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

Haplo

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Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Well, maybe top-tier Tech perk wasn't supposed to be necessary to penetrate walls. BUT it should require an (almost?) full charge and the Tech weapons should have a huge shake with high charge without the relevant perks. Making headshots far more tricky. And yeah, there should be a limit on how much they can penetrate. If not 1 wall/obstacle only, then maybe a hefty damage drop for each obstacle? Like 30% less damage per object.
In general I think Ping-ed enemies should be displayed as 2D location flags, rather then clear silhouettes.
Plus the fact, that aiming a wall-penetrating weapon makes you auto-pinpoint all enemies (even without Ping!), has to be a bug!

Interesting that SPD Grads also penetrate walls. Except for the explosive Iconic O'Five (which ALSO doesn't scan all enemies when aiming). Plus it deals a lot less damage per headshot (like 30% of the damage) - despite having like 30% more damage in the stats and 2,5x higher headshot multiplier then Overwatch. Something is definitely buggy.
 

Bliblablubb

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The more you think about "features" that seem supposed to be only available later, the more you realize it's either bugged up or they decided to make everything available from the start, Bethesda style, because modern audience cannot into "earning a privileg". Or every team member had their own vision for the game and didn't talk to others.
Not sure what's worse.

Like Wakako giving you a smart link for free, so everyone can use smart weapons rite nao.
Gain magic wallhack with tech weapon, no perk needed.
Weapon tiers, progression, any form of limiting? Well aside from the CDPR patented high level enemies that take only 10% headshot dmg, at best.

Nope.

"See that mountain gun over there? Of course you can climb use it at once. It just works."

Shows who they were trying to be like to make even bigger bucks. Everyone wants his game to be like Skyrim, Skyrim with... dicks hacks.
Sad.
:negative:
 

Gerrard

Arcane
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Nov 5, 2007
Messages
11,925
All higher up creatives at CDPR are artists, it's run by wannabe movie directors, who had no chance to break into movie industry as nerdy potatoes.

They don't understand, or even like games and they will never even acknowledge, that the biggest problem with CP2077 are not the bugs.
Gameplay systems design and programming make like 5% of the budget of CDPR games and they are so set up in their ways, that their games are destined forever to have great art and subpar gameplay.
So just like Kojima?
 

Bliblablubb

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Something is definitely buggy.
Something
Something
"Something" he says. :hahano:

Outside the interactive movie themepark ride called main quest, it's probably a much shorter list what's working as intended, working as it should work.
Don't get me wrong: the mainquest (and some sidequests) were a fun ride, but the game gives me zero motivation to divert from it.
Skills, perks, looter shooter... replayability....
Everything outside the main attraction feels tacked on, half finished, a placeholder, or not even thought through for more than the conversation at the water cooler.

Did I get my money's worth? Sure thing, it ran stable for me. Plus countless rants on the 'dex. :obviously:
Is it GOTY material? If you only play it once, mostly mainquest, with an occasionsal dip into sidequests/gig... probably?
But if you expected an open world game.. nope. Not yet, maybe after another year of potatocrunch.
 

Gargaune

Magister
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Mar 12, 2020
Messages
3,136
Its funny about that statement where people talked about Crunch time and CDPR flaked out. They most definitely crunched and it definitely wasn't enough.

As far as I can tell, the blame lies primarily with management and the developer leads: they got it wrong when trying to assess the amount of work required to finish the game and, while the Coronavirus epidemic is a legitimate mitigating factor, it only goes so far.

CDPR put themselves in a losing bind with their second delay, when they shifted the release date from April to September 2020, rather than biting the bullet and pushing the game into 2021. Gamers would've bitched (myself included, I admit) and investors would've been rattled, but they had good business credentials and could've laid blame on the pandemic. Instead, from September 2020 they went into the deathly spiral of smaller delays and "just three microissues left" in a mad dash to make the Christmas holidays, from which they could not then pop out and say "actually, see you next year."

