A gaming community free from the hype and oversaturation of current releases, catering to gamers who wait at least 12 months after release to play a game. Whether it's price, waiting for bugs/issues to be patched, DLC to be released, don't meet the system requirements, or just haven't had the time to keep up with the latest releases.
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It's a work of art, one of my favorite games (and dlc included).
I have a strong PC and play in 4k tho, with tons of mods to improve stuff or change some mechanics. Better textures and loads of clothes as well.
I finished the game several times and have probably a lot more than 100h in it. I still play regularly to simply enjoy life in Night City, and kill some dudes...
I'm in love with that game and I believe anybody should play it at least once in life.
I'm with this. Totally agree.
What game is there that does this kind of gameplay better?
Only the original Deus Ex has captured this genre so well.
The Revision mod made DE even better.
Worth a replay with it on if you haven't already
What are the chances, I was just looking into installing it again. Here's a handy article I found about the various mods, for those interested.
Any mod reccos? I started it before the DLC and only played for like four hours.
I like the ones that add a second operating system cyberware. It can be seen as cheating but you can have a netrunner deck and a sandevistan at the same time (or whatever double cybwrware you want to play with).
I think it’s cyberware EX. I use the collection function of Nexus mods (ordered by rating) so I don’t have to hand manage hundreds of mods.
Really enjoyed it, only recently finished a run with expansion and some QOL mods. Excellent visuals (with RTX), and if your into the theme the story was fun and pretty good. Not perfect by any stretch but solid. Gameplay mechanics is fairly engaging after the 2.0 patch.
It is definitely sad it took so long to get to here though, it was broken on launch beyond bugs - the builds you could do pre 1.5 were plain broken.
That said, we should celebrate anyone making single player games these days seriously, it feels like they are getting very thin on the ground.
I played it at launch. Even through all the bugs and half finished systems, it felt like somebody actually cared about the game. The story, characters and city were and still are amazing. Bit of an unpopular opinion, but it was always a pretty good game, at the very least an uncut diamond.
My theory with a lot of these games that “released badly and then come back” is everyone who disliked the game stopped playing and everyone who liked it kept playing so the crowd playing years later had a positive opinion of it through self selection more than anything the devs did.
I personally liked both Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man’s Sky on release, and while they are better now, I don’t see the night-and-day difference the internet would make you think happened.
NMS was quite literally a different looking and feeling game with maybe 5% (yes, twenty times less) of the current content and gameplay loops. Everything changed from how long it takes to gather basic resources to what order you get them in, the tutorial was streamlined and the way it picks the planet you start on was changed. There's an unbelievable amount of things to do, to the point that expeditions started existing to give players a more guided experience with fresh regular content. It's truly a far cry from where it launched, even space stations (the most static structures found in most star systems) have been overhauled and the old ones are only around as easter eggs now.
CP2077 integrated a ton of content and features from the most popular mods it had after the Anime update (particularly Vehicle Combat, from which it even took improvements to the way police spawn and act in addition to, yknow, the vehicular combat). Only a few of the core systems changed, mainly quickhacking and the way cybernetic implants are handled (also almost straight up taken from a mod). They did a balance pass on guns and made some of the weapon type features a bit different. If you didn't push too terribly far through the game on release, none of it would seem different really. The locations and behavior of weapons and enemies in general gameplay didn't change much, but access to mobility via implants was made easier (as the separated stores for them were largely equalized and merged) so it's easier for fresh players and people not using guides to finish their "build". Not quite the huge makeover NMS received, but it's definitely different in terms of progression.
While you're probably right to some extent about naysayers decreasing naturally over time, both games now have suspicious steamcharts numbers for being single player experiences. They get an influx of new players regularly in ways other similar titles don't, and it's almost certainly due to the changes in opinion of people who were playing them around their major updates, journalist articles or enthused friends.
TL;DR: No man's sky really did change that much. CP2077 didn't go as far but they've clearly made end user-oriented changes that are uncharacteristic for single player experiences.
Uncut diamond is a good way to put it.
