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

[gurugeorge]

On the topic of events not fitting the world,

Spoiler

Saburo's death belongs at the top of that list. One of the most powerful men alive and he dies from 10 seconds of choking? No cybernetics lungs, or cybernetic revival implants? His personal bodyguard doesn't have advanced cyber-eyes that could immediately scan the room for additional life signs? And nobody thought about checking the body which would reveal obvious choking marks?

I kept expecting Saburo to just stand up and be fine, and the whole situation being a red herring but it was all for real, apparently.

No, actually

Spoiler

it makes sense that Saburo wouldn't be a chrome-head, he was too wise to get high on his own supply. He was "into" hi tech only to the extent that it enabled him to stay alive and in charge, and that holds through to the invention of the prototype and his subsequent immortality. His drive is the "perfection" he speaks of in the news feed at the end when in Yoshi's body, and that just means him and his family being in charge of everything. As to the choke marks, Hanako makes it clear that everyone knew the truth, but they went along with Yoshi for reasons of greed and ambition. As to Takemura scanning, he was in the process of doing so when they told him to leave the room.

 

[Ezeekiel]

Interesting little thing about the penthouse scene:

Spoiler

If you have the cybereye mod which highlights any enemy who detects you, Smasher will be highlighted the entire time he is in the suite... Though of course he does nothing. Pretty creepy, though... If only I'd realized that's what it was... Thought it was just a bug haha

 

[Perkel]

I was shocked to discover that the possibility of mouse turning a vehicle is in the game (the tank). Why the fuck didn't they implement an option for mouse turning for the cars and bikes for PC?

Because it is horrible to drive. Borderlands has that feature and its driving is one of the shittiest mostly due to mouse control instead of WSAD.

When it comes to driving games on kayboard you have to learn doing pressing impulses. So if you want to turn gradually you have to quickly press A or D in impuilses which will lead to smooth turn.

Aside from that there isn't really anything you can do. Keyboard is inheritently shitty for anything that requires smooth controls. For years i wanted keyboard with some sticks attached to it alas no one made such a thing.

 

[TemplarGR]

Definitely possible. The game reception and videos have reminded me of original release Crysis which was just a big graphics tech demo on top of a mediocre game, and many of the videos have struck me as a huge ad for RTX and performance hardware making it seem compelling where nothing else really has before in my mind.

Yup. Cyberpunk 2077 is first and foremost an Nvidia killer-app now. The fact that you can't really run it optimally without DLSS says everything you need to know. There is no chance in hell this happened without meddling by Nvidia engineers. What i am really amazed about, is why CDPR actually allowed this to happen. They probably thought they could still make the game perform on lesser hardware/past gen consoles by disabling most of Nvidia shenanigans, and i suspect the multiple delays were because they attempted to fix it, but failed. They failed because they lacked some fundamental understanding on how game engines work, and what parts can be "lowered" without needing to significantly alter game assets and what parts can't. Problem is the way the game was made always meant it couldn't perform on PS4, no matter how much you lower stuff like the resolution, shadows, shaders. It doesn't matter, the geometry is too much and the geometry remains the same no matter how much you lower everything else, unless you duplicate the assets intended for lesser hardware, which means more work and testing. I suppose some people saw "clipping" in PS4 versions because CDPR engineers did some hacks to reduce geometry to make it able to run, to no avail.

It is also strange since Witcher 3 didn't use as much geometry. And high geometry is a very obsolete and inefficient way to increase visual detail, and the only reason some games abuse geometry is cause it makes Nvidia hardware more attractive. AMD in recent architectures have tried increasing clocks (and thus geometry performance) in order to limit Nvidia shenanigans, that is why RDNA and RDNA2 architectures have significantly higher clocks while keeping shader cores steady. You don't need geometry for visual fidelity, that is what shaders are for. But tell that to Nshitia which implemented God Rays in Fallout 4 using tesselated and textured POLYGONS instead of shaders... FFS.... In 2015... While in 2008, Stalker Clear Sky from some Ukranian nobodies had D3D10 shaders design some wonderful god rays and ran on a toaster, in 2015 and D3D11 Fallout 4 used textured and tesselated polygons, cause AMD hardware would be slower at it and Bethesda has always been an Nshitia shill.

