Review / Cyberpunk 2077

I also rinsed this game despite conflicted feelings about it, and if I could change just one thing about it, it would be the extraordinary preponderance of low-level grunt work you do for the cops.

You cannot walk 20m in this game without getting a call from “the dispatcher” to go and murder a dozen people for selling drugs, or “gang activity”. It’s an incredibly lazy crutch for quests, and one that is so at odds with the notion of Cyberpunk it threw my immersion off every time it came up, which was constantly.

Honestly, you’re more Judge Dredd than Johnny Mnemonic. As one wag on Twitter put it, it’s not so much Cyberpunk as Neonliberal.

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True

Ayn-caps do love their cops though, how else will their property be protected?

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It’s meeting my expectations - I wasn’t expecting the Second Coming of Games, just wanted to see what the Witcher crew would do with a different setting and I was excited to see Pondsmith was involved. I get excited every time I see a nod to the old pen and paper RPG.

I feel badly for the console folks who got burned but after the first patch my bug experience has been nominal. Humorous when I’ve seen it, nothing worth getting bent out of shape about. ( running on a 4? year old pc )

For me it’s been head and shoulders above the third Deus Ex, where I found acceptable ( if unremarkable ) gameplay loops were hindered by mediocre level design ( strip away the graphics and it’s boxy corridors ). The city design is a delight to explore, and that’s a huge draw for me.

I’m relieved to find there is no kill the children/save the orphanage binary morality system that gets shoehorned into every-godd*mn-game as an alleged ‘role playing’ mechanic.

That being said, at least where I’m at in the game, there is no evidence there is a faction-reputation mechanic and holy carp is that a wasted opportunity in this setting. I was hoping that the cop-based side quests would earn a reputation which would either unlock an additional story arc where you just flat out become a cop, or at least make the criminal enterprises view you with greater skepticism. Or that helping one group of criminals or corporations would trigger ‘involuntary quests’ ( ambushes, for example ).

But there are good surprises, too. I’d honestly expected Keanu’s character to be an isolated, show up in one story arc so we can use him in press releases kinda deal, and he’s not. He’s way more Gandalf in LotR in the way he bops in and out of the story. Pretty sure he gets triggered by locations as well as story arcs - overall it’s pleasantly unpredictable and considerably better executed than I’d expected.

Overall, IIRC the first Witcher game was pretty rough and that shaped up in a bunch of interesting ways. I’m enjoying this and really hope it iterates and improves.

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I wasn’t surprise but it’s clear to me that they announced too soon and really set the bar too high with the hype. It’s sad that they chose to do crunch rather than work there production properly in this case. This is especially true with their reluctance to actually use a mainstream engine like Unity which would’ve let them prototype quickly and actually get closer to their objectives than try to shoehorn their in-house engine.

Yeah, but both of those I think will resolve themselves. The sales for this game, even after the returns, were really strong (the pre-orders on this were totally absurd), and they’re going to sell a lot more as they fix things.

PREVIOUSLY ON BOING BOING

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Oh, the irony.

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So much factional stuff is right there, too.

I guess there are big reasons why dynamic social modeling is hard with 3D engines. NPCs, quests, scripted stuff, content: the more of it you put in, the more variations you have to put in for every single one depending on where the player is at in the social model. And with a game like this, all that has to be scripted, performance captured, voiced. There’s just a fundamental problem here with the idea of dynamic factional relationships and everything being depicted convincingly in the fancy-pants 3D world we’re in.

So it boils down to hostile or friendly, with friendly being the content and hostile as “no content, they just attack you”

Right? There’s a quest reward verrrry early on which gives you an item for free that plainly identifies you with a faction and I hemmed and hawed about it convinced it would impact future gameplay. That kind of loose end suggests that at one point they were expecting to go somewhere with it and had to drop its priority. Which is too bad, but I think gives reason for optimism that it could be included in later iterations.

I’d push back on the idea that there has to be a large overhead on the inclusion of this. A simple implementation would be the lower a rating with a faction the faster they’ll cycle from seeing you to attacking. You could even have the location be a mitigating factor ( ie, [gang x] is more likely to be aggressive on their home territory so adjust accordingly in [district y] ).

If I had to pitch the ‘why’ behind this I’d say it would make traveling to/from quest locations a more interesting minigame. It doesn’t have to be constant tension but it would be an additional consideration. Their driving minigame isn’t awful but it’s no GTA. ( if you’ll pardon nigh-incoherence, given the 80’s retro gang angle and the included-but-not-included subway system, I wish they’d gone less with cars and more a risk/reward of having to travel by ‘gang-in-a-box’ subway )

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I really wanted to play and love this game. I’m a huge fan of the genre, and getting my copy of Neuromancer signed by Gibson (and my picture with him!) is a highlight of my life thus far. But I just can’t get past the loud and constant river of transphobia coming out of CD Projekt. I’m not one of those people who can separate the artist from the art. Once I find out something like that about you, your output is ruined for me. :disappointed_relieved: I’m genuinely sad in this case, because the screenshots of this game are so cyberbeautiful that it makes me tear up. I ran a Cyberpunk 2020 campaign with the same group all the way through high school. I still have my books from that. I lived and breathed imaginary Night City for years. But I can’t bring myself to give these people money. :confused:

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EvergreenHarshIceblueredtopzebra-max-1mb

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The dickgirl poster in the game is really something. The first time I saw it, it struck me as a hamfisted attempt at progressive messaging. But that lasts half a second, because you remember that the context is Night City’s dystopian media landscape. It registers in-world as crude, cynical and trashy.

Iin our world, then, the subjects of these ads illustrate the objects of dystopia: fat people, ugly people, people committing suicide, people who can’t eat with their mouths closed, and feminine people with dicks.

I’m a 52 year old gay furry ex hacker who is now spending his time socializing with other furries in VR. I feel like I’m already in that future dystopia I read about back in the early 90s and don’t need as fiction.

The future turned out weirder than I expected.

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