Cyberpunk 2078

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

54 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

Patrick K. Mills would like to remind you that this is a really pointless exercise in comparing two completely different things. 

https://www.pcgamer.com/cyberpunk-2077-developer-defends-bethesdas-work-on-starfield-they-are-just-doing-something-different-with-their-time-and-thats-cool/

I know they are different games but even comparing Bethesda’s own previous games going back all the way to Skyrim, it dosent feel like an evolutionary step forward (unlike Starfields misleading marketing suggested it would be a next gen masterpiece) the only aspect of Starfield I’ve seen people enjoying as objectively good is the shipbuilding and space combat.

Hell NPC reactions in Skyrim were better, with far more interesting handcrafted dungeons. Guess it will be upto an army of unpaid fans as usual to mod Starfield to something good.Also my criticism is more on the writing and lack of choices than then core gameplay and technical differences (although the crazy amount of loading screens in a 2023 open world game is jarring along with lack of driving options)which I agree cannot be compared.

I think fallout NV is a good example of how you can have the best of both worlds and BGS should’ve learned from that game.

This article, also from PC Gamer, sums it up well I think:

https://www.pcgamer.com/playing-starfield-made-me-appreciate-cyberpunk-2077-so-much-more/

Edited October 16, 2023 by Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II

[karaddin]

23 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

Also why compare two *completely* different games? No matter what you do, you're going to end up with one or the other looking less than flattering based on the skewed criteria used to judge both. Seems like a rather wasteful use of one's time, comparing apples and oranges, when they're just two different things that appeal to two different types of people. 

The two scenes do make sense to compare as they're very similar on a high level - purchasing a high tech gadget during which the seller gets the player character/companion to sit down and tries to renege on the already agreed upon price. I get the idea of using the comparison to get people that wrote off Cyberpunk to give it another chance, but sentiment has largely turned the corner already now so it's not really that needed.

[Relic]

6 hours ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

Guys should I crank up the difficulty to Hard? Been playing on normal and I’m around level 33 now and everything is pretty easy to deal with, just started PL and the chimera fight also wasn’t much of a challenge. Although me specialising in Precision Rifles and Pistols certainly helped.

yup

[Slurktan]

On 10/12/2023 at 6:38 PM, karaddin said:

I think the main difference was the discussion around the games always talked up the difficulty as suffering but for the most part it wasn't. It's rewarding. The bosses are like puzzles and you've just got to find the solution that works for you and get used to it. Ended up sinking more than 500 hours into it, playing the Demon Souls remake, Dark Souls 1 and started Bloodborne before my ps5 went out of action. I'd say Elden Ring is definitely the one to start with, the beautiful zones are much more pleasant and there's a lot of QOL/UI enhancements that aren't in the earlier games.

Also to be clear - Malenia is an outlier. She's the hardest boss in the game with a move that's the most complex to dodge and very damaging to the fight if you get hit. Most of the others took a fraction of that time and even the other hard ones took a lot less than her.

This is why I love the Souls games.  The bosses/enemies never cheat, they will always do the same moves.  Its on you to learn them. 

Did you get all the way through Bloodborne before the PS5 cut out? I hope they remaster Bloodborne because it runs at 30fps even on PS5 but that game for me is the best of them all due to the setting and just general feel.  Well that and you can't block.

[karaddin]

6 hours ago, Slurktan said:

This is why I love the Souls games.  The bosses/enemies never cheat, they will always do the same moves.  Its on you to learn them. 

Did you get all the way through Bloodborne before the PS5 cut out? I hope they remaster Bloodborne because it runs at 30fps even on PS5 but that game for me is the best of them all due to the setting and just general feel.  Well that and you can't block.

I haven't gone back to it yet, that was months ago and it took me ages to get the PS5 fixed so I would have lost some of the other muscle memory with the controller I started to gain lol. BG3 and Cyberpunk have hogged my time since I got it back anyway.

I was through the first area into the church with 3 bosses down, but felt I had to learn parrying to keep going - my 500 hours in Elden Ring I avoided ever using a shield haha, the pistol parry was needed for the feral hunter though.

[Ran]

From PL, there's a fun easter egg...

Spoiler

If you help Songbird and do the "Killing Moon" mission at the spaceport, when you're supposed to go in, you turn around  and hop into the trees at the roundabout... and you'll see a camoed figure, who'll pop mantis blades but then run away from you and disappear.

