I mean if you're gonna compare it to NMS then expect CP2077 to be a phenomenal game with fantastic free expansions... a year or two from now.

 

True, I can only recommend this No Man's Sky Documentary by The Internet Historian. It's amazing how the hunkered down, took the criticism onboard, and bit by bit fixed the game and delivered what they promised. It's a real unicorn in the industry in that regard, especially because every fix, patch and content update so far has been free of charge.

 

So I've been listening to gaming podcasts out of boredom over the past few weeks and one thing I'm noticing is the... almost rage at CDPR over this game. I have some questions as someone who hasn't played yet.

Aside from the previous gen console versions, did they promise anything (features etc) and fail to deliver?

Is the game truly as buggy on PC and PS5/XB?

Are people truly furious about not having prompt fixes yet, knowing about the cyber attack issue?

I'm seeing a lot of rhetoric that this is the worst launch in history. The particular podcast I was listening to even goes as far as to say CDPR's rep is ruined. My stance on that is that's patently ridiculous and OTT horseshit, but I'm holding back on going in because, as I've said, I haven't played it.

Of everyone I know who's played it, (no one has played it on PS4 that I personally know), the worst they can say is that it crashed on them a few times in their entire playthroughs, and it was a bit overhyped.

I don't want to sound like a CDPR stan, but when people go OTT on these things my inner contrarian rears up. I think it's fair to say the launch was pretty botched, and it came out too early (the reason I've yet to play it), but in a world where Bethesda release buggy shit release after release and still sell for $7bn, the complete vitriol CDPR is getting seems too extreme - especially given the current state of the world and the challenges therein.

Is it because they billed themselves as consumer friendly during the W3 days and even took shots at the likes of EA and other publishers and their practices maybe?


If they move on to their next project without addressing any of the legit issues I'm seeing, then I'd say people have a much more concrete leg to stand on, but all the evidence points to the contrary on that front given what they did with the Witcher (a game I thought was a buggy mess at launch, btw).

I'm just trying to understand the issue I guess. I've been mostly ignoring all coverage of this game to avoid spoilers for when I eventually pick it up.

 

1) There's a handful of features they talked about wanting to include but then got cut (wall running, "peaceful" police interactions (paying them off or siccing them on people and the like), multiple safe houses, etc), but as far as I'm aware none of them were particularly huge or central to the game.

2) The game is quite buggy, with a number of fairly minor issues, and as of a couple weeks ago a small handful of severe/progression-blocking bugs. It's definitely on the high side, in terms of bugginess, but even at its worst it's generally better than most Bethesda games at launch (as low of a bar as that is)

3) I haven't seen anyone crying about fixes not being fast enough, but I've also not really seen many people who still care enough to talk about the game at all, for better or worse.

On the whole, most of the backlash against cyberpunk is from people who bought into the hype competely and were then disappointed when the final result was a decent, if unpolished, product that did not, in fact, fellate then while playing.

 

This was my uninformed kneejerk reaction too. It's why I felt so profoundly annoyed by the take that their rep was 'ruined forever.' It was so ridiculous it made me angry.

 

Oh, the performance on consoles is definitely pitchfork mob worthy.
They should've just admitted that announcing it for what is now last gen years before they even started working on the game was a mistake and admitted its a next gen title.

But on a decent PC... it's just a meh game.

It's very pretty, but it's no GTA IV/V, or Watchdogs, or Red Dead Redemption 2 if you're willing to trade Cyberpunk for horses. It tries to be like those games, but it fails. There's really no reason to play it if you haven't already played those to death.

It's also obvious why it falls flat, the game was already behind schedule when covid kicked it while it was down, and CDPR management were so far up their own asses after the success of Witcher 3/GoG that they ignored the state of the project and acted shocked when the product they pushed out the door wasn't done. They tried something ambitious and it failed, maybe they'll successfully finish the game, maybe they'll just patch the worst of the bugs, rush out some DLC and call it a day.

 

Okay so I haven't read the rest of this thread because I don't want spoilers but I picked up the game last week and I'm having a blast. The world is just so dense and packed with shit to do.

I literally can't make money fast enough to spend it, like I want to buy cool cars but I can't justify it because I want expensive upgrades and the cars and bikes I've gotten through playing the story will do.

It's a little buggy at times but I haven't run into anything gamebreaking and loading times are quite quick. I don't want to expand into a rant about everything I love about this game so I'll settle for this... At what point do you know you've gone too far down the story? I want to have awesome tech and gear by the time I get to that level but because of the RP aspect I don't want to get stuff too early.

