Cyberpunk 2077 Review thread - Umm....

hanselthecaretaker

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Might be that. Might also be that any admission of culpability at this point opens him and CDPR up for juridical action. If he in any way implies they knew the game wasn't up to technical standards or supremely buggy or whatever, that's going to be used by the class action lawsuits being filed as admissions of guilt. Better to stonewall and pretend as if it wasn't that bad then potentially seeing your company torn to shreds by million dollar fines and compensation payouts.
IDK how the legal process works in Poland, but it would seem their lawyers would be telling them to plain keep their mouths shut. Or hell, they might be the ones behind these bullshit statements. Which would make sense as that’s really their primary skill, and everyone with half a brain should be able to see through it.
 

hanselthecaretaker

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I haven't watched it all yet as I'm watching it in chunks.

@30:32

He talks about how video game loot systems including Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk and many other games are so very pointless. I do not consider picking up tons of garbage to be engaging gameplay. "We need an intervention."

@38:20

He talks about why are people calling Cyberpunk a shallow RPG when it has more depth (as an RPG) than Witcher 3? Well, I've been saying Witcher 3 isn't an RPG since I've played it. No flip-flopping over here.

@43:40

"It's that Cyberpunk wants to be everything and that's just not possible."

Again, CDPR never made a game with one of the many systems they promised for Cyberpunk, yet everyone thought they'd be able to pull like 12 rabbits out their ass.

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Yahtzee and Nick saw at least one of those demonstrations and they said they were, IIRC, rather "bored" by it all. The game didn't show off anything they haven't seen before.
Looting systems can be engaging if the loot is worthwhile, but when most of it is just recycled or sold off for towards something better it gets to be a chore-like meta game.

I’ve mostly heard that CP offers very few engaging quest lines where the player choices can affect the outcomes next to The Witcher 3, which might be what the lack of depth talk revolves around.

Yeah, it’s a ‘kitchen sink level of ambition, but nearly everyone was already fawning over The Witcher 3 which is a massive game in its own right. And when there were talks that CP wasn’t going to be as large, and that perhaps CDPR learned some things since then about design (and of course their stellar reputation with the fanbase) then it’s reasonably understandable for what they showed to seem legitimately promising.
 
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Phoenixmgs

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Looting as many uses, on the most basic level it's a form of gambling, you never know when you're going to get something good. It also offer a nice progression that's (ideally) visually represented on your character. It also offer a natural way to give reward to the player for every combat encounter, even if they're part of any mission and it also means that mission which have useless reward for the player (say it gives a sniper but the player is focused on shotgun) still have the possibility of useful reward. It also gives a reason for the player to look at the environment and notice the small details.

That being said, it's often done poorly, shoving way too much crap at the player which will never be useful, usually color coded so that the player doesn't even look at 90% of it. I think a good comparison is soulsborn and Nioh. Soulsborn have very few weapon and armor (compare to Nioh), but each is somewhat unique in gameplay terms (speed/reach/moveset), it means every drop is worth at least looking at and maybe even try for a little bit of time, this means there's less stuff to loot from enemy/environment but they use the upgrade/crafting system to fill that gap. Nioh biggest difference from soulborn is the diablo esque loot, and I think it's the game biggest failing, it throws five bajillions weapon at the player, but it's almost all crap with no real gameplay difference. As a results I'm way less excited when I loot something in Nioh than a soulborn.

Anyway the video seems to go along with my view that CP is just straight up better than witcher 3, but witcher 3 hype was built by people who either didn't play it or drop early and are just going from they heard from other player.
Looting systems can be engaging if the loot is worthwhile, but when most of it is just recycled or sold off for towards something better it gets to be a chore-like meta game.

I’ve mostly heard that CP offers very few engaging quest lines where the player choices can affect the outcomes next to The Witcher 3, which might be what the lack of depth talk revolves around.