Fuck Nvidia and fuck everyone who buys Nvidia. You all suck.

 

[gurugeorge]

But that's a shitty incentive to betray Panam anyway, I would have prefered there was an option to convince her to leave the clan.

Well, you won't be able to sway her mind, no. In the end, you know exactly what you are getting into if you team up with her. Either put up with it, or go your own way.
It's not exactly a shitty reason. If you really think that this sounds like a suicide mission, it's a reasonable way to act. In character, you wouldn't know how the mission ends. It's only with the knowledge how this plays out that you think that mission is a good idea. Or "game logic": trust that the game won't send you on a mission that will fail in an uninteresting way.

With game-logic in mind this should have been a militech set-up cos its literally pointed out "being too convenient" among other indications, prolly cut-content. Never thought mission was a good idea hence I mentioned how I wound up doing the mission but "suicide mission" or not betraying her for just a car is shitty incentive.

You don't know about the car when you make your decision. But I think you get to the point why this is a shitty choice: If you take it, you miss out on quite a bit of content. And which player wants to miss out on content - willingly.

Yeah one of the best things about CDPR is that they stick to the idea of you being an in-game character, and not a gamer sitting in front of a computer. So they don't always flag dialogue options that hide crucial decisions. That's a great thing - it's just that there's not enough of that intricacy in the game, and judging by the amount of quests that look like they should have led to more intricate events down the line, a lot of that was probably planned, but remained unfinished and curtailed, probably for the reasons people have been saying - the need to stuff Keanu in everywhere, bad management, etc.

 

[gurugeorge]

I was shocked to discover that the possibility of mouse turning a vehicle is in the game (the tank). Why the fuck didn't they implement an option for mouse turning for the cars and bikes for PC?

Because it is horrible to drive. Borderlands has that feature and its driving is one of the shittiest mostly due to mouse control instead of WSAD.

When it comes to driving games on kayboard you have to learn doing pressing impulses. So if you want to turn gradually you have to quickly press A or D in impuilses which will lead to smooth turn.

Aside from that there isn't really anything you can do. Keyboard is inheritently shitty for anything that requires smooth controls. For years i wanted keyboard with some sticks attached to it alas no one made such a thing.

YMMV but I find mouse steering of vehicles much more congenial. Anyway, I said "option."

On a related note, there's a cool mod for Skyrim that turns the mouse-wheel into an analogue of the analogue stick - i.e. as you move the mouse wheel forward the character speeds up to a run. Very nice, I wish more games would do that, because the analogue stick is one of the best things about controllers, and the mouse wheel is the best analogue for it in a m/k setup.

 

[Perkel]

On a related note, there's a cool mod for Skyrim that turns the mouse-wheel into an analogue of the analogue stick - i.e. as you move the mouse wheel forward the character speeds up to a run. Very nice, I wish more games would do that, because the analogue stick is one of the best things about controllers, and the mouse wheel is the best analogue for it in a m/k setup.

I think they got it from Star Citizen. In that game they use mouse wheel for multiple things and one of them is to regulate how fast your character is moving. Yeah it is pretty neat for adjusting character speed.

 

[moon knight]

On the topic of events not fitting the world,

Spoiler

Saburo's death belongs at the top of that list. One of the most powerful men alive and he dies from 10 seconds of choking? No cybernetics lungs, or cybernetic revival implants? His personal bodyguard doesn't have advanced cyber-eyes that could immediately scan the room for additional life signs? And nobody thought about checking the body which would reveal obvious choking marks?

I kept expecting Saburo to just stand up and be fine, and the whole situation being a red herring but it was all for real, apparently.

