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

[Justicar]

I found an explanation on Reddit that says "pon pon" is like "plap plap" and the rest of it is, yes, "plap plap me every day".

Every hoe is like that in the first year after that it changes to plap plap me every month/year.

 

[AwesomeButton]

the reason why Japanese companies were so prominent in 80s cyberpunk works,

The Walkman, the VCRs, the fucking SEGA console...

 

[Ezekiel]

It's lame, dude.

This isn't NFS Most Wanted, chases aren't a core focus of CP2077 gameplay
And even in Most Wanted the traffic moves at a slow speed relative to the player and comparatively to CP2077 that NFS game has significantly less traffic on the road (and no, it wasn't hardware limitation, but intentional game design)

he cars never go fast enough even on freeways.

The game was already a clusterfuck on release, because sandbox games of this scale and complexity are a technical nightmare
And the faster the movement of an object, the more troublesome said object becomes to deal with at an engine level

Need for Speed with its empty streets and constant high speed looks shitty, nothing like what I described. The gunplay in this is trash too. No, to hell with your low RPG standards, games that apparently can't do anything really well because specialization might scare away the bad players who only know how to work stats and perks. Put in or build on the third person shooting of Max Payne 3, the sneaking of Metal Gear Solid 3 and the driving of a great sim racer in a dense city with realistic crowds. As for "technical nightmare," these devs waste their time focusing 50 times as much on static graphics as they do on dynamics including physics (like car crashes). Dynamics will be more impressive in motion!

 

[Silva]

BTW, Cyberpunk 2077 + DLC is also on sale. Is it worth it too? I should ask it in the appropriate thread but there's probably a higher number of Immersive Sim fans here, and I would prefer your opinions. Something that have put me off of it so far is it's edgy and colorful aesthetics, as if the streets are Paris fashion week catwalks for people to show their cool clothes and chrome. I like my cyberpunk darker and grittier like in Blade Runner, Deus Ex and Shadowrun (SNES & Genesis). Should I endure the aesthetics?

If you don't like the aesthetic, you might be in for a bad time here.

I think C2077 is remarkably good, the stink of its disastrous launch finally dissipated after the 2.0 release.

It's not anything like an imsim. It's a shooter RPG where your build choices amount to what kind of gun (or sword) you want to be good with. No air vents, and thank god because I fucking hate air vents. Level design is sometimes linear and sometimes much more open. The stealth mechanics are good, or at least good enough, and playing it Thief style is rewarding.

The vibe is really what makes me like the game. Not just the visuals, but the mood of a big crime city and your place in it. The streets look colorful to the eye - the truth is everything is shades of grey. More than anything this game to me has the feel of Bloodlines. Yep, I said it. A city where everyone has their own agenda, some characters are memorable, and you get caught up in all this crazy shit you usually can't control. Your hand does fall on a lever sometimes and once in a while you can even choose to pull it or not. Aside from gunning down a million nameless thugs, you have substantial power of death or life over major NPCs in a few situations where it feels like it matters. One early mission has you infiltrate a fortress of heavily armed antagonistic cyborgs, and if you want you can actually team up with the cyborgs against a rival ambush, which felt great. Of course the story is mostly on rails (also like Bloodlines).

The worst part for me is the main NPC is a very boring bad character and it seems like there are a lot of sections where you are forced to play through his boring story, using his one cool gun and listening to his cool voice act cool. The whole plot about you being handcuffed to him, the main plot of the game, is itself a good idea and it's very motivating, but the actual moment to moment with this character is simply a drag, or at least I found it to be.

I got about 60 hours in which felt like about halfway through the main story. Actually I have no idea how close I am; although every new story beat makes sense, it kind of feels like there is never any end in sight which may be why I drifted away from the game. I would like to finish it someday and still have it installed but there's only so much Johnny Silverhand I can take. I did buy the DLC but never touched it so far so I can't comment on that.

Thanks. I'll give it a try since it's on a sale anyway.

I heard the DLC locations actually have more of a darker vibe than the edgy default Night City? Can someone confirm it?

 

[DJOGamer PT]

games that apparently can't do anything really well because specialization might scare away the bad players who only know how to work stats and perks.

Why are you looking for in-depth high speed motor vehicle pursuit gameplay systems, in an first-person action sandbox whose focus are its lite-rpg mechanics and storytelling?