I say this because I believe stockholders would've been more amenable to fewer but longer delays, given the exceptional circumstances (Coronavirus), simply because that would maintain confidence that management still has a reasonably clear picture of what's going on, rather than what happened, where CDPR looked like they were playing a desperate game of whack-a-mole in Microsoft Project.

That said, I don't know what their financials looked like. I believe they could've kept going for another couple of months relative to what ended up being the release date, given the hype and their successful GOG and Witcher properties, but I have no idea what sort of pressure they might've faced from creditors through 2020 after "eight years" of working on the damned thing. So maybe I'm talking shit and Cyberpunk's fate really was sealed when Covid-19 torpedoed Europe last spring.

As for "more crunch", instituting a formal 6-day week much earlier might've helped some, but I don't know whether it would've been enough. The thing with mandatory overtime is that, aside from labour law and cost limitations, the longer it goes it also becomes a case of diminishing returns as developer morale drops. I guess we'll get a better picture of how much more work was really needed once Cyberpunk makes it back to the PS store.
 

Harthwain

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Dec 13, 2019
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So just like Kojima?
In Death Stranding the systems are designed around supporting the whole "walking simulator" premise, to a good effect.

If you want to mock the modern gameplay systems design this is really not the right game to use an example. Hell, let's go further still: even if the universe created by Kojima is batshit crazy, I have to admit it does not suffer from the common ludonarrative dissonance. Quite to the contrary - the story serves as the means to introduce more gameplay elements to the player. I find it stunning that a game about being a literal Amazon delivery courier has way better approach to gameplay than many games people consider to be serious affair.
 

Gargaune

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Mar 12, 2020
Messages
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TLDR: The bugstravaganza seems to come from fancy high settings if your toaster can't take it. Or the classic internal AA problem, even Bethesda fucked that up.
I hesitate blaming pc players for blowing it up, but.... knowing those entitled shits today they probably tried to run it on super ultra deluxe on their 5 yo notebook and whine on twitter because they saw a bluescreen for the first time in their life.
There's another catch here that has me worried. Iwinski outright said that they developed the game to look great on PC and then retrofitted it to consoles, which proved much more difficult than expected. Now, as much as we might giggle at the consoleplebs finally playing second fiddle and getting a taste of their own medicine, it'll only reinforce the industry-wide practice of developing for console first. Strap in for more decline, boys.
 

Xeon

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Apr 9, 2013
Messages
1,858
How is it running on the new consoles? I assume they spent the same amount of time on it as the old ones so as long as they are running fine then it probably doesn't change much I think.
 

Rinslin Merwind

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Sea of Eventualities
How is it running on the new consoles? I assume they spent the same amount of time on it as the old ones so as long as they are running fine then it probably doesn't change much I think.
New consoles run same version as old ones, but with unlocked framerate or at least I heard so. I assume there was less butthurt about performance on PS5 and new xbox simbly because there much less people who already bought these consoles.
 

Myobi

Liturgist
Joined
Feb 26, 2016
Messages
1,356
The problem is how shit stacks, crit dmg & crit chance needs to be nerfed, I made a int/tech/reflex sniper build n was running around dealing 3 million dmg headshots, my contagion was going over 10k dmg.

Edit: fml im 3 pages late on this, phone didn't refresh :(
 

typical user

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Nov 30, 2015
Messages
957
Someone said it here or on Reddit: if developers had to crunch for a year it meant the game was a year behind schedule. Like how fucked-up CTO or lead you have to be to be doing overhours for a fucking year? I understand a 1-month crunch when the game is about to go gold, to get Day 1 patch ready or to test servers, whatever, but when you have all the money from investors and you crunch people rather than hire more and better skilled and divide them on teams working on different features and then have someone responsible for integration? Ah, I am no developer but come on, a head-of-department doesn't need knowledge how to code more than he needs to know how underlying teams are doing, if they are reaching milestones. What the fuck they were doing? What did they expect? That people are blind and won't give a bad rep? This isn't just crunching to deliver a masterpiece like RDR2. This was crunching to release a demo with barely any gameplay.
 

