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Cyberpunk 2078


Werthead
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Made it to the final mission.  I did all the gigs and side quests.  Didn't get all the police scanner shit, although I have to imagine I got most of them since I pretty much just knocked them out as I saw them while driving around.  Don't care enough to search out the rest, though.  

I already technically finished the game once, as I offed myself on the rooftop initially, but I saved prior to talking to Misty, so after the depressing end credits stuff I reloaded and went to meet with the Nomads.

Going to wrap this one up tomorrow, at least until the expansion comes out.

I'm at around 80 hours, which puts this pretty close to the same length as Witcher 3 pre-expansions.

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8 hours ago, Werthead said:

I'm not sure if this a review or possibly tapping Cyberpunk 2077 as therapy. Entertaining though.

177 hours in one playthrough, plus replying the first 5 hours of the game on three other formats, then replaying the opening hours of The Witcher 3 several times for structural comparison purposes, also rewatching dozens of cyberpunk movies and rereading Neuromancer three times. He puts the work in.

Thanks for this. Very entertaining, fun digressions, and some interesting points I hadn't thought about before regarding the structure of the game (in his "What I liked" video).

Also, for those not clicking through and reading the description, here is the playlist totaling some 8 hours that he talks about in the above video -- Youtube changed some stuff and the bit at the very end that says "Click here" to access the playlist no longer works.

 

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I clearly enjoyed the mechanics of the game a lot more than he did, some of that is just going to come down to much of my play time coming after patches that were released after he was done but I think the basics of the gun play etc appeal to me more at a basic level. He's certainly putting the work in to give it a fair shake though, a lot more work than I would ever do. I did disagree with his reading on certain thematic beats but that was like 2+ hours of video time back so I've already forgotten what it was.

I remain a lot less bothered by the lack of explicitly grappling with any trans elements in the game. Its true that it might be a tad cynical to use the chromanticore ad without any actual exploration of the issue, but it just doesn't bug me in the game - it being used for IRL advertising absolutely did though and was a significant contributor to my initial lack of interest. I lay that one at the feet of the marketing department though, not the developers. 

I definitely agree that the way the narrative is structured makes the integration of side quests into the game cause much less dissonance against the urgency of the mission - you are chasing down leads as you can, but you also have bills to pay and a reputation to spread. You're clearly in a far better place to take on Arasaka as one of the top mercs in NC than you are just crawled out of Vik's clinic. I do think the open world filler content is where you get the most ludonarrative dissonance from the superficial game mechanics butting up against the themes of Cyberpunk generally and the main story lines of the actual game. Also very much agree with him that the story itself and the character you're playing justify not putting much weight on the whole cop chase mechanic that so many people are still so hung up on, although he's not wrong that being essentially a hired murderer for the cops in the NCPD scanner missions was a choice.

I did also find it amusing that when he was commenting on the original teaser showing mechanics that weren't in the end game, he talked about ricochet guns when those mechanics were definitely in there by 1.3 which is when at least some of his play time was - he just forgot and didn't even think to try.

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Yeah, the ricochet guns were there from the start, but I admit I too never used them because hacking and tech shotgun and even smart guns were a bit more fun. 

I've gotten halfway through his video series. Like you, don't agree with it all, but some of it I can understand as being that he's someone who has played a lot more games and with a lot more intensity than I have. He's done multi-hour video games about obscure Japanese dating sims, not surprised he has a lot of ways to worry at even the smallest detail in CP2077

I liked his explaining the game as not being an open world video game, but rather a video game that has an open world in it.

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I followed his viewing suggestion and only watched 2 then the conclusion, I went with 3 and 6 - I think the open world discussion was 5? Don't think I heard that point, so guessing its from one of them I missed but sounds about right.

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5, yeah. It's at the end of that video that he said he actually hoped people watched all of them, he said that stuff about only watching two plus the final so that people didn't go on about him expecting people to watch all 8+ hours. Heh.

Edited by Ran
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Haha makes sense. I was probably going to go back and watch the rest, but was leaving the rest for later as he'd worried it would be a bit repetitive and said to go 2 then the finale, then go back if you wanted.

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Finished #6. I'm going to end up watching Rogers's other video game reviews, I have a feeling. They're so different from anything else I've seen in the gaming space.

The fact that the last half hour of part 6 is a long consideration on gamer chairs vs. office chairs and then on flight jackets was  highly unexpected and strangely entertaining. At the same time, the way that he delves on the idea of authenticity when talking about chairs or jackets or aviator glasses or what have you ties into the topic of the whole segment, the "authenticity" of "cyberpunk" and of the game itself. 

 

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13 hours ago, Ran said:

Yeah, the ricochet guns were there from the start, but I admit I too never used them because hacking and tech shotgun and even smart guns were a bit more fun. 

I've gotten halfway through his video series. Like you, don't agree with it all, but some of it I can understand as being that he's someone who has played a lot more games and with a lot more intensity than I have. He's done multi-hour video games about obscure Japanese dating sims, not surprised he has a lot of ways to worry at even the smallest detail in CP2077

I liked his explaining the game as not being an open world video game, but rather a video game that has an open world in it.

The ricochet gun is SO COOL! Especially when you get some muppet yelling out how I'll never get them and how they've hidden from me, or yelling about how I'm a cyclops (the Russians yell that a lot at me, and I don't know why.)

And then KAPOWSKI! RIGHT BETWEEN THE EYES! FROM HALF BLOCK AWAY! Booyeah! 

It's a *very* satisfying weapon.

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51 minutes ago, Ran said:

At the same time, the way that he delves on the idea of authenticity when talking about chairs or jackets or aviator glasses or what have you ties into the topic of the whole segment, the "authenticity" of "cyberpunk" and of the game itself. 

