Cyberpunk 2078

[karaddin]

5 hours ago, Werthead said:

To trigger the new ending (just the basic fact):

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You need to hand over Songbird to Reed, either during/after the stadium heist or later on at the spaceport (the latter is better).

The reason being:

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Songbird has no idea at all on how to cure you or herself and the solution she proposes is actually a whole hail Mary. By herself, she and her contacts either can't figure out how to make it work, or they just cure her and leave you to rot. So saving Songbird gets you nowhere, even if it is arguably the more morally correct decision once Reed and Alex show their true colours. Songbird literally fucks off and you never hear from her again, not even in the new ending calls.

On the other hand:

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Despite being a murderous SOB, Reed does seem to come to respect you, so by handing over Songbird, even if it's after you betray Reed and Alex at the stadium, he actually fulfils his terms of the deal and the NUS's techs are able to make the rogue AI work and that opens up the new ending.

 

One actually quite important point:

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If you side with Reed during the stadium mission, Alex dies. If you side with Songbird, but then later on side with Reed at the spaceport, Alex lives. So does Reed, so does Songbird (even if her later fate is unclear) and so do you. So actually, although it feels morally murky, this is the "best" outcome.

If you really want to be spoiled on the new ending:.

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Reed and the NUS techs are able to cure you, fully. No Soulkiller, no copying of personalities. V stays V, period. Johnny is gone (obviously).

Unfortunately, there are a series of costs to this (surprise!). The process leaves V in a coma until 2079, so when you wake up it's been over two years since anybody last heard from you. Judy has moved on and is married to somebody else, Panam straight-up refuses to talk to you and River has spiralled downhill and is now in deep shit with criminals.

The other problem is that they confirm the Relic was severely uplifting V's ability to handle insane amounts of cyberware. Without the Relic, V is now severely vulnerable to cyberpsychosis and fatal neural overload. You literally can never use any cyberware, or implants ever again (just trying kills you instantly). The NUSA offer you a desk job but you turn them down.

You return to Night City and are able to reconnect with Rogue, Viktor and Misty, who are all very happy to see you. Rogue warns you that people still remember who you are and will be itching for revenge once they learn you're defenceless. Viktor and Misty provide emotional support but, after a few prods and pulls, Viktor declares there's nothing he can do. You even get beaten up by two hoodlums you could have taken out with ease earlier on but there's nothing you can do. This ending ends with V just becoming a face in the crowd, basically demoted to an NPC in everyone else's lives.

I mean, yeah, it's great V lives to presumably old age (or maybe she's run over and dies in a freak incident 3 days later anyway), but in every other respect it's a pretty shit ending.

I think based on this the ending where you take off with Panam, Judy and the nomads is probably the best, with the vague hope that another solution will present itself later on.

 

Guess it's going to be a while till I can read the rest of those spoilers since apparently

Spoiler

I'm going with Panam and the avocados again lol. Didn't realize there isn't an ending with Songbird. Which is I guess means I played myself thinking there might be a way to avoid her inevitable betrayal.

Siding with Songbird still hurt pretty bad because you're leaving Alex trapped in the room she just killed Hansen in and I assumed that wasn't going to go well for her, but I haven't actually had any confirmation on what happened to her and Reed.

Even just from what I've seen it's a 10/10 expansion for me. The new map area is a great extension of Night City, the new gigs for Hands are almost all in the best in the game category with challenging but realistic choices to be made, the fights stepped up the difficulty in a way that was fun to rise to meet. 

I realise they probably couldn't have gotten here prior to the game being released as the large scale feedback always helps, but it's still interesting to imagine what we could have gotten if they'd been given the time to polish the base game to this level prior to release and had a second DLC pending.

[IlyaP]

Do we know when the 2.1 patch is due for release?

[Ran]

I had to stay up to finish, finally. Holy shit, what a fucking game...

Spoiler

Got the King of Cups achievement, for those who know what it means. Oh man...

But no new ending option for me. Will replay that decision tomorrow to get the new ending, and then see how it looks.

I definitely want to get through all of them, but first once I secure the new ending I'll try and clear out some of the other achievements.

 

Edited October 3, 2023 by Ran

[karaddin]

The difficult increase with PL also feels like it makes the world more coherent to me. By the end of the regular game I felt so powerful that I was effectively a one woman army, but there's quite a few places in PL where the Barghest forces or Scav reinforcements etc feel like they're still a threat. V is absolutely a top tier merc still at 50+ but it feels like the actual militaries are still beyond me which they should be - Corps private armies and their partner/puppet governments are the top dogs in this world after all.