You really want a game where you can austically set up whatever 70s car chase you fantasize about?

Have fun

Put in or build on the third person shooting of Max Payne 3, the sneaking of Metal Gear Solid 3 and the driving of a great sim racer in a dense city with realistic crowds.

Yeah and now you have an incoherent stew of gameplay ideas, all of which also don't intelligibly build upon the game's aspiration of role-playing and storytelling
Great gameplay design

these devs waste their time focusing 50 times as much on static graphics

Wtf are you talking about?
This game literally has one of the most impressive implementations of dynamic lighting

 

[Ninjerk]

BTW, Cyberpunk 2077 + DLC is also on sale. Is it worth it too? I should ask it in the appropriate thread but there's probably a higher number of Immersive Sim fans here, and I would prefer your opinions. Something that have put me off of it so far is it's edgy and colorful aesthetics, as if the streets are Paris fashion week catwalks for people to show their cool clothes and chrome. I like my cyberpunk darker and grittier like in Blade Runner, Deus Ex and Shadowrun (SNES & Genesis). Should I endure the aesthetics?

If you don't like the aesthetic, you might be in for a bad time here.

I think C2077 is remarkably good, the stink of its disastrous launch finally dissipated after the 2.0 release.

It's not anything like an imsim. It's a shooter RPG where your build choices amount to what kind of gun (or sword) you want to be good with. No air vents, and thank god because I fucking hate air vents. Level design is sometimes linear and sometimes much more open. The stealth mechanics are good, or at least good enough, and playing it Thief style is rewarding.

The vibe is really what makes me like the game. Not just the visuals, but the mood of a big crime city and your place in it. The streets look colorful to the eye - the truth is everything is shades of grey. More than anything this game to me has the feel of Bloodlines. Yep, I said it. A city where everyone has their own agenda, some characters are memorable, and you get caught up in all this crazy shit you usually can't control. Your hand does fall on a lever sometimes and once in a while you can even choose to pull it or not. Aside from gunning down a million nameless thugs, you have substantial power of death or life over major NPCs in a few situations where it feels like it matters. One early mission has you infiltrate a fortress of heavily armed antagonistic cyborgs, and if you want you can actually team up with the cyborgs against a rival ambush, which felt great. Of course the story is mostly on rails (also like Bloodlines).

The worst part for me is the main NPC is a very boring bad character and it seems like there are a lot of sections where you are forced to play through his boring story, using his one cool gun and listening to his cool voice act cool. The whole plot about you being handcuffed to him, the main plot of the game, is itself a good idea and it's very motivating, but the actual moment to moment with this character is simply a drag, or at least I found it to be.

I got about 60 hours in which felt like about halfway through the main story. Actually I have no idea how close I am; although every new story beat makes sense, it kind of feels like there is never any end in sight which may be why I drifted away from the game. I would like to finish it someday and still have it installed but there's only so much Johnny Silverhand I can take. I did buy the DLC but never touched it so far so I can't comment on that.

Thanks. I'll give it a try since it's on a sale anyway.

I heard the DLC locations actually have more of a darker vibe than the edgy default Night City? Can someone confirm it?

The DLC takes place entirely in a run down section of town that was once an incredibly optimistic politcal project--a mix of something like Las Vegas or one of those weird, impossible cities in the Arabic oil countries and on the other hand a hotbed of illegal arms trading and deal-making like 90s Grozny (first example that comes to mind, not the best, perhaps). It's something of an homage to spy flicks with a gritty edge on it.

With respect to Zombra's reply, for probably 90% of my 1st playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 I felt the same way about the main NPC and being forced to sit through the story (in fact, I still find the game taking control away irritating). I don't know how to address that idea without spoilers, but what I can tell you is that, more than any other game I have ever played, the game and its characters will present their opinions and/or worldviews to you that are not necessarily true or right, and some are flat out lying to you (or telling you what they believe happened, but are wrong about).

My advice is to play the game however you want the first time through avoiding spoilers and, if you found any of it interesting, start digging into fan theories and whatnot because there is a lot more going on than what meets the eye.

 

[Silva]

WOAH are the main missions all linear like this Arasaka one?

