13
votes
Cyberpunk 2077
Hi everyone, just a quick question!
It's been more than a year since it was released so I was wondering if those who own it and have played it can advise whether or not it's become better to play?
I reckon everyone here remembers all the drama and bugs in it, but I also recall seeing people saying that it was a fine game back when it released. So... Is it worth the while to give it a shot now? I was thinking that I would perhaps buy it as a christmas present for myself.
Edit: Not gonna lie, I actually forgot that I posted this! Thanks so much to everyone for your responses!
I think it depends on what you want out of it. They did iron out a lot of bugs but the key issues remain, so it just depends how much of those you’ll run into.
Is this is a good GTA game? No. Although the world is beautifully crafted, everything else is mediocre to bad about the open world.
Does this have a deep, powerful narrative about the intersection of technology and humanity like the original dues ex? No, the plot is pretty dumb. Dumb fun, but dumb. The game really indexes into the punk part of cyberpunk- a lot of edgy ra ra fuck the corpos, not much else.
So what remains is how satisfied you are with a fun, although narratively simple, single player romp, where you mainly follow the main quest line and don’t stray too far from it. That’s honestly good fun, and a fair amount of content. It has AAA production value, big name actors, and it’s a good “blockbuster as a game” experience
Opinions vary from "It was a good game from the very start, and all problems were overstated" to "The bugs were only the surface layer of everything wrong with the game, and it has deep, foundational flaws that make it irreparable, which will never allow it to take the redemption route that No Man's Sky was able to."
I think the latter is closer to the case, since the game launched completely lacking any meaningful AI, one of the integral parts of the entire "living city" premise they were trying to sell, and one of the largest development tasks they would have needed to accomplish. What was it, 8 years of development? And they managed to create maybe 40% of a game?
Yeah, I'd say the problems run deep with this one, and I think a portion of the people defending the game might possibly be doing so out of that typical desire to validate their own purchasing decisions (or maybe to validate the years they've spent waiting for the game to release).
But maybe you'll still like it. Obviously it's really subjective, and depends on the experience you want out of it.
Or, y'know, we actually enjoyed it, regardless of all its warts and shortcomings? Sure, it's far from perfect, failed to deliver on all its promises, and was way overhyped. However, IMO the characters and voice acting were still great, the main story was ultimately a bit shallow but still completely engrossed me, many of the side-quests were incredibly entertaining, the combat was fun and addicting, and I still genuinely enjoyed the whole experience... So much so that I have even replayed it multiple times to see all the different endings.
Yeah, the part where I said "a portion" was actually important. There's definitely some defensive validation-seeking going on among a portion of the games proponents. If that doesn't apply to you, then I'm not talking about you.
It's great that some people were able to have a good time, and I emphasized that OP might also have a good time.
But I also waited a long time for the game to release, and I feel like trying to "make the best of it" is a mistake in cases like this, because it's just going to encourage this kind of irresponsible unfinished release that's becoming more and more of a trend.
Why is it so hard to believe that everyone who says they enjoyed the game actually did? Just because people enjoy something you didn't doesn't mean that even "a portion" of those people are somehow deluding themselves.... they likely just have totally different tastes than you. And even in the case of a flawed game like Cyberpunk 2077, all it means is that they probably just have different priorities and expectations than you do, and the things that annoyed you most about the game didn't similarly annoy them.
p.s. I've been PC gaming since the mid 80s, and I promise you that studios releasing unfinished/unpolished/buggy games isn't a new trend. There were plenty of those games back then too, its just that most of the worst offenders have simply been forgotten by now. And back then, on top of that being an issue, computers were just generally jankier to begin with. Often requiring us tinkering with bios settings, himem.sys, config.sys and autoexec.bat files over and over again in order to get the games working. And sometimes even that didn't work, and we were basically screwed out of our money as a result.
E.g. Even though my system met all the requirements, I remember spending weeks trying to get SimAnt to work on my computer back when it was first released, to no avail. And that was a major release by Maxis, a massive, well respected studio with a proven track record. It wasn't until I built a totally new system months later that I was finally able to get it working.
