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CD Projekt's Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.0 + Phantom Liberty Expansion Thread

AwesomeButton

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BTW, I have ignored the NCPD calls (I avoid combat whenever I can). Is there any advantage in doing this ?
Do they unlock story developments and new quests ?

If you mean the messages which flash up when you're near a crime scene, I've not seen anything beyond rewards for dealing with that incident. Some of them are a nice difference with the unique NPCs in them but nothing amazing.
What unique NPCs? BTW, of all the assaults I've prevented, I've only had one instance where the NPC said "thank you". In the rest of the cases they either keep stuck in a defensive animation, or just run away.
 

Perkel

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you can disable a mine for 130 engineering exp, and then blow it up with a hack for 120 breach protocol exp. best game

It is not like it matters really. LVL 28 currently and i am like lvl 9 breach and quickacking and i hack almost anything i can. You would have to farm shitload of time in order to farm exp for those skills to get up those by 1-2 levels.

What unique NPCs? BTW, of all the assaults I've prevented, I've only had one instance where the NPC said "thank you". In the rest of the cases they either keep stuck in a defensive animation, or just run away.

There are very rare ones that have some npcs but they don't really talk much. All blue checkmarks on map are from NCPD. Basically contract from them to clean up since they don't have enough force.
 

Mefi

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What unique NPCs? BTW, of all the assaults I've prevented, I've only had one instance where the NPC said "thank you". In the rest of the cases they either keep stuck in a defensive animation, or just run away.

One which stood out on current run was a market which had been taken over by a dozen standard gang members but their leader was a cyber samurai rather than Gang Member #13 with an assault rifle and an absence of taste in clothes. Seemed to have a different script for combat too, more like a psychowhatever than a standard gang member. Nothing to interact with though sadly.
 

Perkel

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There are also random blue stars which work like i think skyrim radiant quests aka they spawn randomly and they are infinite.
 
Vatnik Wumao
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So what are your favorite radio channels in-game? I thought that I'd be into the more electro-themed channels pre-release due to that dope Le Destroy song, but my go-to channel turns out to be 30 Principales now that I'm playing.
 

WhiskeyWolf

RPG Codex Polish Car Thief
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The getting-hacked-through-walls shit can fuck right off. What a retarded mechanic.
Hmm, I thought they were simply using the cameras to hack me and not hacking through walls. I think this was stated clearly in the game at some point, line of sight needed.
 
Last edited:

Grampy_Bone

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I'm actually impressed the enemies in ciberpoonk throw real grenades, because it often means they fuck up. Too far away? Grenade explodes in mid air. Cluttered environment? 'nade bounces off target.

In most FPS games, grenades are not actually thrown at all. The game just plays a 'grenade' enemy bark and spawns a grenade in mid-air that lands at your feet.
 

Perkel

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Hmm, I though they were simply using the cameras to hack me and not hacking through walls. I think this was stated clearly in the game at some point, line of sight needed.

Yup, also there is implant in game which allows you to hack through walls so them being able to hack your trough wall sometimes is expected.

I'm actually impressed the enemies in ciberpoonk throw real grenades, because it often means they fuck up. Too far away? Grenade explodes in mid air. Cluttered environment? 'nade bounces off target.

In most FPS games, grenades are not actually thrown at all. The game just plays a 'grenade' enemy bark and spawns a grenade in mid-air that lands at your feet.

I don't think what you said about other games is true but yeah granades is C77 are not scripted. I can't count how many times i saw dude taking out granade to throw it when i shoot it in his hand to blow him up.

People also seem to use granades with shotguns to detonate them mid air while they deliver lead at the same time.
 

fizzelopeguss

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To me C77 feels like true next gen game while every other game is just two levels below it:
- Guns have no business being this good in open world game yet they do and in fact they are far better than most of dedicated shooters and for me personally they give best gun feel right now topping Destiny and Doom.
- Cars shouldn't have better physics than literally car driving game like GTA5 and yet they do being imo only worse to Forzahorizon
- it has no business being better at being DeusEx as open world game than actual DeusEx with its closed world and yet it is, moreover the more you play it the more it plays like MGS5

On top of that there is stuff that expected from CDPR game like:
- characters
- story
- side missions
- world design

Which all are above and beyond what TW3 delivered which already was sitting on top. TW3 feels like last gen game compared to 77 right now on those fronts.

Yes bugs deteriorate that for many people but once game will be patched this will be game people will play for years if not for multiple play-troughs to see whole story then for game-play itself and world doing multiple different builds etc.