DalekFlay

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Comparing Witcher 3 to Cyberpunk and saying they have similar problems is like saying a car with a flat tire is similar to one with its engine, transmission, and steering wheel missing. C2077 is a game in an early alpha stage, and even saying that I've played alpha early access games that had less missing assets.

I 100% stand by my statement that if the gigs had more story the game would be roughly the same in structure and content. I'm sure you'll reply with something like "the police system is so basic" but so was the guard system in Witcher 3. I'm just not seeing this super in-depth gameplay Witcher 3 had that Cyberpunk does not. Witcher 3 was not a New Vegas or Gothic 2, it was an Ubisoft open world type game with a great story and some cool choices. If Cyberpunk had gigs with great stories and some cool choices, it would be the same fucking game, just with Deus Ex-y shooting and stealthing instead of whacky-whacky melee.
 

Zeriel

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Jun 17, 2012
Messages
13,378
No, I'd reply with the fact the UI is missing any sound effects or feedback from basic actions. This is not a finished game, and I'm stunned by the fact that people are still in denial over that. This is not normal, and it's not like your average Ubisoft or EA release. It's a very visible example of what happens when project management totally fails and there are no safeguards.
 
Joined
Oct 17, 2019
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What people don't seem to understand is the importance of the spectacular and very public failure of Cyberpunk 2077.

Gaming is a big herd of sacred cows. There exists this unspoken rule that some companies/games are not to be criticized, least you incur the wrath of the gaming press or the rabid fanbase.

As an example, how many years did Bethesda get away with their overabundance of bugs, poor writing, lackluster gameplay and general lack of quality to their games? How many years have people just memed the glaring faults away and laughed at the bugs and called them a quirky part of the design?

And then came Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, and suddenly the faults were so obvious and numerous that no amount of intimidation and journalist spin could make it go away. The number of detractors dwarfing the rabid, vocal fanbase to such an extent that it suddenly became socially acceptable to mock Fallout 4 and 76, and by extension Bethesda and all their previous games.

Now, after the success of Witcher 2, and especially Witcher 3, CDPR was the golden Polish darling of gaming - delivering the kind of "deep" and "mature" storytelling that would validate the worthless existence of game journalists and finally put an end to the endless mockery they experience from family, friends, random strangers and pretty much every other human on the planet.

The fact CDPR games were mechanically subpar, buggy and half-finished didn't matter, because they produced a "mature cinematic experience" (read: post-modernist, nihilist filth designed to make you feel like shit) and thus ascended to the endless pastures of gaming's sacred cows and were thus exempt from criticism. They were also the "good guy devs", the people's publisher, the ones that took a stance against greed, lies and deceit - thus becoming haloed sacred cows.

But then Soyberpunk 2077 came along, and it was an undeniably shit game on every level, such that not even journalists could make the bad press go away, and it revealed CDPR to the public as (and this is the most important part) just another shitty publisher, perfectly capable of resorting to the underhanded kind of shit EA, Ubisoft and Activision do on a regular basis.

Now that they have been unceremoniously deposited outside the pearly gates it's hip and cool to shit on them, the spell is broken and they will never again win back that implicit trust. Whenever they try to hype up a new product there will always be a large number of people that will remind the rest of the NPCs about Cyberpunk and the broken promises and scummy behavior. This will forever remain a corrosive poison eating at their success.

And if you don't believe that this will impact their bottom line - just look at what a string of failures have done to Ubisoft. Few companies go bust overnight due to a single failure, it's usually a death by a thousand cuts that sees them slowly crumble from within. CDPR is no Activision or EA, they don't have a reliable money printing IP, they're no Ubisoft with a large number of franchises they can fall back on, they're not even a Rockstar that actually can deliver on their promises.

