Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheGuyWhoCodes | Hacker News Reader

Having played cyberpunk on PC it's mostly a fancy light show and not a lot of substance. You can't even customize anything past the creation screen, no car paint jobs no hair cuts and no body modification, no transmog system..

They tried to hide the console issues while reaffirming time and time again that current-gen console will be a first class citizen, that's an EA tactic not something that CDPR I thought I knew would do...

Moreover CDPR was given a $7 million grant to develop the artificial intelligence. This game has one of the worst open-world AI I have ever seen.

Cops spawn on you, the drivers and pedestrians AI is almost non existing. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas from 2004 is miles ahead of this game.

They even announced that they are "very sorry" and that people can get a refund only that Sony won't refund if you played or even downloaded the game not to mention this game is very badly optimized on AMD systems the current gaming king.

View on HN

So fortunately I've never played any open-world game except for Skyrim, which just didn't really hold my interest... or maybe it was the fact I lost my save game due to a faulty SSD, I dunno.

At any rate, I love this game. I love the story. I love Night City. I love the graphics. I won't lie and say I'm a huge Cyberpunk pen & paper fan; I'm not. I knew more about Shadowrun than Cyberpunk, and that was from the old SNES game and Shadowrun Returns. However, I've talked with hardcore Cyberpunk pen & paper players, and they say its un-fucking-believable how well CDPR has brought to life the Cyberpunk universe in this game.

Yes, there are bugs. I have every confidence though that CDPR will iron all this shit out like they did with The Witcher III. This will be a great game by mid-to-late 2021, in every sense of the word.

I genuinely hope in Cyberpunk 2077 II that they'll be able to flesh out the game world, because I really love this game and this world.

I played the pen and paper way back in the day, and I agree. They have absolutely nailed the aesthetic: a dusting of kitsch and campiness that isn’t over the top. I’m also enjoying the story and game mechanics. It’s my first open world AAA title, so I don’t have much to compare it with, but I’m having fun!

Sure, maybe it will be a great game in six months.

But you don't buy a new car and say "in six months this is going to be a great car" - you have expectations when you put the money down...

> But you don't buy a new car and say "in six months this is going to be a great car"

Sure you do, because we're moving to a new type of reality whereby software is a determinant of features. A lot of people haven't gotten the memo on this yet though.

All Tesla vehicles ship with everything necessary for Autopilot, all the hardware and sensors. If you want to turn it on, you just unlock it with software. Tesla vehicles also get feature updates regularly.

Computer hardware has been this way for awhile. NVIDIA specifically has a history of improving the performance of their GPUs simply with new driver updates, in some cases with ridiculous performance gains on the order of 7-10%. Just from software optimization.

A video game is purely software, so the optimization limits are truly limited only by the hardware upon which it is run and stored.

> But you don't buy a new car and say "in six months this is going to be a great car"

Tesla disagrees. Full Self Driving is coming in 2015 ergh 2016 ergh 2017 ergh 2018 ergh 2019 ergh.. end of 2020...

Now the Tesla fanboys are saying that it will come in 2021.

Just look at the world we live in: it contains 6 billion people. If a small fraction of it is into buying a car or a game that will only work as advertised a decade after they buy it, you might still be able to sell the millions of cars, games, etc.

If you check out the news, the amount of people that's delusional is not a "small fraction", but actually closer to ~50% of the population.

Playing it on PC and I'm really enjoying it.

There seem to be two factions: Anyone who expected a GTA like open world game has to be severely disappointed. But if you're there for the story and Cyberpunk look & feel, you'll have a good time.

Of course, this excludes the console issues. Console players got shafted. CD Project might be able to fix that to some degree, but the reputational damage is done.

PC here, agree it's fun and I think some people are definitely expecting GTA from a developer that has absolutely no experience making something like GTA.

GTA is GTA because Rockstar perfected the formula and the engine over several iterations of the game. I'm sure every GTA is a mountain of work to create, but its a considerably smaller mountain than starting from scratch.