Chocking is not about depriving people from air. That takes too much time. It's about blocking the flow of blood to the brain

 

[orcinator]

Even after 110 hours I managed to come across an area with a distinct style I haven't seen before

The legion of slavs working on this can't QA for shit nor do any of them know about compelling gameplay but they can churn out unique locations like nobody's business.

 

[Ibn Sina]

I was feeling completely disconnected because it was Johnny's show and I was just a schmuck on the wrong place at the wrong time.

Which is the entire point choom. You are supposed to feel helpless and thrashing against your inevitable demise. It is a dystopian setting, not a heroic fantasy.

 

[Turjan]

The idea that "plucky renegades" could have the slightest chance against the society-controlling system (which is the very core essence of cyberpunk) is indeed a function of the relative naivete of the 70s and 80s.

You get short glimpses of reality sometimes. Like when you ask that one ripperdoc why he himself doesn't use any implants, he answers with something like "one solar flare and the whole society will be blind". One of the loading screen messages goes into a similar direction.

 

[Terenty]

It is a dystopian setting, not a heroic fantasy.

When i was mowing down hundreds of corpo super soldiers without breaking a sweat i felt pretty heroic

 

[orcinator]

On a related note, there's a cool mod for Skyrim that turns the mouse-wheel into an analogue of the analogue stick - i.e. as you move the mouse wheel forward the character speeds up to a run. Very nice, I wish more games would do that, because the analogue stick is one of the best things about controllers, and the mouse wheel is the best analogue for it in a m/k setup.

I think they got it from Star Citizen. In that game they use mouse wheel for multiple things and one of them is to regulate how fast your character is moving. Yeah it is pretty neat for adjusting character speed.

Splinted Cell did it way back in the 00's. It let you adjust your speed in relation to the noise level around you.

 

[moon knight]

When i was mowing down hundreds of corpo super soldiers without breaking a sweat i felt pretty heroic

There's nothing heoric in killing innocent workers who were just doing their jobs

 

[Yoomazir]

So I'm on my way to do all the ending and I did notice something, all of them mention the "6 months lifespan". And I'm calling it right here, right now: first expansion is in 6 months from now.

 

[gurugeorge]

I was feeling completely disconnected because it was Johnny's show and I was just a schmuck on the wrong place at the wrong time.

Which is the entire point choom. You are supposed to feel helpless and thrashing against your inevitable demise. It is a dystopian setting, not a heroic fantasy.

Yeesh, I dunno, you could still have a dystopian setting with some very flat endings and it not be fundamentally Johnny's show, which it kinda is.

I think the consensus reached a while back up-thread is that when they got Keanu in, instead of just letting him have a few cool cameos (which I don't think people would have expected much more than that), they decided to weave him into the story in a big way. That in itself may be a big part of the reason for the unfinished state of the game.

One gets the impression that despite the problems (e.g. developers leaving in 2016/2017) they were pretty much on-track to finish something that was more of an RPG, but then when Keanu came in they ended up making another Geralt story, except you're not even Geralt

 

[Quillon]

btw. you guys noticed the quest names being song names? imitating the GOAT RPG again

 

[Agame]

they ended up making another Geralt story, except you're not even Geralt

This is such a godawful idea when you boil it down to that sentence, it stinks of upper management chicanery. No creative in their right mind would think that sounds like a great concept for a game story.

 

[Zer0wing]

I was feeling completely disconnected because it was Johnny's show and I was just a schmuck on the wrong place at the wrong time.

Which is the entire point choom. You are supposed to feel helpless and thrashing against your inevitable demise. It is a dystopian setting, not a heroic fantasy.

I find this dystopian plot with inevitable player character's death shallow and forced compared to a certain rpg called Fallout 1.5: Resurrection where main protagonist is also dying offscreen. His motivation is clear and understandable and stakes are set. And he can actually give an impact on the world around him. Be that legend. Vincent, on the other hand, doesn't.

