Kids randomly running into dangerous places they really shouldn't be playing? Now that's what I call immersion.

 

I am genuinely surprised that more people are not absolutely incensed that CDPR is not allowing reviewers to show bugs. Even after they received a 50gb patch.

It is absolutely scummy and no one can convince me otherwise.

The last company that did this was Bethesda and they ended up tricking millions of people to buy and play the broken monstrosity that was Fallout 76.

Still hyped for the game. But I believe consumers should have been given the chance to see what they were actually paying for.

I am also mad that Reviewers seem to be bending over backwards to excuse the bugs.

Sorry, but any other game would be absolutely lambasted for such shittiness. But because we've all been hyped for this, they are willing to make excuses for it.

What a travesty.

 

Literally... Who cares. The reviewer mooks will be fine and I'm sure you will be too

 

No, he's got a point, I understand where the policy comes from. If early reviews are all about it being a buggy pos then the narrative becomes it's just another failed game i.e F76, No Man's Sky etc.

But on the other hand avoiding these criticisms is going to make Day 1 reviews even worse. Maybe the promised patch and the day 1 patch will tide people over.

 

Wasn’t Witcher 3 pretty buggy at launch?

 

It is still to this day fairly buggy.

 

It's not the most consumer friendly decision but I get why they're doing it, especially if there is a day-1 patch of that size which might fix the issues reviewers would show, creating a potentially distorted image of a project they invested almost a decade of time and money in.

I'll reserve my judgment for when the actual patched game is available to consumers. There'll be plenty of time for the pitchforks and torches to come out should buginess occur beyond a reasonable level.

 

I don't want to come off as an apologist... but sadly buggy games are pretty standard these days. I get it, all because that's sort of the norm doesn't mean its acceptable. The buggyness isn't really a surprise, I mean, the game's been delayed multiple times so obviously the extreme polish isn't going to be there in areas. For me personally though, I'm not too bothered my minors bugs at all. Like I said, that's sort of a conditioning thing, but really, unless there's bugs crashing my game every 10 minutes or erasing my save, it's going to be pretty easy to live with. I think some people are only just now getting hit with the reality that there was a 0% chance that the game was ever going to live up to their expectations.

 

Invisible Horse Mole Man Vesemir is still my favorite bug ever.

 

I like Roofed Horse

 

I think its a matter of principle.

Would a game like Assassin's creed Valhalla, Outerworlds, or that lame ass colonial era rpg(I forget the name), have gotten away with such a buggy release?

No. It would get a shit score because the bugs negatively affected the game.

But I will admit, that Bethesda have enjoyed a huge amount of success by releasing bug ridden games almost every time. So its not unprecedented.

I just think its shitty that reviewers were barred from showing these bugs, because I genuinely believe that alot of people base their purchasing decision on the reviews.

There is a significant difference between hearing about bugs, and actually seeing the bugs.

 

Early launch is a thing? :S

 

Made it through character creation and then crash to desktop. Along with every following attempt to launch from steam lol. I might wait a bit before playing...

 

About four hours in. There's a bit of a learning curve, but the combat is fun. It's not easy to respec, so I'll probably make some mistakes, but it already feels ripe for several replays. The population of the world feels strange - there's a lot of things to interact with and random conversations you'll overhear, but so far it lacks that density of humanity that a place like Night City should have, and I've got the population slider set to max.

So far most of my combat has involved me sprinting at the enemy with my glorious nippon steel, folded 1000 times, and clicking frantically. Enemy hackers will fuck you up if you're not careful. I can see stealth runs being super OP.

 

Did you get the floppy schlong clipping through your trousers bug/feature? Also, are there hacker builds of your own to use?

 

I've put in about 8 hours now. Game is siiick. I love it.

Spoiler

I've only done a few of the main missions so far. I did one of the Dex pre-req missions, which presumable leads up to the mission where you infiltrate a base, steal the chip with Silverhand on it as shown in one of the preview videos from awhile ago. I've just been doing a ton of side missions. Hasn't felt like a slog yet, which is different than what it was in Witcher 3, as it's pretty much the same system.

The city is really cool. Feels a bit what I imagine the Kowloon Walled City would feel like (though not as claustrophobic). I was expecting more of a Mess Effect kind of vibe except on Earth instead of space, but it's not (which is a good thing, nothing against ME). The way the game feels is akin to the Godfather GTA clone, rather than GTA itself, which is also good. I like it a lot.

The game runs pretty well for me on default settings. running a 6 year old i7-4770k and a 1 year old 1660 super, so not exactly top of the line, but a perfectly reasonable setup. Graphics are crisp on my monitor, but I've never been a graphics snob. Haven't experienced any stuttering or fps drops. No crashes or anything.