Maybe I'd feel differently if I was using the same build as Ran though lol. 

[Ran]

Yeah, honestly, death by the end was either me being dumb or me being 45.  Like, 

Spoiler

Spoiler

The MaxTac fight with Reed to free Songbird? I got knocked down to 0 once, Second Heart fixed me up, and I finished it there. The Barghest before Hansen got me down once because I got stuck trying to find cover, and again, Second Heart.

The Voodoo Boy gig with the combat drones? I just face tanked them, and that's without the benefit of being able to set Bleed or Hemorrhage on them. I'm not sure how long I'd last at 5 stars,  though I guess I should try it and see. 

This  is my build at end-game.

[karaddin]

Meanwhile at level 48 or so I struggled with

Spoiler

The ambush from 8 soldiers coming out of the sport academy lol. If I can do it without ever being noticed, I'm your V but if you're forced into a combat situation I'm just not across playing it well haha. I should probably ditch my monowire and pick up a second heart. 

Doesn't help that it feels like the biomon uses multiple charges of my health item for a single drop in hp.

 

[akh]

1 hour ago, karaddin said:

Doesn't help that it feels like the biomon uses multiple charges of my health item for a single drop in hp.

I've suspected this too a few times but I could never really confirm it.

I could never make the monowire not feel terrible. And it's such a shame too because it looks cool and fits so well thematically with the netrunner. But I suppose it's bound to feel weak in comparison to 60k damage hacks spammed throughout the combat due to an endless supply of RAM and HP.

[IlyaP]

5 hours ago, Ran said:

Yeah, honestly, death by the end was either me being dumb or me being 45.  Like, 

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The MaxTac fight with Reed to free Songbird? I got knocked down to 0 once, Second Heart fixed me up, and I finished it there. The Barghest before Hansen got me down once because I got stuck trying to find cover, and again, Second Heart.

The Voodoo Boy gig with the combat drones? I just face tanked them, and that's without the benefit of being able to set Bleed or Hemorrhage on them. I'm not sure how long I'd last at 5 stars,  though I guess I should try it and see. 

This  is my build at end-game.

You can share your build online?!

[karaddin]

2 hours ago, akh said:

I've suspected this too a few times but I could never really confirm it.

I could never make the monowire not feel terrible. And it's such a shame too because it looks cool and fits so well thematically with the netrunner. But I suppose it's bound to feel weak in comparison to 60k damage hacks spammed throughout the combat due to an endless supply of RAM and HP.

60k? Wtf am I doing wrong, I'm not getting anything like that lol.

I underestimated how much impact the heal on kill would have though, chaining synapse burn out to extend overclock is doing work now.

[akh]

4 hours ago, karaddin said:

60k? Wtf am I doing wrong, I'm not getting anything like that lol.

I underestimated how much impact the heal on kill would have though, chaining synapse burn out to extend overclock is doing work now.

With the Iconic variant, I think I saw 110k today.

The majority of damage comes from spamming it on empty RAM while overclocked. Plus, I use the Cyberware that adds 100% crit chance for quickhacks (so all quickhack damage is critical and the cyberware adds 10% to all damage based off 20 INT). And I sandwich the Synapse burn between quickhacks to trigger the +60% damage perk and the +40% from the cyberdeck. 

There are other perks that add some increases too that I can't really list off the top of my head but there's one for +7% in the quickhack tree, there's Adrenaline and I've taken quickhack and int scaling damage modifier cyberware everywhere possible.

But yeah, if I wanna do things from a slight distance I go Purple Sonic blast -> Iconic Synapse -> Green Reboot Optics. Purple Sonic blast because orange is more costly and the added benefit is meh; Green Optics because it's cheap to spam for 2 RAM. Sometimes I queue up two green Optics at the end for +80 heal instead of +40. The purple Sonic makes the dying NPC essentially invisible to everyone around him (until they "locate" the body, which takes a while usually). So most of the time combat isn't even initiated if you do it at a distance. You just gotta look out for Synapse burn spreading (under Overclock) before you've hit them with the Sonic blast.

I believe the Overclock heal talent (and the RAM regen to Health regen perk) are both improved by all health regen/heal effect improvements as well so you get more health back. But I've not really bothered to try with and without to confirm.

 

Edit: wanted to make sure I wasn't imagining things. I don't believe these images spoil anything but not sure, so inside spoiler tag are the lowest and the highest damage I saw within the short time I looked.

Spoiler

Imgur link

 

Edited October 3, 2023 by akh

[Ran]

2 hours ago, IlyaP said:

You can share your build online?!

It's CDPR's official build planner, I just copied what I had in the game.

