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

[AwesomeButton]

I made a quick test of this and it either doesn't work at all or works in specific circumstances which I can't reproduce.

I said apparently it works because some people on the Steam forums said it does. I haven't tested it myself, was at work.

People talking on Steam and upvoting each other on Reddit are apparently the last things you can consider a reliable confirmation.

I mean, I can see it with my own eyes very obviously, so if you're trying to convince me I'm lying to myself you're gonna have a hard time.

No, I'm not trying to convince you of anything. That thing about steam was your example.

What is that you are seeing exactly, more LOD pop in?

 

[Matticus]

You simply can't take a studio like CDPR that has never made a good game, give them $300 million, and then expect a good outcome. Why anyone thought otherwise is beyond me. They should go back to making interactive medieval softcore porns, at least a few people seem to enjoy those.

 

[racofer]

 

[Zer0wing]

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?

"So long ladies, I'm gonna go kick some ass in Hell" does not feel very "powerless". I think the ending movie from PST misses a final scene with some demons saying "oh shit, i'm outta here"

Planescape: Torment offers multiple possibilities for resolving its climactic encounter, but in every ending the Nameless One must accept that he can no longer prolong his mortal existence, and in most of them he faces a purgatorial afterlife of indefinite duration fighting in the Blood War. This is paralleled by the endings in Cyberpunk 2077, in which V accepts the impossibility of prolonging his/her ordinary life, with V's mind in V's body, but can either accept the termination of his/her existence or face an indefinite purgatory hoping for an eventual resurrection.

This thought gave me unexpected conclusion about Cyberpunk 2077 as a whole. CP2077 is nothing less than a museum of RPG and cyberpunk genre clichés, museum of future as seen by anime fans of of the past. The game being all static is not excusable but this gives it a new perspective, it's as static as a showpiece at exhibition, and Night City is one gargantuan museum of those. As opposed to Toddler's theme part, CD Projekt REDs diversity hires went (blindly) to the opposite direction. The game and information noise on official YT channel is full of references to cyberpunk/somewhere around cyberpunk sci-fi classics. As someone smarter than me pointed out that Night City Postcards trailer is not very suble Mobius homage. Corpo intro oozes Blade Runner. Cyberpsycho modeled after Mayor from GiTS.
This might be the last of the kind game, enjoy the memes while it lasts. Its sum of flaws is oddly fitting.

 

[DalekFlay]

What is that you are seeing exactly, more LOD pop in?

I'm seeing low-res assets I never saw before. Billboards that look like Nintendo sprites until you get closer, pipes and things like that which are 2D sprites until you get closer, walls that turn into windows, etc. I never noticed much of this at all on 1.03 or 1.04, now I notice it frequently. It might not be LOD specifically, might be a texture streaming issue or culling assets too quickly when you turn around or something. I just briefly tested that LOD mod on setting "20" and no it doesn't seem to do anything. He said 0 was game default and 50 was max, so 20 should be at least noticeable and it wasn't.

 

[snoek]

I bought the game on launch and completed it today.
Did quite a few of the side gigs and random stuff, my savegame stands at 52hrs, my game time 61+ hours.
I'm now going to check out the other endings I've unlocked and maybe roam around a bit more.

It got very buggy at a certain point but seemed better with the 1.05 patch. Got 1 hard crash and maybe 4-5 glitches that caused me to load a savegame in total.

Loved the main story and some of the beefier side quests.

Night city and the whole game,characters and locations are beautifully rendered.

Most of the side gigs are OK'ish but they're kind of repetitive.
Problem with the sidejobs/gigs/? is you can't see which ones are the 'custom' ones where something interesting is going on vs the run of the mill ones.
So you definitely feel like they rushed/cut a lot of stuff ,especially in the 'open world' part

 

[catchaser]

Some QoL tips:

- sell your clothes and buy them back with improved stats
- your cars have a shared stash (in the trunk) but it's not shared with your flat's stash
- you can display some of your unique legendary weapons in your flat by adding them to that stash

 

[mondblut]

Planescape: Torment offers multiple possibilities for resolving its climactic encounter, but in every ending the Nameless One must accept that he can no longer prolong his mortal existence, and in most of them he faces a purgatorial afterlife of indefinite duration fighting in the Blood War.

