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

[AwesomeButton]

The most rational course is to upgrade a green weapon for better famage and disregard mods slots. Cheaper upgrades to damage will always give you more benefit than weapon mods with the current state of the game balance.

 

[Haplo]

This game really needs static, level-less itemization

 

[Haplo]

But as for the number of slots... I don't think I've ever seen a "Legendary" with no mod slots. In fact all seem to boast 3+.

They are supposed to be:
Green 1
Blue 2
Purple 3
Gold 4

In reality it's "between zero and X slots", I've wasted at least an hour reloading quicksaves to fix loot. And even then it's ALWAYS one less mod than they should have for drops.
Dunno if crafted versions require you to savescum as well or work as they should. Could't be arsed to click on craft at least 700 times to level the skill. Seriously CDPR? No "craft X amount" button?

One less slot for drops seems closer to the truth, as I don't think I've ever found a green with a mod slot. In fact "Rares" with any mod slots seem very rare. And all purples seem to have 1.

 

[gerey]

What people don't seem to understand is the importance of the spectacular and very public failure of Cyberpunk 2077.

Gaming is a big herd of sacred cows. There exists this unspoken rule that some companies/games are not to be criticized, least you incur the wrath of the gaming press or the rabid fanbase.

As an example, how many years did Bethesda get away with their overabundance of bugs, poor writing, lackluster gameplay and general lack of quality to their games? How many years have people just memed the glaring faults away and laughed at the bugs and called them a quirky part of the design?

And then came Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, and suddenly the faults were so obvious and numerous that no amount of intimidation and journalist spin could make it go away. The number of detractors dwarfing the rabid, vocal fanbase to such an extent that it suddenly became socially acceptable to mock Fallout 4 and 76, and by extension Bethesda and all their previous games.

Now, after the success of Witcher 2, and especially Witcher 3, CDPR was the golden Polish darling of gaming - delivering the kind of "deep" and "mature" storytelling that would validate the worthless existence of game journalists and finally put an end to the endless mockery they experience from family, friends, random strangers and pretty much every other human on the planet.

The fact CDPR games were mechanically subpar, buggy and half-finished didn't matter, because they produced a "mature cinematic experience" (read: post-modernist, nihilist filth designed to make you feel like shit) and thus ascended to the endless pastures of gaming's sacred cows and were thus exempt from criticism. They were also the "good guy devs", the people's publisher, the ones that took a stance against greed, lies and deceit - thus becoming haloed sacred cows.

But then Soyberpunk 2077 came along, and it was an undeniably shit game on every level, such that not even journalists could make the bad press go away, and it revealed CDPR to the public as (and this is the most important part) just another shitty publisher, perfectly capable of resorting to the underhanded kind of shit EA, Ubisoft and Activision do on a regular basis.

Now that they have been unceremoniously deposited outside the pearly gates it's hip and cool to shit on them, the spell is broken and they will never again win back that implicit trust. Whenever they try to hype up a new product there will always be a large number of people that will remind the rest of the NPCs about Cyberpunk and the broken promises and scummy behavior. This will forever remain a corrosive poison eating at their success.

And if you don't believe that this will impact their bottom line - just look at what a string of failures have done to Ubisoft. Few companies go bust overnight due to a single failure, it's usually a death by a thousand cuts that sees them slowly crumble from within. CDPR is no Activision or EA, they don't have a reliable money printing IP, they're no Ubisoft with a large number of franchises they can fall back on, they're not even a Rockstar that actually can deliver on their promises.

They're just a collective of underpaid Polish labor monkeys led by inept cretins. 2077 was their one-in-a-million chance to make it into the big leagues, and they thoroughly fucked it up in the most public way imaginable.

 

[Bliblablubb]

The most rational course is to upgrade a green weapon for better famage and disregard mods slots.

Gawd no. The amount of upgrade materials get so ridiculously high after a few clicks, it's simply not worth it.
On the other hand you could just buy the MaxDoc recipe for a whooping 50 eddies, craft tons of it... then disassemble it to get... better componenets back than invested? Ooooookay.

