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

[rusty_shackleford]

DLSS has nothing to do with RTX , by all accounts it's using tensor cores not RT.

That's for the worse, because
https://hexus.net/tech/news/graphics/120656-nvidia-adds-ray-tracing-tech-temporal-anti-aliasing-taa/

as explained here, TAA "edges" can be touched up with ray tracing, and then the cost becomes comparable with ACTUAL anti aliasing.
Which on DLSS's part is not comparable, so how anyone expects correct (AA) output instead of just softened image is beyond me. Yeah, stand in place and don't touch the controls , and "evaluate" on static picture it's comparable to AA , that's just an unrealistic scenario .
Besides Disney tried this with offline animation and failed, yet they had all the incentive.
Maybe it's just that shipping broke tech with broke games won't make much of a diff ?

Which part of this adds the fun?

 

[mkultra]

Jesus Christ. So this mission is so scripted, you always win it, even if you don't fire a single bullet?

well, at least it made somewhat sense, driver crashed (distracted?), they died (...hopefully?) - mission accomplished!

Very lazy design though and you certainly get the impression that the game was eventually rushed, and much of the earlier work just scrapped.
They have worked on it for at least 9 years, which is a lot for a decently large studio.. With Witcher 3 i think they did something a bit similar but not as extreme perhaps, the first engine/renderer was scrapped (which looked a bit better, but i guess performance etc was shit). They did use images from it up until release to promote the game though, made me lose respect for them completely.

They were also granted 7 million USD from their government to develop groundbreaking AI, and MultiPlayer.. Neither of which is in the game.. lol.

 

[gurugeorge]

Was there ever a call on whether this was/is an RPG or not?

Also, is it stable enough to play on PC now or should avoid?

It's not an RPG. It's a moderately enjoyable, mostly linear cinematic storyfag game with some unfinished and terribly wonky RPG elements bolted on, plus an open world nest-hunting experience that's actually decent brainless fun for a while. Art design-wise and graphics-wise it's very good (bar the bugs). Weapon variety and fx impact (both visual and audio) are pretty good, and the shooter experience is good for this type of game. Music is great in places, annoying in others; the in-game "radio" is stellar. Quest design is uneven: there are some good quests - even a few quite interesting and moving ones - but C&C is minimal apart from a few "showcase" bits of C&C, and some immersive simmery here and there, and although the virtual world looks fantastic at times, and is immersive in that sense, it's almost totally unresponsive.

It's been stable enough to play on the PC from release, for the most part (at least I never had much trouble with it on my potato, and in a hundred or so hours of gameplay I didn't experience that many serious bugs, just a few comical ones here and there).

Whether you'll enjoy it or not depends on your tolerance level for action popamole gameplay. If you enjoyed TW3 you'll probably enjoy this somewhat, but not nearly as much. As I've maintained from the beginning, it's about a 6-6.5/10 on a clean objective score, not as terrible as some are bandwaggoning, but not very good either. It has its moments at the "cinematic experience" level (even a few great moments), but they're not enough to make it a great game. The score will probably bump up to about 7-7.5 or so, maybe even 8 in a year's time if they keep working at it - although some here say that the gameplay flaws are too intrinsic and deep to be solvable, no matter how much bugfixing and tweaking they do, and that may be true, I don't know.

Buy on discount, otherwise wait a year.

 

[tritosine2k]

...

Which part of this adds the fun?

The question is why this wasn't in use before if it's so good , and will it be in future or it's not so good. I say it won't , because some kind of leeway is used now that's not apparent to the average consumer (bad displays ,obv. ).

 

[Haplo]

Its obviously inferior to The Witcher 3 in most aspects.
But the combat gameplay I've found more fun here - prefer decent shooting (great weapon design, nice visual feedback and animations) to bad melee. Of course, enemy AI could be better....

 

[SoupNazi]

Reminder that this is still a thing:

This is the reason I fucking hate all that talk about "muh bugs", drowning out everything else. Fuck bugs. This is way, WAY more serious problem. Compared to shit like this bugs are a fucking joke.

Jesus Christ. So this mission is so scripted, you always win it, even if you don't fire a single bullet?

It's kinda bullshit though, he's playing on the easiest difficulty. You can see his life going down as he gets hit. When the game came out, probably because of my potato rig, I had trouble with that sequence because the pistol didn't load and I couldn't shoot back and, on max diff, they kill you in seconds. The solution to get past was do what that guy did - drop difficulty to journo mode so you can get shot at for days without dying.

All you need to do, on any difficulty, in all the driving+shooting missions, is not aim / look at the enemies. Stare at the ground.