At least nowadays you can usually get refunds when a game doesn't work on your system, or when it doesn't meet your expectations, but that often wasn't possible back then since most stores wouldn't take returns after you had taken the shrink-wrap off the game box.
As a gamer who had a 40 MB hard drive in their first PC (no, that is not a typo, 40 megabytes), I can tell you that games have most certainly gotten buggier at release, simply because they can release patches over the internet easily now. (Paying $4.95 per hour to download patches at 2400 baud is a non-starter.)
That's not to say there weren't some rare exceptions back then, but games working right out of the box was the norm.
You sure you don't just have some nostalgia goggles on, or got a bit lucky in the games you bought? Because I remember fairly regularly having to write to various publishers and computer magazines in the 80s in order to get physically mailed floppy disks with critical game patches on them. And by the early-mid 90s downloading patches (both official and unofficial) for newly released games was already pretty common, either via BBS, Usenet, Telnet, FTP, IRC, or the web.
And for further evidence it's not a new trend:
p.s. If we're flexing about how pathetic our first computers were, mine didn't even have a hard drive, it used ROM cartridges and Datasettes to load games and applications directly into its whopping 64 KB of RAM. ;)
I said my first PC had 40MB of storage. My first computer was a TI-99/4A. It was a glorified console with a keyboard.
Damn, looks like you got me beat by a year (and -48K) then. C64 was my first. :P
It's not like games not working right out of the box is the norm now, either. CP2077's completely broken PS4 release is the exception that proves the rule, really.
Besides, patching games online has been commonplace since the 90's, it's a few decades too late to suggest it's changed things now. Gone are the days when you'd have to buy a different version of the game that fixed some bugs (e.g. Gran Turismo 2's impossible 100% completion in the original release).
Oh, it definitely is not, which was what I was saying with day one patches being so easy.
Forza Horizons 5 has been so refreshing in that regard.
As @bub stated, opinions will vary, but I'm closer to the former of his two opinion bookends than the latter.
Where there bugs? Yes.
Did I find them completely game-breaking? No. In my 95 hour playthrough I had half a dozen T-posing NPCs, one NPC car sink into the ground while driving, one side mission that required quitting and reloading to get it to finish, a couple of times where my female character's penis clipped through her clothing, and one time the hitbox to complete a random encounter by looting a corpse was microscopically small. Nothing actually stopping me from playing the game nor do I recall the game crashing at any point (something I can't say for Forza 5). One can argue that bugs break "immersion", but I've yet to play a game where I was unaware I was playing a game, so I think the immersion argument is overblown. I also played on PC while most bugs were about consoles, so take that for what you will.
Is the enemy AI utter crap? Absolutely. However, enemy AI in every single game is crap and it needs to be. Imagine if enemy AI could actually adapt to the player; it'd utterly curbstomp you. No one wants a game they don't have a chance at winning. No matter how cybernetically enhanced your character may be, an adaptable AI would defeat you every time one of 2077's You vs 10 enemies firefights breaks out. You'd get Jurassic Park raptor'd with one distracting you from the front as the other nine flank you. That doesn't excuse witness-less crimes magically spawning cops behind you.
Is it a good game? Yes. The story is in-depth, has multiple arcs, and takes time to complete while not being filled with gopher missions. The game looks good, has enough customization to not feel as if you're playing the only character option, and is generally fun.
All that said, it did not live up to the expectations of many. I don't do hype, I don't read gaming "journalism", no social media, no subreddits, no forums, no pre-orders. A trailer pops up, I watch it and decide if it looks like it'll be an entertaining game. If so it'll get wishlisted to await release/sale and I'll check it out again before purchase. I was aware of the 2077 bug fiasco through the osmosis of complaints rising to the top and becoming prevalent even without me specifically looking for gaming news. Between fan hype, gaming reporters, and CDPR's statements/goals, checks were written for 2077 that it could not cash. Maybe they'll fix it to bring it closer to what was "promised" maybe they won't. If they do and DLC adds gameplay that's worth another trip through it, I'll play it again.
