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

[Justicar]

Time to bring some incline into this thread.

Spoiler

 

[Tyrr]

Time to bring some incline into this thread.

Spoiler

The quality Cyberpunk 2077 content I still visit this thread for.

 

[Gargaune]

Thing is you have places like this in the game whole city doesen't look like that to bring some visual diversity. I mean you have whole shanty town districts right next to clean and sterile towering skyscrappers in the corpo zone it makes a very good contrast. You cant expect corpo middle class and the rich to live in something like Walled city of kowloon it wouldn't make sense since almost everybody who lived there was either poor or a criminal. Here look at some of my screenshots of city areas that are not so well off.

I'm not feeling it, man. The images are great, I do agree that Night City looks amazing, but I'm not getting that sensation of claustrophobia and scale, I don't think you really feel "small" all that often when you're exploring. Nevermind the interior shots since those can't represent what I mean, it's the outdoors - even as the buildings are large, you generally find yourself in pretty ample space. Of the ones you posted, I think this one gets the closest to what I'm picturing:

Maybe it's a little hard for me to explain, but let me try with a visual example. Check out the following two screenshots one by one, take a moment with each.

1

2

Corpo Plaza, night time, rain, neon, fuck yes! But the first one, normal perspective at ground level, doesn't give you a good sense of scale and, push come to shove, it's not altogether that different from what you might see around Leicester Square in London. You gotta look up to get that "whoa" factor, and that's not something that you typically do a lot when playing. Granted, a videogame, be it FPP or TPP, can't leverage the directed camera angles of a movie experience, so it's down to the level design to pick up the slack, and that goes back to my original point - that I suspect CDPR prioritised creating a "realistic" space over what would've best captured the cyberpunk "vibe."

To press a little further, consider that the first screenshot you posted is indoors, whereas that second Kowloon picture I posted earlier is outside, it's an alleyway between buildings. If you read up on that Kowloon entry, they mention that people actually set up ramps between various levels of adjoining buildings and that they used the roofs for leisure - cramped, chaotic, and overgrown.

Now, I completely agree that you shouldn't have all of Night City be like that, and I'm not arguing that Corpo Plaza isn't fine the way it is, but I'd say the game would've benefited from having some of that going on, planning permissions be damned. I think the solution would've been to have more adjoining megabuildings with narrow alleys between them, more overhangs and more vertical traversal like, I dunno, Dishonored, which would've forcefully confronted the player with the sheer scale of these tower blocks. I know that CBP has some of that in its shanty town locations, but the skyscrapers are well spaced apart and "neat" in the sense of urban development, litter and scumbags notwithstanding.

 

[Comrade Goby]

I don't know just because things are a corporate dystopia doesn't mean things will be smashed. Corporations still like aesthetics. I agree that perhaps a Kowloon-esque section on the outskirts would be kino

 

[Daedalos]

In this one respect, I think CDPR might've been too thorough for their own good. From what I recall, the studio actually consulted some urban planners when they were doing the layout for the city. Now, when you're a professional, you instinctively gravitate towards applying your skills correctly, and - this is pure speculation on my part - this might be exactly why Night City doesn't look as intimidating as you might've hoped. For instance, an important aspect of urban planning is controlling for street width when setting out height guidelines for buildings to ensure adequate levels of sunlight throughout the day. And when you look at Night City, bingo, you see a lot of wide boulevards and ample breathing room.

What you don't see is the city looming over you. Ever. Sure, you've got your megabuildings, but you're never boxed in between them, you never feel like they're "pressing down on you", you're never really forced to take in their scope. Night City is, with some indulgence, well designed, but that actively works against it and this is why I said that NC reminds me more of Fukuoka in Ghost in the Shell, which was decidedly on the less miserable side of cyberpunk fiction.

Now take a look at these photos of the former Walled City of Kowloon for what no urban planning looks like:

Thing is you have places like this in the game whole city doesen't look like that to bring some visual diversity. I mean you have whole shanty town districts right next to clean and sterile towering skyscrappers in the corpo zone it makes a very good contrast. You cant expect corpo middle class and the rich to live in something like Walled city of kowloon it wouldn't make sense since almost everybody who lived there was either poor or a criminal. Here look at some of my screenshots of city areas that are not so well off.

