But in all seriousness I think people came down way too hard on this game. The writing is mad good- (like only Disco Elysium and NV really compare to it good) and I love wandering around a cool cyberpunk city as my Skin Diamond lookalike mercenary
I'm all for people enjoying whatever they want, good on ya. But OP comparing the writing from Disco Elysium and Cyberpunk just make this entire thread feel like bait.
I've played the game beginning to end the writing was nothing special in my opinion. The whole thing hinges on V being someone who just loves doing crime for no particular reason, The actual game is okay.
I Erased those quests with that guy because From my memory because having a questline where the point is police would be good if they were just good people in a cyberpunk hellscape was a mind boggling decision.
I was talking about the romanceable cop. I forgot there was 2 cop friends because I did almost none of the mini quests the ganglords give you.
You want to be remembered and be "glorious" amongst criminals, which is frankly about as banal a motivation. Then you want to survive, but can't. The end
The writing is kinda meh. Does nothing with the Cyberpunk setting, has very confused politics, doesn't really know what it is. Someone decided they liked the Cyberpunk setting and it was only after they decided to make a Cyberpunk game that they really got to grips with what that meant and that the "punk" aspect really means "anti-capitalist rebellion against the man". They have then sort of made this confused mess because they don't actually like that stuff because they are all Polish and half the studio is probably fash.
The sandbox is garbage (doesn't exist at all), 20 year old open world city games have a better sandbox where police, ambulances and NPCs actually script and do emergent stuff.
They do very little with the setting.
It's an open world game that shouldn't be open world. CDPR have no idea how to make an open world. They only got away with it in the fantasy setting because they didn't actually need to make NPCs do or react to anything. They make dioramas that don't actually do anything.
Gameplay kinda fails to really be complete, it's not challenging, it's not interesting, it's just kinda eh.
Sloppy and very unfinished. I think the biggest disappoint for me is that there's really very little modding scene as a result of the garbage launch too. Nobody wants to touch it.
The fuck even is this game? It's named after a genre and a number, has Keanu Reeves and seems to just be Video Game in Setting. Like, what even kind of game is it? What's the story? Does it have an identity outside of the genre it's named after?
It's a cRPG based on Cyberpunk, which I've been told was the first tabletop-game set in cyberpunk genre, followed by Shadowrun like a year after.
The game itself is like if you combine Borderlands 3 combat, with Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines rpg mechanics with Witcher 3 writing and top it off with GTA 4ish driving mechanics. It was also released a year too early.
edit: so what I'm trying to say with all these comparisons is that the game isnt really unique, but there isnt a good one to one comparison. Like it's compared a lot to GTA5 because of marketing and the expectations that set, but it's nothing like GTA5. The closest comparison would probably be VtMB with driving and better combat.
It's Skyrim with future guns with 10% the content and done with 100x less skill and polish than a Bethesda release. Truly a feat of achievement in and of itself.
That's trying to do too much a once. Like that dude Forest Gump. That guy lived a life, but you can't do all that in one day.
Maybe, but it works really well together, after you get over the "I just put a bullet in this dudes head but he didnt die." from the beginning.
By late game I had a revolver that killed almost everyone even if I shot them in the toe.
I wish they'd brought on someone who knew how to do vehicle driving AI so that cars weren't just running along set paths in a state of either "going" or "not going."
My favorite part of Cyberpunk 2077 was just walking around and looking at things. The architecture and city layout were fascinating to me. Maybe I'm just lizard brain or something, but it was genuinely amazing that I could drive all the way out of the city and look at the skyline. It was still identifiable all the way out there.
It's possibly the first game I've played where an urban environment seems about the size that it should be. I know it's actually not, it's actually quite small compared to a large city, but whatever perspective tricks they did completely fooled my tiny brain.
In terms of atmosphere and aesthetic, it's one of the best games I've ever played. The characters are all memorable. Some of the quests are fantastic, like the talking gun, the AI taxis, that one about the murderer finding Jesus, it all stoked the parts of my brain that enjoy flash and sparkle. The music is really goddamn good.
Everything else though? 5/10 at its best moments. The combat is goofy. It's way too easy to break the game's economy. It's very easy to become an overpowered death god only halfway through. At a certain point I didn't even have to walk near the enemies. I could hack them all into suicide from 100 meters away.
