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

[mondblut]

That also applies to the term "RPG" - you can definitely play a role in the sense of pretending you have a particular personality, or prefer a particular combat style.

That's not how RPGs really work.

As I pointed out in the next few sentences.

Yeah, that's not how RPGs really work, too.

But I think the Codex is a bit too fascistic about defining roleplaying purely in terms of gameplay, the element of goofing off and pretending is also part of it, and this game has that quite well.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Roleplaying

 

[Semiurge]

My nomad character, does anyone who is actually playing the game knows who sells trench coats? I need one.

Trench coats huh...there's screenshot potential alright, if you make V wear nothing but one of those and cowboy boots.

Zer0wing that there haircut is almost the same as Barb's but shorter, in fact I could use that same face preset and just switch the hair color to blonde

Problem is, she is the definition of a Butter-face. Smoking body but with that mongrel mystery meat half nagger wide nose, swarthy skin tone, and fucking dreadlocked bun.

Wtf, are you this guy?

Panam is not a "butterface", she's at least a 7/10.

Especially since in the 2018 preview, there were other heroes to choose from. They axed a lot of content just to squeeze Keanu in.

The confident move would have been to adapt their original interpretation of JS instead of relying on some celebrity's likeness, but they took the easy way out. And got some more media attention as well.

How much did they pay Timberlake tho?

He's in this too?!

 

[TheDiceMustRoll]

I like the Cyberpunk setting, I hope they do spin-off games. Nomad clan game. Corpo counterintel game. All we got was a Street Kid game.

 

[Axioms]

Its weird to see people who think Silverhand should be the MC when he was supposed to be 1/5 characters of similar significance.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Downloading the patch at the moment. Given I have time at the moment, just one question: I don't really see colors right, and here's a pic of the same V I already posted a few times, with exactly the same gear as in the last pic, but in the apartment. Somehow, I have the feeling he never looks like that anywhere else.

Is that just due to my color vision, or is the outside lighting that different that it always looks different even with normal color vision?

Post yo Vees

Still pretty much the same. Found a legendary vest though.

looks the same, light sources in the bottom pic look a bit fucky though

 

[TheDiceMustRoll]

Does it have potential (after it's pathed ou)t to be good FPS RPG?

Go play the new Shadowrun trilogy.

Literally only Dragonfall is good, why do people act like ShadowRun Generic Game and praise the CCP are good

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Does it have potential (after it's pathed ou)t to be good FPS RPG?

Go play the new Shadowrun trilogy.

Literally only Dragonfall is good, why do people act like ShadowRun Generic Game and praise the CCP are good

I agree on Deadman's Switch, but Hong Kong is just as fleshed out as Dragonfall. Main issue with it is that it is a bit too wordy, but that's about it.

 

[Chickenhawk]

Its weird to see people who think Silverhand should be the MC when he was supposed to be 1/5 characters of similar significance.

Was this always the plan? Because at one point Bowie was supposed to be JS, and I just can't imagine having David Bowie and 4 randos of 'equal importance.' Seems plausible that originally they had one character in mind, fucked around with "well what if there were 5," and then someone with similar star power to Bowie expressed interest in the project and they went back to that.

 

[ADULF HITLOR FAN KLUB]

Dragonfall is a gem.

Hong Kong is ballz. Even Dead Man' Switch is better IMO.

 

[Axioms]

I like the Cyberpunk setting, I hope they do spin-off games. Nomad clan game. Corpo counterintel game. All we got was a Street Kid game.

You posted this right before my comment but the edit button is evil so:
This is a 100% NMS situation where they need to add all the content they ended up cutting like all the other Lore Character quests where you could have Saburo or Blackhand or something as your hero guy. I think the game would have gotten WAY more credit if they had finished the other content. Especially a Nomad hero and also having like relationship questlines where a corpo doesn't have to romance a Nomad.

 

[Turjan]

Some of it's due to lighting but his colours appear to be more like white and navy and lighter blue here while in the crouching pic it looked more like white and grey.

looks the same, light sources in the bottom pic look a bit fucky though

Thanks, guys. Looks as if that is mostly an issue with my color vision then.

 

[Keshik]

Did The Star and The Sun endings and both were satisfying. The last "boss" was pretty underwhelming, I have to say, but I think I overlevelled it. Was a fun romp, the phone calls at the end were nice touch, although not too much would change, I'm guessing.

- One thing I found really annoying is being constantly bombarded by various things as you play. You constantly get phone calls, messages, emails, flashing reminders on UI, quest markers and compasses on your screen, people calling you incessantly to feed you quests and tasks and gigs, and on and on and on. At some point, it almost feels like work, or sensory overload, and you long for the quieter, more desolate RPG worlds of the past.

Agree, it's annoying to be on heading to a mission and have Delamain or Regina interrupt you with something you're near.

