Cyberpunk 2077

https://i.imgur.com/W6uu9Yx.png
Kowloon vibez

how far through are you? i just shook down Fingers

2nd act I guess (garbage dump loading screen) with Keanu popping up now and then
I’ve been grinding on contract missions to get some better gear and level up before I continue with the story
Lot of places to explore and get familiar with
I like the idea of just hanging on a street corner for a couple hours

ha, does anything happen or you're just taking it in? i have to take some time off the story next play

i get reminded of Hong Kong a lot too. Wife is from there

https://i.imgur.com/OvOKUiC.png

https://i.imgur.com/JQQq0pK.png

On the roller coaster with Johnny

The modders are having fun with this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvK_7Ohk16k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP6cRCYYff4

Another playthrough in (on Stadia, as a new GPU has been on order since December). I don't get the lovely ray-traced reflections/shadows, but also very few bugs (mostly audio looping requiring a reload), none of which are game breakers.

The good is pretty obvious: Night City looks great, especially some neighborhoods like Kabuki and Japantown; fine story & dialogue, good voice acting (Keanu and male V are actually the weakest, here), great character animation (and in 10 languages), good original score and diagetic music, quest design permitting multiple playstyles. And the bad is pretty obvious: poor NPC AI; poor game balance, wherein if one engages with much open world ("side") content, there's no challenge at the highest difficulty; a paucity of meaningful player decisions; and non-immersive presentation of open world content.

Aside from the poor performance on last-gen consoles and most PCs, the pros and cons are pretty similar to those for Witcher III at launch. I think this game will get sorted, and may attract an audience as more migrate to current systems. But CD PR isn't as modder friendly as Bethesda, and the NPCs don't have the rich characterization of a golden age Bioware game. So I'm not sure this will have legs.

https://i.imgur.com/gOEh3jb.jpg

Haven't had much chance to look into this one just yet, but even with ps1 graphics I'm very interested from what this trailer is showing us

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDA3RQpSqEw

"Without Judgement" is the name of the game btw

Was hoping this would be the Action Button vid for this finally going up, back to waiting I guess :(

I have been playing the Cyberpunk game

mixed feelings, but it's definitely visually dense

https://kotaku.com/cyberpunk-2077-patch-1-5-combat-perks-traffic-ai-ps5-xb-1848537538#replies

Guess now is the time to give it a shot if you’re on next gen. Free 5 hour trial.

Now that the patch is released (and I have a dozen or so “quality of life" mods installed), I’ve picked this up and am having a blast playing it like an action game with open-world elements rather than the "next gen open world game" the developers pitched it as. I’m playing a "hack and slash" build (i.e., weaken with quickhacks then go in with my katana) and it’s pretty satisfying when the combat music kicks in and I’m leaping out of stealth with sword swinging.

As an open-world game, I don’t find it as satisfying as Red Dead Redemption 2; the world doesn’t feel as “alive”. That’s a vague descriptor, since I don’t really know how to articulate it; it’s more of a feeling, I suppose. For example, the people on the street in Cyberpunk feel more obviously like bots, whereas I was content to stand on a balcony in RDR2 and just watch folks go about their day, or follow a random walking merchant in The Witcher 3 as they wandered the roads. Or I’d stumble into little scripted events when traveling in RDR2 happening in the background. I imagine that’s easier to script in a more sparsely populated setting like RDR2 than Night City, though. (Granted, I’m one of those nerds who appreciates unnecessary, mundane things in RPGs, so wish V could sit at a noodle counter to pass the time before a mission, rather than just “using” from the inventory etc.)

That aside, it looks gorgeous, and I dig driving around at night a lot. I find the side content more engaging than, say, Ghost of Tsushima. There’s valid criticism that it doesn’t feel “new/futuristic” enough in its expression of cyberpunk, but I don’t mind that at all. I read all Gibson et al in high school, and even played a session of the tabletop game back then (around 2001 or so), so it suits me find that it still feels rooted in 80s/90s. I even leaned into it by installing a mod that switches one of the radio station to play stuff like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHMzCpy0fXc

excellent thoughts, thanks blatherskite

good music choice

Thanks. Perfect example: I was cruising around yesterday just to explore, and stumbled on this protest at a brain dance studio:

https://i.imgur.com/lp4YocY.png

I walk up to it and… nothing. There’s no dialog from the protest leader or any of the crowd members. Not even crowd noise. They’re just mutely pumping their arms. By contrast, I think of a time I was playing Red Dead Redemption 2 and stumbled across a little event as I passed by a clearing: three KKK members were arguing about how to light a cross, which then fell on them and set them on fire. It was a neat little moment that felt like the world was happening beyond my character.

(I think the worst offender I’ve encountered is L.A. Noire, which I should have loved due to its subject matter, but was completely dead: nothing ever happened in the open world outside of missions, despite how beautifully rendered the city was.)

there’s a quest related to the protest you can do, but it starts elsewhere

Finally finished this after beginning in February. Opinion didn’t waver much from the above: a blast to play, but some frustration that I could see a better game peeking through if some of it had been fleshed out a bit more. (For instance, after finishing their side jobs, the romance partners don’t really have much to say or do, beyond some texts.)