The overall plot isn't great either. It has an anti-establishment framework to it but without any of the specific details. The main character's motivations make absolutely no sense other than some vague desire for money and power. Everyone you meet also seems to like V, sooner or later. There aren't any characters I remember who hate your guts and refuse to work with you if you're an asshole to them. The politics of the game are really odd and skewed. It seems to endorse a snarky, individualistic nihilism and tries to contrast that with corporate greed, but in practice it all came across as the same thing to me. Johnny only seems to hate Arasaka for completely personal reasons and ended up doing performative terrorism.
There are even a few plots where you meet characters who have a more genuine anti-establishment ethos, like the mission with the radio signals, and the other characters around you treat it all with derision and mockery. It's supposed to be funny. Haha, look at these dorks who believe in something.
Agreed. Nothing better than getting a little buzzed IRL and wandering around the game
I liked Cyberpunk too. I think it delivered on most of my expectations - decent, modern combat/gameplay, near New Vegas quality story (eh), meaningful player choice. Shame about the bugs and seemingly unfinished/poorly implemented features. Another year or two with less crunch and maybe it would've been a solid gameplay experience? Either way I thought it was fine. Wish life paths were actually a thing. But yeah decent 3/5 game.
The huge negative reaction was way overblown (with the exception of then current gen console owners, that sucks). One of the things that always confused me was the series of reddit threads about "cut but promised" gameplay elements and stuff. Every time I see those I find the majority of the list is filled with stuff that was confirmed to be cut or not even in the works years prior to Cyberpunk's release. The rest was wishful speculation on the part of overly hyped up fans. Was CDPR sorta lying by omission and misleading people sometimes? Sure I guess. But like, people knew a lot of stuff wouldn't end up in the final game (or at least that info was very out in the open), but they preordered it and shit and got upset anyway. These guys were so wound up, I think even if the game came out with zero issues they'd still be throwing the same tantrums.
WAAAAA, I can't buy and customize my home!
Well yeah, they said that was out like in 2016 or some shit dude.
Unfortunately I feel like any message or intent is rendered meaningless when the means to produce the game run so blatantly counter to them. Almost as if the story is just focus group tested branding.
Maybe I’m being overly idealist but I’d rather have genuine braindead centrism over hollow manufactured leftism 9 times out of 10. At least I know I can feel good hating it.
The "leftist themes" of cyberpunk (especially the stuff from the 80's) is mad overblown by lefties nowadays. The dude who made the game who's name escapes me now is an 80's cyberpunk guy and this game follows that theme. That means capital already won decades ago and the only thing you can really do about it is try and make your end nicer. Kinda like Neuromancer or Hardwired
Good to know I haven’t played a ton of games recently so I’m def talking about things beyond my expertise. Only new thing I’ve played is subnautica, and unknown worlds certainly looks par for the course company wise despite their own anti-capitalist storylines.
The actual scripted portions of the game are great. But everything else was obviously unfinished. Redditors absolutely freaked out, disproportionately (though I wasn't trying to play it on a last-gen console, it's my understanding that the game barely functioned on those platforms). If the open-world aspects and the side quests had all been on the level of the scripted stuff it would've been the best game of the year. People have, correctly I feel, compared the game unfavorably to Red Dead Redemption 2, which manages to have a great scripted story but also a load of fun open-world stuff to do (though, in my opinion, that game suffers from some of the usual design aspects of a rockstar game, which keeps it behind Witcher 3 as my favorite story-driven game of the decade).
Personally, I felt the setting was really cool, but was again best realized in the scripted portions of the game, not the free-roam content. I hope they make another game in the setting just so I can see more of it.
But I, as a player of games, really only cares about story. I don't really give a shit about mechanics or gameplay, so the more a game is like reading a book or watching a movie the more I'll like it, and the more a game is like an arcade game the less I'm going to care about it.
With that said I think the biggest flaw of the game is V. They should've made V a character in the world in the way Geralt was. Someone with a set personality, someone who would only ever make a certain set of decisions. One of the things that the Witcher 3 excels at are that in situations where the player is confronted with a choice, everything you can choose to do is ultimately in character for Geralt. But I felt like 2077 didn't always know who V was. But it wasn't like the player had sandbox-esque roleplaying options either. V was a character with a personality, kinda, but it was a weak, poorly defined personality.
