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

[Agame]

And for the record around 60 hours and I have been hoovering up every item I see and done a decent amount of crafting, my save file is just over 5mb. Its impossible people were hitting 8mb playing normally, 100% convinced they were doing crafting exploits.

Also think I have just about sucked all the fun I can out of the game, there is not much left to do, no point upgrading or buying equipment now as the game is just not challenging enough, I have a plethora of missions left but they are all blurring together. Clearing bandit outposts is just horribly repetitive. I could buy more cars, but whats the point, I already have half a dozen that cover everything I need. Pretty much seen everything of interest in the city which has really been the main attraction. And doing a second playthrough? No fucking way, maybe after a few big DLC and an complete overhaul mod.

Never played GTA or RDR Online so I fail to see what 'end game' content they would have to keep people playing. Is it PvP or something? I cannot imagine what they could do for Cyberpunk Online to actually make it interesting enough to keep 'grinding' on it.

 

[Agame]

Gentlemen, can you imagine a complete, polished, refined, hyper-realistic life sim that uses 2020's rules with Vávra and CDPR in Cyberpunk universe?

Spoiler

Because I fucking can't.

 

[GrafvonMoltke]

There is a costume system that nobody even reported on! In Goro mission Gimme Danger, if you Arasaka costumes/hazmat suits u can just waltz in without any alarm what so ever!

Is that at the Arasaka Estate? I just wandered in there by chance and thought to myself “why the fuck is no-one shooting me?”.

 

[DalekFlay]

I have a plethora of missions left but they are all blurring together. Clearing bandit outposts is just horribly repetitive.

The blue police icon missions are almost all lame and pointless. I enjoy most of the "real" missions though, i.e. the yellow markers that aren't cars or fights. Like I said above though, I'm a massive slut for stealthy infiltration. Vast majority of the yellow "gigs" have a unique location with multiple entry points and avenues to the objective, along with some ambient dialog if not real dialog interaction. Yes it is obviously lacking in the story department for most of these side missions, but I like the basic fundamentals enough to enjoy them. The blue ones though, fuck that.

Never played GTA or RDR Online so I fail to see what 'end game' content they would have to keep people playing. Is it PvP or something? I cannot imagine what they could do for Cyberpunk Online to actually make it interesting enough to keep 'grinding' on it.

The grind is there for people who enjoy it, really. Most of these checklist games, your GTAs and your Assassin's Creeds, can be completed while ignoring over half the game. Usually they're better off for doing so. Some people just want to play these games forever though, I feel like they use it as a stress ball basically, but wtf do I know. Cyberpunk might actually be the first game ever where I feel some of that drive, just because I love the setting so much and enjoy stealthy infiltration so much, but still... collect the cars, beat the street fights, do all the police missions? Again, fuck that. I might do all them yellows though.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

The Cyberpsycho missions were fun. They made me feel like Bladerunner and challenged me to do them non-lethal until I realized there is literally just an implant that you can buy that changes all of your weapons to non-lethal. Even fucking blades.

Oh, you don't even need that chip. Just make sure that you don't apply a second lethal blow after you downed your target. Yes, it's that anti-climactic.

It depends on the weapon. If you use blades you can cut people's heads and arms off. I also think headshots will fatally kill most people, if it's the killing blow. I agree, though, that many people end up on the floor not dead, even if you shoot them 100 times.

I specifically meant the cyberpsychos. The last one, I downed with a sniper rifle after a longer fight, and the damage said something like 17,000 (was from relatively close). He still lived.

I can see the point with bladed weapons, although there, the blunt types seem to do more damage on average, anyway.

I don't know about that. Regina specifically complained to me that I killed a couple of them when I finished the mission, even though I never did a kill shot on them after they fell. I think it depends on what weapon you are using and where specifically on their body the killshot is, but this game is so buggy, it's hard to tell what are real mechanics and what aren't. I've had people I used non-lethal stealth take downs on just randomly start pooling blood on the ground a few minutes later. And the game doesn't seem to have any indicator, like Deus Ex does, for whether bodies are dead or alive beyond that the alive ones tend to move slightly, but not always.