The Director in Left 4 Dead serves as a great example of a fairly decently adapting AI for player difficulty. It never went full "I'm going to make this game impossible", but it certainly did adapt to increase/decrease difficulty level based on how the group was progressing.
Part of gaming is being presented with new challenges. Having an AI that learns your most common tricks (the ones you're most successful at) and provide more opponents that resist that trick (while exposing a different weakness) would definitely provide an interesting gameplay.
Agree that an AI that just continually learns and doesn't introduce weaknesses to compensate would be very un-fun. Think about an AI that works like rolling an initial DnD character....it has a fixed pool of attribute points to draw from and can't make uber-god enemies. Just ones better tailored to make difficulty easier/harder.
Metal Gear Solid V does this, but it's an exception, not the rule. L4D's AI is more about keeping a pace/flow to the game, not necessarily making it adapt to the player's style/strategy and generally boils down to player winning too easily = more mobs so it scales with more skilled players to keep everyone on the same pace to finish an area.
Sure, AI has to be tuned to make the difficulty reasonable.
But come on, the cops can't manage to follow you around a corner, out a doorway, or even down a sidewalk. They just spawn behind you, then despawn if you run away, only to spawn behind you again wherever you've run to. That's not making their AI manageable - that's just not making their AI at all.
Other enemies just kind of stand there and shoot at you until you kill them. Quake had more complex and functional enemy behaviors in 1996. I don't think we're expecting too much.
Like I said, the AI is utter crap and the cop thing is inexcusable.
At the basic level the enemy AI should at least learn to take cover better, but when it comes down to it AI in games is dumbed down regardless of the game with very few exceptions. If you make it adapt to the player you get people complaining about the game knowing too much about you or they take cover too much and combat is boring. If you make the enemies tougher, people complain about them being bullet sponges. You can't make them act normally, because the game would be too hard. Oh, you just crawled by and an enemy saw you for a split second? Can't have them investigate what was clearly not a friend darting through the area because it ruins your stealth strategy, so you get the classic "must have been the wind" of anything other than a gunshot going off next to their head.
AI at present is a balance of taking cover, health, damage, and number of enemies at once for 99.9% of games.
I bought the game at release, barely touched it. The controls are, in my opinion, abominable. It does a fantastic job at worldbuilding out of the gate, but I can't speak to the rest of the game. (I'd kill for some official-sounding "Hello Night City!" fanmade broadcasts in the vein of what we get in the game... that, for me, set the tone immensely.)
Did you play it on console? I played it on PC and tried (once, briefly,) to play it on the couch with a controller and couldn't make head or tails of it. M&KB the controls were just fine.
I only own a PC, so that's how I played it. I felt like it might have been better on console, but now I just think they're bad (or I just sucked at it, that's always possible.)
It's, fine. The story isn't deep but I did finish it because I wanted to see how it ended. Some of the side quests were just as good as the main game (I'm very partial to Panam's storyline) The gunplay is fun, but the game does not do a great job of teaching you its systems (I didn't know how to effectively use quickhacking until like 5 hours in, when I realized you can swap them out). I've experienced a few bugs but nothing earth shattering. There was an issue where the game would not start until I removed my overclock, but that seems to work fine now.
However, this game is so far away from what was promised, so it's understandable if people shy away from it. The game looks fine, but stuff like Forza Horizon 5 or even RDR2 feel more "consistent" in their visuals, if that makes sense.
That sucks about Outer Wilds. I personally still rank it as one of my all-time favorites, right up there with FTL and Portal, but I can totally see hype outpacing the game.
Personally I never really got the appeal of Skyrim or the 3D Fallouts, so I definitely feel you. I also have not been able to get into Witcher 3 much, and I suspect that's why.
Not sure exactly though....I absolutely loved the first Red Dead Redemption, so it's not purely an aversion to the open-world RPG thing.
I've yet to find someone... anyone... else that thinks that the Witcher is "meh", so... welcome, sibling of my clan!