Cyberpunk 2077 - PS5 and XSeries versions out now + major patch

[smac]

1 hour ago, choddo said:

@Alan Stock I’ve got a smart sniper rifle. It’s pretty damn cool. Will sometimes tweak someone right on the forebonce for ~3000.

I had a dumb, silenced pistol with a base 40-60 damage per shot that could do huge damage on headshots - think it had the silencer with the 2x damage multiplier when firing from stealth for 15% base damage hit, plus a bunch of kit giving critical damage multipliers. When you got a critical headshot, it all multiplied massively.

 

And yes, 1:30 am and still playing it. Just did the 'Violence' gig. Getting the feeling that there's a bigger picture out there, and a lot of seemingly unrelated stuff is going to tie up together.

 

Apart from Burning Crotch Man. He's just a weirdo.

[Alan Stock]

3 hours ago, choddo said:

@Alan Stock I’ve got a smart sniper rifle. It’s pretty damn cool. Will sometimes tweak someone right on the forebonce for ~3000.

Picked up a heavy MG in a bandit area in the badlands after doing 80% of the camp with stealth which was most amusing. But you can’t keep it. Just took it over to some Militech twats 300m away, and let them have all the explodey bullets out of it.

 

Now can someone help my brain with the haxoring grid thing. How come sometimes it will let you pick a number which isn’t on the code you have to match? And it pushes the required code sequence one over to the right. Is it only if it can see that you still have a chance of entering the rest of the sequence in order?

 

Smart sniper rifle?! That sounds so OP!

 

Weirdly just after I posted I ended up in a scripted fight where my smart assault rifle came in really handy. The enemies were all using cover and at range and the bullets were totally curving down to hit them behind the boxes they were crouched behind. Not great damage but easier than trying to snipe whilst taking incoming fire. So maybe smart weapons are pretty good in some circumstances.

 

That was the first fight where I tried boosting the difficulty from Hard to Very Hard. Bad idea. Because its a kind of scripted fight you only have a few viable cover points (for my build at least). As soon as I bumped up the difficulty the enemies threw much more grenades and usually they were bio grenades which had a big enough radius to cover most of the area I could safely take cover in. So no matter how far I got into the encounter, eventually a grenade I just couldn't avoid would sail in and there was nowhere to run to. Gave up after about 7 attempts and switched back to Hard. Very Hard might be viable with a more beefy build, but my character's got like body 3 or 4 and only about 120HP. I will probably try putting the difficulty up again for other encounters, especially as usually you can use stealth or hacking to take down enemies or at least get an edge (no option for that in this encounter). It was just a terrible fight for that difficulty and character build. I appreciate you can toggle the difficulty whenever though, always nice to see.

 

@choddo you can pick any number, it doesn't have to match any of the sequences but it will fill your 'buffer' - the empty squares at the top. You only have a limited buffer in order to fit as many sequences as you can. Sometimes you'll have to enter a few useless numbers just to reach ones that you want (for example if the top row at the start doesn't contain any of the numbers you need). As long as there are enough free buffer slots to enter one of the remaining sequences it'll let you carry on. I recently spent a load of money on an epic cyberdeck at the ripper and now I have around 7 buffer which means I can try to match two or three sequences in one go. It actually makes it really easy and I know the upgrades you get earlier on only make it easier.

 

Honestly I'm dissapointed in this difficulty curve for systems hacking, just because you want to go the hacking route shouldn't make the hacking much easier, it should just allow you access to better hacking options and rewards but still have an appropriate challenge. I suppose it might empower you in its current state, but I'd feel more like a master hacker if I'm busting really hard sequences that lower intelligence characters can't even access. Instead, upgrading breach perks and cyberdecks make hacking boring as it gets easier and easier, although I do appreciate trying to get all 3 rewards in a hack by trying to fit in 3 sequences. I wish there was more focus on cyberspace and hacking in the game, more than one little hacking mini game would have been nice as well. The game has been hinting at more forays into cyberspace (no spoilers please) but even so I was hoping for at least mini games in the vein of Shadowrun. In the Shadowrun mechanics you have all these different hacking stats and you use programs like ICE breakers and hostile systems are almost like mini-dungeons with different 'rooms' with various obstacles to fight with your programs or hack around. I know that kind of complexity wouldn't fit in this game but I was hoping for a bit more than a number grid for every systems hack in the game (so far at least). 

[dataDave]

@SuperCapes

 

I'd certainly prefer that over the community being expected to fix everything. I think they are going to come out with some form of creation kit later, once the fundamentals are tidied up.

 

One very small tweak I'd like would be to increase damage across the board. It shouldn't take 20 bullets to the face to kill someone, at the same time it's not much fun running around as a bullet sponge also. I'd like headshots to be one-hit kills (cyberware/armour permitting), for instance. Much like what the Smilodon mod does for Skyrim, make damage realistic on a slide of 1 to 5. Maybe there is already something in the .ini settings...

