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

[AwesomeButton]

I was dead certain, and I've said it multiple times, that Regina's missions are an unfinished parallel storyline, in the way that Witcher 3 has storylines that partly intertwine with the main plot and have stages which are triggered further by advancing the main plot.

 

[Perkel]

The version of 2077 that had multiplayer was before they wrote Takemura. Hanako was the villain who killed your family and Jackie was your childhood friend. Game started with you going to Viktor and modding your face so Hanako couldn't recognize you in Night City. River Ward was the one to rescue you from the junkyard and there was a higher emphasis on detective work and braindances. You can see elements of this in the original trailer with MaxTac because at the time the plot was about discovering the government was conspiring with corporations to hide the cause of cyberpsychosis. Most of that content still made it in as Regina's side missions but without any resolution.

I would have liked to see them tie in Johnny to the main story by implying he was going cyberpsycho and that's why he bombed Arasaka. Could have had River and the player hunting down artifacts from Silverhand's life to see if he was insane and Arasaka was innocent. I know at one point there was supposed to be a BD that showed Johnny was framed by Blackhand for the raid but God only knows what happened to that in development.

The version of C77 with multiplayer never existed. IT was something they planned to release 2 years AFTER C77. They were supposed to wrap C77 on release. One team would focus on DLC and other bigger one on Multiplayer.

1st trailer for game was done just to recruit people. It never had anything to do with final game and it was released 2 years before Witcher 3 release back when CDPR was still small studio barely existing and C77 was only in some rough idea.

 

[SpaceWizardz]

I'd like a source for all this, seems more like the game was just a directionless mess for most of development until a producer took the reigns and hired a celebrity stunt cast to distract people while having the writers just copy Red Dead 2's plot so they could finish the damn thing.

 

[ind33d]

The game being a directionless mess may end up a good thing. 2077 has so many random and poorly fleshed-out elements that they have endless possibilities for expansions, spinoffs, animes, dragon dildos. Deus Ex clone starring Takemura, LA Noire with River, VR games based on braindances, a Left 4 Dead co-op shooter where the zombie is a cyberpsycho, the writing is a goldmine. Conceptually CP2077 is probably the best idea for a game of all time.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Main story unlike state of the game at release wasn't something they rushed or swapped from something else and it's one of it's main strengths.

I'd say that it was both rushed and swapped from something else. Rushed because you end up with that bullshit cutscene with you and Jackie going on various jobs which would've introduced you properly to the various gangs of Night City and built your street cred in the process (i.e. what should've been the actual first chapter of gameplay)* and swapped because the whole Johnny thing is poorly thought out leading to a glaring narrative issue with the gameplay incentivizing doing open world side content while the plot incentivizes urgency given V's predicament with the malfunctioning chip stuck in his head (which is too obvious of an issue for it to be some developer oversight rather than a thought out compromise that the devs had to make in order to fit Keanu's extended presence despite them otherwise striving for quality narrative design which shows in other parts of the game).

*And that's without even mentioning the lifepaths which were completely gutted as well.

 

[lukaszek]

ind33d where do you get all of those

 

[Wesp5]

Rushed because you end up with that bullshit cutscene with you and Jackie going on various jobs which would've introduced you properly to the various gangs of Night City and built your street cred in the process...

That makes no sense! You rush something because you can't finish it in time, but these missions should have been the first they made for the game. If they ever existed, why would they have cut them?

 

[SpaceWizardz]

The game being a directionless mess may end up a good thing. 2077 has so many random and poorly fleshed-out elements that they have endless possibilities for expansions, spinoffs, animes, dragon dildos. Deus Ex clone starring Takemura, LA Noire with River, VR games based on braindances, a Left 4 Dead co-op shooter where the zombie is a cyberpsycho, the writing is a goldmine. Conceptually CP2077 is probably the best idea for a game of all time.

Most of this stuff comes from the tabletop, I don't think CDPR even made any significant additions to the canon (Braindances?) but I'm not a lore expert here.
I don't know if Pondsmith is really involved on the business side of things anymore but he'd probably reject your spinoff ideas, turning something with explicit anti-capitalist themes into a genre salad bar is a bit grotesque.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Rushed because you end up with that bullshit cutscene with you and Jackie going on various jobs which would've introduced you properly to the various gangs of Night City and built your street cred in the process...

