i gave cyberpunk2077 another shot after hating it at launch because multiple people pestered me about it for two years. i was repeatedly told of my lengthy list of criticisms, “they fixed all that, it’s like a totally different game now”.
10 hours later it’s clear that they’re either:
a) delusional b) liars c) literally cannot hear criticism of the game being spoken aloud
because that shit was 99% identical to at launch, bugs included. the difference between the game that people keep describing to me and the game in front of me is so stark that i’m fucking baffled. it’s like it’s a cult or something.
What list of criticism?
janky “bullet sponge” combat
awful vehicles
fugly characters
invincible enemies bc they clipped into the ground AGAIN
bad voice acting
distinct lack of player agency
feeling of being constantly harassed whenever i try to get my bearings for a second
fake dialog trees
fake options in the fake dialog trees (ie nice and mean options presented, upon picking nice the character says the nice thing, then follows it up with the mean thing)
misleading options in the fake dialog trees (character line does not match menu option at all)
poor level design
ludicrous amounts of padding in every dialog
poor environment design language
“color vomit” aesthetic (as opposed to having a color palette)
awful stealth mechanics
shit gunplay
broken control configurator (m+kb back then, gamepad today)
lack of any engaging “toys” to play with in the “sandbox” of night city
lack of a “skip intro” option for successive playthroughs (though im told the dlc includes one. so very pro-consumer of them to put it behind a fucking paywall.)
all that’s off the top of my head. i found literaly nothing about the game not frustrating and disappointing, it’s just pure dogshit top to bottom.
Man there is so much to unpack here.
Turn down the difficulty or make a build that isn’t ass, nearly every build can one shot enemies on Hard if you aren’t just shotgunning perk points at random perks at all times
Most of the cars look great but driving gameplay isn’t CDPR’s strong suit, I’ll grant you that
Turn up your graphics settings
Literally never had this problem once
You might be the only person with this opinion, I can agree with you in regards to Johnny, this doesn’t apply to almost anyone else in the game
In what manner, exactly? V is railroaded down the story somewhat, but I challenge you to find an RPG where that isn’t the case, only one I can think of is Kenshi and that game literally doesn’t have a storyline.
Honestly have no idea what you’re talking about, please elaborate
What does this even mean?
Oh no, God forbid you have a dialogue option that gives you, you know, dialogue instead of just having an “Accept Quest” button attached to the NPC
Examples? If you’re just complaining that the dialogue selection tree doesn’t tell you your entire line of dialogue ahead of time, that’s silly, and also there is a mod to change that.
You are the only person to hold this opinion that I’ve ever met
See previously, Oh no, God forbid you have a dialogue option that gives you, you know, dialogue instead of just having an “Accept Quest” button attached to the NPC
I’m sticking these two together because they’re similarly nonsensical, Night City has incredible environmental design sometimes on the level of Fromsoft games, and the game has an incredibly obvious red-dominated color palette when it isn’t giving way to the interesting and correctly multicolored city outside of the immediate threat of Arasaka boot. The color language used in the game is supportive of its themes and quite well implemented in my opinion.
I wouldn’t call 'em great, but they’re more in depth than 90% of other RPGs with a stealth gameplay option. Do you prefer the Skyrim style of “you’re invisible if you’re crouching”? Because if so you’re just wrong.
Absolutely insane take, the gunplay is on par or better than any other FPS I’ve played other than Titanfall or Destiny
Don’t know what you’re talking about, I played with M+K on launch and I played again on controller after the release of Phantom Liberty, never had a problem.
Unsure what you mean by this, but if you explain it a bit this might be one of the few things on this list I might totally agree with you on. There isn’t much to do out in the city other than quests, or hunting for loot in tucked away corners or on rooftops. I still got 120+ hours of gameplay from just doing that though.
It got old after the 4th or 5th time through it, sure, but if you’re raring to skip Konpeki Plaza to get to “the real game” then you have completely missed the entire artistic purpose of the game. This is like being Big Mad that you can’t start Final Fantasy 7 at the point where you escape Midgar. Have some appreciation for an extremely well constructed classic cyberpunk mission gone bad that sets up 100 hours of further storyline. The Konpeki Plaza heist is by a long shot the coolest part of the entire game up until you get into Phantom Liberty.
yoo kenshi mentioned 🔥🔥
I did just hit the part in PL where Johnny reappears after Songbird sent him to the shadow realm. I selected “glad to have you back,” since I want the ending where Johnny likes you, and V’s tone was positively dripping with sarcasm. That could have been indicated better.
the difficulty is down, and i’m at the very start of the game. yeah level up make better but it shouldn’t start at “so bad i don’t want to engage this part of the game anymore because it feels so futile”.
no, no it is not. roach lives on in spirit.
i literally cannot do this without the game turning into a jerky tearing mess in slow parts and a complete slideshow in more intense parts. i had to drop the resolutin to 1600x900, lock the framerate to 45, and turn off all the post processing to make it run smooth enough to be playable. the “riding in the car with the NPC” segments still run like hot ass but it’s not a big deal since there’s nothing to do but play the smalltalk simulator.
that’s really strange because it happens frequently on my end
really? keanu was by far the worst but i just couldn’t buy anyone as a genuine person. it sounds like dubbed anime dialogue both in the oddly stilted wording of everything and the way that everyone sounds like they’re sitting in a booth reading a script.
maybe it’s different after the intro but damn bro literally everyone around me describes this as an open world action rpg with branching storylines and consequential player choice. i felt locked in for six hours, player control is frequently taken away and none of the “choices” presented to me ever appeared to matter to anything in the slightest. i hated the witcher 3 as well but in that game i at least felt like i had some say so over what my character did, and that’s not even a selling point for tw3 the way it supposedly is for cp2077.