One gets the impression that despite the problems (e.g. developers leaving in 2016/2017) they were pretty much on-track to finish something that was more of an RPG, but then when Keanu came in they ended up making another Geralt story, except you're not even Geralt

After the soft reboot mid-2018 that enbiggens the role of Johnny Silverhand and throws the work on first 10-15 hours of "rags to riches" plot straight into recycle bin so it would not be possible to restore it, workers just gave up on Cyberpunk 2077 and were there just for wage and possible bonuses.

 

[DalekFlay]

I think the consensus reached a while back up-thread is that when they got Keanu in, instead of just letting him have a few cool cameos (which I don't think people would have expected much more than that), they decided to weave him into the story in a big way. That in itself may be a big part of the reason for the unfinished state of the game.

I don't really get the unfinished claim when it comes to gameplay. Obviously I get it about the tech, on console especially (I've had no real issues on PC), but the gameplay depth and structure seems very standard for this kind of game in today's "AAA" mainstream space.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

Only on codex:

- I finished VTMB at launch best game ever 10/10
- Arcanum is my favorite game ever 10/10
- Nev Vegas grew on me 10/10
- Cyberpunk is buggy mess !

Reminds me how varying that quest chain could end in NV + you can just nuke'em, where in CP77 it ends in one way. NV proves itself to be GOAT once again

Except that part about it being one way is not true.

Like i said before CDPR doesn't do C&C like other games. They don't give you HERE IS AN IMPORTANT CHOICE TO MAKE. SO you have ABCD and each will give you different thing.

They give you a lot of those 1-2 options who are mostly illusory and hide in them real choices so you don't know which one of those is real so you are forced to pick the ones according to what kind of character you play. Some are more obvious than other though.

And then there is Consequences part which happen usually after a long while not imminently. So the "one way" talk about something 5 hours before could have been actually a choice and even reloading it 50 times to check every dialogie option would lead you to idea that it was not choice at all.

The thing with games like Bloodlines or New vegas is that their virtues are so strong that overshadow their flaws. Cyberpunk 2077 has good story, characters and setting. But as an action RPG and open world game it has a lot of room for improvement. It will gain some following with time, that's for sure, but I doubt it will get the same cult classic recognition that those games.

 

[DeepOcean]

I was feeling completely disconnected because it was Johnny's show and I was just a schmuck on the wrong place at the wrong time.

Which is the entire point choom. You are supposed to feel helpless and thrashing against your inevitable demise. It is a dystopian setting, not a heroic fantasy.

I'm not against my character dying or the feeling of helpless but I really dont like the way they did it, if they were going with it, if it is to be a schmuck, at least I would be one on my own terms than be a secondary character for Keanu Reeves.

Besides, they have scenes where Keanu Reeves blows up half of Arasaka security alone with his revolver then I'm supposedly to believe this is a realistic dystopic setting where I'm going to die as a schmuck because corpos are that powerful and I cant really do anything about it?

 

[Mitleser2020]

Edit: It's game logic, anyway. The corporations have stations in space and on the moon. To think that a group of desert dwellers could get away with a scheme like that without being found out breaks my suspension of disbelief. In principle, Cyberpunk shows its age here. While the topic is corporate control, the topic isn't really thought through to the bitter end. On the other hand, that's what makes up its nostalgic charm.

Keep in mind that at this point Arasaka is led by someone who wants to destroy this corp. Him letting such people who caused so much damage to Arasaka get away makes sense.
And in the original RPG, the (first) raid on Arasaka's HQ in NC was done by a group backed by Arasaka's main rival, Militech.

 

[Agame]

The thing with games like Bloodlines or New vegas is that their virtues are so strong that overshadow their flaws. Cyberpunk 2077 has good story, characters and setting. But as an action RPG and open world game it has a lot of room for improvement. It will gain some following with time, that's for sure, but I doubt it will get the same cult classic recognition that those games.

The thing that will kill it long term is replayability. There is plenty of 'ooh and aah' stuff going on when you do your first run, exploring city and cruising around is great and the graphics and ambiance can hide the lack of actual activities and gameplay in the open world.

But: Number 1, story is so on rails and C&C so lacking when you start over. I tried to start a new game to do a netrunner build, gave up half way through prologue cos already I was feeling fatigue at scripted unskippable sequences.

