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  • I've been playing it slowly for the past few months after finally getting a modern GPU, and am going through the endings now, so my impressions are still fresh.

    Overall I enjoyed the game, but it's possible to see that it could have been much better. There are still occasional immersion-breaking bugs like floating items and characters. Some systems are clearly leftovers of bigger plans, for example clothing that barely has any purpose other than roleplaying and taking pics of the character in photo mode. Gameplay can be pretty fun depending on your preferences and how you build the character, that was nice. I do agree that it's not particularly deep.

    Story and writing is what people usually praise about CP2077 + PL, but after finishing the game I can say that I was occasionally baffled and disappointed. Some things were clearly not developed to full potential, possibly because of time/budget constraint. Quests mentioning some areas and characters that are involved, but you can't go and examine those. Some are pretty damn dumb if examined logically. Endings look pretty cool in isolation, but they contradict each other when compared. In pretty much every ending V is told that they're going to die, but reasons differ. Alt claims that the body was changed to that of Johnny, and the immune system would reject V (which is also nonsense, in the game's world an engram is data that can be written to a blank brain, why would data be rejected). In Arasaka endings we see that Saburo needs a body that is already genetically close to him, so he uses his son. Why not use a clone? This also contradicts what Alt says about nanites modifying the body. Arasaka-related characters also claim that V's body was damaged by the Relic, that's why even though the surgery was a success, they'll die. Tumors and DNA damage. But somehow if Johnny takes over the body he can continue to live in it no problemo.

    A dark and depressing theme doesn't automatically make the story great, it still has to be logically coherent.

  • My opinion is... so and so?

    I gave up on it initially, annoyed by it's deluge of bugs coupled with the overall tepid and empty-feeling design.

    I gave it a serious go a year ago after also getting the expansion. I wanted to not use any mods but ended up having to use one anyways, as CDPR still couldn't be arsed to fix some keys being hardcoded so changing your keyboard layout is annoying as stuff gets in the way. Luckily, fans fixed that issue and made all keys rebindable. <3

    I will say... I enjoyed it. It's nothing superb to me, but it was a thoroughly enjoyable romp. It's big upside were the visual design, in particular during the expansion and its high points like the top floor of the tower or the sequence at the space port, the great voicework and Songbird and when you meet her really is a standout in both visual and scene design. I also liked the expansion and the tutorial stories a lot.
    It's weak points to me were the open world itself which feels pointless and a thin, lifeless, facade plus the main story itself. Character progression was also super broken back in the days but by the time I played felt a lot better, so I'm not really holding it against the game. That being said, there were still quite a lot of bugs and glitches. Nothing major a reload here or there could not fix, but still annoying, considering how long the game has been out.

    So yeah, solid 7/10 for me. The expansion is fantastic, wish the whole game were like that!

  • It is OK, word-building, the aesthetics and overall visual and architecture are the strongest points. I cannot comprehend the people who call it one of the best games ever and etc.

    I never played the 1.x versions, I just picked it up last year (or beginning of this year) and steams says I put up 123 hours in it. So I love the background, the cyberpunk of it all, love that the city really feels vertical and you can constantly be in aww looking at it. It so good that I constantly decides to walk from one place to the other so you can get more of the environment. The conversations you here from the NPCs are great, the backstory of side quests are great, many very memorable, a lot of it very sad, specially the NCPD scanner quests because you learn stuff from dead bodies. I cannot say much of the main quests because I am an idiot and decided to clean up all NCPD scanner and gigs because I could not ignore the calls while going from place to place in the city, but I suspect It is good since the NCPD scanner, the most filler of filler quests had a bunch of nice writing in it.

    And all that good makes it much more sad all the shortcomings. Like someone else mentioned you can clearly see the leftovers off all the things that were never finished. For the gameplay systems and mechanics it is the classic wide and shallow, there is so much stuff that just means nothing. For example, during quests and at your home and some places you can stack up in ammo, but you actually is never in any danger to be short on ammo, like, never never. So it is just clutter. On the leftover thing, The other comment mentioned clothes, it is so much clothes but 99% of them do nothing and the ones that do are like almost irrelevant. All clothes have levels/rarity but it means nothing, um can have the same shirt in all rarities for example. You can open the hood and trunk of all cars but there is never anything in them, it is just an interactive thing that does nothing. IT is specially weird because you have vans with cargo and etc and except when it is a quest item there is never any loot in the cago of the vans. Weapons upgrades are pointless, must of the mods does not even makes sense for a weapon to have. The thing that you cannot reuse a mod from one weapon to the other or that you cannot change the scope from a sniper makes no sense in a world that you can literally change your cybernetic eyes. The customization on weapons are so minimal that they might as well not having them. You have stuff like silences can only be put on pistols and one type of assault rifle/smg (I am not good with names of types of weapons). You have sniper rifles but they (with one exception) all makes sound and attract the enemy so using them in the way you see in movies is kinda pointless. Enemies always know exactly were you are when you fire a gun, it would be one thing to use a sniper and everyone on the place be in high alert or looking for you, but no, you can be as far away as you like if you use a sniper they you immediately start firing in your direction.

