(TiTS Update: A WIP document for an enemy from the next tutorial dungeon is posted on Patreon. Wrote ~2000 words to finish a tit-fuck scene and some combat texts.)
Last week, I spoke about taking a week off to play Cyberpunk, intending to get some work done on the side. Typically, after four or five hours of a game, I’ll need a break. Instead, I played over 70 hours of Cyberpunk in a week. The game hooked me and hooked me hard, sequestering my brain inside my monitor for the duration. I don’t think I truly came up for air until after rushing for the ending over the last two days, but I’m coming back on the clock as I write this.
Now I can talk about it. I know the rest of the internet has been slinging their two cents every which way since before the game’s official release – metastasizing into a ball of virulent hate as gamers across the world dogpiled on to add their own particularly brands of grievance to the mass. I have a more positive take. Don’t get me wrong; there are a lot of legitimate issues that are worth complaining about: PS4/Xbone performance and review scummery in particular, but the game’s qualities are hardly all negative.
What I Liked:
A lot. I love first person shooters, and I love RPGs. For a long time the only real take on this kind of game was the Fallout-Skyrim style of Bethsoft RPG which… were universally clunky to control. They had 3+ games to figure out first person controls and mouse aim and still failed every time. CDPR? They’re coming from making third person games. They did first person controls better on their virgin effort. It’s not perfect, mind you. There are other games with tighter controls – Destiny, CoD, Overwatch – and at low levels, the recoil can feel impossible, but that is not the case forever. Popping off heads feels decent. Blasting through walls with a high powered sniper is always enjoyable, even when you lack the necessary strength to reload it at full speed.
Another thing this game does well is characterization. There are less dialogue choices than you might find in something like say, Morrowind, but what’s there generally feels tight, impactful, and well written. I have no idea which choices actually influence the rest of the game, but I actually felt fully immersed in most of the dialogue scenes, like the character I was talking to was someone with actual thoughts, ambitions, and flaws (<3 Judy). I am seriously looking forward to my next playthrough where I’m going to relentlessly pursue all the side missions possible, just to see what sorts of adventures I can get into with the deadly residents of Night City and its surroundings.
Speaking of Night City – it is an incredible, tangled beast. There are parts of the city with roads layered three deep on top of each other, all with their own glowing neon advertisements, often with shops sprinkled around between them and dense crowds of cars of pedestrians (depending on time of day). You can stop and watch kooky TV programs in stores and elevators, or gawk at the absurdity of some of the products blasting in day-glo purple out of animated posters. Obviously you can’t enter every single building, but even structures that serve as window dressing typically come with their own unique business names, signage, and aesthetic so that every part of town can seem “breathtaking” in its own way. I found myself pausing every hour or so just to gawk at vistas and screenshot possible future desktop wallpapers.
Variability of play is also huge. I was able to clear most missions entirely by hacking into a security cam and digitally rendering people unconscious – without ever being seen. It felt immensely rewarding, but I could also use the cams to mark enemies to dispatch through walls with sniper rifles, or fistfight my way in, or go classic stealth. There are usually multiple paths and multiple ways to complete most objectives, sometimes gated behind stat/skill checks (like locked doors) or just out of the way entrances – like windows or hatches on the roof.
Infiltration missions were far and away my favorites. I want more!
What I Disliked:
Bugs, obviously. They didn’t bother me as much as some. I’m playing on a rather high end PC, so I was able to attain lovely visuals on a 1440p widescreen monitor. My bugs tended toward harmless sources of giggles, like NPCs talking without animating their mouths or skating around on locked legs. A few times, my character would flicker into a T-pose above my car while I was driving. Once, during a very sad moment in the game, I found myself cackling like a hyena because of a specific glitch. You can see it yourself at this link, if you don’t mind spoilers from 5-6 hours in.
More troublesome bugs also occurred. When I first started the game, I tried cranking the graphics a bit higher, and it caused my entire PC to hard lock so badly that I’m still unable to use my second monitor, though I wager this is more a result of stressing my graphics card harder than every before than anything specific about how the game is programmed. Once, I summoned my car and it appeared halfway in the ground at a 45 degree angle, completely unable to be used. Several other times, it appeared merged with several other cars, resulting in damage to the vehicle or it flipping over a few times once I climbed in.
Standard city NPCs and vehicles are fucking dumb too. It’s clear that they’re window dressing for the rest of the story, which didn’t bother me much, but I know it was a dealbreaker for some. Cop spawning is sketchier than GTA as well. Once you start committing crimes, it doesn’t take long for a swarm of officers to put you in the dirt, which seemed appropriate for a Cyberpunk setting to me. You don’t go loud without doing something to prevent the cops from getting there. I’d like to see them spawn them a little further away and give them good enough AI to properly pursue you.