But putting GTA aside, I don't think CDPR ever promised to create a Cyberpunk-GTA clone.

There's a lot of small bugs. It doesn't run particularly well, but I'll say it again - the core game is fun and story well written. I'm taking a break, but I look forward to revisiting after the first few big patches.

Edit: One thing that's always worked for me is to amortize the cost of purchase by time played. If I get only six hours of Cyberpunk 2077 played at $60. That's 10/hr for entertainment... which is better than a lot of stuff.

I'll probably sink 50 or 60 hours into the game completing the main story. That's $1/hr of entertainment... ridiculously good value.

Gamers are so cranky.

Some people spent hours in No Man's Sky too. The cost per hour only matters if you can put up with 'flaws'.

Most expected the latest and greatest, what they got was not that. Every hype/drop cycle is the same, but this cycle is filled with more valid complaints than normal, depressingly.

People felt burnt on Oblivion in 2013 because it was boring green forests and unappealing face design. That game pretty much worked for hundreds of hours of content. Cyberpunk can't even get the basic mechanics right.

Oblivion was released way earlier than 2013 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_IV:_Oblivion

Are you saying No Man's Sky is a bad game? It's the greatest comeback the gaming world has ever seen. I've clocked hundreds of hours by now. Absolutely amazing game.

When it came out it was a pointless and mostly buggy grind-a-thon. Some played it to 'chill out and relax' and could have argued the $/hr was a positive ratio when 99.95% of people did not share that experience.

I haven't played it since launch, it made for a good internet historian video!

Ah, I misunderstood. Sorry!

I agree. I played it a few hours on launch at a friend's place and it was completely underwhelming.

>One thing that's always worked for me is to amortize the cost of purchase by time played. If I get only six hours of Cyberpunk 2077 played at $60. That's 10/hr for entertainment... which is better than a lot of stuff.

I'll probably sink 50 or 60 hours into the game completing the main story. That's $1/hr of entertainment... ridiculously good value.

The amount of time we have is finite, attaching a dollars per hour figure to it is a hilariously bad metric to judge how much value entertainment has. People don't play X's and O's all day because it's great value.

I agree.. its very much a quality of experience for me.

I paid $250 for a six person table with dinner at the Mississippi Symphony Orchestra while they played all the best pieces of John Williams' music from his many film scores. Only a two hour concert, but the Jurassic Park theme made me tear up, and I was only 10 feet from the orchestra.

I paid $300 for two Conductor's Box seats at the MSO for myself and a girl I was dating to see the Harry Potter in Concert series, where you watch a Harry Potter movie while the orchestra plays all the music from the film live. For me, it was hit or miss, since I was too old to really get into Harry Potter, but the lady I was seeing was 15 years younger than me, so it really affected her, which of course really benefited me.

Both cases, money well spent.

Imagine bragging about buying sex.

550 hours on Overwatch, 11 cents an hour is pretty good.

>some people are definitely expecting GTA ... I don't think CDPR ever promised to create a Cyberpunk-GTA clone

I don't think this is fair at all. From the earliest days of their marketing, CDPR was promising that Cyberpunk2077 would have "unprecedented" levels of customization, open world interaction, and next-level AIs. It may have been foolish for people to believe that would come true, but CDPR definitely did promise this, and I think it's perfectly understandable that many people feel that they were straight up lied to.

It's a classic case where CDPR just overhyped itself too much. If you ignore the ridiculous amount of bugs, it is a decent game, but it definitely is not at all the "unprecedented" game that CDPR hyped it up to be.

> If you ignore the ridiculous amount of bugs

It has some open world jank, which is inconvenient but pretty much part of the genre even for experienced behemoths like Rockstar, but so far I haven't seen any wide-spread reports of actually game-breaking stuff.

When talking about "ridiculous amounts of bugs", in an open-world game, much worse offenders come to mind that have been doing so for literally decades and are somehow still held in somewhat high regard regardless of that, like a Bethesda.