 

[AwesomeButton]

someone further up complained about the copious use of text and phone messages to convey information and quests.

The characters live and breath as you see them talk and their movements and mannerisms. The best part of CP2077 is the prologue, because you get this with Jackie and other

That was me. One other big problem that emerges in CP77's presentation is that they made dialogue in this free form, instead of scripting it with different camera angles as in Witcher 3. I remember the developers gushing over this decision like it's the most innovative, most unique, and most immersive feature in the history of game development. It sounded like trash and "let's save ourselves some work" from the beginning.

What was described was "the player is always in full control of the character" which we know went out the window. What was described was "NPCs will have a reaction if you cut the conversation in the middle of dialogue and leave", "You can pull out a weapon in any moment". None of this actually matters. What stays though is the amount of scripting work and camera placement, which the developers were saved from having to do, like they had to do in Witcher 3 which prompted them to develop a tool to partially automate it because it was so much work.

The tradeoff to all those non-existent advantages of first person dialogue which nevertheless has to be paid is that the player becomes essentially blind to one major channel for the characterisation of the main character - you can't watch your character's acting and gestures. Instead everything falls on the voice actor. First person in conversations was a bad decision, sold to players under the pretext of more immersion but really resulting in less characterisation, and that for a blank slate main character who desperately needs means of characterisation.

 

[hivemind]

That was me. One other big problem that emerges in CP77's presentation is that they made dialogue in this free form, instead of scripting it with different camera angles in Witcher 3. I remember the developers gushing over this decision like it's the most innovative, most unique, and most immersive feature in the history of game development. It sounded like trash and "let's save ourselves some work" from the beginning.

cope tbh

free dialogues are cozy

 

[hivemind]

free dialogues + silent protag so you can have actually different lines is the future of any good action rpg

 

[AwesomeButton]

cope tbh

free dialogues are cozy

They are, but you lose more than you gain from having them, as far as the player is concerned. Ofc the dev would prefer less work.

free dialogues + silent protag so you can have actually different lines is the future of any good action rpg

If the protagonist is silent, it isn't really a "dialogue". That's a useless gimmick and a compromise which grogs glorify as something cool just because it is an old approach.

 

[hivemind]

saved money on main char VA --> more money to spend on NPC VA --> more potential variety in dialogues

 

[Heroic Liberator]

If the protagonist is silent, it isn't really a dialogue. That's a useless gimmick and a compromise which grogs glorify as something cool just because it is an old approach.

It makes a big difference given a preallocated budget for voice acting, since instead of voicing the protag (which can be immersion breaking anyway in the case of blank slate protagonists) you can instead afford to have more lines for the NPCs and thus more reactivity.

And even when there's no extra reactivity, it can still contribute to immersion since you can be given more 'flavors of speech' which serve to shape your character's personality (imho this was a strength of Dragon Age Origins).

 

[hivemind]

(imho this was a strength of Dragon Age Origins).

another like very blatant example of this are the 4 IQ runs in like fallout and arcanum

 

[Agame]

Cyberpunk might actually be the first game ever where I feel some of that drive, just because I love the setting so much and enjoy stealthy infiltration so much, but still...

Yea I shoulda probly gone for a sneaky silent build as I can see that would make encounters slightly more interesting, but I honestly NEVER imagined I would sink so much time into the game on release. I went for body/reflex to try melee and shooting as assumed the game would be so buggy I would have to restart. And the game is so front loaded with its best content that I was pretty well sucked in and committed once I finally started thinking seriously about my character build.

At least I have a brand new build with hacking/stealth to try out sometime down the line when the game is better (fabulously optimistic??).

 

[Agame]

If the protagonist is silent, it isn't really a dialogue. That's a useless gimmick and a compromise which grogs glorify as something cool just because it is an old approach.