[Kalbear]

Awesome emergent gameplay thing happened last night.

Was driving around doing NCPD calls and saw 3 trauma team members on the top of a hill by North Oak that were highlighted yellow. My dumb ass assumed that meant that they were up to no good and if they were civs or cops they'd be blue, so I killed them (sidenote: Trauma Team folks are hard). 

That immediately put me at 3 stars wanted. Oops. Within seconds 6 police cruisers showed. I jumped into the bushes and cover nearby and hid while they looked around. I then decided to see if memory wipe would make my wanted rating drop and they'd stop looking for me - so wipe + overclock and I hit the 11 cops I could see. Sure enough, the wanted value dropped like right away. That's pretty cool!

But there's now 6 cop cars on North Oak's windy roads, and they've blocked several other cars from passing. The cops start getting back in their cars to take off. The first one starts to pull out but of course the AI being what it is, is none too careful about hitting anyone else - and cops are especially not careful about that. So he absolutely rams the hell out of a civvie car.

Which triggers that civvie to think they're under attack, which causes them to pull iron and start shooting at the 12 cops that are there. That, of course, causes ALL the cops to fire back and absolutely murder that civ - which blows up that car and causes some cops to get killed. Which then causes MORE cops to show up and murder the rest of the civs that are in this line.

And I'm just sitting in the bushes eating my popcorn. 

[Ran]

So, doing some achievement stuff for PL, and decided to finally see if I could straight-up fight MaxTac on my lonesome to get the achievement for hitting 5 stars in Dogtown. Suffice it to say? Yes, yes I can. Touch and go for a bit there due to the turrets at the Dogtown gates, but by the time I got tired of killing Maxtac and the security forces of Dogtown, all my cooldowns were back up to full charges (helped by cyberware that reduces cooldowns on enemy elims) and I basically could have gone on indefinitely, I think. Maybe I should try the border station next...

I need to find one more Relic point somewhere, but I seem to recognize all the place in the guides, so I'm confused and think I may have to run through most of them again to be sure...

Post-"ending" mission stuff.

Spoiler

Did "Run this Town", where you and Mr. Hands use the personality imprint device to present V as Aguilar, a legendary Cuban cartel assassin, to help keep the thug Bennett on top. I did a pretty good job of handling it with limited bloodshed, and Mr. Hands was impressed. 

Also had some random netrunner ADHD addled kid complaining about the car heist we did as part of the story, and offering it to me if I boosted it and let them wipe its memory. That one was a bit annoying because I just went into a security booth, killed a guard, and used the computer to pop open the security gate... but that did not, in fact, open the gate. Turns out the mission wants you to only do it one way, and one way only, which is annoying given how open-ended most missions are to their approaches.

I'm really liking the follow-up stories for some of the gigs -- every one of them seems to have them, including actual interactions with characters involved, which I think CDPR may have decided to do in part to underscore that decisions do in fact matter in the game.

Spoiler

The Bana mission, I met former Brazilian spy Steven now working for Barghest, though there's a small continuity issue in the dialog -- I ask him what he's doing for Hansen, after Hansen was killed. Should be easy to fix that in a future patch.

Finally, had my King of Cups talk with Solomon Reed. What a great character, a man so caught up in doing his duty that he'll not only forgive the people who betrayed them, but work for them and risk himself for them because he assessed that their betrayal served a greater good that he was willing to accept. Idris Elba knocked it out of the park (for the most part -- he did not seem very convinced by the technobabble around the personal identity theft tech). 

Oh, finished the King of Fools quest and am supposed to ask Misty about the new tarots, but apparently I'm having a common bug, which is that she's permanently meditating at her shrine whenever I show up. I may or may not go around trying to do the original tarot cards to see if that shakes her out of it, at least one person said it did, others said no.

The only serious bug I've had the entire game has been post the PL patch, when occasionally the game would crash at random. I've dutifully sent in reports, and hopefully they're crunching away at that. Otherwise, game has been pretty flawless as far as immersion goes.

Edited October 3, 2023 by Ran

[Kalbear]

I've had several CTDs largely around explosions - as soon as I got the ability for contagion to explode if you have a burn tick I'll occasionally cause the game to die a horrible death. 

Otherwise it's been good, though I did run into a weird NCPD thing where I found, like, this christmas tree of rare and legendary knives just floating out of a chest. Nice for parts, but very weird. 

[Relic]

13 hours ago, Ran said:

Yeah, honestly, death by the end was either me being dumb or me being 45.  Like, 

  Reveal hidden contents

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The MaxTac fight with Reed to free Songbird? I got knocked down to 0 once, Second Heart fixed me up, and I finished it there. The Barghest before Hansen got me down once because I got stuck trying to find cover, and again, Second Heart.