That makes no sense! You rush something because you can't finish it in time, but these missions should have been the first they made for the game. If they ever existed, why cut them?

Easiest part of the story to condense into a cutscene as to go straight from the prologue to preparing for the big heist from which the main plot proper takes off with the chip coming in V's possession. Also probably seemed less relevant to properly introduce the various gangs early on through handcrafted missions (which also presumably required more time to craft than regular ones due to having to account for Jackie's presence) once plans for a fleshed out reputation system were scrapped.

 

[gurugeorge]

The version of 2077 that had multiplayer was before they wrote Takemura. Hanako was the villain who killed your family and Jackie was your childhood friend. Game started with you going to Viktor and modding your face so Hanako couldn't recognize you in Night City. River Ward was the one to rescue you from the junkyard and there was a higher emphasis on detective work and braindances. You can see elements of this in the original trailer with MaxTac because at the time the plot was about discovering the government was conspiring with corporations to hide the cause of cyberpsychosis. Most of that content still made it in as Regina's side missions but without any resolution.

I would have liked to see them tie in Johnny to the main story by implying he was going cyberpsycho and that's why he bombed Arasaka. Could have had River and the player hunting down artifacts from Silverhand's life to see if he was insane and Arasaka was innocent. I know at one point there was supposed to be a BD that showed Johnny was framed by Blackhand for the raid but God only knows what happened to that in development.

That (and your previous revelations) sounds like a much better game, and it always seemed to me intuitively that the game must have been initially designed more around progression through the city/factions, and the Keanu content always felt more to me either like endgame content or DLC content. But as someone else asked - what are your sources for this?

 

[ind33d]

The version of 2077 that had multiplayer was before they wrote Takemura. Hanako was the villain who killed your family and Jackie was your childhood friend. Game started with you going to Viktor and modding your face so Hanako couldn't recognize you in Night City. River Ward was the one to rescue you from the junkyard and there was a higher emphasis on detective work and braindances. You can see elements of this in the original trailer with MaxTac because at the time the plot was about discovering the government was conspiring with corporations to hide the cause of cyberpsychosis. Most of that content still made it in as Regina's side missions but without any resolution.

I would have liked to see them tie in Johnny to the main story by implying he was going cyberpsycho and that's why he bombed Arasaka. Could have had River and the player hunting down artifacts from Silverhand's life to see if he was insane and Arasaka was innocent. I know at one point there was supposed to be a BD that showed Johnny was framed by Blackhand for the raid but God only knows what happened to that in development.

That (and your previous revelations) sounds like a much better game, and it always seemed to me intuitively that the game must have been initially designed more around progression through the city/factions, and the Keanu content always felt more to me either like endgame content or DLC content. But as someone else asked - what are your sources for this?

GOG accidentally uploaded a 0.0 pre-patch version of 2077 but took it down. Some people got access by mistake. The day one patch actually was just deleting content CDPR couldn't finish in time like vertical waypoints and inspecting items in 3D. Also had some of the crazier shit before government censors toned it down, like the mayor going to the braindance club for a bug-squishing fetish

 

[EvilWolf]

I just finished Cyberpunk after 75 hours. It's obvious that at least a third of the content was cut, but like VTMB it nails the atmosphere to such an extent that I still think it's one of the best RPGs of all time. The problem is that 2077's strengths are its writing, characters, and aesthetics—which are lost on the average gamer, who is a drooling fucking moron.

Stuff like how playing the guitar in your apartment foreshadows one of the endings is so ambitious that I would be very curious to see what the original script was before they rushed it out the door. Cyberpunk 2077 is a game that launched with no AI but commissioned an entire album just for one missable questline about treating your headmate's band member's suicidal depression. The fact that this game shipped at all should be considered performance art

What third of the game ? Everything ends with bow tie. Maybe you mean prologue ?