Bruh, you seem like a cool dude and then you say unbelievably retarded stuff like this...

 

[AwesomeButton]

If the protagonist is silent, it isn't really a dialogue. That's a useless gimmick and a compromise which grogs glorify as something cool just because it is an old approach.

Bruh, you seem like a cool dude and then you say unbelievably retarded stuff like this...

I was thinking about Far Cry 2, and Half-Life, not Dragon Age Origins "silent protagonist". In my mind there is a difference between "silent protagonist" and "unvoiced protagonist".

It makes a big difference given a preallocated budget for voice acting, since instead of voicing the protag (which can be immersion breaking anyway in the case of blank slate protagonists) you can instead afford to have more lines for the NPCs and thus more reactivity.

Well, my condolences but you both are in the minority, and by a great margin. I can't make the Earth turn backwards just to please you. More people reason the opposite - that an unvoiced protagonist is detrimental to their immersion. Because imagining his pronounciation in their heads is so hard that they need to lie down to recover from the effort.

I'm by now leaning towards grand scale conclusions on the game, and here is one more - CP77 took multiple wrong turns, trying to reconcile irreconcileable concepts. This is a consequence of the game's core vision changing mid-development, with the already complete and coded parts not being revised to accomodate the change, because of the huge cost to that revision. The end result is a compromise of unfinished features and unfulfilled vision and promises to customers/players.

The insufficient means of characterisation due to the lack of 3rd person cutscenes, of which it was mentioned early on there would be a good amount, is just one example of such an attempt to reconcile incompatible ideas. As a bonus I'll remind you what the bullshit machine was parroting pre-release "Cyberpunk 2077 is a personal story" - that was supposed to be an argument in favor of "always first person". What retarded monkeys does it take to believe this? Ergo Witcher 3 is not a personal story? That is a lazy ass explanation for an audience of lazy minds.

Another compromise is the attempt to have a complex and branching main story in an open world setting. The compromises made in order to "sort of" have this are - abdication from any attempts to balance the player's power level vs enemies' level, and the most banal by now case of forced urgency of the main quest. Congratulations, GOTY! Now ask yourself - is having the open world worth it if you are losing the balanced power levels and turning the urgency fake?

A third compromise is that on reactivity. By now you know that hardly any dialogue choice (really one or two?) changes the main quest outcome. This is par for the course, even though original promises were for much more reactivity, which was used as an excuse for the shorter main quest. What is a clear step back however is the general lack of noticeable reactivity between sidequests and main quest, and between main quest branches.

 

[orcinator]

Yea I shoulda probly gone for a sneaky silent build as I can see that would make encounters slightly more interesting,

Just put some points into sneak damage and pistol headshots, congratulations, you are now a stealth archer. There are no builds in this game, just preferences.

Spoiler

Stealth is a joke and won't make anything more interesting

 

[Correct_Carlo]

What was described was "the player is always in full control of the character" which we know went out the window. What was described was "NPCs will have a reaction if you cut the conversation in the middle of dialogue and leave", "You can pull out a weapon in any moment". None of this actually matters. What stays though is the amount of scripting work and camera placement, which the developers were saved from having to do, like they had to do in Witcher 3 which prompted them to develop a tool to partially automate it because it was so much work.

The tradeoff to all those non-existent advantages of first person dialogue which nevertheless has to be paid is that the player becomes essentially blind to one major channel for the characterisation of the main character - you can't watch your character's acting and gestures. Instead everything falls on the voice actor. First person in conversations was a bad decision, sold to players under the pretext of more immersion but really resulting in less characterisation, and that for a blank slate main character who desperately needs means of characterisation.

I disagree strongly with this. The one thing the game does brilliantly, even innovatively, is the first person cinematics and immersion. If it were to break that, it would seem jarring and cheap. It would also hurt the game's central theme of Johnny Silverhand's being inside V's head to disorienting degrees.

