Cyberpuink 2077

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CTPhipps
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Cyberpuink 2077

Post by CTPhipps »

So, I've picked it up as a preorder and am currently playing it.

I'm a HUGE cyberpunk fan and this really does feel like a loving homage to all of Mike Pondsmith's work. It feels a bit Bubblegum Crisis and 80s anime over newer more modern cyberpunk ideas and a lot of this has been recycled over the years by other groups but it is a massively beautiful place. I'm enjoying playing a corpo stealth-based Hitman.

However, it does feel a bit too much like Skyrim in gameplay and that's not a good thing.

Still, the world is breathtaking as is the detail and characters.
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Re: Cyberpuink 2077

Post by CTPhipps »

Cyberpunk 2077 review

"Capitalism, capitalism never changes."

Cyberpunk 2077 is a game that has been hotly anticipated for the better part of nine years. Delayed by both the mammoth juggernaut that was The Witcher 3 and its DLC plus the inability to get it to work on current generation consoles, it was finally released in the tail end of 2020. The people here at Grimdark Magazine were hotly anticipating this game and I had to fistfight the others to see who would get to review it.

Cyberpunk is the purest expression of the grimdark science fiction series. It combines noir, moral ambiguity, a nihilistic worldview, and genre tropes to create a world where doing good is possible but only on the individual level. Most of its antiheroes don't even bother with that, only caring about their next paycheck and their partners (if even that). On the Keanu Reeves scale, they tend to be Johnny Mnemonic and John Wick over Neo. Which is good because this game stars Keanu Reeves as your inner Tyler Durden.

I'm familiar with the world of Cyberpunk 2077 from my experience with Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk 2020. Crafted in the Eighties, it was never the biggest sellar among tabletop roleplaying games but it managed to combine Mad Max, Akira, Blade Runner, Max Headroom: The Series, and a half-dozen other sources to create a fully realized dystopian world that went on to inspire dozens of other settings. If you think about a generic cyberpunk world, as if such a thing could be, you're probably actually thinking about Mike's vision as it could do anything from the movies you loved.

A brief rundown for laymen is that the United States has broken up into several new countries due to the collapse of the economy due to a combination of corporate malfeseance as well as depleted resources. Environmental devastation means that much of the Midwest is now ruined wasteland with feuding nomadic clans, cities have become overcrowded urban hellscapes, and corporations now wield the power of nations. Technology has flourished, though, with cybernetics becoming ubiquitous even for healthy able-bodied people and space travel is commercialized.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a future extrapolated from Mike Pondsmith's future of 2020, not our time so some people may be confused by this. Either way, it is a world that is still relevant due to the fact our 2020 is pretty much a hyper-consequence of the policies enacted in the 1980s. Many of the same greedy materialist corporate executives who rose to power then are still in power today, looting the economy and feeding the masses a steady diet of propaganda.

Cyberpunk is inherently political and this game manages the careful balance of making its points clear while not feeling the need to lecture on what is self-obvious. When you ask whether the marketplace shrimp is fresh and the vendor says, "Absolutely. It's all raised in the aquarium downtown. None of that toxic crap from the bay." You know what it's saying without sounding unnatural. The game touches on everything from for-profit health care, police brutality, corporate malfeseance, rising poverty, defunded social services, and the treatment of sex workers. All within the first few hours and it uses these to tell interesting stories.

The plot of Cyberpunk 2077 is an interwoven set of crime-based stories around a central narrative that is about a miraculous peace of technology gone horribly wrong. I'd call it "Ghost in the Shell meets Fight Club." The stakes are very low in Cyberpunk 2077, at least compared to most Triple A games with it being more science fiction Dragon Age II than Dragon Age: Origins or Inqusiition. This is about personal stakes and protecting your small corner of Night City rather than anything world changing.

Gameplay-wise the game ranges from being excellent to a mess. It basically plays like Skyrim with guns, cyberware substituting for magic. There's also elements of Deus Ex and Watch_Dogs with the ability to sneak up on enemies to auto-kill them or hacking security cameras. Honestly, it doesn't exactly mold all of these divergent gameplay styles together perfectly but feels more like a Frankenstein's Monster combination of whatever they thought was cool. There's just too much going on with looting and shooting, gathering armor types, cybernetics, and hundreds of perks. Gameplay would strongly benefit from being much simpler and closer to Deus Ex or even just the tabletop game.

