Cyberpunk Catch-All

I’m restarting my playthrough. The first time I was a corpo. I quit soon after the first real mission. This time I started as a street kid. I liked this beginning better. I’m noticing fewer bugs. The game looks incredible in 4K on Xbox 1X. I just finished the first mission and I’m already losing interest.

I feel ya, but which mission is the first one? The heist?

The one where you save the girl in the tub of ice. I’m calling that the first real mission but it’s the first one after your origin story.

After that one I was rooting around my inventory while in V’s apartment and the game fully crashed.

I restarted as a Nomad, basically my wife as Vin Disel from F&F. Building Body/shotgun/athletics with cool/cold blood and technical/crafting as secondaries. Trying to decide if I want to get Gorilla arms, rocket launcher or monofilament.

RawkGWJ wrote:

The one where you save the girl in the tub of ice. I’m calling that the first real mission but it’s the first one after your origin story.

After that one I was rooting around my inventory while in V’s apartment and the game fully crashed.

Ah, gotcha. The game doesn't really begin until after the Heist, which ends chapter 1. I'd suggest trying the game until then.

Trauma Team's entrance on that first mission is one of the highlights of the game for me. They nailed that, though Trauma Team isn't really in the game too much.

NathanialG wrote:

I restarted as a Nomad, basically my wife as Vin Disel from F&F. Building Body/shotgun/athletics with cool/cold blood and technical/crafting as secondaries. Trying to decide if I want to get Gorilla arms, rocket launcher or monofilament.

Gorilla Arms got a boost a patch or two ago. They're pretty cool and allowed me to do most of the fisticuffs stuff. Melee still isn't good but it's okay.

My understanding is mono is still kinda broken. I've never bothered trying it, though I own a number of parts for it.

So with the news of the game’s re-entry to the PS Store, as well as the upcoming Steam Summer Sale, I decided to check back in on the state of the game, and see if I should finally consider a purchase when the sale starts.

This is the first thing I saw.

*Legion* wrote:

So with the news of the game’s re-entry to the PS Store, as well as the upcoming Steam Summer Sale, I decided to check back in on the state of the game, and see if I should finally consider a purchase when the sale starts.

This is the first thing I saw.

The PC version the npc’s behave properly by teleporting away.

Every time I turn a corner that little kid with the black tattooed eyes is walking towards me.

garion333 wrote:
NathanialG wrote:

I restarted as a Nomad, basically my wife as Vin Disel from F&F. Building Body/shotgun/athletics with cool/cold blood and technical/crafting as secondaries. Trying to decide if I want to get Gorilla arms, rocket launcher or monofilament.

Gorilla Arms got a boost a patch or two ago. They're pretty cool and allowed me to do most of the fisticuffs stuff. Melee still isn't good but it's okay.

My understanding is mono is still kinda broken. I've never bothered trying it, though I own a number of parts for it.

I had mono for a while, but never used it. I traded it in for gorilla arms, since those I can at least use to rip open doors or something. I did use them to get through most of the fights, although I have put next to no points into Body.

Spoiler:

At this point I think the only remaining side job I have is the final fight against Razor.

The game was kind enough to put up a big warning that going to the meeting with Hanako is a one-way gate, at least until the end game. I saved for the night right before that, but I don't think I care enough about the Razor fight to go back and do that. I tried once or twice, said "meh", and went elsewhere.

Mono was kind of fun for the novelty but that was it

That was really well done.

DF takes a look at how the game runs on Sony's machines:

PS4 almost gets 30 fps now! Crashes and slowdown greatly lessened or not happening at all.

Off topic but, that's not DF this is DF.

Is it bad that by the time I can play Cyberpunk my desire to do so has reduced so much I might just skip it?

Stealthpizza wrote:

Is it bad that by the time I can play Cyberpunk my desire to do so has reduced so much I might just skip it?

The sin of CP2077 isn’t bugs, but the systems which are filled with simple placeholder stubs where fully developed features are supposed to be. They’re like the code equivalent of a low-poly LOD model: something meant to get replaced by the time you get up close to it, but in CP2077 they never were.

Bugs get fixed, but it’s increasingly looking like the stub features aren’t going to be replaced with actual features.