 

I had an amazing session on this last night. Managed to work through several side quests which were initially proving very difficult. Each one took three or four attempts before reaching glory. Picked up a few decent upgrades as well for my efforts. Looking forward to finishing off the Delamain string tonight maybe, I'm hoping for a decent reward out of that.

[Scruff]

3 minutes ago, Fallows said:

Looking forward to finishing off the Delamain string tonight maybe, I'm hoping for a decent reward out of that.

 

I'm doing it now on my second playthrough having not even started the quest on first one. I'm hoping for a horn or an AI that shouts "beep beep MOTHERFUCKER". It'd be ace considering the squiffy handling of the cars.

[Cosmic_Guru]

10 hours ago, choddo said:

@Alan Stock

Now can someone help my brain with the haxoring grid thing. How come sometimes it will let you pick a number which isn’t on the code you have to match? And it pushes the required code sequence one over to the right. Is it only if it can see that you still have a chance of entering the rest of the sequence in order?

Essentially yes.  It's buffer size dependent - you can add duff inputs for so long as there is still space available  to input  at least one correct sequence.

[Padaxes]

1 hour ago, Fallows said:

 

One very small tweak I'd like would be to increase damage across the board. It shouldn't take 20 bullets to the face to kill someone, at the same time it's not much fun running around as a bullet sponge also. I'd like headshots to be one-hit kills.

Have you tried the sniper rifles? I one shot almost everything with mine. Much more satisfying and useful as it does it through cover as well.

[Cosmic_Guru]

Silenced hand guns will also one shot to the head.  There are also debuffs you can apply to all enemies via Breach protocol which reduce their resistance to physical damage and damage effects.   Useful if force ends up being required. 

[footle]

2 hours ago, Fallows said:

 

 

One very small tweak I'd like would be to increase damage across the board

If I wander up to a bunch of goons in a "very high" rated thing, then I'll tend to get one-shotted. You could try that?

[RubberJohnny]

I just realised when I was praising the sidequests before, I wasn't actually doing any of them, I was just doing the side-jobs where you raid a building and rescue people and wondering why my reputation had maxed out at 60.

 

There's actually full quest chains for the people you meet like Judy or Panam that are done to the quality of the main quests (which makes this even more like Mankind Divided), now my rep is climbing up towards 100.

[dataDave]

1 hour ago, footle said:

If I wander up to a bunch of goons in a "very high" rated thing, then I'll tend to get one-shotted. You could try that?

The problem with that is that they will take 3x as many bullets to the head to kill. I understand I've yet to dump any talents into increased damage and crit, but more realistic balance across the board could prove interesting.

[smac]

3 hours ago, Scruff said:

 

I'm doing it now on my second playthrough having not even started the quest on first one. I'm hoping for a horn or an AI that shouts "beep beep MOTHERFUCKER". It'd be ace considering the squiffy handling of the cars.

I think the rewards are supposed to be the, uh, interesting personalities you meet along the way...

 

I'm also hoping it leads to more work for Delamain later.

[footle]

31 minutes ago, Fallows said:

The problem with that is that they will take 3x as many bullets to the head to kill. I understand I've yet to dump any talents into increased damage and crit, but more realistic balance across the board could prove interesting.

I’m mostly just frying their heads with cybernetics so the number of bullets doesn’t mean much to me.

[Floshenbarnical]

1 hour ago, RubberJohnny said:

I just realised when I was praising the sidequests before, I wasn't actually doing any of them, I was just doing the side-jobs where you raid a building and rescue people and wondering why my reputation had maxed out at 60.

 

There's actually full quest chains for the people you meet like Judy or Panam that are done to the quality of the main quests (which makes this even more like Mankind Divided), now my rep is climbing up towards 100.

i was walking through a random market and opened up a mission thread by overhearing some dude play guitar

[RubberJohnny]

Also I just realised that you can remotely disarm mines rather than sneak up close and interact with them, you get Breach Protocol XP vs Engineering XP.

 

I spent ages at the farm with all the mines disarming them or remotely detonating them to get a level in each.

[smac]

22 minutes ago, Floshenbarnical said:

i was walking through a random market and opened up a mission thread by overhearing some dude play guitar

Yeah, I got the initial comment from Johnny, but haven't worked out how to trigger the rest of the gig. Not even seen the guitarist, so it seemed like a random comment about 'chops'.

 

We're in a street market - did he spot some nice pork chops? I worked out what he must be talking about, him being a guitarist and all.

[smac]

57 minutes ago, smac said:

 

I'm also hoping it leads to more work for Delamain later.

Just had another call, so yes it does.

 

Wonder who the VA for the main Delamain AI was; sounds a bit like Sean Pertwee.