Spoiler

what seetings

 

[Tao]

I dont get why ppl still cling on to this pile of shit and can't move on.

i can only speak for myself but if you're a cyberpunk autist like me who has been dreaming for an AAA open world cyberpunk game that's true to the genre for all his life this game is all we have

Shadowrun

 

[DeepOcean]

The way they shown Night City, I would actually wanted to live in there and didnt look distopic at all

I wouldn't go as far as wanting to live in it, but I think they did sort of miss the mark on representing their dystopian setting in NC's architecture. Bear with me, I've got a theory that needs laying out here...

In this one respect, I think CDPR might've been too thorough for their own good. From what I recall, the studio actually consulted some urban planners when they were doing the layout for the city. Now, when you're a professional, you instinctively gravitate towards applying your skills correctly, and - this is pure speculation on my part - this might be exactly why Night City doesn't look as intimidating as you might've hoped. For instance, an important aspect of urban planning is controlling for street width when setting out height guidelines for buildings to ensure adequate levels of sunlight throughout the day. And when you look at Night City, bingo, you see a lot of wide boulevards and ample breathing room.

What you don't see is the city looming over you. Ever. Sure, you've got your megabuildings, but you're never boxed in between them, you never feel like they're "pressing down on you", you're never really forced to take in their scope. Night City is, with some indulgence, well designed, but that actively works against it and this is why I said that NC reminds me more of Fukuoka in Ghost in the Shell, which was decidedly on the less miserable side of cyberpunk fiction.

Now take a look at these photos of the former Walled City of Kowloon for what no urban planning looks like:

Slightly different vibe, eh? With Cyberpunk, you want the city to be overgrown, misshapen and oppressive, you want to mirror the hopeless insignificance of the individual in the environment, but I never got that from 2077. About the only time I got a brief vibe like that from a videogame in recent memory was in DX4, when entering Golem City and seeing that twisted, monstrous mass of cables heaving overhead, that definitely made me go "okay, I'm in the bad part of town now."

TLDR: I suspect CDPR were too conscientious about building Night City as a realistic, believable city, and lost track of making it the dysfunctional, overbearing locale that would've best served the fiction. And that's just in terms of architecture, nevermind the weather patterns. And I don't wanna go too hard in on this, Night City looks amazing, they did a great job with their rendition, but I feel like it's not quite the flavour I'd have gone for.

Also, Kowloon was the product of the political conflict of the chinese goverment and the Great Britain goverment, it was an old chinese fort, old refugees from the chinese civil war and all the political convulsions on mainland China gone there. When the british goverment tried to evict the residents, the residents asked China for help, Mao then using a term on an old treaty the british made with still Imprerial China, claimed the fort was chinese territory and threatened the british with war if they gone inside.

The british after the second world war and after losing India, werent all that confident on keeping Hong Kong from a now unified China so they avoided giving Mao excuses for a war and didnt try to evict the people in there. The result was, the british had no authority inside but the chinese goverment also didnt have any authority because they would need to occupy Hong Kong for that and the british had nuclear weapons. The slum grown on that vertical way because the british goverment made sure to demolish any building built outside the old fort perimeter as the last thing they wanted was a huge horizontal slum they had no control over and that the chinese goverment could claim as its territory, so people build up.

Kwaloon Walled City was controlled by the organized crime that made a lucrative business of using the place as headquarters for their black market operations on China and Hong Kong. Now just replace the chinese goverment and the british goverment by Arasaka and Militech and Kowloon walled City with Pacifica, it would be nice seeing corporation political fights affecting the daily lives of people on Night City and how people feel like ants smashed between titans that dont care about them but instead we got "It is about soul and stuff with Keanu Reeves, dude, smoke some highly spiritual cyber marijuana with me, dude."

