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

[Peachcurl]

Yep, if this is a great game, any Ubisoft garbage is also a great game because there are very little differences between Cyberbug and a regular Ubisoft game.

To be fair, the newer Assassins Creed games were clearly taking inspiration from Witcher 3. So the margin between them is shrinking from both sides. At least we don't have to climb any stupid towers in Cyberpunk.

 

[copebot]

There is merit in what you have said but people buy games to play them. If I wanted to read novels I would go to a bookstore. There is just too much of those shards left in the game for players to pick-up. I would rather like if there were handful of those shards and some of them hidden in computers which the player needs to interact in some way to progress a quest. For example in Fallout 2 you find only handful of holodisks and some have passwords written on them to bypass security or give you hints on what you might find in a location. In Cyberpunk 2077 you get shards almost everywhere and very often do not affect gameplay in anyway. After picking up 20 of those describing things which are shown on TV ads, radio broadcasts and none of those helping me with exploration I've stopped reading them. The UI doesn't help. If I have to scroll down a message every 8 lines then I will just skip it. Again Fallout 2 had 20 lines of text on a 800x600 resolution and it made reading some of the more lengthy files much more enjoyable.

EDIT: In Red Dead Redemption 2 you get something like 10 letters? And newspapers describing your activities? I feel more inclined to read those than 100+ files in CP2077 left in the most stupid locations like Konpeki Plaza where I am chased by corpos and shouldn't be looting all that shit every 5 meters.

The writing in these shards is mostly bad, and it's a waste of time to even skim them. It's like reading a high school student's Facebook wall. Very few of them add anything to the game. They are put there to fulfill a quota and nothing more. The visual storytelling that made a lot of Witcher 3 mini-locations memorable was just not present here. People compare CP2077 to Ubisoft games, but the content here is actually quite a lot worse than even some of the weaker recent Ubi games like GR: Breakpoint. The average Breakpoint camp has a lot more content and makes for more interesting combat/stealth encounters than most of the Cyberpunk areas. The writing on the notes is quite a lot worse than AC: Valhalla's, which often provides oblique hints about puzzles or foreshadows some twist in the plot.

Reading the notes actually takes away from the gameplay experience because it's just a pointless interruption.

Ostensibly, at the blue NCPD POIs, you're supposed to be uncovering evidence of crimes, but none of it ever matters and very few of them even tie in to side quests in even an oblique way. It would not have taken that much effort to tie cleaning up Tyger Claw POIs to unlocking a secret basement under their Pachinko parlor or something like that. Instead, they are all disconnected with each having cookie cutter text message gibberish as the objective.

 

[AwesomeButton]

How you dress contribute at how you appear shaping the attitude of those that you meet.

Good thing this has been modeled in the game and going around dressed as a tiger claw will get you attacked and provoke comments from people on the street, right? :D

I don't know about you, but sometimes I read things in real life too

Of course not, I am obviously illiterate and also have Neanderthal genes on my mother's side.

Notably, one has just had a hectic minute or two clearing out a quest, so there's a certain rhythm of action and relaxation there

I'm glad it's working out for you. I have the same nice feeling in RDR2 which is a game intended to be taken slow and admired in its detals. But in CP77 I find myself rushing from one minor two-minute shooting task to another without much care for why I'm doing it. As it is fashionable to say in entitled gamerspeak, "the game can't make me care" about these trash encounters. Slapping a garbled dialogue between two characters with bad grammar and talking slang while more realistic is harder to read, while neither feeling rewarding nor immersive.

One of the virtues of the storytelling-by-shard-drop-on-body-or-in-case is that you can have lots of interweaving micro-stories because you don't need the voice acting.

It's not really a virtue. It's a compromise which was first made in System Shock if memory serves me. And since then it has always been a compromise. If your medium is a 3D game, especially first person, you should tell stories using this medium. What they are doing is take the player out of the experience of the 3D first person game and say "Hey, you get to be a reader for 2 minutes and then you can go back". The chat history / conversation logs are just the cheap and dirty way of adding an excuse for the lack of characterisation, but are not real characterisation. Especially in this kind of setting. No, I'm not illiterate, no, I don't hate reading, no I'm not ADHD. But these lore bits delivered as text simply don't mesh well with the rest of the game.

There's also just way too many.

I stopped caring after shard number 5000000 which explained to me why tyger claw asshole #5913139254 was all sad and missing his mommy or whatever.
They went for quantity over quality a lot, and also hid interesting background stuff relating to other missions in logs and e-mails in regular encounters.