    You can see in the level design of the gigs that you can approach a quest with multiple options, like stealth or go head first our using other non-violent means, which is great, but much of it was not fleshed out, for start the outcome is 99% of the time the same so there is no incentive to really do one over the other even in any build that you choose. I made the mistake to make the classic stealth-archer and It is almost the same difficult to get it blasting gun. I call it a mistake because it is super easy. Of the non fleshed out options it jumps to attention the stealth ones, There is a lot of places to hide bodies, things that you can remote activate to kill enemies, to distract them, etc, but they are never in the correct place, so they mean nothing almost, and there is almost never a reason to hide the bodies. You have like ducts to crawl to get to place without being noticed, but if you just crouch and kill everyone. There is no reward to not kill everyone with some rare exception, which makes all the level design to make it possible to sneak in a base or den useless. You can also take down enemies without killing them but them again, there is no benefit nor drawback. They are as good as dead.

    I think the graphics looks great, but I don´t play many games and specially AAA games so I don´t have much to compare, my friend saw I playing and said they are like average, not bad but just what you would expect of a modern game, nothing exceptional. But even if the graphics are not special what they do with it is great, all the architecture and stuff.

    There attention to the world is so great yet you meet the same NPC model like 3 times in the same place, it is so repetitive, it is weird. Like, not only the same exact body but the same clothes. Why not randomize a little more? If they at least put an in-universe reason, like people can modify themself to looklike some predefined avatars. It is worst for the children, for some time I even didn´t think there were children in the game. which would be better in my opinion, but you see the same like 3 models everywhere.

    I could go on on the missing stuff, like the public transportation (later half-assed included in the 2.x) or any type of flying transportation. That it is thing, you see a lot of flying vehicles, but you cannot drive or get in any of them. Similarly, there is a lot of motocycles but they are always parked. You never see them in transit.

    I mentioned that the backstory of the gigs and NCPD scanner quests are awesome but the quests itself all look the same, they have more or less 3 types and that is it. Also it is very much bullshit that in a cyberpunk game you are basically pro-cop without option of otherwise. You can help the NCPD with the scanner quest but you have no benefit in going against the cops, they don´t even drop loot. At least you can steal some of their cars sometimes. You are literally a criminal and there is no positive aspect in going against cops, which is specially weird because the game you wand your allys are always talking bad of the cops like in the movies like "I never talk to a pig" style of things, but the gameplay does not reflect that. If in the game the cops were somehow some moral/ethical beacon, but it is cyberpunk, the cops in the game are terrible, a lot of them very corrupt and such.

    There is so much more, annoying bugs like the one that does not show correctly if your gun has silencer in it or not. Some of it can be mitigated with mods, wich is nice, but you should not need a bunch of mods to play the game without getting frustrated.

    With all that said, it is a fun game, I think the story, wordbuilding an visuals are enough to warrant a play trough I guess.

  • Love it to pieces. Paid absolutely no attention to it before it was released, and due to some friendly advice from an online mate, waited a few months before picking it up, when most of the really bad bugs were already ironed out.

    I love pretty much everything about it:

    • The score. The music is just so fantastic.
    • The settings. Brilliant. Any RPG that isn't set in a plain vanilla fantasy world already has a big advantage when it comes to my affection, but this setting is just super cool.
    • The representation. Absolutely not in-your-face, yet so much there.
    • The world building. I think they paid absolutely absurd attention to details, like "where does everyone's food come from" and "where does everybody's garbage go".
    • The story. I like it.
    • The characters. They feel relatable and their motivation makes sense, which is not always the case in many games. I find myself caring about (some of) them.
    • The quests. I like them.
    • The combat. It started out okay, but now, it is so much fun. I absolutely love what they have done with it after 2.0. I love being able to actually throw people at each others. I love the various melee finishers. I love the cyberware. I love using the wrist rocket launcher to blow up attacking cars. I love being able to throw knifes and axes without constly having to craft more. I love all of it.
    • The mods. I love what dedicated modders have done to make a good game into a really really great game. There are such fantastic mods for this game, it keeps bogging my mind.

    So yeah, love it to pieces, and absolutely one of my all time favorite games.

  • I pre ordered it. I had just finished building a new PC with just barely enough resources to handle it. Strangely enough I never encountered any of the bugs people complained about, so I was lucky.

    I kept replaying it and heavily awaited the patch releases to see what the devs were going to fix and/or add. Been there since the beginning and play it through once a year (fully, clear the map of objectives every time). Simply put, I'm a fan.

    I even was running it on Linux pretty much from day one (though certain patch numbers and updates to Nvidia drivers would occassionally break this compatibility). A small thing, but one that I greatly appreciated.