Fixing his past mistake of achieving immortality and ending his mortal existence is what the Nameless One is striving after to begin with. V just wants to get his shitty thug life back only to be told "too l8 lol, ur fucked".

Ultima 8 (haha) would be a better example. Run as you might, Britannia is pwnd.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

Well, just finished my first playthrough

Spoiler

Corpo background, in the end went with the nomads and decided to return to my body to stay with my waifu Panam.

Took me 63 hours according to the Steam, I did plenty of side content, but there was still a ton of it left untouched – I guess that a full completionist playthrough could easily be about 90 hours or so.


Gotta say that despite the terrible combat AI and some minor glitches I don’t regret a single dime I spent on this. The story, writing and characters are fucking top notch (including some truly feels inducing moments in the questlines of the major characters). Stealth gameplay is OK and the bullet sponginess isn’t that much of a deal once you get the right perks and upgraded gear.


I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the side content (the only WTF moment was the Sinnerman gig:

Spoiler

Maybe there was a bug or something, I followed the target car, when it had to stop the client said he wanted to kill the criminal himself, a cop shot him and the criminal kept asking me to go with him someplace, while no one provided a slightest bit of context on what was even going on. I just told the criminal to fuck off and left, I think I didn’t even get paid but w/e such is the life in the Zone Night City I guess)

I didn’t like the cyber psycho gigs much, but then again there is no need to do them. Vast majority of the side missions was pretty good, allowing for variety of approaches and by no means felt like a filler (all the more impressive given how much of the side content there is).


It should be noted that despite all the “dick on female body” shit in the char creation etc the game actually sends a very strong conservative message if you care to follow the questlines of the major characters to the end.

Spoiler

Judy, Panam and River all end up more or less explicitly rejecting the decadent society of the Night City, coming in their own ways to conclusion that the strong family ties (be it Judy´s grandparents, kids of River´s sister or the nomad clan for Panam) are the way to find peace and meaning despite the general shitiness all around.

So yeah, you can have a dick-girl as your character, collect dildos etc but it is clear that the game really isn’t about glorification of those things at all. In fact it seems to me that the game´s tone is ultimately about rejection of all the SJW shit as worthless and wrong, even though it was largely being marketed as being the exact opposite.


The boss fights are a true pain in the ass exactly in line with the nu-Deus Ex tradition. Funnily enough I had much more trouble defeating Oda (whose incessant shouts of "SHITHEEEEEEEEAD" will likely haunt my dreams for a while) than Smasher. I even finished Smasher with Johnny´s pistol, which felt like the right way of doing it.

Oh well, guess I am gonna wait with the second playthrough for a few more patches to come out. Sure hope CDPR is already getting them DLCs ready.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I'm seeing low-res assets I never saw before. Billboards that look like Nintendo sprites until you get closer, pipes and things like that which are 2D sprites until you get closer, walls that turn into windows, etc. I never noticed much of this at all on 1.03 or 1.04, now I notice it frequently. It might not be LOD specifically, might be a texture streaming issue or culling assets too quickly when you turn around or something. I just briefly tested that LOD mod on setting "20" and no it doesn't seem to do anything. He said 0 was game default and 50 was max, so 20 should be at least noticeable and it wasn't.

That's strange. I first commented that I notice more pop in which might be a way to handle worse performance on the consoles, when 1.04 came out. Now I don't know if I'm just used to it and people are noticing it now, or the devs are being even more tight with the streaming of assets. My driving around the busiest streets in the city center seems to still cost lots of fps, but in the less taxing parts of the city I'm driving around with fps in the upper 50s or more. Again I can't say if this is due to them dropping texture LOD more, or some other optimization. CDPR should definetly be pestered to say something about those changes, the problem is that no one can make them, and those with the power to require a response will not ask the question.

It's easy to imagine that CDPR devs are under extreme pressure to get the game to a state where it will be allowed back on the playstation store. This must be the absolute imperative top priority. What would their ETA be for that - maybe mid-January, maybe even by the end of this year? And I guess that while they are working on that, they are temporarily allowed anything, including pushing changes meant for PS4 into all the other platforms with the expectation that they will handle platform-level tuning at a later stage. Probably the expectation is that "we'll add some more LOD sliders later" or simply "we'll up the LOD again for PC in a separate patch".