It may have been technically easier for them to create first person dialog/cinematics, because there's less editing involved, but it's much harder to conceive of good first person cinematics because so much of video game cinematics owe a huge debt to the shot/reverse shot structure of traditional filmmaking. CDPR actually thought through mise-en-scene very well, better than I've seen in any other FPS video game I can think of, doing some shit that even movies haven't done (although, there was a HUGE amount they ripped off from Gasper Noe's Enter the Void, which is also shot in the first person, especially in the Johnny Silverhands intro scene with the floating camera entering the club and the pulse of the music getting louder).

I just replayed the heist and playing it a second time made me realize how brilliantly everything was done:

Spoiler

-The scene where the Japanese dude kills his father is done perfectly, with the conceit of standing behind the scrim watching it unfold. It's like something from a Hitchcock film and the music and sudden shift in tone work well. I was kind of bored with the game the first time I played it, but that scene took me by surprise and made me realize the game was suddenly working on another level, at least cinematically, if not in terms of gameplay.
-Jackie's death, where he basically dies looking into your eyes, worked incredibly well. I've never seen anything done like that in a movie before. That entire sequence in the cab, while basically a cut-scene, would not have worked as well in the third person. And the small details like telling the cab where to take his remains sell it.
-Same thing with the scene where V is shot by Dex after looking in the mirror. That scene was staged as effectively, and is as memorable for me, as some movie scenes that come to mind (it recalls, for example, the Bride's execution at the start of Kill Bill, especially given the smash cut to the title immediately after).
-The entire Johnny Silverhand introduction is great. It's disorienting in a way that it couldn't be if it weren't in the first person, revealing its information in pieces, as you really have no idea what just happened or even who you are. I didn't follow the game's development, so I had zero idea who Johnny Silverhands was before that sequence happened, and it blew me away. If you were looking at Johnny from a 3rd person perspective it wouldn't have the same effect.
-The shot where V is being wheeled into his apartment by Misty is also incredibly well done. It breaks the typical bobbing movement of the FPS camera, and seems like it's one long panning shot, which throws you as nothing like that has been done in the game up to that point, until you realize, half way through, that it's V's perspective from being wheeled in via wheelchair....even before you see the wheelchair. Again, small details like that just wouldn't be as effective in the 3rd person.
-Even basic scenes like the Dinner meeting or the first time V tries BD with the Japanese dude are incredibly well done.

To me, the game's first person immersion is the one thing the developers totally kept their promise on. The problem that gives people the right to complain, though, is that these sequences are few and far between, mostly being reserved for main story missions and just a few side missions. The vast majority of the game's "story" content is delivered via phone calls and text messages......which is the game's real lazy, corner, cutting.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

It makes a big difference given a preallocated budget for voice acting, since instead of voicing the protag (which can be immersion breaking anyway in the case of blank slate protagonists) you can instead afford to have more lines for the NPCs and thus more reactivity.

Well, my condolences but you both are in the minority, and by a great margin. I can't make the Earth turn backwards just to please you. More people reason the opposite - that an unvoiced protagonist is detrimental to their immersion. Because imagining his pronounciation in their heads is so hard that they need to lie down to recover from the effort.

Well, that's the thing - a voiced protag's way of speech will invariably be more suited to certain kinds of characters. Which is all fine and dandy in cases of premade protagonists such as Geralt or Shepherd in which dialogue choices amount to you choosing the protagonist's thoughts at a given moment (which serve to reinforce the premade personality and not to rewrite it) rather than fundamentally deciding on *your* character's outlook, but it is very limiting for blank slate characters and leads to restrictive dialogue choices to fit with the overall 'vibe' of the voice actor which in turn have to be as neutral as possible in order not to break immersion due to the flow of the lines that you've chosen (e.g. it is less immersive to pick and choose options which aren't of the same 'mood' during a conversation in Dragon Age 2 since witty, aggressive and diplomatic options usually are quite distinct in speech style and do not mesh together well).