In general, enemies are basic but functional. This is no Halo, that’s for sure. Your foes will find cover and shoot at you, but you won’t be facing much in the way of flanking maneuvers or the varied sorts of tactics you’d see various enemy types in “pure” shooters employ. I’m kind of glad for that, because as a low-combat, hacking-focused character, being pushed more aggressively, even on normal, would have been a tremendous pain in the ass.
Lack of cosmetic customization. You can’t get a haircut. You can’t get much in the way of cosmetic cyberware. You can’t give your character big tits. The dongs are very limited. Despite a sex shop selling toys, there’s nothing you can do with any of them, and to my knowledge, they don’t impact any sex scene in the game.
The ending. Without getting into spoilers, I got the worst possible ending. For a game that lets you approach missions and NPCs with such variety, Chrono Trigger still does this far better. Cyberpunk is a setting with a plethora of options, and I’m terribly disappointed that we’re apparently limited to a half-dozen endings.
In Summary:
I still love this game. It isn’t perfect. It doesn’t offer as much freedom as I would have liked. The conclusion could use some more options. But I love it. I want more. I want to experience more of this city. I want them to add more interesting NPCs and more interactions with the ones that I can’t spend that much time with. I want to see vehicles expanded so that you can customize and upgrade them in GTA-like fashion. I hope they DLC more ending paths and give us expansion-sized DLCs like the Witcher 3 got.
In a sentence: Cyberpunk 2077 is deeply flawed in many areas, but is also a piece of art that I’ll be relishing for years.
In a second sentence: Don’t try to play it if you’re on a PS4 or OG XBone. You’ll be sad.
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i would’ve labled it as a diamond in the rough more so than flawed beauty. first day i sank my teeth into it i lost track of 8 hours of my life. and while yes it’s buggy as all get out… so was/is skyrim, and that thing is still selling to this day. and the bugs are more often than not (at least for me) annoying at worst and comedic as all get out usually. have someone inserting a full blown pistol into my head instead of a biochip.
Nice review. It’s unfortunate that there are so few customization options but I’m sure there will be mods in the future for those kinds of things. I’m curious what graphics card you have? I haven’t played yet cause I don’t want to lose myself during final exam times, but I want to have a fully immersive experience when I do finally sink my teeth into it, so I would like to upgrade if need be to have a better experience.
i’m personally using the geforce rtx 2070 super and the game more or less runs perfectly on the best settings.
I must have a super xbox one or something cause I’ve been doing okay all things considered. I’m not at all having a sad time playing it on OG xbox one, and most bugs I get or funnier than game breaking. The WORST I’ve had to deal with is the game occasionally needing to catch up, and this was BEFORE the recent patch. Not really sure what everyone’s talking about it sucking on last gen consoles.
Also I can’t afford a PS5, Xbox series X or a good PC. So I didn’t really have an option.
I have it on ps4 pro and I’ve crashed a lot playing it, still fun though.
My problems with all the complaining is that how many times was the release date pushed back? Then we got complaints about them delaying release again. Then you have the hype build up seem to remember another game that went through this a few years ago and look at that game now. Also my biggest problem with all this complaining is what game has ever been released since online downloading/purchasing came into a thing/existence has been released completed or bug free, yet almost every big release there is complaint after complaint about bugs, crashes or other real or perceived failure and how unfinished the game is.
While it’s true that since day-1 patches became the standard that most games have bugs, there’s a pretty wide margin in the amount of bugs some games have vs others. I still haven’t picked this up myself, I just had a bad feeling in my gut that something like this was going to happen after all the delays, so I can’t speak from experience. But if we’re ever going to get back to buying FINISHED games, we HAVE to stop giving companies a pass on releasing a game before it’s done, and then have them “patch” (READ: finish making it) the game after a month or two.
problem about that is we get people who bitch and bemoan that the game isn’t out yet and they create enough of a stink the dev’s say fuck it here you go, and give us a version that’s not yet completed. we can’t have it both ways but people seem to think we can.
Well that’s the fault of their advertising department, their executives, managers, and share holders, and the sorry state of (and I hate having to use this term) games journalism, which has been twisted into one massive corporate mouth piece and hyping machine. Games should not be announced before production even begins and hard deadlines shouldn’t be set in a way that forces crunch.
