Cyberpunk 2078

[Ser Rodrigo Belmonte II]

39 minutes ago, Ran said:

I took it easy due to aforementioned tendon injury, and even the opening fight seemed a bit harder than what I remember of the previous run. Not a lot, but a bit. The baddies felt more accurate and aggressive.

I assume the scaling issue is simply that at end game the game was too easy, especially with certain builds.

But does levering up your character make a difference in the gameplay then and makes facing enemies progressively easier ? Or is it easier to keep them at the same level for combat like oblivion

[karaddin]

1 hour ago, Ran said:

I assume the scaling issue is simply that at end game the game was too easy, especially with certain builds.

And it absolutely was. I exclusively played on very hard after my first run, the early game could be extremely challenging but once you got past 35-40 the only real challenge was the secret ending (which just so happened to have enemy scaling)

[IlyaP]

11 minutes ago, karaddin said:

And it absolutely was. I exclusively played on very hard after my first run, the early game could be extremely challenging but once you got past 35-40 the only real challenge was the secret ending (which just so happened to have enemy scaling)

Weirdly, I never noticed, nor even really THOUGHT about enemy scaling at any point in the game. I just went and...did stuff. At no point did the game ever feel too tough OR too easy, all while playing on Normal. It just felt...just right.

[karaddin]

8 minutes ago, IlyaP said:

Weirdly, I never noticed, nor even really THOUGHT about enemy scaling at any point in the game. I just went and...did stuff. At no point did the game ever feel too tough OR too easy, all while playing on Normal. It just felt...just right.

I don't think I would have noticed if I stayed on normal (which I was on for my first play through), but when I got sucked into trying to challenge myself it became more noticeable. To be fair the worst case of that was probably the blades build before they nerfed armadillo mods and with a sandy, so much heal on kill/heal on hit and mitigation that I was almost unkillable at the end lol. Just charge into anything.

[Ran]

Thanks to the link to that video, @karaddin. Very interesting to watch and  get a sense of it. Yeah, a lot more time to kill in Pacifica, at least.

[akh]

I think the game benefits from a difficulty increase, so I am pretty happy to see level scaling. I hope they update the mod which adds "minibosses" and more stuff to enemy combat AI soon (unless this patch added that too). I just prefer it when thinking through your build and loadout actually matters for something (even if it might be very little in games like Cyberpunk).

Although seeing people unhappy with level scaling: perhaps they could have left the difficulty unchanged for difficulty levels below the hardest, so that less min-max inclined players wouldn't be put off by it.

[Ran]

People can always play it on Easy if they want a domination fantasy. I decided to do Hard, but my second run was on Very Hard and definitely before 2.0 the start was tough but there was a point where your build was shaping up and you started to just completely dominate. Happened with my netrunner-silenced pistol assassin first run, and my tech shotgun-selfheal build the second run. It was fun, but at the same time it stopped being a challenge to fight, it was more about how quickly you could run through people or how to do it in some silly or fancy way. Now, Very Hard looks Very Hard throughout -- though I suspect once you throw in the Relic boosts and added attribute and perk points you get in PL, you'll probably be able to one-shot mobs a lot more often, with overcharge, fury, etc., it's just that there'll be something of a loop where you can do that for a few seconds then you need to think tactically for cooldowns and rinse, repeat.

The changes to netrunning that they've made along the way and capped off with 2.0 make me think my fourth run will be female V corpo, and basically a reprise of my first build.

[akh]

2 minutes ago, Ran said:

The changes to netrunning that they've made along the way and capped off with 2.0 make me think my fourth run will be female V corpo, and basically a reprise of my first build.

Haha, that was also my first build and I also plan on going back to that for the update. Maybe I can find a good way to convince myself to finally go street kid. 

And having played both V's, femme V is an obvious choice for the voice actor; she absolutely nailed it.

[Ran]

Yeah, being back in male V for this run, there's a certain brusque, staccato qualtiy to his delivery that works at time (and he changes it up more later on, especially post-heist and Jackie's death), but other times it felt a little jarring. My recollection is that Cherami Leigh's V seemed to "fit" start to finish.

[karaddin]

45 minutes ago, Ran said:

Thanks to the link to that video, @karaddin. Very interesting to watch and  get a sense of it. Yeah, a lot more time to kill in Pacifica, at least.

