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

[Takamori]

It seems kind of ironic to criticize 2077 for being too political given that one of its core issues, as rusty_shackleford has also mentioned, is it that it is way too politically bland - almost to the point of being apolitical - for a Cyberpunk game (an inherently political genre). It really does feel like the new Deus Exs in the way that it sets up a handful of political themes but then refuses to comment on them (to a further degree than "bad things are bad"). Even Johnny Silverhand, the game's eponymous superhero terrorist anti-corper, rarely says anything other than lines to the effect of "corps are bad", he doesn't elaborate as to why, describe at length his political ideals or anything of that sort. The same goes for the wider game itself - it almost never makes concrete comments about the politics of its world. There are three long, entire quest lines in a game with very few of them in general that revolve around Night City's mayoral issues, during which you help solve political coups and unveil political conspiracies.

Guess what: literally at no point do actual politics get involved in motivations, dicussions or backdrop. Politicians are described in terms of their job and their character - not their ideas.

So what you're left with is a game whose entire setting screams politics, and where two of the three starting backgrounds for your character have deep roots in this political make-up, but where the game almost entirely focuses on all these aspects as cultural phenomena.

It's the exact same thing with identity politics. You have a game where you can literally put a cock on your female character and that CONSTANTLY explores the huge posibility space for sexuality in a world where you can heavily modify your own body by having entire factions and a huuuuge swath of locations built around that concept, but besides the cultural and aesthetic expressions of it, it doesn't really go into any thematic discussions or storytelling related to those things. So sexuality is something the game throws into your face at every turn, but it's just there as dressing.

For instance, there's a quest where a guy suspects his wife of cheating, and it turns out she didn't: she was just doing doctor check-ups because she made herself prettier with implants before she met her husband and didn't tell him. Boring. You could have done so much with that - somone completely, physically altering themselves and their partner realizing this and coming to terms with whether he or she is fine with that or can't let it go that beneath the chrome is someone else. But no, she essentially just underwent plastic surgery before meeting him. What if she had been someone else entirely before their meeting instead?

Cyberpunk 2077 almost reduces politics to aesthetics in the way it refuses to engage with it.

It really is quite bizarre.

Agree with you, its just spreadsheet politic check mark, ok X issue is popular with zoomers put in there and call it a day. Thats why I don't understand the anger towards CDK going Woke, when at "worst" they put a trans flag in a pickup and basically said that chick used to be a dude now go pod racing.

Its like that quest in TW3 in Blood and Wine I think? Were Geralt said yeah women have rights too and uhh lets go back killing monsters.

 

[Takamori]

You can't fix this mess. DLC won't help. Patches won't help. Mods won't help.

In a ideal world where people have shame for fucking up stuff. They could still save itemization and builds to make something interesting at least instead of the fucking Borderlands retarded shit. Because in the end they are just stat blocks at the current state and have almost zero interaction with your perks, if they wanted to go through ARPG route at least do it well where guns have interaction with different aspects of gameplay and do new stuff so you can actually seek then to have new interactions.


One thing fundamentally unfixable is the quest and level design, feels like a bootleg hitman mission with not many alternatives. With few exceptions.

 

[CthuluIsSpy]

Is Smasher really that much of joke in game? I've seen a lot of memes comparing Edgerunners Smasher to game Smasher and apparently game Smasher is more disappointing than TW3's final boss.

 

[Grunker]

Is Smasher really that much of joke in game? I've seen a lot of memes comparing Edgerunners Smasher to game Smasher and apparently game Smasher is more disappointing than TW3's final boss.

I can't speak to whether that's the totality of the game, but in what I saw of the game he was a robot who said manly robot stuff once or twice doing the intro, showed up once more to say more manly robot stuff, and then provided a pushover boss fight. He wouldn't even be a character if Johnny and Rogue didn't have some dialogue about him

 

[Tyrr]

Is Smasher really that much of joke in game? I've seen a lot of memes comparing Edgerunners Smasher to game Smasher and apparently game Smasher is more disappointing than TW3's final boss.

