It seems that everybody seems to hate this game, or rather unfinishedness of it. Meanwhile, I am playing it since 2 weeks on PS4 (not Pro) and totally enjoying every minute it.
It does seem like there were some legitimate issues on consoles, but I don't even know how seriously to take that given the insane disproportionality of the criticism that even the PC version has been getting. I saw somebody on Reddit seriously suggesting that Steam should pull the game like Sony did, and it's like, what?
Presumably if it does end up in court, the truth will come out and CDPR will be sanctioned appropriately. I don't mean to say the release couldn't have been better, but from where I'm sitting it feels like 75% just another case of insane "gamer entitlement".
I'm starting to think that some major players are capitalizing on the situation by bankrolling marketing and negative PR. CDPR stock has fallen dramatically and now they are facing punitive action from governments that on a level I've never heard of for a game studio.
I'm not apologizing for them. They should not have released what they did for the PS4. But I'm seeing a bunch of articles about how the number of players one steam has fallen by X% and lots of others stuff not typically reported about on a game.
I guess we'll see if they get acquired at a deep discount by Ubisoft or something.
I am part of this group. I think the real reason for the drop off is just that their is not really that much to do in the game. You can 100% the game in 60-80 hours. If you are just trying to finish the main quest lines you can probably do that in about half the time or less if you are really beelining through it. The combination of the pandemic plus holiday shutdowns has resulted in a lot of people finishing the game and moving on.
Additionally, the sentiment that I have been seeing and agree with is that the game currently does not have any good endgame content. Once you play through the story and do most of the side quests, there is not a whole lot left to discover. The artwork is beautiful but aimlessly exploring has not been very enjoyable since NPC AI ranges from shallow to non-existent (e.g. completely broken police system, pot-shot or rush enemies, random cowering citizens, etc.). I am sure that CDPR has some DLC in the pipeline to change that but I don't plan to pick up the game again until a DLC release.
Fact is that right now criticism of this game will get engagement, so people are doing it with criticisms that sound spicy regardless of relevance.
There's just...nothing to do that isn't on a yellow quest marker dot. Nothing to explore and no AI to create rich, memorable experiences with. Just a gorgeous, puddle-deep map. An aquarium swimming with schools of brain-dead, filler NPCs.
It makes me wonder why CDPR even made 2077 an open world at all. You don't need one for a smattering of (superb) siloed missions/levels and cut scenes. That's a lot of extra work so players can...drive around the mostly empty world, I guess?
Who knows, maybe CDPR had a lot of features in mind and will deliver them to us through updates & DLCs. But as it stands, 2077 is billed as an open world and delivers a dead/static map.
Guess you missed coverage of flops like Battleborn and Evolve. Loss of player count is a pretty common stat in articles about games with a popular, if not prevailing, negative perception.
Note that that's not to say that CP2077 is a flop or mostly disliked.
From what I understand it’s a fairly anodyne action-RPG, with routine quests, an underwhelming plot, and not too many interesting choices for character development - nothing bad, but nothing great. It doesn’t have the script of The Witcher III, the humor and satire isn’t as clever as Watch Dogs, it doesn’t break new action-RPG gameplay ground like Fallout 4, and as an open world city it’s a shallow clone of a GTA game. And it doesn’t contribute anything particularly unique itself - outside of all the hype, the consensus seems to be that it’s a fine choice if you’re looking for a solid action-RPG, but not essential. Which would be fine if the game were finished and appropriately hyped! But neither were the case.
People would be more forgiving of the bugs and even the unscrupulous marketing if the game was legitimately extraordinary and unlike anything else out there - the viral buggy footage would be offset by viral stories and videos of cool things in the game itself. But those cool things just aren’t there in Cyberpunk - it’s a B+ game, and doesn’t seem to have much to offer compared to its competitors.
> routine quests, an underwhelming plot, and not too many interesting choices for character development
Come on, man.
> watched others and read a good number of reviews
What's the point of reviews, if not to give people this kind of general sense of a game before they decide whether or not to buy it? Why else would AAA studios be so anxious to impose and enforce pre-release embargos, except to reduce the risk of the preorder hype and FOMO being in any way ameliorated by reality?
When someone hasn't even played the game and comes out swinging, though, it comes across as a bit silly, especially if you've played the game and disagree with them.
It has not been regarded as a flawed masterpiece, but something more like 2001's Anachronox - a solid game with strong elements, but in many ways mediocre and hardly justifying a tortured development cycle and myriad bugs.
