Cyberpunk Catch-All

Props to them for continuing to try with the in-game news stuff, but it's meh.

The three fixes don't exactly seem that impressive. Oh well. Maybe next patch I'll be back, again, when transmog is put in.

Allegedly these three features are ‘not the biggest’ in the patch, which… well I would hope so. I’ll watch the stream tonight and report back if it’s looking interesting.

The stream wasn't great - not very well rehearsed, long digressions about how difficult patching games is, a weird choice of things to show.

However, the list of fixes is very, very long and the patch is dropping 'very, very soon'. It does appear to be another patch that's broadly stability and bug focused, rather than any significant changes to AI, game world or content. But several of the folk on the stream said those areas would be focused on in the future.

I'll fire up a new game once this patch is out, I think, to see how it plays.

First set of free DLC is in there and it's exactly what was expected:

A list of all the free DLCs can be found in the Main Menu under "Additional Content".

Johnny Silverhand's Alternative Appearance – can be enabled in Settings in the "Additional Content" tab.

Multilayered Syn-Leather Deltajock Jacket, Luminescent Punk Jacket - both available in the stash in V's apartment after receiving a message from Viktor after completing The Ride. They're of Rare/Iconic quality by default, Crafting Specs to craft a higher quality will also be unlocked.

Archer Quartz "Bandit" - available as a reward or for purchase (depending on choices made by player) after completing Ghost Town and then receiving a message from Dakota or Rogue. If you haven't received the message, make sure to be in the Badlands area and move further away from Dakota's workshop. Dakota will also need a couple of days to contact you.

garion333 wrote:

First set of free DLC is in there and it's exactly what was expected:

CDPR definitely worked hard to manage their customers' expectations, but I don't think 3 cosmetics and 1 new vehicle were "exactly what was expected".

I look at your list, garion333, and I immediately think of Winston Churchill's description of Clement Attlee as "a very modest man. Indeed, he has a lot to be modest about.."

It really doesn't bode well for the next 6 months (IIRC, the most recent roadmap from CDPR runs to early 2022). And there will be no multiplayer to ride to our rescue.

The patch just dropped, it’s 40gb on PS4 Pro, though the size of the patch doesn’t really seem to correlate with anything previously.

detroit20 wrote:
garion333 wrote:

First set of free DLC is in there and it's exactly what was expected:

CDPR definitely worked hard to manage their customers' expectations, but I don't think 3 cosmetics and 1 new vehicle were "exactly what was expected".

I look at your list, garion333, and I immediately think of Winston Churchill's description of Clement Attlee as "a very modest man. Indeed, he has a lot to be modest about.."

It really doesn't bode well for the next 6 months (IIRC, the most recent roadmap from CDPR runs to early 2022). And there will be no multiplayer to ride to our rescue.

It is exactly what's expected because it's what they dropped for free with the Witcher after release. You'll get a drip feed of some costumes, some cars, maybe a weapon, maybe a new gig. That sort of thing.

It's meant to help keep players engaged and coming back, but the mountain of bug fixes and balancing issues meant that instead of being out in January this first free dlc is out eight+ months after launch and barely gets a mention in the patch. They know it isn't much, but it never was meant to be much. The delay makes it seem sad.

But, yes, it was as expected for the first dlc.

53GB patch. Surely this one will fix Many Ways to Skin a Cat!

Just waiting for this thing to drop <$50, hopefully before the year is up. I’m ready to jump in on PC, just not for full price.

Could really care less about a tacked on MP mode but can understand how there’s some anticipation for it.

Maclintok wrote:

Just waiting for this thing to drop <$50, hopefully before the year is up. I’m ready to jump in on PC, just not for full price.

The subreddit for the game is full of deals, some as low as $10 on some platforms. It's £33 in the UK on GOG at the moment.

Fired up a fresh game and the Sandra Dorsett mission is still absolutely packed with bugs - loads of pop-in, miscuing audio, invisible guns. I’m reinstalling the game from scratch as I have a feeling multiple patches on top of one another probably isn’t helping. Will report back.

I own this on Stadia, I'm prepared to own it again on PC under $20. Someone let Newell and Sweeney know.

I can happily report that after deleting and complete reinstalling, V can now lie down in bed correctly on patch 1.3.

Also seems to have fixed many of the audio bugs. The only standout stuff now that I’ve seen is NPCs clipping through things or hovering above benches etc.

That Exekiller thing looks good - retrofuturist cybercowboy bounty hunter? Sweet!

Okay I bit since it's cheap on GOG atm.

About how long does it take from the main menu to actually start walking around in the world, assuming I pick the default V in the creator and just click thru cutscenes as fast as I can?

strangederby wrote:

The hard on that cyberpunk games have for the look of Blade Runner is annoying and limiting.

Maclintok wrote:

Okay I bit since it's cheap on GOG atm.