 

[Gerrard]

In this one respect, I think CDPR might've been too thorough for their own good. From what I recall, the studio actually consulted some urban planners when they were doing the layout for the city. Now, when you're a professional, you instinctively gravitate towards applying your skills correctly, and - this is pure speculation on my part - this might be exactly why Night City doesn't look as intimidating as you might've hoped. For instance, an important aspect of urban planning is controlling for street width when setting out height guidelines for buildings to ensure adequate levels of sunlight throughout the day. And when you look at Night City, bingo, you see a lot of wide boulevards and ample breathing room.

What you don't see is the city looming over you. Ever. Sure, you've got your megabuildings, but you're never boxed in between them, you never feel like they're "pressing down on you", you're never really forced to take in their scope. Night City is, with some indulgence, well designed, but that actively works against it and this is why I said that NC reminds me more of Fukuoka in Ghost in the Shell, which was decidedly on the less miserable side of cyberpunk fiction.

Now take a look at these photos of the former Walled City of Kowloon for what no urban planning looks like:

Thing is you have places like this in the game whole city doesen't look like that to bring some visual diversity. I mean you have whole shanty town districts right next to clean and sterile towering skyscrappers in the corpo zone it makes a very good contrast. You cant expect corpo middle class and the rich to live in something like Walled city of kowloon it wouldn't make sense since almost everybody who lived there was either poor or a criminal. Here look at some of my screenshots of city areas that are not so well off.

Spoiler

I've seen screenshots from Stalker that look more realistic than this oversaturated, overcontrasted plastic shit. It just screams "This is a 3D render".

 

[agris]

Nah it doesn’t look like how you characterize it all. Maybe in these small thumbnails, but not live in the game.

take your garbage take and set yourself by the road for collection

 

[Danikas]

what seetings

Here are my settings:

Spoiler

More screenshots:

Spoiler

 

[Riddler]

So, are CDProject still working on this or are they cutting their losses?

 

[tritosine2k]

So, are CDProject still working on this or are they cutting their losses?

Bet they became preoccupied with ray-tracing gung-ho nvidia-tech so bad they can't iterate on gameplay to get/ keep players occupied.

 

[T.Ashpool]

i...i need a girlfriend bros

 

[Daedalos]

what seetings

Here are my settings:

Spoiler

Any reshades or mods using or just default settings?

 

[Danikas]

Any reshades or mods using or just default settings?

No mods no reshades its vanilla graphics.

 

[Gargaune]

Ok, performance report time. Updated to 1.2, I'm not really seeing much difference in frame count, I tested with two saves outside V's megabuilding and in Lizzie's bar, seemed to have gained a frame here, lost a frame there, but rather within the margin of error. CPU temperatures, on the other hand, seem to have gone up a couple of degrees. Sadly, I didn't think to take screenshots to compare the builds, but nothing jumped at me as being significantly different with the image quality.

So first impressions: disappointing patch, made things slightly worse in the CPU load department. I hear that 1.2 did make things better on consoles, though I'm surprised that absolutely none of that optimisation would be reflected on PC in any capacity.

 

[Zer0wing]

So first impressions: disappointing patch, made things slightly worse in the CPU load department. I hear that 1.2 did make things better on consoles, though I'm surprised that absolutely none of that optimisation would be reflected on PC in any capacity.

Of course not, this patch just cuts in half crowd density and car traffic on consoles, they're still not ready to sacrifice polygon count.

 

[c2007]

Gerrard is a retard, a very old retard. I played the game for 11 hours Officer Fuckmeat, pretty sure any opinions I have are my own.

In general, a lot of faggots defending a shit game here, which is strange to me. Go on, enjoy your game.

 

[Twiglard]

I'm not really seeing much difference in frame count, I tested with two saves outside V's megabuilding and in Lizzie's bar, seemed to have gained a frame here, lost a frame there, but rather within the margin of error. CPU temperatures, on the other hand, seem to have gone up a couple of degrees

How many cores? I get 100% usage with 4 cores. Streaming in data lowers the framerate considerably.

