marelooke

There was also the DLC for the second one where you start with basically nothing and have to go out on expeditions to make progress. That one was pretty neat.

Wish they'd just push more regular, smaller patches. There's enough little frustrations that would be nice to get fixed rather than having to wait for a big-bang "big patch" that likely will not live up to (inflated) expectations and/or break other stuff. In good news, maybe graphics card prices will go down to something reasonable by then. Heh, who am I kidding...

Well, story is a big case of "your mileage may vary". I thought the main story was pretty darn good, just frayed a bit at the endings (imho) because they really wanted to set it up for continuation in a certain way instead of taking it to its logical conclusion. Most of the characters are also very well done, and believable, with motivations that make sense based on what you know about them. An example is the way Jackie, which presents like a typical "mr cool", handles the stress when you're on The Heist. Annoyed the hell out of me, but it was very ... human in a way I feel most characters in The Witcher lack. I'm not generally a fan of having a voiced character, but I have to admit that in this case the voiced main character really helps to put some emotion in some moments that would likely lack such otherwise (at least with the female voice). Will be interesting to see how the male voice does (wasn't too fond of it at first, hence why I started with the female one) The way the game handles choice & consequence is also very well executed, in the sense that it is, in the majority of circumstances, unnoticeable. Many quests have consequences based on how, or even if you do them, but in many cases you'll never notice unless you happen to do something differently (or in a different order) on another playthrough (or because you redo things differently because...bugs ) as many of these consequences can be subtle, and only visible a long way down the road. Many of the side jobs, for example, lead to different results in other side jobs based simply on whether you go non-lethal or lethal (eg. murder everyone, and their friends in a future job won't be amenable to talking, while otherwise you wouldn't have had to fight in said future job, for example. Of course, you could be doing them in a different order, and not even notice the possible interaction at all) There are of course choices that have obvious repercussions, but then again, some things that would seem like they'd obviously have repercussions, don't. Like ... The majority of quests also don't have an obvious good/best outcome. There's quite a few (most?) where you get to pick between bad, and worse. But which is which is then often debatable. Hell, in some of them arguably not getting involved is the better outcome. The main story is fairly linear, but in a way that didn't feel forced. The circumstances are just created in such a way that you don't really have a choice (which I prefer over artificially taking choice away). Though depending on your actions you will only have access to a subset of endings and there will be variations in how you actually get there (and how they play out). It's also well shorter, but a lot more focused than Witcher 3's story. If you really rush it you can probably be done with CP2077 in a very short amount of time. I wouldn't have minded the main quest chain being longer, as long as it didn't meander like Witcher 3's. Think I'd honestly have preferred more substantial (optional) side content (and more interaction between blocks, see later) over a longer main questline for CP2077. And yeah, they didn't want to lock people out of any endings, so you can basically pick whichever one you want as long as you meet the conditions (I think there's only 2 endings, out of five, that are not missable though). I didn't particularly mind this approach (but, as mentioned, I do have reservations about how some of them play out) Where I do take some issue with the game is how there's basically three "content blocks": there's the main story (intertwined with Johnny's), there's the love interests, and there's "the city" (side quests, NCPD call signs, etc). A fourth is, imho, missing for "V's friends", most of which have really nothing to say, or do, after their "part" is played (since there's only really 2 people, outside of the ones already mentioned, that know "what's up", that's a bit of a shame, but I digress). And fwiw I'm referring to: The problem I have with these "blocks" is that they don't really interact , they feel like entirely separate entities, that are very well done in their own right, but only overlap at very well defined points (if at all). The further into the game I got the more noticeable this became. There's not really any points where helping someone in a side quest ("city"-block) impacts how the main quest goes (not even in minor ways), and vice-versa: for the main quest "the city" feels like just a backdrop. Moreover none of the (possible) LIs ever comment on any of the (major) side quests either (for some of them, like Johnny's, that's a serious bummer), or hell most barely even comment on your "situation". As for gameplay, there's still ways to get around, I got double jump rather late and am seriously regretting that choice. Managed to get into some interesting places with it. But yes, combat is extremely unbalanced, especially hacking ends up being killer since there's not really any level scaling, so if you are level capped before starting the final quests there's not really any challenge to be found (the only reason I didn't one shot the "big bad" was because he has an invulnerability phase). Only way you can die is if some enemy sniper gets lucky with a critical head shot, and that probably wouldn't even happen if some of the attributes actually worked (some of the defensive attributes apparently just don't work). Crafting is also broken as hell in a few ways, on one end you can create stupendously overpowered gear (especially weapons), on the other hand it's ridiculously expensive to upgrade early game gear to keep it relevant in the endgame. So you're sometimes better of trying to do certain things as late as possible, just to avoid the upgrade costs. Not exactly desirable imho (not that you need any of that gear to get by, at least on normal) Another thing that's brought up constantly is the "police system". I played as a mercenary, not a petty thief or a lunatic, and I triggered it not even 5 times in 130hours. There honestly is no reason to ever steal vehicles from innocents at all, aside from "because I can", since you can summon yours whenever, and wherever, and if you can't, there's gangs all over with vehicles that you can grab without repercussions. The focus on this system by gamers, and reviewers alike is a bit baffling (well, CDPR promised, but still), game's not GTA and at this point I feel they would have been better off not adding a police system at all just to get rid of all the GTA comparisons. Now, granted, if actually using cars you'll probably end up killing innocents all over since driving (which is only sort of tolerable with a controller), and traffic AI, suck. The simplest workaround I found is to just use a motorcycle. You get one of the best ones in the game for free early on anyway and it bypasses the majority of the issues with traffic. Stealth, well, I put 3 points in "Cool" (aka Stealth) and managed to sneak my way through pretty much everything with that and a high hacking skill. Can't say I minded, but wouldn't call it balanced Still, the technical, and gameplay, issues are likely to get worked out, the story related stuff, much less likely. Welp, that became a tad longer than I intended (and there's a load more I could cover, but, err, let's not ). Imho the game's nowhere near as bad as people make it out to be, and in a lot better shape (at least on PC) than many prior games games that didn't receive this level of flak (looking at you, Fallout: New Vegas), if nothing else I do hope CDPR continues down this road, fixing up the obvious issues (bugs, broken mechanics, balacing) but leaving the things that do work alone (c&c, storytelling,...)

