I played it when it first came out. It was fairly buggy and unoptimized and shouldn’t have been released like that, but there wasn’t anything too game breaking for me. And underneath that was a game with great writing, fun gameplay, and a very memorable world.
I played it again when Phantom Liberty came out, and it was even better. It ran smoother, the bugs were gone, the overhauled systems better served the gameplay, and PL itself was an amazing addition. And I actually had an RTX card to take advantage of this time.
Cyberpunk’s only real problem, for me, was it being pushed out before it was ready. I hope that the shift from REDengine to Unreal helps to at least mitigate the issues that caused that going forward.
The gameplay suck. The story starts off ok, but becomes lame. Pretty graphics. Still plenty if glitches. Walking around the city is worth like $10, not worth the $30 I paid.
I played it at launch. Even through all the bugs and half finished systems, it felt like somebody actually cared about the game. The story, characters and city were and still are amazing. Bit of an unpopular opinion, but it was always a pretty good game, at the very least an uncut diamond.
Uncut diamond is a good way to put it.
The scenario, world building, graphics, and acting are world-class. Combat was decent. Most side-quests were forgettable and clearly worse than the main quest. The open-world was mechanically massively underwhelming, especially considering TW3 came out five years earlier.
This game received a lot of love and took a long time to make, but failed to achieve in some key areas. CDPR didn’t have the means to do what R* or Larian could, and that’s fine. I can’t help but feel that if these developers had put the same time and energy into a (semi) closed world à la Mass Effect or Deus Ex, not having to spend so much time filling in a huge open world map would have allowed them to make the whole game as tight and polished as the main quest stuff, and this could have been the best game of the decade or close to it. Only downside is it doesn’t tick the mandatory “Open World” box for AAA games, but does anyone actually care if the RPG elements are good? Mass Effects fans would surely disagree.
My theory with a lot of these games that “released badly and then come back” is everyone who disliked the game stopped playing and everyone who liked it kept playing so the crowd playing years later had a positive opinion of it through self selection more than anything the devs did.
I personally liked both Cyberpunk 2077 and No Man’s Sky on release, and while they are better now, I don’t see the night-and-day difference the internet would make you think happened.
NMS was quite literally a different looking and feeling game with maybe 5% (yes, twenty times less) of the current content and gameplay loops. Everything changed from how long it takes to gather basic resources to what order you get them in, the tutorial was streamlined and the way it picks the planet you start on was changed. There’s an unbelievable amount of things to do, to the point that expeditions started existing to give players a more guided experience with fresh regular content. It’s truly a far cry from where it launched, even space stations (the most static structures found in most star systems) have been overhauled and the old ones are only around as easter eggs now.
CP2077 integrated a ton of content and features from the most popular mods it had after the Anime update (particularly Vehicle Combat, from which it even took improvements to the way police spawn and act in addition to, yknow, the vehicular combat). Only a few of the core systems changed, mainly quickhacking and the way cybernetic implants are handled (also almost straight up taken from a mod). They did a balance pass on guns and made some of the weapon type features a bit different. If you didn’t push too terribly far through the game on release, none of it would seem different really. The locations and behavior of weapons and enemies in general gameplay didn’t change much, but access to mobility via implants was made easier (as the separated stores for them were largely equalized and merged) so it’s easier for fresh players and people not using guides to finish their “build”. Not quite the huge makeover NMS received, but it’s definitely different in terms of progression.
While you’re probably right to some extent about naysayers decreasing naturally over time, both games now have suspicious steamcharts numbers for being single player experiences. They get an influx of new players regularly in ways other similar titles don’t, and it’s almost certainly due to the changes in opinion of people who were playing them around their major updates, journalist articles or enthused friends.
TL;DR: No man’s sky really did change that much. CP2077 didn’t go as far but they’ve clearly made end user-oriented changes that are uncharacteristic for single player experiences.
A solid game in its current state. Probably one of the best games of the decade for me, just not in top 5. Has that “once you start playing, suddenly it’s 3 hours later” factor. Extremely atmospheric world design. Lots of great writing too.
Now, it does have the annoying thing that it sometimes keeps reminding me of games that did some aspect better. For example: Vehicle physics feel completely hokey. (“Man, I wish I was playing Saints Row 3/4”) Can’t really go exploring everywhere, would have loved to explore more rooftops and such. (“Man, I’ve got to get back to Mirror’s Edge”) Not exactly a prime stealth game in accordance with the laws of the art form. (“Man, Deus Ex was the shit, got to play it”)
Man, I love the vehicle handling. It’s far from perfect but I much prefer the weightiness of Cyberpunk (or GTA IV) over more “Hollywood” approach of most games. I realize I’m in a minority on this one but I hope they keep it in the next game (just with extra polish, obviously).