The scenario, world building, graphics, and acting are world-class. Combat was decent. Most side-quests were forgettable and clearly worse than the main quest. The open-world was mechanically massively underwhelming, especially considering TW3 came out five years earlier.
This game received a lot of love and took a long time to make, but failed to achieve in some key areas. CDPR didn't have the means to do what R* or Larian could, and that's fine. I can't help but feel that if these developers had put the same time and energy into a (semi) closed world à la Mass Effect or Deus Ex, not having to spend so much time filling in a huge open world map would have allowed them to make the whole game as tight and polished as the main quest stuff, and this could have been the best game of the decade or close to it. Only downside is it doesn't tick the mandatory "Open World" box for AAA games, but does anyone actually care if the RPG elements are good? Mass Effects fans would surely disagree.
I played it both at launch and a year ago with the DLC. It's alright - 6/10, but pre patches like 4/10.
The gameplay is fun because of how customizable your build is now, after the skill system was completely reworked.
The story is shallow, the characters forgettable and the open world really doesn't fit the urgency the story is supposed to have and ruins the pacing. The DLC is much better, but there's some parts where I don't really like how V is written, especially at the start, since it forces a specific personality I don't think fits them.
I remember the sidequests being generally entertaining, but I wouldn't call any of them special, just kinda average.
It feels a lot like a Far Cry game, but with much better build customization.
Agree to disagree. For me the story and main/side quests were amazing and rarely has a game captivated my attention as much as cp2077 did.
I'm curious, if you consider them average, what game has good or great side quests ?
I’m curious, if you consider them average, what game has good or great side quests ?
Probably average wasn't the right word, as I don't really think sidequests are generally good storywise in games. I wanted to say "mediocre" but thought that sounded negative. I meant that I didn't find anything special in them, neither bad nor good.
But for examples of games with sidequests I think are good (storywise), I can think of only The Witcher 1 and 2 and Yakuza 0 (all of which I haven't played in a while so I might only remember the good parts).
A solid game in its current state. Probably one of the best games of the decade for me, just not in top 5. Has that "once you start playing, suddenly it's 3 hours later" factor. Extremely atmospheric world design. Lots of great writing too.
Now, it does have the annoying thing that it sometimes keeps reminding me of games that did some aspect better. For example: Vehicle physics feel completely hokey. ("Man, I wish I was playing Saints Row 3/4") Can't really go exploring everywhere, would have loved to explore more rooftops and such. ("Man, I've got to get back to Mirror's Edge") Not exactly a prime stealth game in accordance with the laws of the art form. ("Man, Deus Ex was the shit, got to play it")
Man, I love the vehicle handling. It's far from perfect but I much prefer the weightiness of Cyberpunk (or GTA IV) over more "Hollywood" approach of most games. I realize I'm in a minority on this one but I hope they keep it in the next game (just with extra polish, obviously).
Same. I like feeling every bump.
I've been playing it slowly for the past few months after finally getting a modern GPU, and am going through the endings now, so my impressions are still fresh.
Overall I enjoyed the game, but it's possible to see that it could have been much better. There are still occasional immersion-breaking bugs like floating items and characters. Some systems are clearly leftovers of bigger plans, for example clothing that barely has any purpose other than roleplaying and taking pics of the character in photo mode. Gameplay can be pretty fun depending on your preferences and how you build the character, that was nice. I do agree that it's not particularly deep.
Story and writing is what people usually praise about CP2077 + PL, but after finishing the game I can say that I was occasionally baffled and disappointed. Some things were clearly not developed to full potential, possibly because of time/budget constraint. Quests mentioning some areas and characters that are involved, but you can't go and examine those. Some are pretty damn dumb if examined logically. Endings look pretty cool in isolation, but they contradict each other when compared. In pretty much every ending V is told that they're going to die, but reasons differ. Alt claims that the body was changed to that of Johnny, and the immune system would reject V (which is also nonsense, in the game's world an engram is data that can be written to a blank brain, why would data be rejected). In Arasaka endings we see that Saburo needs a body that is already genetically close to him, so he uses his son. Why not use a clone? This also contradicts what Alt says about nanites modifying the body. Arasaka-related characters also claim that V's body was damaged by the Relic, that's why even though the surgery was a success, they'll die. Tumors and DNA damage. But somehow if Johnny takes over the body he can continue to live in it no problemo.
