Cyberpunk 2077 Grieving Thread

[SiccDicc]

Lol so appeartently Cyberpunk 2077 sold 13 million copies in the first two weeks. Even IF something like 3 million people get a refund nothing is gonna change. Projelt CD was able to pull a fast one with marketing hype and screw the rest.

That depends on how much they spent, how much they owe their investors, etc.

If it was a four year game I'd agree, but this went on for 8 years. I'm skeptical on just how much they totaled through those years.

 

[Cod of War]

B-but he didn't du nuffin man. He just wanted the cash back and keep playing. Can an African American man in this day and age not have dreams anymore? So racist.

Story seems a bit blown up tho. So this was a single tweet? That's news? Really..

How do you know they're basketball american?

 

[Lou’s Biggest Fan]

Oh shit did this thing actually release finally? I don’t know how I missed it.

 

[HensKenKline]

How do you know they're basketball american?

I don't. I saw the black-ish avatar and "Zack" and kinda assumed it.

 

[Back me up!]

B-but he didn't du nuffin man. He just wanted the cash back and keep playing. Can an African American man in this day and age not have dreams anymore? So racist.

Story seems a bit blown up tho. So this was a single tweet? That's news? Really..

Its comicbook.com, OF COURSE they are going to try to paint "gamers" in the least flattering light possible after going full woke. Like you said, it was one tweet they are trying to blow up to show a trend.

 

[Secret Asshole]

Was this guy in a fucking coma for 8 years?? He also said the game plays well on ps4 & xbox one. Something shady is going on. He is lying trough his fucking teeth. He knew it plays like shit and he also knew what was going to happen. He is just pretending that CDPR had no idea that their customers would be pissed.

lol, they're STILL fucking lying. They're not going to fix this buggy mess. I hope the reputation being unceremoniously destroyed was fucking worth it.

Not so much lucked out, more that most of the people who made those games left/were forced out and replaced by west coast americans and danger hair women.

They were replaced with less experienced dangerhair Canadians and Americans because they were cheaper and didn't want to pay the more experienced Witcher 3 devs. Which caused the entire game to suffer for it.

Cops don't seem to be hackable.
Really sucks trying to use a netrunner build when trying to fight on missions that require you to take them out.

They're not, because the game is retarded. Anyone with a 'friendly' flag you can't hack. For some fucking reason cops are flagged as 'friendly' so if you piss them off or have to kill them for a mission you have to cheese them.

 

[You]

I don't. I saw the black-ish avatar and "Zack" and kinda assumed it.

Fucking Nostradamus over here. Not only does he have basketball in the veins but he's also a shitty Chicago soundcloud rapper and "producer" named Zack Tickman with the rap name ZTwithDaBeatz

Jusglo x GloGangTwins - Coupe [Prod. by @ZTwithDaBeatz]

Jusglo x @GloGangTwinsGLORYBOYZENT [Prod. @ZTwithDaBeatz]

soundcloud.com

He apparently chimped out hard over the attention the tweet got him and got both his twitter and instagram suspended.

https://twitter.com/ztwithdabeatz

https://www.instagram.com/zack_tickman/

https://twitter.com/ztwithdabeatz/status/1339989531261628417 Showing it was his tweet

 

[Fagnacious D]

A video about how save file size increases and becomes corrupted...

From what I can tell, the main issue with ballooning saves has to do with the amount of individual items your create or loot, and it does not purge the data from the game when those items are sold or dismantled. So it is actually safer to dupe components rather than craft and dismantle for them.

Also how to get back to the hotel you enter with Jackie early in the game.
Make note that the corpses are still there from when this guy entered earlier in the game.

 

[Kurtis Trent]

I remember in Deadly Premonition PC port if you do any side missions in early chapters your save file becomes too big and the game will freeze at certain checkpoints. The only way to avoid this is by not doing any side missions, and that's annoying because you'll lose some cool rewards like fast travel.

 

[The Cunting Death]

Its weird, I played the game for at least 40 hours and it never crashed on me, despite Hard-drive loading issues.
Played on a GTX980 btw

 

[Montalbane]

Shit like this makes me feel glad to be detached from any online social circles.
Can't buy into hype if you're deaf and blind to this bullshit.