About how long does it take from the main menu to actually start walking around in the world, assuming I pick the default V in the creator and just click thru cutscenes as fast as I can?

There’s a life path prologue which is pretty on rails, a series of linked missions that takes maybe 2 hours. Once you’ve done the Sandra Dorsett mission you can free roam in Watson, but the rest of the map doesn’t unlock until you progress the main story.

One thing though - the story is actually pretty good, with some memorable characters. And you get a lot of gameplay tutorials in that first hour or two that never repeat. So honestly I would take your time, turn off subtitles even. At present the ‘living, breathing’ open world is kind of underwhelming when you’re not following the main quests and taking your time, so I wouldn’t be in a hurry to jump into it. I’m semi-hopeful that will improve with future patches, but I think you will enjoy the game more if you don’t skip all the lore, fast travel everywhere etc.

How long before the meat of the game depends on the life path. Nomad is actually pretty significant (also the best IMO) corpo is super short and ganger is in the middle.

There's a few interesting changes that didn't make the patch notes.

The "Death and Taxes" iconic pistol is now attainable from Maiko's office, unfortunately if you already did that mission you're never able to go back (this gun is mentioned in the strategy guide but has never been in the game until now.)

You can get a set of MaxTac armor in Judy's apartment, ha. Which is a reference to some of her flirty dialogue during Pyramid Song. Apparently the assets existed already but like the Death and Taxes pistol, wasn't in-game until now.

Some quickhacks (besides Contagion) have been nerfed. Legendary Ping's hacking through walls now only works on devices, which is a good gameplay balance tweak, IMO. It also means hacking cameras is still relevant/useful, even late game. Overheat got its damage dialed down. Bizarrely, they left Short Circuit alone, which now makes it kind of the de facto quickhack to use for one-shot kills. Maybe that'll be next on the chopping block.

It looks like some revolvers also got a straight damage reduction. But even with that they're still pretty ridiculous.

Optical Camo is mentioned in the notes, but is another example of how weird it is they focused so much on the cat Nibbles during the stream. It also technically existed, assets-wise, but was never in-game until now. The Legendary version can turn you invisible for 15 seconds and the effect looks pretty cool.

This video ends with Johnny cursing, in case that's an issue/you're not on headphones.

The notes mention improving NPC behavior, but it's very minor. Fewer NPCs perma-crouch, but that seems to be because more of them now run away when a fight starts. The ones that do crouch, still do so permanently. Even though it's a small thing, I still find the perma-crouching to be one of the biggest immersion breakers for me. Cars can now drive around obstacles to a degree, instead of a single parked motorcycle causing a permanent traffic jam.

Performance does seem better. On my Xbox One X the map in general was sluggish and the #1 cause of hard crashes. That doesn't seem to happen anymore.

They removed stashes from motorcycles, which is a bummer. Also I don't think it makes sense from a "suspension of disbelief" level because cars like the MaiMai that have trunks smaller than my motorcycle's luggage rack still have stash access.

They also removed Johnny's arm item from your inventory, so no more wearing it outside of his specific quests. That's a bummer too. Again, didn't hurt gameplay, disappointing they removed it. It felt more like an easter egg than a bug that needed fixing.

There's some new bugs introduced that will hopefully result in a hotfix soon. Xbox Series X players apparently can't create new saves until they delete all their old autosaves/quicksaves. Gun reloading will sometimes become comically slow, the fix for that is a save/reload.

They were very careful not to promise anything in the stream, but they did seem to imply that with 1.3 they could start focusing on actual gameplay and content changes as opposed to the current cycle of almost purely bug fixes.

If some quest breaking bugs were preventing you from progressing, 1.3 is worth a try, but if you've already beaten it, there's nothing really here to prompt a replay.

I do still think there's an entertaining enough game there for at least a single playthrough (personally I've done several). You can get completely legit "physical" copies on eBay for about $30 (it's a GoG download code with some nice extras like the soundtrack and postcards and stuff like that, there's no physical game disc.) And on Xbox or PlayStation, physical discs sell for even less than that.

Happy Dave wrote:

There’s a life path prologue which is pretty on rails, a series of linked missions that takes maybe 2 hours. Once you’ve done the Sandra Dorsett mission you can free roam in Watson, but the rest of the map doesn’t unlock until you progress the main story.

One thing though - the story is actually pretty good, with some memorable characters. And you get a lot of gameplay tutorials in that first hour or two that never repeat. So honestly I would take your time, turn off subtitles even. At present the ‘living, breathing’ open world is kind of underwhelming when you’re not following the main quests and taking your time, so I wouldn’t be in a hurry to jump into it. I’m semi-hopeful that will improve with future patches, but I think you will enjoy the game more if you don’t skip all the lore, fast travel everywhere etc.