 

Define "too far". There's a point of no-return at the end of the story, but the game will make it very clear that it's happening, auto-saving and then promoting you to make sure you've done everything else you wanted to do.

If you're looking for something other than that, you'll have to elaborate.

 

Nope, can't really define further, I've generally been putting off the main quests as much as possible as I tend to get hooked by the urgency and spiral down them. Like the Aldecaldo storyline, I ripped right through that.

 

Expressing an opinion on the game and whether it was a disappointment and to what degree is ridiculous if you haven't played it @Gengar All you're doing is picking the response you want that matches what you'd like the case to be. The answer is purepy personal based on what each person was expecting and how they interpreted the things they got compared to that. The game was definitely not what was expected of or promised by CDPR, but to what extent that matters is up to you. Play the game and find out.


Personally, I did enjoy what there was in the game, but it was very disappointing in many ways, and yes, I would say that CDPR's reputation took a big hit. Before this, I would say that CDPR has my trust until they break it. I consider this a breach of trust.

 

The way they handled this from a marketing/business side is what really is annoying people the most. While not outright lying, the way they phrase things in trailers was deceptive and fanned people's already unreasonable high expectations

They came out and said there was no vehicle customization - then in the vehicles trailer for the game said " sport cars - they're powerful engines and exchangeable parts make them perfect for tuning" - If someone didn't read the news story about no vehicle customization and only watched official promo, you'd be lead to believe there was vehicle customization.

In the 2018 50min demo (45:47), the announcer says "so many options, So many possibilities, and each will have consequences that will ripple out through your game story. And that's just one quest" - while not direct, this implies that most quests in the game will be as in depth if not to a similar quality to the one show in the demo. As shown by powerpyx, this quest is one of the most dynamic and a lot of your choices don't matter.

Then there is not giving review copies of the PS4 and Xbox one versions of the game. The PS4 trailer shows the game running much smoother than it turned out to run. They knew how the game ran on those consoles and purposely prevented consumers from seeing it and making an informed purchase.

You can be an asshole as a game company and most people will eventually grow to just accept it like with EA, Ubisoft, and Bethesda. But when you set yourself up as the consumer friendly company that has good consumer practices, only to then falter and do the exact same terrible shit every other company does, it makes you the thing people hate the most - a hypocrite.

 

This:

Is the best breakdown of the game that I've come across. It's from an otherwise great youtuber who I would recommend subscribing to, as he always brings out long-form, well written content that ties into gaming.
I would imagine that this video will tickle people on this forum well, since it digs deep into the literary backgrounds of the genre and how these have been adopted.

TLDR: He focuses mainly on the flaws that go beyond broken promises, to dig into the game that is actually there. He finds several aspects lacking and rushed, and concludes with answering the question if the game can be redeemed by future patches like No man's sky: "You can't patch in imagination".

 

New patch that supposedly makes the game more playable on previous gen consoles, plus some gameplay improvements and bug fixes.

https://www.cyberpunk.net/en/news/41435/patch-1-5-next-generation-update-list-of-changes

TLDR: If you’ve somehow waited a year to touch this game for whatever, I would keep waiting. This patch doesn’t suddenly make the game into something that would even remotely live up to the hype. If you’ve already played through the game and looking for an excuse to play through it again, then you’ll probably have some fun, and it's probably been long enough that a lot of it will feel fresh, but it won’t be incredibly different than the first time, though there has been some number tweaking and combat improvements.

I played 110 hours on release, did about 98% of the content. The 2% was bugged shit, or the obscure hidden ending I missed because I picked the wrong dialog choice with Johnny at some point. Then, I started a new playthrough about 2 weeks ago because I thought 1.5 was still a few weeks/months out, and I had started reworking on my crossover and wanted to get back into the feel of things (hadn’t played it since release). I would’ve waited if I knew it was coming out today. Anyways, I digress. My perspective here is from someone who was already 30 hours into a playthrough and updated in the middle of it.

Immediately upon loading in, I’m hit with this amusing visual bug, which was a new one for me. https://imgur.com/dQEHXZ5

All the cars were like that for a minute while everything loaded into their new states I guess.