 

[KK1001]

Only way CDPR can redeem the game is if they actually add more content in and spend the next 3 years doing DLC. The first two (free) should be adding in more lifestyle content and the Jackie timeskipped stuff.

 

[gurugeorge]

That also applies to the term "RPG" - you can definitely play a role in the sense of pretending you have a particular personality, or prefer a particular combat style.

That's not how RPGs really work.

As I pointed out in the next few sentences.

Yeah, that's not how RPGs really work, too.

But I think the Codex is a bit too fascistic about defining roleplaying purely in terms of gameplay, the element of goofing off and pretending is also part of it, and this game has that quite well.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Roleplaying

Yes those are all ways of goofing off and pretending. What's your point?

 

[Alpharius]

Finished it too. I concur that game would have been much better if Silverhand would have been the main character.
Didn't get the "secret" ending because apparently

Spoiler

i didn't suck Johnny's cock enough in the dialogues.

Was disgusted by combat, itemization, leveling, c&c etc and wanted to finish the main quest ASAP and uninstall this shit but then the game started throwing half-decent side quests at me. So i ended up finishing most of them except for "gigs", fistfights etc.

It seems any quest in Side Job journal tab has the potential to be non-shit, while 99% of quests in gig tab are "kill the baddies, get paid". Although these side jobs are mostly made up of talks with npcs and are usually linear which means that they are interesting only the first time around. Also apparently new side jobs are unlocked depending on character level and\or main quest progress, so i probably missed some of them (finished at level 34).

So this game is a shit shooter, a shit RPG, a shit open-world game but half decent as a visual novel. Worth pirating for one playthrough i guess.

Elex is better game.

 

[wyes gull]

Finished it. Loved it. I'm heavily biased tho. Far as I care any sort of sci-fi>fantasy, especially of the medieval kind, and I hold cyberpunk especially dear. Heck, I can say I'd been waiting 20 years for the chance to walk around in a cyberpunk city like this and I'd have happily shelled twice the amount just for the city, no peds, no traffic, so long as it had a dynamic weather system or at least perpetual night. It's not perfect but it's still the prettiest thing I've ever seen in a game. I could go through it for hours and find a surprise at every corner and in fact, a lot of my 60-something hours' playthrough was made up of just that. I wouldn't say it's perfect- it's too western for my specific taste, especially the outskirts. But hell, even those parts look fantastic.
I could even mirror most of that praise on the design of the vehicles, the weapons and most of the central characters. Oh and the sound design. That is, when the sound is actually work as intended. But I make no bones about it. The city is the linchpin. And she is gorgeous.

Having said that, all the reasons I like this have nothing to do or are at most tangential to the actual game because as it turns out, there is an actual game in here. I'll give it points for ambition if nothing else. I've never been a fan of the avg modern shooter and as one, this doesn't work particularly well without maps specifically designed to suit it and with an AI that is just not there. The RPG (air-quotes RPG, mind) mechanics don't help either. So it varies from spongy and reasonably hard and boring to fast, easy and satisfying. Similar to how it worked in VtMB if you specialized in combat and were fighting humans. The sound and animations/gibbing really do save the day as blasting someone to shreds looks and sounds... just right, and it's at least reward enough in itself to not expose the lacking areas of the shooting as a mindless chore. Swording and (I imagine) Blunting work pretty much the same way. Fast, easy, satisfying. Too easy, unfortunately. AI aside, my choice for biggest culprit would be the damage breadth that weapons come in. And how easy it is to find a weapon that does, per second, more damage than the avg enemy has HP. Weapons -are- level restricted but that restriction does little to help the PC not easily overpower the NPC 15-20 levels in. Out of a supposed 50. Ouch.
Long and short of it, the game needs rebalancing. Especially when it comes to gains for skills, who just slog the whole fucking game, way behind stats, player level and reputation. And even then combat's too easy. It brings to mind just what the hell are skills for. Right now? Absolutely nothing but gating the last, highest perk (which lets you put infinite points into minuscule improvements), contrary to all other perks, which are gated by stat levels rather than skill. Crafting seems an exception, as it gates the quality of items you can craft, but then that skill levels appropriately via crafting. So someone call Oscuro or le-balance-man because this thing needs an overhaul. Bad. I'll add 1 bit of praise though, in that most combat areas seem to be designed with choice in approach in mind is particularly noteworthy; that after hours and hours you can jump onto a side window of the building in which the objective of some meaningless side-mission is located and be surprised by a hidden entrance and on the way out you find another point of entry is impressive, not to mention the cameras and computers you can use to unleash a number of surprises on unsuspecting mooks.