If you go into the game with no expectations it's a pretty good game with a lot of technical issues. Won't argue with anyone who wants to wait things out because of the technical issues/bugs though. As for "deeper running problems" without specifics that's not saying much. I do take issues with some of the stuff in the game, but it's generally not what most people/media keep hammering on.

Well, finished Cyberpunk 2077, and I gotta say, the endings were kinda disappointing. I wasn't expecting a "and they lived happily ever after", but unfortunately the game decided to commit one of the biggest narrative sins there is (imho, anyway): they changed the rules in the ending to force a desired outcome. Major spoilers inc, obviously:

Well, I'm not particularly good with controllers, and I sure as hell ain't chaining combos like this guy... I just got by on the basic combo set, like most people, I imagine, which, at least on normal difficulty, is perfectly adequate, albeit probably crude. I haven't stuck my neck inside the arenas yet, I sort of doubt I'd fare very well. If you're not enjoying third playthrough then I'm not sure it gets any better, honestly, but my memory after Ending B is kind of fuzzy of what happened when. I do know that A&B are the longest chunks though, so might as well make it to the end at this point and find out I guess...

NieR: Automata's combat is of the easy to learn, hard to master variety, which suits me just fine because I'm bad at it. If it were actually challenging I'd never have made it through the game. However, the DLC contains some arenas with supposedly harder bosses and I've seen some clips of people that mastered the combat system do things I didn't even realize were possible...feels like I barely even scratched the surface of it, really. The first two Routes (or playthroughs, if you prefer) just give you different perspective on the same situation, ever so slightly lifting the veil of what's really going on. If you've only just started playing as 9S you're on Route B (2nd playthrough), there will be differences with Route A, due to 9S's perspective, some will be significant, but most of it will be the same as in Route A. Side quest availability is also dependent on who you're playing as (might want to re-check areas regularly) It's Route C (which is entirely different from A & B) where things really get going. And yeah, first time I tried the game I gave up halfway through Route A because things were just meandering along and the control scheme (ugh, controllers) didn't really work for me. Second time around I pushed through, and am I glad I did.