there’s scarcely a moment when there’s not an NPC insisting you hurry up, or a character on the phone telling you do thisandthat and step on it, text inbox not getting blown up by three people. i remember specifically taking time to read and consider each dialogue choice for a few seconds before deciding but got tired of the npc’s nagging to pick a dialogue choice already every 5-10 seconds. i’m not a slow reader and i don’t have time to even read everything before the npc starts whining and nagging.
as stated multiple times, none of the choices ever feel meaningful or impactful in any way. i already played the entire segment 3-4 times at launch “to see the different life paths and try different builds” and nothing appeared to be any different, save the first 20 minutes being weirdly disjointed from the rest of the story (i was supposed to steal a car to clear my buddy’s debt? then suddenly there’s a “best friends forever” montage with jackie and nether my buddy nor his predicament are ever mentioned again?). the “trees” are really just poles, i didn’t retry every dialogue but the ones i did retry had no real choices except the length of the conversation, if that.
i don’t understand this response, the complaint you appear to be replying to is specifically about player dialog choice literally being undercut. many times i chose to not say the “rude” line and v said the exact rude thing i chose not to say anyway. it was a short dialog with a random unimportant NPC and it kinda chaps my ass that even that can’t be open-ended enough for me to actually role play my character in this role playing game.
i honestly have no idea what you’re talking about, everything looks incredibly disjointed and samey. agree to disagree.
skyrim is also an awful fucking game whose popularity boggles me, and its influence on the entire genre has been a detriment. i wouldn’t go out of my way to knock the stealth being shoddy if the game didn’t make a big deal about stealth from the very get-go, there’s a lot of emphasis on it and it’s just downright done poorly for how important the game makes it seem. they bit off more than they could chew and still chose to put it front and center, i think it’s correct to criticize.
not an fps fan, got it. moving on…
i’m talking about player ability to configure specific controls. at launch i broke the entire game trying to remap my keys to an ESDF layout. this last playthrough i have a controller with a nintendo button layout, and i wanted to swap A/B and X/Y to correct the button placement (so that the buttons are on the intended part of the face) and there is not a controller configurator that i could locate anywhere in the options menu. i don’t feel like either of these are unreasonable expectations to have from a big budget aaa title from a studio like cdpr, especially after five years of updates.
idk about you but im of the philosophy that a game, especially an open-world player-driven game as cp2077 is so frequently described to me, should have a toy that’s fun to play with regardless if you’re using it to play the game or not. assassins creed had parkuor. gta has the driving and rampage simulator aspect. hell even the witcher 3, my other least favorite game, has gwent and flower-picking. cp2077 has “shoot gun, sell loot, go to waypoint, engage dialogue pole”.
it felt old the first time
i have been searching for and missing the artistic purpose of the game besides “water down the genre so far it misses the point and cash in on A E S T H E T I C” from the get-go.
the entirety of ff7 disc 1 isn’t a glorified tutorial padded out to eight fucking hours either.
if by “well constructed” you mean “hacky, cliche, and disjointed for the sake of pretending to deliver on a promised feature because we don’t understand how to manage scope creep”, then sure.
this is the most damning thing i’ve ever heard about the game tbh and now i definitely don’t want to finish it.
I stand by my points but I was kind of being an ass in my first reply, sorry about that. Some of these are super valid complaints that I can agree with. In particular,
Yeah fair enough the combat doesn’t pop off until you get a handful of perk points invested, and the first 20 guns you pick up are going to be garbage. This never turned anyone off of Borderlands, but fair enough.
Full agree
This is and will forever be my biggest and most vocal complaint about the game since release day. Different life paths give about a handful of unique dialogues apiece that often don’t do much of anything, and the opening montage deal is the most frustrating thing CDPR has ever handed us I think.
Yeah agreed on that front. Your options are largely limited to sidequesting. Kind of lame I guess, but I never noticed it that much when I was playing the game because I don’t often do that sort of messing around anyway, personally.
…On the points where we disagree, though, I think we’re just kind of ideologically opposed to some things and I don’t even really understand why. I get the feeling that you just may not be the intended audience honestly. On my first time playing, as a long time fan of the likes of Shadowrun and other tabletop sci-fi-rpg’s, I thought the setup and execution of the Konpeki Plaza Heist was one of the greatest adaptations of a proper tabletop cyberpunk run gone bad that I have ever seen in a video game, and I think it might be some of CDPR’s best work they’ve ever done. I was in awe. Very little of the rest of the game lives up to what Konpeki Plaza promised until you get to Phantom Liberty and that’s the one complaint that I agree with most when people say that the game is a rug pull. Konpeki illustrates the vision of a tabletop Cyberpunk run that CDPR intended for the entirety of this game, and the only other parts of the game that somewhat approach that same vision in my opinion are some of the companion quests (Judy, Panam, River, Etc) and Phantom Liberty.
You don’t seem to have enjoyed Konpeki at all but I find it quite a shame that the rest of the game wasn’t more like Konpeki. To each their own I guess. I like this game. There are definitely valid complaints to be made about it but I don’t think it deserves to be called garbage. I do think it was rushed out the door and Phantom Liberty gives a better idea of what the developers actually intended the game to be like, given the time they needed to actually cook on it. Hopefully next time they release a game it’ll be one that’s given the proper time it needs.
What games do you like? It sounds like you have specific games in mind that have hit all of these notes. I wonder if there is a game that hits all of them? Maybe your criticism is the scope of the project leaves it overstretched?