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

 

[Robber Baron]

Well, that's the thing - a voiced protag's way of speech will invariably be more suited to certain kinds of characters. Which is all fine and dandy in cases of premade protagonists such as Geralt or Shepherd in which dialogue choices amount to you choosing the protagonist's thoughts at a given moment (which serve to reinforce the premade personality and not to rewrite it) rather than fundamentally deciding on *your* character's outlook, but it is very limiting for blank slate characters and leads to restrictive dialogue choices to fit with the overall 'vibe' of the voice actor which in turn have to be as neutral as possible in order not to break immersion due to the flow of the lines that you've chosen (e.g. it is less immersive to pick and choose options which aren't of the same 'mood' during a conversation in Dragon Age 2 since witty, aggressive and diplomatic options usually are quite distinct in speech style and do not mesh together well).

One of the few things DAI did right was giving two voice options for each sex. Having your hard boiled soldier actually sound like one really mattered. They went for extra trouble just to add some roleplay value but it really made a difference in the end.

 

[Zer0wing]

One of the few things DAI did right was giving two voice options for each sex. Having your hard boiled soldier actually sound like one really mattered. They went for extra trouble just to add some roleplay value but it really made a difference in the end.

First we praised Fallout 4, now Dragon Age: Inquisition looks more advanced and actual role-playing game in front of Cyberpunk 2077. So what's going on inside CDPR?

 

[Robber Baron]

So what's going on inside CDPR?

 

[Zero Credibility]

Another compromise is the attempt to have a complex and branching main story in an open world setting. The compromises made in order to "sort of" have this are - abdication from any attempts to balance the player's power level vs enemies' level, and the most banal by now case of forced urgency of the main quest. Congratulations, GOTY! Now ask yourself - is having the open world worth it if you are losing the balanced power levels and turning the urgency fake?

I can not overstate how much I fucking hate this fake forced urgency. If you really have to go with urgency in the main quest line, then fucking enforce it. Otherwise, don't fucking do it. Is not doing something that fucking hard?

Spoiler

First, why does a street doctor know exactly what a piece of tech he has never seen before is doing to you? Why not instead have the player gradually figure out what is going on over the course of the game? And if that's too much work, at least don't have him right away tell the player exactly how little time he has left. And for fucks sake, ease up on the whole coughing up blood cliche. Yes, we get it, the PC is dying, he does not have fucking tuberculosis. Don't push the player with this fake urgency when the rest of your game is not made with any time limit in mind. What's that, Panam? You want me to waste a whole day with you and your buddies over a campfire while we wait for a convoy? Sign me up, it's not like I have anything better I should be doing. No, no, don't mind me coughing up blood.

Idiots. You'd think they would have learned something from the same problem in Witcher 3, but no, instead they made this aspect of it even worse.

 

[Fenix]

I just played through a miniquest called "A Day in the life". How it goes - you overhear a conversation between a client and a food vendor at a market in Arroyo.

So there IS actually quest(s) if you listen carefully.
Probbaly it's the only quest of such kind.

 

[Correct_Carlo]

Personally, I don't mind the forced urgency. While it depends on how the game handles things somewhat, with a game like Cyberpunk, where there is a great rift between its main story and side quests (especially the gigs and hustles, which are even less developed than the game's major side missions), I'm able to compartmentalize the main story from the side quests and suspend disbelief. The act of doing its gigs is so different than the act of completing its main missions and major side missions, that it's almost like I don't really see them as the same things in my brain. I will have fun as much as possible playing the side gigs, and then, when I get bored, I'll think "OK, time for more story," and go play the story like I haven't been just slaughtering 1,000 people at the behest of some random fixer that calls me constantly to do menial jobs.

At anyrate, it's an open world game so all of this is in your control. If you think it's unrealistic that V would do side-missions while dying then don't do any side missions that you think would be implausible for him to take.