Cyberpunk 2077 - New RPG by CD PROJEKT RED

[bobholly39]

I was really looking forward to this game. I'm playing it on a PS5, so aside from a few crashes which are annoying, performance has mostly been fine. Maybe a few glitches here and there at beginning at launch, but nothing that really impedes gameplay too much. Nonetheless, there are two things I absolutely hate in this game, that simply make me like it a lot less than I feel I should:

1. First person view. This might be the first time I play a first person game all the way through - and I hated it at the beginning. Overtime you sorta get used to it a bit - but I still think it's a million times less fun than 3rd person view. Being a huge fan of the Witcher 3 - I can say that going from 1st person to 3rd person would make such a huge difference. I don't know if it's something they might change/release in a future update - but this game would be so much better 3rd person. I know some people like first person - it's just not for me though.

2. The NPC's absolutely suck. The game is so dark. The missions are fine, and the characters you interact with can be pretty good too - but there's sooooo many random people you run across in the streets and they're all horrible and don't say/do anything... Such a wasted opportunity. There's so much potential there, but none of them have any dialogue or do anything interesting. This imo is the biggest issue with the game. It's too dark, and doesn't feel real. If you give NPC's dialogue options and make them appear more like real people - it would make the world so much better. I'm not saying every single npc has to have a full blown story/quest of its own - but just give them some dialogue options, some funny things to say, a few surprises...it would have made the experience so much better.

The game itself can be a lot of fun. I'm playing a melee build going around slashing people with my Katana, which is a ton of fun. I'm not finished my first run yet, but i'm at final mission and haven't done it yet, been messing with side quests before I finish.

I'd probably rank the game a ~6 or 7 on 10. But I honestly feel I could have given it a 9 or even 9.5 on 10 if not for the above 2 concerns, especially the 2nd one.

 

[HanSolo]

Still not quite done with it. Rolling through as many Side missions, gigs, and side jobs as I can before I start the endgame.

But I gotta say, while I appreciate that many gigs have at least some story content behind them to contextualize the combat you're gonna be doing, side jobs and NCPD alerts are the biggest filler in this game. Yeah you'll get one morsel of lore from an archived conversation but usually they're completely out of context and pointless. Feels kind of like mission content is organized in descending order by amount of content you get from story missions, to side missions, to gigs, and then side jobs and NCPD alerts are really just...

I mean I doubt if you cut most of them it would allow for more cut content to be in there since I'm sure they took the least amount of coding, but as I'm trying to experience as much as I can before I finish, these tasks feel like chores at this point. If I ever replay this game, I don't imagine I'll be doing them much at all. The financial loss of not doing them isn't really significant.

 

[HanSolo]

1. First person view. This might be the first time I play a first person game all the way through - and I hated it at the beginning. Overtime you sorta get used to it a bit - but I still think it's a million times less fun than 3rd person view. Being a huge fan of the Witcher 3 - I can say that going from 1st person to 3rd person would make such a huge difference. I don't know if it's something they might change/release in a future update - but this game would be so much better 3rd person. I know some people like first person - it's just not for me though.

2. The NPC's absolutely suck. The game is so dark. The missions are fine, and the characters you interact with can be pretty good too - but there's sooooo many random people you run across in the streets and they're all horrible and don't say/do anything... Such a wasted opportunity. There's so much potential there, but none of them have any dialogue or do anything interesting. This imo is the biggest issue with the game. It's too dark, and doesn't feel real. If you give NPC's dialogue options and make them appear more like real people - it would make the world so much better. I'm not saying every single npc has to have a full blown story/quest of its own - but just give them some dialogue options, some funny things to say, a few surprises...it would have made the experience so much better.

I tend to agree with you. I'll do my own full review when I finish the game but I have to say that while I understand and in some ways appreciate the decision to make the game entirely first person, I think it suffers from not letting you actually see your V much at all. Like you said, TW3 gains so much from being able to see Geralt interact with everyone. It makes it feel like your hero is centrally involved in everything that happens and in a lot of ways, makes the game's experience feel like you're controlling a serialized fantasy drama. Cyberpunk wouldn't have suffered any from letting you see your character talking in cutscenes at least. Or at the very f***ing least make the effort to design your character and all the different armor pieces worth it by having your character appear in reflections.

As for the NPCs I mostly agree but not entirely. I'd point out that a number of stationary NPCs will at times have conversations with other NPCs and when you're creeping up on a gang for a gang fight you can usually hear one of the members speaking to the others. And there's a small handful of random NPC moments like an NPC running from an area where a cyperpsycho just killed a number of people before you go in for the fight or a NPC I saw last night posing for a selfie in front of the temple in one of Wakako's gigs. But for the most part, yes. Most NPCs are just there to populate space and don't do anything interesting. While in The Witcher 3 it had a lot more instances of characters conversing with each other for atmosphere and subtle world-building. Children would run near Geralt and say something uniqe, some passerby would make comments disparaging Witchers and things like that. This kind of immersion is mostly missing from Cyberpunk. It's not completely absent but it's nowhere near what was originally promised. The thing is I don't let that bother me too much given that the game is incredibly dense and I think making all NPCs have something unique to say and do that you can trigger would result in a lot more cut content. And I think I'd rather have shitty boring NPCs than an empty city or have more of this game stripped back.