Yeah, it’s a ‘kitchen sink level of ambition, but nearly everyone was already fawning over The Witcher 3 which is a massive game in its own right. And when there were talks that CP wasn’t going to be as large, and that perhaps CDPR learned some things since then about design (and of course their stellar reputation with the fanbase) then it’s reasonably understandable for what they showed to seem legitimately promising.
Tying the weapons to damage output is where the main problem comes in. You're constantly getting ever-so-slightly better weapons (and armor) in a lot of these games causing much unneeded inventory management after just about every fight (especially a game with a party). You can tie damage to player leveling/stats vs putting it on the weapons. Like Souls has stats that scale with weapons improving damage. A minor problem with Souls is that you also level your weapons with limited upgrade rocks so you can't just switch weapons and stay at your current DPS.

I didn't finish the video yet but he did put in parenthesis on that Witcher 3 was the better game. Witcher 3 is a large world and everything; however, it's a much much simpler game. The only AI in the game is basically pathing AI, the creatures don't really do anything but move towards Geralt and attack basically.
 

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Looting systems can be engaging if the loot is worthwhile, but when most of it is just recycled or sold off for towards something better it gets to be a chore-like meta game.

I’ve mostly heard that CP offers very few engaging quest lines where the player choices can affect the outcomes next to The Witcher 3, which might be what the lack of depth talk revolves around.

Yeah, it’s a ‘kitchen sink level of ambition, but nearly everyone was already fawning over The Witcher 3 which is a massive game in its own right. And when there were talks that CP wasn’t going to be as large, and that perhaps CDPR learned some things since then about design (and of course their stellar reputation with the fanbase) then it’s reasonably understandable for what they showed to seem legitimately promising.
I dont have a problem with the loot system in the game. Loot is fine, but problems always seem to arise when loot is matched with a crafting system.

I cant think of a single game that is loot based that also works well with a crafting system. They always end up with the player picking up bullshit just in case it is the key component required for the BigDick2000 or whatever.

In either case the crafting is lack luster because the best shit just drops from enemies. Or the loot sucks because the game wants you to craft the ultimate shit.

They never work well and i challenge anyone to show me a game that has an awesome loot system AND awesome crafting.

Thats the problem with Cyberpunk, they floodwd the game with systems that dont fucking mean anything just to say they have a system.

Why a melee combat system?
Why a wanted system?
Why a crafting system?
Why not simply make a good fps game with modifiable talent trees to determine what kind of shooty shoot bang bang you like to do the most?

Seems like this should have been a no brainer smash hit. Create a cool cyberpunk setting, stick a good story in place, and let the plaher shoot their way through it. It didnt need all these extra frills and and shit.

The Witcher 3 clearly fucked them on this. Because they felt like this game had to be bigger and crazier when all it had to do waa be a good game. Thats all.
 
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hanselthecaretaker

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I dont have a problem with the loot system in the game. Loot is fine, but problems always seem to arise when loot is matched with a crafting system.

I cant think of a single game that is loot based that also works well with a crafting system. They always end up with the player picking up bullshit just in case it is the key component required for the BigDick2000 or whatever.

In either case the crafting is lack luster because the best shit just drops from enemies. Or the loot sucks because the game wants you to craft the ultimate shit.

They never work well and i challenge anyone to show me a game that has an awesome loot system AND awesome crafting.

Thats the problem with Cyberpunk, they floodwd the game with systems that dont fucking mean anything just to say they have a system.

Why a melee combat system?
Why a wanted system?
Why a crafting system?
Why not simply make a good fps game with modifiable talent trees to determine what kind of shooty shoot bang bang you like to do the most?

Seems like this should have been a no brainer smash hit. Create a cool cyberpunk setting, stick a good story in place, and let the plaher shoot their way through it. It didnt need all these extra frills and and shit.