[ZOK]

I was loving wandering around the docks the other day, people watching in the street markets and generally mooching the vibe.

 

I think part of the problem this game has is it is so fantastically detailed and ‘real’ in its depiction of an environment that when the NPCs or buildings that inhabit it act like they are in a game (or as is more often the case, don’t react) it is even more jarring than usual. Half the time you just expect to be able to do anything in the world you want, and the world react to you.

[Nobuo's Organ]

The mod which makes any weapon non-lethal is a bit OP for cyberpsycho sidequests and others which have a no-kill bonus objective. Just sniping entire outposts of people through walls "non-lethally".

[RubberJohnny]

I still feel I haven't explored the city properly, even 45 hours in, I know small pockets, like around your starting megabuilding, the shantytown, the badlands, Japantown and so on, but not how to intuitively navigate to them from each other, or the areas in between. It feels like it would be too big to fit in your head.

 

I decided to do a little exploring and started climbing a fire escape near Japantown, at a certain point it was blocked off, so I jumped to a ledge on the building opposite, and then back higher up. Near the top of the building it was blocked off again, but I could jump to the nearby roof and then scale some antennas to get high enough to leap back across. On top I discovered a two storey penthouse with a Japanese garden - clearly some future mission location I hadn't encountered yet, but devoid of enemies. Unfortunately the elevators wouldn't let me down even though I nabbed an access token, clearly the developers didn't expect me to get up there this way. The view over the city was pretty spectacular.

[Kryptonian]

Can anyone show me where the Red Dirt Bar in Santo Domingo is please? I tried looking around the area and failing that, googled it and still no joy

[alex3d]

1 hour ago, ZOK said:

I was loving wandering around the docks the other day, people watching in the street markets and generally mooching the vibe.

 

I think part of the problem this game has is it is so fantastically detailed and ‘real’ in its depiction of an environment that when the NPCs or buildings that inhabit it act like they are in a game (or as is more often the case, don’t react) it is even more jarring than usual. Half the time you just expect to be able to do anything in the world you want, and the world react to you.

 

Absolutely. Actually I got a bit angry with CDPR today while playing the game. I was walking through the camp and the ride towards the camp was magnificient, with the city fading out and the countryside emerging. But then of course, as you say, the camp is just an empty shell, a utility to advance the story. There's a camp fire with people, beautifully animated NPC people, sitting around and all you can do is press x to "talk" to them, receive a shallow "What's with you?!" answer and move the fuck on. Why? Why not designing 10 fewer cars and put some development time in NPC dialogue options? And it's not like there are no best practices out there already.

It is so strange tbecause the game's narrative is its great strength. Gameplay is okay, nothing to write home about. But the way the narrative is being presented is ace. And that is why it is so strange that the stuff that should back the story up (AI, NPC, conversations of random people, newspapers that you can actually read; I'm not even talking about interacting with Pachinko machines, it's about the basic stuff) is just decoration material.

[choddo]

11 hours ago, Alan Stock said:

 

Smart sniper rifle?! That sounds so OP!

 

Weirdly just after I posted I ended up in a scripted fight where my smart assault rifle came in really handy. The enemies were all using cover and at range and the bullets were totally curving down to hit them behind the boxes they were crouched behind. Not great damage but easier than trying to snipe whilst taking incoming fire. So maybe smart weapons are pretty good in some circumstances.

 

That was the first fight where I tried boosting the difficulty from Hard to Very Hard. Bad idea. Because its a kind of scripted fight you only have a few viable cover points (for my build at least). As soon as I bumped up the difficulty the enemies threw much more grenades and usually they were bio grenades which had a big enough radius to cover most of the area I could safely take cover in. So no matter how far I got into the encounter, eventually a grenade I just couldn't avoid would sail in and there was nowhere to run to. Gave up after about 7 attempts and switched back to Hard. Very Hard might be viable with a more beefy build, but my character's got like body 3 or 4 and only about 120HP. I will probably try putting the difficulty up again for other encounters, especially as usually you can use stealth or hacking to take down enemies or at least get an edge (no option for that in this encounter). It was just a terrible fight for that difficulty and character build. I appreciate you can toggle the difficulty whenever though, always nice to see.

 

@choddo you can pick any number, it doesn't have to match any of the sequences but it will fill your 'buffer' - the empty squares at the top. You only have a limited buffer in order to fit as many sequences as you can. Sometimes you'll have to enter a few useless numbers just to reach ones that you want (for example if the top row at the start doesn't contain any of the numbers you need). As long as there are enough free buffer slots to enter one of the remaining sequences it'll let you carry on. I recently spent a load of money on an epic cyberdeck at the ripper and now I have around 7 buffer which means I can try to match two or three sequences in one go. It actually makes it really easy and I know the upgrades you get earlier on only make it easier.