Yeah, the hype surrounding 2077 had me thinking this was a GTA/Witcher 3 style game. Haven't played it yet.

See what I did there? Compare GTA and W3? Because to me, they are similar. I mean, you can't kill random people in W3, but the "go where you want and collect and build" seems the same.

If you're telling me 2077 is not open world, I'll be disappointed.

Imagine the Novigrad chapter in Witcher 3, but 20× larger and in a futuristic setting instead. That's basically 1:1 Cyberpunk. And it's why I love Cyberpunk so much.

I wouldn't mind paying more than $60 if they actually delivered on what they promised the game was going to be.

These were the expectations set by CDPR and their marketing team. Open world mechanics are a joke in this game. Pedestrians look same. Driving mechanics are janky.

> Anyone who expected a GTA like open world game has to be severely disappointed

I personally don't expect a GTA like game, but I would expect an AI/police mechanism at least as good as gta3 (2001), and it's clearly not the case which is ridiculous.

Having 2020 graphics/interactions coupled with early 2000s AI breaks the immersion so bad

The game has an overwhelming amount of very detailed content in the main job and side jobs, and also provides plenty of flexibility in combat if you explore the various upgrade systems. It's an evolution of the Witcher 3, not Grand Theft Auto. Better driver AI and haircuts would be cool, but they're not central to what the game is.

> Better driver AI and haircuts would be cool, but they're not central to what the game is.

The problem though is the AI is outright stupid right now, and that does affect the game. It doesn't have to be groundbreaking, it just has to not break. Enemies that can see you through a door or try to shoot through the floors is a problem - and probably why performance is so bad.

Agreed. I think the AI could use a lot of work. I notice most enemies have some kind of "approach distance" where they won't come any closer. Perhaps it's intentional but if enemies never come closer to engage, at any point in time or their HP, I can just hide behind something a few meters away and pick them off with quickhacks and headshots, even when they're completely aggro'd.

It's worse than that. I was hacking a turret and slowly picking them off one by one while they "approached" me (all of them immediately knew where I was even when I was in cover) and never even engaged with the turret in the middle of the camp blasting them off.

Enemy combat range is based on the weapon they have. Snipers will hold long range, medium range for rifles and pistols, close range for melee/fists.

Seeing through doors is fine in this game. The player can do it to using things like "ping" or taking control of cameras, so I don't mind if enemies can too. Trying to attack through doors isn't very smart though. However I also very much enjoy when AI has an enemy hiding away in some corner trying to hack my brain while I fight off a few others directly. Or when an enemy I'd tagged but lost track of visually has taken a path around me & come up from behind. So there's some problems, but in general it seems okay to me.

> Having played cyberpunk on PC it's mostly a fancy light show and not a lot of substance.

That really depends on individual expectations. With many people treating the game like the second coming of gaming Jesus a lot of the disappointment was pretty much guaranteed.

Personally I didn't expect anything like that, I was hoping for an open world Deus Ex like, with a more "colorful" setting, and that's pretty much what I got.

> not to mention this game is very badly optimized on AMD systems the current gaming king.

AMD has been the "current gaming king" only since Zen 3 desktop release, which happened just last month, most of these CPUs are still completely impossible to buy at actual MSRP.

Regardless of that even Zen 2 is mostly performing very well with the game [0], which the HEXedit fix will only improve once it's patched in officially.

In that context this complaint sounds very much like still complaining about the lack of an epilepsy warning; Sure it's not great to overlook something like that, but it's inane to act as if these are unfixable and nonredeemable issues, particularly in an industry where "games a service", releasing early access products, has become the new low-key norm even for much bigger publishers.

[0] https://youtu.be/-pRI7vXh0JU

AMD has been very popular in gaming PCs for the last 3 years now. The Zen 2 release offered 99% of the gaming performance of an intel chip at a fraction of the cost and it completely blows away intel in non gaming workloads so its what most people picked unless spending an extra $300 for 2fps is your thing.

