don't quite buy, as some speculate, that his memory of the Arasaka raid are made up. They  would have been short-term memory for him when Soulkiller gobbled up his mind, not something that would have been confabulated. Yes, his leading the raid and setting off the nukes in Arasaka is a change from the lore that it was Blackhand who did that while Johnny provided a distraction, but IMO they just made a decision to deviate from the lore (or, I guess, have the lore be wrong as I'm sure Mike Pondsmith will reveal in his next Cyberpunk edition). OTOH, his 2013 memories of Alt and so on ... I'm sure there's a very self-centered spin on his memory of those events.

3) Rogue - :wub:

4) Alt - :drool:

5) Things I would have added/changed/tweaked - I think each lifepath should have had not just a unique mission (I have no idea what the Street Kid unique mission is, and maybe they don't have one?), but a unique chain of three-four missions that loops back and reinforces your past and maybe fleshes it out a little bit. They could parcel it out so it plays across acts, rather than all in a rush, so that your changing circumstances can be reflected in what's going on in said chain. So ... basically something like the Peralez missions, but focused around your origin. Let Nomad V smuggle themselves back across the border after discovering some stuff going on with that skeevy sheriff, let Corpo V have to deal with some of his shady dealings with the cartels on Arasaka's behalf have to get dealt with, let some huscle from Atlanta show up demanding V's head, what have you.

I feel like the first act could have also used just more dialog options delineating the life paths just a bit better. And as I've already remarked, I think the Street Kid should absolutely have known Jackie from way back, and IMO they should have made it the case that Nomad V had also worked with Jackie before. Don't need to explain anything, but I think bringing them up to parity with the Corpo life path would have helped reinforce your closeness with him.

The game at Very Hard can be very tough in the early going in the open world missions, but at a certain point you just start wildly outpacing things -- I'd say somewhere in the mid-to-late 20s it's like a switch just flips and suddenly it gets a lot easier. I experienced this in both of my playthroughs, playing really different builds. And I discovered that things would have been even easier this last playthrough but the perk that should have made tech weapons ignore armor entirely does not actually appear to work in the game. Hah. 

Obviously, bug fixes and things like perks and items that don't work or don't do what they say they do should be fixed. I'm all for better traction on vehicles, getting cars to move around obstructions, some AI tweaks to make the enemies more pro-active when they know there's an enemy around -- maybe just having them run towards cover in a random direction if not engaged after X time, and rinse-repeat as necessary until they find you or you find them -- and I think some more depth to netrunner enemy AI (all they seem to do is reveal your location or overheat you -- why don't they try to glitch your weapons, for example, or drop Contagion on you?) wouldn't be bad. On the whole, though, I recognize that in reality most games of this sort can only go so far in making enemies require high skill to defeat. 

As to cop AI... like, you're a merc, not a psychopath. Personally, I'd sooner they just drop AI cops and say, "What, you think police show up faster than an hour in Night City unless you're a corpo muckety-muck? Forget about it, someone will eventually show up to find an empty crime scene and a pile of paperwork they don't need". 

6) As I've made abundantly clear, I do not have a deep frame of reference to rate this game. I've played lots of games in my time, but barely anything like this, and it's easily the single-player PC game I've played the most extensively in... well, pretty much ever? In my current Steam library, the next most played game is Team Fortress 2 at 168 hours, and I haven't opened that in a couple of years. In the pre-digital download games, my favorite games (space sims like Wing Commander series, X-Wing and TIE fighter, adventures like King's Quest, Quest for Glory, The Longest Journey, Sam and Max Hit the Road, etc.), appear to have run between 10 to 20 hours, for the most part, so the idea that I've sunk that many hours into this one is just... amazing to me, really.

This game definitely sticks more in my mind, right now, than just about anything in the above list. The only thing that really compares is the MMO The Secret World, which Linda and I played obsessively for quite awhile and what was almost certainly multiple hundreds of hours, and had a lot of interesting lore and world building that seeded clues and made discussing the game when not playing it actually something we'd do. Ditto with Cyberpunk 2077. So, I think I'd rate it as one of the best game purchases I've ever made, flaws and all. I'll call it an 8.5/10, with room to improve.

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44 minutes ago, Ran said:

As to cop AI... like, you're a merc, not a psychopath. Personally, I'd sooner they just drop AI cops and say, "What, you think police show up faster than an hour in Night City unless you're a corpo muckety-muck? Forget about it, someone will eventually show up to find an empty crime scene and a pile of paperwork they don't need". 

