> routine quests, an underwhelming plot, and not too many interesting choices for character development
Come on, man.
> watched others and read a good number of reviews
What's the point of reviews, if not to give people this kind of general sense of a game before they decide whether or not to buy it? Why else would AAA studios be so anxious to impose and enforce pre-release embargos, except to reduce the risk of the preorder hype and FOMO being in any way ameliorated by reality?
When someone hasn't even played the game and comes out swinging, though, it comes across as a bit silly, especially if you've played the game and disagree with them.
It has not been regarded as a flawed masterpiece, but something more like 2001's Anachronox - a solid game with strong elements, but in many ways mediocre and hardly justifying a tortured development cycle and myriad bugs.
Having recently played around with this series (3 and 5) for the first time in my life - since they were heavily discounted over the holidays - I have to say, for shooters they could be a lot worse. FC3 has clearly influenced other games that came out since. Production value is high, graphics are great, they run fine on 5+ year old computers and the stories are fun. I'm neither bored nor overly frustrated.
Really my only issue is the lack of non-lethal play options, but you can play stealth most of the time and it's a good challenge for me. Not a shill or anything, I was just surprised to be enjoying them.
I'll agree with parts of what you said. If you want in-depth crafting, this isn't the game. If you want a sandbox, this isn't the game. If you want an immersive sim, this isn't the game.
If you want hacking, this is the game. I don't mean the hacking mini-game, which is still better than most, I mean the fact that every major skill tree can be ruthlessly exploited by learning its rules, and on higher difficulty you're basically forced to do this. Many reviewers call it broken, but the incentive landscape is both steep and similar across different skill trees which makes me think it's intentional. In any case, sniffing through the rulebook looking for exploitables and gleefully exploiting the shit out of them is The Hacking Experience as far as I'm concerned. Doom Eternal wants you to learn quickscopes and weapon-switching, CP2077 wants you to learn RTFM and exponential growth. It's not as visceral and it's much easier to cheat, but if you play it honestly then the thrill is quite comparable when your plan snaps together and you go from "struggling asthmatic" to "cyber-god" or "machete-king" or even "discount doomslayer."
The character writing is on point. CP2077 puts more effort and personality into throwaway characters than most AAAs put into supporting characters, and it really shows in side missions and replays. The Witcher 3 was in its own class for having meaningful side-missions and while CP2077 doesn't exceed it, it's a positive outlier in the right direction. When someone who hasn't played the game calls the side-quests unimaginative, it comes across as lazy and inauthentic virtue signaling. If someone came to that opinion first-hand I'd agree to disagree.
The endings are a highlight. No, they don't have a combinatorial number of AI-written endings that respect every possible permutation of choices, but anyone who expects that in a 2020 game is delusional. In 2020, if you want quality endings you can either have a large number of short endings (Prey) or a small number of fully fleshed out endings. CP2077 does the latter and does it very well. It is now my go-to positive example in that regard, the polar opposite of Mass Effect 3.
On PC, the bugs weren't bad and the graphics were good enough to give me a handful of "ambiance moments."
I enjoyed CP2077 and since I kept my expectations under control that's enough to stop me from going online and flaming it.
Well the only side quests I got so far are go here and kill people grinds, but the bar is low. I consider a side quest interesting if it gives you some speech options or has some kind of immersion to the side quest environment. Having novel puzzle solving or forcing some kind of reasoning skills, revealing something fascinating about the world that adds depth to what is going on, those are great side quests.
There was definitely world building in the computer messages which was good. You can hack a computer to skip some side quest requirements, it's not bad. To me the world is kind of cliche and dreary, again contrast with the playful inventiveness of Outer Words sci-fi world.
Actually I started playing on hard but switched to normal and then got super bored because it was too easy. Hard was kicking my ass and I couldn't do anything but it does emphasize the hacking you are talking about and probably is how I would make the game interesting for me.
I got dejected after I ground out the money for the doctor who helps you and it had no impact on anything and realized my craft deconstruction perk was tearing up valuable sellable things and not giving much XP (you can't turn it off). If it had scaled XP to value that would have been cool.
Crafting/engineering is one of the the most OP paths you can invest in. There's a great build posted some time ago on YT.
