I can roleplay it to some extent. If I take out a baddie using an allegedly non-lethal means, and they die anyway, well, I’m going to still count that as non-lethal in my head. I guess one might argue that getting put in a dumpster might end up with you getting compacted into a small cube, so it should count as a kill… but on the other hand, they should wake up or be found before that actually happens.
More comments, spoilered since it’s a fight that happens fairly late (I think?) in the main mission:
Regarding the fight with Oda after pulling the plug on the netrunner:
My first try, I finished him off with a gun, using the Target Analysis mod (which ostensibly makes all guns non-lethal). However, Takemura was very unhappy about it and it seemed that I killed him.
I tried again, this time using only non-lethal quickhacks. This time he went down cleanly, and Takemura was much happier. Not sure what went wrong when using the gun. However, I pretty much only use quickhacks for combat with my current character so it’s not a big deal.
Anyway, I agree that it would be nice to have more feedback on the game mechanics. Even just a kill counter buried somewhere in the stats would be helpful.
I ran into two problems with these: one, at the end, where the car I was supposed to get into was upside down and destroyed (I think this was fixed with the 1.05 patch?); and another that just got stuck in the wrong place or something. The rest could be activated, though.
Are you staying in range for a long enough time? I forget the threshold but you have to get to something like <50 m for several seconds to activate properly.
Huh, weird. Maybe the boss fights have special rules.
Oh yeah, stood on top of one and jumped up and down on it for a while. The quests cannot be activated or completed. Hopefully a hotfix will take care of them at some point.
I think it’s a clear epic “meh”. It’s not a complete disaster that makes enough people want to demand their money back so they’re scoring all that pre-order money, but it’s not really living up to the hype and the multiple delays which led people to expect more, especially from the makers of Witcher 3.
Putting aside the frankly horrendous “last gen” console launch, that speaks more to the hype than to the quality of the game itself.
It’s like everyone’s expectations are binary these days. A game must be either 1) a cute little indie release with such a low bar that any kind of success is magnified in the public perception or 2) a megahit that redefines entire genres and stays fresh for years and years post launch. It’s okay for a game to be somewhere in the middle.
It’s likewise unfair to compare everything a studio releases to its greatest previous triumph. It’s like how RDR2, which is a really excellent single-player experience, is getting a lot of shit because its really excellent multiplayer experience isn’t as dynamic and fresh and seemingly eternal as GTAV.
Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t Witcher 3, sure, but Witcher 3 was widely acclaimed and won GOTY from pretty much everyone. Obviously a studio would love for lightning to strike over and over again, but is it really a failure to ‘only’ make a game that’s quite good rather than astonishing?
I like the game. Now, without analysing how originally original the game may be, and whether it be merely good, or really good, or excellent— I have not even finished it yet— what is it supposedly failing to live up to? E.g., does the fact that skill trees, levels, and crafting mechanics have been used before in other games mean this game is automatically derivative? What cool things that people were expecting and were hyped did not make it into the release?
One thing, though. I am no professional beta tester, but anyone will have noticed the plethora of minor to medium glitches. I even had to work around a catastrophic one. That has nothing to do with hype, exactly; it just seems a bit unprofessional to slap a 1.0x version number on it and release it in that state.
I am realizing just how powerful the netrunner build is. I hate to be the guy who screams Over-Powered. The CyberPsycosis quickhack, is just crazy effective. Just one camera in sight anywhere, and heavily fortified bad guy bases are toast without even getting off the couch. Many of the other purple/orange quickhacks with a top of the line deck, are pretty much the same.
I think people were expecting things like from Breath of the Wild or Dark Souls. The latter has now had plenty of time for clones as well as sequels, and the clones are just coming out for the former. Both of those games are open world RPGs, but they each have a very specific set of rules that are unlike anything else that came before them such that people realized how well they all meshed together and decided to continue the trend. I can’t say if there’s anything about Cyberpunk’s setup that’s really comparable. It might end up being just like Avatar: really pretty and popular right after it comes out because of the hype, but the shallowness and unoriginality means it’ll get forgotten quickly.
(Full disclosure: I have not played it at all and probably never will, and am merely speculating. The game definitely seems good - even Zero Punctuation gave it what passes for a positive review if one can look past the bugs - but I don’t know how deep it is or if there’s any new ground broken.)