For those who finished, what ending did you all get, and were you happy with it?

I originally started going for the ending where V joins the nomads, since it seemed a closest to a happy ending. As it progressed, though, I felt dissatisfied. I always played V as lusting after Night City fame, so it didn’t feel right the my level 45 badass would chuck it all to live a dusty tent, even if Judy joined her. I opted for the secret ending, instead, so I could storm Arasaka with Johnny at my side and become queen of the Afterlife. Plus, the final scene approaching the space casino gave me heavy Neuromancer vibes. A shame about being dumped by Judy but, hey, I bet the DLC will include whoever the player romances, even in passing. And if not, well, we only knew each other a few in-game weeks at most, right?

The game uses these blue and green windows a lot

https://i.imgur.com/YE64JDk.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/w4qIVqn.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/Dv3m1gw.jpg

they should make a sequel called naturepunk, not sure what it would entail

I'm not sure why walking around night city is so boring

I watched Strange Days for the first time last night—that whole braindance tutorial with the robbery has to be a homage to the film.

@lag00n

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solarpunk

https://globalpattern.bandcamp.com/album/solarpunk-a-possible-future

Maybe the best thing about this game is that it saved rockstar from having to do it (badly)

Jig-Jig street?

I feel as bad for this game as one can feel for a AAA mega-hyped beast. The most beautiful open world, so full of work. It’s deserves applause for giving verticality to its world. Up into buildings, down into slums, and thought yeah there are locked doors everywhere, it does not feel like it due to how many inside areas are accessible. It is a game dependent on high-end hardware though. Most of my enjoyment would not exist if I was not playing this on a 1000nits OLED and a 3070 with ray tracing. It has so many flaws, but it deserves credit for the world it created and for how it has pushed video game hardware.

i havent played but that was the one part of the pitch that really appealed to me, so many games just push the map out wider and wider when what i really want is density and verticality

Honestly that’s the only reason I’m playing

That and all the neon in hdr. I popped an eye vessel playing this last night. Worth it

Also, I like when little numbers go over peoples heads when I shoot them. Essential part of any game

All it needed was a good writer and it’d be goty for me. Mix this with disco elysium and I would die

Yup

I probably mentioned this before but you don’t need a $2k rig to play this with hdr etc. check out GeForce now if you have a good internet connection

Night City Wotld Cup team

2.0's out and Phantom Liberty is dropping shortly

still making sense of the new skill tree. starting a new character, chooms?

I never played the base game, but I think I've seen people suggest starting from scratch?

that's the general recommendation

Is this worth playing now? Should I play this or BG3 after Elden Ring?

Depends on how long until you're going to be ready, I think. My suspicion is that the base game plus dlc is going to hit the sweet spot as far as functionality goes. The base game is pretty solid now, at least as far as my experience on the PC version goes.

this game has gotten a lot better but i was charmed enough by it to begin with that i was kinda disappointed when some update or other suddenly fixed the doppelganger problem wherein the dense city sidewalks had surged and teemed with around nine infinite sets of multiple-birth siblings

maybe it was my hardware

Realistically, probably not until the Christmas holiday - I have ER and TotK to probably keep me going the rest of 2023 for whatever video game time I have left.

But when I bought ER it was either that or Cyberpunk I was choosing from. BG3 wasn't even on my radar. However, I might just cave and get BG3 for Mac OS and Cyberpunk for PS5 and slowly play both simultaneously or something. Or, just maybe, I should give gaming a break for a year and get back into Ableton and write some damn beats again, but that would be crazy talk

Had fun finishing this some months after release. But going back to dink around some time after they first had you reset all your character points, and noping out pretty quick, tells me I'm reeally not an RPG guy. There must be some webpage that could tell me a sensible way to spend the points to be an ok all around character right?

I'm the same way--though I do like RPGs, I don't dig all all that analyzing of point and perk percentages etc. Whenever I start a game like this, I usually just figure out my concept--sneaky sniper, charmer not a fighter, whatever--and just look up builds from those who've already put in the research. If you search "cyberpunk 2077 builds", you can probably find some. I think I used https://fextralife.com/guides/cyberpunk-2077-guides/, though those may be too specialized for your taste. Of course, in many games it's almost irrelevant once you get a certain level, and you can slaughter everyone with two hits.

What I've gathered from the retooled perks is that they've made it a lot more straightforward. The text tells you exactly what each does, what they apply to (weapon types/hacking/movement speed/etc.) and they're divided into tiers that unlock with skill points allocated to a particular aspect. Just browse around a little bit and you're good. I don't think I'll feel the need to look up any guides.

The other thing they seemed to have addressed is how there was a bunch of overlap once your character got to a certain level and you could just be insanely overpowered with little effort