The Witcher 3 clearly fucked them on this. Because they felt like this game had to be bigger and crazier when all it had to do waa be a good game. Thats all.
I’ve only played a couple hours, but The Surge seems to do loot rather well, in that you can identify specific components on enemies that will benefit you most in constructing your custom mech suit, and target those specific body parts (or in other cases, their weaknesses) to make your offense feel more effective and/or efficient. Now, the caveat is that it’s not exactly on a 1:1 scale, meaning you could be farming components for a while before you end up with something usable, but it seems to dangle the carrot in very non-RNG way.
 

CriticalGaming

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I’ve only played a couple hours, but The Surge seems to do loot rather well, in that you can identify specific components on enemies that will benefit you most in constructing your custom mech suit, and target those specific body parts (or in other cases, their weaknesses) to make your offense feel more effective and/or efficient. Now, the caveat is that it’s not exactly on a 1:1 scale, meaning you could be farming components for a while before you end up with something usable, but it seems to dangle the carrot in very non-RNG way.
I dunno if i would call what The Surge has as a loot system technically. Because there is no randomness to it really. The enemies all have set pieces of armor and weapons on them and you can beat the pieces of gear you want off of them. Like yes it's "loot" but Mario picking up mushrooms is technically loot.
 

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Might be that. Might also be that any admission of culpability at this point opens him and CDPR up for juridical action. If he in any way implies they knew the game wasn't up to technical standards or supremely buggy or whatever, that's going to be used by the class action lawsuits being filed as admissions of guilt. Better to stonewall and pretend as if it wasn't that bad then potentially seeing your company torn to shreds by million dollar fines and compensation payouts.
That and legal issues aside, like 99% of the shit heads calling for his blood won’t see humility in that kind of statement, they’ll see an open invitation for a coup de gras and just keep going. It’s obstinate and stupid but I’d probably stick to my guns too if I were him and at least go down swinging.
 

Dirty Hipsters

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That and legal issues aside, like 99% of the shit heads calling for his blood won’t see humility in that kind of statement, they’ll see an open invitation for a coup de gras and just keep going. It’s obstinate and stupid but I’d probably stick to my guns too if I were him and at least go down swinging.
Because there isn't humility in that statement. He's basically pretending that the PC version is fine and that it's just the console versions that have issues.

No, I'm playing the PC version, and it's still borked. He's pointing out that the PC version's metacritic score is a 9. The problem with that is that reviewers often play pre-release versions of games without the now ubiquitous day-1 patches that come out to fix bugs, so they're used to devs going "oh yeah we know there's bugs, we're fixing them, it'll all be ironed out on launch." Had reviewers actually known that they were playing the totally finished final product, and that the bugs they encountered would ALL be in the final game (and then some) I think they would have been a lot less kind to the game overall.

I find his statement totally insulting. He glosses over the fact that he and his team lied about game features, lied about performance, lied to the Polish government about the AI they were developing, and released a half-finished game and thought people would be too stupid to notice. And that's an opinion from someone who actually LIKES the game.
 

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Because there isn't humility in that statement. He's basically pretending that the PC version is fine and that it's just the console versions that have issues.

No, I'm playing the PC version, and it's still borked. He's pointing out that the PC version's metacritic score is a 9. The problem with that is that reviewers often play pre-release versions of games without the now ubiquitous day-1 patches that come out to fix bugs, so they're used to devs going "oh yeah we know there's bugs, we're fixing them, it'll all be ironed out on launch." Had reviewers actually known that they were playing the totally finished final product, and that the bugs they encountered would ALL be in the final game (and then some) I think they would have been a lot less kind to the game overall.

I find his statement totally insulting. He glosses over the fact that he and his team lied about game features, lied about performance, lied to the Polish government about the AI they were developing, and released a half-finished game and thought people would be too stupid to notice. And that's an opinion from someone who actually LIKES the game.
You misunderstand me. My position is that if his statement had been one of humility, it wouldn't matter. Not that the one he made was in any way humble.
 

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I dont have a problem with the loot system in the game. Loot is fine, but problems always seem to arise when loot is matched with a crafting system.

I cant think of a single game that is loot based that also works well with a crafting system. They always end up with the player picking up bullshit just in case it is the key component required for the BigDick2000 or whatever.