Number 2, the character development from school of Bethesda 'you can do everything because your AMAAAAAAZING' is a disastrous design decision for replayability. I focused on body and related skills, but I can use any weapon in the game very successfully in combat with no investment of perks. And I have enough backlog of stat and perk points I could easily have made a decent netrunner side build on this character. I mean what the actual fuck were they thinking with the character system?

Number 3, if you put aside story/side missions on rails so do not create enthusiasm for a replay what are we left with? A 'YUGE' open world right? Problem is it is filled with the the most basic bitch UbiCry 'bandit outpost' filler trash. Very quickly this becomes boring and tedious as you dash from 2 minute shootout to 2 minute shootout, maybe read the 2 emails placed at every location? Yea not thrilling content guys. Even Bethesda games have more interesting exploration than this.

Clearly none of the above are going to change after release now, we can get bugfixing and polishing, and probably more story DLC that will be one and done. The ONLY hope for this game to have major longetivity is modding. And that requires CDPR to do like Bethesda and open flood gates for modders to do complete overhauls and suchlike.

Otherwise Cyberpunk Online will completely eclipse this game for the masses, and it will be forgotten as some kind of intro/tech demo for Online version. (That is unless Cyberpunk Online release is a Fallout 76 level of disaster... And at this stage who knows?)

 

[gurugeorge]

The thing with games like Bloodlines or New vegas is that their virtues are so strong that overshadow their flaws. Cyberpunk 2077 has good story, characters and setting. But as an action RPG and open world game it has a lot of room for improvement. It will gain some following with time, that's for sure, but I doubt it will get the same cult classic recognition that those games.

The thing that will kill it long term is replayability. There is plenty of 'ooh and aah' stuff going on when you do your first run, exploring city and cruising around is great and the graphics and ambiance can hide the lack of actual activities and gameplay in the open world.

But: Number 1, story is so on rails and C&C so lacking when you start over. I tried to start a new game to do a netrunner build, gave up half way through prologue cos already I was feeling fatigue at scripted unskippable sequences.

Number 2, the character development from school of Bethesda 'you can do everything because your AMAAAAAAZING' is a disastrous design decision for replayability. I focused on body and related skills, but I can use any weapon in the game very successfully in combat with no investment of perks. And I have enough backlog of stat and perk points I could easily have made a decent netrunner side build on this character. I mean what the actual fuck were they thinking with the character system?

Number 3, if you put aside story/side missions on rails so do not create enthusiasm for a replay what are we left with? A 'YUGE' open world right? Problem is it is filled with the the most basic bitch UbiCry 'bandit outpost' filler trash. Very quickly this becomes boring and tedious as you dash from 2 minute shootout to 2 minute shootout, maybe read the 2 emails placed at every location? Yea not thrilling content guys. Even Bethesda games have more interesting exploration than this.

Clearly none of the above are going to change after release now, we can get bugfixing and polishing, and probably more story DLC that will be one and done. The ONLY hope for this game to have major longetivity is modding. And that requires CDPR to do like Bethesda and open flood gates for modders to do complete overhauls and suchlike.

Otherwise Cyberpunk Online will completely eclipse this game for the masses, and it will be forgotten as some kind of intro/tech demo for Online version. (That is unless Cyberpunk Online release is a Fallout 76 level of disaster... And at this stage who knows?)

Agree with much of this, but I partly disagree with the build system being "You can do anything."

Well, it is that, but only because the enemies are too weak, even on Very Hard, even by the end of the game. For example, if you do a Netrunner build that focuses on 20 into Int (both branches) and 20 into Cool (cold blood), you can get a truly spectacular, all-destroying mage build that insta-melts everything with crit-based Contagion, with other spells to spare and tidy up. Same if you focus on Sniper+cold blood.

Those are heights of power that you definitely can't get by building an unfocussed hybrid.

But the problem is there are no circumstances in the game where you really need that level of power and build focus, and you can actually finish the game with any old hybrid.