 

[Osprey]

He apologizes and takes responsibility for the problems with the game and promises a large 1.1 patch "in the next 10 days" and free DLC at some point. The link in the second tweet has a FAQ to answer other questions.

 

[The Crypto Guy]

He apologizes and takes responsibility for the problems with the game and promises a large 1.1 patch "in the next 10 days" and free DLC (seemingly, from the timeline, around early Summer). The link in the second tweet has a FAQ to answer other questions.

They don't have the Next Gen release until the end of this year according to that? Which in reality likely means not until next year. Oh well, guess i'll be waiting another year +.

 

[Osprey]

They don't have the Next Gen release until the end of this year according to that? Which in reality likely means not until next year. Oh well, guess i'll be waiting another year +.

That's how I read it at first, too, but, looking at it some more, I'm not sure that it means that. It looks like the free DLCs and next-gen update markers are stemming from the shaded area that extends from March to the end of the year, perhaps suggesting that both will come at some point during that span, not necessarily where they are relative to the timeline (or else there'd be no reason to add that bold shading). That said, if their window is that large, we can probably safely guess that we won't see either until the second half.

 

[SolidSnakeUS]

If anything, it puts more credence in that this game should of scrapped the PS4/XBO versions of the game and gave it one more full year to get it all sorted out and actually good. We would of avoided this shit.

 

[HanSolo]

Tried the game a couple hours with the 1.1 update on base PS4 since I'm still farting around on side content before I do the endgame story line. Patch notes say improvements focus was on next gen and pro versions of last gen consoles which struck me as weird. I already feel like the hotfixes cleaned up a lot of what was wrong at launch but I did see...some improvement through the 1.1 update. So

good:

-FPS in combat seems more consistent but still occasionally drops low. Actually I'd say that when the FPS does drop (a lot rarer now) it drops lower than it did before.
-UI menus seem crisper and a bit snappier to control.
-Driving seems ever so slightly better.
-Didn't encounter any crashes or noticeable bugs in two hours of play, save for two that I'll save for the bad section.
- The consistent bug I'd encounter where you got locked into first person view while driving without the ability to switch to third without reloading the save seems to be gone and it seems to default to third person view.
-When crashing into other cars, it seems far more likely now that the other car will get knocked hard out of the way rather than me slipping underneath. That slipping was rare to begin with but it didn't happen at all in my 1.1 playtime. Granted, the way cars get knocked away is still completely unrealistic but it's less immersion breaking than literally clipping under the vehicle you hit.
-I don't know if it was there before but I noticed a lot more steam and smoke coming out of buildings around Night City and the Badlands and it seems properly animated.
-Animation of flying vehicles in the sky seems to flow a lot better.

Neutral:

-I don't know if a lower shootout FPS gave guns firing a more impactful effect, but I noticed after the patch that my legendary shotgun that used to feel like shooting someone with a cannon now feels a lot more...I don't know. Neutered. Yeah sometimes there's knockback but it doesn't feel like the shot hits as hard anymore.
-While general FPS seems streamlined I think I noticed where they might have made up for it. I noticed a very slight change in the rendering of buildings and roads that now seem have this almost grainy visual effect that wasn't there before. It's not that noticeable unless I'm really looking for it.
-It does seem that draw distance on some buildings has gotten a little worse, but again, I really gotta be looking for it to notice.

Bad:

-The hotfixes seemed to fix the disastrous rendering delay issues I was seeing before I got the game. And with 1.1 it's not back down to that level but I've noticed that when starting the game on initial load-in, I'm seeing a lot more rendering of my guns, in game menus, and some building features. Again, it's not as bad as it was at launch but still I don't like seeing features get worse with improvement updates. It only lasted through my first five minutes of play so it wasn't a huge deal but it was still noticeable.
-The bug where for some reason V would get stuck unable to sprint and some weird input on aiming weapons wasn't fixed and it happened just as I was going to start a gig. Had to reload my save.
-Not sure how much of this is a bug but on the same gig, before that bug triggered I went in and killed a few enemies before I suddenly lost all 525 of my health instantly. I couldn't tell if I was shot by something, or if I triggered an invisible mine, or if something else exploded near me. Nothing on my screen and no sound effect indicated any incoming danger. I was alive one second and the next I was flatlined. That would usually happen when I got into fights I didn't know were at high danger for my gear tier and I could presume I was just vastly under the stat requirement for the encounter. Here, I went back and checked and saw the danger level was low at my near end game stats. So I still don't know what in the hell happened.