They're just a collective of underpaid Polish labor monkeys led by inept cretins. 2077 was their one-in-a-million chance to make it into the big leagues, and they thoroughly fucked it up in the most public way imaginable.


High IQ.
 

Gerrard

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Nov 5, 2007
Messages
11,925
So just like Kojima?
In Death Stranding the systems are designed around supporting the whole "walking simulator" premise, to a good effect.

If you want to mock the modern gameplay systems design this is really not the right game to use an example. Hell, let's go further still: even if the universe created by Kojima is batshit crazy, I have to admit it does not suffer from the common ludonarrative dissonance. Quite to the contrary - the story serves as the means to introduce more gameplay elements to the player. I find it stunning that a game about being a literal Amazon delivery courier has way better approach to gameplay than many games people consider to be serious affair.
Couldn't give less of a shit if they are "used to good effect" if the gameplay overall is trash.
 

mediocrepoet

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Codex 2012 Codex+ Now Streaming! MCA Project: Eternity Divinity: Original Sin 2
Interesting that SPD Grads also penetrate walls. Except for the explosive Iconic O'Five (which ALSO doesn't scan all enemies when aiming). Plus it deals a lot less damage per headshot (like 30% of the damage) - despite having like 30% more damage in the stats and 2,5x higher headshot multiplier then Overwatch. Something is definitely buggy.

Overwatch, the iconic sniper rifle from Panam, also penetrates walls. It was the first thing I found before I realized you could do it with charging tech weapons which I basically never bothered with. I tried because it's a fuckhuge sniper rifle, so I figured if anything should be able to shoot a guy through a wall, it was that. It's the only weapon I really used for the purpose.
 
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Turjan

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Mar 31, 2008
Messages
5,047
But as for the number of slots... I don't think I've ever seen a "Legendary" with no mod slots. In fact all seem to boast 3+.
They are supposed to be:
Green 1
Blue 2
Purple 3
Gold 4

In reality it's "between zero and X slots", I've wasted at least an hour reloading quicksaves to fix loot. And even then it's ALWAYS one less mod than they should have for drops.
Dunno if crafted versions require you to savescum as well or work as they should. Could't be arsed to click on craft at least 700 times to level the skill. Seriously CDPR? No "craft X amount" button?:argh:

One less slot for drops seems closer to the truth, as I don't think I've ever found a green with a mod slot. In fact "Rares" with any mod slots seem very rare. And all purples seem to have 1.
Legendaries have between zero and 4 slots at the moment. I'd say 3 is about a 40% chance, 4 slots less than 5%, no slots is also rare, but not unseen. This system sucks. At least the slot number should be fixed.
 

Correct_Carlo

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Jul 19, 2012
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Pronouns: He/Him/His
I played this a lot more this weekend and like the game much more. Its stats/skills and combat are mediocre, not bad, and it has quite a few bugs, but I think once the bugs are patched it will be a solid 3.5/5 star game. Once I've gotten into the world, it's seemed much less empty than it did at first glance, and once you get into the game a bit further, the random side quests start being more fleshed out. Even the side-gigs that are told primarily through text often have interesting backstories if you bother to read them, and the fact that if you sneak in you can actually talk to the people you are killing/kidnapping is a nice touch that most people are probably missing.

Ultimately, once it's patched up, I think the game is going to be Witcher 3 level of quality. In other words, it does a few things so exceedingly well (mainly story and immersion) that the game is noteworthy and worth playing, despite its flaws. While W3 outdoes CP in the sheer level of quality of its side quests (W3 has so many intricately written and unique sidequests), CP outdoes W3 in combat and variety of gameplay. Yes, CP's stats/skills and combat are mediocre. However, it's way more engaging than W3 as there are just so many different ways that you can tackle any given situation, especially in the side quests, which you can pretty much complete however you want in most situations.