    The driving mechanics to this day is the biggest pain point for me. Even though a patch at some point improved on it, it still feels wrong whenever going around a corner at even moderate speeds. There's a reason most people opt to use motorcycles in the game (or use mods).

    The story is well done IMHO. I feel like they could have spent way more time in the prologue section, fleshing out one particular character (anyone who's played knows who I'm referring to). Other than that, I'm happy with only a few very small nitpicks.

    The combat system is well fleshed out since patch 1.68, and iirc patch 2.0 brought some significant QOL changes. It's fun and varies extensively depending on how you build out your character's skill tree.

    The atmosphere is perhaps the developers' biggest achievement. The depiction of Night City is difficult to put into words. It feels lived in, and there are still areas of the map seasoned players are discovering. Other than the combat system, the environment is definitely one of the game's strongest selling points.

    Ever since patch 1.68, the game has run smoothly. I can't run Ray Tracing or other high resource requiring features as my PC, again, is considered to be mid to low tier depending on who you're talking to. But if you're running a high end PC, the visuals are likely to be far more stunning for you.

    If you do buy, definitely get the Phantom Liberty DLC, the side content adds quite a bit to the story, including a new ending, and is overall a fun addition to the entire experience.

    Lastly, if you do dive in, enjoy yourself, and want more, I'd highly recommend watching the anime mini series, Cyberpunk: Edge Runners, which depicts a prequal to the events of the main game. And of course, if you're really in love, perhaps get together with some friends and play the Table Top RPG.

  • I played it at release on PS4 and then with Phantom Liberty on XSX. It was awful game with a great story then. Today it’s a pretty good game with one of the greatest stories in this medium. It’s often brought up as a comeback story for CDPR but lack of polish still rears its head in places. For example clothing pieces still have rarity label based on how much defensive stat it gave prior to patch 2.0 (which detached armour rating from the clothes).

    • one of the greatest stories in this medium

      I mean admittedly I don't read cyberpunk as a genre, but as an avid reader I find that hard to believe. My two standout sub-stories are the intro heist and the expansion's main story, and while those are awesome, they're not exactly literary masterpieces. The rest of the game's story is... amateurish? But not in a bad way? Like, it's servicable as the thin motivational veneer you expect from an open world game, and doesn't stand out either way, which is more or less what you want from your open world story: To not get in the way. The last few parts are quite bad though and show how much the story must have been cut apart and pieced together to fit a release date.

      Is it really outstandingly good comparing other cyberpunk works?

      • I was mostly talking about Phantom Liberty part - it is much more interesting and better executed than anything in the base game.

  • I recently restarterd my playthrough (first time touching the game since 2.0 dropped) so I'm not done with the game yet but my very brief thoughts are: I like the new content and technical improvements, I'm not entirely sold on gameplay changes and have more fun with the old mechanics to some extent (I actually reinstalled the legacy version to compare). There are some things I really appreciate in the latest version but over all legacy is more up my alley.

    It's still a great game and probably will end up as one of my favorites despite all its issues. Will see how I feel after I'm done with it.

  • One of the best games of the last decade. Top-5 easy.

    I played it since launch. Originally on a Xbone, and my biggest complaint back then was minimap lag. You wouldn't believe how many turns I missed.

    But yeah, rough launch. Made a storybook comeback. Now it's incredible. My biggest gripe now is that it doesn't have NG+. I went on Pavel's streams and begged for NG+ for 2 years. All I wanted was Levels. Not SC, not money, not 'ware, not unique weapons. I just wanted to start the game at max level. They heard NG+ and thought we wanted the NG+ from Witcher 3. Which I actually hated. Cuz all the enemies get a buff and all your specced out end game gear is outclassed by garbage you pick up on the side of the road by the time you leave White Orchard. But that's not what we or at least I wanted.

  • I think my brain is stuck in 2018 because some voice in the back of my head is telling me I should be excited for when cyberpunk and starfield come out, lol. Maybe I'll get to cyberpunk soon but the backlog is yuge

  • A friend let me borrow their PS4 version. Word of warning: Do not play it on PS4. I got through it, but damn if that cobbled together abandoned mess didn't take away from the experience at times. I dread to think how bad it must've been at launch! It was the side content that was mostly broken; I recall the taxi missions just constantly glitching out. The music on the radio didn't work properly and I was teleported to the other side of the map for no reason at one point.

    Despite that the story, atmosphere, design of the city and characters are all great. I'm tempted to get it on PS5 or Steam (with the DLC) at some point to play through it again properly.

  • It is by far one of the best open world games I have played. You can literally get lost in the world.

    I never played the game on release, I played after phantom liberty came out.

    And boy I can't emphasise how amazing the game is. Plus Keanu as Johnny silverhand is soooooo phenomenal.

    10/10 would recommend.

  • It shouldn't be forgiven for releasing in such a broken state. Do we really think the rest of the game industry didn't notice how well it did? How little they're willing to do if it means still getting that money rolling in?

66 comments