Cyberpunk 2077

Brahma said:

That was a huge patch man. Not a nitpicker, but that seems like a TON of issues.

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jooka said:

evaluating CDPR on cyberpunk sales is a bad way to estimate the future of CDPR. Cyberpunk was gonna sell well regardless of the quality of the game, the quality of the game as released will certainly have a negative value when talking about sales of future products. That's the reality they are dealing with now.

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mkopec said:

you must be one of those nit pickers we were talking about.

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Fight said:

I've been completely finished with the game for about a week now. Played it on Xbox Series X. Level 50, 50 Street Cred, level 20 skill in crafting, all gigs, side jobs, bought 60% of the vehicles, and Nomad/Panam ending. All in all, came in just under 80 hours played.

The game is good, but it is far from great. I definitely liked it enough to not even consider returning my copy.

The bugs, the crashes, the instability, and the overall excrement-show of a launch are well documented. A lot of that stuff pissed me off, but I am going to put all that aside and just try to focus on where the game stands from a feature, promise/delivery, scope, technical, and presentation standpoint.

Here is what is does Well:

Spoiler: The Good:

• Main Story: The story is pretty good. It could have gotten convoluted, but they kept the train on the tracks. It was just good futuristic fiction.
• Combat: The combat system is really great. The weapons look and sound great. The guns have real impact. The melee weapons thump and slice. It is all really well done.
• Controls: General controls and movement feels fluid and natural. Running, jumping, crouching... all of it feels great.
• Characters: They created a world with good characters. Though, they really should not have killed Jackie so early. The sheer amount of good characters is something they should be commended for.
• Voice: The Voice acting is varied and interesting.
• Music: I wouldn't say the music was amazing, but there are 5 or 6 great tracks. I wish they would have leaned into techno-vibe more and the death-metal-vibe less. Best case scenario for me would have been the Bladerunner 2049 soundtrack.
• Night City: Night City is well constructed. It feels like it could be a real, futuristic place. The bones of the city are just great... but what they fill it with is another matter.
• Side Quests: These stories are awesome. The Gigs get formulaic and repetitive. More on that below.
• "Magic System": Quick Hacks are a great stand-in for a magic system. It fits within the Cyberpunk world perfectly.
• Stealth: The system also works well. They aren't pioneering anything new here, but they did a good job with it.

Things they did Poorly:

Spoiler: The Bad:

• Three Life Paths: They matter for about 2 hours of your entire play-thru. It determines where you start and a handful of dialogue choices (which make no difference) along the way. Just one of countless game features that are present, but so under-cooked that you wonder why they ever bothered in the first place.
• Game Vibe: That bombastic talk show host every time you loaded up the game was out of place and a poor copy-cat attempt at the GTA series take on social commentary. It was like they couldn't really decide was "Cyberpunk" was. The vibe and feel of the game is disjointed and tries to be everything to everyone.
• NPC's: NPC's are embarrassingly under developed. Morrowind, almost 20 years ago, puts this game to shame. The clearly devoted zero time or effort to making the city populace be anything but automatons that walk down the sidewalk or drive in a straight line.
• Traffic: The traffic system is copulateed. They spawn cars behind you, you turn look at them, then turn away, and they respawn/disappear. It is all 100% artificial.
• Vehicles: All you get are Trucks, Cars, Motorcycles. That is it. And that is just for you. The NPCs don't even get motorcycles. There are train stations with no trains. You can't fly anything. There are no flavor vehicles like bikes or jet skis or any watercraft outside of a few huge cargo ships.
• Police: This has to be one of the worst implementation of Police in any open-world game ever. They spawn on top of you, they stop pursuing you when you get 1 block out of range. It is like the developer's had to come up with a police system in less than a day because they were told their game was shipping whether it was ready or not. It is really embarrassing.
• Water: There is one mission were you dive under the water and a couple events where you dive down to loot a stash. Just another game-system that is barely there.
• Companions: Johnny is the only companion and he is only there to add flavor to the story. It would have been great to get your own crew or a side kick.
• OP Weapons: No balance or correct scaling with the weapon system. Everyone gets to the point where you can one-shot every enemy. Prior to that, you have no way of telling enemy threat levels or whether you should engage them in a fight or not.
• Play the Way You Want: They took the "play how you want to play" to an extreme level. To the extent that EVERY mission has way in the back door, a garbage dumpster to dump bodies in, a dialogue option avoid combat, a terminal to hack, a computer to switch off cameras... on and on and on. At some point, when you have EVERY option available to you, every mission is essentially the same, just with different flavor text. Gigs especially fell into this trap and turned into a lot of filler content.
• Fixer's and Gigs: They came up with a solid formula, then copy/pasted it about 60 times. Break in, and upload virus/kill target/rescue target/steal data. Rinse, repeat. All the fixers are hallow and shallow. None of them are your friend or your foe. They just offer up the same lame missions and pay you for it.
• Gangs & Districts: No ability to pick your allegiance and have the other factions hate you. Sure, all the various gangs existed, but they were just there add a bit of flavor and fill a stereotype. Why was there no faction rating that could go up or down with your actions? They should have had their own unique vendors that would only sell unique and rare items if you had faction with them.
• Character Creator: Minor gripe for me personally, because I will often just use the generic pre-made character in RPG's, but character creation is pretty shallow. Why did we get to customize our dong's when you never see them? Beyond that, you can't alter your appearance, get a tattoo or a haircut after the fact. This is basic and standard stuff for RPG's these days. excrement it was basic and standard for RPG's a decade ago.