I can't speak to whether that's the totality of the game, but in what I saw of the game he was a robot who said manly robot stuff once or twice doing the intro, showed up once more to say more manly robot stuff, and then provided a pushover boss fight. He wouldn't even be a character if Johnny and Rogue didn't have some dialogue about him

He was memorable during Evelyn's Braindance in act 1. Proving again that act 1 was the only good part of the game.

 

[Grunker]

Is Smasher really that much of joke in game? I've seen a lot of memes comparing Edgerunners Smasher to game Smasher and apparently game Smasher is more disappointing than TW3's final boss.

I can't speak to whether that's the totality of the game, but in what I saw of the game he was a robot who said manly robot stuff once or twice doing the intro, showed up once more to say more manly robot stuff, and then provided a pushover boss fight. He wouldn't even be a character if Johnny and Rogue didn't have some dialogue about him

He was memorable during Evelyn's Braindance in act 1. Proving again that act 1 was the only good part of the game.

Dunno about memorable, but he was certainly menacing. As character traits go that’s not exactly deep but when the rest of the game gives you nothing for the character that part at least stands out. I remember thinking they were setting him up as a villainous bastard who would haunt your step, but no, he’s really just there for the intro

 

[Heroic Liberator]

The game representation is way too elegant and clean. You are never confronted with the fact that you're actually just a torso and have no real eyes anymore.

Besides stuff like having hostile NPCs mess with your implants the same way that you can mess with theirs, I think that a neat wait of showcasing the danger of getting too cybered up would've been to use a similar system to hunger in VtMB. Only instead of being lost to the Beast, you risk becoming lost to cyberpsychosis. And unlike with the Beast in VtMB where, ending with 0 humanity aside (which makes you permanently lost to it), you can always feed as to avoid losing control; in Cyberpunk going over a certain amount of implants could give a scaling % chance to trigger psychotic breaks every now and then. This would also add some extra character build depth since now you have to decide whether you want to play with only a reasonable amount of implants or are ready to go over the limit knowing that you'll have to endure the aforementioned psychotic breaks. And ideally you'd also have some NPC reactivity to the inhumanity of your cybered body.

 

[Marat]

going over a certain amount of implants could give a scaling % chance to trigger psychotic breaks every now and then.

Gameplay-wise, a horrible design decision that would only frustrate players and have them reload.

ideally you'd also have some NPC reactivity to the inhumanity of your cybered body.

Not ideally - absolutely necessarily; not some - a fucking lot. Imagine, over certain Humanity thresholds players would lose a choice between showing mercy or executing someone, some social solutions to quests would become impossible, people would not entrust certain tasks to a chromed up V or conversely, only to a sufficiently chromed up one. Characters would refuse to work with the PC fearing him or what he might do, thus forcing a change in quest lines. Some endings would change or become unattainable. Dialogue could change, purely for flavor. Those are just things I came up with while writing this comment. There was a mountain of reactivity that this setting enabled, one that could very well top anything ever done before - and CDP actively chose not to pursue such design, all the while lying about it.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

going over a certain amount of implants could give a scaling % chance to trigger psychotic breaks every now and then.

Gameplay-wise, a horrible design decision that would only frustrate players and have them reload.

Precisely why I'd frame it as,

you have to decide whether you want to play with only a reasonable amount of implants or are ready to go over the limit knowing that you'll have to endure the aforementioned psychotic breaks.

If someone wants to savescum, they're free to do so. Others would enjoy it (and it could also be a gameplay setting, so people that don't want to play with such a hindrance can turn it off altogether).

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Not ideally - absolutely necessarily; not some - a fucking lot.

I agree, but sadly that ship sailed long ago. Otherwise if we talk in the abstract,

Characters would refuse to work with the PC fearing him or what he might do, thus forcing a change in quest lines.

And on the opposite end... with a functioning faction system, having a certain amount of cyber would be a requirement for becoming a Maelstrom ally (or ideally, outright member).

 

[Justicar]

 

[Justicar]

DYING

 

[Gargaune]

DYING

It's not a bad figure up from 12 million in the first year, but you gotta factor in the game's gone on half-off sales quite a bit since.