I have more gripes about the gameplay but it's bugging me that I've gone several paragraphs without mentioning something... buggy. I wouldn't exactly call the game buggy. Bugs sometimes are innocuous, sometimes brick saves, sometimes render the game unfinishable. Happy to report that for me, that wasn't the case. Say what I will but it is finishable. It's just not finished. Which is absolutely NOT an excuse. And the bugs come at you at an alarming rate that I've seldom, if ever, experienced. Fortunately, most of them are graphical in nature (such as the fucking crosshairs that remained on the hud after I'd holstered my weapon, forcing me to un-holster, switch to the katana (that doesn't have a crosshair) and then sheathe that instead to get rid of them. That fucker stayed with me the whole fucking game. Fuck the fuck off, already) and only 2 made me lose game time; one in a mission with Panam wherein, should you die (I died twice thanks to those sneaky explosive barrels and to being run the fuck over by a car with no engine noise, so bugs within bugs now), the 3 or 4 previous autosaves put you in the car with Panam, except on the driver seat she's in rather than the passenger seat where you're supposed to be, rendering you permanently stuck. The other one I can't recall but in all it's 30 minutes of lost game time. Remarkably, for all the bugs, only one quest was rendered unfinishable for me, the 7 proxies one.

Finally there's the story. I liked it quite a bit. Characterization and acting were strong throughout and I'd say the voice acting was great across the board, the weaker cog being Keanu himself, whose performance varied wildly. He's not the most expressive actor in the world (I mean he's pretty much a plank) but even then he manages to be really convincing most of the time. Problem is the rest of the time, when he sounds half asleep and completely unaware of the gravity of the situation the characters are in. I do find his presence and integration welcome enough, though, as it lends a sorely needed bit of banter to even some small side missions in a game where a solo protagonist would be rendered almost speechless and perhaps even characterless for the vast majority of playtime were it not for the opportunity to play off of the voice in his or her head. The plot, however, has 2 major problems. First off it does itself and the player a disservice by separating characters into groups and camping them in their respective islands, never to interact. Party based RPGs have an easy time of this by virtue of there being a party but if that comparison sounds unfair, consider then that Witcher 3 (hell, even 2) accomplishes this splendidly. Characters move about and seem ready to discuss themselves, each other, you and the world at large in a way that seems believable and the game makes no bones about setting up situations where it brings people together. In 2077 Goro and Hanako live on one island, Panam and the Aldecalientes live on another, Misty and Mamá live on another, River, Kerry, Judy, Vic and so on and so forth live in theirs and they -never- interact. Which is not only a waste of perfectly good characters, it only reinforces the feeling that the city -is- dead (a feeling borne of either bugs or missing/unfinished/cut content in the overworld) and at worse, it beggars belief. That one character seems to bring so many people around them who either appreciate or owe them and yet they're completely unaware of one another. V doesn't, ever, even bring them up in random conversations, of which you have a -ton-.
Then there's the ending. As I understand it

Spoiler

what Alt is supposed to do is essentially replace the chip (via software, if not physically) containing Johnny's engram with a chip with V's engram, hereby killing V, having the new chip/software resurrect V and eventually have their original personality+Johnny's overwritten with a new V personality, right? If that is the case, the 6 months thing just sounds like complete arsepull for drama's sake. And if it's not the case... well, why the fuck isn't it the case? They have the chip specs, they have access to V and they know how to make an engram. What's the problem???

That and the whole V being a witness to the murder mattering a single iota (because why the hell would it? It's not like he has a recording of the event, even though HE HAD A FUCKING CYBERNETIC EYE) are among a few seemingly dumb moments that signal "turn on brain-shut-down-mode" but fortunately the sci-fi wets the beak enough that they don't ruin it outright.

Oh, almost completely forgot the OST. Which is telling. There's 3 strong tracks on it and that's yer lot. What disappoints me, though, isn't lack of quality on the ost's part, it's the lack of melody- almost entirely replaced with droning and noise. But the worst is the lack of identity. Some of the most popular cyberpunk movies have instantly recognizable soundtracks whose point isn't that they're memorable, but that they signify/identify their movies and their movies' worlds. This one could fit a number of different games/movies/worlds and yet signifies almost nothing at all. It also doesn't help that you'll be listening to the radio most of the time. So rest assured, Shawn Lee, Bully is still the best open-world game ost.

So that's that. Still have shit to say (something about how modern influences combined with the raw-er eras where cyberpunk genre originated/evolved make this game's world seem incongruous or something of that nature) but I'm reaching critical Durandal levels. Time to die. Besides, if they couldn't be bothered finishing the fucking game, why would I finish the "review"?

TBA/5, would not recommend. Still love it, tho.

 

[gurugeorge]

Some of the most popular cyberpunk movies have instantly recognizable soundtracks whose point isn't that they're memorable, but that they signify/identify their movies and their movies' worlds. This one could fit a number of different games/movies/worlds and yet signifies almost nothing at all.

