Finally got to the Adam Smasher fight last night for the first time, and the game crashed on me when he was down to ~1/3 health.
Re: Phantom Liberty:
I agree with @ParallelLines about Songbird. She’s not a good or sympathetic person, although she’s pretty good at manipulating people (Reed, in particular) into thinking she’s sympathetic. I sided with Reed at the end, got Alex killed (felt bad about that) then turned Songbird over to the NUSA (didn’t feel bad about that at all).
I took Reed’s offer to get the chip out, just to see the ending. Got a good laugh out of Misty explaining that you’re an NPC now, and thought the camera finally switching to a 3rd person perspective after she says that really drove the point home.
Stuff in PL sometimes unlocks new dialogue options for missions in the base game, so you’d miss out on that, but I don’t think there are any real narrative changes, so if you just want to see the new content, you can just go back to a previous save from before the final mission without missing much. If you were planning on starting a new playthrough anyway, you might want to wait, as I think the new content works better when its interwoven with the old content, but that’s basically an aesthetic call more than anything else.
Ok, thanks. Are there any other significant changes besides the DLC? My original playthrough was from the original release date and I haven’t really touched it since. I didn’t really run into many significant bugs (a few incompletable missions here and there), but if they tweaked enough stuff in various patched, I guess it’s worth another full playthrough.
CDPR just released a new patch (v.2.11) a couple days ago.
I think the game is about as close to as good as it will ever get. Maybe there will be a little more tweaking but I think a re-play is probably really worthwhile now. Especially if you have the Phantom Liberty DLC.
Yeah, if you haven’t played since the launch, there’s a ton of changes that aren’t directly DLC content. Biggest is that they completely overhauled the perk tree, but they also added in stuff like car chases and better police AI. It’s definitely worth a replay from the beginning.
This. I didn’t start playing until 1.6 when it was basically ‘fixed’ from release. 2.0 rebalanced and made more different playstyles much more interesting, while fixing some of the ludicrously OP options. So I’d say do a replay. Phantom Liberty starts more-or-less organically once you’ve completed a substantial but not complete portion of the base game.
Sadly, the lifepaths still feel like aborted remnants of something that was far more substantial, so other than 1-2 secondary quests you get from the lifepath, it just offers a few unique comments, which don’t (95% of the time) actually make any difference. The 5% that do generally make so little difference, as to not worry. But the little bitty details in the micro-prologue are fun.
That’s what I did and why I did it. I finished the game already and I liked the ending I had. I started over from scratch because I wanted to try it from a different perspective and have a different story. My first playthrough I was a handgun expert with everything geared toward one-shotting stuff with a revolver. I also dispensed with the quickhack stuff and traded my cyberdeck in for Sandevistan. My character was an invincible hitman by the end of the game.
This time I went the opposite route, and he’s a total netrunner. I take people out through quickhacks and I only use smartguns as a backup. (And they even feed off of each other, as kills with my gun regenerate RAM, and my gun also does more damage to someone affected by a quickhack. Also, if I infect someone with a cybervirus then use a gun that sets them on fire, they explode!)
Also, for what it’s worth, I was a street kid my first time, now I’m a corpo rat. It does change some of the dialog options, though not much else.
My first run I’d sneak in and take out everyone one-by-one like Jason Voorhees. This time around, I kill everyone or almost everyone before I even set foot in the place, hacking through cameras and such. Then I casually stroll in, looting everything and completing the mission. Most of the time I don’t even have to kill people, just short-circuit their cyberware and leave them unconscious.
Between the radically different gameplay and new content, this makes the game feel like more of a sequel than a second playthrough.
I even wonder if I want to later do a third run with a melee-focused person, but I don’t know if I’ll have enough interest by then.
Speaking to @DPRK’s spoiler, let’s just say that I always inform V’s playstyle by the early game.
I never forgive betrayal. Leave out some details, okay, maybe - that’s biz. But betrayal. Dexter DeShaun was just damn lucky he got offed before I rezzed, or his fat ass would have been spread across a dozen blocks of Night City!
As for Reed, he’s loyal, certainly, deliberately to a fault. But he’sd honest with you. It would have been easier for the NUSA to kill you on the table, or just pull the plug while you’re in a two year coma, but he doesn’t do that, and makes a point of showing up in person for when you awaken (depending on chosen ending of course). Songbird?