77 started next gen without asking anyone for permission in both gameplay and graphics.
Is this serious or are you memeing or something?


And it gets super dark at times fully realizing dysktopia theme of city chewing and spitting you out. Yesterday i got 3 quests independant from each other and after 3rd i had to go to take a shower. I don't remember any game going as dark as C77 since i started playing in 90s i think only Fallout 1 gets as dark as C77.

I fucking howled with happines when i butchered VooDooBoys.

The sidequests in this game are just something else. And the most impossible thing is that they achieved such cinematography without any cinematography as game is completely from 1st person view.
 

WhiskeyWolf

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Since you don't play game here is spoiler for you:

This is sequence in which Alt Cunningham gets kidnapped and Johny organizes attack on Arasaka to get her out. In that sequence you experience Cyberpunk 2013 not 2077 and the mentality of characters than imho should be in 77 but it is completely absent due to lore reasons.

This is the switch you need to understand Johny psyche and until you don't experience that you don't realize mentality behind Johny. It is not that he is weird or fucked up. It is V and rest of 77 world that is fucked up with spine of rats who fear corpo like black death rather than to have a spine and do what is fucking right consequences be damned

This and later on talk with Johny after escaping voodoo boys on shitty chairs is what makes it awesome.

It is not that they gave justice to Never Fade Away story but they truly made Johny character badass you don't see anymore is media or games. Not because he wears aviators and has face of actor but because his character has backbone you wish you had. Which contrast a lot with V which is effectively rat compared to him and your choices you often make.

That moment on chair changed how i roleplayed character from now on and the main premise of game aka "who are you ?" started to shine. That cig you smoke with Johny is also form of acceptance that it doesn't matter if you get erased or not you live now and that is what matters no reason to think about feature when you have shit to do.
There is this great line in the ending with Johnny and Rough discussing the plan of attack on Arasaka tower in Afterlife. If you choos the dialogue option about 'do we even need a plan' Johnny says this - "Do we even need a plan? Back in the day we only needed to snort a line, grab your iron and go wreck Arasaka."

This is the perfect moment illustrating that Johnny is indeed a man from a different era. A much more wild time.
 

Perkel

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This is the perfect moment illustrating that Johnny is indeed a man from a different era. A much more wild time.

Before that scene in Afterlife i talked to Rogue without any quest and she says that 77 times are much more conservative but she doesn't go into detail. It is only when you trash power station in Aldecado questline where that mask slips a bit as she mentions that this thing that looked crazy for player gives her nostalgia.

And then you see her in that scene in previous life and Johny rightfully comments that he didn't need to do shit to convince anything to do crazy shit. Any mention of fucking up corpo would get all of mercs wet and you can see that with Santiago who doesn't even care about money, he just gruffs and basically is "he we go again, finally"

This is why i hope for next game they will directly go to 2020 setting. 77 setting is amazing but after experiencing that bit i want to see 2020 more so than 88 or whatever. It is not the what they do or what they wear but mentality of characters is completely different.
 

Turjan

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I see, thanks.

Even afterwards, you have to really pay attention to look at the little counter at exactly the right moment. In the end, it's not really that important.


One other question: I have this first iconic weapon you usually get, "Dying Night", stuck in my inventory. I guess I could disassemble it, but is there a way to get rid of that quest(?) marker in order to be able to just put it into the stash?

YOu should never get rid of iconic weapons, they stay relevant throughout the entire game due to upgrading in the crafting menu. Especially the Lexington, it's great all around, looks cool, fun to use. You can put it in the apartment stash or car trunk if you really don't want it :mad::mad::mad:
Well, yes, but I want it out of my inventory. I hogs about 4 pounds that I cannot access, and I probably won't use it anymore.
 

GloomFrost

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Ofcourse Vavra would defend it. Thanks to CP absolutely ANY developer will be able to say something like.... Yes we know our game is buggy BUT.......... at least its not 300 million, 8 years in development, unplayable on consoles buggy! RIGHT?! Right?! ;)
 

Catacombs

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Absolutely fucking based.:salute:

That's not a revelatory idea. Anyone who followed this game closely over the years knew developing for older-generation consoles -- or any consoles, for that matter -- would push the release date back and spread the dev work pretty thin, leaving the project open to bugs. If CDPR stuck with PC only, as God intended, we'd have a more stable, featured-filled game.
 