A dark and depressing theme doesn't automatically make the story great, it still has to be logically coherent.
I quite liked it from the beginning. I played through all of it on PC with the unpatched release version. It was not nearly as buggy as people made it out to be. The story was pretty engaging and made up for a lot of the game‘s flaws.
Similar thoughts here. I was playing it on fairly high end pc as well from day 1 (wasn't really patient with it... yea...) - Sure there were some funky glitches (eg. occasionally T-posing nude on bikes) here and there, but nothing game breaking. But that's not to say those things didn't happen to others, but I've understood the game was an absolute shitshow on ps4.
I'm a HUGE cyberpunk fan, so I made the mistake of buying it at release. Some of my most impressive issues:
So, I refunded it, outside of the refund period, but they were nice to me.
When the expansion released, and everything seemed a LOT better, I bought the game again, and I loved it! It's a pretty OK game, with a great story and absolutely amazing sidequests.
It's pretty good. I don't think it's $30 good. But it's pretty good, I would put it in the class of interactive fiction, an in-depth visual novel.
As far as role-playing goes, it's good for LARPing, but you don't really get to craft your own story. There's lots of rails, there are narrative branches but they all come back to the same place.
Kind of like a very well done Bethesda narrative environment, some okay storylines, some amazing storylines. It's all on rails, you can do it in different orders. It's a good immersion game.
My opinion is... so and so?
I gave up on it initially, annoyed by it's deluge of bugs coupled with the overall tepid and empty-feeling design.
I gave it a serious go a year ago after also getting the expansion. I wanted to not use any mods but ended up having to use one anyways, as CDPR still couldn't be arsed to fix some keys being hardcoded so changing your keyboard layout is annoying as stuff gets in the way. Luckily, fans fixed that issue and made all keys rebindable. <3
I will say... I enjoyed it. It's nothing superb to me, but it was a thoroughly enjoyable romp. It's big upside were the visual design, in particular during the expansion and its high points like the top floor of the tower or the sequence at the space port, the great voicework and Songbird and when you meet her really is a standout in both visual and scene design. I also liked the expansion and the tutorial stories a lot.
It's weak points to me were the open world itself which feels pointless and a thin, lifeless, facade plus the main story itself. Character progression was also super broken back in the days but by the time I played felt a lot better, so I'm not really holding it against the game. That being said, there were still quite a lot of bugs and glitches. Nothing major a reload here or there could not fix, but still annoying, considering how long the game has been out.
So yeah, solid 7/10 for me. The expansion is fantastic, wish the whole game were like that!
I’ve played through the normal game and the expansion. I loved the universe, but the gameplay isn’t so great to be honest.
Also I often struggled with dialogues, selecting one sentence and not understanding why I’d have to kill everyone around after making this choice (Maman Brigitte for instance). But this might be just me😇
I recommend playing these games and I’ll play both at least twice.
mild spoilers ahead
It did seem strange how poorly things end with the voodoo boys. You can get out without a fight, but you can't make any friends. It seems to me like asides from kinda betraying you, they'd make for pretty natural allies against netsec and Arasaka.
So no, I don't think that was just you.
Just a heads up, your spoiler is broken (you're missing the first spoiler keyword).
Thanks, fixed!
I played it when it first came out. It was fairly buggy and unoptimized and shouldn't have been released like that, but there wasn't anything too game breaking for me. And underneath that was a game with great writing, fun gameplay, and a very memorable world.
I played it again when Phantom Liberty came out, and it was even better. It ran smoother, the bugs were gone, the overhauled systems better served the gameplay, and PL itself was an amazing addition. And I actually had an RTX card to take advantage of this time.
Cyberpunk's only real problem, for me, was it being pushed out before it was ready. I hope that the shift from REDengine to Unreal helps to at least mitigate the issues that caused that going forward.
