Cyberpunk 2078

[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.

[Werthead]

Reached the end on my current playthrough and have managed to unlock the "secret" ending, but it is brutal. No saving and you can be one-shotted by some enemies during it. The infinite waves of enemies it generates during the Matrix-inspired lobby scene is very silly. Still, at least it presents a challenge again.

ETA: Very weird bit. I got to the single autosave after the lift, used the turret to clear out some enemies, took down a bunch others, then got to the bit where Johnny points out the mainframe to you. And then two dudes walk in and one-shot me instantly. They can't be hacked, at all, and have no flinching or recoil animations even when you're shooting them with a goddamn mobile turret. Completely bewildering.

Edited November 2, 2022 by Werthead

[Kalbear]

11 hours ago, Werthead said:

Reached the end on my current playthrough and have managed to unlock the "secret" ending, but it is brutal. No saving and you can be one-shotted by some enemies during it. The infinite waves of enemies it generates during the Matrix-inspired lobby scene is very silly. Still, at least it presents a challenge again.

ETA: Very weird bit. I got to the single autosave after the lift, used the turret to clear out some enemies, took down a bunch others, then got to the bit where Johnny points out the mainframe to you. And then two dudes walk in and one-shot me instantly. They can't be hacked, at all, and have no flinching or recoil animations even when you're shooting them with a goddamn mobile turret. Completely bewildering.

That's weird. While it wasn't super easy and took a few tries, I don't remember having two guys one-shot me or anything like that. To be fair I was playing pre-balance mode so hacking was absurdly powerful but even then it didn't seem, like, impossible. 

[karaddin]

14 hours ago, Werthead said:

Reached the end on my current playthrough and have managed to unlock the "secret" ending, but it is brutal. No saving and you can be one-shotted by some enemies during it. The infinite waves of enemies it generates during the Matrix-inspired lobby scene is very silly. Still, at least it presents a challenge again.

ETA: Very weird bit. I got to the single autosave after the lift, used the turret to clear out some enemies, took down a bunch others, then got to the bit where Johnny points out the mainframe to you. And then two dudes walk in and one-shot me instantly. They can't be hacked, at all, and have no flinching or recoil animations even when you're shooting them with a goddamn mobile turret. Completely bewildering.

That's sounds like something has bugged, the last thing I did was running through that ending with a netrunner build and I was able to suicide or short circuit everything and managed it on my first try. Granted I was also 20 body so max HP, legendary biomon and legendary second heart and I now second heart triggered a couple of times. But I definitely didn't notice guys I couldn't hack at that point. Maybe the issue is where you're standing when they trigger?

[Ran]

Been awhile since I did the suicide run (think I completed it twice with two different builds), but I can't say I recall any one-shot guys either. I did die my very first time, with my pistol sniper/cold blood build, half way through when I found that I couldn't kill people quickly enough without using more hacks than I was at the time. But that was just soaking up too much damage, not being one-shot.

[Werthead]

It looks like it's something to do with the spawn point (the guys don't run up to the door, they spawn directly behind it and then rush in), you can't target or hack people just after they spawn in. To get past it I ran up to Johnny to trigger his dialogue and then ran all the way back to the entrance hallway, peeked out and waited for them to get a few feet down the corridor before hacking them to death.

I had to do that again when going through that door out into the bigger hallway areas because a whole ton of guys, a mech and half a dozen robots spawn and you have to be careful because they can one-shot you as well.

Got to the end but it was pretty tough.

[Werthead]

I remembered I had an interesting anomaly in my second playthrough. For whatever reason, I left the "check on your suicidal cop neighbour" mission for quite some time, and when I came back to do it his two friends were in tears outside his apartment and apparently he'd already killed himself, completely blocking off the whole quest progression.

That was a surprise as I was pretty sure there were no time-limited quests in the game outside of those that are explicitly so (with an in-mission timer or whatever). Something to remember for my third playthrough.

Quote

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.

Very old comment resurrection!

