Well, no. As I said, it was a business decision, not an artistic one. And business-wise, it has paid off.
Pray that modders adapt PnP modules or even create something new with the release of the modding tools.
Deus Ex 4 has it too, in a sense, you load up too many black market augs up to a certain plot point, you risk Jensen's firmware turning into Windows 95. Or the Wild Mage in D&D is pretty much a walking "I never asked for this" billboard. Chance-of-failure mechanics, even major ones, aren't that controversial even among mainstream gamers as long as decisions and effects are made clear in advance.
! Would you need to go to a fixer to remove some implants? Or at least get some adjusted? This could be a good reason to make the fixers more important overall...
I was thinking on that too, since cyberpsychosis is pitched as a definitively blown fuse in Cyberpunk's lore, not just flipping some switches like in Jensen's case, but taking a couple of liberties really wouldn't have been the end of the world. You could require regular maintenance or sleep or introduced an addiction to some costly focus-enhancing drugs or etc. etc. and you could've even tied some of that stuff into Regina's quest for a cyberpsychosis treatment or whatever. Point being, it wouldn't be so much of a problem, but rather an opportunity to add some interesting mechanical loops to the game.The only problem is how to fix this because it wouldn't be as easy as drinking some blood when you are a vampire
Another way to approach it might simply be to have the PC skirt the line but show another key NPC's descent into cyberpsychosis and becoming a major threat later on.I was thinking on that too, since cyberpsychosis is pitched as a definitively blown fuse in Cyberpunk's lore, not just flipping some switches like in Jensen's case, but taking a couple of liberties really wouldn't have been the end of the world. You could require regular maintenance or sleep or introduced an addiction to some costly focus-enhancing drugs or etc. etc. and you could've even tied some of that stuff into Regina's quest for a cyberpsychosis treatment or whatever. Point being, it wouldn't be so much of a problem, but rather an opportunity to add some interesting mechanical loops to the game.The only problem is how to fix this because it wouldn't be as easy as drinking some blood when you are a vampire
Yes, aside from the regular augmentations, you can choose to activate some black market systems at the expense of additional load on an Overclock stat. The higher your Overclock, the more likely you are to get Glitches, ranging from visual artifacts to UI failures and even critical augmentation malfunctions. Once you've enabled some of these black market features, the only way to reduce your Overclock is to permanently disable some of your regular systems.
Could lead to some hilarious outcomes, but then I think you'd really be nosediving into savescum territory. I suspect people would be onboard with whacking civvies and facing the NCPD over a cyberpsychosis fit, but they probably wouldn't be too happy botching a quest branch or waking up in River's bed on account of it.
Sure, it would be a solid way to show cyberpsychosis narratively, but given an opportunity, I'm always in favour of letting the player experience stuff in gameplay.
It's better than HR but still an evolution from it instead of a complete overhaul, so if you hated that, MD might not do much better. I thought HR was reasonably good as a modern DX successor and MD was excellent by the same metric, so maybe set your expectations along those lines. And yeah, Squeenix's batshit nickel-and-diming really hobbled the game's release, it deserved better. Either way, if you already have it, it's at least worth trying for an hour or so to see how you get on, just don't get too hung up on the plot and disable Objective Locators and the Radar in your Gameplay Settings right away, Deus Ex games shouldn't have those.
I'm not sure that's the case. Even Dishonored's Chaos mechanic, while not the most inspired, was actually a creative relaxation of Thief's "don't kill people" rule - you could kill people, but there'd be a price to pay later. And ultimately, the cyberpsychosis mechanic we're discussing would be closer to the slot limitations on cyberware, I don't see a lot of people complaining that there's only one leg slot because, even among general audiences, it's understood that some exclusive choices are part of what makes the game work. So in what we were talking about you could have X total implants but as a soft limit, and you could go higher but at your own risk. I don't think the concept in and of itself would vex players, the trick would be for devs to correctly balance the limits and the consequences and to communicate them clearly.
Somebody get the channers on this, pronto.
I think it celebrates augmentation in the game world because of how much it's under corporate control. The biggest people are crackpots because it turns you into one, being anti-cyberware in a world controlled by cyberware. You can use tons of examples from politics to social shit irl nowadays, but as society condemns / flies by people, their arguments become more unhinged and radical to counter the normalization. Most of the pro-cyberware PDAs and shit are 'CYBERWARE IS AWESOME -SPONSORED BY ARASAKA' so as unsubtle as it is, the 'religious crackpot' is just more obvious as a 'lol funny goofball' than the mundane and normalized corporate / government fellatio of their own ideas and products.
Sure, but my point is that people wouldn't like it. Even as relaxed as Dishonored's system is (that allows you to get the good ending so long as you don't go full rambo on most missions) just having the system in place there is enough to make people squirm. I've seen accounts of some being unable to play the game normally and just having to reload every time someone spots them because "what if the game penalizes me for killing them?"
Ambiguous, sure, and though I don't remember Dishonored all that well, I recall feeling uneasy about how many bodies I dropped and how much of an impact that would have on future missions. But, again, I don't see the concept of a cyberpsychosis mechanic generating random challenges past a clear threshold as analogue to Dishonored's Chaos mechanic - if, for the sake of example, it stated "after 5 implants, each additional implant adds a 3% chance of spazzing out in combat", is that ambiguous? You're not making an on-the-spot decision about owning up that one kill against a hypothetical kill you might need later and nebulous limits, you know what the stakes are and you're under no pressure to take that extra implant.
