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Comment by elgatonegro | Hacker News Reader

I completed it twice -more out of boredom and getting my money's worth than actual enjoyment- and my biggest complaint is that the game is totally dumb and a complete waste of time to those more philosophically inclined. It feels like a throwback to the dumbest action games of the 90s: here's a main story and a bunch of quests that you'll be completing on railtracks. Your choices don't really matter, the world is empty and soulless, the writing is lazy and you can't stop but keep thinking how superficial everything feels.

There is no emergent gameplay which is simply unacceptable, taking all the promises and descriptions of groundbreaking immersive gameplay into account.

Great for teenagers looking for mindless action kicks, bad for everyone else.

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Wait a second... how did you "complete" the game twice in less than a week?

I've put more than 40 hours in and I'm nowhere close to completing it even once. I'm pretty sure all the dialogue alone adds up to that much.

Even completing the main story, gigs and side-missions is probably going to take me around 100 hours. Maybe someone faster could do it in 40, or maybe 20 if you skipped all of the dialogue and played on a low difficulty. I spend/wasted a lot of time just exploring the city and surrounding areas, doing 'bounties' or climbing on random places to see if there's something interesting/loot to be found.

I suppose you mostly played the main story line on a low difficulty, ignoring all the side activities (which do impact the main story and vice-versa) and likely rushed through or past everything else.

If you were looking to have a good time you didn't exactly set yourself up for success. A bit like reading a book and skipping all of the chapters that follow minor characters for world-building purposes.

I agree that the life paths don't have major consequence, which is a bit disappointing, but saying "choices don't matter" as a blanket statement is just factually incorrect, considering there's a long list of choices that have a lasting effect on the game world, and there are at least 3-5 different endings depending on the choices you made earlier in the game.

There's a list of (so far known) major choices here if you want to spoil yourself: https://www.ign.com/wikis/cyberpunk-2077/Choices_and_Consequ...

IGN removed that page a few hours ago. Looks like their wiki is still very much work-in-progress.

Here's the most recent google-cached version I could find, archived via archive.is: https://archive.is/DFb7d

Honestly thank you for saying that. I felt like I'm going crazy, I can't figure out how people are enjoying this game, I tried to find a redeeming quality and "pretty lights" is all I can think of.

Edit: Scrolled down and found great r3view that put what felt into words better then I can.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25436061

> a complete waste of time to those more philosophically inclined

At a surface level it is very reminiscent of the Deus Ex games, but if you go in expecting something profound you will be disappointed

It really feels like a mashup of GTA 5 and Deus Ex, except without GTA's sense of humor and Deus Ex's feeling of personal agency. That said, I am really enjoying it, I mean a mashup of those two things is very compelling even if it doesn't quite manage to borrow the charm of either.

I got serious DX vibes, but as soon as the surface is scratched you can see that it’s not an ice cream sundae but a shit sandwich.

How can you claim you don't like a game but also complete it twice in the space of about a week?

The main story is short and as I said, you're on railtracks. It's not like you can get lost in the world like in GTA or RDR, there is no world for you to get lost in. It's all smoke & mirrors. Also, pandemic lockdown in my country has left me with plenty of free time.

The game offers you three "life paths" at the beginning so after I finished it once I had to see if a different path would be better.

Well it turns out life paths change nothing besides the introduction. It's still the same dumb game with the same railtracks and the same story. Your choices don't matter and you realize that you've been swindled since the promises and descriptions of the immersive and emergent open-world nature of the game turned out to be a bunch of lies.

Hearing all the stories about refunds being hard or impossible to execute, one has to wonder if legal action is justifiable here. The CP2077 that CDPR framed and advertised gameplay-wise has very little to do with the end result that they delivered. And I'm not even talking about the bugs, but the game itself.

It goes without saying that I'm done with them and my intuition tells me that the CDPR brand will be poisonous to a lot of gamers out there after this fiasco. Bugs are one thing, but blatant lies quite another.

I think the question really was: why didn't you stop after the first time?

Are 'boredom', 'lockdown' and 'curiosity whether decisions actually change anything in the world' not good reasons?

It doesn't sound like you gave it much of a chance tbh. If you only play the main quests it might be possible to do 2 playthroughs since launch. I'm at 43h in and haven't finished the first playthrough yet, on normal difficulty.

The gameplay is pretty much identical to w3, which is what I expected going in. If you expected more than that you were bound to be disappointed.

It took me around 20 hours to finish it the first time. Second time was a lot faster since I was essentially playing the same game and I could fly through the same situations and dialogs. It's a hollow experience, pretty but zero substance.