 

[DeusVult]

People are mad at them for sucking off the CCP. I've seen plenty of people angry about what they did to the Devotion devs and even bringing that up in light of their perpetual PR suicide involving CP2077, PR suicide like...
View attachment 1801981

Their savefile system is broken and here we have this retard (in the screenshot attached) mentally masturbating about game design philosophy, while missing two facts:
- there are countless games with a definitive start, middle and end, but functioning savefile systems.
- there are countless games without a definitive start, middle and end, but also with functioning savefile systems, which is arguably harder. The only system I've noticed has a bit of a problem, is the Arkham Knight's one. It takes noticeable time to autosave, but only if you beat and unlock the majority (like 70% of achievements, not totally sure) of the game. But - you can still play the fucking game.
The post in the screenshot is so stupid and detached on so many levels, that this person should never touch a keyboard again.

 

[Tor Lugosi]

I think a more apt analogy would be:
Patient: Doctor! Doctor! It hurts when I breathe!
Doctor: Then don't breathe.

 

[Not Really Here]

Its weird, I played the game for at least 40 hours and it never crashed on me, despite Hard-drive loading issues.
Played on a GTX980 btw

This is one of the things I love most about this game, total inconsistency of performance.
Guy with a $900 computer built years ago-Works fine!
Guy with $2000 computer built last year-Crashed 3 times on character creation but I got a fix and only had to text edit a few files.

Game on non-AMD-Cool I'll multithread the shit out of these cores!
Game on AMD-6 cores? You get 6 threads!

Great job polacks.

 

[Huge Fuckin Nerd]

Okay, this is gonna be a long one. I've played most of the game but not all of it over about 70 hours, so I think I pitch in with my review.

CYBERPUNK 2077 - THE PIGLET REVIEW

Welp, where to begin. In one word - hubris. I think also with this. Cyberpunk 2077 isn't really an RPG. If anything it's more of an immersive sim with mechanics lifted from a looter shooter. The game it reminds me the most of is Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines from 2004, and not just because it also was an over ambitious game based on a lesser known tabletop RPG which had a troubled production and was kicked out the door not entirely finished. But because they both cast the player as a mercenary with superhuman abilities who has to battle to retain their individuality and decide what it means to be alive, and both have the trifecta of combat / diplomacy / stealth to determine the outcome of quests. This will of course be spoilery so you have been warned.

The bottom line is that CP77 is a really good game IMO. However it isn't as good as Witcher 3, and there is no way it could have lived up to the hype, and also has a number of flaws. I also played it on a reasonably powerful PC (Ryzen 3700X, 16 GB RAM, GTX 1080 Ti) and I was able to max it without ray tracing but had to drop to 1440p resolution. Even so there were still some bugs and glitches but these were usually of the funny rather than game breaking variety such as your car being summoned partly merged with another car or adverts while driving being super low resolution until you looked away and it loaded them in. There was one bug that I had to back up to an earlier save to work around in one of Johnny's side quests but that was about it really. The console versions are verifiably a shitshow and I personally wouldn't be surprised if there was litigation over those but more on why I think this is later.

Okay. So what's it like to play? Pretty cool. It looks the part certainly. Night City is an advert overloaded neon hellscape of ultra-violence and consoomerism. A degenerate society that feeds off its own degeneracy. It also feels alive. Yes, I know the ambient NPCs (and there are many, certainly on PC, and they do all seem to look unique) are just wandering around according to a script, and the traffic is driving around in circles, but it still feels alive. Ridiculous adverts for ridiculous products blare at you from every hoarding. Radio and TV news gleefully fills in background as to just how fucked the world of 2077 really is - and yes, both main and side quests can affect its content. Everyone, including (and especially) V dresses like a fucking fashion victim, which is probably because they are. Cars range from clunkers in the slums, excessive pimpmobiles in the lower middle class areas, to sleek sports models in the posh areas, and Mad Max jalopies in the badlands. My personal favourite is the Herrera Outlaw which is a rear-engined sports saloon which accelerates faster than it can brake and fishtails hilariously round corners.