 

[Grunker]

You can't fix this mess. DLC won't help. Patches won't help. Mods won't help.

In a ideal world where people have shame for fucking up stuff. They could still save itemization and builds to make something interesting at least instead of the fucking Borderlands retarded shit. Because in the end they are just stat blocks at the current state and have almost zero interaction with your perks, if they wanted to go through ARPG route at least do it well where guns have interaction with different aspects of gameplay and do new stuff so you can actually seek then to have new interactions.


One thing fundamentally unfixable is the quest and level design, feels like a bootleg hitman mission with not many alternatives. With few exceptions.

It's kind of dumb yeah. Like, if someone put a "support trans people" on a copy of Mein Kampf, does it suddenly become woke?

Admittedly Cyberpunk wants to tell you couple of times that its cool and progressive, but really, it's just a bumper sticker. There's not much substantial to it, and even that bumper sticker rarely rears its head.

 

[Justicar]

DYING

It's not a bad figure up from 12 million in the first year, but you gotta factor in the game's gone on half-off sales quite a bit since.

You can buy Witcher 3 goty for 1/6 (10 kwanzanians bucks) of full price since like 4 years. Half off sales in this number are still pretty good.

 

[Perkel]

Managed to snap this beauties yesterday. As you probably know i am replaying it again but this time with 3080 rather than 1080 and all bells and whistles including full raytracing. RT in C77 is very subtle when you look at big scenes but it can change a fucking lot when you look at small scenes especially in car. Like in this cases. It really looks fucking good

 

[Grauken]

It really is quite bizarre.

Is it? I'd say it was to be expected. It was a business decision - to play it safe, don't say anything remotely controversial.

Bad decision, if the game had had more political bite, even with all the bugs, it would have been at least somewhat interesting

They can polish it all they want now but at its core it's just not very interesting narrative-wise

 

[mediocrepoet]

going over a certain amount of implants could give a scaling % chance to trigger psychotic breaks every now and then.

Gameplay-wise, a horrible design decision that would only frustrate players and have them reload.

Sure, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It'd be nice to have some sort of nod to cyberpsychosis in gaming. It was a concept even in Shadowrun that wasn't really delved into much outside of the essence score.

There are a number of ways that this could be modelled without necessarily having a % chance to lose control and go nuts (which would likely work better in a turn-based party CRPG anyway, like X-Com's panic mechanics). Obviously it could be a narrative thing, but it could also impact you mechanically too, like maybe getting too cybered starts to lock out certain options like non-lethal takedowns and non-lethal targetting implants because you're too far removed from humanity to care, or perhaps if you did have the implants, maybe they'd have a % chance to simply not function because your character has gone berserk and chosen not to activate it.

There are probably all sorts of interesting things that could be done to model this aspect of the world and almost any of them would be better than only being limited by slots, cash, essence score, etc.

 

[lukaszek]

can PC get cyberpsyhosis with keanu on back wheel?

 

[Kjaska]

Besides stuff like having hostile NPCs mess with your implants the same way that you can mess with theirs, I think that a neat wait of showcasing the danger of getting too cybered up would've been to use a similar system to hunger in VtMB. Only instead of being lost to the Beast, you risk becoming lost to cyberpsychosis. And unlike with the Beast in VtMB where, ending with 0 humanity aside (which makes you permanently lost to it), you can always feed as to avoid losing control; in Cyberpunk going over a certain amount of implants could give a scaling % chance to trigger psychotic breaks every now and then. This would also add some extra character build depth since now you have to decide whether you want to play with only a reasonable amount of implants or are ready to go over the limit knowing that you'll have to endure the aforementioned psychotic breaks. And ideally you'd also have some NPC reactivity to the inhumanity of your cybered body.

I think one of the main issues is that you're only in 1st person view all the time and they didn't really bother making custom modules for your arms and legs (which admittedly would have been a lot of work, if you'd go the route from Edgerunners). You could have all kinds of mismatching weird looking parts scrambled together. Some of them could give you special dialogue options for intimidation and NPCs would sometimes make remarks about your implants, if you had some really good ones. It was probably on the docket for CDPR as well, but the effort is hard to justify when most normies probably wouldn't even notice the difference anyway. Most discussion I have seen on the topic of Edgerunners has been centered around tits, gore and the lol-i.

