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

[Alan Stock]

Personally I'd wait for the next big patch in January on base PS4 if you are thinking on getting it on that format and see how that pans out. Otherwise if you're wanting to get it just now I'd definitely go for another format (apart from base Xbox). At the moment the performance and graphics on base PS4 isn't great (although better than it was on day 1), but really its the extra bugs and jank that is why I wouldn't really recommend it right now.

 

I've been fortunate in that I got Divinity Original Sin 2 on the Switch for Xmas so I have something else big to lose myself in. I'm planning to only dip into cyberpunk again a wee bit until the January patch in the hopes the experience will be a bit better after that

[multi]

I've just received an email from Microsoft with a £10 refund for buying/pre ordering this through Xbox store.

 

I didn't request a refund at all. 

 

It's puzzled me a bit. I haven't tried playing the game since I got the email but I'm assuming it's still available to play and this is probably a good will gesture?

 

Anyone else had the same or similar?

 

Edit - email was received 1.10 am this morning

[Mr Do 71]

54 minutes ago, multi said:

I've just received an email from Microsoft with a £10 refund for buying/pre ordering this through Xbox store.

 

I didn't request a refund at all. 

 

It's puzzled me a bit. I haven't tried playing the game since I got the email but I'm assuming it's still available to play and this is probably a good will gesture?

 

Anyone else had the same or similar?

 

Edit - email was received 1.10 am this morning

I got the £10 refund too.

[Isaac]

[Kryptonian]

Maybe it’s to put people off getting a refund and to stick with it? I opted for a refund in the end and will buy it again when the series x/s patch comes out to do the different paths & endings. I’ve not really played Witcher 3 (done the tutorial I think) so might sink some time into that until then

[Minion]

I'm absolutely loving this and some events have been different in my new playthrough but yes I do feel that if I had played this in a year it would be a much better, less buggy experience, there is an amazing game in here underneath all the jank. I don't regret it though it's just what I needed for my xmas time off.

[smac]

2 hours ago, Alan Stock said:

the next big patch in January on base PS4

Ah, bollocks.

[Yuujiin]

Thanks for the advice. Might just hold out till summer when I can hopefully pick up my own PS5.

 

Still got plenty on the Switch to keep me going .

[Thor]

A particular ending spoiler...

Spoiler

On my second play I've unlocked the secret ending, but at lvl 30 I'm too underpowered. I get ruined in the Arasaka hallways. Reckon I'll need to be level 40 before attempting it.

 

[max renn]

Just cleared Judy's story arc...so much amaze

Spoiler

and feeling sad now... I liked Judy, she was ok.

 

[Floshenbarnical]

10 minutes ago, max renn said:

Just cleared Judy's story arc...so much amaze and feeling sad now... I liked Judy, she was ok.

smells like spoilers

 

ill kill you

[Thor]

36 minutes ago, Floshenbarnical said:

smells like spoilers

 

ill kill you

Don't sweat it, but @max renn you should be tagging that.

[Floshenbarnical]

I sort of don’t want to play any more

[Uzi]

Just finished and got one of the endings - took around 85 hours to do all the insane amount of side gigs/quests and exploration and wow. I've been obsessed with this since the 10th. 

 

I want to go into this right away and say over the last few years - I've genuinely stopped looking at media I enjoy through a critical eye. I'll enjoy those critical viewpoints - whether it be from review sites/youtube/people on forums - but I'm out of that. I recognise flaws but not really here or there to dwell on them when I'm enjoying something so much. So get it out of the way - yes there were some bugs and a few visual discrepancies but it never tore me out. What it did do was make me realise peoples grievances were real but I hope it didn't sour the potential enjoyment of this world too much because I thoroughly enjoyed living with V through the last month. 

 

What really got to me is while the gameplay is genuinely nothing special - it's good but nothing out of this world sure, it's the narrative glue holding it all together. Each side gig despite falling into a few types of work that gameplay wise hardly varied were just really enjoyable self contained tales. I'll give an example that I don't feel is a spoiler and I want to illustrate why I loved my time in night city so much.

 

I got a gig to find who was producing BD's involving kids...I won't say more. A father who had lost their kid in one hired me via a fixer and essentially you find the place and find a sick father/son combo who are editing and producing them. When you are there and get the BD - you have the full freedom to blow their brains out because of what they have done. I thought justice was in order - so out came the shotgun and went onto the son - the BD producing father actually reacts to this and crys out in pain at witnessing his son being taken out before putting him out of his misery too. The fact that this interaction was accounted for was all the little things that made these moments so fucking memorable. And there are so many of them. Stuff like the story behind each cyberpsycho encounter and the incredible enviromental story telling that went with them.

