CYBERPUNK 2077

[J.T.]

Thoughts so far.

• Character creation is fucking awesome.  Maybe too awesome.  So many options that I get a bit overwhelmed.   I had to reel in my dork size for fear that I would trip over it while walking around my safehouse with no pants on.  I also don't need my schlong clipping through my jeans as I stroll through the city.
• I wish that developers would get rid of film grain for display options.  I am old and need crystal clarity.  I need the Series X version that will take full advantage of all of the rendering bells and whistles real soon.  Come on, Smart Delivery!
• God, but weapons are fun AF!  Shotguns feel like they have real weight and pistols even have some heft to them.  As everyone has said before, enemies are a bit tanky so I hope that weapon damage buffs from firearm specialization or body augmentation will help me feel a bit more lethal.   I hate being a Level 1 schlub.   The struggle is real.
• Hello Good Morning by Konrad Oldmoney will never not play on my safehouse soundsystem.  I am not a fan of the Samurai tracks, but I hated Rockerboys anyway.
• My safehouse arsenal is so empty. It makes me sad. 

Edited December 10, 2020 by J.T.

[Eivion]

From what I understand enemies will get way less tanky as you improve your characters abilities.

[J.T.]

I also owe Zimbra something of an apology for not fully responding to some of his comments.... which were totally on point.

On 12/9/2020 at 10:21 AM, Zimbra said:

If CDPR didn't want people to review a busted-ass game they should not have sent out review codes for a busted-ass game and it is insane that this is a debate.

I 100% completely agree.  I still think that reviews of the unpatched release are really dumb, but you'd think that CDPR would've released a review version of the game that included the Day One update. 

CDPR obviously wanted to put the games into the hands of reviewers expecting stellar reviews and thinking that early positive buzz would extend the hype train, but their follow through wasn't well thought out.

Reviews of the unpatched release were obviously going to be negative as it would be running without all of the enhancements and fixes that led to the game being delayed by nearly five months.

1 hour ago, Eivion said:

From what I understand enemies will get way less tanky as you improve your characters abilities.

It's an RPG based on an RPG, so I figured that would be the mechanic.  The problem being that you won't get enough skill points to be good at everything, so the time to figure out your proficiency build is now. 

I will probably go with SMGs and Pistols to compliment my hacking, stealthy, and engineering skills for my first playthrough and go with disturbing offensive augmentations and shotguns / heavy weapons / bashing people with heavy objects during my next run.

Edited December 10, 2020 by J.T.

[Robert C]

24 minutes ago, J.T. said:

Thoughts so far.

• Character creation is fucking awesome.  Maybe too awesome.  So many options that I get a bit overwhelmed.   I had to reel in my dork size for fear that I would trip over it while walking around my safehouse with no pants on.  I also don't need my schlong clipping through my jeans as I stroll through the city.

I'm forgetting.  Whose turn is it to make the Jehovah's Witnesses joke now?

[J.T.]

I will never live that down.  A GTA5 inside joke has crossed into the 2077 thread.

[Craig H]

Uggggh... This game crashes on my PS5 whenever I hit another vehicle. Three times tonight. 

[The Natural]

 

Check it out.

Edited December 11, 2020 by The Natural

[Jiji]

Yeah, it crashed on me too (ps5 as well). Between that, quite a few visual glitches (floating guns, people randomly appearing), lackluster controls/combat, and cringey dialogue, casting, and voice acting, I think I'm going to wait a while to dive into this. 

I really get the dad rock vibes many of the reviews pointed too. It's not good. 

[Craig H]

Outside of the game crashes and some wonkiness when driving, the game is fantastic. I have no idea what the "dad rock vibes" are because fuck reviews. So far, I love this shit.

I did have another funny glitch when a tile for a "studded dildo" appeared on the right side of my screen and just never went away.

[Jiji]

The dialogue and world are 1980s views of 2077. It feels like a game written by old people. 

[Craig H]

Yeah, I'm not getting that sense at all. I'm not even sure what dialogue that could possibly be referring to and it's fucking Cyberpunk. What should this world look like?

[Robert C]

Weirdly, I have had no issues with crashes, weird visuals, etc.  Maybe it runs best on an ancient, release xbone with a tiny hard drive?

I can't drive for shit in the game, which is my main annoyance at the moment.

[Craig H]

The detective work I did doing the Braindance shit was some of the coolest shit I've done in a game. I think I spent an hour in that short BD recording trying to find the security system stuff and I never did find it all. I decided to just move on so I could go to bed. 

[Casey]

I had a PS5 crash, got the CE-108255-1 error. All I did was restart the game and go back to the last checkpoint. I had to reload a previous save an hour or so before, when I went and met up with Royce. At the end of that mission, the exit door wouldn't open/unlock.

I still like the game a lot, though. I too don't understand the "1980s view of 2077". Capitalism run amok and tech is the new God? Uh, that sounds like a 2020 view of 2077.

[Tromatagon]

The game is such a glitchy shitshow I don't know if I'm supposed to be locked out of the building where the underground fights are or not so I just said fuck it and did another mission instead.

[Craig H]

Honestly, the biggest problem I had with a crash is that it somehow reset my look inversion and graphics settings to default. Other than that, it always goes right back to where I was just before the crash. The biggest annoyance is just going through the main menu stuff again, which I feel should load a bit faster on a PS5, but it's not like it takes that long anyway.

And my biggest struggle right now is that I just don't know what I want to be. I wanted to be a super hacker and stealth person, but I'm not sure how to build to that or what the best build for that is. Plus, in the mission where you have to grab the Flathead robot, I wound up fighting against a ton of Militech agents. There was no way to stealth or hack my way out of that fight and I basically had to find a better gun to take down those two mechs. I'm sure there was a way to avoid that fight or hack my way out of it, but I'm not sure what it was.