I just finished Cyberpunk after 75 hours. It's obvious that at least a third of the content was cut, but like VTMB it nails the atmosphere to such an extent that I still think it's one of the best RPGs of all time.

Yeah, difference being that VtMB starts going into crappy combat dominated territory near the end while '77 is full of crappy side content all the way throughout (and unlike VtMB, most of the side content isn't memorable nor does it flesh out interesting NPCs for you to interact with).

Apparently the Keanu/Silverhand stuff was supposed to be DLC and the Morgan Blackhand heist storyline (the RPG part) was supposed to be the core game. This is why there is a Relic skill tree that does nothing and the chip doesn't have a countdown timer to killing you even though there is literally a working in-game clock. The main story was about doing heists and police work to make enough money to leave Night City, and at the end you would get fused with Johnny's engram.

Doesn't make any sense. While surface level story in Cyberpunk2077 might be pretty easy to execute quickly swapping stuff the underskin part of it is clearly something someone sat down and thought about for a long fucking time.

Main story unlike state of the game at release wasn't something they rushed or swapped from something else and it's one of it's main strengths. It's soundtrack pretty much tells you it was always story about Johny and V not about Morgan. They literally recorded whole album as metanarrative about V and Johny best shown in Black Dog EP. Which has double meaning. Same with Never Fade Away which in game is recorded as song for Alt but if you actually look at it from player perspective it is also song about V and Johny.
And this doesn't just end with soundtrack.

Morgan idea about story might be true to super early pre witcher 3 release game where it was still not what C77 become which completely got scrapped after Witcher 3 release.

You can't have an open world Cyberpunk 2020 game with in game radio without Johnny Silverhand music. It's a 100% fact that prior to Big Chungus reveal that they were going to have Silverhand, Blackhand, and Arasaka "personal hero" selection in character creation. After Chungus-gate they leaned hard into Silverhand. Only God himself knows the masterpiece we would have got if David Bowie had lived to play Johnny Silverhand like Mike wanted.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I would have liked to see them tie in Johnny to the main story by implying he was going cyberpsycho and that's why he bombed Arasaka. Could have had River and the player hunting down artifacts from Silverhand's life to see if he was insane and Arasaka was innocent. I know at one point there was supposed to be a BD that showed Johnny was framed by Blackhand for the raid but God only knows what happened to that in development.

I think that last point evolved into Johnny just being the one who gets caught and held responsible by Saburo, after the "choose your hero" backstories were abandoned in favor of the "choose a lifepath" idea.


https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkg.../?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/778998-cyberpunk-2077/77346087

 

[Wesp5]

Easiest part of the story to condense into a cutscene as to go straight from the prologue to preparing for the big heist from which the main plot proper takes off with the chip coming in V's possession.

Why would they want to condense anything unique when they later bloat the game with generic side missions?

 

[Heroic Liberator]

Why would they want to condense anything unique when they later bloat the game with generic side missions?

Bad priorities I guess? "It's an open world game, so there must be enough open world content." And if that's your priority, it's much faster and less resource intensive to make a bunch of gigs and shorter side jobs when you're running out of time. And I doubt that they originally intended for it to be that way (as we do get some good side jobs here and there, although nothing on the level of The Pickup in terms of complexity), but their poor time management made it necessary for them to cut their losses. Keeping the few better side quests that were either close to completion or already done and focusing their efforts on quantity over quality for the remaining time.

 

[PanteraNera]

Why would they want to condense anything unique when they later bloat the game with generic side missions?

Maybe they could not make them work, to many bugs, or what ever incompetency.
To make up for it they added the generic shit.

There was a also a fairly long video ITT where basically it was said that they made up missions and stuff for presentations and videos and team members where upset that they spent the time and manpower instead of actually adding it to the real game. To me this is a clear sign that they wanted to, but couldn't. So they were only able to "fake" it, because otherwise this stuff would have made it into it.

 

[Fedora Master]

 

[Perkel]

Why would they want to condense anything unique when they later bloat the game with generic side missions?