The Writing

The plot I have to admit seems a bit banal on first glance but it works. V (which is short for Vincent if you're a man or Valerie if you're a woman) is either a street kid, a nomad, or an office drone for Arasaka, and undergoes an incident which drives them to lose everything - in my case playing a corpo origin, it was picking the wrong side in office politics and being fired and impoverished - and go out on The Edge. There then follows a montage of jobs with Jackie which if I'm brutally honest could have been a bit more playable, before the mission from the 2018 trailer in which you rescue Sandra Dorsett, a corporate woman, from a scavenger gang. There is then the biggest job yet - steal a biochip from Arasaka for a huge payday, only for Saburo Arasaka to appear, be killed by his son Yorinobu, and in the resulting confusion for Jackie and V to botch their escape and long story short, the biochip has to be preserved by putting it in V's head.

I have to say, Saburo Arasaka is a seriously compelling character even though he only gets a few minutes' screentime. He is a master of tranquil fury but at the same time strangely vulnerable because he thinks he can trust his son. He might also look sympathetic but then again he is the head of the biggest and most ruthless corporation on Earth.

Anyhow, the biochip contains Johnny Silverhand, the legendary rockerboy who blew up Arasaka Tower in 2023 and who has been missing but whose body was never found. Despite being lionised in legend as the messiah of the downtrodden who will one day return to lead the revolution, Johnny comes over at all times as basically a rebel without a clue. I thought Keanu did a really good performance as him here. Johnny Silverhand is a hate-filled, bitter shell of a man whose bitterness is only exacerbated by having spent the last 50 years on a USB drive. He is also far from being a great revolutionary, someone who wants little more than to watch the world burn because it is beyond saving. He also hates the fact that he is predominantly known for his music rather than the message. Late in the game, a number of his side quests see him meeting his former band member Kerry Eurodyne, who is kind of like the Paul McCartney to his John Lennon, only an even bigger sellout and whose repeated flounces and rejoinings of Samurai were more like tiffs between unrequited lovers (and indeed, Kerry Eurodyne is gay, and yes, you can bang him, and he had a huge crush on Johnny back in the day). Johnny accepts that he is stuck in V's head but gradually by way of how the biochip works, he is taking over V's personality and indeed I suspect the game keeps a track of how you respond to Johnny's presence and constant manifestations during almost every main and side quest and even random gigs, and then swaps out dialogue options later on based on whether you adopt a line of teeth-clenched teamwork or begin to act more and more like Johnny. Yet at the same time, Johnny begins to feel more and more at peace with the world and less rage-filled. Because when he first becomes aware of the world of 2077 he notices just how much of a failure he was - Arasaka are back and bigger than ever, Alt Cunningham is still lost in cyberspace, Rogue (the fixer and Johnny's former "output") still hates him, and his only real fans are a bunch of diehards who are more in love with Johnny the symbol than Johnny the person.

He also has no friends and in flashbacks and in his quest line you see just how he systematically alienated everyone when he was still alive.

Later on in the game you can let him manifest in full and take over V's body. One such incident involves him having a night on the town where he (piloting your body) gets blind drunk, gets into fights with bouncers, picks up a girl in a club and on the ride back to her place fingerbangs her while driving to the point that she wraps the car round a concrete pillar. Upon where he fucks off and then gets a tattoo of "Johnny + V 4eva" in a heart (on your body).

I have to say that I really rated the character development for both V and Johnny. V can either retain his idealism or become more jaded over time, and Johnny can become more like V. It is telling that in the Fool on the Hill tarot graffiti collection quest, the card immediately outside V's apartment is the Fool and the one most associated with Johnny is the Devil. There's a lot of tarot symbolism in the game but that's not massively important.