[Casey]

2 minutes ago, Tromatagon said:

The game is such a glitchy shitshow I don't know if I'm supposed to be locked out of the building where the underground fights are or not so I just said fuck it and did another mission instead.

Is it the fight in Kabuki? Because that fight is on the roof.

[Craig H]

2 minutes ago, Tromatagon said:

The game is such a glitchy shitshow I don't know if I'm supposed to be locked out of the building where the underground fights are or not so I just said fuck it and did another mission instead.

You're not supposed to be able to get into those underground fights yet, which is why those doors are locked. I kinda wish that guy wouldn't have introduced that aspect of the game that early on considering you can't get into those fights (at least you can't in Kabuki anyway).

[Craig H]

1 minute ago, Casey said:

Is it the fight in Kabuki? Because that fight is on the roof.

You can't get to the roof though because the doors to the building are locked. At least that's how it's been for the first 4 or 5 hours anyway. Is there a separate outside staircase we're missing?

[Craig H]

Also, well done everyone. I'm glad we all saw we could get into underground fighting and tried to do that as soon as we could.

[Casey]

4 minutes ago, Craig H said:

You can't get to the roof though because the doors to the building are locked. At least that's how it's been for the first 4 or 5 hours anyway. Is there a separate outside staircase we're missing?

Behind the building are some things you can climb to get to the roof. I'm not sure that's how you're supposed to get there, but I assumed since it was a super secret underground fight or whatever that you probably couldn't just waltz through the front door and find it. It's a motherfucker of a fight. I lost it twice and haven't went back to it yet. It's not as easy as the training simulator or the robot that Coach wants you to fight at the start. Because...

Spoiler

It's one guy, who has a double of himself. You have to beat both, I think.

Oh, and that Flathead mission you brought up? Yeah, there are ways around having to fight Militech. They helped me pay for the Flathead, but, uh, spoiler, it doesn't go as planned obviously. But if you're fighting them, you've probably lost the chance to work for Meredith I'd imagine.

Spoiler

To avoid fighting them, you'd have to call Meredith, meet up with her, and offer to find the Militech mole. She'll offer to pay for the Flathead, and you can hack into the credit chip, but if you don't, when Royce takes the chip, it'll install a virus in their hideout that triggers a fight with the gang. Royce eventually gets a semi-mech suit at the end, and you get an Epic jacket with a decent armor rating when you beat him.

 

Edited December 11, 2020 by Casey

[Jiji]

11 minutes ago, Casey said:

I too don't understand the "1980s view of 2077". Capitalism run amok and tech is the new God? Uh, that sounds like a 2020 view of 2077.

Japan as a major player instead of China, the '90s hacker movie speak, the technology looks like it's from Bladerunner and a lot of other '80s futuristic dystopian movies, and that's fine but let's not pretend this isn't a Gen X vision of the future. Polygon said it best:

Quote

This is what I least expected about Cyberpunk 2077: that its notions of “cool” are so tied up in the digital persona of a past-his-prime rocker that the game sometimes feels like looking through your uncle’s musty record collection while he talks about how great the Rolling Stones are. When William Gibson’s genre-defining novels like Neuromancer and Count Zero first appeared in the mid-’80s, they were thrilling in part because they offered a vision of the future that felt entirely new, and with it, a whole new vision of “cool.” I believe there’s still potential for cyberpunk stories to be so boldly visionary and relevant, but Cyberpunk 2077 prefers to look back, an attitude reflected not just through Johnny’s efforts to avenge old grudges and to recapture the glory days of his band Samurai. In fact, the game’s entire worldview feels like the product of someone who’s about 30 years behind the times, who may have been rebellious and liberated once but who nowadays doesn’t understand why it’s messed up to call sex workers “whores,” as Johnny routinely does.

I've only played for ~2 hours, so this is just my initial feeling. People have been writing stories about rampant capitalist dystopian societies and how technology plays a part in alienation compounding capitalism's role forever now. It's just we're many steps closer to that reality.

[Casey]

Yeah I don't really have a problem with anything you mentioned. I mean, it's fine that you do, I'm not going to go full r/cyberpunkgame and lose my shit because you don't like something about it  But I'm also like @Craig Hwhen I say fuck reviews, and that quoted part is part of that reason. It reads like a Pitchfork writer reviewing a video game, and I just don't really have time for that.

Plus if China was the major player in this game and had a strong (overt) foothold in America, I don't think you'd see unbridled capitalism and sex at the forefront of the game's world. Although I'd be down for a mission where you liberate the Uighurs, for sure. Sprinkle in some Winnie the Pooh easter eggs and I smell a potential spin-off series!

[supremebve]

6 minutes ago, Jiji said:

Japan as a major player instead of China, the '90s hacker movie speak, the technology looks like it's from Bladerunner and a lot of other '80s futuristic dystopian movies, and that's fine but let's not pretend this isn't a Gen X vision of the future. Polygon said it best:

Not a single word of this would have ever crossed my mind.

[J.T.]

3 hours ago, Jiji said:

The dialogue and world are 1980s views of 2077. It feels like a game written by old people. 

The pioneer authors of the cyberpunk genre are all as ancient as dirt and Mike Pondsmith, the head of R. Talosorian games aka creator of the Cyberpunk tabletop RPG, is not in the flower of his youth either.

So yeah, it is a game written by old people.... or at least written in such a manner to appeal to the fans of the pioneers of cyberpunk literature.... who are also old... like me....

Anyone that doesn't want to have the Flathead mission spoiled should stay away from the 2077 gameplay vids.   That was the mission showcased in the introductory walkthrough.

Edited December 11, 2020 by J.T.