So what is happening before our eyes is reversing CDPR's process. It used to be "PC first, then scale down" before release. Now after release it's "Consoles first then scale up". We get to watch how a modern game gets optimized for consoles

That's why it gets so interesting to understand what the arrangement was between CDPR and Sony. I watched a Yongyea video where he assumed, I think correctly, that if the game is pulled from sony's storefront but not from MS' storefront, then it must have been Sony who pressured CDPR not the other way around. He reasons that if the initiative for pulling it was in CDPR they would have pulled it from both storefronts. Now if the push was from Sony that the game should be removed, was there any arrangement as to when it will be allowed back? My guess is they just said "you work on it as much as you think you need, then give it to us again for certification". Corps love to work "according to the existing process" for everything and it's not an offer that CDPR would have reasonably been able to bargain against.
If there was real gaming journalism, people would be going after the storefront owners as well.

One question from me regarding the censoring shit. For anyone who is playing a version earlier than 1.05, do you have this star on the model's boob like I have it?

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

 

[Starwars]

As I've gotten a bit further into the game, I'm enjoying it a lot more overall. It's a pretty slow burn I think, but yeah... the opening didn't really pull me in. Witcher 3 also had a slow start but I think the whole prologue chapter there just felt right for that game.
Also, as much as Night City is mainly scenery (kinda like Novigrad), it really does offer some beautiful, ultra-cyberpunk views. Jig-Jig Street at night is just pure cyberpunk, dirty, neon beauty.

I didn't follow the game before the release, did they actively push the "cyberpunk GTA" angle or did that just come from fans? I just went in treating it like the Witcher 3 in Cyberpunk form and that seems to work for the game. Open world sure, but not much to "prod" it comes to interacting with it all. Only memories I have from the Witcher 3's crime system is guards wanting to kill me when I accidentally loot-vacuumed a container that was marked as stealing. Did the marketing push that Cyberpunk would go deeper in that regard?

 

[Mefi]

One question from me regarding the censoring shit. For anyone who is playing a version earlier than 1.05, do you have this star on the model's boob like I have it?
View attachment 16789

Don't recall any. I started a play through earlier today and the hologram stripper dancing most definitely did not have tape on her nipples in two previous playthroughs which were in that room. There's some posters which have changed too - if you go into Lizzie's now there's really shitty resolution ones for car loans which weren't there before. I've not seen some of the more overtly sexual ads. But, against that, I have jsut come from finishing some endings where the ads on display did change anyway so could have been changed some time back.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

One question from me regarding the censoring shit. For anyone who is playing a version earlier than 1.05, do you have this star on the model's boob like I have it?
View attachment 16789

I would say I saw that model exactly like that, with the stars on her boobs while roaming the city, but now I'm not 100%. Anyway, I think there's a couple of variations for each spot.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Nice to see that the Afterlife support body positivity too:

 

[Keshik]

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the side content (the only WTF moment was the Sinnerman gig:

No bug, if you go with the criminal you get a neat side quest where you can end up crucifying him. I regret that, should have told him to go tell the corpos to stuff themselves.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Good thing I keep my savegames. Same NPC, screenshot taken before and after 1.05:

Spoiler

Spoiler

In the context of the mission, this one was supposed to be in an affair with another NPC, so it could have passed as environmental storytelling of sorts, damn

 

[Agame]

Would have made more sense as a Judge Dredd game, regarding the 'side content' at least. The fact you are single handedly eliminating all criminal life from Night City as you playthrough is such nonsense. In Witcher 3 you are a Witcher... so fine, you slaughter monsters for breakfast. Would have felt really bad ass here if you were a Judge or Robocop whatever, stomping around using maximum violence to obliterate anyone looking even remotely like commiting a crime.

 

[Naraya]

Good thing I keep my savegames

Um, do you document (for science) every NPC in such a way?

 

[Robber Baron]

Funnily enough I had much more trouble defeating Oda

My Oda fight bugged on me when he got stuck in midair trying to catch me while I was bunnyhopping from him. Is there a more powerfull move than bunnyhopping in Cyberpunk universe? I doubt it. Even cyber ninjas don't stand a chance.