In either case the crafting is lack luster because the best shit just drops from enemies. Or the loot sucks because the game wants you to craft the ultimate shit.

They never work well and i challenge anyone to show me a game that has an awesome loot system AND awesome crafting.

Thats the problem with Cyberpunk, they floodwd the game with systems that dont fucking mean anything just to say they have a system.

Why a melee combat system?
Why a wanted system?
Why a crafting system?
Why not simply make a good fps game with modifiable talent trees to determine what kind of shooty shoot bang bang you like to do the most?

Seems like this should have been a no brainer smash hit. Create a cool cyberpunk setting, stick a good story in place, and let the plaher shoot their way through it. It didnt need all these extra frills and and shit.

The Witcher 3 clearly fucked them on this. Because they felt like this game had to be bigger and crazier when all it had to do waa be a good game. Thats all.
Devs really make things way more complicated than shit needs to be most of the time. I'm playing Wasteland 3 and I have to lookup exactly what each stat REALLY does and how to build my character properly. Keep It Simple Stupid. PnP games like DnD are usually way simpler. I wanna make a melee character so Strength it is for my main stat and health is important to take hits since I'll be in melee range so I'll want some decent Constitution. That's really it. Sure to make some perfect build, you'd have to do a lot digging in the minutiae of the system.

For loot and crafting to work, it really shouldn't be so hard. Keep It Simple Stupid. I would think a good way of doing crafting would be allowing you to be able to customize your gear better vs just hoping for gear with the perfect stats to drop. Say you're doing a stealthy build in Cyberpunk, you'd probably want something like headshot damage buff (say 10%) and critical damage buff (say 10% again) as say you get critical damage on enemies when they don't notice you and you're using stealth so you're most likely lining up headshots (with a silenced weapon). So instead of hoping to find a pistol that drops with 10% bonuses on headshots and crits, you can make it yourself. And how you would make it would be easy. For example, you could extract those bonuses from other pistols you've found. Say you got a pistol that has the headshot bonus + a reload bonus (that you don't care about) and say you have a pistol with the crit bonus + that stupid reload bonus. You can break down both those guns, getting those bonuses extracted as mods or gems or whatever you wanna call it. Then you can craft a pistol with those 2 desired bonuses. Isn't that like a hundred times more basic than having to find some random rare components to be able to craft that gun? And, crafting should yield better equipment (aka the very exact thing you want that has like 0.01% of dropping) because you have to spend skill points or whatever that can be going elsewhere to make your character better obviously.
 
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Satinavian

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I generally like crafting systems because you can produce stuff reliably instead of hoping for good luck, can produce stuff that best fits your build/strategy and because you can slowly build incredients/crafting skills for your next improvement.

The cyberpunk crafting system has some good and some bad things going :

good :
- components are not limited. If you actually can craft something you can craft it sooner or later. No nonsense like "only three adamantine ores in the game"
- crafted items are as good as the best random loot and it is not a waste using them. You would be most of the time have superior outfit to a looter
- crafting still has some high cost in character building so that forgoing crafting does not make you weaker, it just gives you different strength

bad:
- most recipies are random drops. So you actually need luck just as well as the random looter
- clothing recipies of the same slot/tier have the same values. So while you are soon able to craft clothing with the stats you want, you are not able to craft clothing with the looks you want and might very well never be throughout the whole game (this might be partly due to a bug)
- crafted items are always level appropriate to your current level, but there is also quality/rarity and higher quality recipies only drop later which means for most of the ame stuff you craft is low level and low quality and while the first is ok, the latter makes it garbage
- you don't get much out of investing somewhat in crafting. Either you go the full way or you skip it. There should be a viable middle.
- the crafting economy (xp, components) is all sorts of broken. You can easily exploit it but at the same time you kinda have to exploit it.
 