It is OK, word-building, the aesthetics and overall visual and architecture are the strongest points. I cannot comprehend the people who call it one of the best games ever and etc.
I never played the 1.x versions, I just picked it up last year (or beginning of this year) and steams says I put up 123 hours in it. So I love the background, the cyberpunk of it all, love that the city really feels vertical and you can constantly be in aww looking at it. It so good that I constantly decides to walk from one place to the other so you can get more of the environment. The conversations you here from the NPCs are great, the backstory of side quests are great, many very memorable, a lot of it very sad, specially the NCPD scanner quests because you learn stuff from dead bodies. I cannot say much of the main quests because I am an idiot and decided to clean up all NCPD scanner and gigs because I could not ignore the calls while going from place to place in the city, but I suspect It is good since the NCPD scanner, the most filler of filler quests had a bunch of nice writing in it.
And all that good makes it much more sad all the shortcomings. Like someone else mentioned you can clearly see the leftovers off all the things that were never finished. For the gameplay systems and mechanics it is the classic wide and shallow, there is so much stuff that just means nothing. For example, during quests and at your home and some places you can stack up in ammo, but you actually is never in any danger to be short on ammo, like, never never. So it is just clutter. On the leftover thing, The other comment mentioned clothes, it is so much clothes but 99% of them do nothing and the ones that do are like almost irrelevant. All clothes have levels/rarity but it means nothing, um can have the same shirt in all rarities for example. You can open the hood and trunk of all cars but there is never anything in them, it is just an interactive thing that does nothing. IT is specially weird because you have vans with cargo and etc and except when it is a quest item there is never any loot in the cago of the vans. Weapons upgrades are pointless, must of the mods does not even makes sense for a weapon to have. The thing that you cannot reuse a mod from one weapon to the other or that you cannot change the scope from a sniper makes no sense in a world that you can literally change your cybernetic eyes. The customization on weapons are so minimal that they might as well not having them. You have stuff like silences can only be put on pistols and one type of assault rifle/smg (I am not good with names of types of weapons). You have sniper rifles but they (with one exception) all makes sound and attract the enemy so using them in the way you see in movies is kinda pointless. Enemies always know exactly were you are when you fire a gun, it would be one thing to use a sniper and everyone on the place be in high alert or looking for you, but no, you can be as far away as you like if you use a sniper they you immediately start firing in your direction.
You can see in the level design of the gigs that you can approach a quest with multiple options, like stealth or go head first our using other non-violent means, which is great, but much of it was not fleshed out, for start the outcome is 99% of the time the same so there is no incentive to really do one over the other even in any build that you choose. I made the mistake to make the classic stealth-archer and It is almost the same difficult to get it blasting gun. I call it a mistake because it is super easy. Of the non fleshed out options it jumps to attention the stealth ones, There is a lot of places to hide bodies, things that you can remote activate to kill enemies, to distract them, etc, but they are never in the correct place, so they mean nothing almost, and there is almost never a reason to hide the bodies. You have like ducts to crawl to get to place without being noticed, but if you just crouch and kill everyone. There is no reward to not kill everyone with some rare exception, which makes all the level design to make it possible to sneak in a base or den useless. You can also take down enemies without killing them but them again, there is no benefit nor drawback. They are as good as dead.
I think the graphics looks great, but I don´t play many games and specially AAA games so I don´t have much to compare, my friend saw I playing and said they are like average, not bad but just what you would expect of a modern game, nothing exceptional. But even if the graphics are not special what they do with it is great, all the architecture and stuff.
There attention to the world is so great yet you meet the same NPC model like 3 times in the same place, it is so repetitive, it is weird. Like, not only the same exact body but the same clothes. Why not randomize a little more? If they at least put an in-universe reason, like people can modify themself to looklike some predefined avatars. It is worst for the children, for some time I even didn´t think there were children in the game. which would be better in my opinion, but you see the same like 3 models everywhere.