Turjan

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I guess even I have my limits.
afsVGtu.jpg
 

Infinitron

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https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/12/16/cyberpunk-2077-review/

Cyberpunk 2077 review
A big, beautiful and broken mess

90


I was in an NPC’s car as she drove us across Night City when a thought occurred to me. We were driving at night to perform a risky stealth mission, which required me to break into a compound filled with military security so we could, to put it briefly, hack the planet. On the drive, two cars spawned out of thin air in front of us, blocking the road, but my driver didn’t react. We plowed into one of the cars as if it wasn’t there, sending it twirling into the like it was stuffed with helium. Our own car wasn’t even slowed down.

The thought: Cyberpunk 2077 has as much in common with early ’00s Eurojank as it does with the Rockstar games it aspires to. I’m OK with this. If it’s a choice between a less polished Grand Theft Auto or a high budget Boiling Point, I’d choose the latter every time.

Eurojank games like Boiling Point, The Precursors, or even arguably the Stalker series, aimed for vast open worlds and absurd systemic complexity. It was an ambition far beyond their means and I’d not recommend most of these games to anyone, but the messy results were always exciting. While we now live in an era when open world games are commonplace, they’re mostly too sensibly scoped and carefully produced to swing for the fences.

I appreciate Cyberpunk 2077, then, which has the best looking hair I’ve ever seen in a game, but which is populated by NPCs who can’t pathfind around a parked car. A game with multiple choices which dramatically alter the story, but just as many story-stopping bugs. A first-person game that can theoretically claim to offer as many angles of approaches as an immersive sim like Dishonored or Deus Ex, but with RPG progression systems that make many of those available approaches dull or broken or both.



You play as V, a mercenary for hire within Night City. Based on your character creator choices, you can be either male or female – though your in-game pronouns are determined by which voice you choose, and your choice of voice is separate from any choices you make about your body, including your genitals. If you were hoping for better trans representation from the year 2077, you are going to be disappointed – this is no more advanced than 2011’s Saints Row 3.

You also choose from one of three life paths – I went for Street Kid, a person raised by the dealers and vagrants of Night City. This gave me unique dialogue options throughout the game, in which I could flex my knowledge of the city, and as a backstory it fits with my perception of the character. Night City, the game tells us again and again, is a deafening, overpopulated, suffocating place, and V’s life of crime is pitched as an attempt to rise above the din and make a name for themselves.

The other two options are Nomad, which starts you in the badlands outside of the city, and Corpo, which has you already living a life of corporate espionage in the offices of the city’s glittering skyscrapers. Whichever you choose, however, the game’s story will shunt you onto an identical path within the first couple of hours. Beyond those dialogue options, which do not change the story, there appears to be little that’s unique between the three paths.

These opening hours are the game at its best, however – and make no mistake, Cyberpunk 2077’s best is very good. The intro quickly introduces you to Jackie Welles, your partner in crime. Jackie showcases CDPR’s talent for writing loveable brutes, and your missions with him over the first ten hours are some of the most fun in the game.


There’s a rip-roaring momentum to these missions as well, pulling you through a large chunk of the main story better than any other open world singleplayer game in recent memory. This is in spite of, or maybe because of, the stakes always being personal. The cyberpunk genre owes as much to noir detective stories as it does to science fiction, and as in those stories, Cyberpunk 2077 pitches against a world you have little hope of changing. You want to survive, you want to be remembered – or, a lot of the time, you just want to help your friends.

Jackie is eventually joined by a larger cast of criminal sidekicks, mission givers and potential romances, and I found each of them likeable and interesting. It’s in these relationships that the comparison to Grand Theft Auto is most stark, because of how differently both games approach a similar structure. Where Grand Theft Auto is relentlessly cynical and nihilistic, making you do terrible things for terrible people in every mission, Cyberpunk 2077 seems optimistic about humanity – and particularly people in the lower echelons of society. “Corporations are bad” isn’t a nuanced argument and neither is “people are good”, but I enjoyed spending 40 hours with people who enjoyed spending time with each other.

When the momentum breaks at the ten hour mark, it’s an opportunity to explore Night City. Around the same time, your car will be damaged and inaccessible for a while. Resist the temptation to buy a new one or fast travel and walk everywhere instead. Wander down the back alleys to find lantern-lit markets, gaze up at greeble-covered skyscrapers and staggering statues. The world is built upon decades of worldbuilding already done on Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk TTRPG, and it shows in the detail and history visible in each of the city’s districts. It’s maybe the best walking sim ever made.