I think this is a solid attitude and it matches the question apparently being asked at CDPR of if they were marking The Witcher But Blade Runnner or Grand Theft Night City because they couldn't make both but management forced them to try, but I do think that once CDPR started leaning into the fact this was a open-world city game, they had to make the police and cops work at least as well as say Grand Theft Auto III (a game that came out over nineteen years ago, somehow), if not as well as in say Watch Dogs 1 or 2, which are only mediocre-to-okay open world city games. They didn't need to go crazy, but they needed at least some kind of reasonable system in there. Maybe even have the police dropping in from flying cars to at least moderately explain how they show up so fast (and not have to worry about spawning cop cars or cops unconvincingly in a busy area), with a warning they're on their way.

Actually that gives me an idea. If you do decide to go crazy and start gunning people down, if it's in a highbrow area there should be a chance to spawn Trauma Team as well.

Quote

This game definitely sticks more in my mind, right now, than just about anything in the above list. The only thing that really compares is the MMO The Secret World, which Linda and I played obsessively for quite awhile and what was almost certainly multiple hundreds of hours, and had a lot of interesting lore and world building that seeded clues and made discussing the game when not playing it actually something we'd do. Ditto with Cyberpunk 2077. So, I think I'd rate it as one of the best game purchases I've ever made, flaws and all. I'll call it an 8.5/10, with room to improve.

Sounds about right. In my review I put it more at 8, because the jarring absence or poor implementation of features versus contemporary games in the same genre is really quite startling, which obviously is much less of a problem with less of a frame of reference. However, on the flipside the game wipes the floor with almost all of its contemporaries when it comes to story and characterisation. Apart from The Witcher 3, as you'd expect from the same team, the only game in the same class for story, scale and atmosphere on that level is Red Dead Redemption 2.

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9 hours ago, Werthead said:

Actually that gives me an idea. If you do decide to go crazy and start gunning people down, if it's in a highbrow area there should be a chance to spawn Trauma Team as well.

That'd be cool. Trauma Team were very tough when I decided to try them out with my first character's build. I suspect my second would have done much better, she's functionally immortal.

The flying car idea could work. Obviously, in the game, all flying cars or units exiting from them are in scripted events, but just having one show up above a street or having the sound of it become louder followed by police showing up... could work. 

But I'd rather they focus on making enemies fight better and balancing things than spend time on it, IMO. People can play GTA if they want to be maniacs.

ETA: Read a pretty interesting account of how CDPR has hidden mechanics in a way that people don't realize. One of the first side gigs you get is "The Woman From La Mancha", about a hit on a female cop. This person did as I, and I think most, people did and took this pretty easy gig early on. First thing was to go to a market, then ask around about her to find where she was. At Street Cred 1, the muscular ripper doc isn't talking to you about anyone and that's that, have to ask around elsewhere to get the info.

BUT, on a 2nd play through, the person only tackled it when they were much further in the game and at street cred 30... and the ripperdoc interaction about her is totally different:

Spoiler

 

Second playthrough, I forgot about that job until I was Street Cred 30+ . Went to Robert to remind myself what Legendary cyberware he sells, and saw the "transfer image" option. I thought... what the hell.

And he says hey you're that fairy fixer (or something like that) and then he started going on about how Anna is a good person and someone should look out for her, gave me her room number, said she was a good person, said some other stuff and finished with a reminder than Anna is a good person.

 

I had no idea that they had early missions react to that sort of thing. There's a couple of missions that show up late in the game that are there to highlight your street cred or badassitude (the one where you interrupt a meeting with Scavs, the stick up at the diner), but that they actually thought of seeding that variable into some early missions a well is quite cool.

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7 hours ago, Ran said:

I had no idea that they had early missions react to that sort of thing. There's a couple of missions that show up late in the game that are there to highlight your street cred or badassitude (the one where you interrupt a meeting with Scavs, the stick up at the diner), but that they actually thought of seeding that variable into some early missions a well is quite cool.

The stick up at the diner where you get interrupted whilst trying to get some food? I got that early on. Not that early on, but not long after the heist and opening up the rest of the city.

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4 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The stick up at the diner where you get interrupted whilst trying to get some food? I got that early on. Not that early on, but not long after the heist and opening up the rest of the city.

I guess I should say "late" in terms that it clearly doesn't show up until you've passed some sort of street cred threshold. But as it happens, both playthroughs I never got around to that area until pretty late.

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I'm still quite enjoying this game.  Even on PS4, other than the occasional crashes, I am enjoying my time.