Crafting/engineering is one of the the most OP paths you can invest in. There's a great build posted some time ago on YT.
Having recently played around with this series (3 and 5) for the first time in my life - since they were heavily discounted over the holidays - I have to say, for shooters they could be a lot worse. FC3 has clearly influenced other games that came out since. Production value is high, graphics are great, they run fine on 5+ year old computers and the stories are fun. I'm neither bored nor overly frustrated.
Really my only issue is the lack of non-lethal play options, but you can play stealth most of the time and it's a good challenge for me. Not a shill or anything, I was just surprised to be enjoying them.
I'll agree with parts of what you said. If you want in-depth crafting, this isn't the game. If you want a sandbox, this isn't the game. If you want an immersive sim, this isn't the game.
If you want hacking, this is the game. I don't mean the hacking mini-game, which is still better than most, I mean the fact that every major skill tree can be ruthlessly exploited by learning its rules, and on higher difficulty you're basically forced to do this. Many reviewers call it broken, but the incentive landscape is both steep and similar across different skill trees which makes me think it's intentional. In any case, sniffing through the rulebook looking for exploitables and gleefully exploiting the shit out of them is The Hacking Experience as far as I'm concerned. Doom Eternal wants you to learn quickscopes and weapon-switching, CP2077 wants you to learn RTFM and exponential growth. It's not as visceral and it's much easier to cheat, but if you play it honestly then the thrill is quite comparable when your plan snaps together and you go from "struggling asthmatic" to "cyber-god" or "machete-king" or even "discount doomslayer."
The character writing is on point. CP2077 puts more effort and personality into throwaway characters than most AAAs put into supporting characters, and it really shows in side missions and replays. The Witcher 3 was in its own class for having meaningful side-missions and while CP2077 doesn't exceed it, it's a positive outlier in the right direction. When someone who hasn't played the game calls the side-quests unimaginative, it comes across as lazy and inauthentic virtue signaling. If someone came to that opinion first-hand I'd agree to disagree.
The endings are a highlight. No, they don't have a combinatorial number of AI-written endings that respect every possible permutation of choices, but anyone who expects that in a 2020 game is delusional. In 2020, if you want quality endings you can either have a large number of short endings (Prey) or a small number of fully fleshed out endings. CP2077 does the latter and does it very well. It is now my go-to positive example in that regard, the polar opposite of Mass Effect 3.
On PC, the bugs weren't bad and the graphics were good enough to give me a handful of "ambiance moments."
I enjoyed CP2077 and since I kept my expectations under control that's enough to stop me from going online and flaming it.
Well the only side quests I got so far are go here and kill people grinds, but the bar is low. I consider a side quest interesting if it gives you some speech options or has some kind of immersion to the side quest environment. Having novel puzzle solving or forcing some kind of reasoning skills, revealing something fascinating about the world that adds depth to what is going on, those are great side quests.
There was definitely world building in the computer messages which was good. You can hack a computer to skip some side quest requirements, it's not bad. To me the world is kind of cliche and dreary, again contrast with the playful inventiveness of Outer Words sci-fi world.
Actually I started playing on hard but switched to normal and then got super bored because it was too easy. Hard was kicking my ass and I couldn't do anything but it does emphasize the hacking you are talking about and probably is how I would make the game interesting for me.
I got dejected after I ground out the money for the doctor who helps you and it had no impact on anything and realized my craft deconstruction perk was tearing up valuable sellable things and not giving much XP (you can't turn it off). If it had scaled XP to value that would have been cool.
I also thought Johnny was a really well executed. He really made me feel like some asshole is taking over my brain, and you slowly develop a bit of empathy with him and you can feel that he's doing the same with you.
Plus, the scene where you play a gig as Johnny is so awesome. I've never played a first person game where something like that was done. Looking out on that crowd of people, I really felt like a rockstar.
Yeah, the side missions were filler. And every NCPD job was identical. But they didn't feel any worse than Spiderman, and much better than FF7R (the cats...). You didn't even have to do any of them anyway. It was just something to occupy you if you wanted to run around and explore the city.
I actually disagree with this pretty solidly - I've seen absolutely trash side missions like Dragon's Age 2 where a handful of dungeon templates had slices taken off of them and were repackaged endlessly. The NCPD jobs (especially the Assault ones) are cheapo quests - but they're placed interestingly in the world with custom prop work and differing tactical options. Depending on your build it may be more or less of "Just rush in with a sword" but viewing them as the random world encounters they appear to be created as makes them rather high quality in my eyes.