Or just ignore all that crap. Pick a gun you like and only replace it if a better version drops somewhere. If at all 10 dmg more per shot? Whatever, enemy's head do not care when they play popamole with you.

I looted a golden nippon magnum from the animal womyn boss, and while I found much higher dmg stuff, that one with a silencer was enough to pop every head.

 

[Haplo]

I'm kinda attached to my Widow Maker, though. But its still rather good, multiple levels later.

 

[Bliblablubb]

Oh, and speaking of that animal womyn in Pacifica, she is the perfect example how this game was made to beeline through the mainquest without stopping:

Remember that Rouge Rogue wants 15k from you to continue? Guess how much bounty downing Sasquatch is worth. Exactly 15k. You can even collect twice by killing her after she is knocked out, because... reasons.
Das rite, no need to stop the mainquest to earn money kiddos, stay in the ride and buckuru upu! :takamura:

 

[mediocrepoet]

Dunno if crafted versions require you to savescum as well or work as they should. Could't be arsed to click on craft at least 700 times to level the skill. Seriously CDPR? No "craft X amount" button?

This was probably my number 1 QOL piss off, tbh. It's compounded by the fact that not only do you have to hold the button down, but you have to release it and push it down to start the next one which requires you to at least half ass pay attention to it even though it's tedious and time consuming. I actually found it a bit ridiculous since you basically need to upgrade components into higher quality components to do anything later, so when you start needing like 50-100 of something for a single upgrade level and you create one at a time...

What a bizarre and retarded design decision.

 

[TheImplodingVoice]

She looks like she'll stab you, bite off your dick and burn down your house if you break up with her.

 

[Bliblablubb]

She looks like she'll stab you, bite off your dick and burn down your house if you break up with her.

Y'know, that's pretty much the case for every strong womyn in the game as well. Guess that's a defining feature of being a modern strong womyn then?
Judy is a clingy stalker psycho drunk girlfriend, Panam would gut you with a rusty can opener and Rogue... I'd rather not try to imagine what Rogue would do. 70 years of experience...
Sad.

 

[typical user]

Kiroshi Mk3 which you can get from Viktor in Act 1 has 5000 E$ cost and allows you to put 3 mods into it. Viktor is also selling legendary Kiroshi mods which give +50% headshot increase. So you can get additional 150% more damage while clicking enemies' heads. You can get additional 50% from Cool skill-tree. First perk in Stealth tree increases damage from silenced weapons (or negates the penalty). Of course if you use cameras and ping quickhack you can just grab Nekomata and shoot people through walls.

Something tells me penetrating walls was supposed to be top-tier perk in Tech stat. Also I think the bullets should only go through limited seleciton of objects or 1 surface and not be a complete wallhack. How are you supposed to make multiplayer game when every Tech gun is OP by default? Same thing with auto-aim Smart weapons, you get an implant which unlocks this feature from Wakako Okada as part of Scav hunt main quest. On the other hand to get ricochet you need a Kiroshi mod which means you have to give up on +% crit chance or +%headshot damage. Also I think Ballistic Coprocessor / Subdermal Grip was supposed to be optional cyberware mod. The 2018 fake implied some weapons would have a biometric lock and you would need that implant to be able to shoot those.

 

[Haplo]

Well, maybe top-tier Tech perk wasn't supposed to be necessary to penetrate walls. BUT it should require an (almost?) full charge and the Tech weapons should have a huge shake with high charge without the relevant perks. Making headshots far more tricky. And yeah, there should be a limit on how much they can penetrate. If not 1 wall/obstacle only, then maybe a hefty damage drop for each obstacle? Like 30% less damage per object.
In general I think Ping-ed enemies should be displayed as 2D location flags, rather then clear silhouettes.
Plus the fact, that aiming a wall-penetrating weapon makes you auto-pinpoint all enemies (even without Ping!), has to be a bug!

Interesting that SPD Grads also penetrate walls. Except for the explosive Iconic O'Five (which ALSO doesn't scan all enemies when aiming). Plus it deals a lot less damage per headshot (like 30% of the damage) - despite having like 30% more damage in the stats and 2,5x higher headshot multiplier then Overwatch. Something is definitely buggy.

