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

[AwesomeButton]

Fair enough, but Elden Ring doesn't touch the budget bracket of Cyberpunk, BGIII (the counter example I was thinking of), Witcher 3, the Assassin's Creed almost-RPGs, etc.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Baldur's Gate 3 has so many dialogue scenes and cutscenes that it doesn't seem terribly different from The Witcher III in this regard, as opposed to other aspects such as combat.

 

[moon knight]

i decided to give combat mods a go. After very long 2min research ive settled on hardcore22v2, went with katana.
Its quite surreal. Everyone dies on single quick slash so no finisher is ever going to happen. Red skulls need like 2 slashes.
If you start jedi blocking bullets then enemies will die to their own shoots faster than you run out of stamina. Assuming you keep at it for a while, lower hp pool means that they get staggered after each returned shot.
Grenades kill people.
Since enemies die on single strike, its possible to run very fast and clear room of people without alerting anyone.

As such it makes game easier for experienced player?

I like the concept of killing fast and dying fast, but hardcore is seriously unbalanced. You can achieve the same results with a combination of mods

 

[AwesomeButton]

Baldur's Gate 3 has so many dialogue scenes and cutscenes that it doesn't seem terribly different from The Witcher III in this regard, as opposed to other aspects such as combat.

The sad thing about BG3 is that it's a playable version of the RPG Ages of Man. It starts out like a PnP adventure flawlessly translated to PC in Act 1, then in Act 2 it declines into a long Dragon Age Origins chapter, feeling great in terms of atmosphere, but ultimately too talkative and narrative-heavy, taking away the player's freedom to compose and tell the story in his own style through his roleplaying and interaction with the systems. Finally in Act 3 it declines into an unremarkable, mediocre, overwritten, unpolished and unfinished modern "spiritual successor", which counts mostly on name-dropping household names from the series and the player's completionism urge to get him to the end.

 

[Lord_Potato]

Fair enough, but Elden Ring doesn't touch the budget bracket of Cyberpunk, BGIII (the counter example I was thinking of), Witcher 3, the Assassin's Creed almost-RPGs, etc.

I'm sure Cyberpunk's budget was larger (over 400 million $ with expansion) but Witcher 3? This game was much cheaper

 

[AwesomeButton]

Fair enough, but Elden Ring doesn't touch the budget bracket of Cyberpunk, BGIII (the counter example I was thinking of), Witcher 3, the Assassin's Creed almost-RPGs, etc.

I'm sure Cyberpunk's budget was larger (over 400 million $ with expansion) but Witcher 3? This game was much cheaper

You are right, Witcher 3 seems to have cost around 30-something million USD. Even if you double that for inflation, Elden Ring was.... 200 million?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Half of that was Keanu's salary though.

 

[Fatberg Slim]

I recently finished this plus Phantom Liberty. The game has already been discussed to death so I thought I’d just share some minor things that I appreciated and that I’ll probably still remember a few years from now:

- Being able to wipe out the Voodoo Boyz after you’re done with them. Given how railroaded the majority of the game was to this point, I was honestly surprised I was allowed to do this
- “Rust in piss, shitbot!”
- Songbird's ass . No wonder she was able to manipulate V so easily after 3 minutes of following her around!
- Finding the shovel that the Caretaker boss used in Witcher 3 HoS. This fight prompted one of my favorite Geralt moments of the entire series
- Panam's consistency as a needy bitch throughout the entire game and ending
- The quest line with the guy who wants to be crucified like Jesus, particularly how it was treated more or less seriously and not just for laughs

 

[Tehdagah]

 

[Justicar]

Dead game





Would have sold 50 million+ by now if they launched it in 2.0 state.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Perkel]

Testing new gif comparison tool. Made some path tracing on/off:

 

[gurugeorge]

Testing new gif comparison tool. Made some path tracing on/off:

I just recently got an RTX 4070 Super in prep for upgrading my system in the New Year (I wanted a wee bit of instant gratification lol), and I was playing around with PT/RT - it does look pretty amazing. It's a subtle difference in some ways but once you've tried it, it's hard to go back.

It reminds me of when I got a DX10 card years ago and discovered the shadows from trees while I was playing LOTRO (so your character could be sun-dappled by light coming through the trees). It's maybe not that vast a difference in and of itself (and with CP2077 the raster look is pretty darn good in an of itself, it has to be said), but subliminally it all adds up to a deeper sense of "presence."

 

[Perkel]

It makes the biggest difference in two areas:

- shadowed areas that are directly next to sulight
- characters

Imho the biggest difference is with characters.