I mean, after an exciting prep with "brain dance" and all, it turns out the actual mission is a linear affair of "follow the NPC's ass, then kill enemies that pop up" followed by a cutscene-car-chase and then half an hour of QTE and dialogues where I passively listen to NPC babbling while pressing W to forward conversations? Really????

Please, say this is an exception and the following missions will be open to multiple approaches and outcomes and planning, etc.

 

[AwesomeButton]

WOAH are the main missions all linear like this Arasaka one?

I mean, after an exciting prep with "brain dance" and all, it turns out the actual mission is a linear affair of "follow the NPC's ass, then kill enemies that pop up" followed by a cutscene-car-chase and then half an hour of QTE and dialogues where I passively listen to NPC babbling while pressing W to forward conversations? Really????

Please, say this is an exception and the following missions will be open to multiple approaches and outcomes and planning, etc.

Welcome to 2020! The main quest is on rails. The C&C in the "secondary quests" is token-level. Their writing is cringe and boring, at least to my taste.

 

[Ryzer]

QTEs and main quest on rail is what CD Projekt make since Witcher 2 at least.

 

[Zombra]

WOAH are the main missions all linear like this Arasaka one?

Some of the levels are more open, but yes many are very linear. I certainly felt the tightness of the early game. When it "opens up", it's not because levels become freeform, but because there are a ton of missions to do that play differently from each other. Again it makes me think of Bloodlines - good content but very much not an imsim.

 

[Valestein]

WOAH are the main missions all linear like this Arasaka one?

Some of the levels are more open, but yes many are very linear. I certainly felt the tightness of the early game. When it "opens up", it's not because levels become freeform, but because there are a ton of missions to do that play differently from each other. Again it makes me think of Bloodlines - good content but very much not an imsim.

It's like a more open world Human Revolution/Mankind Divided.

 

[AwesomeButton]

WOAH are the main missions all linear like this Arasaka one?

I mean, after an exciting prep with "brain dance" and all, it turns out the actual mission is a linear affair of "follow the NPC's ass, then kill enemies that pop up" followed by a cutscene-car-chase and then half an hour of QTE and dialogues where I passively listen to NPC babbling while pressing W to forward conversations? Really????

Please, say this is an exception and the following missions will be open to multiple approaches and outcomes and planning, etc.

Welcome to 2020! The main quest is on rails. The C&C in the "secondary quests" is token-level. Their writing is cringe and boring, at least to my taste.

The way I've found to extract fun out of this open world game, and I wrote this some time in 2022-2023, after the 1.6 patch, is to turn it into a nostalgic 80-90s time machine, and a reenactment stage for edgy action movies of the same period*.

If you read up on the Cyberpunk PnP setting, the edgyness and tryhard tone of roleplaying is "factored into" characters and quests. They are supposed to be over the top, like you are re-watching Johnny Mnemonic. The videogame's "writing problem", in my experience, is with conveying that tone, while walking the very narrow line between obnoxiousness and parody, using the imperfect tools it has - i.e. the motion-captured acting.

Try to make a good parody with wooden actors and you will just come off as obnoxious as the audience's reaction will be either indifference, or is just "wow, this writing is shit". No one will get what you were actually going for.

* - So that's my "house rule" for not getting annoyed by the writing. My house rules for the mechanics are the mods I use, and if you take advantage of some of the work people have done, the "game" part of the game can be massaged into being fun.

 

[what am i doing]

games that apparently can't do anything really well because specialization might scare away the bad players who only know how to work stats and perks.

Why are you looking for in-depth high speed motor vehicle pursuit gameplay systems, in an first-person action sandbox whose focus are its lite-rpg mechanics and storytelling?

They put racing quests and car chase quests in the game, so criticizing the driving gameplay is 100% fair play especially given the game's massive budget and the sheer amount of money they wasted hiring one of the worst actors of our time for reddit cred.

 

[AwesomeButton]

The driving model never felt right. Traffic AI is smoke and mirrors. If you drive up to a traffic car very fast, you can see the car get "spawned" anew, not as a traffic car, and it just stands in place, stops driving on its way. I don't know what causes this bug, but I can demonstrate it.

 

[Silva]

The way I've found to extract fun out of this open world game, and I wrote this some time in 2022-2023, after the 1.6 patch, is to turn it into a nostalgic 80-90s time machine, and a reenactment stage for edgy action movies of the same period*.