> The Zen 2 release offered 99% of the gaming performance of an intel chip

Zen 2 is a good deal for it's overall versatility and particularly the amount of physical cores one gets for the amount of money paid.

But gaming wise Zen 2 struggles to keep pace with any Intel CPU above the 10600k, particularly when the Intel's are overclocked, where they have much more headroom than both Zen 2 or Zen 3.

Meaning that anybody who wanted maximum gaming performance, above all else, had pretty much no other choice except for Intel, that only changed with Zen 3, last month.

Now with Zen 3 AMD has the "crown" in both gaming and productivity with CPUs like the 5900x, but that comes at the cost of a price premium as Zen 3 is not nearly as generously priced as Zen 2.

>anybody who wanted maximum gaming performance, above all else, had pretty much no other choice except for Intel

Which means nothing for the vast majority of users since the cpu was far from holding them back which is why we have seen most pc builds include an AMD cpu for the last few years because very few people want to pay way more to get a slightly higher number in a specific benchmark and see nothing in reality for the money.

> since the cpu was far from holding them back

A common misconception, but in reality the CPU actually is very responsible for min frames and thus pushing up the average frames, preventing frames from skipping. That becomes particularly important in demanding scenarios like PCVR and generally running high-resolutions with high-refresh rates.

> which is why we have seen most pc builds include an AMD cpu for the last few years

We've seen that because they offer excellent price and performance ratio, but that didn't make them the "gaming king", it made them them "budget all-rounder king", which is not the same.

> that's an EA tactic not something that CDPR I thought I knew would do...

EA gets a lot of well-deserved criticism, but it's important to recognize their behavior is typical of all major players in the games industry. The whole thing is rotten and you shouldn't trust any of them. They certainly haven't earned it. Always wait for reviews.

I'm not saying it's all bad. The art style is amazing, the sound track is awesome. The lips sync, facial expressions and body movement are pretty damn good. Yes there some nice side missions and the main story line is ok I guess but it's not really cyberpunk or really engaging. They advertised it as a cyber punk open world RPG and promised so many things and then literally changed the marketing of the game to an action shooter after the game came out...

* it's not really cyberpunk*

Having read a bunch of great (and not so great) cyberpunk fiction from the 80's & 90's, that's actually a theme that really shines through here for me. Crazy cybernetics & brain/computer interfaces, hacking, drugs, weird AI doing things like running a transport/security company with some splinter groups that have existential crisis... I really get that original cyberpunk vibe.

Your main character says not all cops are bastards. Strong punk energy. eyeroll

It's extremely a game that is pastiche of cyberpunk, diving neither into the cyber nor punk beyond skinning things. Where's the Ghost in the Shell examination of the self? Where's the dive into what it means to have modifiable bodies? Where's the anti-establishment story (oh wait, the game opens with praise of the cops by multiple characters, including V).

For a game that wants to be cyberpunk, it sure relies on a lot of stereotypes about people and what they can be.

To me, it reads a lot like a Boomer/GenX take on what they remember cyberpunk being (NEON AND CHROME) and not an actual understanding of the genre (exploration of what it means to be a human in a corporate, transhuman world.)

If you want to play an actual cyberpunk game, check out Umurangi Generation or Shadowrun: Dragonfall. The Final Fantasy 7 Remake that came out this year is more cyberpunk than Cyberpunk.

That said, the game is a serviceable noire and shooter with some extremely always on aesthetic choices which aren't really my taste but they might be other's tastes.

Eh, this comes across as hipsterism. I know it's trendy to hate on the game right now, but c'mon.

How much of the game have you played? The entire main quest is about transhumanism and corporate control. Cyberpsychosis and the Maelstrom are used as a means for examining the results of the overuse of body modification.

Just like the Cyberpunk RPG, it was very heavily inspired by Gibson's work, and I mean that in a good way.