C77 characters like peds look kind of normal to sometimes last gen. But with pathtracing you can easily see that models and shaders are excellent, it is the lighting that makes them look a lot worse than they actually are:

 

[Perkel]

Another avenue is HDR. Pathtracing naturally makes sunlight very strong as in real life. This image looks overblown in without HDR but on my OLED it looks amazing:

 

[Alienman]

The man looks happier with pathtracing off.

 

[Perkel]

Another one of aspects it improves is giving a depth to the image. Humans evolved to recognize those shadows and judge depth based on those shadows. If something has wrong shadows or is unlit wrongly it makes image flatter than it should be. Here is good example. In path traced image you can see clearly flat face of this shop with clear alcove in the middle. In non-pathtraced image it kind of blends together.

 

[Perkel]

What happens if you find character that sits in shadowed area, aka combine both badly lit characters + badly lit environment and use pathtracing to fix it ?

You get this:

 

[Melcar]

Are those stills made with low settings or something? My game without gaytracing and everything else maxed out does not look that ass.

 

[Perkel]

Are those stills made with low settings or something? My game without gaytracing and everything else maxed out does not look that ass.

Everything is on ultra. And yes game looks this way but you never notice it because there is nothing better to compare it too. Once you compare it to pathtraced image you see the difference and recognize issues. Kind of like if you play non stop at 30fps everything seems fine, only when you move to 60fps suddenly that 30fps seems archaic.

C77 also has dual personality when it comes to lighting. CDPR made sure that everything quest related is properly lit in all conditions, there are still issues but they use "hacks" to make those scenes look good. Like single lights, fake GI etc.

But once you go off beaten path like in cases above their GI sollution works but has number of issues.
What path tracing does is to fix lighting in all areas regardless if they are on main path or some random junkpile in middle of nowhere.

I'll do some more comparisons. I'll try to see if i can do 4k gifs. Because 1080p ones don't do it justice and there is a lot of compression artifacts.

 

[General Disarray]

Another avenue is HDR. Pathtracing naturally makes sunlight very strong as in real life. This image looks overblown in without HDR but on my OLED it looks amazing:

Looks great, I have a 4k QLED flagship model but only a 5600xt so playing with fsr. Was planning on getting a 7900 XTX for native 4k, but that pathtracing looks good.

How would you rate/prioritize 4k native, hdr and pathtracing for visual?

I really like hdr, have phsical 4k blu-ray movies and play most singleplayer game with autohdr with fixed ICC profiles.

 

[Perkel]

Here is more normal situation for C77 lighting. Indoors, very little bounce lighting and only few small lights rather that one strong light that needs to lit everything. Aka situation in which pathtracing won't give you much.

First still alone without comparison. Looks normal.

and here is comparison in form of gif:

It doesn't do much. It only fixes fake gray ambient lighting coming out of nowhere and leaves only lights that are in the scene.

-----

Another example.
V apartment in the middle of the day. It absolutely looks normal. It looks great. Top tier graphics.

But in fact there are huge problems with lighting.
You only can see those problems when you activate path tracing and then you can't unsee those problems:

Now you can see problems it fixes:
- lack of proper sunlight in room, everything is evenly lit
- blue TV holograms barely cast any blue light, everything seems to be lit by warm orange light
- shadows are all wrong, you can see that clearly on that white coffe table.

How would you rate/prioritize 4k native, hdr and pathtracing for visual?

I really like hdr, have phsical 4k blu-ray movies and play most singleplayer game with autohdr with fixed ICC profiles.

Pathtracing > HDR > 4k

 

[Perkel]

More character comparisons. Can't find any host with proper quality.

 

[AnKor]

V apartment in the middle of the day

While other examples indeed look better with path tracing, I think the room is a bad one.
Do you really believe a room with a lot of white surfaces lit by daylight through a large window should have such dark shadows everywhere?

 

[General Disarray]

...

How would you rate/prioritize 4k native, hdr and pathtracing for visual?

I really like hdr, have phsical 4k blu-ray movies and play most singleplayer game with autohdr with fixed ICC profiles.

Pathtracing > HDR > 4k

Really? It must be good then. I got 1600 nits peak 10% window on my Samsung and 700 sustained whole 55 inch screen. And a normal sdr monitor is like 100-200 nits, pathetic in comparison. But I can imagine it looks great with pathtracing. I sit like 2 meters from the tv so I can see 4k details, and the upscaling along with lower texture really hurts. What is your setup? But again the comparison gifs really make pathtracing stand out.