All in all it's a slight improvement to an already playable state of the game. The clearer FPS in combat helps a lot but I still wouldn't say it's perfect. Still subject to sudden drops and I don't think if I measured it it would quite be hitting 30 consistent fps. Probably 3-5 FPS below.

 

[Static]

I enjoyed finding the death stranding easter egg. A lot of the side missions are legitimately awesome.

 

[ColonialsHockey10]

Sorry if this has been answered before.

I bought this game on base XBONE pretty much after release. Played for a little while and decided to give them some time to patch it up and make the experience a bit more enjoyable. Haven’t touched it since.

Would I see a noticeable difference if I fired the game up today? Is it worth playing now, or should I wait for the 1.2 patch next month? I wouldn’t say my standards are super high or anything, but the game was pretty horrendous looking and running right at release. And I have no intentions of waiting like a year for them to totally fix it.

 

[HanSolo]

Sorry if this has been answered before.

I bought this game on base XBONE pretty much after release. Played for a little while and decided to give them some time to patch it up and make the experience a bit more enjoyable. Haven’t touched it since.

Would I see a noticeable difference if I fired the game up today? Is it worth playing now, or should I wait for the 1.2 patch next month? I wouldn’t say my standards are super high or anything, but the game was pretty horrendous looking and running right at release. And I have no intentions of waiting like a year for them to totally fix it.

I'd say yes at least based on my experience with the base PS4. The first round of hotfixes got it more or less playable. I'd liken it to playing Fallout 4 with maybe a few more bugs but nothing as egregious as the game's state at launch. 1.1 I still haven't had a crash and the bugs are incredibly minimal. It will never look as good as intended on the base XBone but at least you can more or less have the full intended experience on 1.1 imo.

 

[ColonialsHockey10]

I'd say yes at least based on my experience with the base PS4. The first round of hotfixes got it more or less playable. I'd liken it to playing Fallout 4 with maybe a few more bugs but nothing as egregious as the game's state at launch. 1.1 I still haven't had a crash and the bugs are incredibly minimal. It will never look as good as intended on the base XBone but at least you can more or less have the full intended experience on 1.1 imo.

Amazing, thank you!

 

[Hammettf2b]

 

[The Crypto Guy]

When it rains...it pours.

 

[542365]

Who says “Pwned” in 2021?

 

[Commander Clueless]

Who says “Pwned” in 2021?

Leet haxors, obviously.

 

[Jussi]

I watched IGN Patch review video (yes, even they can't believe they actually did that) and looks like the latest patched managed to actually make the game perform worse on pretty much all platforms but mostly on Xbox. Granted it's because of higher resolution but still. And I'm still waiting for the official next-gen upgrade before I start playing this. That's totally going to be a dumpster fire.

 

[SolidSnakeUS]

I watched IGN Patch review video (yes, even they can't believe they actually did that) and looks like the latest patched managed to actually make the game perform worse on pretty much all platforms but mostly on Xbox. Granted it's because of higher resolution but still. And I'm still waiting for the official next-gen upgrade before I start playing this. That's totally going to be a dumpster fire.

The fact that they are like 10 ot 11 major updates in and still are making things worse really show how shortsighted and down right shit the management of the project really was.

 

[542365]

I have a question for those of you who have finished it. Is the game even good? Like if there were no bugs or glitches, is the core experience fun?

 

[Jovavic]

The only reason it was released in 2020 was because of a stipulation in a loan CDPR took out from the Polish government? That can't be true

 

[Jovavic]

I have a question for those of you who have finished it. Is the game even good? Like if there were no bugs or glitches, is the core experience fun?

Some of the AI is pretty dumb, especially compared to GTAV, so it's not just technical things that hamper the experience. Aside from that, I think, the impressions have been good. I personally haven't played it and won't till fall at the earliest (I kinda have my gaming schedule mapped out in my head lol)

 

[Static]

I have a question for those of you who have finished it. Is the game even good? Like if there were no bugs or glitches, is the core experience fun?

You have to specialize when leveling for the combat to be fun. Don't spread your points around because you'll be locked out of the best abilities and end up extremely bored with the combat, and there is a lot of combat.

I went with a hacker build and that made combat really cool (and also faster to deal with). There are a lot of really well done side quests and characters, but you have to work to find them because there is also a lot of fluff. It isn't really a game that will blow you away if you skim, you get what you give.

It's also clear they both left a lot at the table and bit off more than they could chew. A tighter open world that was less GTA and more focused would have done the game a lot of good.

 

[aleshemsky83]

For anyone interested, all version of this game (including the PC version) are on sale at bestbuy

You actually get quite a bit extra for buying a "physical" (steam code) PC version including a game manual, physical map, soundtrack disc, and fake little postcards and stickers.

I'll probably throw them in the trash but still.

Edit: and on Amazon

 

[Dolemite]

Incoming patch. They’re finally fixing driving mechanics. These are just two features for a huge patch coming.

 

[Jovavic]

Maybe the game will be closer to their vision whenever the next gen versions come out later this year (I doubt very much that they will come out this year)