It's optional content for completionists or for you to trip over when wandering around and for that role I think it was well done.
I'm not talking about the gigs that you get from the fixers in the different regions. Those are interesting, they are mostly the same concept, but you can choose to go in stealth or rambo, and for many, if you scope the place well enough and have the right build, you can b-line to the objective.
Well there's your problem right there - don't accept lofty expectations ever. In terms of games that have been decade defining I can draw two examples: Skyrim and Age of Empires 2 - the first game came out after a real avalanche of negative PR around Oblivion being unfun at a basic level (the leveling system in that game was so horrible) and having the first exploitative DLC (see horse armor)... and the second game was mostly a dark horse that has somehow grown over the past two decades to have an incredibly strong e-sports community.
Don't let yourself have lofty expectations for games - realize that a game costs about six or seven movie tickets and make sure you're not dropping 70$ on a game that you shelve after thirty minutes.
I have played about 200 hours of the game on Ultra with Ray Tracing and this is the only point I disagree on. The graphics and beautiful design of the city is _the_ major accomplishment of this game. It's significantly more dense in terms of graphical fidelity and polygon count. I found myself often just ignoring the actual gameplay and parkouring around the beautiful city.
I can't speak to the ps4 version really, but I've seen screenshots and as far as I can tell they somehow made it look like a PS3 game. I don't think I could make it look that bad on PC even if I turned everything to low.
https://www.twitch.tv/ckplayer0ne/videos?filter=archives&sor...
> I found myself often just ignoring the actual gameplay and parkouring around the beautiful city.
That’s kind of what I mean - and everyone I’ve watched play Cyberpunk has done the same thing, ignore the quests and abuse the quirky movement system to explore places they aren’t “allowed” by the developers to visit, and admire the pretty views. It does look fun and relaxing - I often dick around like that in open world games.
But pretty views and nice models are only part of a good open world. In GTA the act of messing around in the city is real emergent gameplay explicitly supported by the game’s mechanics, and not just an improvised Mirror’s Edge. In GTA you can have an exciting chase across the city, and your actions have real (if transient) consequences for the surrounding cars and pedestrians. GTA’s cities do feel like real cities. The city in Cyberpunk seems like more of a set piece - impressively detailed and engineered, but without a lot of action.
The real issue is what was promised and teased and what was delivered. Honestly might border on false advertising. There are countless videos breaking down what was advertised in their promotional feature walkthrough videos and what was actually delivered (not even withstanding pretty glaring bugs and performance issues).
You should see games from The Elder Scrolls franchise. Even in the latest version of Skyrim there still are game-breaking bugs they have not fixed.
It’s a hard problem. Extremely large open world, thousands of scripts and triggers and things to test. I sympathize. Gamers are the hardest genre of users to please.
If you trigger the exit dialogue before picking up your stuff, the quest line gets stuck.
That's the only actual showstopper I encountered in 60 hours of gameplay.
There's so many differences between our savefiles and our system configurations that the bug could be a combinatorial explosion of things without access to source code.
This is super common in videogames. When some significant amount of people are experiencing bugs with a game and you're not, you should defer to the judgement of the ones who are having problems.
I can deal with bugs, but the lack of depth constantly breaks immersion, and some of the writing is just really cringeworthy
Which games writing is not cringeworthy please?
That and the weird way that V rarely uses the pronoun "I" or "we"
It's not "I need help"
It's "Need help"
Not "We're going to have time."
"Gonna have a hard time."
Doing it sometimes is one thing, it's a manner of speaking after all, but for anyone who hasn't played it, it's more jarring than it sounds.
I get the sense they were going for a quick talker vibe, but it just doesn't fit at all in so many places where they do it.
It makes it feel like you're listening to the VA do a quick read through of each line before they actually record the line...
I may be biased as I picked it up after some time mindlessly grinding through Persona 5, which has an English translation that is perfectly functional but never amazing.
TBC, it physically stops you from playing, but it's told in small enough bursts with sufficiently fast text rendering/animations that it doesn't feel like a real interruption; where most games will happily sit you through unskippable cutscenes and long monologues because gameplay is largely the means to reach the next narrative checkpoint
Cringeworthy isn't saying "I can use this dialog and real life and no one will cringe", it's a video game, it's not meant to be quoted without reference.
