I watched a fair number of ps4 streams of it at launch. Best case areas weren’t too bad, but worst case was unplayable. Vague blocks for people and cars that took 30 seconds to load any recognizable textures. And even though it had maybe 5% of the random pedestrian and car traffic of the PC version, moving very fast dropped to single-digit fps slideshows. Plus lots of clipping issues, falling through the ground, being flung here and there, that I never saw any of on PC.
I’m guessing the patches took care of the worst of that, but haven’t checked
I picked it up as part of the Steam Summer Sale. I am not impressed, but it’s not horrible. Yes, there are some scattered bugs, pop in, and bad textures, but that’s nothing unusual.
What I really don’t like is that they had the money and the goodwill to attempt something new, but the game mostly feels like another Elders Scrolls/Fallout/Outer Worlds clone complete with pointless crafting mechanics, “elite” early game enemies that carry the equivalent of BB guns while generic late game mooks are armed for bear, and gameplay and story segregation that makes the whole thing ridiculous if you give it any thought.
My pettiest complaint is the clothes- everything has an armor value, which is completely divorced from what the items actually are- meaning that your character always looks like a clown, dressed in whatever mismatched items happen to have the best stats. Seriously, a party dress tougher than flak jackets, a pair of taped together nerd glasses better than a military ballistic sunglasses. All this in a game in which cool and street cred are supposed to matter.
I thought the crafting system was one of the weakest parts of the game. Unless they changed things, it’s tedious and time consuming to use (try individually breaking down 300 blue widgets to make scrap; why is there no bulk scrap option?) and the mechanical side being locked to the cosmetic side means you either give up on looking cool or give up on having the best armor. Fortunately, game play wasn’t so hard that you need the best armor so I picked looks but it’s a shitty system that made you pick.
Edit: Also, the results are semi-random which is just bonkers. So you finally craft a Legendary jacket and it may have between 1-3 mod slots which is a huge swing in how powerful it is. What’s the point of that besides just making people save-scum until they get the result they wanted?
I didn’t craft until nearly the end. But by that point I was one-shotting just about everything already so all it did was make even more overkill ridiculous damage.
I’m sure you can go the whole game without crafting a thing. It’s “useful” for customizing a bit and it allows you to upgrade the named weapons/gear to higher tiers if that’s a thing you care about. But it’s not really going to make the game easier since it’s already pretty easy.
Absolutely. Also, crafting doesn’t seem to be very helpful unless you have an investment into the proper attributes and perks. I guess if you have a concept that involves investing into the Technical tree already it might be something to do. Otherwise it seems like there’s very little of use you can make.
It’s not. It’s really just “something to do” for people who enjoy crafting mini-games. Although, as I said earlier, it’s not even a really well done mini-game and has some glaring issues with it. I did max it out pretty much just 'cause but I wouldn’t recommend that anyone else do so.
I’d go on about the absurdity of not being able to use crafting to customize your look in a game where fashion is supposedly king but this is also a game where you can’t get your hair cut or change your lipstick when fashion is supposedly king.
I was a little disappointed in Cyberpunk 2077 because I expected much more than we got but overall I found it enjoyable at least. I regret spending full price for it though.
I hated the crafting system but I generally dislike crafting in most games anyway. Seriously, it’s time consuming and most importantly it isn’t fun. Time spent crafting is time I’m not spending shooting punks in the face. And, yes, like most RPGs with strong narratives, there’s a strong disconnect between game play and where you are in the narrative.
If you could see what you’re actually wearing, yeah. For a game that’s supposed to be style over substance they sure dropped the ball on style.
I did not craft basic items. I just upgraded them. You end up with a lot of eddies, so I went to high end clothing stores and got items that gave the maximum armor bonus with the maximum number of slots. That’s more reliable than crafting things. Then I bought armadillo mods, which come out with a somewhat random power level. However, even the weakest gives you 200 armor (and the strongest 255) so the difference was minimal.
I don’t think the crafting system “doesn’t work”, I think it’s poorly explained. You need a guide to tell you where the best clothing stores are, for instance. Unfortunately you cannot control what your items look like (though nothing from the high-priced stores were ridiculous).
I could upgrade weapons but it didn’t seem worth it, not with my playstyle. (My first character used mantis blades and had no crafting ability, the second was a hacker.)
Yeah, you never caught a reflection of yourself in a window or other reflective surface. It was very controlled to a weird extent.
It works, it’s just terribly done. My full criticism of it was a couple hundred posts back:
Re-posted complaining about crafting
What I will complain about is the awful, awful crafting system. It’s obviously half-baked and was never really tested well or completed. On the surface, it’s fine and if you only use it now and then, it’s no problem. If you decide to make crafting “a thing” (which is a legitimate choice seeing as how there’s a whole perk tree dedicated to it) you run into a number of issues. The worst offender is that there’s no bulk crafting for turning lesser components into advanced components. You’re actually expected to press and hold a button each time to turn 9,000 Common parts into 1,500 Uncommon parts. Then to convert those into 250 Rare parts. I wound up installing an autoclicker with a custom script so I could set the game to waste an hour converting all my Commons. I feel bad for console players where that’s not an option; you need to press-hold-release each time so taping down a button doesn’t work. Converting iconic items into Legendary tier takes a LOT of components.
There’s not a ton of high end recipes so I hope you like the look of the handful of options you get. Not an issue for weapons but maybe not everyone wants to wear a bright blue and pink motorcycle jacket – I’d think a benefit to crafting should be having better control over how you tailor your look. What’s worse, the result you get is semi-random. You might get a Legendary item with no mod slots, you might get one with a single mod slot and you might get one with four mod slots. That’s a huge power discrepancy and just encourages save scumming each time you craft since I can’t blame anyone for not wanting to press/hold their button 10,000 times and get a gimped item at the end.
It’s weird that they made such a big deal out of being able to customize your character only to have said character remain largely invisible throughout most of the game. You can catch a glimpse of your character in a mirror if you want to but you’re mostly out of sight while playing. But then the goofy clothes combination you end up with as you wear the best gear available means you probably don’t want to look at your character anyway.
Which is too bad because I thought they did a decent job with the character models for the PC and the NPCs. Placide’s jacket is pretty damn cool.
I understand that, but I think it was a mistake. Adding third-person cutscenes didn’t make the Mass Effect or Witcher games less immersive, IMHO, and here they would have added to the cinematic nature of the game, as well as made your character feel more like a real person.
Worse is Anthem. When I first started up the game, at release (I had a preorder) they had a character customization system. I picked my character’s appearance. From that moment on, I have always been in first-person perspective, or when seeing my character in third person (during missions) I am in full Iron Man style armor from head to toe. The game was released in February 2019, and I have not seen my character’s face for 2.5 years, and in all honesty I have absolutely no recollection of what he looks like.
Theoretically if you wear certain the default helmet you can somewhat see your character’s face during cutscenes where the faceplate is open but the default helmet is fugly and I don’t think I ever wore it (since I pre-ordered it came with a nicer cosmetic helmet from the beginning, which I’ve replaced multiple times since with even better models). It’s completely absurd.
Probably one of the countless reasons why the game died and the sequel was canceled. The game is playable but EA has permanently cut off any new content or other updates permanently.