*Legion* wrote:

The sin of CP2077 isn’t bugs, but the systems which are filled with simple placeholder stubs where fully developed features are supposed to be. They’re like the code equivalent of a low-poly LOD model: something meant to get replaced by the time you get up close to it, but in CP2077 they never were.

Bugs get fixed, but it’s increasingly looking like the stub features aren’t going to be replaced with actual features.

Yep. Unfinished systems are definitely one of the games major failings. There are hints, for example, that underwater missions were to feature in the game, but there are barely any missions or side quests that make use of it. But I think there are three others:

Systems Promised, But Not Even Delivered As Stubs - As late as November 2019, CDPR staff were giving interviews promising thing like dynamic weather.
Poor design - For example, the oft-criticized way that the police response. They used to teleport immediately to your precise location, whether your were inside or outside.
Lazy "will this do?" coding...

Been playing Yakuza: Like a Dragon recently and I feel like, despite wild differences in most of the gameplay systems, there's a lot of underlying similarity with CP2077. They're both narrative-heavy open world RPG experiences with the character as a minor figure in a city controlled by powerful criminal forces.

And, as I play, I often feel like Yakuza: LoD does a better job of hitting the mark that CP2077 was aiming at.

We have already reached a satisfactory level [of stability]. We have also worked on the overall performance, and we are quite satisfied with that. Of course, we have also fixed bugs and glitches, and we will continue to do so. Over time, we will be introducing fixes to the general systems that players [have pointed out as needing improvement].

Whew, they talked about the elephants in the room. Hopefully this means AI overhaul.

https://www.ign.com/articles/cyberpu...

Apparently the machine translation here is a bit loaded. The original Polish meaning was more along the lines of ‘we’re pretty sure the foundation is solid now’ which is hopeful for meaningful gameplay and AI improvements.

I started playing for the first time on my Xbox One X. I'm not sure how it compares to Series X or a beefy PC outside of screenshots, but it looks pretty good to me.

Peformance and load times are actually pretty decent! I've only had one hard crash to Home, although I have had some freezes when transitioning between areas. And one that made me sad face because it was mid-firefight and I was very, very dead by the time it unfroze.

Less clipping issues than I'd have though. Had a body or two stuck in objects but otherwise seems okay.

I kind of hate driving the car. Rather than fast travel I wish you could just, well, auto drive so I could spend my time looking at the city and not accidentally running into stuff, hitting people causing a police response, or flipping the car. I'm glad the car flips back over almost automatically, but why not... just make it harder to flip over in the first place if you're gonna do that? Literally within seconds of getting into a car for the first time I had flipped it and had to do some wiggling to unturtle myself. And it was on a weird railing so the autoflip thing didn't take. I half considered quitting immediately, lol.

I actually haven't completed The Heist. I've just been doing side missions for the reporter lady and driving/walking around the city. Not sure how long that'll entertain me but for now it's pretty fun.

I kind of avoided reading any of the hype and most of the criticism, so I probably have less room to be disappointed than a lot of folks. Given the above comments I can see how some things would be disappointing. Right now the way I'm playing is kind of just first-person GTA, dumb AI and all. Sometimes the wonkiness/ambitions of quests reminds me of the Fallout games, too. In terms of how you can break them/achieve weird results (although so far nothing game breaking for me, fingers crossed).

I have a gun that randomly gets a different ability whenever you reload, and it's hilarious to use even though I have higher damage weapons by now. You get it when you retrieve the rover robot thing.

I find the stats, abilities, and systems kind of overwhelming, honestly. I'm pretty confused on where to put points, which skills are worthwhile, and there's just a ton of info thrown at you with not a lot of walking you through it. So I'm Googling a lot of stuff, basically.

Even wearing the most random clothing (I'm just equipping whatever has the highest stats) so far I always like how the character looks. Somehow everything seems to seem a bit less ridiculous/clash less than other games where you can wear weird stuff. I do wish that a character creator that lets you literally adjust the size of your genitals let you pick a different body type. I'm a bit, let's say, husky, and I like making my avatar resemble me on *some* level.

I hate console ports where you just use one of the analog sticks as a mouse cursor. In a lot of these menu screens it should just automatically place you over something clickable. There's literally no good reason (other than less effort/expediency, but no gameplay reason) to make you wave it back and forth over the screens to click on different things.