It's just like the loot system, 99% trash which tires you out and makes you stop giving a shit so you end up disassembling some iconic gun you could have used by accident along with all the garbage.

The whole checklist/collectathon/borderlands/gta aspect took too much of their resources which would have been better spent on fewer, deeper storylines and characters, more conversation/personality options and proper challenges.

One issue with these shards in "Assault in progress" and NCPD-marked locations is how repetitive the structure is. Another is that you only get to read them after the fact.

As it has been implemented now, the player gets to first clear the area, and only then when he is checking out the loot, does he get to learn "who are those guys I just killed here". Well, big deal, the player thinks to himself as he continues filtering through the trash loot. Loot that will be disassembled seconds later, or sold - wow so immersive, I'm a merc in Night City who makes his living by killing random punks and pawning their gear. But my point isn't about the game's unbalanced economy.

Imagine these encounters were implemented in a less cheap and more immersive way. You go to one of the many bars, overhear the same conversation that one character is having on the phone. Only then does the location with the combat become visible on the map - I would suggest it's even available only for a limited time. You go there and have your combat and loot. Yes, it's more expensive to script the conversation and record the same lines that you find written but brings more character to the activity and makes the activity feel more connected to the world, exactly like the mini-quest it should be.

As a matter of fact I suspect those shards with "chat history" were originally intended to be voiced and listened to. I can't imagine someone just decided to have all the premises written as dialogues "just because".

 

[DalekFlay]

You could be mistaken for thinking that given the terrible decisions CDPR made that feel ripped right from Todd Howard's own design philosophy of cut everything and oversimplify as much as possible.

To be honest witcher 3 had way more outcome in side content than cyberpunk 2077. And that is the odd thing. Witcher had a predefined character however it was possible to do different choice with vast different outcomes as you progressed in the main story but also in the side quest. Cyberpunk is just linear and that's it. Choices there have no concequences at all the different endings minus one are dictated by the choice of 1 single dialogue. Side content is straight forward and linear. I know it sounds very odd to say however. Witcher 3 even being more an action game than a proper rpg had way more roleplay elements than cyberpunk 2077

Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk share the "all you're doing is going from map marker to map marker checking off boxes and picking up random crap" design philosophy. They also share the "main quest is like a movie" philosophy. Only difference is Cyberpunk's side content has less story and dialog choice than Witcher 3's did. So when you see someone acting like there's a huge difference between the two this is what they're focused on. Witcher 3 is a storyfag game through and through and Cyberpunk failed to excel as much at storyfagging.

Neither game is like Bethesda or Obsidian's stuff at all, whatever you think of those games, and it frustrates me people lump them into the same category because they're all "open world." New Vegas is not that cinematic outside a few rare exceptions, you obtain quests by exploring and talking to people, the world itself is much more interactive and "loot" is limited to some unique weapons and armor hidden away as an exploration reward, everything else is standard model junk you don't have to look at. They are very, very different experiences.

 

[Robber Baron]

I can't imagine someone just decided to have all the premises written as dialogues "just because".

Well this one is actually pretty easy to asspull into ingame universe logic. Like text is cheaper to store than audio right? Maybe all phone devices come with speech recognition and a mandatory writer that stores all your calls which are then logged on your phone and kept for your own safety.

 

[res11]

So this is how it works? You make a game with fancy graphic 5 linear but well written quests then you fill the map with gigs ((clear the bandit camp style)) ship it with a crappy perk system and a loot system ala borderland and you have a damn fine game?...

Wow....low standardt much?

Yep, if this is a great game, any Ubisoft garbage is also a great game because there are very little differences between Cyberbug and a regular Ubisoft game. You have the outposts and the gigs that are just improved outposts with some primitive level design on it and most main missions are just follow the guy around and press F on things, typical AAA open world. Actually, Ubisoft games have police systems that work and an ai that knows how to drive. Also, the main quest of this game is short as fuck, I mean, CDPR claimed this game would be shorter than Witcher 3 but they never said how shorter it was, remove Skellige and the end game quest from Witcher 3 and this remains shorter than Velen and Novigrad.

Also, after the raid, the main quests are just a big setup for the final quest and nothing or relevant happens on them, you are just introduced to characters that will be relevant on the final quest, you meet them, say "Hi, nice to meet you." then to the final, linear, Act 3 you go. There is a whole act missing from this game and they rushed the main story as fuck, Adam Smasher doesnt go after you, Arasaka doesn't try to fuck you or you feel any pressure of any kind besides the retardred mcguffin "you gonna die" and the classic fake urgency. They just remain there waiting until Act 3.