 

[Bliblablubb]

The more you think about "features" that seem supposed to be only available later, the more you realize it's either bugged up or they decided to make everything available from the start, Bethesda style, because modern audience cannot into "earning a privileg". Or every team member had their own vision for the game and didn't talk to others.
Not sure what's worse.

Like Wakako giving you a smart link for free, so everyone can use smart weapons rite nao.
Gain magic wallhack with tech weapon, no perk needed.
Weapon tiers, progression, any form of limiting? Well aside from the CDPR patented high level enemies that take only 10% headshot dmg, at best.

Nope.

"See that mountain gun over there? Of course you can climb use it at once. It just works."

Shows who they were trying to be like to make even bigger bucks. Everyone wants his game to be like Skyrim, Skyrim with... dicks hacks.
Sad.

 

[Gerrard]

All higher up creatives at CDPR are artists, it's run by wannabe movie directors, who had no chance to break into movie industry as nerdy potatoes.

They don't understand, or even like games and they will never even acknowledge, that the biggest problem with CP2077 are not the bugs.
Gameplay systems design and programming make like 5% of the budget of CDPR games and they are so set up in their ways, that their games are destined forever to have great art and subpar gameplay.

So just like Kojima?

 

[Bliblablubb]

Something is definitely buggy.

Something

Something

"Something" he says.

Outside the interactive movie themepark ride called main quest, it's probably a much shorter list what's working as intended, working as it should work.
Don't get me wrong: the mainquest (and some sidequests) were a fun ride, but the game gives me zero motivation to divert from it.
Skills, perks, looter shooter... replayability....
Everything outside the main attraction feels tacked on, half finished, a placeholder, or not even thought through for more than the conversation at the water cooler.

Did I get my money's worth? Sure thing, it ran stable for me. Plus countless rants on the 'dex.
Is it GOTY material? If you only play it once, mostly mainquest, with an occasionsal dip into sidequests/gig... probably?
But if you expected an open world game.. nope. Not yet, maybe after another year of potatocrunch.

 

[Gargaune]

Its funny about that statement where people talked about Crunch time and CDPR flaked out. They most definitely crunched and it definitely wasn't enough.

As far as I can tell, the blame lies primarily with management and the developer leads: they got it wrong when trying to assess the amount of work required to finish the game and, while the Coronavirus epidemic is a legitimate mitigating factor, it only goes so far.

CDPR put themselves in a losing bind with their second delay, when they shifted the release date from April to September 2020, rather than biting the bullet and pushing the game into 2021. Gamers would've bitched (myself included, I admit) and investors would've been rattled, but they had good business credentials and could've laid blame on the pandemic. Instead, from September 2020 they went into the deathly spiral of smaller delays and "just three microissues left" in a mad dash to make the Christmas holidays, from which they could not then pop out and say "actually, see you next year."

I say this because I believe stockholders would've been more amenable to fewer but longer delays, given the exceptional circumstances (Coronavirus), simply because that would maintain confidence that management still has a reasonably clear picture of what's going on, rather than what happened, where CDPR looked like they were playing a desperate game of whack-a-mole in Microsoft Project.

That said, I don't know what their financials looked like. I believe they could've kept going for another couple of months relative to what ended up being the release date, given the hype and their successful GOG and Witcher properties, but I have no idea what sort of pressure they might've faced from creditors through 2020 after "eight years" of working on the damned thing. So maybe I'm talking shit and Cyberpunk's fate really was sealed when Covid-19 torpedoed Europe last spring.

As for "more crunch", instituting a formal 6-day week much earlier might've helped some, but I don't know whether it would've been enough. The thing with mandatory overtime is that, aside from labour law and cost limitations, the longer it goes it also becomes a case of diminishing returns as developer morale drops. I guess we'll get a better picture of how much more work was really needed once Cyberpunk makes it back to the PS store.

 

[Harthwain]

So just like Kojima?