Plus, I re-speced as a stealthy blade user + cold blood for protection + Breech Protocol primarily for infiltration and debuffs and have found that build to be really fun. The key to enjoying this game is avoiding min-maxing a single skill tree, instead picking pieces of each to conform to your playstyle. Some melee stuff from Body, enough Reflexes to get the "slow time" mods, some stealth and a limited amount of Int has been way more fun than my initial Rifles + Crafting build.

That said, the combat is still pretty mediocre. Melee is fun largely because it forces you to strategize, plan ahead, and strike quickly from stealth, not because the game's melee system is fun (it's not). Think of how awesome this game would have been had CDPR just blatantly ripped off Dishonored's melee system, for example. I want enemies to actually parry me and block my blows, and I want to see them respond to the impact of my blows when I hit them, much like Dishonored. Instead, they respond like Bethesda enemies, where you run up to them and slash away without their reacting (you can stagger with blades, but it's purely an RNG thing that happens randomly based on rolls, so it doesn't seem like anything that's tied to physics).
 

Gargaune

Magister
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Mar 12, 2020
Messages
3,136
Someone said it here or on Reddit: if developers had to crunch for a year it meant the game was a year behind schedule. Like how fucked-up CTO or lead you have to be to be doing overhours for a fucking year? I understand a 1-month crunch when the game is about to go gold, to get Day 1 patch ready or to test servers, whatever, but when you have all the money from investors and you crunch people rather than hire more and better skilled and divide them on teams working on different features and then have someone responsible for integration? Ah, I am no developer but come on, a head-of-department doesn't need knowledge how to code more than he needs to know how underlying teams are doing, if they are reaching milestones. What the fuck they were doing? What did they expect? That people are blind and won't give a bad rep? This isn't just crunching to deliver a masterpiece like RDR2. This was crunching to release a demo with barely any gameplay.
I think I've explained this before, oh, maybe a hundred pages back, but that's not how it works. Staffing logistics aren't just a function of temporary resource requirements, since hiring people is expensive, time-consuming in training and subject to long-term growth plans under the influence of applicable legislation. Independent contractors, on the other hand, are more costly and harder to manage in the context of a large development. Additionally, timeframes do not scale linearly against the number of resources, there's only so many programmers who can work on the same curly bracket.

You'll say that a whole year (if your Reddit post is correct, and that's huge "if") doesn't count as "temporary resource requirements", but look back to what I wrote a few posts up, CDPR completely missed the mark on scoping out the outstanding work over 2020 as evidenced by the haphazard delays, that was their critical failure.

Basically, this story does not hinge on "just hire more people lol." Trust me, I'm a developer, we know everything. Next Friday I'll tell you about the best bridges for sale in Florida.

I 100% stand by my statement that if the gigs had more story the game would be roughly the same in structure and content. I'm sure you'll reply with something like "the police system is so basic" but so was the guard system in Witcher 3. I'm just not seeing this super in-depth gameplay Witcher 3 had that Cyberpunk does not. Witcher 3 was not a New Vegas or Gothic 2, it was an Ubisoft open world type game with a great story and some cool choices. If Cyberpunk had gigs with great stories and some cool choices, it would be the same fucking game, just with Deus Ex-y shooting and stealthing instead of whacky-whacky melee.
I agree with this in principle, though there's more at work than just the narrative design. There are other relevant distinctions between Cyberpunk and The Witcher 3, such as the impact of game space density on quest pacing and exploration or the delivery of characterisation in first-person context, all of which affect the overall flow of the game. But I agree with you that CBP largely follows TW3's formula, with some timid improvements to level design.

The problem is that some consumers seem to have expected more from the open world content, and while that's mostly their own fault, CDPR did make some promotional statements in the past that might've fueled such aspirations, stuff like faction systems and "activities" and LARPing opportunities. Take that old line about Night City having "a thousand NPCs with daily routines in a full day/night cycle" - CDPR might have some plausible deniability in that (a) there may be 1000 NPC models and (b) the city has a full day/night cycle with a variation routine (e.g. crowd and traffic density), but it's not surprising that people might've interpreted that as Bethesda Game™ NPCs with their own homes and jobs etc. In the end, I suspect there's plenty CDPR wanted to do through development, but they dropped all of it as they fell farther behind and struggled to just deliver The Witcher 3-with-Raytraced-Guns.
 