I heavily got into Let's Eat Grandma's stuff recently, mainly because they'd just started playing "I Really Want to Stay at Your House" live on their current tour (and only since Edgerunners came out) so a bunch of live performances hit YouTube and then connected to their other material. Their new album, Two Ribbons, is incredible and their first two aren't slouches (their first album I, Gemini is definitely way weirder and more idiosyncratic, and unbelievably has songs on it that they wrote when they were 13). And to round it off they also did the entire soundtrack to Netflix's The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself, presumably in about ten minutes spare they had somewhere.

The story behind them making the song is interesting, although a bit sad. CDPR seemed to tap them as one of a bunch of artists they wanted to work with and they agreed to contribute a song in late 2018 or early 2019. Then one of the two members, Jenny, her boyfriend passed away at a shockingly young age (22, and she was only 19). So she understandably bailed out of the project leaving Rosa to handle it completely solo. So she finished the song three years ago and almost forgot about it. It was a year before it appeared in the game and it picked up some traction then, but about the same as six or seven other prominent songs from the soundtrack. Then they heavily used it in Edgerunners which the band wasn't even really aware of, then it blew up massively. They weren't playing it live because they seemed to regard it as Rosa's thing more than the band's thing, but because Rosa has no plans to do more solo stuff (at the moment), they decided to integrate it into their live set to take advantage of the higher profile of the track. One slight problem with that is that Rosa isn't as good a singer as Jenny live, so her live handling of the song (especially the autotuned/robotified chorus) can be a bit hit and miss.

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They seem to be largely romance related, but include things where Panam asks about Jackie and Judy, and V tells her about Takemura.

 

Another olllllld comment but I though interesting, as in this playthrough I had almost 0 interaction with Panam outside of her missions, despite her being my romance choice. Almost no texts, only one new line of dialogue if you call her after you hook up and that's about it. I had far more interaction with Judy as my best friend when she goes on her world tour after she leaves Night City, with her sending pictures of visiting Portland and Seattle. Also none of the "naughty" text pics that Panam apparently sends you after one of the earlier updates.

It's almost like the effects of the update that added all that stuff (1.3 or 1.4, IIRC) never took effect on my install, which would be...weird.

[Ran]

19 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Their new album, Two Ribbons, is incredible and their first two aren't slouches (their first album I, Gemini is definitely way weirder and more idiosyncratic, and unbelievably has songs on it that they wrote when they were 13). And to round it off they also did the entire soundtrack to Netflix's The Bastard Son & The Devil Himself, presumably in about ten minutes spare they had somewhere.

I had no idea that they did the soundtrack for that show. Hrm.... YA stuff is not really my thing, but I may check it out just for the soundtrack.

19 minutes ago, Werthead said:

The story behind them making the song is interesting, although a bit sad. CDPR seemed to tap them as one of a bunch of artists they wanted to work with and they agreed to contribute a song in late 2018 or early 2019. Then one of the two members, Jenny, her boyfriend passed away at a shockingly young age (22, and she was only 19). So she understandably bailed out of the project leaving Rosa to handle it completely solo.

I did know Rosa did it solo, but had no idea of the backstory. Tragic.

19 minutes ago, Werthead said:

One slight problem with that is that Rosa isn't as good a singer as Jenny live, so her live handling of the song (especially the autotuned/robotified chorus) can be a bit hit and miss.

Yeah, I fear I noticed that in the couple of live performance recordings I saw, though I thought maybe some of the blame was that the live performance recordings were pretty bad and the venues seemed like small clubs with dodgy sound systems.... but I guess a lot of it is just that Rosa is not really a vocalist.

That's fine, but I wonder if they should consider switching to Jenny "covering" Rosa's performance... 

 

22 minutes ago, Werthead said:

It's almost like the effects of the update that added all that stuff (1.3 or 1.4, IIRC) never took effect on my install, which would be...weird.

That does seem rather weird. The lack of Panam interaction is not something I've heard of before, so it must be some sort of bug.

