EvaUnit02 on 25/9/2023 at 19:38
FYI, the expansion is out today.
Gaz's review:
[video=youtube_share;XTfaFry3tQQ]https://youtu.be/XTfaFry3tQQ?si=NNmagVE69tMmXZw2[/video]
Malf on 28/9/2023 at 21:51
The changes they've made to systems are superb.
The Cool tree in particular is so much better than it was before, and I am absolutely adoring being a sneaky knife chucker.
On top of that, it would appear that they've FINALLY learned their lesson in regards levelled gear (which as well as being a complete let-down in this, was also one of Witsher 3's weakest points). Yes, you still have quality tiers, but from what I can tell, there's no longer higher levelled gear, so it's no longer a constant grind. If this remains the case, it's pretty much a perfect RPG gear system in my eyes.
I've not started the DLC yet, as I've started a new character to fully explore everything that's new. But even then, I'm having a whale of a time, especially coming off the back of Starfield.
I've also seen people complain about the new lack of non-lethal options, but personally, I think that was deliberate. Stuffing bodies in containers is now a lethal action, so if you want to go pacifist, you have to leave unconscious bodies out in the open. You can move them still to make them harder to discover, but I still think it's a nifty little change, adding some more tension to the non-lethal approach. On top of that, unmodded weapons all apear to be lethal, so your only guaranteed way of knocking out NPCs is by sneaking takedowns.
Yeah, I'm loving this added complexity.
Top job CDPR. You've put the work in and massively improved the game. Unlike many others, I enjoyed it on release, but now it's just fantastic.
And that's just the patch!
Can't wait to get stuck in to the expansion content, although given the way I play this game, I'll probably be massively over-levelled when I get around to it.
I ignore the initial meeting with Dex, and just wander off to complete side quests, so it means by the time I get around to progressing the story, I'm usually massively OP, even on the highest difficulty (which I'm playing on at the mo.)
nicked on 29/9/2023 at 05:53
I now wish I'd waited to play it, as these system changes sound superb. But I have no inclination to replay it, having finished the main story with the 2.0 update.
Admittedly welcome changes to the RPG systems don't change the fact that my lingering memories of the game are of bullet sponge encounters with dreadful AI. Plot was good, but a slog to enjoy.
heywood on 29/9/2023 at 10:44
I was really looking forward to CP2077, but then I bounced off it. I won't have time to dig into a game of this size until the end of the year, but it looks like it's worth a second chance.
Malf on 29/9/2023 at 11:26
Yeah, unfortunately the AI hasn't really improved, I won't lie. And without headshots, they still seem spongey, but I suspect that will reverse at higher levels with decent build specialisation, in much the same way it did on release. CDPR always seem to struggle with power-scaling.
Briareos H on 29/9/2023 at 11:28
Quote Posted by heywood
I was really looking forward to CP2077, but then I bounced off it. I won't have time to dig into a game of this size until the end of the year, but it looks like it's worth a second chance.
I'm in the same boat. It came out at a moment in time where AAA fatigue made me judge it unfairly and I had no patience for any bugs on top of an already frustrating experience. I'm feel more ready to enjoy it now.
catbarf on 10/11/2023 at 21:07
Quote Posted by heywood
I was really looking forward to CP2077, but then I bounced off it. I won't have time to dig into a game of this size until the end of the year, but it looks like it's worth a second chance.
I was in the same boat and am now getting really into it, and I'm hooked. The simplification to the leveling and gear grind is a huge improvement, as well as the removal of stat bonuses from (most) clothing. There's a lot less fiddly crap to mess with and it's clearer what you need to do to improve in power. I've also had very few bugs, the worst being that it's sometimes fiddly to scan things.
That said, I really don't like that they've just made enemy stats and attribute checks auto-scale to your level. In some ways it feels like I'm just maintaining parity in my chosen specialty while getting worse at everything else. The attribute checks are particularly silly since they continue to change as you level up; there's a quest I ran into where you need Body to move a dumpster, but if you leave, level up a bit, and come back, the requirement has increased. I think it might be impossible to complete on this playthrough. Kinda wish they'd just bitten the bullet and gone the Deus Ex route, with skills and cyberware but without the now-atavistic leveling system.