He had some cool challenge runs if you're ever in the mood, I think the most ridiculous was using console command to lower his max hp to only 1hp so he couldn't take any damage at all lol. A couple of his other challenges weren't really feasible and fudged the rules a little.

[IlyaP]

55 minutes ago, Ran said:

Happened with my netrunner-silenced pistol assassin first run, and my tech shotgun-selfheal build the second run. It was fun, but at the same time it stopped being a challenge to fight, it was more about how quickly you could run through people or how to do it in some silly or fancy way.

The way you talk about it makes me think of the way people would talk about Diablo 2 and the builds you could make. Which reminds me of how unsatisfying the initial game choices were in the grand scheme of things - in that, really, the background players choose doesn't really affect the game that much in the grand scheme of things - it doesn't close off certain paths or stories, and instead, it just affects some dialogue choices and possible outcomes, but not in a really big way. (The devs said they wanted to let players do everything, which shows, given how little it matters which lifechoice players choose.) 

[Ran]

There were a whole bunch of build guides for the game. You could definitely do different flavors of assassin, you know. Netrunner, brawler, explosives, etc. I guess there will need to be new guides with the radical changes.

I remember discussing whether CDPR could have mitigated the claim that there's not enough choice, by gating content. They could easily have made it that you could only do one of the relationships and that once you advanced far enough on one of those quest chains, that the rest would close off. Then you'd only have the Arasaka or the relationship related ending option. But I think it was the right choice for CDPR to not gate content that way. People who were stuck on "choice" were always going to complain regardless of how they approached it.

The only thing I'd have done differently is have a mini quest chain based on your background. Right now, you get one bespoke mission that involves new characters, but I'd have also tied the background mininquest chain to characters you met in the course of the game. 

[Ran]

A video showing what you can do maxed out at endgame. The rampage is real.

 

[Kalbear]

The main time I noticed the scaling - or lack thereof - was when I went into Jackie's home area early on and decided to waste some gangs there. And they were just absurdly tough to kill compared to others. Guessing that's gonna change here.

I am probably going to go back on my bullshit and play the net runner sniper build again, but at least right now I'm trying to go for stealth sniper techy style. My son is going for all tech cyber & grenades.

[Ran]

Street kid start, I checked the arcade games at the Coyote and saw they had the new Trauma Drama game. It's basically Contra, but you're trauma team extracting clients. Funny stuff.

[karaddin]

I barely played due to a migraine but did at least start and decided to go netrunner/stealth for this one. I knew stealth revolvers aren't possible anymore so that aspect at least would be a lot harder to pull off.

[Ran]

Daaamn, Saburu's katana Satori has been updated. Makes me even happier I've decided I want to try and do a katana/mantis blades build.

Spoiler

Used to do like 400 or 500% crit damage, now it has a special leap and quick attack that causes bleeding... and if you've already triggered bleeding with a newly introduced weapon, Saburo's knife, it'll cause hemorraghing instead that drains enemy HP and refills yours.

I'm really curious about what they've done to some of the other iconics. Particularly Johnny's gun, if it's all the same or if they gave it more flavorful buffs.

 

[Ran]

Played up to the most important first task getting completed: repaying Vik. I always do. Been using a katana to try and get used to the game play. I've managed up to gangs of six members at level 5, but it's touch-and-go. 

Next is meeting Evelyn at Lizzie's, then I'm going to take time to run some gigs and stop random perp attacks and start gearing up a bit more before tackling Maelstrom (and Meredith Stout, hubba hubba).

ETA: I will say that after about an hour of playing, started to get a headache. Don't know if it's just relative old age, just not having played a game like this for awhile, or if maybe the screen tearing is causing eye strain. If it's the last, I'm going to have to take off frame gen and fiddle with settings to see what sort of performance I can get while enabling actual v-sync.

Edited September 22, 2023 by Ran

[karaddin]

Yup, always repay Vik before the heist - don't want to risk dying without paying him back!

[Kalbear]

As before, I left Jackie with sylvie checking out his chakras and entirely left dex hanging so I can go do absolutely random bullshit to level up. Mostly going after ncpd scanner stuff.

The Mao is really much better and it definitely feels more interesting. And man, stealth is satisfying.