The first thing I checked was the state of my equipment, as that was one of the advertised changes. All the mods were removed. All my legendary mods were completely missing in fact, the ones that give increased crit chance and crit damage. They were OP to the point where I didn’t want to ever swap out the item with it, so I get it. However, one of my items actually got converted from 4 open slots to 2 open slots, which is weird (turns out max sockets overall went down from 20 to 9 across all your gear). Balancing reasons I guess. Can no longer stack 4 armadillo mods in it and be a tank. Those mods themselves got nerfed as well. At my level, I could craft one that would give 70 armor, so figure 4 of those plus the item's armor itself, it wasn’t balanced. Now the mod at my level gives 29 armor. Meaning you actually have to try in combat and play the game instead of steamrolling it. After picking it up the next day, I discovered some mods are dedicated to certain slots, so your glasses are the only ones that can hold the crit related one.


Combat AI was tweaked. There’s now some additional combat profiles. They definitely seemed more aggressive and accurate. Couple that with me no longer being close to indestructible and combat feels completely different now. Add in that the sniper’s scope I’m using seems bugged and I couldn’t actually see the crosshairs with it, and it seemed like enemies weren’t always visible through walls with it (tech sniper). Some of the weapons got downtuned as well, so I was using up to a whole 30 round clip in my Fenrir to kill one guy and it was current level. Not an issue in a fresh playthrough I suppose, but loading an active playthrough and suddenly being much weaker is a bit jarring. And yes, I made sure I respecced all my talent points to where they were before, more or less. All of this is good to help the game feel like an actual game, not just a sandbox, though I'm sure there's just going to be new OP builds. It does also explain why easy mod difficulty got increased, because my current playthrough is on normal and there's been 0 challenge from pretty much the start. Oh, and with the combat ai tweak, I have a feeling the snipers on harder difficulties will be pretty damn close to jackal snipers from halo 2 on legendary.

Crafting did need a bit of a nerf, but it’s still tedious levelling. Also, crafting specs are MUCH more expensive now. To the point where you can’t just mindlessly buy them all. It’s like 7k for a common spec that you’ll never use. Finding some of the specs is still quite annoying though. 30 hours in and I haven’t found the backpacker mod spec yet.

One of the changes is a sidequest unlocking system. For additional context, I had finished every sidequest in Watson and Japantown and had started working on Santo Domingo. The new system gates them somehow. I’m actually not quite sure how it works yet. Watson and Japantown were already completed, so those rewards were already given to me and put into my stash. One of them is an armor mod I’ll never use, and I’m not sure what the second one is. I had to empty my entire stash just to get the quest to complete. Anyways, I loaded into Santo Domingo, and it felt empty of quests compared to the state I had left it in the previous day. I think there’s only 4 or 5 fixers you get “rep” with, but it looks like it’s just a tracker that says like 5 of 8 quests completed. On the second day of the new patch, I realized that the NCPD missions were all shunted to a filter, so that made the map feel even emptier. And I discovered that a few of the fixer rewards are vehicles. Edit: played through more on day 2, and it didn't really seem like I was unlocking additional quests in an area. Additional, meaning old content that was gated though other old content.

Anyways, the whole point is to reduce side-quest burnout. Not sure if it works yet. I went through all of the badlands quests, and those are already super far apart, but I could imagine gating quests behind other quests will actually add more travel time overall and make it more of a slog. Honestly, it’s the same issue I had with the Witcher 3. Kinda wish they actually copied more of it, specifically mini-quests to find crafting patterns and iconic gear.

Supposedly there’s been some quest reward tuning. I had one quest give me 2.5k and another give 14k. Maybe it's on a quest by quest basis, but the 2.5k was for discovering why drug drones were being caught, and the 14k was for getting a training bot shard out of a junk yard, and the drug drone was much more difficult. Overall I guess it’s slightly more, but it feels like most of my money has always come from hacking access points.

I will admit I didn’t look at the new car prices, so can’t really comment on that. But I did note that the crafting specs were much more expensive. There’s also slightly less clutter so you’re not running around as much picking up food items that you’ll never use and probably never even be bothered to sell. That being said, I was having problems actually seeing some items were there as the loot icon was having some range issues I think. Also, some obvious loot containers were now containing nothing. Second day edit; lots of issues looting enemy bodies as well as their fallen weapons. Still some junk item clutter in a few areas. Oh, and the one car I bought, the type 66 Javelina, was 99k. So I’m pretty sure that’s actually a price increase (just checked and the old price was 73k). That being said, I do remember it being my go-to car of choice with perfect handling, and that’s still the case post-patch. Doesn’t have the highest top speed, but it’s pretty much impossible for it to lose grip.