The character creation engine is pretty robust with the option of making characters ranging from the absolutely gorgeous to the supremely ugly. Much has been made of the power to make characters of trans identity but this hasn't been anything new since Saints Row 2. Your pronouns are also tied to your voice, which is a cheap fix that kind of undermines the benefit. Still, I had a lot of fun making Agent G from my cyberpunk novels and playing him. You get to choose an origin for your character but these scenes take about ten minutes to resolve and aren't really that interesting.

Generally, the game consists of you traveling around Night City and shooting up the place at various gang bases while also performing various investigations on behalf of clients. V is a mercenary and criminal for hire so they don't need to justify why they're doing 90% of the missions they do. The writing is top notch with virtually every type of corruption available. Sadly, their character is a bit pre-set with often very little variation on their responses. V is a likable character but, unfortunately, the straight man to a lot of the more eccentric character's reactions.

The game runs pretty smoothly on Playstation 5 and the newest Xbox iteration but is a pretty buggy mess at launch for Playstation 4 and Xbox One S. It was actually hard to see in places due to the lighting too with it moving from atmospheric to, "how the hell do I get out of this room?" Patches have already improved a lot of the most glaring flaws but long loading times, clipping, and the occasional floating head. Still, I had a lot of fun just shooting up Night City's gangs and breaking necks like a cybernetic Punisher or Solid Snake and that worked just fine.

In conclusion, this is a solid and entertaining game but people should adjust their expectations. The amount of bugs and somewhat confusing overcomplicated gameplay hurts the overall experience. If you're using a last generation console, you're probably best to either wait a month or two for patches but current gen should definitely buy this right away. It is a fantastic setting, characters, and full of amazingly written stories. I also feel it is a game with many strong opinions that are presented with a world that makes them fun to hear. Plus Keanu Reeves is awesome here, proving himself the undisputed god of non-literary cyberpunk. Maybe co-god with William Gibson of the entire genre.
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Woodclaw
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Re: Cyberpuink 2077

Post by Woodclaw »

I'm a big fan of the pen-n-paper Cyberpunk game and I've been working for quite a lot of time at translating the new edition.
I like 2077 in general, but I agree that it's not the perfect game that so many hyped it to be, but I love it nonetheless... except for one thing: the timeline.
Don't get me wrong, I like references and fanservice as much as the next guy, but seeing characters like Rogue and (especially) Saburo Arasaka still alive and well in 2077 made me think that, maybe a shorter time gap would have been more effective.
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NoOneofConsequence
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Re: Cyberpuink 2077

Post by NoOneofConsequence »

What system are you playing on?
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Re: Cyberpuink 2077

Post by RainOnTheSun »

Everything I hear about Cyberpunk 2077 makes me think that it's probably worth getting on my computer... in a year. I might try and make my character from Davies' future game.
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Re: Cyberpuink 2077

Post by CTPhipps »

It's only a few more days until the massive update and a few more after that until the Phantom Liberty DLC drops. They've stopped the embargo on both and we're already getting the deets about what it's going to be like:

Update 2.0

* New Skill Tree
* Cold Blooded is no longer a thing
* Crafting is no longer tied to Technical. You can craft anything as long as you have the Blueprints.
* Body limit for cybernetics now exists.
* You can improve cybernetics.
* Vehicular combat now exists
* Police in Night City now has a star system, will pursue, new AI, and Max Tac that will hit at 5 stars.
* You can now alter your V's appearance rather than just clothes.

Phantom Liberty

* You can play the game directly with a new character.
* The new area, Dogtown, will be composed of three districts in Eastern Pacifica.
* The Voodoo Boys will be back and massively expanded.
* The major faction will be the Barghests, ex-NUSA soldiers.
* Mr. Hands will have his own questline like the other Fixers, 10 missions.
* The campaign will be about 30 hours long.
* There will be a new ending to the main campaign.
* All of the love interests will have content if you've finished their quests.
* Dynamic events will now occur in the campaign.
* El Capitan will introduce you to car thefts around Night City ala Grand Theft Auto and so many other games.
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Re: Cyberpuink 2077

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Re: Cyberpuink 2077

Post by Shock »

With how bad the driving mechanics are, I feel like adding vehicular combat may be a mistake. Why add emphasis to the worst subsystem in the game?
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Re: Cyberpuink 2077

Post by CTPhipps »

Shock wrote: Fri Sep 22, 2023 3:53 pm With how bad the driving mechanics are, I feel like adding vehicular combat may be a mistake. Why add emphasis to the worst subsystem in the game?
They've massively upgraded driving to but I fast travel anywhere so I didn't get much experience with it.
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Re: Cyberpuink 2077

Post by Shock »

Motorcycles are fun because you can weave around traffic. Anything bigger has been an exercise in frustration for me
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