The Voodoo Boy gig with the combat drones? I just face tanked them, and that's without the benefit of being able to set Bleed or Hemorrhage on them. I'm not sure how long I'd last at 5 stars,  though I guess I should try it and see. 

This  is my build at end-game.

3 int? Dumb as a brick haha. I need to research some builds, im pistol/katana freeballin it, and it works on hardest difficulty to some extent, but ive def got taken out by randos. 

[Ran]

1 hour ago, Relic said:

Dumb as a brick haha.

Yep, hence fucking up my first gig in Dogtown.

Spoiler

Poor Paco. When you inspect him, you learn he was decapitated by what seems to have been a blunt object...

Mostly I did it so I had no chance to try and rely on netrunning. I wanted to stealth things in the early game without it, and in the late game, well, master street samurai beckoned...

Edited October 3, 2023 by Ran

[Ran]

Got "The Tower" ending. Man.

Spoiler

I've read some reviewers claim this feels like the "canonical" ending (IIRC, CDPR has so far denied there's any such thing), but it's a super down ending. To survive, you've betrayed So Mi, you've sacrificed Johnny and your promise to help him strike a blow against Arasaka, you've lost pretty much every friend and relationship (not surprised by hysterical Panam going nuclear, though; jesus...; Kerry, OTOH, is still busy with his own life but is genuinely happy your alive and will eventually see you again), you've even lost all of your possessions.

You become just another faceless NPC in the crowd. Yeah, Misty helps put it in perspective a bit, but still... it feels very depressing, a bunch of bodies and lives crushed under your feet to scrabble and just be ... a nobody. And sure, look, maybe Vik and Misty would be in the same place by 2079 if you fucked off with Panam or did a suicide run on the Crystal Palace, but in the Sun ending you'd probably be able to help Vik and Misty out, leave them your wealth or whatever in case you don't make it, etc.

It's absolutely good and valid story telling, but it's pretty brutal in how things have gone to shit for quite a few of the people you care about. In terms of morality, this is now the worst possible ending, IMO, surpassing the Arasaka ending, IMO. 

And yeah, yeah, I know. Wrong city, wrong people... But this one is especially joyless.

My canonical ending remains the first one I did, the Sun and becoming a legend of the Afterlife.

 

Edited October 3, 2023 by Ran

[karaddin]

9 hours ago, akh said:

With the Iconic variant, I think I saw 110k today.

The majority of damage comes from spamming it on empty RAM while overclocked. Plus, I use the Cyberware that adds 100% crit chance for quickhacks (so all quickhack damage is critical and the cyberware adds 10% to all damage based off 20 INT). 

But yeah, if I wanna do things from a slight distance I go Purple Sonic blast -> Iconic Synapse -> Green Reboot Optics. Purple Sonic blast because orange is more costly and the added benefit is meh;  

I'm sure I'm doing most of that. Is the 100% crit the iconic variant of the brain cyberware that gives 35% crit to quick hacks? I haven't seen that so need to go to the right ripper. But that shouldn't make the crit numbers higher, just always crit.

I was getting most of the iconic quick hacks last night and initially didn't see any difference between legendary and iconic sonic shock but although the effect is the same the iconic sonic shock is only 2 RAM so using that over purple now.

4 hours ago, Kalnak the Magnificent said:

I've had several CTDs largely around explosions - as soon as I got the ability for contagion to explode if you have a burn tick I'll occasionally cause the game to die a horrible death. 

I hadn't had any crashes before last night but had 3 or 4 last night, 3 of them killing the same guy in a Rogue gig. Wasn't sure if it was the tiny update yesterday or the fact I'd been running a VM for work before playing yesterday and it used to negatively impact performance in prior patches.

[Kalbear]

11 minutes ago, karaddin said:

I'm sure I'm doing most of that. Is the 100% crit the iconic variant of the brain cyberware that gives 35% crit to quick hacks?

It actually gives 100% crit but doubles the RAM cost. Which in his case is actually good. The thing that I think gives a massive damage boost is that spend RAM to make things do more damage part of the synapse burn means that if you've spent 40 RAM you're doing 400% damage more. So overclock + sandwiching it between control things + spending all your RAM + making sure that it all goes off at once (when you're at your lowest RAM) means a major kill. 

 

[karaddin]

All of that has only been about 6k for me on a crit though so I'm missing a couple of modifiers and it's almost certainly something dumb I haven't read right because I think I already know what it does lol.