As for other characters, they're a mixed bag. Some of them are really well conceived and excellently written - Judy for one, Panam Palmer the nomad girl for another. There's also ex detective River Ward who went out on his own to catch a serial killer in one of the most disturbing plotlines of the game. Judy's quest chain explores the more gruesome side of the burgeoning Night City sex trade, while Panam's is all about the price of freedom - hers is a hardscrabble life in the Badlands and constantly on the move and dodging bandits and corporates but which feels freer and more "authentic" than the materially more comfortable life of a bug-eating, pod-dwelling urbanite. (Also TANKSEX). One of my personal favourite (and most nightmarish) quests was Dream On, in which you are engaged by mayoral candidate Jefferson Peralez and his extremely THICC wife to investigate an intruder into their penthouse flat, only to uncover that their private security is gaslighting them to the point of which he is reduced to being basically a Manchurian Candidate in the guise of being a populist rebel. Others seem a bit flat if I'm honest. Jackie could have had more than just a montage and the Sandra Dorsett job to get to know him. I suspect that given that in 2018 Sandra Dorsett was stated to be about 8 hours in there was probably some reworking of the script. Granted, there was some development with what we already had but it felt like his function was kinda to get fridged. Missed opportunity there lads. Maman Brigitte and the Voodoo Boys in general really needed fleshing out. Ditto the Animals. Okay, in the fist fighting side quest there was the strangely amiable roid-head Rhino but most of the time they just felt like they were making up the numbers. 6th Street were another gang who could have had more in-depth context to them. Then there's Claire Russell, the bartender at Afterlife who enjoys working on her armoured battle-truck and taking part in Mad Max style cars-and-guns street races, whose quest chain was actually quite interesting and is an example of how you write a trans character who isn't all "have I mentioned I am trans today" or otherwise just chucked in for representation, mainly because her being trans is not the total extent of her personality.

(Hmmm, muscular women and trans women in a game and the game not being trashed other than by the usual OAG spergs because of it? What heresy is this? Is it possibly that people like good writing? Surely not.)

There's been some criticism that you don't have an effect on the world and are railroaded to picking an ending. I'm not sure that's correct to be fair. How the last few main quests play out seem to be dependent on how you handled the major side quest chains. Also you absolutely have an effect on the world. Certain characters react differently based on what quests you have done to that point and how you handled things previously. For instance, how you handle the murder of Lucius Rhyne and the Dream On side quest affects the outcome of the election in the news.

The Gameplay

Is solid. On easier difficulties enemies are fuck-stupid, frankly. But even so the gunplay is quite fun and weapons are fairly well spread out. A personal favourite in the early game was a submachine gun that set enemies on fire. Later on, a sniper rifle that fired exploding bullets was always amusing as a headshot from stealth could not only pink-mist their skull but also the force could tear off all their limbs as well. I never really cared too much for the ability to bounce bullets off things with power weapons or shoot through cover with tech weapons, and smart weapons with homing bullets didn't bother me too much because I was able to do enough damage with direct fire to serve. Melee combat was satisfying if serviceable.

Offensive cyberware was pretty damn tasty to be fair. Mantis blades have the ability to leap and slice and dice enemies and even with the right mods set them on fire or otherwise wreck their day. The Monowire I never really used but from other peoples' experience it wasn't what I was expecting. I thought it would be more like the Harlequin's Kiss from Warhammer 40K but it's more like an energy whip. Gorilla Arms were very fun though because they had an increased chance to stun and also did bleeding damage as well.

The best offensive cyberware, and the most fun, though, was quickhacking. It plays so much like Disciplines from VTMB in that you have a limited pool of points to spend on hacks and any enemy or entity in your line of sight can be subjected to a quickhack. So you can use Short Circuit to insta-kill most drones, Friendly Mode to turn turrets against enemies, and Overheat to set enemies on fire. Stealth aficionados can use Reboot Optics to temporarily blind guards so you can sneak past them, while Contagion makes for useful crowd control. But of course, enemies can also quickhack you and give you status effects of a similar variety, and unless you have the appropriate cyberware mod you can't always know where they are coming from as the only defence is to kill the enemy attempting to hack you before the hack completes.

Stealth is IMO the most satisfying way to get through encounters. I had originally tried to go for a full diplomacy build but that didn't seem to have too much effect, so I switched to stealth / ranged.

The main story is annoyingly short, however there are a lot of side quests that feed into it and also side quests that unlock based upon progress within it. There are also "gigs" or side quests that unlock as you explore Night City - and I found myself doing just that and very rarely fast travelling, because I just wanted to see what it was like. Night City was reportedly designed in game by a real life urban planner and it shows. As you explore you can find bars and clubs ranging from the bad guy bar the Afterlife; Lizzie's, the fleshpit run by a gang of whores; Dicky Twister, a gay bar run by an expy of the Mexican cartels; Totentanz, a permanent warehouse rave (and yes, you can throw down some moves on the dancefloor, and yes, V dances like an idiot); and Riot, a celebrity hangout. There are also clothing stores of various varieties, eateries which all seem to sell noodles in the rain (because of course they do), and ripperdocs where you can upgrade your cyberware.