Have had some bugs.
1) First bug I saw was before I got to my apartment, random npc clipped through the gate outside like it didn't even exist. I suspect that due to the gate not actually being there post-apartment visit.
2) Inside the apartment, the mirror is bugged, and I've seen multiple reports on that one. The mirror should show your character model, but it just shows like default settings, no hair or anything. It's weird.
3) Maybe not really a bug, but you can find the NPC pedestrian spawn points and just see them repeatedly spawn out of the air. Just seems kind of lazy.
4) Early on, when you get your first mods from the ripperdoc, I couldn't get the quest completed. You had to talk to him again, and he shows you the options of paying the 21k debt, or asking how business was. Neither one caused the quest flag to complete. Thankfully there was an autosave right before him, and loading that and talking to him worked the second time. Not the kind of bugs I like to see, but it could be worse.
5) Got in a car and I stood up through the roof while driving around. A classic.
6) Enemy death physics are kind of weird? They die in all sorts of weird positions, lots of "U"s, but it's not really ragdoll physics. Also, I kill some guys and they lay on the ground breathing like they're still living, unless I managed to do some sort of non-lethal takedown on them (which I'm pretty sure I'm not).
7) Item placement is bad at times. There's some junk items that you just can't target and reach despite being right in front of you. Collusion hitboxes or something, I don't know. Secondly, getting the weapons that an enemy drops can be annoying. Having to actually pick up and move their body to get it is not ideal.

Other notes. The first thing that really blew me away was the BD. I saw mention of it when I was looking at keybindings but I didn't know what it was at the time. But it's pretty fucking cool. Of course, it hasn't overstayed its welcome yet and I haven't had to try it outside of the introduction to it, so who knows.

I've seen some complaints about the RPG elements. It's fine to me. You have 5 different skills you can level up, and each one has a plethora of perk choices, and there's additional perk level of bonuses which incentivize you for specializing. Sure, some of the choices are kind of generic, and I never really bother with things like reload speed or faster hip aiming, but its whatever. One of the things I do like is that when you are doing a quest, you come across some sort of gate that has a skill requirement that you don't meet, chances are there's a secondary entrance you can find. I will say the actual item choices are a bit light. Not enough diversity. Sure, items seem to get a damage upgrade upon leveling, and in that level range there's damage variation, and you can get different rarities, but I've only seen like 3 different pistols, 2 different machines guns, 1 different sniper. Random aside, why do pistols weight 4.3 lbs? That's a fucking heavy pistol.. The body mods are quite cool though. I've only been to one ripperdoc, so I don't know all that's out there, but overall, I think between all the different systems, there's a good amount of flexibity that leads to different playstyles.

As far as playstyles go, I've been doing a pretty generic shooter style. Sniper and assault rifle style. I had a light machine gun but I accidentally deconstructed it. That's another thing. I'm not sure how I feel about the crafting system yet. The game put in some special weapon crafts, but it seems like you need a ton of epic crafting components to make them, and unless you can buy them (I forgot to check) im not sure when you'd ever make them. Seems a bit of an afterthought, just needing generic crafting components. The item situation isn't anywhere near as bad as Dragon Age 2 though, just none of it really feels that special.

Side note about item density. There's a ton of loot everywhere. I'm not sure if I've seen a game with as much random junk as this one. More than Fallout 4 I'd say. Issue is that the actual junk items in this game are very limited, like 5 different types. It's weird just seeing all these fans, card decks, and vinyls all over the place. Lots of shards as well, which is how you get in game lore, but it's like you can't go more than 5 feet without having a new one to read.

Anyways, as for the combat, it's fine. The gunplay reminds me exactly of Borderlands. Haven't done much melee. Seemed like actually hitting people was pretty hard. I did do the one brawlers quest (which is a staple of every open world game it seems), and I struggled a bit to do it. Felt better in Witcher 3, but maybe because that whole game was done in melee. The actual hacking stuff is something I'm not used to at all yet. Reminds me a lot of Bioshock. Seems pretty cool though.

Actually, I know exactly what the problem is with melee, and that's the button layout. I'm using mouse and keyboard, and I reckon it would feel really good with a controller. Nothing against controller. In fact, I love playing shooters with controller. It's just that my controller joysticks are shot and i've been having phantom joystick inputs. I discovered that when I was playing Hades. Not a big deal, as sniping badguys in the head is pretty easy with a mouse. But for melee, the defaults don't really work for me. I did use the controller for the tutorial, thats how I found out it wasn't working right, and I saw the controller had its own dodge button while the keyboard the dodge is double tapping the strafe keys. It just doesn't feel as organic and it felt like my movement was awful as a result.

With all that said, I'm having a ton of fun. Definitely an A+ from me so far.

 

I decided to start with a hacking focused 'stealth' build. I've had situations where I distract some enemies, then go up to two guys, make one of them blind, and choke out the other, coming back for the blind guy while he's still confused.

Inevitably, I've messed up and had some shoot outs, but being able to blind enemies and disable weapons does make things interesting.

 

It's good so far, except for the driving. That shit just feels bad to me. Bugs are alright: existing but not as game breaking as was mentioned in SkillUps review, for example. I suspect the day one patch did away with quite a lot of them.