A piece of cyberware and zero help using her connections to maybe save YOUR life even after you saved hers when she admits to betraying you. Hell no.
ETA - Oh, and Songbird’s comments after she directly causes Alex’s death and kills countless non-involved individuals in the Stadium? The whole “Look what you made me do?” That’s two bit villainy there. Again, when I wanted to feel sympathetic (give her the death she begs for) I chose in my internal head-canon to decide that much of her more inhumane actions are the direct result of the overt/covert AI influence I mentioned before.
That was mostly my playstyle in the first run. I tried going for a non-lethal run, though apparently putting unconscious bodies in dumpsters kills them, so I had a pretty high actual body count.
I’ll probably go for non-lethal again, but maybe with a different strategy. The OG game had guns that claimed to be non-lethal, though that was always a little dubious to me. Not sure how much of that has changed.
There are weapon mods (and blunt weapons by default) that cause them to be classed as non-lethal (of course, blunt weapons can be modded to BE lethal if you prefer). Of course, if you have an ability that does additional damage and procs after, or if you hit them after they fall down, they still die.
As said before in this thread, the dumpsters are trash compactors, so yeah, that does kill them.
If you want to raise your Headhunter skill, tossing a body in a dumpster counts for that even if they’re already dead. I guess “cleaning up” is part of being sneaky, so I suppose that’s on brand.
Learning how to non-lethally defeat someone is really useful for the cyberpsycho missions.
The thing about non-lethal weapons is, if the person’s already unconscious, hitting them with a non-lethal weapon again will kill them. If you go spray-and-pray with a non-lethal weapon, you’re probably still going to end up with some corpses.
Spray-and-pray isn’t my style. I pretty much always play as some kind of sneaky sniper and/or melee character in these types of games. But post-takedown kills are always a problem. Sometimes, the physics engine goes wonky and the body manages to kill itself by wiggling around the wrong way (had this problem sometimes in the Deus Ex games).
Heck, sometimes they end up with their head stuck in a wall or other part of the environment, so how would they survive?
It’s annoying but honestly, if you were knocking people unconscious frequently, you would snap a neck or have someone hit their head hard enough for a fatal injury every once in a while. An uncontrolled fall from a standing position is extremely dangerous unless you’re surrounded by piles of pillows. Even though I’m sure it’s a glitch, in a sense that’s good physics.
I’ve had to reload many times when doing a mission that requires a nonlethal takedown. Bad luck is what it is.
I don’t care for the new level up tree, and I am definitely getting more glitches on PS5 than before. I didn’t pay the game until it has been mostly patched already a year in though.
Finished Phantom Liberty. Pretty solid! Really liked the credits music. Sorta James Bond + Radiohead vibes.
Doing non-lethal again, to the extent possible. Mostly quickhacks, takedowns, and punching people. I use a lot of System Collapse due to it being ostensibly non-lethal and untraceable. Unfortunately, it kills the people pretty frequently when they fall to the ground–even on ordinary flat ground with no post-hack events. I sometimes reload when this happens, but it’s too annoying to do all the time.
Contagion is more reliable since they get to their knees when they go down. But it’s traceable. Stealth takedowns are reliable, too, but trickier to pull off (though easier with optical camo).
Sometimes I go for just punching the baddies in the face. That’s also pretty reliable. I think there might be more built-in leeway, since occasionally I get a few punches in even after they start going down and it doesn’t seem to turn lethal.
A couple of mission bugs. One: there’s a mission where you rescue two police officers, only to meet the boss guy on the way out. You can talk your way out of the situation, but when the police officers pull out with their car, they run over the henchmen, triggering combat. Tried reloading a zillion times (in case it was a random physics glitch) but it happens the same way each time. Two: the Space Oddity mission, where you take the corpo laptop from the bums, doesn’t progress because the laptop doesn’t actually show anything (except for the background). Weird.
Anyway, pretty solid otherwise. Liked the spy thriller vibe. I do wish the game referenced my non-lethal nature more. Regina and a few other fixers are thankful at various times, but lots of others remark at how many people I’ve killed, even though I go through such an effort not to do that.