I know there are additional endings and side quests, but the problem is that game has no depth whatsoever so I'm not exactly motivated to spend more time. It's mindless action with a few variations on the quests that keep repeating themselves. After playing the game for a few hours, the shallowness and superficiality of it all starts weighing on you.

> My biggest complaint is that the game is totally dumb and a complete waste of time to those more philosophically inclined.

What are some modern games that are like this?

I came looking for something to scratch my Deus Ex 1 itch and I’ve so far been satisfied. Not terribly engrossed in the world, but otherwise not disappointed.

The Witness was great as was The Talos Principle.

SOMA and Fallout: New Vegas were good.

I would add Spec Ops: The Line (depending on what online communities you're a part of this game is either hugely underrated or hugely overrated), and the entire Bioshock series.

There also some simpler indie games like The Stanley Parable, Papers Please, and This War of Mine

New Vegas is a great example, and is better than I remember on this dimension [0].

[0]: https://youtu.be/gzF7aHxk4Y4

NieR: Automata is like that.

I've had friends tell me NieR: Automata is one of the best 'artistic' games you can buy for PS4. Though the combat and dialogue is pretty, uhm, Square-Enix-ish, it is one of my favorite games/stories of all time.

Nier is truly fantastic and dives headfirst into discussions of identity in a posthumanism world.

New Deus Ex games (Human Revolution and Mankind Divided) are pretty good.

Hard disagree, I’ve played through both multiple times and was disappointed with how they presented and discussed the metastory even though the gameplay was far more polished and fluid. My favorite part of Deus Ex was the conversation with the bartender [0]. There’s at least one similar, if dumbed down conversation in 2077 but I admire that they at least tried.

[0] https://youtu.be/JKF0IYwhrjk

> I completed it twice ... There is no emergent gameplay which is simply unacceptable

getting some really mixed signals here

People can play games for reasons other than fun or enjoyment. Spec Ops: The Line isn't a 'fun' game, but holy shit I couldn't stop playing it.

uh I'm a gamedev at my dayjob and I'm working on a game design mfa so ... I know? my favorite game is INSIDE and it's a total chore to play. But I think it has a LOT going on and is extremely interesting. OP is saying Cyberpunk is not fun -and- it has nothing going on intellectually -and- they played it all the way through twice? Really, that's a mixed set of signals. If you think it's not fun -and- it has nothing going on, why play it -twice-?

> the game is totally dumb and a complete waste of time to those more philosophically inclined

really reads like "I liked it, but I'm ashamed to like it, so I'm going to say I didn't like it instead"

> If you think it's not fun -and- it has nothing going on, why play it -twice-?

"If you think the car is no fun to drive, why take it for a spin, twice?"

Playing it twice is what allowed me to form this opinion. The game offers multiple "paths" after all. It's called giving it the benefit of the doubt.

eh, I dunno. I used to do that, thinking that I "needed to get my money's worth", but I've started bailing on games if I'm not having fun after 2 or 3 hours and don't ever regret it. The way I look at it now is that paying for a game is like paying the price of admission to a museum. If I'm not liking the show on display, I'm not going to stay there for longer just to feel like I got my money's worth. Paying the price of admission isn't a promise of enjoyment.

but like, I'm not really trying to convince you of anything, I'm trying to get clarity on what you're saying, because your original comment is so ambiguous that it doesn't actually help me figure out whether or not I want to play Cyberpunk.

You got one answer, but I'd also suggest that someone might play a game out of spite. They might play it to check their experience ("maybe I was in a bad mood the first time"). Maybe all the coverage in the media made them feel like they needed to give the game a second chance. Maybe they wanted to see if the path or play style they chose was just a bad fit. Maybe they wanted to ensure they had enough data to back up their critique.

As someone who has spent years in the games industry, I strongly encourage you to take your players seriously and don't just assume you know better.

it's not "assuming you know better" to talk about the subtext of someone's comment.

Factorio wasn't particularly fun for me and I couldn't stop playing that. That game really stressed me out and I was very relieved when I could set it aside.

honestly I found playing Cookie Clicker to be really transformative in terms of perceiving those situations. Ever since then, I look at games differently. The most recent example of this is Hades. I played that game very compulsively, and feel that most of the serotonin I was getting out of it was the result of operant conditioning, not something that I really like. That game has an absolutely perfectly designed reward loop, but I wasn't really enjoying playing it very much.

> I completed it twice -more out of boredom and getting my money's worth than actual enjoyment

You should familiarize yourself with the concept of a "sunk cost"[0]. You'll probably be happier for it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Fallacy_effect

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