I also have to say that if you didn't get to the conclusion of the first act, the second act is where the game really starts to open up. This game has some of the most inventive, genuinely interesting sidequests and plot threads I've seen in an open-world RPG, but the first act is more of the classic 'interesting main quests + one-off busywork sidequests' formula.
I respect when a developer is willing to significantly rework an already-released game to get closer to their vision, and this does really feel like what the game was meant to be.
catbarf on 21/11/2023 at 15:57
Finished the game.
The only major bug I ran into besides the aforementioned scanning problem was related to initiating quests. Some quests are supposed to trigger a set amount of time after the last one in the chain, or involve waiting for someone to call, and it just... didn't happen. If I didn't go to a wiki to find that a character had more story remaining, I might have just breezed into the ending not realizing I was missing stuff. Instead I had to go into silly loops of sleeping for 24hrs, walking out of my apartment, saving and quitting and loading the save, driving near the area the quest was supposed to trigger in, and ultimately that got them all to trigger eventually.
Speaking of breezing into the ending, there is no third act. It's one mission. So the first act is restrictive, the third act is nonexistent, and the second act is pretty much the entire post-tutorial game. Not necessarily a bad thing, I guess, but it means that doing the sidequests- some of which are chains of 5-6 quests- means putting the main story on pause for a significant length of time and doing them all at once, and likely having sidequest chains that take longer to complete than the main story missions of the second act. At least the game is nice enough to tell you when you're about to hit the point of no return. This is all only frustrating because I ultimately found the sidequests more interesting than the main story, which never again lives up to the awesome setpiece that ends the first act.
Gameplay has been substantially improved over release. Quickhacks are no longer god mode, though I do feel they maybe went too far in the other direction- with how fiddly it can be to acquire a target and scroll to the quickhack I want without accidentally losing target and having to do it over again, I often found it easier to just shoot the guy in the face. And it's silly when I manage to hack a dude to detonate the grenade in his pocket and he still lives with half his health, or I pop three cyberware malfunctions on a guy who's more machine than human and all that happens is he takes like ten percent more damage. AI's still kinda crap but the combat doesn't feel like a slog, stealth is decent (and harder to cheese with cyberware now), the obnoxious grind of leveling gear is gone, none of it really stands out as great but it's serviceable.
The worldbuilding and environmental design are great, but beyond the sidequests, the gig missions are pretty bare-bones and there isn't much else to do. The core gameplay loop of driving to a place in the city and then shooting or stealthing past a bunch of dudes gets stale quickly without the writing to carry it. There's a good amount of player choice in the quests but some of it runs on moon logic or is outright broken, like taking down a character non-lethally but then the game treats you like you killed them.
Overall, I'd say... 7/10? It doesn't feel broken anymore but it didn't knock my socks off. I certainly got my money's worth and it's a massive improvement over pre-2.0, let alone release, but I don't feel any strong desire to replay it.
Briareos H on 8/12/2023 at 07:50
Quote Posted by Briareos H
Quote Posted by heywood
I was really looking forward to CP2077, but then I bounced off it. I won't have time to dig into a game of this size until the end of the year, but it looks like it's worth a second chance.
I'm in the same boat. It came out at a moment in time where AAA fatigue made me judge it unfairly and I had no patience for any bugs on top of an already frustrating experience. I'm feel more ready to enjoy it now.
Nope, still can't. The main draw of the game for me was exploration and Night City itself but every aspect of the world screams that it is little more than a backdrop for RPG quests and encounters. It doesn't help that I don't find it all that pretty, open vistas with deep and wide fields of view look awesome especially with all the verticality, but those vistas seem to be few and far between plastic-textured corridors and poorly-lit underpasses. Also, maybe it's because I'm still only 10 hours in but I've tried to drive around the city as much as I could and I find it tiny. Unrealistically so.
One aspect that I didn't expect to be enjoying is the FPS-RPG gameplay, you can really tell they have spent a lot of time fine-tuning it, so I think I'm going to focus on the main quest and get this done as soon as possible. Any cool secondary quests that I don't want to miss?