 

The characters in this are also not exceptionally written - there isn't anything specifically groundbreaking or unique in these. Stereotypes are abundant - yet still, you go through ongoing journeys with some of them and go through shit together and I felt genuinely connected to a lot of them. The game needs to get more credit for how well it uses the phone/text system too. I was surprised that outside of missions I was able to call a few familiar faces and explore quite a bit of entirely optional and interesting dialogue.  

 

It also kinda helped that maxed out on PC this is genuinely at times the best looking video game I have ever seen - the atmosphere and detail is an insane work of passion and I felt like a tourist in some weird dreamlike place. 

 

Like everything else the combat isn't groundbreaking but fuck the right weapons and situations just felt so satisfying. The feedback on a lot of the weapons was great and I almost wish they had a Doom style weapon wheel so you can could use a tonne at once - I always had a hard time sticking to three. Being able to RPG the system and break it was fun too which I always appreciate in these. By the end I had one pistol that was doing 160k damage per shot lol. 

 

That is just a random spatter of thoughts but it is rare a game comes along and makes me want to just genuinely lose myself in the sights/sounds and shit of another world and CDPR did it. I think it's worth remembering that Witcher 3 has been their only actual open world title before this and that took two previous lore and world building games to get them to that place. This was hugely ambitious and it is clear that the limitations of time/money and tech did have to compromise some of their original vision with this thing, but i haven't jacked in so deep into another world like this since Witcher 3/Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim which are my favourite three open world RPG's. This is up there with them because it took the stuff I love about Deus Ex too and smushed them together into this flawed but absolutely immersive masterpiece. Ok my chooms - you have fun don't be a gonk and let the tech issues put you off experiencing this world. I was happy to end 2020 in Night City rather than in our own corpo fucked world eh. I'll see the other endings and then leave Night City behind - but sure as fuck will be back.

 

 

[Uzi]

That being said - the "open world" part of the game with respect to the gameplay depth of it is definitely the weakest part - its just window dressing for the actual content which is the missions and this video appears to be entirely fair and enlightening about some of the cheap and crappy smoke and mirrors used. Says a lot that that the missions and characters meant I genuinely didn't notice a tonne of these things

 

 

[Stevie]

I've finished the game once and these are my thought:

 

Art direction is wonderful. The abandoned and decayed outskirts of the city feels like a mix between Rage and Borderlands 2, and there were many times where I've pondered if that's something we will see in real life with urbanization and centralisation, and the growing gap between the haves and the have nots. Night City itself has a very Paul Verhoeven Total Recall/Robocop vibe to it, mixed in with a few drops of blade runner and . Oh, and sneaking into the Arasaka Industrial Park Warehouse was the most Metal Gear Solid thing I've played since Metal Gear Solid. Its wonderfully handcrafted and it really shows the difference between an artisan product and the stuff released by some of the other AAA studios.

 

At first I rolled my eyes a bit when I saw all the sexualisation that goes on in Night City, but after doing a mission where you essentially experience the death of a snuff victim then all of a sudden it became something else. I stopped seing it as CDPR trying to be edgy, but instead saw it for what it really was. A world where nothing is sacred and everything is for sale. It went from "funny" to thought provoking. I mean I found this quite scary, something that rarely happens.  The game also does a gob job in showing a possible future where corporations have more power than public institutions, and I would argue that we are heading in that direction unless the governments of the world starts to rein in the billionaires. 

 

I think the combat is great at harder difficulties. At first I thought guns where underwhelming, but then realized that everyone is augmented with metal limbs and metal sculls so people being bullet sponges made sense. Melee is great, and swords are awesome. Still, there are room for improvements. 

 

The game itself seems to be 75% shorter than The Witcher 3? I never finished TW3 because it seemed to last forever, while Cyberpunks main story is fairly short. I'm left with the impression that there is a lot of things CDPR can add to the game and that Night City has the room for much more content. There's no need for future DLC to take place in other parts of the world because Night City has room for it. 

 

 

I'd give it a 8/10 for now, while future patching and DLC can easily turn it into a 10/10.

 

 

 

 

 

One of my favorite characters...is that Gillian Anderson?

 

 

 

 

and now playing as a corpo I'll do anything to impress Mademoiselle Stout.