Do you think he's riffing on Case Pollard and her bomber jacket in Pattern Recognition and how that jacket and jackets like it have somehow become associated/affiliated with cyberpunk?

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5 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

Do you think he's riffing on Case Pollard and her bomber jacket in Pattern Recognition and how that jacket and jackets like it have somehow become associated/affiliated with cyberpunk?

I know he is because he talks about it!

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His video on Death Stranding is very good, although amusingly the sheer volume of times he mentions the name "Hideo Kojima" does not equal the number of times the name is mentioned in the game's opening and closing credits (of which the game has two sets, for absolutely no reason).

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His critique of Kojima wearing a replica of Ryan Gosling's jacket in Drive was one of the things that made me wonder at how far there was a performance to what he was saying, especially as Rogers doesn't seem to have any compunction against saying untrue things for effect and then later admitting it was untrue (e.g. telling people to only watch two segments when he hopes they'll watch all of them). Telling Kojima his jacket sucks because it's an inauthentic take on the Japanese souvenir jacket while he goes at great length about every bit of frippery he chooses to buy (including the Cyberpunk gaming chair, jacket, and shirt) and how this thing is actually "authentic" because they notionally use the exact same sewing machines while this thing isn't because...

Well, it made me think, and it certainly ends up tying into the idea of what is "cyberpunk" and how "cyberpunk is Cyberpunk 2077".   Pretty cool stuff. The exhaustive lengths he went to research -- reading Pondsmith's source books, watching even tangentially-related films like Strange Days, etc. -- is impressive.
all the parts save his "what I didn't like" part of his review, which he previewed in his "What I liked" section. 

The one thing I'm surprised by most is that he I don't think he's really dwelt on the score or the radio stations. He has a lengthy bit about the titles of missions being based on song titles, and he seemed puzzled/frustrated by the broad range of genres (IMO, this means Johnny Silverhand is a rockerboy with eclectic tastes), but I wouldn't have minded him dwelling more on some of the actual music in the game. Unless that's in the "what I didn't like" section?

Speaking of in-game music, the winners of the contest to provide songs for the new radio station that'll be introduced in Phantom Liberty were announced:

 

Edited by Ran
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JustCosplaySings, who's listed as one of the selected performers, did a Japanese version of "I Really Want To Stay At Your House" that's quite cool (Saya Elder of CDPR, who was one of the producers of Edgerunners, ended up sharing it on Twitter):

 

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  • 1 month later...
  • 3 weeks later...
On 3/26/2023 at 2:42 AM, Ran said:

Now, this looks like an incredibly impressive mod:

 

I tried it out myself, as I'm uh...mildly obsessed with this game, and I just...found it lacking, mainly because there's no real meaningful way to punish me *or* reward me in a way that makes me care. It brings to the forefront the point that CDPR developer Miles Tost mentioned at GDC around path validation - like, I could fail a path, but it didn't really affect the outcome in any meaningful way beyond me not getting a bit more XP or not not accomplishing the mission the way the programmatics wanted me to accomplish it. 

Which is to say, I wasn't punished for brute-forcing my way through a situation by missing out on anything, or having something denied to me. To use an example that he referenced at his GDC talk, with Dishonored, if you brute force your way through the game and go on a killing spree, the rat plague actually gets worse, which affects the outcome of the game. If you restrain yourself, the plague ends differently, which results in different outcomes.

As much as the mod wants to try and allow - and indeed encourage! - stealth, the only thing reward is meeting the objectives it gives you, which in no way affects the mission's outcome regardless of what you do. Which is inevitable, but inherently tied to the design choices CDPR made with this magnificiently addictive game1

I maintain hope that Phantom Liberty will introduce mission pathways that are more impactful and force me to think more than the current ones do, since at the moment, despite allowing any playstyle to be legitimate, they all, really, have the same outcomes, since the focus was on story rather than on playstyle. Hopefully reviewing Arkane's masterpieces has positively influenced how CDPR's designers approach level design and narrative choice in and actions/consequences in future DLCs and games.

1. On Steam, it's my second most-played game, behind Skyrim, a game that absolutely ruled my life for nearly four years2.

2. Stop judging me. I can see that face you're making. I don't judge you for playing 7,000 hours of Factorio!

 

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5 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Which is to say, I wasn't punished for brute-forcing my way through a situation by missing out on anything, or having something denied to me. To use an example that he referenced at his GDC talk, with Dishonored, if you brute force your way through the game and go on a killing spree, the rat plague actually gets worse, which affects the outcome of the game. If you restrain yourself, the plague ends differently, which results in different outcomes.

 

 

To add to this, specific important NPCs react VERY strongly to you doing a high chaos ending and change certain missions quite a bit. It's significantly more integrated in the fabric of the game. That's not really true for Cyberpunk as a whole - while specific questlines massively impact the NPCs in those questlines, they have little outcome for other NPCs or behaviors as a whole. 

I'm not sure what that would have looked like in Cyberpunk. Possibly something like certain fixers refuse to work with you or actively put hits on you, while other fixers give more jobs for you because of your rep to be extra quiet/extra loud. 

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I cited the idea of blocking off missions based on criteria (e.g. passage of time), but CDPR took the approach of making basically everything accessible, and I was told that a lot of people strongly dislike learning that they need to re-play the game to get content they were gatekept out of. I'm not sure that CDPR necessarily made the wrong choice for the majority of players even if they feel a lot of players took the path of least resistance.

For me, the mod acts the same way achievements did, it gives rewards for following a particular path (stealth in its case) and I don't, personally, need any more consequences than not achieving those rewards if I fail to play that path.

I don't mind it if Phantom Liberty does more branching story to encourage replayability, but for my part I'll replay it anyways if I decide a different build and different approach to missions would be fun to try even if the end-results are the same.

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