There is "non linearity" in the main quest if you dont do any side quests, you wont have access to some endings but common... who will play a game with a main quest short as fuck as this is and not play the side quests?

Choosing whether or not to do certain side quests is a major choice though. Choice doesn't have to be "bae or bay" dialogue

 

[Perkel]

Only difference is Cyberpunk's side content has less story and dialog choice than Witcher 3's did. So when you see someone acting like there's a huge difference between the two this is what they're focused on. Witcher 3 is a storyfag game through and through and Cyberpunk failed to excel as much at storyfagging.

How it is less storyfaggy when 77 is better written, has leaps and bounds better main story and quality of side quests also is level above those from TW3 ?

 

[Robber Baron]

Choosing whether or not to do certain side quests is a major choice though. Choice doesn't have to be "bae or bay" dialogue

Too bad Arasaka one is mandatory. Now imagine if every quest chain of the main three led to its own finale based on which you do first.

 

[DalekFlay]

How it is less storyfaggy when 77 is better written, has leaps and bounds better main story and quality of side quests also is level above those from TW3 ?

A lot of that is subjective but I'd agree the main quest is better for me, as I'm more into this setting than Witcher's. However the side quests? Come on dude. 90% of them are a generic phone call and some text messages you pick up, they barely have any story at all. They're just random yellow markers you go to over and over again and get a little min-Deus Ex map to do the same shit in over and over again. I don't know how easy it would be to ignore most of it like you can in some other games of this type, character progression wise, but that would have issues too considering the vast majority of the main quest is a movie. If you just did that with no side content, you'd feel like you're not even playing a game.

 

[moon knight]

Choosing whether or not to do certain side quests is a major choice though. Choice doesn't have to be "bae or bay" dialogue

Choosing to play or skipping content is not a fucking choice, unless it is organically presented to the character in game.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

told you guys it would be shit

 

[DalekFlay]

told you guys it would be shit

Glad to see your real life trauma has been overcome and you are back to discuss the video games.

 

[Peachcurl]

Choosing to play or skipping content is not a fucking choice, unless it is organically presented to the character in game.

You had choose those from the main menu or what? :D

 

[DeepOcean]

Choosing whether or not to do certain side quests is a major choice though. Choice doesn't have to be "bae or bay" dialogue

The problem I have is that, for example, Panam's side quest, after you do her portion of the main quest, you have three missions with her (only the first side mision actually has real gameplay). She calls you tohelp her, when I play a game, I'm a completionist. If an NPC calls me, it is a no brainer to do his quest because it is xp. There is no reason to not do her quest. Yes, there is the choice to not do her siquests but there isnt a reason for that. Also, the game pushes hard for a relationship with her that develops on three short missions. I know, it makes sense a girl being attracted to you and wanting to do some casual fucking with you that fast but risking her whole family to help some random dude she just casually fucked? That felt forced as fuck.

If this was like the Takemura case where you needed to get out of your way to discover that option, it would be more interesting and rewarded exploration with you having to actually, on your own initiative, call Panam alot and talked with her alot before she offered her quests, with the way it is actually in game, the game pratically screams "do this, for xp and for pussy!", it was meh because it was obvious and most of her sidequests are just following her around doing some really basic popamole and Panam isnt even a good waifu material.

 

[Danikas]

There is no reason to not do her quest.

There is perfectly valid reason to not do her quests if you hate her character.

 

[Tyrr]

They put in a side quest that makes fun of SJW web activists. Love it.

 

[moon knight]

There is perfectly valid reason to not do her quests if you hate her character.

That's metagame. It's V who has to hate her. Is the possibility of disliking her presented directly through V?

 

[res11]

Choosing whether or not to do certain side quests is a major choice though. Choice doesn't have to be "bae or bay" dialogue

Too bad Arasaka one is mandatory. Now imagine if every quest chain of the main three led to its own finale based on which you do first.

Mandatory how? You could just end up committing suicide and nothing else

 

[Turjan]

There is perfectly valid reason to not do her quests if you hate her character.

That's metagame. It's V who has to hate her. Is the possibility of disliking her presented directly through V?

No, the ingame reason the game lets you present is that you think her plan is stupid and endangers everyone in her clan.