 

Honestly I'm dissapointed in this difficulty curve for systems hacking, just because you want to go the hacking route shouldn't make the hacking much easier, it should just allow you access to better hacking options and rewards but still have an appropriate challenge. I suppose it might empower you in its current state, but I'd feel more like a master hacker if I'm busting really hard sequences that lower intelligence characters can't even access. Instead, upgrading breach perks and cyberdecks make hacking boring as it gets easier and easier, although I do appreciate trying to get all 3 rewards in a hack by trying to fit in 3 sequences. I wish there was more focus on cyberspace and hacking in the game, more than one little hacking mini game would have been nice as well. The game has been hinting at more forays into cyberspace (no spoilers please) but even so I was hoping for at least mini games in the vein of Shadowrun. In the Shadowrun mechanics you have all these different hacking stats and you use programs like ICE breakers and hostile systems are almost like mini-dungeons with different 'rooms' with various obstacles to fight with your programs or hack around. I know that kind of complexity wouldn't fit in this game but I was hoping for a bit more than a number grid for every systems hack in the game (so far at least). 

Agreed. The mental image I had of runners hacking corpo ICE from Neuromancer was wild. Shadowrun at least attempted something, this is just very basic.

[Wiper]

Ironically, this is something where it feels like the game would have benefited from following the design of Cyberpunk 2020's maligned netrunning (which saw the party netrunner spending potentially hours having a mini-adventure while the rest of the table were bored to death), rather than modern Cyberpunk's 'run a programme, make a stat check, wait for it to process in real time", which is much more enjoyable for the party, but much less satisfying for the netrunner.

 

(personally, I'd have liked a modern Interphase/System Shock approach - free-floating first-person shooting in abstract space, all the better if they'd kept those games' graphical fidelity)

[Mr.Crowley]

I've just hit the 40 hour mark and I think I'm nearing the end of act 1. In a year with Tsushima and The Last of Us 2 this is probably easily in my top 3.

It does crash on me occasionally but the PS5 loads so quickly it barely matters, apart from that I've not had any bugs of notice.

I really hope the developers are able to continue to add features to this amazing world and give it a bit more depth around the edges, what's already there is amazing in my opinion.

[Alan Stock]

@Mr.Crowley I'm curious what you have been spending your time doing? Have you been able to access a lot of gigs/sidequests? Honestly I would just get through Act 1, its more of an intro to the game and everything really opens up in Act 2 (plus you don't lose any of the sidequests etc). 

[robdood]

12 minutes ago, Alan Stock said:

@Mr.Crowley I'm curious what you have been spending your time doing? Have you been able to access a lot of gigs/sidequests? Honestly I would just get through Act 1, its more of an intro to the game and everything really opens up in Act 2 (plus you don't lose any of the sidequests etc). 

Nah, I'm loving literally walking everywhere really slow and just looking at stuff and listening.  Atmosphere so good. 

 

(until two cars brush against each other gentle and one goes flying directly upwards for no reason.)

[Alan Stock]

Same here, I spend ages wandering about and stuff and it took me quite a while to get through Act 1. But you don't lose any of that by progressing to Act 2, plus it opens a ton of extra stuff to do, so there's more to find in the areas you're exploring. Nothing wrong with taking your time at all, just worth pointing out it might be worth doing especially if you're finding the world a bit bereft of side stuff to do/find.

[deerokus]

Act 1 is like the white orchard in witcher 3. Get out of there into the game proper asap

 

[Thor]

And that's the credits rolling for a second time, but not a second playthrough.

 

Two different ending spoilers...

Spoiler

Last night my V said fuck it, tossed the pills away and blew his brains out. The phone messages in the end credits were full of bitterness and sorrow.

 

This evening I took up Hanako Arasaka on her offer, wound up in an orbital medical facility, Johnny shredded and gone, and to the news that Saboru Arasaka had taken over Yorinobu's body. As for V, despite successfully removing the relic, he had only months to live. They conducted loads of tests, with a nice (if on the nose) nod to the  Voight-Kampff test. In the end Takemura (I saved him) turned up offering a choice:  

 

Pack my bags and live the remaining months on earth (you don't get continue playing, sadly, I tried this) or...

 

Become an engram in Mikoshi, and wait for a suitable body as a host.  This one seemed fitting. 

 

No matter the choice, V dies, but the messages from friends on earth are more upbeat than when V just shot himself, they think you're still alive, just in orbit.

 

This was a very intriguing ending, I liked it, also liked how downbeat it was.

 

Now I'm reloading the PONR and am gonna get help from Panam.

 

[smac]

4 hours ago, Nobuo's Organ said:

The mod which makes any weapon non-lethal is a bit OP for cyberpsycho sidequests and others which have a no-kill bonus objective. Just sniping entire outposts of people through walls "non-lethally".

Cyberpsychos are supposed to be taken down nonlethally?

 

Whoops!