I could go on on the missing stuff, like the public transportation (later half-assed included in the 2.x) or any type of flying transportation. That it is thing, you see a lot of flying vehicles, but you cannot drive or get in any of them. Similarly, there is a lot of motocycles but they are always parked. You never see them in transit.
I mentioned that the backstory of the gigs and NCPD scanner quests are awesome but the quests itself all look the same, they have more or less 3 types and that is it. Also it is very much bullshit that in a cyberpunk game you are basically pro-cop without option of otherwise. You can help the NCPD with the scanner quest but you have no benefit in going against the cops, they don´t even drop loot. At least you can steal some of their cars sometimes. You are literally a criminal and there is no positive aspect in going against cops, which is specially weird because the game you wand your allys are always talking bad of the cops like in the movies like "I never talk to a pig" style of things, but the gameplay does not reflect that. If in the game the cops were somehow some moral/ethical beacon, but it is cyberpunk, the cops in the game are terrible, a lot of them very corrupt and such.
There is so much more, annoying bugs like the one that does not show correctly if your gun has silencer in it or not. Some of it can be mitigated with mods, wich is nice, but you should not need a bunch of mods to play the game without getting frustrated.
With all that said, it is a fun game, I think the story, wordbuilding an visuals are enough to warrant a play trough I guess.
I tried it for the first time this year, I put in around 10 hours to try and get into it and honestly I found it pretty dull. I didn't think the combat felt particularly satisfying and the story as far as I got in it did nothing to interest me or draw me in.
I'm not saying it is a bad game because I certainly dont think that but for me personally just nothing clicked, it felt like a slog just to get through the 10 or so hours I put in and I dont have enough time to force myself to like games any more so I just moved on.
Don't forget to save the man with the burning crotch!
Played it again right after they stopped releasing updates this year. If you don't play it expecting an RPG or immersive sim, it's good.
I like Phantom Liberty even more. They didn't attempt to compromise on anything regarding the game genre anymore and just made it a shooter action adventure with a cinematic story, which plays in it own little open world area.
2077 is one of the few AAA games that doesn't feel completely soulless. It could've delved deeper into the philosophical "what if" aspect of the Cyberpunk genre though.
Also they should've made the badlands story part with Panam it's own game, in retrospect it's what I enjoyed the most out of the base game.
Love it to pieces. Paid absolutely no attention to it before it was released, and due to some friendly advice from an online mate, waited a few months before picking it up, when most of the really bad bugs were already ironed out.
I love pretty much everything about it:
So yeah, love it to pieces, and absolutely one of my all time favorite games.
I have it on the PS5 and did four playthroughs already. No other game since the last two Deus Ex games has captured the spirit of cyberpunk so damn well. And with CP77 being open world, it is so easy and nice to immerse yourself in the world. One of my favorite games of all time.
Fascinating documentary that slipped through a wormhole from the future
The gameplay suck. The story starts off ok, but becomes lame. Pretty graphics. Still plenty if glitches. Walking around the city is worth like $10, not worth the $30 I paid.
Before Phantom Liberty / 2.0: average game. Overpromised and underdelivered. Good at first but getting boring fast.
After Phantom Liberty / 2.0: very good game overall, fixes most old problems. PL by itself one of the best DLCs ever made, sad that such high quality was necessary to save the base game. It's like the game was meant to be from the start.
Still not on W3's level overall though, but if you can get it at reduced price it's a really good experience now. Start PL before the meeting at Embers. After PL, resume that main quest.
I played it at release on PS4 and then with Phantom Liberty on XSX. It was awful game with a great story then. Today it’s a pretty good game with one of the greatest stories in this medium. It’s often brought up as a comeback story for CDPR but lack of polish still rears its head in places. For example clothing pieces still have rarity label based on how much defensive stat it gave prior to patch 2.0 (which detached armour rating from the clothes).
one of the greatest stories in this medium
I mean admittedly I don't read cyberpunk as a genre, but as an avid reader I find that hard to believe. My two standout sub-stories are the intro heist and the expansion's main story, and while those are awesome, they're not exactly literary masterpieces. The rest of the game's story is... amateurish? But not in a bad way? Like, it's servicable as the thin motivational veneer you expect from an open world game, and doesn't stand out either way, which is more or less what you want from your open world story: To not get in the way. The last few parts are quite bad though and show how much the story must have been cut apart and pieced together to fit a release date.
