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Cyberpunk 2078


Werthead
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10 hours ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

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. 

It feels like it should be paired with a reputation system for each of the gangs, I've always acted like there is one anyway and try to keep it non-lethal with the Valentino's for example.

There's one gig in particular that Dakota sends you on to free a guy from a Militech border camp and says not to kill anyone (because the guy hiring you works for Militech), and that's definitely a gig you shouldn't be getting if your V is known for always going in loud and kicking in the front door.

There are also some pretty clearly sign posted spots where you would have been able to qualify for some gigs from other factions, the TCs if you leave the bosses alive after the coup at Clouds, Militech with Meredith etc.

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9 hours ago, Ran said:

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.

Is it weird to you that some people might think this way when it pertains to an RPG, given that replaying and build styles et al have become such a common feature and are actively promoted in games like Diablo 2, 3, etc.? 

Like, if people are willing to try different build and playstyles in ARPGs, why can't they do it in CP77? Or is there something obvious that I'm missing? 

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29 minutes ago, karaddin said:

It feels like it should be paired with a reputation system for each of the gangs, I've always acted like there is one anyway and try to keep it non-lethal with the Valentino's for example.

The problem that I've always encountered with reputation systems is that they've either never made much logical sense to me, or have been handled in a way that never amounted to much. (Josh Sawyer gave a Zoom talk about reputation mechanics, including in Deadfire, which might be tangentially interesting to some.)

That said, whenever I've encountered reputation mechanics in the past - for example, in any of Bethesda's offerings over the last decade +, it's always felt unrealistic to me. I did something awful on one side of the world map, and somehow, people I've never met, who have little if any connection to the actions that I engaged in, got word of what I did and decided to change their view towards me? Obviously, games with factions have to find ways to make reputations and factions work, but it always felt wildly unrealistic to me.

On the other side of things, there's the reputation system in things like Deadfire, which reportedly exist, but honestly, never felt like they amounted to anything consequential. After having played through the game three times (yes, three, stop judging me, I love the PoE games), I can't really say like I felt it amounted to much, even when I tried playing the game as a complete and utter bastard. (Also, as best as I can tell, in PoE2, reputation only ever matters if you're interested in romancing someone. Beyond that, the plot, uh, like life, finds a way.)

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I remember the reactions to Fallout: New Vegas, where there was a hardcore fanbase who loved the way the game organically reacted to you finishing quests any way you like (including killing the quest-giver, automatically negating however many other quests they could give out), and a lot of other people who got kinda freaked out by it and didn't appreciate being forced to make choices - some of them quite early in the game - that locked them out of other possibilities.

Fallout 4 tried to address that by making quest-givers indestructible and also pushing the moments of final decision-making (thus blocking off other quests) as late in the game as possible. Unfortunately, they also made things quite confusing anyway, with 4 distinct factions who interact with one another in unpredictable ways, rather than the 2 factions in New Vegas which were easier to keep track of (with the rogue element being only yourself, and the ability to tell both factions to fuck off and you're the new king in town).

I'll be interested to see how Starfield falls on the axis of freedom versus being locked into linear pathways with only a moderate choice on how things unfold.

Edited by Werthead
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2 hours ago, Werthead said:

I remember the reactions to Fallout: New Vegas, where there was a hardcore fanbase who loved the way the game organically reacted to you finishing quests any way you like (including killing the quest-giver, automatically negating however many other quests they could give out), and a lot of other people who got kinda freaked out by it and didn't appreciate being forced to make choices - some of them quite early in the game - that locked them out of other possibilities.

But...that's called replayability! And player choice! They gave you options! It means you also get more bang for your buck, and get a game that's dynamic and offers different outcomes and ways of playing! Surely that's a good thing?! 

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On 3/28/2023 at 6:12 AM, IlyaP said:

Is it weird to you that some people might think this way when it pertains to an RPG, given that replaying and build styles et al have become such a common feature and are actively promoted in games like Diablo 2, 3, etc.? 

It does feel strange, but at the same time I can't say it's the wrong "play style", as such. If the majority of people just want a sign-posted path that gets them all the story content, I'm not sure that's wrong.

On 3/28/2023 at 6:12 AM, IlyaP said:

Like, if people are willing to try different build and playstyles in ARPGs, why can't they do it in CP77? Or is there something obvious that I'm missing? 

I feel like they do do it, but they don't think of it in terms of "And this playstyle will get me a different story experience," they just play a different playstyle for the achievements or the fun or the challenge.

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20 hours ago, IlyaP said:

But...that's called replayability! And player choice! They gave you options! It means you also get more bang for your buck, and get a game that's dynamic and offers different outcomes and ways of playing! Surely that's a good thing?! 