I am guessing so that game wouldn't be divided into two parts. With such quick prologue you effectively have open city in less than 2-3 hours. In case of heist being later they would have to write everything with assumption that you didn't have johny din't know X etc.

I mean you can see that when you do missions before Heist in game. Normally you do them with Johny commenting etc. but if you do them before Heist there isn't Johny to talk with about them.

Hell you can see how this breaks if you don't go to Tom's Dinner after Heist.

 

[AwesomeButton]

I'm willing to buy the theory that CDPR released the DLC story as the main game and are now going to release the main game story refashioned as a DLC. "The Heist" makes sense as a high-stakes mission that would get offered to an already experienced merc (and player) with some fame attached to his name. Secondly, the main game storyline is too short, even taking into account CDPR's announced plans to scale down the main story after Witcher 3 felt like too much to them in retrospect.

Thirdly, there is also the boasting from CDPR that Phantom Meanace is the biggest expansion they've ever made, but let's remain conservative about those claims.(Fake news apparently)

BTW I started updating my mods last night, and was surprised to find that the new version of Appearance Menu Mod has been supporting invoking animations on characters spawned by the player since Dec 22! This makes it significantly easier to RP V calling a hooker to his home. Previously you had to use photomode for this, but now you can spawn any character model and make it "do things".

 

[AwesomeButton]

I mean you can see that when you do missions before Heist in game. Normally you do them with Johny commenting etc. but if you do them before Heist there isn't Johny to talk with about them.

Yet Johnny's comments are only important in the main story missions. His appearances in the side missions, gigs, etc is just for flavor, and could easliy have been added after the fact.

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

Thirdly, there is also the boasting from CDPR that Phantom Meanace is the biggest expansion they've ever made, but let's remain conservative about those claims.

That's incorrect. The interview that talked about it was later corrected by CDPR stating that they said it was their most 'expensive' expansion. On the topic of it being their biggest expansion that was never confirmed or denied. They simply corrected the interviewer who misunderstood the answer.

 

[Popiel]

So, I have finished it for the first time yesterday and what I can say is that the endings definitely upped my overall assessment of this one. I played two - the Devil and the Stars - and I'm looking forwards to the last one (I already know what happens in the Sun though). They are well written and well built, very strong presentation. The Devil is amazingly haunting and bleak (hey, welcome to corpohell you helped built, enjoy). The Stars is pretty conventional good fuzzy-feelings ending, but I really enjoyed it. A damn shame that this game is evidently biased towards one (oookay, maybe two) companion/romance option out of four,

Spoiler

I just can't explain no distinct River ending in a way other than cut content

. A damn shame that the rest of the game wasn't as strong as its endings.

Spoiler

Saburo-Palpatine in the Devil made me laugh though, I enjoy my scene chewing villains.

 

[ind33d]

I suspect there were supposed to be 22 endings, one for each card of the major arcana. Suicide is The Fool, taking over Arasaka would be the Emperor, Panam would be The Lovers, Devil ending is accepting the contract, Tower is Rogue, The Moon would be the cut heist, etc.

The Misty red pill/blue pill choose-your-own-adventure is so obviously cobbled together that CDPR must have had a better idea. The tarot mission goes nowhere, it would make sense if it was really about how to choose your ending.

 

[Perkel]

I suspect there were supposed to be 22 endings, one for each card of the major arcana. Suicide is The Fool, taking over Arasaka would be the Emperor, Panam would be The Lovers, Devil ending is accepting the contract, Tower is Rogue, The Moon would be the cut heist, etc.

The Misty red pill/blue pill choose-your-own-adventure is so obviously cobbled together that CDPR must have had a better idea. The tarot mission goes nowhere, it would make sense if it was really about how to choose your ending.

Misty tells different things depending on state of your choices as game progresses. They probably just wanted to give quest so that player could have pointer to her regardless of completion of game and not something you can "finish".
Also some of the cards symbolize different people. Fool is V, saburo is emperor etc.

Your comment reminds me of that dark souls meme about guy dying and saying something like "...forgive me Zanzibar"

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

I highly doubt The Fool would ever be put in a position where it symbolized suicide, that's simply not what that card represents.