And then when you look where they were to begin with, there's a dead body with a message addressed to 'B.' which is a homage to Bill Duke's monologue in Predator.

 

[IFR]

Ever since the anime, I've been very curious about this game. I have a window of free time right now and I think I'm going to take the plunge. I look forward to it!

[IlyaP]

Have finally met Solomon Reed and now the world has become an open world again after a few hours of being stuck in the impressively vertical Dogtown. 

The game seems to have changed up how it introduces some of the fixers, with a mission that involves stealing cars for El Capitan resulting in me meeting him out near Santo Domingo rather than out near the dam next to Laguna Bend. Wakako and Regina still seem to have the same introductions, as does Padre, but the rest - who knows. 

The car combat is an adjustment and I'm still working out how to make my horrifically ADHD-y brain manage to pay attention to driving and car combat and not hitting pedestrians and thus alerting the police. 

It also seems like the 2.0/2.1 patch has also made slight tweaks to the world map as well, including: 

• Fixing the visual clipping issues with the monorail
• Adding new micro-encounter locations around the city
• Adding a few new smaller locations/buildings/routes around the city

Clearly, Mister Hands has grown a beard (finally, someone from my tribe of The Heavily Bearded), which is rad as hell and I fully approve and dig. The interesting question will be whether or not CDPR has had a chance to add Johnny back into the Pan Am quests, as I believe that was one quest that was tweaked after Reeves recorded audio, which is why Johnny oddly vanishes for a good duration of the quest - which always struck me as odd. Did Harvey just not like the Aldecaldos or something?!

Meanwhile, every single time I exit the game, I get a "your game has crashed" pop-up after I've already exited to desktop. Yet the only mod I have installed is the one that skips the opening black screens (the ones in multiple language, the CDPR logo, etc.) and instead takes me to the opening picture of Night City in the distance with garbage in the foreground. Very weird. 

Now if only CDPR would release the scores for the new radio station tracks that have been added, as they have with every other station, as I am almost certain that an Australian scientist got name-dropped in one of the songs I heard on the radio...

Edited October 17, 2023 by IlyaP

[Kalbear]

20 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

Meanwhile, every single time I exit the game, I get a "your game has crashed" pop-up after I've already exited to desktop. Yet the only mod I have installed is the one that skips the opening black screens (the ones in multiple language, the CDPR logo, etc.) and instead takes me to the opening picture of Night City in the distance with garbage in the foreground. Very weird. 

 

Yeah, I get that too. Just a standard crash reporter that's being too zealous about exit codes. 

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

The only bug that I’m still getting regularly is clipping. NPCs will sometimes clip through each other or through walls and sometimes the car I summon will be half clipped in the ground. Once I grabbed an enemy by sneaking and somehow he and I clipped through the wall and fell to our deaths.However try to avoid saving and loading the game in a heavily scripted event, as loading into it does tend to break the code some times and you’ll have to do that mission from the start again. 

Edited October 17, 2023 by Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II

[IlyaP]

4 minutes ago, Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II said:

NPCs will sometimes clip through each other

This is, I think, intentional. Ever notice that people can walk right through you? I think it's meant to stop collision issues. 

[karaddin]

1 hour ago, IlyaP said:

Clearly, Mister Hands has grown a beard (finally, someone from my tribe of The Heavily Bearded), which is rad as hell and I fully approve and dig. The interesting question will be whether or not CDPR has had a chance to add Johnny back into the Pan Am quests, as I believe that was one quest that was tweaked after Reeves recorded audio, which is why Johnny oddly vanishes for a good duration of the quest - which always struck me as odd. Did Harvey just not like the Aldecaldos or something?!

He is pretty dismissive of them later lol. I actually saw a theory on this that I thought seemed a pretty good match which is that Saul was originally going to be Weyland (cant remember if the theory was Sr or Jr) but that was rewritten fairly late, after Keanu had recorded his lines. Given Johnny was friends with Sr there would have been dialogue there that absolutely doesn't fit Saul being someone else completely, so the result was Johnny taking a break to prepare the hotel.

Some of the tracks on Growl FM are great, wasn't expecting to love it as much as I do.

[Ran]

5 hours ago, karaddin said:

Some of the tracks on Growl FM are great, wasn't expecting to love it as much as I do.

Yeah. That and Impulse Radio are the ones I kept turning to when driving around, with the latter basically just being an hour of House music that Elba curated. 

Sadly, I get "I Really Want To Stay at Your House" a lot less than I had hoped. Think I heard it maybe six times across 80 hours. For shame (though partially my fault, I spent too much time bunny-hopping around once I had air dash...)