Is it really outstandingly good comparing other cyberpunk works?
I was mostly talking about Phantom Liberty part - it is much more interesting and better executed than anything in the base game.
Oh yeah definitely. The expansion was such a cool thing, and the limited scope really helps it rather than hurting it.
I pre ordered it. I had just finished building a new PC with just barely enough resources to handle it. Strangely enough I never encountered any of the bugs people complained about, so I was lucky.
I kept replaying it and heavily awaited the patch releases to see what the devs were going to fix and/or add. Been there since the beginning and play it through once a year (fully, clear the map of objectives every time). Simply put, I'm a fan.
I even was running it on Linux pretty much from day one (though certain patch numbers and updates to Nvidia drivers would occassionally break this compatibility). A small thing, but one that I greatly appreciated.
The driving mechanics to this day is the biggest pain point for me. Even though a patch at some point improved on it, it still feels wrong whenever going around a corner at even moderate speeds. There's a reason most people opt to use motorcycles in the game (or use mods).
The story is well done IMHO. I feel like they could have spent way more time in the prologue section, fleshing out one particular character (anyone who's played knows who I'm referring to). Other than that, I'm happy with only a few very small nitpicks.
The combat system is well fleshed out since patch 1.68, and iirc patch 2.0 brought some significant QOL changes. It's fun and varies extensively depending on how you build out your character's skill tree.
The atmosphere is perhaps the developers' biggest achievement. The depiction of Night City is difficult to put into words. It feels lived in, and there are still areas of the map seasoned players are discovering. Other than the combat system, the environment is definitely one of the game's strongest selling points.
Ever since patch 1.68, the game has run smoothly. I can't run Ray Tracing or other high resource requiring features as my PC, again, is considered to be mid to low tier depending on who you're talking to. But if you're running a high end PC, the visuals are likely to be far more stunning for you.
If you do buy, definitely get the Phantom Liberty DLC, the side content adds quite a bit to the story, including a new ending, and is overall a fun addition to the entire experience.
Lastly, if you do dive in, enjoy yourself, and want more, I'd highly recommend watching the anime mini series, Cyberpunk: Edge Runners, which depicts a prequal to the events of the main game. And of course, if you're really in love, perhaps get together with some friends and play the Table Top RPG.
Still waiting for the ultimate all-in edition of this one
Same. I want to play it but until it's available in some sort of convenient package at a price point I can justify, I'll play something else.
I recently restarterd my playthrough (first time touching the game since 2.0 dropped) so I'm not done with the game yet but my very brief thoughts are: I like the new content and technical improvements, I'm not entirely sold on gameplay changes and have more fun with the old mechanics to some extent (I actually reinstalled the legacy version to compare). There are some things I really appreciate in the latest version but over all legacy is more up my alley.
It's still a great game and probably will end up as one of my favorites despite all its issues. Will see how I feel after I'm done with it.
I think my brain is stuck in 2018 because some voice in the back of my head is telling me I should be excited for when cyberpunk and starfield come out, lol. Maybe I'll get to cyberpunk soon but the backlog is yuge
One of the best games of the last decade. Top-5 easy.
I played it since launch. Originally on a Xbone, and my biggest complaint back then was minimap lag. You wouldn't believe how many turns I missed.
But yeah, rough launch. Made a storybook comeback. Now it's incredible. My biggest gripe now is that it doesn't have NG+. I went on Pavel's streams and begged for NG+ for 2 years. All I wanted was Levels. Not SC, not money, not 'ware, not unique weapons. I just wanted to start the game at max level. They heard NG+ and thought we wanted the NG+ from Witcher 3. Which I actually hated. Cuz all the enemies get a buff and all your specced out end game gear is outclassed by garbage you pick up on the side of the road by the time you leave White Orchard. But that's not what we or at least I wanted.
Still waiting for a 66% deal