[Werthead]

2 hours ago, Ran said:

Yeah, I fear I noticed that in the couple of live performance recordings I saw, though I thought maybe some of the blame was that the live performance recordings were pretty bad and the venues seemed like small clubs with dodgy sound systems.... but I guess a lot of it is just that Rosa is not really a vocalist.

That's fine, but I wonder if they should consider switching to Jenny "covering" Rosa's performance... 

Rosa's always sung half or more of their songs, I guess the ones she wrote and she wrote the lion's share on the latest album because Jenny was still coming off her break, and there's a whole bunch they collaborated on so sing different verses (the notable exceptions being "Watching You Go" and "Two Ribbons" itself). I noticed on the new album Rose also double-tracks some of her vocals, which Jenny has to sing live (which might have been deliberate to spread out the workload).

I just think for that particular song Rosa probably thought it wouldn't blow up so she didn't have to worry about singing it live, which very much was not the case! I was just reading Miki Berenyi's (of 1980s/90s shoegaze band Lush) biography and she noted that for their first album (produced by one of the Cocteau Twins) they did some really ambitious vocal stuff which she then realised she had zero chance of singing live (especially with mike technology back then), so on their later albums she made sure more of the songs were in her natural register. I get the impression Let's Eat Grandma don't worry too much about that.

ETA: I noticed on some of their most recent dates - Chicago and Toronto - it sounds like Rosa's using a live distortion effect to replicate the chorus, which helps a lot. Also she downshifts into a lower register to sing more comfortably, although it's not quite the same as the recording. Plus they've now get the entire audience screaming the lyrics to help out

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That does seem rather weird. The lack of Panam interaction is not something I've heard of before, so it must be some sort of bug.

 

Yeah, it's a very odd thing. When I went back and did the later patch-added new stuff on my original save it did feel like not all of the updates had taken effect, but for my actual second playthrough it did (i.e. the new dynamic cop car chase missions appeared, and performance seemed to smooth out a lot, and I definitely got Judy's expanded friendship interactions).

 

Edited November 14, 2022 by Werthead

[Werthead]

I actually had this argument on YouTube with someone a while back who was annoyed Hallie Coggins wasn't credited on the YouTube videos despite, y'know, not actually existing.

I get his point that the band alter-egos ended up being a bit of a waste of time, since aside from Lizzy Wizzy/Grimes none of their alter-egos even really appeared in the game (Us Cracks' singing is provided by Namakopuri, but they don't act as the characters in-game, not to mention there's only two people in Namakopuri versus three in Us Cracks)

[karaddin]

I've had a lot of variation in terms of seeing those extra interactions depending on how much else I'm doing and the order I do it in. Most of the time now I'm doing the main story mission lines one at a time and focusing on gigs and scanner hustles while I wait between the stages, so you end up with a lot more time for the interactions to happen. On the other hand I did a quick playthrough as male V just to do it once and see the Panam romance and with rushing through the main quest and beelining the Panam romance I didn't even get to the point of the call from Judy about Evelyn.

I was really hoping that would mean that the voice mail from Judy would change and Evelyn would still be alive in this ending, but alas that's one variable they didn't take into account

@Wertheadthat neighbour quest has always been time limited, but its only once you progress it - if you walk past and hear them knocking on the door and get the quest but don't do anything its fine, but either once you speak to the cops or knock on his door the first time it starts a clock that I think is either 24/36 or 48 hours without you visiting again and talking to him, then going to the Columbarium to find out its a turtle and talking to the cops then he'll kill himself.

I'm trying to hold out until the next patch to do another play through now, but next time I think I want to turn off a bunch of the HUD features - only thing I can see being an issue is the in game map not having the street names on it. There are actual street signs on the streets, but not the map itself to see where I need to be turning.

Also saw Witcher 3 next gen patch finally has a date, I got CP2077 last year when I decided I'd wait for that W3 patch before doing either NG+ or another playthrough and its been more than a year and over 500 hours into CP2077 by the time its actually coming out lol.

[Ran]

A fun-sounding new mod: the Night City Stock Market, which dynamically responds to quests and missions.

