Cyberpunk 2078

[Quijote Light]

I’m so excited for this. I’ll probably start a new playthrough, but I might jump on to an old one to mess around with the new skill trees. There’s a simulator of the new skill trees on their website, including the relic tree if anyone is interested. 
 

https://www.cyberpunk.net/en/build-planner?a=33333&b=&r=&i=&t=&c=&e=

[Ran]

The news about the relationship quests having some small impact gave me pause. I don't really want to run through every major relationship again, so what I'm thinking is that I'll stick to my plan of playing a male street kid, and running through the game that way, maybe get through Panam's and/or Kerry's story, and then do PL that way... and then once I'm done with that run through the expansion, I'll go and boot up my female nomad (assuming I still have that save.. ulp) and run her through to try the path unchosen from my first PL run, and also to see what's going on in Judy and River Ward land in that run.

That's the plan, anyways. The game tends to suck me in and I tend to do a lot more than I intended, but I really want to experience PL's story.

[Kalbear]

For me I'm gonna start fresh because it's going to take me some time to both build up my muscle memory and actually figure out the build I want to use and use it. 

[IlyaP]

So goes all of our lives for at least a week, come 26 September.

Ground Control to Corpo V
Ground Control to Badlands V
Take your Samurai jacket and strap your mirrorshades on
Ground Control to Urban V
Commencing download, arch bike engine on
Check in with Judy and may Panam's love be with you...

Edited September 20, 2023 by IlyaP

[Kalbear]

The toughest thing for me is to figure out if I'm going with the male or female V. I think I need to do a female V fully - I've never done that - but I absolutely adore the Panam plot and her as the romance interest. 

Man, they really should have gone the Baldur's Gate 3 option and let everyone fuck everyone in all sorts of weird-ass combinations. 

 

[karaddin]

Female V still gets a really solid relationship with Panama but obviously not the explicitly romance parts. As someone that would normally be pretty frustrated by female V not being able to romance her I actually like it here - the characters feel real enough that them having defined sexualities makes them feel more real to me.

Even if River's seems to include an inability to understand I'm not into him no matter how many hints I try and give. Certainly not unrealistic there either though.

[IlyaP]

6 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Even if River's seems to include an inability to understand I'm not into him no matter how many hints I try and give. Certainly not unrealistic there either though.

Same. Never saw the appeal in romancing River. But Kerry? A chaotic AF bisexual rocker boi with a penchant for torching yachts? Frelling hells to the yes. 

[Werthead]

I liked the Panam relationship but it's pretty curtailed. You hook up with Panam and that's it, there's not really much development afterwards, unless you get the ending in the penthouse and she's...just hanging out there. With Judy you get a fair bit more interaction, telephone calls, and if she leaves Night City she actually stays in touch and sends you e-postcards of her trips to Seattle, New York, Europe, Japan etc. It's quite cool.

I do think maybe they (and games in general) need a post-relationship mission of some kind, or maybe a couple, to sell the idea you're with this person. A lot of these games have boinking as the endgoal and the second you do that, you're apparently hooked up for life but you have little to no dialogue and it doesn't really feel like you're in a relationship, really (even BG3 is bad for this, with immense, yawning chasms of time between hooking up and anything else happening in the relationship).

[karaddin]

Yeah agreed - they treat the start of the relationship as the end when it really should be the beginning. The small things they added like being able to sleep in Judy's bed and her being there when you wake up is a step in the right direction as were the text messages, but I still want more. 

[Kalbear]

You get more with Panam though - you get her sending nudes and you can stay with her in camp iirc. 

I agree Judy is better - she has the best ending, the best banter, and better future stuff - but the Panam quest and special romance stuff is better. Whomst among us doesn't want to have sex while in a tank and as a tank?

[Kalbear]

4 hours ago, IlyaP said:

Same. Never saw the appeal in romancing River. But Kerry? A chaotic AF bisexual rocker boi with a penchant for torching yachts? Frelling hells to the yes. 

Much like skyrim where the best npc is the woman, a lot of times you get really trash male options because it's written mostly from the male perspective. So its easy to write someone who would be interesting to another man, but much harder to figure out what a woman would want for those same writers.

At least we didn't get an obvious self-insert.

Mostly (as we've said before) river suffers in comparison with all of the others because his plot comes so late and is relatively lame. It just doesn't have either the game relevance (like Judy or panam) or the lore relevance (kerry) and it suffers. 