Ah, reminds me of the underwater sandstorm of Conan Exiles Mostly playing Cyberpunk 2077. Think I've done all the major quests I had left (so the ones that aren't Gigs, or just NCPD markers), barring finishing up the Kerry quest chain. Whoever calls this game short must've been skipping most of the side content because I'm 118hours (and 51minutes) in according to Gog, and there's still plenty of Gig and NCPD markers to go around. The way I played is basically by not manually skipping time, ever. I did use the "wait here" feature of certain quests, and I did sleep a few times (a V's gotta sleep) but instead of skipping forward to force quest triggers I just did side content/exploration in the meantime. This way the "major" content is mostly nicely spread out so the side quests don't start feeling like too much of a slog. Still, the game could have done with some additional meaty quests, especially once you complete the Johnny quest chain there was really very little left except for Gigs to stay busy until the next stage triggered for the like two quests that unlock after. Anyway, at this point I'm mostly just putting off pushing towards the ending, since, given the rest of the game, I doubt any of the endings will end up being particularly cheerful... So let's attempt some predictions about the endings based on what I know:

Missed your chance to just answer with "No!" and confuse everyone Anyway, been rather hooked on Cyberpunk 2077. I've been saved most egregious bugs it seems (well, unless the game is yet to slap me with some broken quest chain down the line...), and graphical glitches have been very much limited (there were only 3 occasions I can recall: one floating person, 2 parked cars stuck in the ground, and some untextured terrain). Ran into one item glitch which is an invisible item, it doesn't have a picture in the inventory (does have a name though) and no textures, so if I can find a few more of those I can run around nude, while clothed, I guess. Literally unplayable Actual gameplay affecting bugs have mostly been weird UI breakage, the two most obnoxious issues being getting stuck in hacking mode and being unable to fire my weapon when I aim down sights. Both of them only fixable with a reload. The one quest breaking issue I've encountered so far is one of the Cyberpsycho quests that refuses to recognize a non-lethal takedown (it's the Mox one fwiw), possibly breaking the overarching questline. I sure hope all the previous ones registered, but I haven't gone back through my quest log to check how many I've already done... There's a bunch of systems that could use some serious work, driving (I didn't expect Forza Horizon, but come on...) and the UI (the map can be rage inducing if you tend to drag it with the mouse, like I do) being on top of the list for me. I also absolutely hate how double tapping a direction key dodges in that direction (and puts you out of stealth to top it off). I've done that way too often by accident and I couldn't find a way to turn it off. As for the story, the start feels kind of rushed. The "origin story" is really short and does not really give you much time to "get into" that part of your PCs life. After that you barely spend time with the main NPCs before the first big mission (and the actual start of the game), instead most of that timespan is covered by a cinematic montage of what you've been up to in that timespan. That first big mission itself has some very obvious cut content too (spoilers on The Heist mission): It has been uphill after that, but I haven't really touched the main quest past where it branches out in multiple quests. Given the criticism the game has gotten about "having nothing to say" I was pleasantly surprised how often quests touch upon various mental illnesses and how society is still unable to cope with them (and boy, there's quite a lot of reasons to pick up some kind of mental illness in Night City...).

Oh, quite a few people claim the game is unplayable on a GTX970, turns out it is, at least for me, perfectly playable. As for the bugs, yeah, there's quite a few though it hasn't quite gotten to the level where they're enough for me to shelve the game.

Made it past the Heist in Cyberpunk 2077 and getting absolutely bombarded with quests (and Gigs, just by walking around...), a lot of them "urgent", do any of them have actual timers, other than possibly failing by pushing the main quest too far? Because if they do, it's going to be an interesting (and frustrating) ride...