 

[Gargaune]

How many cores? I get 100% usage with 4 cores. Streaming in data lowers the framerate considerably.

i7 9700K, 8 single-threaded cores. I'm not monitoring the CPU load itself, just the temps since that's what interests me.

And I may have been lowballing the impact of patch 1.2 earlier, just now I saw temperatures sit entirely in the 80°C range, even momentarily clipping 90°C in the market area around Misty's shop. Granted, I have a subpar airflow setup and heat buildup will factor in, but my point is this is the worst I've seen Cyberpunk do to date. For reference, the best build for me was 1.04, when I was running mid 70s to low 80s, rarely spiking up to some 85°C. And what for? I can't see any obvious improvements in picture quality of game behaviour.

 

[Twiglard]

Undervolt the CPU. My old 2600K had dust under the radiator and still lost over 15 deg. from a stable undervolt under max load.

 

[Gargaune]

Undervolt the CPU. My old 2600K had dust under the radiator and still lost over 15 deg. from a stable undervolt under max load.

God damnit! I just checked Intel XTU, and the Core Voltage Offset had been reset, some system crash in the past year must've triggered the safety wipe without notifying. It's back now to the -70mV I'd originally settled on, thanks for the reminder! It should only account for about 3-4°C at full tilt, but I'll take all I can get at this point.

I've also set a framerate cap of 50 now, idea being that I'm comfortable there and it should help reduce heat buildup in less intensive scenes. Maybe I should also tweak the fan curve, I've gone with a quiet profile for regular operation but it may do to set a more aggressive progression past 65°C on the CPU. Honestly, though, I'm getting a little tired of babysitting this one fucking game.

 

[Twiglard]

I've also set a framerate cap of 50 now, idea being that I'm comfortable there and it should help reduce heat buildup in less intensive scenes. Maybe I should also tweak the fan curve, I've gone with a quiet profile for regular operation but it may do to set a more aggressive progression past 65°C on the CPU.

Go zero RPM below 55 deg, 20% at 65, and only go above 2k RPM once it's really necessary. That is, above 87-ish degrees. 100% at 92. Everything below 2k RPM is bearable. Set fan to spool down slow but spool up fast as fake hysteresis. Running under 85 deg. shouldn't be a priority. In worst case, drop the multiplier by one or two steps.

 

[Gargaune]

Go zero RPM below 55 deg, 20% at 65, and only go above 2k RPM once it's really necessary. That is, above 87-ish degrees. 100% at 92. Everything below 2k RPM is bearable. Set fan to spool down slow but spool up fast as fake hysteresis. Running under 85 deg. shouldn't be a priority. In worst case, drop the multiplier by one or two steps.

I'll think about it. I don't really need to adjust the low end, the PC's dead silent at idle so I can literally only hear the mechanical drive spinning, and then the fans barely whisper in the 50-60°C range with games like PFKM or Fo4. After that the noise gradually picks up over 60°C, but I was thinking I might push the RPMs more aggressively from 65-70°C to reduce the opportunity for heat to build up in the case. Might be overly fussy, but I'm just not too giddy about running prolonged periods over 80°C.

 

[Semiurge]

I've also set a framerate cap of 50 now, idea being that I'm comfortable there and it should help reduce heat buildup in less intensive scenes. Maybe I should also tweak the fan curve, I've gone with a quiet profile for regular operation but it may do to set a more aggressive progression past 65°C on the CPU.

Go zero RPM below 55 deg, 20% at 65, and only go above 2k RPM once it's really necessary. That is, above 87-ish degrees. 100% at 92. Everything below 2k RPM is bearable. Set fan to spool down slow but spool up fast as fake hysteresis. Running under 85 deg. shouldn't be a priority. In worst case, drop the multiplier by one or two steps.

Hybrid-passive cooling is a scam. It's purpose: to reduce component life-spans. Never go zero rpm unless you want to slowly cook those cheap caps on GPUs. Power supplies have models with bad and good caps, but Nvidia and AMD only offer you cheap Chinese shit that isn't rated to endure high temperatures.