I don’t claim to know much about this but I guess it pulled a No Man’s Sky and patched in everything that needed to be fixed or added. And it’s half off on steam right now so I’m considering pulling the trigger. Should I?
I don’t claim to know much about this but I guess it pulled a No Man’s Sky and patched in everything that needed to be fixed or added. And it’s half off on steam right now so I’m considering pulling the trigger. Should I?
I’ve been very curious about the state of Cyberpunk since it’s launch. I didn’t get super on the hype train as I’ve learned over the years you never know what a game is like until it’s out and you can play it for yourself.
It’s been interesting to observe all the post-launch changes from a distance in No Man’s Sky fashion. I found it pretty hilarious to read CDPR went from multiplayer and multiple DLCs to one DLC 3 years later, but it does seem as if that DLC will include exhaustive gameplay system changes. That workrate is still hilariously low.
I guess when you rush out a big budget project and pressure your staff massively to get it out on a deadline, they get burned out to they point want nothing to do with it once it’s out the door. That’s definitely the sense I get. It’s a shame considering how massively hyped it was in the lead-up only for it to be generally seen as a rushed disappointment, but I guess it’s a lesson for CDPR to learn for the future alongside other AAA developers.
Anyway, Cyberpunk fans - how would you describe the state of the game at present? Outside of the performance issues, what is it in Cyberpunk’s marketing that was missing from the released game? What are it’s pros and cons? Have the gazillion patches “fixed” the missing expected features yet? Does it seem as if the DLC features are wrapping up the final missing features?
I played it when it came out after I found it in an underground chest on a desert island and got probably halfway through. I didn’t really mind the performance issues (they were BAD, don’t get me wrong) but I hated how the game was broken to its core. It wanted to be both an open ended RPG and a narrative action adventure game, resulting in something I like to describe using this metaphor: if the game was talking to you, it would sound like “YOU CAN BE WHOEVER YOU WANT, CHOOSE YOUR PAST AND WRITE YOUR FUTURE! But actually no, you’re a predetermined character with an established personality and traits. BUT YOU CAN CHOOSE HOW YOU INTERACT WITH THE WORLD AND ITS CHARACTERS AND WATCH THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR ACTIONS UNFOLD! But not really, choices slightly change the way you get from point A to point B, except maybe in the sidequests”.
Regarding the open ended “write your own story” RPG aspect of it, It’s INFURIATING choosing to have a certain attitude towards a character when the game gives you the option just to see the protagonist act in a completely different (and totally unambiguous) way in the next line of dialogue, but the game creates this kind of contradictions even by itself. I remember that in the beginning of the game you see V freaking out when they realises that Johnny is in their head, insulting him and screaming and asking him to leave their head. Then you start playing, go in the street and not even 5 minutes later you can trigger a cutscene from a side quest where you see the two of them getting along like two good old friends. That shouldn’t happen, and it’s just completely broken narrative design that spoils me the evolution of the relationship between V and Johnny. They could have avoided it by simply unlocking the side quest after a few main missions.
On the Action-RPG side of things, everything’s great on paper but with deeply flawed execution. I wanted to be an hacker, and after not even half of the game I could kill EVERY enemy in a building before even entering it. The same goes for the shooting, where you have a classic resistances and weaknesses system (e.g. if I shoot fire bullets enemy A will get x.5 damage and enemy B will get x2 damage) that is literally useless. After a while I stopped paying attention to it and it didn’t make a difference, not a noticeable one at least (and it would have been useless anyway since I could kill people just by staring at them through walls).
Overall, performance aside, it felt like an alpha version of a game, where you have some systems that kinda interact with each other and that not only need to be smoothed but often times reworked from the ground up. It is (or at least was at the time) a game without internal coherence from a semiotic point of view: it kinda knows what it wants to tell you but not well enough to not completely fail in how it tells you.
Of course they patched it since, and it looks like this dlc could address some of these problems, but I think that the criticism focused on the wrong things.
The city is beautiful though, probably the only time I felt like walking in a real city, and the game still kept me hooked for 20-ish hours so it probably isn’t completely terrible. It’s also worth mentioning that I was, using accurate and scientific terminology, hyped as fuck for this game as if it was the second coming of Christ and this surely impacted my judgement of it.
Also almost all Characters are huge assholes that constantly make the worst possible decisions possible, while the game tries to sell them as cool and badass.
Yeah, sometimes it feels as if what the developers (well, the writers to be fair) want to say is “look how cool this world is”. Or at the very least as if they wrote the game without subtext or thematic coherence: again, as if they produced a game that’s still in its preproduction stage
I think some of it comes from their earlier games. The Witcher games also have some really edgy dialogue, it is one of the reasons I never finished the second game. But they are also adapting an old ttrpg and the tone and themes of that game is shining throug. Which would not be a problem if Cyberpunk 2020 (and most cyberpunk media today) was not stuck in the 80s as much and someone actually bothered to update the themes for today.
This is something I almost never see discussed, but it’s probably what made me tired of cyberpunk stuff. It became a parody and a part of what it was supposed to criticize
Your reply was kind of exactly the type of thorough breakdown I was looking for! Thank you for all that detailed information. It certainly sounds like theres some ludonarrative dissonance going on given the open world design vs linear storh.
Maybe I’ll wait for a few months after the already confirmed GOTY edition, see how it plays after that, then add the inevitable mods improving the core gameplay systems if I want to. Fingers crossed they do a better job with the sequel.