As for bugs. In my 3 hours of playing (7 now after 2 days), only a few. But more than I’ve had in the previous 30 hours.

First was the aforementioned car frame glitch upon load in. I guess it’s not really a bug and just a slow load in of the assets, but I don’t see a reason why some parts would load much later than others.

Calling in your vehicle is smoother, and doesn’t come to a screeching halt upon approaching you. (edit, seems I was just lucky) However, if you’re not on completely flat ground it will float to you. Also, I did have my bike load in, and instead of driving towards me, it drove away from me. On the second day, both happened again. The first happens with both the bike and car. It's actually quite annoying since it will get stuck in the air and you can't interact with it or knock it down, so you have to run some distance away and resummon it.

All your clothing mods were supposed to be removed and put into your inventory, and some evasion ones were converted to a new stat, but like I mentioned above, I lost my orange mods. One of my items also lost 2 sockets, and I think a different item went from epic to common. Edit; as noted above, some mods only go into certain slots, but I think I still lost items. Not an issue for a fresh play.

Gig: no Fixers. Your objective is to recover a girl named Iris. Optional part is to drive her van back to the drop off point with her in it. I tried it 3 times and couldn’t get it to work. Iris would thank me for saving her car but the quest giver wouldn’t acknowledge the successful drop off

Gig: Goodbye Night City. Have to break into a Militech compound and rescue bruce. All the vehicles inside were spawning inside and collusion detection was launching them into the air. Also, the optional part of the quest is to not kill anyone. Knocking someone out was okay, but stuffing them into a box would kill them, and I’m pretty sure that’s something that I read had been fixed by now but I guess not.

Overall impressions. I’m sure there’s a lot of little QoL stuff I haven’t noticed yet. I haven’t tried the aesthetics stuff (mirrors finally work supposedly), nor the new apartments, so can’t comment on that. The game seems to run slightly worse than it did on the previous patch. Can’t really comment too much on bugs I suppose, as it’s all relative. But I can say in the previous 30 hours on the previous patch, I haven’t really had any bugs at all. In fact, the ones I’ve had are all related to vehicles, with them occasionally spawning in on their bottoms rather than their wheels, one time floating in the air, and another time my vehicle spawning inside an npc vehicle and exploding. Other than that, there seems to be changes made in balancing equipment and combat itself. Can’t attest yet to say whether or not it’s actually an improvement over from where the game was previously. And that’s kind of what my opinion at overall.

If I wasn’t currently 30 hours into a playthrough, how different would my opinion actually be? A lot different, I’m sure. I think a lot of people will have a higher opinion of the game, but I honestly think a lot of the changes they will notice are ones that happened in the previous patch, but still after the initial release. I cannot comment on console gameplay at all, because honestly my opinion on the PC gameplay overall has been quite positive from the very beginning. With the previous patch, everything felt pretty smooth, and after having loaded that playthrough on the new patch, I think my initial opinion is actually that everything is slightly worse, but hopefully after I’ve had a time to experience everything it will be overall better.

One comparison people like to make is to No Man’s Sky. Delivered on no promises on release, and people think it’s good now. I’ve played that recently (not the most recent patch, but the one before), and they’re still overdosing on Copium since I found the game to be barely playable (shitty crafting UI, awful combat, and a terrible tutorial that locks you out of meaningful exploration for a dozen hours because you don't have any storage chests). If people think that mess is good now, I can only imagine how bad it must’ve been on launch. Cyberpunk is very much playable, and honestly, always has been (on PC). But a lot of the fundamental problems still exist, the No Man’s Sky problem of promising features and not delivering them. There’s been a lot of small bandaids added to some of the problems, the bad AI, the empty feeling of the game, the combat, the disjointed dialog, but lots of people will take a look at it and think there’s still a lot of work to be done, and they’re not wrong. The question though is what exactly can they do? Or rather, what will they do? They’re not really redesigning systems from the ground up, and they’ve yet to add any major content. At some point we may get some expansions similar to Hearts of Stone and Blood and Wine, but those came out already in comparison with the Witcher 3 release schedule, and there's no hint of anything regarding such content with this. But my enjoyment of the game is still equal to where it was before.

However, if you’re someone who couldn’t even play the game before due to bugs, or you were on the previous console generation, maybe now’s the time where you’ll finally be able to play it and get the same relative amount of enjoyment that I’ve been able to get.