I will throw a huge criticism at this though. The wanted system with its amazing teleporting police. It feels like it was crudely amputated for some reason, or just a placeholder. More on why I think this. But it's not the best part of the game. Also sometimes traffic can act very strangely, stopping at green lights for no good reason. In an anti-frustration effort to avoid the player getting stuck in traffic too much while driving, they fixed it so that all traffic lights turn green as you approach. But the traffic AI seems to get confused by this. Driving is servicable but no Gran Turismo. However all the cars handle differently and distinctly - the Quadra Turbo with its huge V8 and powersliding goodness, the Thorton Galena with its clunky engine but odd charm, the Villefort Cortes with its excessive size and inertia, the tail-happy Herrera Outlaw, and of course Johnny's Porsche.

The Graphics

Look pretty damn tasty when cranked up. Not sure about ray tracing because I don't have an RTX card. But it's the best looking game by a long shot, as long as you don't run into too much glitching. Yes, there is a photo mode and yes there are bits where you see V in normal gameplay (during the TANKSEX scene for one if you must know). Slightly upset that you can't go tackle out in photo mode or gameplay though.

Why it's a Shitshow on Console

This is pure spergulation here, by the way.

Current generation consoles are pretty underpowered even by 2013 standards. And this is where CDPR's hubris comes into play here. Basically, in the design stages of the game, they made a list of, I don't know, 100 features and mechanics that had to be in the game. They then got the deal to release on PC and console within a given timeframe, in exchange for funding. They then proceeded to blow all the funding on the PC version thinking that they could just downgrade and optimise onto consoles like they did with Witcher 3. Unfortunately, they ran into a snag - CPU power. Consoles don't have enough of it. Both Xbone and PS4 are based on Bulldozer type CPUs. That's just not enough to run and coordinate all the subsystems they had in mind even with a graphical downgrade. But they are contractually obliged to release on current gen console. So what do?

If they release on PC and next-gen only, they get sued.

If they delay excessively, they get sued.

Therefore the only thing they can do is to start pulling features until it works on console. I suspect there may have been a meeting at which the engineers said to management, okay, here's a list of 100 features that CP77 has to have. To make it work on consoles, pick any 80 of them and we'll arsehole the rest. This is probably why the wanted system is so pants, and why ambient NPCs are basically scripted automata rather than entities who react to V's appearance and suchlike. The result is a game that feels not entirely finished on PC, and only just works on console. If you're thinking of VTMB again, you're not the only one. CDPR had the same hubris that they would be able to incorporate everything they had proposed and still make it work properly as Troika did. They also thought that by throwing bodies at it they could simply beat it until it started working. This worked with W3 so it should work here, right?

Nope.

I honestly think that the best way for CDPR to escape this predicament would be to give it a year then release an Enhanced Edition for PC and next gen only which restores the things they had to chop off to make it work on current gen, and make that free for current players. They did that for Witcher 1 and 2.

Conclusion

It's still worth playing - on PC, that is. Despite its flaws and bugs it's still very well written from a character development perspective and fun to play, and most importantly it gave me "the feeling" that made me want more and more and to stay up past my bedtime doing just one more quest or poking about Night City some more. Which is something I really haven't had this year in gaming. Doom Eternal was very cool but didn't have that effect on me. Iron Harvest did at first as well but later levels felt like a chore. Horizon Zero Dawn on PC was pretty fun once I got over its constant crashing.

I would probably give it an 87. That's about what I'd give Witcher 2 or VTMB. To get into the 90s it needs restored the wanted system and stuff with Jackie, and some more fleshing out in places - Pacifica especially. And less glitching. If you can put up with the rough around the edges elements but quality writing and fun gameplay like in VTMB then you should play it. If you're expecting it to be the best thing ever, it isn't.

I think for their next effort, CDPR might want to think about making something less sprawling and tighter in scope. They are really good at worldbuilding and character development, so something that emphasises that maybe. They need to see this launch as an object lesson in the dangers of hubris. But then, 1 million concurrent players on Steam and the fact that it was profitable from PC sales alone means they probably won't and their next game will be even more excessive and hilariously wonky at times.

Absolutely jealous that you were able to get decent graphics settings. I have an older midrange pc that I really should upgrade (i7 @3.5ghz, 16gb ram, 1070) and I had to crank down to 1080p low settings to get a decent framerate.