Harthwain

Magister
Joined
Dec 13, 2019
Messages
4,688
In Death Stranding the systems are designed around supporting the whole "walking simulator" premise, to a good effect.

If you want to mock the modern gameplay systems design this is really not the right game to use an example. Hell, let's go further still: even if the universe created by Kojima is batshit crazy, I have to admit it does not suffer from the common ludonarrative dissonance. Quite to the contrary - the story serves as the means to introduce more gameplay elements to the player. I find it stunning that a game about being a literal Amazon delivery courier has way better approach to gameplay than many games people consider to be serious affair.
Couldn't give less of a shit if they are "used to good effect" if the gameplay overall is trash.
You're free to have your own opinion, but I will say this much - he who is unwilling to learn or dismisses an opportunity, because the source, is a fool.
 

msxyz

Augur
Joined
Jun 5, 2011
Messages
296
The problem is that some consumers seem to have expected more from the open world content, and while that's mostly their own fault, CDPR did make some promotional statements in the past that might've fueled such aspirations, stuff like faction systems and "activities" and LARPing opportunities. Take that old line about Night City having "a thousand NPCs with daily routines in a full day/night cycle" - CDPR might have some plausible deniability in that (a) there may be 1000 NPC models and (b) the city has a full day/night cycle with a variation routine (e.g. crowd and traffic density), but it's not surprising that people might've interpreted that as Bethesda Game™ NPCs with their own homes and jobs etc. In the end, I suspect there's plenty CDPR wanted to do through development, but they dropped all of it as they fell farther behind and struggled to just deliver The Witcher 3-with-Raytraced-Guns.
Ok, let assume it's *us* consumers that had the wrong expectations. There are however many large and small details that points to CDPR not even being able to deliver a game which is on the same level,technically wise, as the others game on the market. One example is the retarded traffic AI. How about water? It's just a flat polygon covered by a static shader. Throw something and it will clip without even a sprite simulating the ripples. What was the last time we saw such static water? Even in Morrowind with a DX8 card the water was animated. While the poor game mechanics can be a direct consequence of bad design decisions, there's no excuse to how 'primitive' the game feels. Even if they rebooted the story and mechanics twice, what were the programmers doing meanwhile? Why car AI and phisics are shit? It's not as if going from 3rd person to 1st person or rewriting the story to give a bigger role to mr. Reeves required a complete rewrite of the game physics!
 

Haplo

Prophet
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Messages
6,138
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Interesting that SPD Grads also penetrate walls. Except for the explosive Iconic O'Five (which ALSO doesn't scan all enemies when aiming). Plus it deals a lot less damage per headshot (like 30% of the damage) - despite having like 30% more damage in the stats and 2,5x higher headshot multiplier then Overwatch. Something is definitely buggy.

Overwatch, the iconic sniper rifle from Panam, also penetrates walls. It was the first thing I found before I realized you could do it with charging tech weapons which I basically never bothered with. I tried because it's a fuckhuge sniper rifle, so I figured if anything should be able to shoot a guy through a wall, it was that. It's the only weapon I really used for the purpose.

Well, its a SPT32 Grad variant (with a custom silencer... that isn't quite silent). The description in the text for the regular gun even states "No wall will stop it from hitting its target."
Also its motto is "From this weapon there is no cover."

But it can't be intentional that aiming trough its scope instantly reveals all enemies in the whole area...
 
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Terenty

Liturgist
Joined
Nov 29, 2018
Messages
1,367
God bless Crowbcat for his video, finally something retarded shills can't defend their precious "masterpiece" against
 

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