In Death Stranding the systems are designed around supporting the whole "walking simulator" premise, to a good effect.

If you want to mock the modern gameplay systems design this is really not the right game to use an example. Hell, let's go further still: even if the universe created by Kojima is batshit crazy, I have to admit it does not suffer from the common ludonarrative dissonance. Quite to the contrary - the story serves as the means to introduce more gameplay elements to the player. I find it stunning that a game about being a literal Amazon delivery courier has way better approach to gameplay than many games people consider to be serious affair.

 

[Gargaune]

TLDR: The bugstravaganza seems to come from fancy high settings if your toaster can't take it. Or the classic internal AA problem, even Bethesda fucked that up.
I hesitate blaming pc players for blowing it up, but.... knowing those entitled shits today they probably tried to run it on super ultra deluxe on their 5 yo notebook and whine on twitter because they saw a bluescreen for the first time in their life.

There's another catch here that has me worried. Iwinski outright said that they developed the game to look great on PC and then retrofitted it to consoles, which proved much more difficult than expected. Now, as much as we might giggle at the consoleplebs finally playing second fiddle and getting a taste of their own medicine, it'll only reinforce the industry-wide practice of developing for console first. Strap in for more decline, boys.

 

[Xeon]

How is it running on the new consoles? I assume they spent the same amount of time on it as the old ones so as long as they are running fine then it probably doesn't change much I think.

 

[Rinslin Merwind]

How is it running on the new consoles? I assume they spent the same amount of time on it as the old ones so as long as they are running fine then it probably doesn't change much I think.

New consoles run same version as old ones, but with unlocked framerate or at least I heard so. I assume there was less butthurt about performance on PS5 and new xbox simbly because there much less people who already bought these consoles.

 

[Myobi]

The problem is how shit stacks, crit dmg & crit chance needs to be nerfed, I made a int/tech/reflex sniper build n was running around dealing 3 million dmg headshots, my contagion was going over 10k dmg.

Edit: fml im 3 pages late on this, phone didn't refresh

 

[typical user]

Someone said it here or on Reddit: if developers had to crunch for a year it meant the game was a year behind schedule. Like how fucked-up CTO or lead you have to be to be doing overhours for a fucking year? I understand a 1-month crunch when the game is about to go gold, to get Day 1 patch ready or to test servers, whatever, but when you have all the money from investors and you crunch people rather than hire more and better skilled and divide them on teams working on different features and then have someone responsible for integration? Ah, I am no developer but come on, a head-of-department doesn't need knowledge how to code more than he needs to know how underlying teams are doing, if they are reaching milestones. What the fuck they were doing? What did they expect? That people are blind and won't give a bad rep? This isn't just crunching to deliver a masterpiece like RDR2. This was crunching to release a demo with barely any gameplay.

 

[DalekFlay]

Comparing Witcher 3 to Cyberpunk and saying they have similar problems is like saying a car with a flat tire is similar to one with its engine, transmission, and steering wheel missing. C2077 is a game in an early alpha stage, and even saying that I've played alpha early access games that had less missing assets.

I 100% stand by my statement that if the gigs had more story the game would be roughly the same in structure and content. I'm sure you'll reply with something like "the police system is so basic" but so was the guard system in Witcher 3. I'm just not seeing this super in-depth gameplay Witcher 3 had that Cyberpunk does not. Witcher 3 was not a New Vegas or Gothic 2, it was an Ubisoft open world type game with a great story and some cool choices. If Cyberpunk had gigs with great stories and some cool choices, it would be the same fucking game, just with Deus Ex-y shooting and stealthing instead of whacky-whacky melee.

 

[Zeriel]

No, I'd reply with the fact the UI is missing any sound effects or feedback from basic actions. This is not a finished game, and I'm stunned by the fact that people are still in denial over that. This is not normal, and it's not like your average Ubisoft or EA release. It's a very visible example of what happens when project management totally fails and there are no safeguards.

 

[JDR13]

The game is still very immersive at times despite the bugs and shitty balance. I can only imagine how good it could have been if properly balanced and polished.