 

 

 

 

edit: I forgot to include what I didn't like

 

Spoiler

I will never, ever, ever forgive studios for including reoccurring non playable scenes in games. Yes I'm talking about the scenes where the protagonist coughs blood and falls to the floor and passes out. I hate that type of stuff. I hated it in Dying Light and I hated it in Cyberpunk2077. Why? WHY? Just stop it!!

 

 

[Isaac]

I also just finished it with 100 hours on the clock. Got quite a few side gigs to do and cars to buy but I'm going to leave that for the patch.

 

What an achievement this game is.

 

Yes, it doesn't really have the systems or emergent gamplay of a proper sandbox game (the wanted system is a joke), but the city itself is by far the best bit of world design I've ever seen in a game.

 

Somehow managed to get what I think is the 'best' ending first time:

 

Spoiler

Ended up leaving with Panam and the other nomads, taking Judy with me. Probably only have six months to live. That all felt fair.

 

Going to try the other endings later.

[Scruff]

5 hours ago, Uzi said:

 

 

I got a gig to find who was producing BD's involving kids...I won't say more. A father who had lost their kid in one hired me via a fixer and essentially you find the place and find a sick father/son combo who are editing and producing them. When you are there and get the BD - you have the full freedom to blow their brains out because of what they have done. I thought justice was in order - so out came the shotgun and went onto the son - the BD producing father actually reacts to this and crys out in pain at witnessing his son being taken out before putting him out of his misery too. 

 

 

I killed the dad, even after all his pleading. The son breaks down crying and mourning the loss of his father. I felt like a cunt. Then I read some of the data spikes laying around and felt completely vindicated; the old man is an absolute monster.

 

There are many, many instances in the game where it does this to you. It may have many issues (as you and everybody else says) but the work that has gone into NC and its inhabitants (and I don't mean the meat that shuffles along the streets doing nowt) is amazing. Like the ex cop whose life takes a dive when his best friend dies. Your choices mean quite a lot in that one too.

[Thor]

6 hours ago, Floshenbarnical said:

I sort of don’t want to play any more

You do, at the risk of spoiling further, it's not what you think. 

[Stevie]

Yeah thats Hideo (sorry if already posted)

 

 

 

[Thor]

There's a choice you make early on in the game which has an almost immediate impact, but also affects the ending. Spoilers, obviously.

 

Spoiler

Where you tell Delamain to send Jackie's corpse. 

 

On my first play I thought his mother shouldn't see him like that, so sent him to Viktor to clean him up. But if you do that, Arasaka swoop in and take Jackie's body. This means that Mama Welles never gets to give her son a send off, and she's quite resentful of you. Misty is okay with you though. However, at the end, you can then encounter Jackie's engram, or a kind of engram. Turns out Arasaka took what they could from Jackie's brain to "question" him after death. You get to speak to Jackie, by he's not an engram like Johnny, or Alt, just a glimpse of who he used to be.

 

Of course, if you send Jackie to Mama Welles, you get the proper send off at the El Coyote Cojo bar, and the option to reconcile things between Misty and Mama Welles, this includes a touching scene with Misty as you both go through Jackie's things looking for an item of remembrance. 

 

[MK-1601]

I'm not going to watch 46 minutes of some "lazy devs" YouTube cunt, but suffice to say: every open world game on current hardware leans heavily on smoke and mirrors. The sole objective of the 'ambient NPCs' stuff in 2077 is to make the game feel like you're in a city populated with millions of people. Mission accomplished. Yeah no shit they don't all follow full daily routines. It's no better or worse than any open world game with essentially zero persistence - so any Ubi or Bethesda or Mafia game for a start.

 

RDR2 is an exception because it BRUTALLY limits the number of things it has to keep track of and simulate in a given area and because it had $500m+ spent on building content within those confines. Ahhhh but in Cyberpunk you can't get fat from eating junk food like in GTA:SA! Yeah, all that stuff is a distraction from having hit the hard limits of what can be persistently simulated on the hardware two games ago.

...

ANYWAY. Had a weird issue earlier. The 'system reset' quickhack says that it's nonlethal, but I used it to take down a cyberpsycho and still got the 'lethal' job closing dialogue? Annoying as I was trying to do the whole set non-lethally. Bug or something I'm not understanding with how it works?

[smac]

Think I had the same. Maybe if you're mostly implants, the effect is worse?

 

I found the 'Pax' weapons mod, so my headshots can be non-lethal. And a stun baton that does 1K non-lethal dps.

 

I did notice that the update has changed the lethal/non-lethal keys on holding a bad guy. I wonder if they were mislabelled before and I've just been snapping necks on my 'non-lethal' stealth runs.