But many of the lines from 2077, even in their context, are just bad.
I mean, I hope one day soon "Ghost Off!" enters our lexicon, but for 2021 it's just bad...
Then look at Ghost of Tsushima or RDR2 on the same console.
I got a refund, bought the xbox version and played on xbox series s and it was actually pretty good even with graphics clearly "old gen"-level compared to the pc version.
Both games have worlds that are mostly empty, with few buildings here and there. As far as I remember, RDR2 dropped to ~25FPS in Saint Denis on my PS4 just after launch (not sure now), and Saint Denis is tiny comparing to Night City.
This game was not meant to be played on > 10 year old hardware. That's no excuse they shouldn't have released it at all on ps4, but still what did you expect ?
I don't think it's a stretch to say people expected it to at least look better than it does.
>It's like watching movies in 360p on Youtube
surely you mean like watching 720p Youtube :)
All of these games are cross-platform. It's possible. I just think the management of CDPR let everyone's pet feature into the timeline and marketing material without regard for the impact of delivery time.
I think that the issue isn't so much 'the audience' but the terrible work conditions associated with the gaming industry.
> It really holds the medium back as an art form
How? games are probably the most diverse art form in existence today, there is literally no rules to what a game can be.
It's like saying the people who play Call Of Duty online and Visual Novel X or Z are necessarily the same audience, no matter what game is produced, it's purely a stereotype, and it's not true.
Really? Compared to film, music, visual arts? I would say it's the least diverse of them. It's starting to branch out, especially in the indie scene, but it's still in it's infancy.
Yes because gaming actually unify all other art medium without being burdened by their 'rules'. Movies today have clearly defined cinematographic rules, very little professional produced movies can be deemed experimental. Games do not suffer from these kind of 'academic' considerations.
What we call "video games" now encompasses pretty much all other art forms except cooking. Whatever you can do with one form, you can do the same thing plus more in a game. There is much greater artistic potential in this kind of software than anywhere else that doesn't require physical presence (and even that can be simulated). It also requires massive engineering skill, itself an art.
That being said, the medium has a very long way to go yet and there are still many areas it has yet to explore. I'm very glad there's a thriving indie scene where developers are continually experimenting with fresh, crazy new ideas.
Because CDPR promised to Sony they'd fix it at launch, it was Sony being lenient, obviously that was a mistake from Sony.
Anecdotally, the players I knew have stopped playing it altogether due to a variety of issues.
The game-hours-to-calendar-days translation won't be 1:1.
And also note, the massive amount of players of CP2077, 3x less is still few orders of magnitude more than W3 had.
The main story lines are not crazy long, maybe 30hrs or so. The side quests aren't nearly the quality of Witcher 3. Most are just, "run into this building and kill this guy / steal data from the terminal, then run out." They only serve as something to do while you're exploring the city.
With no multiplayer or generated content, I can't imagine why anyone would spend more than 60-80 hours playing the game. It makes sense that fewer people would be playing it by now.
As a Linux gamer, I really don't get this whole drama and I appreciate that CDPR even provided the game to Wine and Mesa developers in advance so they even added a whole new Vulkan extension to improve support for it.
I think people just got way too excited about from having nothing to do during this pandemic and then ended up really disappointed. I empathize with that but I don’t know, it’s a $60 game. That’s like four movies. I’ve enjoyed it more than the last four movies I’ve watched for sure.
I also played it through Stadia, because Google was having really good deals on Stadia. The first month was free (through a Google Music promotion), and buying Cyberpunk for $50 got you a Chromecast Ultra. I have actually been pleasantly surprised by how good the Stadia experience is.
- The PC version is by far the most playable
- CDPR games haved worked well on Linux through proton in the past
- Stadia targets are very narrow set of hardware and I would assume Google added a couple of patches to make sure it plays well.
You probably still get the logic bugs that you see in all platforms but from everything I have seen it seems like once the games passes a "performance threshold" the graphics hold up pretty well.
Look in the comments here.
Then you are either not past the railroad stages of the very early game, or you have not been paying attention. Or both.
I stand by what I said. GP may not be lying, in which case I believe they have either only just started the game, or are not paying attention to its many readily reproducible, unavoidable glitches.
rig:
- threadripper 1920X 12-core
- 2080ti
- 32gb ecc ram