Do you think you’ll include some cyberpunk inspired implants?
thank you I was thinking about buying it for PS4
If you played a hacker type then you ran in the biggest bug in the game. Someone important at Code Project didn’t like players hacking others.
You can sneak into an open mission area take out a random enemy, drag them out of the mission area and be back inside the mission area in the time it takes you to take out one enemy by using Short Circuit. Using the Short Circuit hack that way will result in a body dropping and the enemy going into war mode. So you think lets distribute it across all the enemies, well this is where the hate for hackers comes into play. You do enough Short Circuit that you might drop a body (on one enemy or multiple) the game counter hacks you.
Not your enemy, the game. The perk that allows you to see who is hacking you doesn’t show a hacker, the implant that counters hacking doesn’t react.
It is even worse when you run into a psycho. Except the first, didn’t know what I was going to run into and wasn’t prepared, I’ve cheesed every single one of them using the environment. But try to do one Short Circuit while in cover and the game counter hacks you because you are NOT allowed to be stealthy while hacking. Sniping them with a tech weapon through walls with locked doors so they can never get to you is OK but having the gall to actually make use of the tools of the hacker trade gets you the wrath of the game.
So now I’m basically using 3 hacks that are allowed since they help a stealth player not a hacker. Ping, Whistle/Request backup and Reboot optics since anything else risks alarming the enemies or is not conductive to a stealthy approach.
What I like the most so far is that they managed to sneak so much background information into the game without trying to force feed the player. I remember on gig mission where I spent fifteen (or more) minutes listening to the news. You don’t need to do that but over the game you will get bits and pieces of it when you do your next mission and they’ve got the TV on again.
I’ve had no problems being a stealth hacker, you just need to be further away, the stealth 100% + dmg works on hacks, so you can short-circuit people to cause instant kills, or just spam it due to the short cd.
Now I generally just drop a contagion on a camp and everyone dies, or if i want to go full stealth I just swap out my hacks for the covert type and sneakily kill them all instead.
It’s a fascinating review and absolutely a testament to how different gamers have different experiences and expectations. From a life long RPG player, a long time CDPR fan, and modder of their games I was well aware of their issues. I expected weak combat and nonsensical looter shooter mechanics to stretch out the core gameplay loop to encompass their ever increasing scope.
What we got certainly isn’t bad and will please those that have never really gotten into the marketing hype or were “serious” RPG players. I use serious just to try to get some type of differentiation, because in my view Cyberpunk 2077 is not an RPG. Progression elements do not make an RPG, diverse roleplay elements do. Otherwise every action adventure can be classified as an RPG, with many games like Dishonored blowing Cyberpunk out of the water if we use the term so loosely.
What we have is a larger, beautiful CDPR game that has been truncated into something else. That something else is a medium-short linear action adventure campaign placed in an open world. It’s a good game, a 7/10, and that means almost everyone will have fun. These are not conflicting ideas about the game, and games having flaws does not automatically mean a game is unfun to play. But it’s clear that many mechanics, often ones that need to interact with other systems, are either underbaked our outright missing. These are the bulk of complaints about the games design. Whether or not you like the story, it’s length, it’s bredth of choice, etc depends on if you listened and believed CDPRs direct quots.
CD Projekt CEO Adam Kiciński says. “We strive to publish games which are as refined as Red Dead Redemption 2, and recent Rockstar releases in general.”
I guess it also depends on if you considered Witcher 3 to be some type of gold standard for RPGs as well, as this game carries a lot of the bad design elements from that series with none of the story polish and interactivity. The bones are there for sure. Side quests are dark, intriguing, immersive, and in general a true first person adaption of CDPRs narrative design. But it doesn’t translate well when the game lacks connecting features and true choice outside of the ending you choose.
Another way of presenting my expectations. I was expecting nothing other than the design decisions of Witcher 3. What we got was if Witcher 3 came out a year earlier and had it’s main story truncated to allow the game to launch on Christmas.
The customization left me disapointed BDG 3 even is still limited as fuck on customization did a better job at it in my opinion,the story itself was well written and the missions werent too repetitive the city did felt alive but the dumb ai and bugs broke the imersion a little oh and the sex scenes in my opinion were rather lacking and boring wich was amplified by the romance up to that point being really good(and wtf cant even fuck Panam in the ass smh such a waste for a massive ass).
All and all not a bad game a solid 7/10 but given the time spent on it and the hype projekt red themselfs propagated i expected more, honestly unless you really whant to play i would recommend for you to wait for at least the next bug patch or dlc.