[smac]

8 hours ago, Thor said:

There's a choice you make early on in the game which has an almost immediate impact, but also affects the ending. Spoilers, obviously.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Where you tell Delamain to send Jackie's corpse. 

 

On my first play I thought his mother shouldn't see him like that, so sent him to Viktor to clean him up. But if you do that, Arasaka swoop in and take Jackie's body. This means that Mama Welles never gets to give her son a send off, and she's quite resentful of you. Misty is okay with you though. However, at the end, you can then encounter Jackie's engram, or a kind of engram. Turns out Arasaka took what they could from Jackie's brain to "question" him after death. You get to speak to Jackie, by he's not an engram like Johnny, or Alt, just a glimpse of who he used to be.

 

Of course, if you send Jackie to Mama Welles, you get the proper send off at the El Coyote Cojo bar, and the option to reconcile things between Misty and Mama Welles, this includes a touching scene with Misty as you both go through Jackie's things looking for an item of remembrance. 

 

If you do nothing, you still 

Spoiler

get the send off, and remembrance; Delamain takes the liberty of sending Jackie to his family. Nice touch.

 

[dr_manhattan^]

2 hours ago, MK-1601 said:

I'm not going to watch 46 minutes of some "lazy devs" YouTube cunt, but suffice to say: every open world game on current hardware leans heavily on smoke and mirrors. The sole objective of the 'ambient NPCs' stuff in 2077 is to make the game feel like you're in a city populated with millions of people. Mission accomplished. Yeah no shit they don't all follow full daily routines. It's no better or worse than any open world game with essentially zero persistence - so any Ubi or Bethesda or Mafia game for a start.

 

RDR2 is an exception because it BRUTALLY limits the number of things it has to keep track of and simulate in a given area and because it had $500m+ spent on building content within those confines. Ahhhh but in Cyberpunk you can't get fat from eating junk food like in GTA:SA! Yeah, all that stuff is a distraction from having hit the hard limits of what can be persistently simulated on the hardware two games ago.

Of course any game system is smoke and mirrors, but the world of cyberpunk feels paper thin compared to others. 
 

You’re right they’re trying to simulate a city of millions, but no one asked them to, that was their choice and I would say they failed in their aim to make the city feel like a living place. 

[Thor]

22 minutes ago, dr_manhattan^ said:

Of course any game system is smoke and mirrors, but the world of cyberpunk feels paper thin compared to others. 
 

You’re right they’re trying to simulate a city of millions, but no one asked them to, that was their choice and I would say they failed in their aim to make the city feel like a living place. 

Hard disagree. This feels like a living city to me, far moreso than Los Santos in GTA V, which is the closest comparison I can think of.

[dr_manhattan^]

3 minutes ago, Thor said:

Hard disagree. This feels like a living city to me, far moreso than Los Santos in GTA V, which is the closest comparison I can think of.

Having travelled to Oxford Street in the last few days you could be right on second thoughts. 

[choddo]

3 hours ago, MK-1601 said:

I'm not going to watch 46 minutes of some "lazy devs" YouTube cunt, but suffice to say: every open world game on current hardware leans heavily on smoke and mirrors. The sole objective of the 'ambient NPCs' stuff in 2077 is to make the game feel like you're in a city populated with millions of people. Mission accomplished. Yeah no shit they don't all follow full daily routines. It's no better or worse than any open world game with essentially zero persistence - so any Ubi or Bethesda or Mafia game for a start.

 

RDR2 is an exception because it BRUTALLY limits the number of things it has to keep track of and simulate in a given area and because it had $500m+ spent on building content within those confines. Ahhhh but in Cyberpunk you can't get fat from eating junk food like in GTA:SA! Yeah, all that stuff is a distraction from having hit the hard limits of what can be persistently simulated on the hardware two games ago.

...

ANYWAY. Had a weird issue earlier. The 'system reset' quickhack says that it's nonlethal, but I used it to take down a cyberpsycho and still got the 'lethal' job closing dialogue? Annoying as I was trying to do the whole set non-lethally. Bug or something I'm not understanding with how it works?

Weird, I've been massacring them with normal weapons and they've not died yet.

[Uzi]

59 minutes ago, choddo said:

Weird, I've been massacring them with normal weapons and they've not died yet.

There is an optical implant which makes all weapons non-lethal. People may have that equipped

[Thor]

Or you're just shooting their limbs. You can incapacitate anyone just by shooting their legs. For the Cyberpsychos this does mean shooting their legs repeatedly, but I now use the System Reset quickhack to deal with them. I've only got two of the CPs left now.