Thanks Happy Dave. Yeah I was thinking about sneak previewing the first bit of the prologue, mainly to check game performance and stability before I featured the game on Twitch. But I just went in feet first & relatively blind this morning and had a blast!

I went Nomad and appear to have gotten clear of the prologue and major tutorializing. The game looks GREAT and general performance has held up so far. No crashes or major glitches yet. Frame rate is good although I may tweak the intensity of the ray tracing and DLSS to squeak out some extra smoothness.

I am surprised at how nice the melee feels and I'm glad I decided to go the melee specialist route. The shooting plays about as well as I imagined it would: a bit sludgy, with some weapon types feeling better than others.

ccoates wrote:

There's some new bugs introduced that will hopefully result in a hotfix soon. Xbox Series X players apparently can't create new saves until they delete all their old autosaves/quicksaves. Gun reloading will sometimes become comically slow, the fix for that is a save/reload.

Yeah, I just noticed a new one. I cannot talk to Elizabeth Peralez partway through the "Dream On" mission, which prevents me from, y'know, completing the mission.

Oddly, I feel like (on PC), I've noticed more and more seams and weird sh*t going on as they've released more and more patches. For me, personally, the game felt stable and playable as hell after that first patch. Everything since then has been.... complicated.

Maclintok wrote:

I am surprised at how nice the melee feels and I'm glad I decided to go the melee specialist route. The shooting plays about as well as I imagined it would: a bit sludgy, with some weapon types feeling better than others.

Both have improved a lot since v1.0, at least on console. Shooting was really not great when you were starting up a new playthrough. I think they’ve rebalanced it a bunch to make it more forgiving at every level.

Did some more shooting. It's feeling better and it's not like I put any perks into gun handling. I especially like the way they do the ADS peeking around corners or over cover.

Is it just me or a lot of the gang NPCs on a hair trigger? I was strolling Kabuki market the other night and innocently turned off a radio sitting on a table. The next thing I knew every gangster in the area was firing at me. Dropped a couple bystanders by accident and then I had to flee the NCPD. A good 5 minutes before I could double back to the market to continue my side quest!

Yeah, the gangs seem to trigger semi-randomly. I've had groups attempting to attack my car as I drive past. I suppose it adds a bit of an edge to pootling around the city.

I'm on the GOG version and whenever I quit to desktop there's a 50/50 chance it prompts to send a crash report. Anyone else get this?

There might be some new collision handling bugs that manifest as attacks so enemies go aggro. Police randomly attack you now after 1.3 in a way I don't remember pre-patch. Although they're supposed to not attack you during random events just for, well, being there.

All the Tyger Claws in the Woman from La Mancha market went aggro on me for seemingly no reason and I ended up having to kill them all. Was actually kind of a challenging fight since it was early game, but I have no idea what triggered it.

Messing with cameras can definitely start a fight, but I've never tried the radios, too. Ha.

Maclintok wrote:

I'm on the GOG version and whenever I quit to desktop there's a 50/50 chance it prompts to send a crash report. Anyone else get this?

I'm GoG on PC and no crashes like that so far. But I could just be lucky.

Patch 1.31 is out. More quest fixes, disappearing eyebrows, GPU optimisations for PlayStation and for PC users with beefy rigs, properly reflective wet roads for the 10 times per playthrough it actually rains. Also a line about ‘enemy stealth detection’ which might be a fix for the random aggro from gangs etc.

Such a late, late gripe, but it's been annoying me for over a year now:

Did anyone at CDPR think that it might kind of break the immersion a bit to frequently ditch things like kevlar body armor and armored boots for spangled crop tops and booty shorts because, for some reason, the crop top has far better armor?

The item tiers/system has just always rankled me.

Yeah, and without a transmog system it's double bad because you consistently look like an idiot.

garion333 wrote:

Yeah, and without a transmog system it's double bad because you consistently look like an idiot.

Uh, speak for yourself.

IMAGE(https://steamuserimages-a.akamaihd.net/ugc/1649972007336760477/B62F0D8648BD01401FCA9175447C291B098A96EB/?imw=5000&imh=5000&ima=fit&impolicy=Letterbox&imcolor=%23000000&letterbox=false)
For some reason I always think my character looks like Ethan Hawk. Clear as day to me, but my wife doesn’t see it.

I would love to see transmog in the game when I inevitably do a second play through. I know a lot of people had terrible experiences with this game and I really hate that. For me it was an amazing experience, albeit marred by noticeable launch bugs, that sits right up there with the best of the best. I put in over 100 hours, did every task, completed every quest, and saw every ending. In the end I felt even at double full price I still would have gotten my money’s worth. (Generally shoot for 1 / hr on if I’ve gotten what I paid for out of a game or not) I wish everyone could have had the same experience I did.

I have faith CDPR will fix it, but man would I love to play the game they envisioned, you know the one that had a full development cycle without any corporate suits getting in the way.