The other reason for this slowed pace is to nudge you towards the game’s side quests. There are dozens, including every kind you’d expect from a modern open world game, but among them are three chains of optional missions that are as involved as anything in the main plotline, and which can have a bearing on the game’s story. Structurally, I think this is a great idea – Cyberpunk 2077’s main story can be completed in a zippy 20 hours if you want it to be, but these critical side quests can almost double its length.



Unfortunately, this is where the most serious bugs reared their heads for me. RPS was not provided with early review code (“the review they didn’t want you to read” – 7/10), and so all my play time was after the day one patch, yet there were two chains of side quests that bugs rendered completely or partially unplayable. One simply did not trigger at all, while I had to abandon the other because it would crash to desktop at the same point on every attempt.

This is on top of several other game stopping bugs that forced me to reload old saves, as when critical NPCs would get stuck on scenery, and possibly hundreds more superficial glitches. I’ve seen NPCs phase through walls, I’ve been catapulted 200 meters while trying to climb through a window. I’ve had phone calls where the ‘answer’ button wouldn’t work, and some that happened on top of other phone calls that were already ongoing, with bits of mission critical dialogue crashing into each other. Objects floating in mid-air, characters fixed in T-poses, pedestrians who can’t walk up stairs…

Ultimately, these affected my enjoyment of the game only a little. Of greater impact were all the other systems that seem incomplete or poorly designed.



I mentioned before that pedestrians couldn’t pathfind around a parked car. Traffic will also not navigate around a parked car – or worse, around world geometry. Every car seems to drive as if on a single scripted path, and in places where that path hews too close to a wall, every car will simply strike the wall. If you’re in an AI-controlled car that’s in a tight space, it will spin as if on a turntable rather than be bound by the physics of the world. When you do the driving yourself – which you will do a lot over the course of the game – the driving most often feels like nothing at all regardless of the type of vehicle you’re in or the surface you’re on.

The bugs almost feel like a smokescreen, an optical hack to distract from the game’s largest problem, which is that its combat and RPG systems never cohere. As V, you’ll need to fight or sneak past the various gangs of Night City. One mission asks you to sneak through a shopping mall filled by the Animals, a gang of roidraging animal fanciers who look like they’re the striving children of Wolf from off of Gladiator. Another has you blasting away the Maelstrom, who look like their personal awakening happened the moment they saw Babyface from Toy Story 1. (I mean, look at their gang logo.)



The stealthing and blasting is your choice in each instance, and your success at either will be shaped in part by your weapons, cyberware, and your allocated attribute and perk points. None of this is well explained by the game, but it’s firmly in Borderlands territory. Enemies are bullet sponges that take half a dozen headshots or more to kill, and they drop guns you’ll scour for better damage-per-second stats. I’m not the biggest fan of systems like this, which replace the innate satisfaction of aiming and shooting for a dopamine drip of ever bigger numbers, and much of the game felt like a slog until the digits were in the 200s.

My preference in games like this is always to play stealthily, anyway. I want to sneak, to hack, and to preferably leave everyone alive. Cyberware, which can be purchased and installed by cyber surgeons around the city called ripperdocs, can tweak your abilities. I had an implant that made all my guns non-lethal, somehow stopping my shotgun bullets from finishing people off unless I shot them a final time when they were already downed. It feels like a cheat to make a Dishonored-style “no-kill” playthrough technically possible, without any of the ingenuity or satisfaction such a playstyle normally brings.

Then there’s attribute points, which can be spent across five categories and grant access to the perks inside. I initially focused on the “Cool” attribute, where the stealth perks lie, but the game’s systems for sneaking often feel too thin to make this a valid way of approaching the game. Enemy sight cones are hard to discern, alerting one person often alerts everyone, and there’s rarely an opportunity to reset guards to an unalert state short of reloading an older save. Instead, I more often than not fell back on straightforward combat when my attempts at sneaking were rumbled.

Most disappointing are the perks themselves. There are seemingly a hundred of them or more, spread across several trees under each attribute, but they’re almost all tiny stats changes that I can never bring myself to be excited about. ‘Handguns do 3% more damage’, ‘5% increase in chance to crit when attacking from stealth’, ‘10% movement speed increase after stealth takedown.’ The perks for hacking, engineering, gunning and movement are all similarly uninspiring. I ended up keeping my points in reserve for when specific opportunities arose to use a particular skill, such as when a door required a minimum level of Body or of Engineering to be broken or hacked open.