I'm really itching about wanting a new computer system, but the GPU prices right now are just absurd.

[Gorn]

3 hours ago, Ran said:

A fun-sounding new mod: the Night City Stock Market, which dynamically responds to quests and missions.

I'm really itching about wanting a new computer system, but the GPU prices right now are just absurd.

If you're looking for the latest releases (Nvidia 4000 series), I agree, but there is absolutely no need to do that. You can find a bunch of bargains for the older series of cards right now, especially if you are not dead-set on Nvidia - for example, AMD RX 6900 XT, a ludicrously powerful card that will last you for the next five or six years, is currently discounted to $649 + tax, and you can find AMD RX 6700 XT, a reasonably powerful card for 1080p and 1440p gaming, in the $350-400 range.

Intel's new card, Arc A750 and A770, are also a great deal for $280-350, but you may want to wait until their drivers "mature" a bit.

[Kalbear]

If you're looking to play CP2077 don't go with AMD. It's not nearly as good as it is on NVidia. 

And run all the way away from Intel. 

[Ran]

The new i7-13700k feels like the right balance for me between productivity use and gaming use, so kind of what I'm looking at. The 7900X is substantially more expensive and it's TDP is pretty high, the 7700x doesn't perform as well and is only marginally cheaper and still has a high TDP. That said, I know the 13700k can spike very hot indeed when turboed up, from all reports, so the rated TDP doesn't seem very accurate. I'm not a fan of water cooling but I was thinking the Noctua DH-15 would be sufficient, provided there's enough airflow...

And yeah. CP2077 is the main game I'd like to play, with RTX on. DLSS doesn't bother me, nor does FSR, but raytracing performance eats a lot of the performance in the AMD cards vs Nvidia, from what I can see.

As to pricing, in Sweden, well, those prices are sadly not operative. A 6900 xt starts  just short of $900. A 3080 is like $970. 

Personally, I was hoping to move on to a 4K screen and subsequent 4K gaming, but now that seems dubious and I should wait a generation or two more. At the same time, getting a hot new system together and then cannibalizing my GTX 960(!) to wait out those two generations feels very sad-

[Kalbear]

If you can wait a few months the prices should drop significantly - demand for cards is on the floor with the lack of mining that is being done right now, and that will affect the market in 2-3 months.

You can also try your luck on a used one but the ones from mines are notoriously overworked and sketchy, so buyer beware.

[Werthead]

I'm probably going to start saving for a new PC with a view to getting it in the spring. This PC is now five years old (six in February!) and it'll be nice to do an upgrade on my terms rather than waiting for my old machine to die by itself and then rush around like a maniac trying to get a new one in a hurry.

I'm thinking of a moderate switch up to 4K, probably via a 3080 or maybe even a 3090 if I can find one at a not-too-insane price.

[karaddin]

I'd dragged my feet for a long time on bumping up monitor resolution, but after doing it for the main monitor a few months ago I'm now decided on doing the second as well - the 3070TI is sufficient to handle 2k. I can't see giving 4k a chance for at least another couple of years though, as I think it's already near it's upper limit for CP2077.

So I guess it comes down to whether you're already on 2k or looking to jump from 1080p to 4k?

[Ran]

5 hours ago, karaddin said:

So I guess it comes down to whether you're already on 2k or looking to jump from 1080p to 4k?

1080p going to 4k was the thought. It's a big jump. Maybe aiming for something that can do 1440p solidly instead makes more sense right now...

[karaddin]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

1080p going to 4k was the thought. It's a big jump. Maybe aiming for something that can do 1440p solidly instead makes more sense right now...

It's definitely an appreciable improvement in terms of how good it looks and I'd say the increased screen real estate for non gaming is at least as significant - that's actually the part driving me to upgrade the second monitor.

I'm very much committed to 2 monitors though so didn't want to go to a monitor larger than 27" as I'm not sure how well it would fit my desk, and 4k on a 27" starts to get pretty small I think. If you're going with a single monitor then a 32" 4k might make more sense