On the other hand, you have games like Skyrim, which didn’t really innovate much, and was really pretty buggy, and yet is fondly remembered for hard-to-articulate reasons. It was (still is) a great game, but it didn’t exactly carve out a new genre the way Dark Souls did.
Mods have certainly helped Skyrim retain some relevance, as well as DLC content. But I don’t think that’s the only thing going on. It just happened to be a solid, if not too adventurous, entry in the genre. It might have more relevance than Dark Souls since the latter’s gameplay is a turnoff to a sizeable fraction of the gaming population.
I am enjoying the game despite some bugs (PC) but from the makers of Witcher 3 and a what…five-plus year development cycle I am decidedly less than impressed (I think they announced it in 2012 but I am not sure when they got serious about development).
It’s pretty good and I am not unhappy I bought it but it falls well short of “wow” or “amazing”. It’s just pretty good(ish). Nothing about it really impresses much. They didn’t even deliver on the raunchy, edgy, weird place that CP77 is supposed to be. They made a few nods at it but…eh.
I’m still happy to play the game but there are no nerdgasms over it.
I’m playing on a high-end gaming PC, so my technical issues have been pretty minor, and I’m genuinely enjoying the game, but I was expecting something more like GTAV or RDR2, where there’s a ton of stuff to do that’s just living in the setting. In Cyberpunk, you can’t go bowling. Or play poker. Or use any of the arcade cabinets that are all over the place. There’s tons to do, but it’s all jobs and missions. You can’t really just hang out there.
Here’s a minor thing. When I go to a bar and buy a drink, instead of a shop interface that adds an Alcohol Item to my inventory, I’d like to see my character sitting at the bar, having a drink while talking to the bartender. Stuff like that, I think, would really help to draw you into the game world.
I mean, the game we got is fine, if it works, but there’s nothing here that seems to justify the how long it was in development. With this much lead time, I expected either basically the game we got, but polished to a high sheen, or a game overstuffed with random ideas and subsystems and minigames, and about half as many bugs as the version that shipped.
I’m enjoying the game but I’m also the seemingly rare specimen who left unimpressed by Witcher 3 so the whole “But it’s by the Witcher devs” never held much water for me. I also thought it was stupid that GTAV had crap for playing golf or doing yoga but having my crime guy, say, rob a store was restricted to a tiny handful of convenience marts. Even Mafia 2, for all people whined about its fake open-world nature, allowed you to bust out a gun at any store and get a handful of cash.
I think it’s very much a matter of taste. That stuff you mentioned, to me that was pointless meandering and one of the main reasons why I can’t stand the GTA series. I don’t want to bowl in a video game - I want to kill people. I’ll bowl if it helps me get better at killing people (or if there’s some storyline attached to it, of course), but I won’t do it for no reason. The GTA games, to me, were vast, boring wastelands that kept on leading me towards pointless dead ends.
Plus, there’s plenty of “hangout” in Cyberpunk, just like there was in, say, Skyrim. In Skyrim, hanging out meant wandering around the wilderness, soaking up the sights and looking for new dungeons; in Cyberpunk, hanging out means wandering around the city, soaking up the sites and looking for new side jobs. Same thing.
I found the constant double-damned choices (“Kill the baby” or “Save the baby and the baby is actually a demon that eats all the other babies”) tiresome and eye-rollingly 2grim4u – and this is coming from someone who usually loves the whole Soviet Bleak thing so “But it’s Eastern European…” doesn’t count as an excuse. I reached a point where I just stopped giving a shit about any decision because I figured the game was waiting to fuck me over anyway which isn’t conducive to great roleplaying. I thought the pacing fell apart entirely in the first big city area where I had to run back and forth repeatedly across the poorly designed map. I wasn’t all that impressed by the combat. I get that other people probably loved all that stuff since the game is highly regarded and that’s cool but it didn’t work for me at all.
I suppose the contrast is that Cyberpunk hasn’t really tried to pull any “lol you thought that was the good choice but… ah hah! Gotcha!” nonsense on me (much less repeatedly) and I find Night City to be fun to traverse. I don’t know if I would praise any individual aspect of the combat but a mix of hacking and shooting manages to stay fresh.