If you read up on the Cyberpunk PnP setting, the edgyness and tryhard tone of roleplaying is "factored into" characters and quests. They are supposed to be over the top, like you are re-watching Johnny Mnemonic. The videogame's "writing problem", in my experience, is with conveying that tone, while walking the very narrow line between obnoxiousness and parody, using the imperfect tools it has - i.e. the motion-captured acting.

Try to make a good parody with wooden actors and you will just come off as obnoxious as the audience's reaction will be either indifference, or is just "wow, this writing is shit". No one will get what you were actually going for.

* - So that's my "house rule" for not getting annoyed by the writing. My house rules for the mechanics are the mods I use, and if you take advantage of some of the work people have done, the "game" part of the game can be massaged into being fun.See, that's the problem right there. I never really liked the colorful, edgy, pulpy aesthetics of Cyberpunk2020, and this game follows that to a T. It feels like the streets are Paris Fashion Week catwalks with exalted teens running around exhibiting their cool drip and talking in cringy slang.

See, that's the problem right there. I never really liked the colorful, edgy, pulpy aesthetics of Cyberpunk2020, and this game follows that to a T. It feels like the streets are Paris Teen Fashion Week with exalted kids running around exhibiting their cool drip and talking in cringy slang. The cyberpunk I grew up is darker and more ominous like Blade Runner, Neuromancer, Outland and Shadowrun (early works like 1e/2e books and SNES / SEGA games). Here, this is the tone I prefer in the genre...



Thanks for your thoughts. I will give the game another chance and see if I can find something interesting to like amid the cringe aesthetics and shallow gameplay.

 

[Maxie]

WOAH are the main missions all linear like this Arasaka one?

I mean, after an exciting prep with "brain dance" and all, it turns out the actual mission is a linear affair of "follow the NPC's ass, then kill enemies that pop up" followed by a cutscene-car-chase and then half an hour of QTE and dialogues where I passively listen to NPC babbling while pressing W to forward conversations? Really????

Please, say this is an exception and the following missions will be open to multiple approaches and outcomes and planning, etc.

Welcome to 2020! The main quest is on rails. The C&C in the "secondary quests" is token-level. Their writing is cringe and boring, at least to my taste.

The way I've found to extract fun out of this open world game, and I wrote this some time in 2022-2023, after the 1.6 patch, is to turn it into a nostalgic 80-90s time machine, and a reenactment stage for edgy action movies of the same period*.

If you read up on the Cyberpunk PnP setting, the edgyness and tryhard tone of roleplaying is "factored into" characters and quests. They are supposed to be over the top, like you are re-watching Johnny Mnemonic. The videogame's "writing problem", in my experience, is with conveying that tone, while walking the very narrow line between obnoxiousness and parody, using the imperfect tools it has - i.e. the motion-captured acting.

Try to make a good parody with wooden actors and you will just come off as obnoxious as the audience's reaction will be either indifference, or is just "wow, this writing is shit". No one will get what you were actually going for.

* - So that's my "house rule" for not getting annoyed by the writing. My house rules for the mechanics are the mods I use, and if you take advantage of some of the work people have done, the "game" part of the game can be massaged into being fun.

See, that's the problem right there. I never really liked the colorful, edgy, pulpy aesthetics of Cyberpunk2020, and this game follows that to a T. It feels like the streets are Paris Fashion Week catwalks with exalted teens running around exhibiting their cool drip and talking in cringy slang.

The cyberpunk I grew up is darker and more ominous like Blade Runner, Outland and Shadowrun (early works like 1e/2e books and SNES / SEGA games). This is the tone I like...



Thanks for your thoughts. I will give the game another chance and see if I can find something interesting to like amid the cringe aesthetics and shallow gameplay.

the game was supposed to be like this like twelve years ago

 

[AwesomeButton]

See, that's the problem right there. I never really liked the colorful, edgy, pulpy aesthetics of Cyberpunk2020, and this game follows that to a T. It feels like the streets are Paris Teen Fashion Week with exalted kids running around exhibiting their cool drip and talking in cringy slang. The cyberpunk I grew up is darker and more ominous like Blade Runner, Neuromancer, Outland and Shadowrun (early works like 1e/2e books and SNES / SEGA games). Here, this is the tone I prefer in the genre...