It will be interesting to read the news in the coming years about the development and launch of the game. I have a feeling that someone will spill the beans and pull the curtain back on what a clusterfuck of development this must have been. The game is passable most of the time and has some really good story moments, but when it comes down to it... it is average. It was still worth my $60, but they over-promised and severely under-delivered. They did not raise the bar in any aspect of the genre and were outshined by similar games that came out 5-10 years ago. Hard to believe that this was the same company that gave us Witcher 3.

I am hopeful that the DLC redeems them. If they could somehow come out with something on the level of Blood and Wine, I will sing their praises.

Score: 6.5/10

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Fight said:

No, I am one of those people that nearly 100% the game and took the time to give a full assessment of it. To say it has a few minor bugs and nothing game breaking is factually wrong. I crashed 25-30 times. I lost my dialogue sound for about 15 hours of my playthrough. I lost another 5-6 hours of progress having to go back and load prior saves multiple times because their quests completely crapped out, or my vehicles got completely stuck in a spot that would not allow me to exit.

If I wanted to nick pick, yeah I could call out some janky excrement every 2-3 minutes or so, but I made an effort to look past it. I have been gaming my whole life and this game is the #1 contender for the most broken thing I have ever played... but yeah, "It's an awesome game with a few minor bugs. None of the bugs are game breakers." You'd have to be on the payroll or a stock holder to push this notion.

Honesty, a rare commodity these days.

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Fight said:

No, I am one of those people that nearly 100% the game and took the time to give a full assessment of it. To say it has a few minor bugs and nothing game breaking is factually wrong. I crashed 25-30 times. I lost my dialogue sound for about 15 hours of my playthrough. I lost another 5-6 hours of progress having to go back and load prior saves multiple times because their quests completely crapped out, or my vehicles got completely stuck in a spot that would not allow me to exit.

If I wanted to nick pick, yeah I could call out some janky shit every 2-3 minutes or so, but I made an effort to look past it. I have been gaming my whole life and this game is the #1 contender for the most broken thing I have ever played... but yeah, "It's an awesome game with a few minor bugs. None of the bugs are game breakers." You'd have to be on the payroll or a stock holder to push this notion.

Honesty, a rare commodity these days.

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Lanx said:

i would've liked quests to have more depth, mean something and when they actually were going somewhere...

stops

like i'm sure we could all appreciate a 20 hour dlc on just the mayor/wife questline alone

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