Originally published at: Review / Cyberpunk 2077 | Boing Boing
CD Projekt Red’s sci-fi epic is a dense and entertaining open-world adventure with a mercilessly nostalgic aesthetic. Welcome to the unevenly distributed past; watch out for bugs.
2 Likes
The best bit of advice I ever saw with regard to RPG games in general was to play it for a few hours and levels and then start over from scratch before you have too much time invested so you can have a redo on what may be core character errors when you start out knowing nothing.
Just waiting on them to finish the PS4 version. I hope it isnt too long a wait
2 Likes
Nothing here—politics, technology, style—is newer than the early 1990s.
I thought a lot about this. Maybe the only thing that’s modern is the reliance on texting/cellphones but maybe not even that considering websites are browsed on old desktops and email seemingly doesn’t exist. Suddenly wondering how the corpos get any work done.
This game is great if you turn your brain off completely and try not to worry about the plot holes, the 2 dimensional characters, the mechanics that were clearly unfinished, and the endless bugs. Which is to say that if you pretend it’s still 1990 and we didn’t expect much out of a game.
2 Likes
Again?
Is it Groundhog’s Day?
9 Likes
Wait looks at calendar… it is.
9 Likes
Still waiting for this game to get patched a few more times before i bother buying it, unless Rob wants to buy it for me.
I have the stadia version - game has crashed twice but was able to recover in minutes. I stream to my pc (which would likely not run the pc version due to my 5+ year old rig). I didn’t read into any of the hype before purchasing so I haven’t been disappointed.
1 Like
This is literally what I did. I played for 10 hours and then started over and started playing a different way once I figured out how I wanted to play it.
You’re forgetting all the laptops you encounter with email (and spam!) on them. The pervasiveness of the spam on almost every machine is both cute and annoying.
~~
I love exploration in this game. I’m eager to see more mods and more updates and DLC. The map remembers places where you’ve killed people because little blips of Xs marking your victims momentarily flash. “Oh yeah, I killed all those scavengers at that street dancing party…”
Once mechanic I’m impressed with and enjoy a lot is the slapstick comedy and useful feature of bad guys literally tripping over bodies. They’ll stumble and you’re laughing while you take the opportunity to kill them before they get back up.
I’ve now got 250+ hours and I’m at the last level. I’m definitely going to start over again and play it a different way after some more updates or maybe a really interesting mod.
The mod that lets you change the skin of your vehicles is great. I also recommend the one that converts all your food and drink into a single type of each.
3 Likes
I see what you are doing with that Gibson quote. Well played, Mr. Beschizza, well played.
4 Likes
I love the game, I play it on Xbox One X, and I disagree about the braindances. Great idea, but it is impossible to progress without hitting what you need to hit, and it’s mostly nearly impossible NOT to. No two players will ever have a different experience with them. They’re arguably a waste of time, a minutes-long cesura to whatever microplot has just slammed it’s brakes to show you. In short, they’re bullshit and Beschizza has finally never made an error.
2 Likes
CP2077 honestly is NOT a great, or possibly even a good game right now. That said, I still don’t regret my purchase; the framework of what I believe will become a great game in the future is definitely there.
DO purchase the game if you love the aesthetics and can tolerate sometimes astonishing numbers/types of bugs. DON’T purchase the game, at least not yet, if you don’t have the patience to deal with the game’s many flaws.
Notably, by the by, there’s a bug that prevents the game from registering middle-mouse clicks with Logitech mice; this is fixable w/o too much trouble.
fwiw i have a logitech mouse (m510) and had no problems (apart from the wheel rotating and changing my weapon when pressing it, grr).
one annoyance is that the game (barely) gives you a tutorial on quickhacking but completely leaves you alone to discover that you could replace that option with the Sandevistan (like wired reflexes in Shadowrun, puts you into bullet-time) or a berserk/rage module. that basically ignores an entire character class! otoh quickhacking is so amazingly overpowered that it’s not a disadvantage at all. on the third hand, you can literally just kill everyone over the wifi which is kinda boring.
also, you have blinding glare and cinematic lens flare on your “top of the line” cybereyes. wtf did people forget how to do signal processing? i guess they forgot about fuses too, since any script kiddie could literally electrocute anyone. what a miserable future indeed.
the worst things about this game aren’t the bugs (which are imho overstated, at least on PC), but awful design decisions like those and what Beschizza mentioned (and many others).
i wish it were better, but the main story is so good, in some ways the best cyberpunk story so far in any medium (admittedly this says as much about cyberpunk-in-general as it does about Cyberpunk 2077). maybe they should have pushed the main story out a little earlier with a little more polish, at ~$30, and then left the open-world looter-shooter GTA-clone as paid DLC (which, no spoilers, the plot could easily be put into service to justify).
2 Likes
This is why my initial reaction, to the publisher releasing a broken game, was that this would ultimately work in their favor. They get one round of bad press when it came out, but then get dozens of subsequent rounds of good press lauding the game for being less broken than it was before, every time significant patches are released. Overall they get far, far more attention (and even more good attention) than if they had simply released a not-shitty game to begin with.
I expect to see this approach deliberately deployed as a cynical marketing strategy, soon.
On the contrary, I agree with you! When I said they were underused, I meant that they built this really quite elaborate detective subgame. But all you can do with it is play each one through. The clues are completely unambiguous, it tells you where they are, and there is only ever a single path to a determinate conclusion.
4 Likes
In The Hunt, you can miss certain clues (although they are pretty hard to miss…) in the BD, leading you to guess incorrectly about a location and fail the mission. Overall I agree, underused. The intro BD was more interesting than the actual plot-relevant BDs.
2 Likes
their stock price also took a ~40% hit and they are facing multiple lawsuits from investors. idk.
1 Like
Personally I enjoy playing RPGs multiple times with different sorts of characters – smart,skilled, but weak in combat vs. strong but dumb as rocks. I haven’t played Cyberpunk 2077 yet, but I’ve been playing 2019’s “The Outer Worlds” (a somewhat underrated game that is basically Firefly: The Role Playing Game) and it is clever how the creators made most situations solvable by different kinds of characters.
1 Like
Yeah Outer Worlds is basically made for that multi playthrough strategy cause there are so many options and the game play is really short. I keep trying to play is so I can hang with Halcyon Helen But I do not think that is an option
2 Likes