There’s also the Kinkoid review too: https://kinkoid.com/blog-en/cyberpunk-2077-wheres-all-the-sex/
There’s also the Sankaku news about refund too: https://www.sankakucomplex.com/2020/12/15/sony-customer-support-refusing-cyberpunk-2077-refunds/
Update news about refund: https://www.sankakucomplex.com/2020/12/19/sony-xbox-refunding-digital-copies-of-cyberpunk-2077-removed-from-ps-store/
After playing Cyberpunk 2077, I feel the need for more cybernetics in TiTS
You were right. I got it on Xbox One and my heart has shattered. Gonna wait a bit after I get a next gen console
I’m curious as to what ending would be the worst… The Devil maybe? Temperance? anyway, just finished my first playthrough and… it was amazing. Took me 80 hours and I got The Sun ending, not sure which one it is but it felt like a good one to me.
Everyone already knows about the glitches so I won’t beat a dead horse here, the worst one for me was that the game absolutely REFUSED to load V’s hair if I was wearing a hat, so seeing my V looking like an augmented cue ball the few times she popped up on-screen was a bit grating.
The characters were the star of the show for me. Jackie, Dex, Judy, Panam, River, Royce, Dum Dum, Claire, Rhino… each character, no matter how minor, just oozed personality. I’ve seen very few games feel as alive as this one.
my main critique would be how the gangs were left as just the grunt enemies. We hear almost nothing on them and their bosses (if they even show up) get reduced to one, maybe two token appearances. Names like Royce, Brick, Sasquach, Susie Q and Gunner are little beyond footnotes on the journey and it just feels wasteful.
7.5/10, will play again, let us customize our cyberware’s cosmetics dammit.
I find it working pretty well on my laptop. What I appreciate the most is that it’s truly “open.” Unlike RDR2 or other “open-world” games, this one will let you get yourself waaay in over your head from Day 1 if you so choose, without having you progress through quest gates for much more than progressing the main story.
While I can’t say I had Jackie sticking a large calibre handgun-shaped biochip in my head, I did have other… oddities.
The first was a spectacular case of lack of personal space as my auto-driven car teleported into an occupied garage then attempted to drive out of it… The van it spawned under was not amused.
The second, and one that many seem to have happen eventually, was an access card fail. This happens when you acquire an access “token” necessary for a gig or random crime-in-progress, then the door it goes to fails to unlock. I managed to fix this by opening another door nearby, causing the bugged door to refresh.
A more notable one was during a gig called “Burning Desire”… the client, known as Flaming Crotch Man, has had a dong augment failure. Said augment was spontaneously combusting at random, causing him considerable pain… it also caused ME considerable pain when it exploded my truck, and Flaming Crotch Man, halfway to a ripperdoc.
It’s definitely a game with potential. Sadly, that potential is wasted at the moment. I’m absolutely looking forward to the promised Jan/Feb patches. If they’re as gung-ho about those patches as I seemed to glean, it’s definitely going to shift the ‘make it or break it’ bar for some people in favor it ‘make it’. I’d definitely recommend putting off getting the game until Feb for anyone that hasn’t gotten it yet. And they haven’t even updated it for next-gen yet. Once we get that upgrade later next year or whenever it drops, it’s probably going to include even more bug fixes and, if we’re lucky, additional content. For now though, the game’s still worth my time and that’s what matters. I’ve sunk about 60 hours into the game myself, and I haven’t even gotten out of the lockdown. There’s definitely a lot of game here and I love it for that. What works is great fun, what doesn’t is a frustrating distraction at worst (at least so far). Ultimately, I’m excited to see where this game goes once it gets some much needed TLC.
I fully agree with you, and have high hopes for upcoming patches. The game is great in spite of all the “wasted potential” and definitely worth holding onto. I for one would love to see more content with those future patches.
It’s a bit upsetting seeing so much negativity for a game that was rushed. There was a reason the developers kept trying to push off the release date – they didn’t want to put out an unfinished product. However, after threat of pulled funding and more, that’s exactly what they did or there would likely be no game at all.
Oh, typing this out I just realized something about this game. It’s developers are nearly at the level of immersion that I would want from an ACTUAL revamp of Mass Effect…
fair enough this is still the best RPG I’ve gotten my hands on in long time
Personally I am just waiting for a game to come out with fully simulated npcs who have jobs, relationships, and information travels by word of mouth or being posted somewhere and read. Also having missions or quests get created based on the situation at hand, for instance in a fantasy setting if the horned rabbit population is too high then a quest is posted to cull the herd.