Supposedly, CDPR "have you covered". What's supposed to make the game feel darker are the secondary quests and their storylines. The recurring theme is loss, as in someone dying. You could say that's juxtaposed vs the consumerist ethos of "everything is a commodity, and everything is replaceable", proudly being touted from all the advertisements in the city, while "in the real world" people are experiencing irreversible loss of loved ones. It's featured in almost any secondary quest in some way, and of course very much in the main quest.

For me, the problems with selling such a "serious", "deep" main theme are that:
1. It's too gloomy for a mass entertainment product like a videogame. This has to reach an audience larger than Deus Ex or Omicron back in the day.
2. The player, much as "narrative designers" might dislike it, is still the director of his videogame-interactive movie, and he gets to choose when to play the next bit of story. And the pacing that the player chooses will never work as the designer planned, in order to allow for his "deep, profound" statement to be felt the way he intended it.
3. The wooden mocap acting doesn't sell the characters' personal tragedies on a level that can make me at least feel for them. One bit of writing I did find touching was when Misty said she was sitting in front of the garage waiting for Jackie, even though she knows he won't come ever again, but I find it hard to think of other moments when the writing moved me. The root of the problem with the acting is that in this interactive movie/game the player acts not only as director but as a cameraman all the time. This was a gross error, that CDPR for some reason decided to double down on with their "you are V" bullshit. Witcher 3 had its characters grow on me because I was able to see them, and their mannerisms gradually built them up as individuals, but there is none of that in CP77, and you never get to see your character in conversation. This puts the game at a huge disadvantage in getting the player to care about his main character. Completely counter to the declared intention when they decided to keep it 1st person all the time. I'm certain this was a technology-forced decision, not a creative one, though who would admit it at this point.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

it makes me think of Bloodlines - good content but very much not an imsim.

Speaking of, I think CDPR could've done a decent Bloodlines 2 imho.

 

[Ibn Sina]

I really don't know how anyone can play this game more than once. The dialogue and cutscenes are so long winded that they are extremely tiring, and have zero charm listening to them for a second time. There is not enough roleplay or different path to warrant listening all those cutscenes again.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

criticizing the driving gameplay is 100% fair play

Sure, but it's one thing to criticize driving mechanics and it's another thing entirely to start a game that very explicitly prides and sells itself first and foremost on it's narrative elements, and also clearly treats driving as a side activity not a main attraction, yet despite that expecting said game to actually be Driver San Francisco or something...

 

[Ninjerk]

The driving model never felt right. Traffic AI is smoke and mirrors. If you drive up to a traffic car very fast, you can see the car get "spawned" anew, not as a traffic car, and it just stands in place, stops driving on its way. I don't know what causes this bug, but I can demonstrate it.

I haven't been playing lately but I used to occasionally see vehicles get spawned into the air in strange orientations for only a few frames and it seemed to happen more often when I started playing on Linux. Mind you, I just got the game in December or so, so I missed the really bad times.

 

[Ezekiel]

games that apparently can't do anything really well because specialization might scare away the bad players who only know how to work stats and perks.

Why are you looking for in-depth high speed motor vehicle pursuit gameplay systems, in an first-person action sandbox whose focus are its lite-rpg mechanics and storytelling?

You really want a game where you can austically set up whatever 70s car chase you fantasize about?

Have fun

Put in or build on the third person shooting of Max Payne 3, the sneaking of Metal Gear Solid 3 and the driving of a great sim racer in a dense city with realistic crowds.

Yeah and now you have an incoherent stew of gameplay ideas, all of which also don't intelligibly build upon the game's aspiration of role-playing and storytelling
Great gameplay design

these devs waste their time focusing 50 times as much on static graphics

Wtf are you talking about?
This game literally has one of the most impressive implementations of dynamic lighting

The story choices seem to amount to very little. Very little branching. Have that impression because the dialogue often funnels you into the same options anyway. You choose an alternate response and it turns out to be just another way to inquire about the first one. The upgrades? Please. Who gives a shit when the foundation for it all is crappy? Action-adventure is better as a concept and can have choices and a little bit of customization too.

I was talking about dynamics that affect gameplay, like crashes, but even the mirrors only work when a button is pressed, lol.