Character models/looks and voice acting are all pretty good so far! Every now and then one of the characters seems like they're really hamming it up (in a bad rather than appropriate way) but there's a LOT of spoken dialogue so it's still pretty impressive.

I don't know the word for it, but starting with one of the Unreal games (or was it Doom 3?) the whole every surface is shiny/looks like it just got rained on is still something I consider an artistically weird decision. I'm kinda surprised it still seems to be the default for a lot of 3D games.

Granted, I paid less than $20 for the game new and didn't have to suffer the growing pains as it got patched out, but so far enjoying myself and expect I'll get that money's worth from the game. The install process was PC-like in an annoying way, making you alternate the discs back and forth and download a 40GB patch before you could even start it.

Question: what decides your "Connect" level? I see panels/jacks where I can't do anything because it just says "Connect 3/4" or something. Is it tied to your deck? Your intelligence level? It's really unclear from within the game. And since "connect" is such a common word in a cyber world, I'm struggling to find something that explains it via Google.

ccoates wrote:

Question: what decides your "Connect" level? I see panels/jacks where I can't do anything because it just says "Connect 3/4" or something. Is it tied to your deck? Your intelligence level? It's really unclear from within the game. And since "connect" is such a common word in a cyber world, I'm struggling to find something that explains it via Google.

That’s your Intelligence stat. If you want to hack access points and enemies, you need to level that up. Agreed that it’s not terribly well explained and is a bit overwhelming.

Ok. So I’ll stop dumping all my points into “cool” and dump them in int instead.

Yeah ‘Cool’ is the stealth and resistances quality.

You don't need to use points as soon as you get em. It helps to play a little and see what you're missing out on, then put points into that so you can, say, steal a nice car.

Happy Dave wrote:
ccoates wrote:

Question: what decides your "Connect" level? I see panels/jacks where I can't do anything because it just says "Connect 3/4" or something. Is it tied to your deck? Your intelligence level? It's really unclear from within the game. And since "connect" is such a common word in a cyber world, I'm struggling to find something that explains it via Google.

That’s your Intelligence stat. If you want to hack access points and enemies, you need to level that up. Agreed that it’s not terribly well explained and is a bit overwhelming.

Aha! Thank you. For some reason the way it was displayed with a 3/4 I thought it was like... memory or something. Not that I had 3 intelligence and needed 4.

I hit level 10 just doing side quests and still haven't started the main quest.

Also, now that I've discovered events appear on the map I went down a deep rabbit hole of just driving from side quest to encounter to side quest.

Some of the quests do have these neat little details and jokes. There's one where you have to drive someone to a cyberdoc (for a penis thing, not the funny part of the joke) and at first I didn't realize it has scripted events to get in your way. Like literally a class of school children at a crosswalk, haha. With your passenger just screaming to run them over (I didn't.) And then a police barricade, making you detour pretty far out of the way. Rule of 3 says there should've been something else but maybe I missed it.

But then I got trapped inside one of those BBQ stands because while I was inside a table and chair fell over and were positioned *just right* so I couldn't hop over them or crawl over them. Which was ridiculous.

... why exactly can't you pickup a table or chair and throw them? Or why don't they bump out of the way similar to how the car kind of unsticks itself?

Hilariously the autosave kicked in RIGHT AFTER that happened so I was just trapped there. I ended up having to grenade myself because I didn't feel like redoing the fight from right before I got trapped.

I have some sort of pistol now that only has 4 bullets but does a ton of damage per shot. So with pistol skills and cool skills it's literally making people blow apart on criticals.

To keep things interesting I've been trying to make use of stealth grabs more, and then only start combat when I get seen. I'm not very good at it though, so I just end up shooting everyone a lot.

I didn't get at first that using skills levels them up. It makes me wish I had been hacking every chance I got early on.

A tomahawk is considered a blunt and non-lethal weapon. But the art makes it look like a very sharp fire axe, haha.

I’ve had some cool moments where I overheard NPCs talking about characters in the game that I was about to encounter or had recently met. It really added to the story. Those conversations were well written and performed too.

I was running around looking for the tarot cards and started an encounter in another part of the city and absolutely got my ass handed to me.

Are the boroughs roughly organized by level/difficulty?