Cyberpunk 2077 looks like it is one of the grand theft auto/watch dogs games, except everything is bumped up at least a notch. Everything from hacking to background NPCs seem to be superior to all the other similar games, and the bugs that happen in game are the same as the bugs that happen in every game like this. Except the copyright music issue that one was a bit new, but for most players they would never deal with it. I don’t know about combat since I have not been able to play directly yet, but everything I have seen leads me to believe it is either on par or above par.
Overall I would say Cyberpunk 2077 is a step or two ahead of the other games on the market (at least the ones I have seen) and pointing out it’s pros and cons without comparing it to the other games like it is like talking about speed in space without a reference point.
I’m barely seeing any “virulent hate”. Sounds like you’re too defensive… or paranoid. These days usually it’s the fanboys that are the most toxic (Pokemon Sword and Shield’s white knights, anyone?) And remember: it’s okay to enjoy things that are not 10/10. Or even 9/10.
On the upside all the bizarre hijinks caused by the bugs makes for some hilarious YT videos o3ob
I have the same experience of you, been a very long time since I was so immersed in a game. Sixty hours in and haven’t finished it yet, but I’ll save the rest for later when the DLC and Expansions are out.
I hope it inspires you to add more cybernetics to TiTS. Robot eyes like the ones you can already unlock with the save editor would be nice.
This is not a review of the game, but rather, my own personal commentary on this whole shitstorm that we’re caught up in.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say anyone commenting in this thread is probably an experienced gamer who were likely already expecting a game that would launch with issues. For those individuals, i think the majority, including myself, enjoyed their experience, cut CDPR some slack and simply played the game for what it was, with the understanding that patches would ultimately smooth out the experience in the long run. But with that being said the manner in which CDPR went about marketing and releasing this game was not just wrong, it’s downright unacceptable. I recognize the amount of money and time and effort invested into this project, and i understand the studio’s aversion to further delaying this game. However, when you deny gaming journalists access to console codes and force them to base their reviews on the PC experience, you are now using their industry and the individual reputations’ of those journalists as a shield. You are no longer acting in good-faith to the consumer, and you are making a deliberate choice to mislead them, to mislead your investors, and to mislead your console partners.
As a consumer, i can live with a game not being perfect at launch, i can live with the reality that some things will require a few patches before its to my liking, and that developers are people too who make mistakes with glitches being the product of those errors. What i can’t live with is preventing a sizeable share of your player base from knowing what exactly they were paying for. Further, dumping this game onto past gen players and still charging them full price for a subpar experience isn’t just wrong, its borderline criminal. And this isn’t just my opinion on that part; lawyers are circling around CDPR, eyeing a class-action lawsuit, and believing they can levy charges of false advertising and defrauding customers against the studio. And i truly do believe that these lawsuits, if taken up in the Polish courts, would be successfull, and would bankrupt CDPR before they could ever fix the game.
But i know plenty of people love this game, and i know just as many who hate it. I’m personally having a ton of fun but i’m also incredibly ticked off at the fact that this might be as good as it will ever get. I’m not a casual gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but i do understand that making the game worthwhile for them will help fund and develop bigger and more ambitious projects in the future for us all to enjoy. I feel for all the devs and writers and editors who built this beautifully flawed world for us, they did their damned best given the circumstances, and are having their reputations dragged through the mud because of decisions that were out of their control.
But my personal enjoyment of the game, and support of those who created it for us, does not excuse the actions made by the studio executives. It’s just a shame that the consequence of their greed, could spell the end of CDPR as we know it and close the door on the idea of future patches smoothing out the experience for last gen players.
I assume the game has A LOT of cut content, will it be added in as DLC later…who knows? I like it too even though I’m running it on my almost 8 yo PC, can’t upgrade it because of last year’s scalpers as well as the ones this year plus the pandemic. I’ve had a few glitched missions but reloading a quicksave fixes it every time. I’ve never had a crash at all, however because of my potato of a PC I’m forced to drive in 1st person and most of the car’s driving positions/seats are so low I feel like I’m a toddler trying to see over the wheel. I HOPE CDPR gives this game the love Hello Games gave to NMS and not treat it like how EA treated Mass Effect: Andromeda, even though that was a cash grab by making a team not suited to make a full game themselves. Which is why much of the work was outsourced or had an AI do most if not all the animations. That is the reason for the silly walks and faces.
I appreciate your honest approach to the review, waited to read it until I beat the game and I have to say your review was spot on. As a thought if you played a female character to romance Judy the best ending involves Panam and the Aldecados so work on their side quest if you want a great ending.