On the idea of choices mattering, while I haven't seen the ending, I must say, I am not noticing a lot of dialogue choices mattering.  Like a mission will give me an option to punch someone or ask him nicely, but it doesn't matter which I choose, I get the same answer.  It is a problem I see in a lot of open world games.  The illusion of choices that don't matter one bit.  Granted this could all change once I complete the game.

Now, for a choice that I noticed that does effect the game, in a minor way:

Spoiler

The mission in your apartment building with the two cops trying to talk to their friend.  If you talk to the friend and ask him about the person that died, he mentions a memorial he visits.  If you go there, you find out it was a tortoise.  You then tell his cop buddies and they end up talking to him and helping him.

If you don't ask him about this person and thus don't visit the memorial, his cop buddies don't change their views and a little while later you discover that this guy offed himself.

I thought that was interesting, but didn't really matter to the main story.

 

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14 hours ago, Fiddler said:

Like a mission will give me an option to punch someone or ask him nicely,

If it's the mission with Fingers, it actually does matter in a sense, though not to the outcome of that mission:

Spoiler

If you chose to beat Fingers up, he won't ever sell you any of his cyberware after that point, which includes one unique one which, IIRC, you can't get anywhere else -- the Lynx Paws leg enhancements which boost speed and make your footsteps much quieter for stealth purposes. As they're extremely expensive, most people aren't ready to dive into trying them by the time they get to that particular mission chain. CORRECTION: Misremembered. The Lynx Paws he sells are not unique, but what he does have which are unique are  epic Fortified Ankles which reduce fall damage and provide mid-air hover, plus he may be the only ripperdoc who sells the Legendary pain editor (reduces all damage by 10%) and legendary Catarist (increases resistances by 35%). And he has a legendary Sandvestian OS which may be unique.

As to the Barry mission, yeah, I think that's one of the very few that has a genuine time sensitivity. In my second run, I spoke to him but didn't follow up and discovered he killed himself. Poor guy.

Re: music,

P.T. Adamczyk, one of the composers of the game, has started a Youtube channel where he's put some tracks that weren't released on the official soundtrack CD (plus a track from Gwent, when he launched the channel last month). Provides some context and little details in the descriptions of each piece. 

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Amazon has the XBox and PS versions of the game for some 40% off right now, by the by, and 33% off on the PC version. This is for physical copies of the game, rather than digital. I'm assuming the release blowback led to overstock and they're dumping some. A steal, IMO, at twice the price, but YMMV. I've read a lot of people say that the two hotfixes have made the game substantially more stable on older consoles, and we're just a few days from the first of two largeish patches.

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I somehow accidentally triggered the voodoo boys mission. That was odd. Among other things I got the option to take the blockers before I ever acquired them. As far as I can tell it triggered off of a random ncpd subcon in Japan town. 

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Not sure if it was a bug, but I was doing a gig near where one of the boxing quests was (The Animals one), and I guess my quickhacks spread to the boxer, because I got sucked into combat with them. But since I was in regular combat and never did the conversation to trigger the boxing match I had all my weapons still with me (and was still fighting everyone else too). They were still a beast to kill, even with all my combat options open, but I eventually managed it and I got credit for completing the job. There was no conversation acknowledging it afterwards either; just the call from the fixer about the gig that started it all.

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5 hours ago, Kalbear Total Landscaping said:

I somehow accidentally triggered the voodoo boys mission. That was odd. Among other things I got the option to take the blockers before I ever acquired them. As far as I can tell it triggered off of a random ncpd subcon in Japan town. 

That's a weird one. Feels like the memory leak(s) they have not plugged yet may have somehow triggered something it shouldn't have, just as some of the graphical swaps that seem to happen (like cigarettes being rendered as guns, or -- in my most recent playthrough -- Mitch's holstered pistol being rendered as a half-eaten hamburger towards the end of the game.)

4 hours ago, Fez said:

Not sure if it was a bug, but I was doing a gig near where one of the boxing quests was (The Animals one), and I guess my quickhacks spread to the boxer, because I got sucked into combat with them.

Yeah, Rhino can get herself involved. Though, oddly, my first run I ended up beating her first, then did the mission and while I killed everyone else (including the weapon dealer who I accidentally shot in the course of fighting the Animals), Rhino just stayed where she was. Second time, same thing, fought and beat her, did the mission... but this time, she went and joined the Animals in fighting me. 

I suspect there's some sort of edge cases happening with the scripting that's leading to different results.