Sure, but how many people ever actually replay games that take 40+ hours to beat?  I'd love to replay Witcher 3 with the graphics update, but I just don't have the fucking time if I want to play anything else for the next six months.

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2 hours ago, briantw said:

Sure, but how many people ever actually replay games that take 40+ hours to beat?  I'd love to replay Witcher 3 with the graphics update, but I just don't have the fucking time if I want to play anything else for the next six months.

*shifts foot awkwardly*

I...replay long games regularly, including Uru, Pillars of Eternity 1/2, Mass Effect 1-4, Finaly Fantasy 7, Assassin's Creed III, etc. But I am probably not a statistical majority in this regard. When a game hits home, it becomes kind of like a comfort food, and I like just hanging out and exploring and trying stuff out just for fun. 

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16 minutes ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

skyrim enters the Chat

Hey heard you were talking shit about people not replaying long games 

Skyrim is a bit different because it's so meandering and open ended and how you play can alter a run significantly.  

With Witcher 3, there's really only one way to play it, and the story is linear even if you can spend a lot of time dicking around.  You're Geralt (and, occasionally, Ciri).  You'll always be Geralt, the witcher.  He'll always have two swords and the same five or so spells and a bunch of potions you always forget to use.

Edited by briantw
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19 hours ago, Kalnestk Oblast said:

skyrim enters the Chat

Hey heard you were talking shit about people not replaying long games 

Skyrim isn't very narratively-focused, though. Like most Bethesda games, you can mainline the shit out of the main quest and finish it in under a dozen hours, and because of both how it level-gates everything to your level and also gives out EXP like confetti, you can pretty much get through the entire main quest and finish it fairly straightforwardly.

One of the appeals of Bethesda RPGs is also focusing solely on side-quests and even completely optional activities to a ridiculous degrees. You don't have to look far on forums or on Reddit etc to find people who've put 2,000 hours into Skyrim (or Oblivion, or Fallout 3 or 4) and never finished the main story quest or even really pursued it very far.

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3 minutes ago, Werthead said:

Skyrim isn't very narratively-focused, though. Like most Bethesda games, you can mainline the shit out of the main quest and finish it in under a dozen hours, and because of both how it level-gates everything to your level and also gives out EXP like confetti, you can pretty much get through the entire main quest and finish it fairly straightforwardly.

One of the appeals of Bethesda RPGs is also focusing solely on side-quests and even completely optional activities to a ridiculous degrees. You don't have to look far on forums or on Reddit etc to find people who've put 2,000 hours into Skyrim (or Oblivion, or Fallout 3 or 4) and never finished the main story quest or even really pursued it very far.

I'm aware, but at the same time the idea that people won't replay games that take 50+ hours - even narratively based ones - is I think inaccurate. 

I like CP 2077 doing a 'we will not lock you out of any main ending on a single playthrough' especially given that the main ending quests are themselves fairly long, but I think optional sidequests and behaviors are fine that way. Heck, that's true right now regardless if you want to complete things - decisions around what you do with Panam and Saul, for instance, can absolutely change what you experience later on in the game and if you want to see those things you can't see the endings for them. Expanding this to be more about your fixer relationships I think would not be a particularly big alteration of that theme.

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Looks like Phantom Liberty's release date will be announced in June. It won't be in June, it will just be announced then, possibly for later this year. Three years to get an expansion pack out is quite something.

Nice.

 

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Missed this news: a technology demo patch will be released on April 11th for the game, bringing in "RTX Overdrive" (aka path tracing) to the game. It's not the final RTX Overdrive implementation, apparently, it's still a work-in-progress, but they (and Nvidia) think it's so cool that it's worth giving people a preview of it now. They're aiming for a "good experience" across all the 40-series Nvidia cards (though from an interview I saw, it sounds like the final release may have path tracing work on AMD cards as well? Wasn't sure if the developer was just being cagey or if that's what he really meant).

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The music got me pretty hyped about playing again. But I will resist until Phantom Liberty is out. Well, maybe I'll patch and play around with RTX Overdrive a little bit... but no properly play-through. I'll start fresh with a Street Kid background for that.

Edited by Ran
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I confess, every time I see an update to this thread, my heart leaps in joy in the anticipation of some new and interesting observation from @karaddin, as her insights into this game are magnificent and one day, if I'm a very lucky boy, I'll be able to give her the highest of high fives for her brilliant thoughts on this game. (And for genuinely being a stupendous badass.)

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Patch 1.62, bringing RTX Overdrive to the game, is now live on Steam. Digital Foundry has done a couple of videos about it, one more analytical looking at performance and effect on the game visuals, another just giving a pleasant tour of Night City using Overdrive. I'll include the former:

 

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