 

[Paul_cz]

They have worked on it for at least 9 years

The development timeline of Cyberpunk is:

2012 - license bought, game announced, CGI teaser released, preproduction done by small team
2013 - almost everyone who worked on C77 gets assigned to work on Witcher 3 instead, because it grew in scope and needs all help it can get
2015 - Witcher 3 is shipped, team works on expansions
2016 - Blood and Wine ships, small team works on preproduction of Cyberpunk again (all stuff done previously gets thrown out), full production starts by the end of 2016, with 250 people, growing over the next 4 years to 530 (and onboarding all the newcomers ain't easy, and apparently there is friction given what happened with Konrad)

So, technically, one could say Cyberpunk has been in "some capacity" worked on for 9 years, but in reality, the actual game that was shipped was really only in development for 4 years.

 

[J_C]

Reminder that this is still a thing:

This is the reason I fucking hate all that talk about "muh bugs", drowning out everything else. Fuck bugs. This is way, WAY more serious problem. Compared to shit like this bugs are a fucking joke.

Jesus Christ. So this mission is so scripted, you always win it, even if you don't fire a single bullet?

It's kinda bullshit though, he's playing on the easiest difficulty. You can see his life going down as he gets hit. When the game came out, probably because of my potato rig, I had trouble with that sequence because the pistol didn't load and I couldn't shoot back and, on max diff, they kill you in seconds. The solution to get past was do what that guy did - drop difficulty to journo mode so you can get shot at for days without dying.

All you need to do, on any difficulty, in all the driving+shooting missions, is not aim / look at the enemies. Stare at the ground.

 

[Tyrr]

 

[Wesp5]

All you need to do, on any difficulty, in all the driving+shooting missions, is not aim / look at the enemies. Stare at the ground.

So what's so special about that? Besides that this one is some kind of intro-tutorial-cutscene-mission and in which game is such a thing not heavily scripted, I can't remember the times I just crouched in a mine-car or other vehicle on rails and survived without shooting back...

 

[Zer0wing]

So, technically, one could say Cyberpunk has been in "some capacity" worked on for 9 years, but in reality, the actual game that was shipped was really only in development for 4 years.

Is it really needed to have a big pre-production team to work on the game, especially with the dungeon master Mike Pondsmith himself onboard? And signing up Big Chungus Reeves on role for a cyberpunk disneyland title is a given, the pre-production team should've been ready exactly these 4 years ago, with a script ready. For tarnishing the company's reputation among both goymers and the inside staff, Adam Badowski truly needs to be fined with three hundred bucks instead of gorillion dollars upbonus and receive public fisting.
I'm no Konrad but would've seen this if were on his place.

 

[Gargaune]

Jesus Christ. So this mission is so scripted, you always win it, even if you don't fire a single bullet?

No, no, you don't get it, that's the pacifist option! When you refuse to shoot him, the enemy driver realises the error of his ways his overwhelming guilt drives him right into a wall! Choice and consequence, ch000000m!

 

[Zer0wing]

So what's so special about that? Besides that this one is some kind of intro-tutorial-cutscene-mission and in which game is such a thing not heavily scripted, I can't remember the times I just crouched in a mine-car or other vehicle on rails and survived without shooting back...

It's a scripted event in a proclaimed by the masses (but not the devs lol) RPG title where the player is welded on a car with a gun to pop some moles. So it's like the infamous Kowadooty moment in Fallout 4 that everyone sane in their minds hated. Neither should this game get a free pass. Scripted cheap thrill rides are cancer. The tutorial event is special because its the shortest one and like bullet in the head, the van goes off rails too quickly on its own even though in these games the ride is usually cycled in a loop. It teaches the player a valuable lesson about today's game designers. In fact, I started a fresh save today on hardedst difficulty and latest patch and guess what, survived with a couple of hungryhungry hypos I saw exactly this, a van full of scavengers says "FUCK IT" and kills itself for no reason. Even though in 48 minute demo it was presented and looked like a random encounter with AI taking the role of a driver instead of a player, a reversed certified rockstar games car chase scenario.

 

[racofer]

Reminder that this is still a thing:

This is the reason I fucking hate all that talk about "muh bugs", drowning out everything else. Fuck bugs. This is way, WAY more serious problem. Compared to shit like this bugs are a fucking joke.

Jesus Christ. So this mission is so scripted, you always win it, even if you don't fire a single bullet?

It's kinda bullshit though, he's playing on the easiest difficulty. You can see his life going down as he gets hit. When the game came out, probably because of my potato rig, I had trouble with that sequence because the pistol didn't load and I couldn't shoot back and, on max diff, they kill you in seconds. The solution to get past was do what that guy did - drop difficulty to journo mode so you can get shot at for days without dying.

All you need to do, on any difficulty, in all the driving+shooting missions, is not aim / look at the enemies. Stare at the ground.

 

[gurugeorge]

Scripted sequences like that are either lame or exciting purely depending on how into the story and your character you are. I didn't mind them at all, because I was quite into "being V."