I’d bet good money there’s a way to spend your points surgically and stack them towards a particular, extreme and powerful build, one that combines with certain weapons and certain cyberware to do ridiculous things. I don’t know how you’d know how to do that short of waiting for the guide artists to tell you, particularly given there’s no way to re-assign attribute points and re-assigning perk points costs a staggering 100,000 of the in-game currency.

Not that it matters, ultimately. The game doesn’t want to tie your ability to advance the story to these progression systems anyway, meaning your choices in how you engage with them are broadly meaningless. I was 25 hours in before I realised that I should probably switch from the clothes I found in the first hour to items with a higher armour rating, but after I dropped casual trousers with an armour rating of 4 and hiked up a business skirt with an armour rating of 40, I didn’t really notice any difference. As an RPG or a Deus Ex, it’s one big shrug.

Of the game’s many systems, it’s only hacking that I think coalesces into something satisfying. Quickhacks are, as they sound, of-the-moment abilities that let you switch off cameras, cause vending machines to vomit their canned guts to distract enemies, or damage enemies directly. It’s the closest the game came for me to a satisfying use of stealth mechanics, letting me sneak past enemies by temporarily disabling their ocular implants.

You can also ‘breach’ enemies or jack into certain machinery to play a hacking minigame, which asks you to pick chains of alphanumeric characters from a grid within a time limit. It’s mostly optional, and mostly rewarding, at least until you find the upgrades that make it trivial.



It’s not quite hacking, but lastly on the cyberfront, there are braindances, or BDs. These are Cyberpunk’s detective mode, first-person recordings of people’s lived experiences which you can visit in virtual reality when the plot requires it. You drop into an editor mode during playback that lets you scrub through the timeline and scan visual, audio and heat information from the scene, delivering clues which further whatever crime you’re investigating or preparing to commit. It’s straightforward stuff, but using it to plot a heist is also fantastically cool. I’d have gladly played with it another half dozen times than the handful the story allowed me – though be warned that at release the intro to these sequences was a seizure risk, and I can’t confirm that subsequent updates have addressed it.

At this point I feel like I’m just listing stuff in the game, desperate to cover it all. Cyberpunk 2077 is huge, sprawling, complex, and deeply flawed. It’s at its best as a fairly straightforward singleplayer action game, with likable characters and thrilling capers in a fascinatingly detailed open world that looks better than any game before it. It’s at its worst if you want it to be an RPG, an approach-as-you-please Deus Ex successor, or a polished piece of software. I enjoyed my time with it a lot, and I even want more of it, though I’m going to spend years complaining about its flaws. I’ll enjoy the complaining, too.

It reminds me of the Eurojank games of yore, then, but maybe it’s fairer to say that it reminds me of the previous games from developers CD Projekt Red. After eight years of one of the most grating marketing campaigns imaginable, Cyberpunk 2077 is here, its ambitions beyond its means. Cyberpunk 2077: Enhanced Edition when?
 

Grampy_Bone

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You would have to farm shitload of time in order to farm exp for those skills to get up those by 1-2 levels.

Engineering is actually a bit hard to level without throwing grenades constantly, disabling cameras manually helps. I haven't found a way to level athletics reliably at all. It seems to gain XP by running or jumping very rarely and that's it.
 

WhiskeyWolf

RPG Codex Polish Car Thief
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You would have to farm shitload of time in order to farm exp for those skills to get up those by 1-2 levels.

Engineering is actually a bit hard to level without throwing grenades constantly, disabling cameras manually helps. I haven't found a way to level athletics reliably at all. It seems to gain XP by running or jumping very rarely and that's it.
Engineering is hilariously easy to level with dismantling and crafting. With enough crafting materials I just stood there and gained two levels of proficiency.
 

Perkel

Arcane
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Mar 28, 2014
Messages
15,810
[I haven't found a way to level athletics reliably at all. It seems to gain XP by running or jumping very rarely and that's it.

Athletics covers jumping, running, dodges. Dodges and jumping gives way more than running. From what i have read dodges are the best way to level it up. Speaking of jumping. It really feels nice when i installed that leg implant that gives you higher jump. Now instead of sneaking like rat i can directly just jump on building roof from outside of compound.
I also noticed that outside of higher jump and double jump there is also hover mode which can be bought at Fingers clinic.

Engineering is hilariously easy to level with dismantling and crafting. With enough crafting materials I just stood there and gained two levels of proficiency.

Yes but i noticed with unleveled crafting your materials run out really really really fast.
 

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