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Say you're doing a stealthy build in Cyberpunk, you'd probably want something like headshot damage buff (say 10%) and critical damage buff (say 10% again) as say you get critical damage on enemies when they don't notice you and you're using stealth so you're most likely lining up headshots (with a silenced weapon). So instead of hoping to find a pistol that drops with 10% bonuses on headshots and crits, you can make it yourself. And how you would make it would be easy. For example, you could extract those bonuses from other pistols you've found. Say you got a pistol that has the headshot bonus + a reload bonus (that you don't care about) and say you have a pistol with the crit bonus + that stupid reload bonus. You can break down both those guns, getting those bonuses extracted as mods or gems or whatever you wanna call it. Then you can craft a pistol with those 2 desired bonuses. Isn't that like a hundred times more basic than having to find some random rare components to be able to craft that gun? And, crafting should yield better equipment (aka the very exact thing you want that has like 0.01% of dropping) because you have to spend skill points or whatever that can be going elsewhere to make your character better obviously.
You literally can do that in Cyberpunk.
 

hanselthecaretaker

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You know it's a clusterfuck, when Crowbcat makes a video about it.
Let’s see how much all these snobby idiots whine about future games getting delayed now, after it should’ve sunken in that even all of Cyberpunk’s delays still weren’t enough to fix the game and make them happy.

But having said that, it’s CDPR’s bad for putting this game on the map over half a decade before they were able to hobble it out the door.

Hey most game devs: be like Apple/FROMSOFT/Rockstar and stop announcing/hyping the shit out of your product before it’s even close to being ship-worthy.

Also, review standards really need to change after this. Any time a dev restricts reviewer footage to solely their own, should be a red flag and a literal suspension of the review process until said restriction is lifted.
 
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Samtemdo8

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You know it's a clusterfuck, when Crowbcat makes a video about it.
I'm amazed because he completely didn't even tackle the controversies Blizzard went through with Warcraft 3 Reforged and such.

This situation is even bigger then what happened with Blizzard in recent years?
 

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Oh for the love of God, ANOTHER JIM STERLING ***** VIDEO?!

I don't even need to see it. I know what he's gonna say because its the samething he always say when a company attempt to apologies for screwing up.
 

CriticalGaming

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Oh for the love of God, ANOTHER JIM STERLING ***** VIDEO?!

I don't even need to see it. I know what he's gonna say because its the samething he always say when a company attempt to apologies for screwing up.
BLAH BLAH BLAH AAA-Companies are evil. Blah Blah Blah the gamers are shitheads too. He bitches about "cis" men in this episode complaining that they don't want a female GTA protagonist because they wouldn't be able to "identify" with her, ironically doing the same this that he has done when complaining about "another white male main character". It's interesting how he can't see the double standard in his own video because like a typical lefty only his opinion matters and everyone else is a Nazi. He even uses Nazi in the video, which I'm really fucking sick of. America is not overrun by Nazi's and Nazi ideals, and to claim it is means you don't fucking know what a Nazi really is.

Go see a therapist Jim, you're off your rocker mate.
 

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Oh for the love of God, ANOTHER JIM STERLING ***** VIDEO?!

I don't even need to see it. I know what he's gonna say because its the samething he always say when a company attempt to apologies for screwing up.
You could just get over it and not watch it. Hell ignore the video. I don't watch every video that's posted up on these forums.

BLAH BLAH BLAH AAA-Companies are evil. Blah Blah Blah the gamers are shitheads too. He bitches about "cis" men in this episode complaining that they don't want a female GTA protagonist because they wouldn't be able to "identify" with her, ironically doing the same this that he has done when complaining about "another white male main character". It's interesting how he can't see the double standard in his own video because like a typical lefty only his opinion matters and everyone else is a Nazi. He even uses Nazi in the video, which I'm really fucking sick of. America is not overrun by Nazi's and Nazi ideals, and to claim it is means you don't fucking know what a Nazi really is.

Go see a therapist Jim, you're off your rocker mate.
Sucks that the truth hurts. It ain't his fault that's what's going on right now. Like I said to Sam, don't watch it.
 
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