Same. I like feeling every bump.
It’s a work of art, one of my favorite games (and dlc included).
I have a strong PC and play in 4k tho, with tons of mods to improve stuff or change some mechanics. Better textures and loads of clothes as well.
I finished the game several times and have probably a lot more than 100h in it. I still play regularly to simply enjoy life in Night City, and kill some dudes…
I’m in love with that game and I believe anybody should play it at least once in life.
Any mod reccos? I started it before the DLC and only played for like four hours.
I like the ones that add a second operating system cyberware. It can be seen as cheating but you can have a netrunner deck and a sandevistan at the same time (or whatever double cybwrware you want to play with).
I think it’s cyberware EX. I use the collection function of Nexus mods (ordered by rating) so I don’t have to hand manage hundreds of mods.
Thank yoooou!
I don’t want to put you down or anything, but this is very surprising to me. 100+ hours from multiple play throughs feels really small to me. You clearly love the game. So I am wondering why was your first time so short? When I love a game, I want to experience as much of the content as I can in my first playthrough. It took me 185 hours to finish Cyberpunk 2077 without the DLC. I haven’t played that one yet. I am waiting for a new PC so that I can play the game on max settings.
I know you are right. I said that number from out of my ass as I was at work.
I just checked gog and I am actually at 201h and 7 minutes. My first play through was probably around 120 to 140h but I honestly don’t remember.
Funny enough, the actual save I use is from my first playthrough, the last save right before the last mission. As if I don’t want to abandon this specific V (female badass street kid net runner with katana).
I’m with this. Totally agree.
What game is there that does this kind of gameplay better?
Only the original Deus Ex has captured this genre so well.
The Revision mod made DE even better.
Worth a replay with it on if you haven’t already
What are the chances, I was just looking into installing it again. Here’s a handy article I found about the various mods, for those interested.
I’ve been playing it slowly for the past few months after finally getting a modern GPU, and am going through the endings now, so my impressions are still fresh.
Overall I enjoyed the game, but it’s possible to see that it could have been much better. There are still occasional immersion-breaking bugs like floating items and characters. Some systems are clearly leftovers of bigger plans, for example clothing that barely has any purpose other than roleplaying and taking pics of the character in photo mode. Gameplay can be pretty fun depending on your preferences and how you build the character, that was nice. I do agree that it’s not particularly deep.
Story and writing is what people usually praise about CP2077 + PL, but after finishing the game I can say that I was occasionally baffled and disappointed. Some things were clearly not developed to full potential, possibly because of time/budget constraint. Quests mentioning some areas and characters that are involved, but you can’t go and examine those. Some are pretty damn dumb if examined logically. Endings look pretty cool in isolation, but they contradict each other when compared. In pretty much every ending V is told that they’re going to die, but reasons differ. Alt claims that the body was changed to that of Johnny, and the immune system would reject V (which is also nonsense, in the game’s world an engram is data that can be written to a blank brain, why would data be rejected). In Arasaka endings we see that Saburo needs a body that is already genetically close to him, so he uses his son. Why not use a clone? This also contradicts what Alt says about nanites modifying the body. Arasaka-related characters also claim that V’s body was damaged by the Relic, that’s why even though the surgery was a success, they’ll die. Tumors and DNA damage. But somehow if Johnny takes over the body he can continue to live in it no problemo.
A dark and depressing theme doesn’t automatically make the story great, it still has to be logically coherent.
Played it again right after they stopped releasing updates this year. If you don’t play it expecting an RPG or immersive sim, it’s good.
I like Phantom Liberty even more. They didn’t attempt to compromise on anything regarding the game genre anymore and just made it a shooter action adventure with a cinematic story, which plays in it own little open world area.
2077 is one of the few AAA games that doesn’t feel completely soulless. It could’ve delved deeper into the philosophical “what if” aspect of the Cyberpunk genre though.
Also they should’ve made the badlands story part with Panam it’s own game, in retrospect it’s what I enjoyed the most out of the base game.
I played it both at launch and a year ago with the DLC. It’s alright - 6/10, but pre patches like 4/10.
The gameplay is fun because of how customizable your build is now, after the skill system was completely reworked.