Some other games, with similar sequences, I've hated them because I felt detached (IOW, I felt like "me sitting in a chair playing a lame-ass videogame, wondering what went wrong with my life").

 

[SoupNazi]

All you need to do, on any difficulty, in all the driving+shooting missions, is not aim / look at the enemies. Stare at the ground.

So what's so special about that? Besides that this one is some kind of intro-tutorial-cutscene-mission and in which game is such a thing not heavily scripted, I can't remember the times I just crouched in a mine-car or other vehicle on rails and survived without shooting back...

You don't get to duck. You're still sticking out of your car like a idiot, just aiming at the ground. The "special" part is that it's so heavily scripted that they only shoot back when you're trying to shoot back. Otherwise they intentionally miss you.

Don't get me wrong I actually admit that I like the game unlike most of the edgy kids here who have 100 hours on it but claim they'd never pay for it, but it does have its (often hilarious, sometimes frustrating/disappointing) flaws.

 

[Wesp5]

Scripted sequences like that are either lame or exciting purely depending on how into the story and your character you are. I didn't mind them at all, because I was quite into "being V."

Some other games, with similar sequences, I've hated them because I felt detached (IOW, I felt like "me sitting in a chair playing a lame-ass videogame, wondering what went wrong with my life").

Exactly! A lot of games have intro sequences that you can't change. I don't remember to not cause the cascade in Half-Life or not being shot in FO: Las Vegas. And the later is a known favourite here, no?

 

[Paul_cz]

Is it really needed to have a big pre-production team to work on the game, especially with the dungeon master Mike Pondsmith himself onboard?

I don't know how big the preproduction team was, my guess would be 10-15 people at most, establishing the vision and core design. Point is, everything done prior to 2016 was thrown out after the directors changed. Stepien left for Blizzard, Kanik was demoted and Badowski decided to direct it himself.

Personally though, I enjoyed C77 a ton (with some caveats, there is definitely stuff to improve), and who knows how it would look if those changes didn't happen..maybe it would not have shipped at all, or even worse..or better (unlikely).

It is quite easy to point at some scripted thing in Cyberpunk and go "AHA!!!" but..yeah, shit is scripted. If I am not trying to intentionally break the game and just play it, it works well enough for the most part.

 

[cvv]

It is quite easy to point at some scripted thing in Cyberpunk and go "AHA!!!" but..yeah, shit is scripted. If I am not trying to intentionally break the game and just play it, it works well enough for the most part.

Did you just run through the MQ or did you try to poke the game in various side quest and activities?

 

[Paul_cz]

Did you just run through the MQ or did you try to poke the game in various side quest and activities?

I did everything there was to do incl. the filler trash - every mainjob, sidejob, gig, ncpd call, purchased every car. I loved the city and its atmosphere as well as the gunplay and didn't want to leave it until there was nothing else to do.

 

[Comrade Goby]

Honestly the map looks so nice that they really just need to focus a little bit on city liveliness and it can carry.

 

[DeepOcean]

Honestly the map looks so nice that they really just need to focus a little bit on city liveliness and it can carry.

If the game remained how it is and they actually bothered placing enough interesting stuff on hard to reach places so you had to Parkour to find that stuff, honestly, I couldnt give a fuck to V whining or Keanu Reeves being Keanu Reeves, the only thing I didnt grow tired off was using the leg implants jumping around and seeing the vistas, what is ironic is that their best asset, the city, they decided to go full Ubisoft with, what a pity. Some Mirror's Edge, Cyberbug edition would be interesting.

 

[Gargaune]

If the game remained how it is and they actually bothered placing enough interesting stuff on hard to reach places so you had to Parkour to find that stuff, honestly, I couldnt give a fuck to V whining or Keanu Reeves being Keanu Reeves, the only thing I didnt grow tired off was using the leg implants jumping around and seeing the vistas, what is ironic is that their best asset, the city, they decided to go full Ubisoft with, what a pity. Some Mirror's Edge, Cyberbug edition would be interesting.

I still say their best chance at clawing back some street cred with Cyberpunk 2077 at this point is a megadungeon expansion. Hit up one of those megabuildings, cram a proper branching plot into it, design some proper levels with actual breathing room for alternate routes, implement some meaningful stat checks and interesting loot etc. Hell, they could even dump V and have us roll a new bellend to more properly control for stat progression, but they wouldn't, it's not CDPR's MO.

 

[RRRrrr]

. I don't remember to not cause the cascade in Half-Life

When I was very young (like 4-5 years old) and playing Half-Life 1, I couldn't figure out how to do the cascade. I didn't know English nor what to do. I spent weeks hanging around Black Mesa without causing the cascade. I played it like an adventure game, clicking everywhere and trying to talk to everyone.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

any eta on when this game is leaving early access?