I loved the outline of the story I got when I played. The sad, dying corpo woman who fell from grace and found a family on the streets who has to choose between her ambition and her desire for meaningful human connection. Beautiful. But then I wanted to see more of her early corpo lifestyle and I wanted to see a lot more of her time with Jackie's family. And of course they couldn't do that because V wasn't a set character, there are three starting options. They not gonna make like six hours of unique content for each start. And then later they're hamstringed because how V would react to Jackie's lifestyle/family is massively dependent on their background. It's only after a year in the life of street mercenary that the player gets to see V again because that's the same for all the starting paths and that shapes who V is as a character for the rest of the game. Sure, there are unique dialogue choices depending on your starting path at some points of the game, but that wasn't enough. And I'm aware that if V had been their own character then the story I got might not have even been possible, but that's the price to pay for a better, more human story.
It's such a different beast from something like Disco Elysium or even New Vegas that I'd hesitate to make a comparison. I dunno. When I think of 2077 I think of the characters and their stories first before I think of anything else. But when I think about Disco Elysium I think about the mood and the broader political and philosophical themes before I think of the actual plot or the characters. Disco Elysium is very dreamy. And with New Vegas I think about the crazy-ass plot and playing all the factions against each other but I don't really think about the characters, the focus isn't on them the way it is in 2077.
With that said I think the biggest flaw of the game is V. They should’ve made V a character in the world in the way Geralt was.
What's frustrating is that they basically kinda did that and then tried to sell it as a make your own character...which just made them feel generic and extra frustrating. I actually wound up remaking and playing through the opening missions twice because I just couldn't handle the disconnect between the character I had envisioned in the creation screen and what he actually was when the plot kicked in.
Mass effect and commander Shepard have a lot of short comings but to bioware's credit they properly sold and did this sort of customization right. There is a "vanilla" option and the character creator is limited to a fairly narrow framework. Yes...people can still make some seriously unconventional extremes...but ultimately Shepard is a soldier and your choices are limited to deciding the flavor of your soldier.
Mass effect and commander Shepard have a lot of short comings but to bioware’s credit they properly sold and did this sort of customization right.
More RPGs should do this. Too many RPGs (especially western ones?) try to give endless customization when making the character. Some of the best RPGs though limit customization e.g. Planescape Torment
I've always thought this about Mass Effect. It perfectly strikes the balance between something like Witcher where the main character is their own character and a sandbox like Fallout where the character is whoever the player wants.
She did yeah.
I'm curious how you know about her? Just following on Twitter and stuff?
I've been a fan of her for like 10 years. When I was a wee college lad there was this chick I was really into who was just friends with me who was a dead ringer for Raylin, so I got into her work back then and have kept a loose on her ever since on twitter
The hate the game gets seems to be extremely performative and yes I'm looking at the comments here
I think the game's writing shines with the relationship development between Johnny and V. The gameplay was distinctly lacking though I did play it 2 times in a row to 100% around release with no major patches, the bugs and the horrible driving started to really wear on me and the combat eventually felt very stale. The most interaction I had with the world was doing the random combat areas strewn about. I only ever once fought off the police and I think it's because I was in a location where they weren't allowed to spawn from anywhere but outside a single door where I could then funnel them through, every other time I pissed them off they'd just pop into existence and fuck my shit up. The choices only really existed in the first mission and I while my first playthrough I did try to RP as close as I could to a nomad I did find that it was quite nice with how the game sometimes let me remark on that stuff, especially on the nomad mission line. Playing through as a corpo the next run though V acts almost exactly the same and it just ended up being super jarring.
I do agree that the game has gotten to the point where people performatively hate on it because it's the thing to do, it has a lot of good going for it if CDPR can just make the game more fun to play. The plot is decent enough, it really doesn't recognize what the punk part of cyberpunk is and I feel like any of the anti-capitalist message that is in the game comes through the setting that was premade and not through CDPR's stuff. Interacting with Johnny has some really interesting aspects as long as you 100% the game and you're able to experience the progression as much as possible rather than just rushing and being surprised that he's suddenly less harsh.
spoiler
I think the culmination of the storyline between V and Johnny comes through the ending where you let Johnny have the body. You see the final stage of his character progression and he's an absolutely changed man. He's more relaxed and has a very different look out on life. Since I played a female V he also mentioned that he'd eventually need to get some cosmetic work done because he's not a woman and genuinely seems to feel guilt and gratitude at being given this second opportunity. The best ending is going with the nomads since you're given a more hopeful view of the postgame and your romance partner actually doesn't hate your guts. But for thematic endings, the "secret" lone wolf ending sequence is my favorite. Nobody else has to die, you just storm the corporate headquarters and if you're decent at gunplay you have an intense sequence fighting down, if you're hit by bugs it'd suck, but I got through on my first attempt and the boss fight did have me more worried because dear god I don't want to lose all that progress.