Well there's your problem right there - don't accept lofty expectations ever. In terms of games that have been decade defining I can draw two examples: Skyrim and Age of Empires 2 - the first game came out after a real avalanche of negative PR around Oblivion being unfun at a basic level (the leveling system in that game was so horrible) and having the first exploitative DLC (see horse armor)... and the second game was mostly a dark horse that has somehow grown over the past two decades to have an incredibly strong e-sports community.
Don't let yourself have lofty expectations for games - realize that a game costs about six or seven movie tickets and make sure you're not dropping 70$ on a game that you shelve after thirty minutes.
I have played about 200 hours of the game on Ultra with Ray Tracing and this is the only point I disagree on. The graphics and beautiful design of the city is _the_ major accomplishment of this game. It's significantly more dense in terms of graphical fidelity and polygon count. I found myself often just ignoring the actual gameplay and parkouring around the beautiful city.
I can't speak to the ps4 version really, but I've seen screenshots and as far as I can tell they somehow made it look like a PS3 game. I don't think I could make it look that bad on PC even if I turned everything to low.
> I found myself often just ignoring the actual gameplay and parkouring around the beautiful city.
That’s kind of what I mean - and everyone I’ve watched play Cyberpunk has done the same thing, ignore the quests and abuse the quirky movement system to explore places they aren’t “allowed” by the developers to visit, and admire the pretty views. It does look fun and relaxing - I often dick around like that in open world games.
But pretty views and nice models are only part of a good open world. In GTA the act of messing around in the city is real emergent gameplay explicitly supported by the game’s mechanics, and not just an improvised Mirror’s Edge. In GTA you can have an exciting chase across the city, and your actions have real (if transient) consequences for the surrounding cars and pedestrians. GTA’s cities do feel like real cities. The city in Cyberpunk seems like more of a set piece - impressively detailed and engineered, but without a lot of action.
https://www.twitch.tv/ckplayer0ne/videos?filter=archives&sor...
I also thought Johnny was a really well executed. He really made me feel like some asshole is taking over my brain, and you slowly develop a bit of empathy with him and you can feel that he's doing the same with you.
Plus, the scene where you play a gig as Johnny is so awesome. I've never played a first person game where something like that was done. Looking out on that crowd of people, I really felt like a rockstar.
Yeah, the side missions were filler. And every NCPD job was identical. But they didn't feel any worse than Spiderman, and much better than FF7R (the cats...). You didn't even have to do any of them anyway. It was just something to occupy you if you wanted to run around and explore the city.
I actually disagree with this pretty solidly - I've seen absolutely trash side missions like Dragon's Age 2 where a handful of dungeon templates had slices taken off of them and were repackaged endlessly. The NCPD jobs (especially the Assault ones) are cheapo quests - but they're placed interestingly in the world with custom prop work and differing tactical options. Depending on your build it may be more or less of "Just rush in with a sword" but viewing them as the random world encounters they appear to be created as makes them rather high quality in my eyes.
It's optional content for completionists or for you to trip over when wandering around and for that role I think it was well done.
I'm not talking about the gigs that you get from the fixers in the different regions. Those are interesting, they are mostly the same concept, but you can choose to go in stealth or rambo, and for many, if you scope the place well enough and have the right build, you can b-line to the objective.
From what I understand it’s a fairly anodyne action-RPG, with routine quests, an underwhelming plot, and not too many interesting choices for character development - nothing bad, but nothing great. It doesn’t have the script of The Witcher III, the humor and satire isn’t as clever as Watch Dogs, it doesn’t break new action-RPG gameplay ground like Fallout 4, and as an open world city it’s a shallow clone of a GTA game. And it doesn’t contribute anything particularly unique itself - outside of all the hype, the consensus seems to be that it’s a fine choice if you’re looking for a solid action-RPG, but not essential. Which would be fine if the game were finished and appropriately hyped! But neither were the case.
People would be more forgiving of the bugs and even the unscrupulous marketing if the game was legitimately extraordinary and unlike anything else out there - the viral buggy footage would be offset by viral stories and videos of cool things in the game itself. But those cool things just aren’t there in Cyberpunk - it’s a B+ game, and doesn’t seem to have much to offer compared to its competitors.