Technically you already do go "cyberpsycho" in the game. It's whenever you run over a pedestrian on accident.

 

[Rahdulan]

DYING

Hold up, wasn't it somewhere in the area of 18 million before Edgerunners aired?

 

[Marat]

Bad decision

Well, no. As I said, it was a business decision, not an artistic one. And business-wise, it has paid off.

They can polish it all they want now but at its core it's just not very interesting narrative-wise

Pray that modders adapt PnP modules or even create something new with the release of the modding tools.

 

[Gargaune]

going over a certain amount of implants could give a scaling % chance to trigger psychotic breaks every now and then.

Gameplay-wise, a horrible design decision that would only frustrate players and have them reload.

Sure, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. It'd be nice to have some sort of nod to cyberpsychosis in gaming. It was a concept even in Shadowrun that wasn't really delved into much outside of the essence score.

There are a number of ways that this could be modelled without necessarily having a % chance to lose control and go nuts (which would likely work better in a turn-based party CRPG anyway, like X-Com's panic mechanics). Obviously it could be a narrative thing, but it could also impact you mechanically too, like maybe getting too cybered starts to lock out certain options like non-lethal takedowns and non-lethal targetting implants because you're too far removed from humanity to care, or perhaps if you did have the implants, maybe they'd have a % chance to simply not function because your character has gone berserk and chosen not to activate it.

There are probably all sorts of interesting things that could be done to model this aspect of the world and almost any of them would be better than only being limited by slots, cash, essence score, etc.

Deus Ex 4 has it too, in a sense, you load up too many black market augs up to a certain plot point, you risk Jensen's firmware turning into Windows 95. Or the Wild Mage in D&D is pretty much a walking "I never asked for this" billboard. Chance-of-failure mechanics, even major ones, aren't that controversial even among mainstream gamers as long as decisions and effects are made clear in advance.

If CBP flashed a warning for growing cyberpsychosis risk past your, I dunno, fifth implant, I think it could work. The more important bit would be to present the consequences in a manner that's effective without actually wresting control from the player. For example, imagine a brief, 30-second cyberpsychosis episode during combat where the game replaces all NPCs in the vicinity with ganger models shown as and acting hostile, faux-shooting at you. Even if the player might notice they're not taking damage from certain enemies or remember where certain civillians were, they're bound to sometimes lose track in the chaos and mow down a few innocents, a reasonable rendition of cyberpsychosis that could also be interesting in play.

 

[Wesp5]

The more important bit would be to present the consequences in a manner that's effective without actually wresting control from the player.

Even that would work if it is handled, as already has been mentioned, like in Bloodlines in that your character only runs amok for a few seconds in which he will attack anybody. The only problem is how to fix this because it wouldn't be as easy as drinking some blood when you are a vampire ! Would you need to go to a fixer to remove some implants? Or at least get some adjusted? This could be a good reason to make the fixers more important overall...

 

[mediocrepoet]

Deus Ex 4 has it too, in a sense, you load up too many black market augs up to a certain plot point, you risk Jensen's firmware turning into Windows 95. Or the Wild Mage in D&D is pretty much a walking "I never asked for this" billboard. Chance-of-failure mechanics, even major ones, aren't that controversial even among mainstream gamers as long as decisions and effects are made clear in advance.

In DX-MD? I might actually have to finally get that out of my backlog.

For example, imagine a brief, 30-second cyberpsychosis episode during combat where the game replaces all NPCs in the vicinity with ganger models shown as and acting hostile, faux-shooting at you. Even if the player might notice they're not taking damage from certain enemies or remember where certain civillians were, they're bound to sometimes lose track in the chaos and mow down a few innocents, a reasonable rendition of cyberpsychosis that could also be interesting in play.

This could be pretty cool. Hopefully CDPR will take some cues from the success of Edgerunners and will integrate some of those themes to their next Cyberpunk project. I thought that they already nailed the melancholy, everything goes to shit vibe of a lot of cyberpunk fiction in 2077.