I think that cyber psychos are a really tired way to translate an old tabletop game mechanic into a story beat. What's more interesting -- amputees and disabled folks go BERSERK when they get treatment, or what if we escaped the bounds of the human form. Why does this game have such an extremely boring view of what humanity could be if you had access to mods. Gender, race, body type, even the configuration of limbs and the like seem like they should be things of the past in 2077. Instead we have a tired Japanese stereotype, a Haitian gang, and some pretty boring ideas about the human condition.

Gibson himself offered the critique that the game looked like GTA papered over with 80s retrofuturism.

I think it's totally reasonable to critique the game as not really doing anything interesting in the genre or even doing anything more than appropriating genre tropes.

Step into the shoes of almost any past futurist and you'll find that humanity usually took the boring, predictable route, technologically. There is an inherent cynicism in the setting that needs to shine through as a fundamental part of the genre's identity.

Also, it's only 57 years in the future. You're not going to advance that much in that time. Personally I think the aesthetic seems a little too trapped in 80s retrofuturism -- I guess I agree with Gibson there -- but that was always the interpretation of cyberpunk and scifi that I liked the most so it gets a pass.

There is plenty of whimsical, optimistic visions into the future, and while I think a setting that explores "high tech, low life" in that context would be cool to see, it'd feel a lot closer to Star Wars than "cyberpunk".

That makes sense. Something like Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix really gets wild with what posthumanism can look like. Cyberpunk taken to the next 200 years.

That said, media like ghost in the shell and altered carbon (the novels) gesture in this direction. Altered carbon, for instance, has people who have modded their bodies with animal features. GitS goes hard on the ship of Theseus metaphors and has lots of mods that don't fit a standard human shape. Not to mention plenty of discussions of gender and gender roles in a society where you can just choose whatever body you want.

A bit into the game, Cyberpunk starts to resemble Altered Carbon in some ways. I'm not super far into it, and I don't want to spoil anything, but it definitely has some things to say about transhumanism and at one point I felt like it was sharing some vocabulary with AC.

You are right in that I think the universe could explore those themes more thoroughly, but then maybe it will and I'm just not there yet

I'm a HUGE fan of Gibson's books, but let's be honest: he's 72 years old, and might not be the best judge of modern video games. He was also involved in (and wrote the screenplay for) the Johnny Mnemonic movie, which was one of the blandest attempts at mainstreaming cyberpunk ever.

The Japanese stereotypes and Haitian gangs are lifted straight off the pages of Neuromancer and Count Zero. I dig the retrofuturist 80s vibe, but then I love retrofuturism in general so that's not surprising.

In the end, CP2077 is a AAA video game. It has to appeal to the general population, so yeah, it's probably not going to be the most experimental take on the genre. As mainstream cyberpunk attempts go, can we at least agree it's heads-and-shoulders better than Netflix's Altered Carbon? :)

Netflix's Altered Carbon?

Yes. It definitely fell flat for me. Having read the source material probably didn't help there since it was so much better. Although even the book... I re-read about 2 years ago and it wasn't nearly as good as I remembered it from around 2006.

I agree on altered carbon for sure. The Haitian gangs, however, are based on the Voodoo Boys from the original source material. (Though I understand why they changed the game to have them not be a bunch of racist white dudes with dreads.)

Yeah, but Mike Pondsmith no doubt drew inspiration for the Voodoo Boys from the Rastafarians living in orbit in Neuromancer, and from the AIs representing themselves as Haitian voodoo gods in Count Zero.

The tabletop game draws heavily on Gibson and Philip K. Dick by the way of Blade Runner. (And to be clear, I love that!)

Cyberpunk never was cyber + punk.

It literally was explicitly that. Gibson and others started writing in this genre, which then took it's name from CYBERPUNK by Bruce Bethke a short story that was named to elicit a feeling of technology and punk attitudes.

The common idiom high tech, low life is another way of describing the genre and also succinctly suggests that the genre is, in fact, cyber + punk.

Happy to provide references, but a quick internet search clearly shows that what you've suggested is factually incorrect.

I know all that. You're just misusing the word "punk" as a free variable.

I'm using it as intended -- that stories in cyberpunk universes focus on anti establishment themes and lowlifes.