A lot of your sentiments echoed mine, but it’s funny how we’re the opposite on our definitions of an RPG. Personally I think the game fails on the story front as there are little to no meaningful choices or branching paths, but the gameplay and character building scream RPG. I like the build diversity and I’ve played with a few different combat styles thanks to buying respecs at ripperdoc.

In spite of its flaws, I also really enjoy the game. I lament for what it could’ve been, which is why I hope to see a sequel one day, but I’ll be happy to replay it and get lost in night city all over again when I eventually build a new PC

 

[Drain Todger]

Let's see if I can pull some Resetera-level misrepresentation with this plot summary.

Okay, here goes. Angry white army deserter and punk rocker whose band's name is a vicious act of cultural appropriation destroys the local headquarters of a Japanese family business with a stolen nuke. Fifty years later, you're haunted by the vengeful ghost of Johnny "Nagasaki Every Nip" Silverhand, the most racist man on earth.

"Wake the fuck up Samurai, we've got some Zipperheads to burn."

I hate videos like this.

This and "how to win at game design in 10 MINUTES" shit is a pretty good tell that the industry isn't going to get any better when this is most of the new blood.

The grifters around teaching "game design" are numerous. They remind me of the "how to get big on youtube" people who have like 10k subscribers at best. (most of them are purchased fake ones anyway, judging from the engagement.)

I really dislike the video. The asshole just goes and buys a bunch of assets and pre-made systems and goes "LOL GUYUZ LOOK I MADE CYBA$RPUNK IN ONE DAY". Nigger, you didn't make shit in one day.

That's pretty much what Epic are trying to do with Unreal Engine as of late. Make it so any dumbass with very little gamedev experience can toss some prefabs together and prototype a game overnight. They want stock asset libraries for everything. That's why they bought out Quixel.

That UE5 tech demo kinda blew my mind, particularly because of Nanite, their new mesh optimization algorithm. What Nanite means, ultimately, is that anyone can throw an unoptimized model straight from ZBrush and into a game without retopology, normal map baking, hand-authored LODs, or any of those other time-consuming tasks. This is also good for VR, because traditional methods of saving polys like normal mapping don't play well with stereoscopic goggles (they look flat regardless).

There is a catch, of course. Extreme polycounts mean larger files, and it's probably only really useful for static environmental objects that don't need to be animated (retopo and fiddling around by hand with shit will still be necessary for character models for the foreseeable future, I'd say, unless you want warped models that are impossible to skin and animate correctly). Still, it's a perfect example of how Epic are trying to radically alter game development workflows.

For an example of what I mean by this, Bright Memory was made by just one guy with UE:

Of course, the flipside of this is that you get a lot of this sort of bullshit:

 

[Neuron Gayjoy]

Let's see if I can pull some Resetera-level misrepresentation with this plot summary.

Okay, here goes. Angry white army deserter and punk rocker whose band's name is a vicious act of cultural appropriation destroys the local headquarters of a Japanese family business with a stolen nuke. Fifty years later, you're haunted by the vengeful ghost of Johnny "Nagasaki Every Nip" Silverhand, the most racist man on earth.

View attachment 1805861

"Wake the fuck up Samurai, we've got some Zipperheads to burn."

Sorry, are you making fun of ResetEra?! I'll have you know that I am their fed, sped, lover and otherkin. Duly elected to defend Cyberpunk until 2077. As a happy fellow spewing facts about worlds of fiction, I cannot help but tell you that you are wrong. Keanu's Reeves is a brave and bold character subverting our privileged expectations by forcing his way inside V's body and making us - the players - enjoy it. He is truly the pearl of our harbor, blowing in our face like a Japanese nigga's saki.

 

[Dark Edea]

Did they fix it yet??

 

[Rance's Hyper Weapon]

Did they fix it yet??

lmao no. Don't expect it to be "fixed' for at least a year. Also ironing out the bugs and optimizing performance won't change the fact that the game is flat out missing a bunch of features that the devs spent years marketing.

 

[Dark Edea]

lmao no. Don't expect it to be "fixed' for at least a year. Also ironing out the bugs and optimizing performance won't change the fact that the game is flat out missing a bunch of features that the devs spent years marketing.

Gyahahahahaha