 

[gurugeorge]

There is merit in what you have said but people buy games to play them. If I wanted to read novels I would go to a bookstore. There is just too much of those shards left in the game for players to pick-up. I would rather like if there were handful of those shards and some of them hidden in computers which the player needs to interact in some way to progress a quest. For example in Fallout 2 you find only handful of holodisks and some have passwords written on them to bypass security or give you hints on what you might find in a location. In Cyberpunk 2077 you get shards almost everywhere and very often do not affect gameplay in anyway. After picking up 20 of those describing things which are shown on TV ads, radio broadcasts and none of those helping me with exploration I've stopped reading them. The UI doesn't help. If I have to scroll down a message every 8 lines then I will just skip it. Again Fallout 2 had 20 lines of text on a 800x600 resolution and it made reading some of the more lengthy files much more enjoyable.

EDIT: In Red Dead Redemption 2 you get something like 10 letters? And newspapers describing your activities? I feel more inclined to read those than 100+ files in CP2077 left in the most stupid locations like Konpeki Plaza where I am chased by corpos and shouldn't be looting all that shit every 5 meters.

The writing in these shards is mostly bad, and it's a waste of time to even skim them. It's like reading a high school student's Facebook wall. Very few of them add anything to the game. They are put there to fulfill a quota and nothing more. The visual storytelling that made a lot of Witcher 3 mini-locations memorable was just not present here. People compare CP2077 to Ubisoft games, but the content here is actually quite a lot worse than even some of the weaker recent Ubi games like GR: Breakpoint. The average Breakpoint camp has a lot more content and makes for more interesting combat/stealth encounters than most of the Cyberpunk areas. The writing on the notes is quite a lot worse than AC: Valhalla's, which often provides oblique hints about puzzles or foreshadows some twist in the plot.

Reading the notes actually takes away from the gameplay experience because it's just a pointless interruption.

Ostensibly, at the blue NCPD POIs, you're supposed to be uncovering evidence of crimes, but none of it ever matters and very few of them even tie in to side quests in even an oblique way. It would not have taken that much effort to tie cleaning up Tyger Claw POIs to unlocking a secret basement under their Pachinko parlor or something like that. Instead, they are all disconnected with each having cookie cutter text message gibberish as the objective.

I just did one where after, ahem, "arresting" the gang I heard muffled cries for help coming from a nearby container, I opened it, bunch of people came tumbling out making thankful noises, but there was one dead girl left in there, and on her person was a text exchange between her and her mother, with her asking mum for help, and her mum showing a touching faith that the police would find her. Then on one of the gangsters there was a callous note talking about shifting product.

But sure, they're all about Tyger Claw A bitching to Tyger Cllaw B

I wouldn't want to be perceived to be making more out of this than it warrants, I'm not claiming it's God's gift to storytelling; all I'm saying is that it's stupid advice to recommend to players not to bother with the police quests. If you want to level faster do the police quests, and incidentally there are sometimes cool things in the shards and messages. That's all there is to it really.

Obviously they could have done more with it, but that's a separate issue.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

You could be mistaken for thinking that given the terrible decisions CDPR made that feel ripped right from Todd Howard's own design philosophy of cut everything and oversimplify as much as possible.

and it frustrates me people lump them into the same category because they're all "open world."

Just pointing out I never actually did that. I made the point about that people would be mistaken for thinking this was a Todd Howard game because of how much was missing in translation from the original IP aka what Todd did to Fallout. My point was not that this plays anything like a Bethesda game because you're correct it doesn't.

 

[Robber Baron]

Mandatory how? You could just end up committing suicide and nothing else

Hol up. The suicide option shows up along with other options AFTER you've completed that Takemura mission - making his(Arasaka route) mandatory.

 

[Tyranicon]

Like most reasonable people, I too have refunded the game and will maybe grab it two years later for 10 USD.

The most entertainment I got out of this was watching the haters and copers attack each other on reddit.

 

[Fenix]

Wait, you can knock out random NPSs and bring them to your flat, and not all of them disappear afterwards? Can you strip them?

yeah, you can't strip them of course. And some do disappear, but some don't.
That guy, poor bastard, was going to fill his house with girls ahah, pretending it's a date.
Lmao, if only twatter could knew that, what a shitstorm that would be.

 

[res11]

Mandatory how? You could just end up committing suicide and nothing else

Hol up. The suicide option shows up along with other options AFTER you've completed that Takemura mission - making his(Arasaka route) mandatory.

ok I misunderstood your post