Agree with much of your review, except your points re. music. In particular, I think the ominous synth drones are excellent and really add to the mind-bending atmosphere of some of the quest themes. I also like that there's something for everyone on the radio (I exclusively listen to the jazz channel).

And the game does have a theme tune, it's this



It perfectly describes both the fun to be had just wandering about blasting ne'er-do-wells into oblivion, and the degeneracy the game is saturated with, in one somewhat old-fashioned, but very catchy techno-pop bundle.

 

[Quillon]

Spoiler

what Alt is supposed to do is essentially replace the chip (via software, if not physically) containing Johnny's engram with a chip with V's engram, hereby killing V, having the new chip/software resurrect V and eventually have their original personality+Johnny's overwritten with a new V personality, right? If that is the case, the 6 months thing just sounds like complete arsepull for drama's sake. And if it's not the case... well, why the fuck isn't it the case? They have the chip specs, they have access to V and they know how to make an engram. What's the problem???

because keanu is compatible but V ain't with his own body m'kay!?

"you should have chosen keanu" as in "you should have chosen eric"

 

[Alpharius]

Btw what if instead of this "Johnny talks inside your head about bad bad Arasaka while you steal new cybernetic dildo schematics for a client while knowing you have two weeks left to live" shit the story was like:

Prologue: same shit, could make V even more of a disgusting small-time thug, instead of a thug that thinks he has morals.
Act 1 instead of talking to Johnny, V starts getting dreams about him, then starts acting strangely, experiencing memory loss, sudden erections, wants to buy a guitar, etc.
Act 2 V is no more, Johnny discovers that he is born again in a body of a thug, wants revenge on Arasaka\wants to make sure Arasaka won't be making any more immortality chips\whatever. Steals cybernetic dildo schematics not fo fun and money but to gather resources, reputation to prepare for assault on Arasaka. Because people who have information and manpower won't instantly agree to help him. (Like, you know, every other RPG does.) Johnny doens't die in two weeks so he can do racing, boxing, dildo hunting, maybe record some new music in his spare time.
Act 3 etc.

Wouldn't it have been instead of ?

 

[Harthwain]

I wouldn't say it's perfect- it's too western for my specific taste, especially the outskirts. But hell, even those parts look fantastic.

This is a strange thing to say, considering the action takes place in United States (California).

 

[wyes gull]

And the game does have a theme tune, it's this

For a second I thought you were gonna bring up that japanese song. You know the one. Makes me want to gouge out my eyes just so I can stuff them in my ears.
Agree with your point re; that track, even if I don't find it pleasurable to listen to. However, I want to at least clarify that when I criticize the OST, I'm excluding the radio stations. Which might seem unfair since I know at least some of the tracks in there are originals (Samurai's, possibly more) but I reckon the majority aren't and I'm not about to shit on Chet Baker because of 2077. Whose song, btw, was put to perfect use in the ending I got.
The title track "V" is a good example of the problem I have with it on the whole and I thought it was a solid track. That, the Silverhand theme (esp the cello version) and one other track that plays 15 mins into the credits were my picks.

This is a strange thing to say, considering the action takes place in United States (California).

How? I'd put my perfect cyberpunk city in east Asia rather than the USA, that's all I'm saying. To put across the point that even though it's not catering to specifically to me, it's still fantastic.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

This is not a hero power fantasy self-insert as in 99% of rpgs. Can anyone give me another example where an RPG made you feel so powerless against your own inevitable demise no matter how much you thrash against your fate?

 

[Axioms]

Its weird to see people who think Silverhand should be the MC when he was supposed to be 1/5 characters of similar significance.

Was this always the plan? Because at one point Bowie was supposed to be JS, and I just can't imagine having David Bowie and 4 randos of 'equal importance.' Seems plausible that originally they had one character in mind, fucked around with "well what if there were 5," and then someone with similar star power to Bowie expressed interest in the project and they went back to that.

In the Cyberpunk 2013/2020/2077 lore Morgan Blackhand and Saburo are as relevant as Silverhand. Even Smasher has a similar amount of backstory. There are other relevant characters as well. Remember like Witcher CDPR didn't invent the IP. Its like 40 years old.

 

[Consul]

I'm sorry I criticised your favourite game, didn't know you got mental problems(I only suspected)

Seems I wasn't the only one.

 

[DalekFlay]

1.05 patch seems to have lowered draw distance even on "high" setting. Noticing a lot more pop in, and I barely noticed any before. Driving feels a lot more smooth, so I'm guessing these two things are related. Otherwise performance is roughly the same in my experience.

I'm also pretty sure they toned down the post processing film effects like chromatic aberration, which is a bummer as I thought this was the first game ever they looked good in due to matching the Blade Runner aesthetic.