Clearly Ghost in The Shell was famously anti-establishment and Kusanagi a definitive low life... Not transhumanism, identity or sexuality.

>Your main character says not all cops are bastards.

IIRC this comment was made when you're on a quest and partnered with probably the one good cop on the force, who was also suspended for doing his job. The quest started based on the incompetence of the police leading to him needing to ask V for help to pursue the case. And the comment was made in reference to this one guy you're trying to help out. Meanwhile the next quest V will matter-of-factly state that the cops can't be trusted to handle so-and-so issue.

So please don't take lines out of their context.

Some additional context-- you have to engage in a system where you get paid to kill people for the police. And then there's this, https://twitter.com/TurboBurpo/status/1338945708200656896?s=...

Remember that Night City evolved out of LA and imagine that description applied to the LAPD.

That tweet looks to be deleted, so I don't know what you're referencing.

But back to the point: you work with all sorts of terrible people in the game. That's sort of one conclusion of the Cyberpunk genre: every level of society is rotten has decayed even as technology progressed. The police are no better (and no worse) than any other faction of human traffickers, politicians, crime syndicates, drug dealers, fixers - everyone is simply looking out for their own interests. You regularly get gigs with orders to kidnap or kill people with no questions asked. So it seems unnatural for you to single out the police as being the one faction where it is unforgivable for the game to have you side with at any point.

There's a very strong "cops can be dicks" theme in literally the first opening scene. There's a very strong theme of cops being a tool of corporate interests.

On what to means to have a modifiable body, there too from the beginning the game puts it right in front of you where it causes a sort of body dysmorphic disorder that can drive people crazy. There's even a series of side quests that deal directly with this.

The dialog in that scene says, effectively, he must have done something to deserve it. To me it showed police violence and then immediately tried to justify it. I took away a very different message from that scene.

But that's the beauty of critique, I think we can both look at the same work and draw different messages from it.

It has the vibe (aesthetics), like most modern "cyberpunk" works. The tech, hacking, drugs, and weird AI were mostly the setting for the main themes of corporate power and how technology enabled new forms of control/manipulation.

When an article compared William Gibson's visions to Second Life, he rejected the notion explicitly[1]:

    But as Gully Jimson says, in The Horse's Mouth,
    "It wasn't the vision I had."

    Neither is Second Life.

    Chia and her buds build their treehouses in
    corporate ghost sites. That's the difference.
    Interstitial. Gotta be interstitial.

I've only seen the first few hours of Cyberpunk 2077, but so far it has the potential for some of the social/political themes. The "Corpo" prelude depicting a corporation abusing its power to "repo" parts of someone's body was a good start, but so far the game hasn't returned to that theme, instead focusing more on the tech/combat.

Unfortunately, the trend over the last few decades in cyberpunk has steadily shifted towards aesthetics. The only true counterexample I know of (and by far the best cyberpunk movie ever made is Sleep Dealer (2008). Its aesthetics suffered due to a very tiny budget, but it was shockingly prescient in its depiction of the "gig economy" and drone violence.

[1] http://williamgibsonblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/#8519138918500...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZr8A_9VZBw&disable_polymer=...

Don't worry, after a few twists and turns the story becomes very, very cyberpunky. But there's a large gap until that happens. I think of it as an 8-hour long tutorial.

The game has a different take on the cyberpunk universe and I think that is okay.

Personally, it's a great game. I find myself caring about the characters and the outcomes of my actions. Despite technology being everywhere, everything feels so human.

I’m playing on first gen threadripper and a 580rx card with no major issues, the game is gorgeous and I am having a blast. I agree that the AI is horrible and the UI is a pain, especially when you want to do things like sell a lot of items

I've seen it summarised as maybe a mile wide and an inch deep, that there aren't particularly interesting systems at play, there isn't actually much meat to the pretty bones.

I fully agree. It's mostly a fancy light show and not much more. Gameplay wise, this reminds me of games from the Xbox 360 / PS3 era.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com