The story is shallow, the characters forgettable and the open world really doesn’t fit the urgency the story is supposed to have and ruins the pacing. The DLC is much better, but there’s some parts where I don’t really like how V is written, especially at the start, since it forces a specific personality I don’t think fits them.
I remember the sidequests being generally entertaining, but I wouldn’t call any of them special, just kinda average.
It feels a lot like a Far Cry game, but with much better build customization.
Agree to disagree. For me the story and main/side quests were amazing and rarely has a game captivated my attention as much as cp2077 did.
I’m curious, if you consider them average, what game has good or great side quests ?
I’m curious, if you consider them average, what game has good or great side quests ?
Probably average wasn’t the right word, as I don’t really think sidequests are generally good storywise in games. I wanted to say “mediocre” but thought that sounded negative. I meant that I didn’t find anything special in them, neither bad nor good.
But for examples of games with sidequests I think are good (storywise), I can think of only The Witcher 1 and 2 and Yakuza 0 (all of which I haven’t played in a while so I might only remember the good parts).
Still waiting for a 66% deal
I pre ordered it. I had just finished building a new PC with just barely enough resources to handle it. Strangely enough I never encountered any of the bugs people complained about, so I was lucky.
I kept replaying it and heavily awaited the patch releases to see what the devs were going to fix and/or add. Been there since the beginning and play it through once a year (fully, clear the map of objectives every time). Simply put, I’m a fan.
I even was running it on Linux pretty much from day one (though certain patch numbers and updates to Nvidia drivers would occassionally break this compatibility). A small thing, but one that I greatly appreciated.
The driving mechanics to this day is the biggest pain point for me. Even though a patch at some point improved on it, it still feels wrong whenever going around a corner at even moderate speeds. There’s a reason most people opt to use motorcycles in the game (or use mods).
The story is well done IMHO. I feel like they could have spent way more time in the prologue section, fleshing out one particular character (anyone who’s played knows who I’m referring to). Other than that, I’m happy with only a few very small nitpicks.
The combat system is well fleshed out since patch 1.68, and iirc patch 2.0 brought some significant QOL changes. It’s fun and varies extensively depending on how you build out your character’s skill tree.
The atmosphere is perhaps the developers’ biggest achievement. The depiction of Night City is difficult to put into words. It feels lived in, and there are still areas of the map seasoned players are discovering. Other than the combat system, the environment is definitely one of the game’s strongest selling points.
Ever since patch 1.68, the game has run smoothly. I can’t run Ray Tracing or other high resource requiring features as my PC, again, is considered to be mid to low tier depending on who you’re talking to. But if you’re running a high end PC, the visuals are likely to be far more stunning for you.
If you do buy, definitely get the Phantom Liberty DLC, the side content adds quite a bit to the story, including a new ending, and is overall a fun addition to the entire experience.
Lastly, if you do dive in, enjoy yourself, and want more, I’d highly recommend watching the anime mini series, Cyberpunk: Edge runners, which depicts a prequal to the events of the main game. And of course, if you’re really in love, perhaps get together with some friends and play the Table Top RPG.
Still waiting for the ultimate all-in edition of this one
Same. I want to play it but until it’s available in some sort of convenient package at a price point I can justify, I’ll play something else.
Really enjoyed it, only recently finished a run with expansion and some QOL mods. Excellent visuals (with RTX), and if your into the theme the story was fun and pretty good. Not perfect by any stretch but solid. Gameplay mechanics is fairly engaging after the 2.0 patch.
It is definitely sad it took so long to get to here though, it was broken on launch beyond bugs - the builds you could do pre 1.5 were plain broken.
That said, we should celebrate anyone making single player games these days seriously, it feels like they are getting very thin on the ground.
I think my brain is stuck in 2018 because some voice in the back of my head is telling me I should be excited for when cyberpunk and starfield come out, lol. Maybe I’ll get to cyberpunk soon but the backlog is yuge
Fascinating documentary that slipped through a wormhole from the future
I’m a HUGE cyberpunk fan, so I made the mistake of buying it at release. Some of my most impressive issues:
- Trees would draw “on top” or in front of everything else, even when blocked by other objects. So in greener areas, my entire screen was filled with trees.
- The scripted driving sequences would get me stuck in “driving mode” about half the time after the scripted sequence is over. So I’d be walking around like a car, not able to strafe or jump.
So, I refunded it, outside of the refund period, but they were nice to me.
When the expansion released, and everything seemed a LOT better, I bought the game again, and I loved it! It’s a pretty OK game, with a great story and absolutely amazing sidequests.