 

[Ibn Sina]

Funnily enough I had much more trouble defeating Oda

My Oda fight bugged on me when he got stuck in midair trying to catch me while I was bunnyhopping from him. Is there a more powerfull move than bunnyhopping in Cyberpunk universe? I doubt it. Even cyber ninjas don't stand a chance.

Lucky you. In my fight I was standing at the ledge and dodged when he charged me, and he fell out of the building. Taku called and blames me for killing him am like wtf? Dude flew off on his own.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Good thing I keep my savegames

Um, do you document (for science) every NPC in such a way?

Erm, only in the name of science.



Russian spy chicks even need triangular coffins when they die.

Would have made more sense as a Judge Dredd game, regarding the 'side content' at least. The fact you are single handedly eliminating all criminal life from Night City as you playthrough is such nonsense. In Witcher 3 you are a Witcher... so fine, you slaughter monsters for breakfast. Would have felt really bad ass here if you were a Judge or Robocop whatever, stomping around using maximum violence to obliterate anyone looking even remotely like commiting a crime.

That's a bigger subject I wanted to touch on, because I'm constantly accused of being a fanboy and what not. I actually have some complaints against CP77, which apply to most open world games, but the inconsistencies are especially glaring in this case.

First, the game suffers from the old syndrom of mechanically turning you into a superman billionare while narratively telling how you are supposed to feel like a scrub, a small time gang-banger, just as oppressed by the city as every other bum around you.
It's worse than usual in open world games, because for CP77 there were interviews where it was explicitly stated that "we don't want to have heroes who save the world because when a hero saves the world, there is no place for the hero any more". To put it short, you reach epic-level power in what was intended by part of the team as a low-level adventure, but apparently the team that designed the perks, issues the XP, money and loot, didn't get the same memo. So who is right and who is wrong?

Second is the even more common syndrom of fake urgency. Again the game opens the bathrobe to you from the get go, revealing all it's "points of interest" so to speak, while the main quest tells you "hurry V, you have to find a mcguffin to save you from an abra-cadabra". It's like two different games were being developed and at some point merged.
To compare with Witcher 3, I've played Witcher 3 a lot, and I can say the same problem was there too, however:
1. At least you could hide the points of interest
2. It was easier to sell the idea of a long and winding journey in a medieval fantasy setting, much more easily than in a setting where the whole story takes place in the same city.

Ultimately the three games that CDPR was trying to make at the same time - the Witcher with guns, the GTA clone, and the Deus Ex clone, are fighting each other.

 

[SoupNazi]

Some of the better missions in this game have some unexpected possibilities. Spoilers for one of the best missions in the game, given by Takemura:

Spoiler

https://streamable.com/fli69x

https://streamable.com/uz8lqz

You can jump on the floats, quite surprisingly (to me at least) they are solid. And you can actually use them to bypass some of the stealth/platforming/elevators in that mission. Both instances that I recorded were discovered more or less at random, I imagine there are more options to do some serious hopping in there, if I go back and think about it. Confirms to me that Taskemura's missions are the best in the game (the one previous to this one is probably even better).

 

[Mefi]

No bug, if you go with the criminal you get a neat side quest where you can end up crucifying him. I regret that, should have told him to go tell the corpos to stuff themselves.

I liked that quest line. My V ended up being there to be with him but not taking part and telling the corp woman to destroy the tapes at every opportunity. Was kind of hard to square it with also having a mini war against the scavs for their production values in making light entertainment.

 

[DeepOcean]

This game is missing some dynamic open world shit,looking to the shitty pedestrian Ai, I see why they cut that. I have no idea why to this day, no developer copied the Saints Row system of you having multiple gangs and when you do hostile stuff on their turfs, they get hostile and call reinforcements that get worse and worse culminating, many times, on massive shootouts with multiple gangs fighting each other, Cyberbug 76 has the perfect structure for that, go guns blazing on a mission, enemy back up is called, you flee from the area into another gang turf, they start fighting each other, the police is called and all of sudden, complete chaos.

I mean, common, 300 million dollars on this project and a shitty B studio like Volition can have fun open world shit while Cyberbug 76 only has Far Cry outposts over and over and over.