Strange that there are almost no parking spaces with all these cars around. The roads are so small that it doesn't feel like a real city, and I would respect that about a city if there were public transit and bicycles.

How are all the people in Night City getting around?

Like the guy above said, it's not dark or dreary enough. Too colorful and gay to be cyberpunk.

 

[Lord_Potato]

Strange that there are almost no parking spaces with all these cars around. The roads are so small that it doesn't feel like a real city, and I would respect that about a city if there were public transit and bicycles.

How are all the people in Night City getting around?

Look, Night City is already a hellscape, no need to make the situation even worse by turning it into Houston downtown:

So I guess we either have to abandon realism or just agree that all those cars use underground parking lots. We've seen a couple ingame, so just imagine they're more prevalent.

Like the guy above said, it's not dark or dreary enough. Too colorful and gay to be cyberpunk.

I kind of like the sunny side of Night City. Sun shines even in the darkest of times. It shone over the 3rd Reich and the Soviet Union during the Great Purge. Good weather doesn't make it less oppressive. And the vibrant colors? When life is dreadful and grey people try to compensate in different ways.

 

[AwesomeButton]

The driving model never felt right. Traffic AI is smoke and mirrors. If you drive up to a traffic car very fast, you can see the car get "spawned" anew, not as a traffic car, and it just stands in place, stops driving on its way. I don't know what causes this bug, but I can demonstrate it.

I haven't been playing lately but I used to occasionally see vehicles get spawned into the air in strange orientations for only a few frames and it seemed to happen more often when I started playing on Linux. Mind you, I just got the game in December or so, so I missed the really bad times.

Spawning into the air doesn't happen for me, though I've seen it in bug compilation videos. As for the issue I'm describing, I think I've found a layman's explanation for what goes wrong with the logic, and it's likely something with the game engine's "streaming" of npcs. If I drive significantly faster than the ingame NPC traffic, the cars from the traffic should in theory get "spawned" as NPCs as I pass them by, probably so that a more indepth version of the pathfinding takes over from the traffic routine that makes them drive aimlessly.

But instead of getting spawned as I pass by, they get spawned some distance before I've reached them, and stop in place in the middle of the road, which blocks traffic around them and leads to me having to drive around them, very annoing. My finding from yesterday - after I pass by a static NPC car, and I turn the camera around, it has despawned soon after it left my camera's FoV.

I'm going to do some experimenting to see if this might be caused, or at least exacerbated by the mod https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/19628 (Disappearing NPC and Vehicle Fix (Crowd LOD spawn distance))

 

[mediocrepoet]

The driving model never felt right. Traffic AI is smoke and mirrors. If you drive up to a traffic car very fast, you can see the car get "spawned" anew, not as a traffic car, and it just stands in place, stops driving on its way. I don't know what causes this bug, but I can demonstrate it.

I haven't been playing lately but I used to occasionally see vehicles get spawned into the air in strange orientations for only a few frames and it seemed to happen more often when I started playing on Linux. Mind you, I just got the game in December or so, so I missed the really bad times.

Spawning into the air doesn't happen for me, though I've seen it in bug compilation videos. As for the issue I'm describing, I think I've found a layman's explanation for what goes wrong with the logic, and it's likely something with the game engine's "streaming" of npcs. If I drive significantly faster than the ingame NPC traffic, the cars from the traffic should in theory get "spawned" as NPCs as I pass them by, probably so that a more indepth version of the pathfinding takes over from the traffic routine that makes them drive aimlessly.

But instead of getting spawned as I pass by, they get spawned some distance before I've reached them, and stop in place in the middle of the road, which blocks traffic around them and leads to me having to drive around them, very annoing. My finding from yesterday - after I pass by a static NPC car, and I turn the camera around, it has despawned soon after it left my camera's FoV.

I'm going to do some experimenting to see if this might be caused, or at least exacerbated by the mod https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/19628 (Disappearing NPC and Vehicle Fix (Crowd LOD spawn distance))

This was more of an issue in the earlier patches of the game. It had more or less stopped happening when I last played, but there has been a patch or two since then, so either it's your mod or it's an issue that they managed to re-introduce.

But yeah, most of the weird stuff with the game was due to timing and hardware bottlenecks, etc. as far as I could tell (based on reading what people more knowledgeable than I had to say about the tech side of things).