Had a few inconvenient crashes. Usually autosave/saving often helps, but sometimes you've just gotten done doing 15-20 minutes of inventory management, it freezes as you're exiting the inventory menu, and crashes, forcing you to cry.

Quality of life discovery: holy crap, you can run. I genuinely don't remember that ever being explained. You just click the left stick once.

Combined with the super mario cyber legs, it's way easier to get around now. And for extra fun, if you super mario jump while running, you regain some stamina during the jump. Now it doesn't have to take 10 minutes just to walk around a fence.

I've been exploring the different systems and perks and I'm half worried I'll end up with a jack-of-all-trades master-of-none character that gets creamed later game. I'm just on the default difficulty, so I'm hoping I'll be fine.

ccoates wrote:

I was running around looking for the tarot cards and started an encounter in another part of the city and absolutely got my ass handed to me.

Are the boroughs roughly organized by level/difficulty?

Yep, roughly in the order you encounter them following the main story missions.

Still having fun. I ended up starting a new character on very hard since now I kind of know what I'm doing.

I'd classify this as a good game. Maybe even very good. In it's current fully patched state of course. But the jankiness and bugs, and the stubs other folks have mentioned that indicate a deeper game, keep it from being great for me.

Maybe with time if they actually put out more improvements and DLC it'll become great, who knows!

I still think some stuff is explained so poorly. I only just realized there's a completely different trading menu in Ripperdoc stores. They sell an item named "Tabula Rasa" that lets you respec/reset ALL your perk points. Which is amazing and I am pretty sure is never mentioned anywhere.

That would have made my early game a lot more fun as I wouldn't have been hoarding perk points if I knew I could respec them later. 25,000 isn't cheap, but it's also not a ton of money.

Another thing I didn't catch either of the two times I've started a game is how to ricochet bullets. You start out with the cyberware, but then you need ANOTHER mod to see the trajectories. I feel like the game should have either made that a LOT more explicit in the first tutorial showing you how to ricochet stuff, or just given you a common version of that mod to begin with.

Some of the patches have rebalanced stuff for the better. I tried to get a legendary cyberdeck that was previously 14 street cred and now it's 40, meaning you can't get it before the "Heist", haha. Which for game balancing makes a ton of sense, but I was still bummed at not having a ridiculously overpowered deck before I should.

I've also tried crafting, but mostly I don't see the point at making weapons, since you pick up so many and the stats get better as you level up and you get more drops. But for upgrading your Iconic weapons? Super fun. It's nice to keep using them. Even if they're slightly lower stats I like sticking with the iconic weapons most times. For crafting mods it's helpful too, since mods can't be removed (without a high level skill and destroying the item they're in). I only just now figured out why clothing with mod slots is so valuable. Even if you just slap a common/uncommon armadillo mod in it, I'm crafting them at like 60 armor right now, which with two slots makes a crappy shirt with two mod slots suddenly way higher armor than the best drop I'm getting now.

I'm also spending more skill points in quickhacking to start fights. It's nice to mix it up and throw in a quickhack attack with guns to mop up. It makes the fights a lot more dynamic for me than when I was just speccing all my points into getting my pistol or rifle damage so high it was gibbing enemies and I'd just kind of rush them. I was reading one build guide where they suggested always putting 20 points into strength because they hate hacking and that just kind of turns combat into GTA III without much strategy. Just grenade, rush. Grenade, rush. Your survive, sure, but Cyberpunk is a mediocre shooter if that's all you do, IMO.

I restarted on very hard and I noticed something weird.

Blunt weapons now are "lethal", in terms of quest goals. On the other two difficulties I could go in with a baton and knock everyone out. Now it seems to count as deaths.

Is that a bug or on purpose? I could see it going either way.

The only exception seems to be the cyberpsycho battles still result in the non-lethal completion dialogues.

Not that it changes the results much, I'm just curious. It ends up so that the only way you can complete those extra objectives is the sneak attack non-lethal takedown. Although I stuck a guy in a box and that killed him anyway.

ccoates wrote:

Not that it changes the results much, I'm just curious. It ends up so that the only way you can complete those extra objectives is the sneak attack non-lethal takedown. Although I stuck a guy in a box and that killed him anyway.

Is the arm cannon with tranq ammo still a one-hit knockout for most baddies?