Also his fashion sense is pure trash

[karaddin]

14 minutes ago, Kalnak the Magnificent said:

You get more with Panam though - you get her sending nudes and you can stay with her in camp iirc. 

I agree Judy is better - she has the best ending, the best banter, and better future stuff - but the Panam quest and special romance stuff is better. Whomst among us doesn't want to have sex while in a tank and as a tank?

I actually did an express play on male V in part to see it and it didn't do it for me at all lol. In comparison the scene with Judy is by far the best intimate scene I've come across in a game. I interpret that as "they do a good job of targeting the intended audience with each option". Judy is a lesbian and that's woven through everything they did with her. Panam is hot but she's for the lads.

[IlyaP]

6 hours ago, karaddin said:

Yeah agreed - they treat the start of the relationship as the end when it really should be the beginning. The small things they added like being able to sleep in Judy's bed and her being there when you wake up is a step in the right direction as were the text messages, but I still want more. 

Guessing this never happens with a male V playthrough? 

[IlyaP]

Oh, @karaddin, as a non-mandatory, casual FYI, if you have any friends who want to read the CP77 novel, I finished it* and dropped it off at the street library in Berowra near the local library.  

* It was...fine, I guess. Not terribly memorable.

[Ran]

I am pretty sure she let me use her place as male V, but IIRC the ability to sleep in her bed was added in an update after I'd finished my run. 

[IlyaP]

4 minutes ago, Ran said:

I am pretty sure she let me use her place as male V, but IIRC the ability to sleep in her bed was added in an update after I'd finished my run. 

From what I'm reading online (never considered this until today!), Judy is written expressely as gay and is not into dudes. Also, apparently Kerry can only be romanced by male V, even though Johnny says that Kerry's openly bi (which made him very appealing to me for obvious reasons). At least that's what RPS states. 

Edited September 21, 2023 by IlyaP
Formatting

[IlyaP]

PCGamer has a report revealing when CP77 2.0 will launch. We won't be getting it here till *sigh* 1am. 

Don't these people understand what they're doing to me? I already lost enough sleep last night thinking about new builds I want to try out and different techniques that have my interest, which kept me awake till 3 am. 

Edited September 21, 2023 by IlyaP

[Ran]

31 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

From what I'm reading online (never considered this until today!), Judy is written expressely as gay and is not into dudes. 

 

Yes, but you can become her friend as a male V, and when she takes off you can use her apartment. That's my recollection, anyways. Confirmed it with a look online -- if you're her buddy after you help her with the Clouds but it falls through, she takes off disillusioned and basically leaves the apartment to you.  That's what happened my first run.

The bed sleeping thing, I'm literally talking about whether you can use it to sleep or not -- I have a vague recollection that they added that after I finished the game, and I've no idea if you can do it as male V or not, but I don't see why not... but it's just a bed, no Judy included, in that case, since again, she's taken off and left you the apartment (or access to it, anyways).

 

Edited September 21, 2023 by Ran

[karaddin]

Yeah I assume it's the same as the other extra apartments you can get at that point.

46 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

From what I'm reading online (never considered this until today!), Judy is written expressely as gay and is not into dudes. Also, apparently Kerry can only be romanced by male V, even though Johnny says that Kerry's openly bi (which made him very appealing to me for obvious reasons). At least that's what RPS states. 

Yeah Kerry is an absolute disaster and his attraction to V is tangled up in unresolved feelings for Johnny. Femme V fucks with that dynamic so he isn't into her, but male V is a chance to fuck the one that got away lol. Much like giving them a defined sexuality it contributes to him feeling more real to me but do agree it would be nice if there was a bi male character that's into both. Could use a bi female character that's more interested than Stout while we're at it.

Basically the "more options would be good and we can ask for that without diminishing what we got".

[Ran]

I had hopes that the fact that the Miltech HQ was partially built but closed off meant they might eventually expand on Stout if she didn't end up wearing cement overshoes, and basically planned to add some Miltech-centered missions where Stout could have been the person calling you in to help her out of some dark corpo shit in return for whatever ... benefits she deigned to offer. 

Alas, no. But I think it would have been interesting to get more directly pulled into the corpo side of the world. Maybe if their initial plans had included a second DLC, they were thinking that way, who knows. But between all the effort to improve the game and the limitations of RED Engine, they decided to cut bait and will move on to Unreal Engine.

Wonder when Cyberpunk 2087 is likely to come out? A decade from now?