Hotfix 1.11 out for the progress stopper introduced in the 1.1 patch: https://forums.cdprojektred.com/index.php?threads/hotfix-1-11.11077733/

Well, not going to post a lot of these since they're already all over the place, unless something extraordinary happens, but this is CP2077 on a GeForce GTX970 (on an AMD Ryzen 5900x, so the CPU certainly isn't a bottleneck), getting between 30 and 50 FPS. Would love to upgrade so I could get a stable 60fps but given the drama online I expected this to look like trash and be barely playable. So far it's been a pleasant surprise, at least on the graphical front.

Quick update, restarting the game got me past it without the bug. But yeah, there be dragons...

Might want to make a backup of your current install since downgrading basically requires a full re-download. The patch appears to have totally broken hacking of cameras for me, I'm now locked into the "camera mode" and the only way out is to reload the game. Exact same thing happened after the reload. Will have to test on another mission to see whether it's a structural issue.

Wikipedia seems to point in that direction too, indeed. Interesting, I'm pretty sure I read 1 and 3 of the reboots were basically the same team. They sure feel that way with the return of the QTEs and the overall writing style in Shadow. I felt both 1 and 3 suffered from the "Hey, let's do something obviously dumb, or have another character do so, just so we can move the plot forward", which 2 didn't quite have (well not bad enough that I can recall instances anyway). Guess it being another studio could also explain some of the "regressions".

Well, been playing it a bit on my GTX970 and it runs just fine. Not great, but fine (~30-40fps, depending on area). At least on whatever it picked as default settings for my system. Probably of note that while my GPU is old, the rest of the system is not, as I recently upgraded to a Ryzen 5900x and the game is on a rather fast NVMe SSD. GPU prices, however, are a bit too rich for my tastes right now so the GTX970 will have to hang in there a while longer. Game definitely has issues (I'm sure this surprises many people), had a bunch of CTDs already, always when taking screenshots though. So quicksave -> screenshot it is Alt-tabbing is also a bad idea as it messes things up in weird ways (eg. some controls stop working, notably had it with the sprint button, or the game starts to feel like slow motion while FPS is still fine. Stuff like that) Other than that the only bug I ran into was when there's random shoot-outs between cops and a gang, and you help the cops, they go hostile once they find one of the gangers corpses. Rather annoying but I'm just ignoring those events for now. Haven't seen anything else really weird though, aside from an NPC spawning right in my face, which, while not exactly helping immersion, probably isn't a bug either.

Should just get the story people from Rise, which I felt was the best of the three in that respect, by a long shot. Both Reboot and Shadow had a lot of seriously eye-roll moments. Rise far less so. Shouldn't be too surprising as Reboot and Shadow were made by the same team, while Rise supposedly were other people.

Well, it's paywalled, so guess I'll never know...

Yeah, ok, but is it any good?

Hah, got that one in the sales as well. Should be interesting to read some opinions while I play through Sense.

NG+ in Sense: A Cyberpunk Ghost Story. So this is where they disable the quicksaves. So far it's been retreading the same path as on the original playthrough. So the lack of quicksaves is mostly annoying when you want to quit and do something else, but hasn't, so far anyway, been much of a hindrance otherwise.

Cyberpunk doesn't sound like it's anywhere near as bad as either of those though? Cyberpunk might have technical issues, but FF XIV was broken on every front (bad engine, bad controls, bad UI, bad mechanics,...). I mean, FF XIV's beta was such a terrible experience it took my entire guild moving to that game before I could even be coerced into playing it, and that was not even a year ago now, so almost 10 years after the beta... Talk about scars (to inject some positivity: FF XIV is pretty good now) And FO76, well, FO4 online, what did people honestly expect when you take the worst FO game to date, take out every redeeming quality, and add some more of one of the most iconic features that is left: bugs...

Finished my first playthrough of Sense: A Cyberpunk Ghost Story, which took me about 5.6 hours, according to Steam. The game has been quite enjoyable so far. Despite the store page claiming no autosave etc. there was autosave and even quicksave, at least on default settings. Presumably added after release. And thankfully so, as I feel the Resident Evil (1) inspired save system would have been mostly annoying given the relatively slow pace. The story ramp up pretty slowly during the first playthrough, but the game is designed to need three playthroughs to get to the "real" ending, so should be interesting where things go.