[Relic]

This game is quickly moving up my list of all time rpgs. 

[karaddin]

Its been sitting at the top for me since I first played it in 1.3 and I'm not just restricting that to RPGs.

[Relic]

21 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Its been sitting at the top for me since I first played it in 1.3 and I'm not just restricting that to RPGs.

Yeah like i mentioned some time back, i first played this on release on a last gen Xbox, and while i tried to like it it looked like SUCH SHIT that it was borderline not playable. Coupled with having an inventory filled with dildos (there were SOOO many dildos everywhere that i would accidently loot) i stopped playing and didnt pick it back up until the DLC hype train started. Glad i did, because this might be the best RPG ive  ever played (playing it on PC now tho). 

Edited October 17, 2023 by Relic

[karaddin]

28 minutes ago, Relic said:

Yeah like i mentioned some time back, i first played this on release on a last gen Xbox, and while i tried to like it it looked like SUCH SHIT that it was borderline not playable. Coupled with having an inventory filled with dildos (there were SOOO many dildos everywhere that i would accidently loot) i stopped playing and didnt pick it back up until the DLC hype train started. Glad i did, because this might be the best RPG ive  ever played (playing it on PC now tho). 

Yeah, thats why I feel its important context that I didn't get that initial negative association because I didn't even try it then. I also didn't have any hype from the marketing so no huge expectations of it blowing my mind - if anything I had a very negative view from some of the early social media marketing so discovering that the actual story wasn't edgelord shit but pretty much the opposite really sucked me in.

[IlyaP]

1 hour ago, karaddin said:

Yeah, thats why I feel its important context that I didn't get that initial negative association because I didn't even try it then. I also didn't have any hype from the marketing so no huge expectations of it blowing my mind - if anything I had a very negative view from some of the early social media marketing so discovering that the actual story wasn't edgelord shit but pretty much the opposite really sucked me in.

Same. I just bought it 'cause, as we would say with a shit-eating grin in Russian, "КИБЕРПААААНК!" (Cyberpunk!), and it just looked like the Saints Row/GTA games with a cool SF sheen. Which was a win in my book.

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

4 hours ago, Relic said:

This game is quickly moving up my list of all time rpgs. 

Same here, Ive lately been obsessed with the world, even started reading some of the graphic novels, hopefully the live action show also gets greenlit because the next game is gonna take atleast 6-8 years more. This one is even better than Witcher 3, which i always thought was CDPRs magnum opus. That said, im glad i got to experience this game directly from the 2.0.1 version which by all reports is quite ahead of the launch version. CDPR apparently invested 125Mn USD in its development of PL + 2.0, its really refreshing to see a game studio go to such great lengths to ensure good games for their fans, they're honestly my favorite game development studio at the moment. Hope this quality continues in their future games. 

[Kalbear]

There are a fair amount of places to improve, IMO. A bigger variety of quest behaviors and things would be good, having more vertical places to explore and rewarding that sort of gameplay would be good, having your background matter more would be very nice (IMO, corpo is the only one that really makes a big difference in gameplay and it's kind of profound what giving V a background of wanting to get back at Arasaka does, especially compared to Johnny). Vehicles are still very unsatisfying to drive - they're better, but still largely trash. Still decently racist in the enemies and the stereotypes there. And as usual it would be good to have more of your actions change things in the game a bit more than they do, though I guess that's part of the message - that fighting the system doesn't actually change anything and if you want real change you've either got to get out of the system entirely (the Nomad ending) or you need to vastly change the environment that the corps exist in. Still, not entirely satisfying there.

But these are all real quibbles. The biggest problem prior to 2.0 was that the combat was just kind of there and not super fun - you were vastly more powerful than basically anyone and enemies were pretty boring as a rule - but all of that has been made significantly better. It reminds me a lot more like playing either Spider-Man - zipping around the city via dash and diving down on enemies to strike fear - or the spiritual successor in every way to Deus Ex and its satisfying combat. Both are great.

Another thing s that the world of Cyberpunk is weirdly anachronistic now. That's not really a fault of CDPR or anything and they did a good job extrapolating a world where the Soviet Union is still around, Japan is this weird mega powerful nation, China is a nonissue, global warming isn't a thing of note. There are no streaming things - people still broadcast TV and radio and talk about scheduling times! But that's not a huge deal, just one of those weird alt-futures like Fallout.