In other news, discovered that you can get a free Shion Coyote

Spoiler

if you tell Saul about Panam and the others planning to steal that Basilisk tank. And it seems like he'll throw in a bunch of cash, too -- saw 27k transferred. But, OTOH, all the others will hate you after that, you'll never talk to Panam again following a furious diatribe from her, and the Aldecaldo camp will soon after get blown to shreds -- presumably due to the Raffen Shiv raiders -- and most of them will disappear to parts unknown.

 

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Had a weird experience, must be a design flaw or the like after looking something up...

Spoiler

 

So I'm on the Never Fade Away on the main quest line and at the part where you are escaping Arasaka and get in the car the reporter is driving. I failed to get in the car the first time I did the quest. So, I end up running the streets in a zig zag pattern since I'm being told to escape the Arasaka Agents. 

I suddenly get a message from Wakaka, which I think is plenty weird, given I'm in the past as Johnny. But I track it and go on the mission. It turned out it was the gig Getting Warmer, where you are rescuing a netrunner named Bugbear. I got killed by the Tygerclaws because I wasn't able to hack and tried to do that. Unfortunately I didn't keep a save to try it again, not a recent one anyway. 

I thought maybe they really went all out and designed a gig or two for Silverhand. Would have been cool if they did. I'm sure he didn't learn to shoot like that just doing rock concerts.

 

 

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14 hours ago, Martell Spy said:

Had a weird experience, must be a design flaw or the like after looking something up...

 

That's crazy. Never heard of that happening before without deliberate efforts to break out of barriered areas. Yeah, you definitely ended up accidentally triggering a mission intended for V. But it's genuinely amazing that they didn't lock down all but a tiny bit of the city so that you couldn't wander off.

(BTW, that Bugbear mission was the one that completely bugged out the first run through I did -- I never got a call from Wakako, and though I could see enemies none of the doors would open. Managed to do it in my 2nd run through, though, which was cool.)

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The 1.1. patch just dropped; at least on Steam.

ETA: Looking at the patch notes, all the bugs they call out as being fixed are ones I never encountered. Not sure if the vague "stability improvements" cover things like "characters standing and sitting rapidly when they shouldn't be moving" or if its just about crash prevention. So I'm not sure if I'll see any major improvements from the patch.

Doesn't look any content was added, which isn't that surprising. I was kinda hoping a barber/tattoo shop would be added to allow for customization after game start, and I think one will eventually; but I suppose right now they are way too busy on fixes to adding anything new.

I don't see anything about police spawning or driver AI either. Hopefully those are addressed in February patch. Though I'll probably be done with my second playthrough before then; and once that happens I don't think I'll be touching the game again until whenever the first major expansion drops.

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Patch notes, for those looking for them.

I don't think I've run into any of those particular bugs. I did see someone else refer to having the Japantown gig involving Bugbear bugged for them (as I did in my first run through), but that one does not (yet) seem to be addressed as an issue.

I'm not surprised by the list of things, and can only imagine that a lot of the memory improvements will both improve performance in some cases and also perhaps lead to fewer memory-related bugs (like models swapping).

 

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36 minutes ago, Fez said:

I don't see anything about police spawning or driver AI either. Hopefully those are addressed in February patch. Though I'll probably be done with my second playthrough before then; and once that happens I don't think I'll be touching the game again until whenever the first major expansion drops.

Those are game system issues, and the system in the game at the moment was apparently coded and added into the game from scratch in the closing months of development because people realised that players would be expecting such a system (when others had argued that it was a waste of time because CP77 was an RPG, not GTA, which is nicely naive of them).

A "proper" police system will take months to design and implement. Assuming they're even doing it, it probably won't be ready that quickly. They may improve it somehow though.

Looking at the patch notes, the only bug of these I encountered was the prompt for exiting braindance not appearing and having to mash keys until I got out of it.

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On 1/22/2021 at 6:01 PM, Werthead said:

Those are game system issues, and the system in the game at the moment was apparently coded and added into the game from scratch in the closing months of development because people realised that players would be expecting such a system (when others had argued that it was a waste of time because CP77 was an RPG, not GTA, which is nicely naive of them).

A "proper" police system will take months to design and implement. Assuming they're even doing it, it probably won't be ready that quickly. They may improve it somehow though.

Looking at the patch notes, the only bug of these I encountered was the prompt for exiting braindance not appearing and having to mash keys until I got out of it.

That's true for the police system, and I wasn't expecting a full overhaul there yet. But I would've liked something like pushing back the spawn radius for police, so they can't appear too close to V, would go a long distance towards making it feel more natural.

The driving I'm less clear if that was a last minute throw-in as well, or if there's something not working right.

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