I finished the game on my PC. I experienced a few glitches before updating my graphics driver but nothing that broke the game. Typically I wait a year or two before I buy a “new” game, but since I cut my teeth on the pen & paper Cyberpunk 2020 back in the day I took the plunge because I was pretty exited about this and I loved the Witcher 3. But then by the time I purchased Witcher 3 all the bugs were worked out and I’m pretty sure I had the gamy of the year addition with a bunch of extras packed on it for about $30. I wish I would have waited a year or two before purchasing Cyberpunk.
Overall the game wasn’t very challenging on normal difficulty. By the time I hit my stride, I could either lay waste to entire groups by sneaking around and hacking or go balls-to-the-wall and shotgun them in the face and not worry about damage because I was sitting on 50+ health potions (or whatever the Cyberpunk version of health potions are). But you can adjust the difficulty so there’s that.
I sometimes didn’t understand where my dialogue choices would lead me. This didn’t happen often, but sometimes I’d make a dialogue choice without realizing it would lead to a final choice or that it would piss some NPCs off. On the other hand, I thought it was great that sometimes your best option was to simply keep your mouth shut.
I didn’t craft a single item in this game. In fact, I didn’t figure out how to craft until I looked it up after I finished the main quest. And that’s fine with me because I hate crafting.
The characters were very well done and I thought the plot for the main quest was pretty good. When I saw Johnny Silverhand in the trailer I was curious how a rocker boy from 2020 was going to show up in 2077 and they did a good job explaining it. What I didn’t get was how some of Silverhand’s associates hadn’t aged so much over the last 57 years. Obviously there are some treatments in the future, but these people gotta be in the mid 80s at least and they’re still running around like they’re in their 30s.
Overall this isn’t a bad game but it isn’t great either. I’d wait until it’s discounted before purchasing though.
$15 has been the standard price for the Witcher 3 for a few years now. I would recommend getting it anywhere but epic. GOG gives the most back to the developers and publisher, but I’m sure it’ll be on sale on steam in a few days too.
Well, for both of the games under discussion, buying them on GOG gives the absolutely highest percentage of your money to the developers, considering they also own GOG. Only the credit card processors are taking a cut.
Overall I am enjoying it. It is not nearly as good as Witcher 3 is though.
Glitches aside (which for me have been few and mostly a graphics glitch here and there) the game is slow to become interesting. In Witcher 3 I was hooked pretty much instantly. The world immediately grabbed me. The story was there from the first moments drawing me in. In Cyberpunk it took me about 3-4(ish) hours for the storyline to really get its groove. Until then it was do mission A, B, C. It is a good story but it takes longer than it should to hook you in. But it does get there.
Some complaints:
Character creation system…why? You can spend so much time on your character before even starting and it amounts to almost nothing in the game. You can take snapshots of yourself and share them online but that doesn’t help the game. There are a few occasions where you see yourself but…meh. This adds almost nothing to the game.
The above segues to the first person perspective. CDPR claimed they did this so your character was not blocking the amazing city you live in. I suspect that is corporate speak for, “Third person is more difficult to deal with costume and weapon changes and we couldn’t be arsed so here is a bogus reason to suggest we are doing it for a better experience.” I loved seeing costume changes and weapon changes on my character in Witcher 3. This is a lot less immersive. It’s not terrible or even bad…just a good deal less good.
Not to be all PC Masterrace about this but the PC game clearly suffers because the game was also developed for consoles. This should have been PC only and ported to the very newest consoles (which are very PC-like anyway so shouldn’t be too difficult) and skip the older gen stuff. I get why they did it as they did…LOTS more money. But what we all got is a gimped game and a bruised PC experience that could have been much better.
For such a lively place it feels lifeless. More Fallout-like. I loved Fallout (not 76) but like in Fallout the NPCs are just…meh. Witcher 3 you really felt like a town was running around you. Here, like Fallout, the NPCs are more mannequin-like with a few canned responses. It really hurts the whole bustling city vibe.
I’m happy to have it. I am enjoying it. It just feels like a pretty big step down from Witcher 3.
Agreed, though for me it was more like 2 hours. For some reason it just didn’t grab me right away–not sure why, maybe the opening Nomad mission wasn’t great, or some of the early cutscenes. But after a while I got into the groove of things.
I think I’m liking it more than Witcher 3 at this point. A big part of this is just that I like sci-fi more than fantasy, so the universe is way more interesting to me. Another is that I vastly prefer first person (except for driving…). I barely spend time on the character stuff, and min-max my clothing choices, so I look ridiculous anyway. Don’t need or want to see that. At one point I was wearing shiny sequined pants.
I guess the city could feel a bit lifeless if you actually try to talk to people, but just walking/driving around, it feels pretty good to me. And the general architecture and design of the city is a thousand times more interesting than anything in Witcher 3. Yay, another wood house or stone castle. Night City has a ton of diversity and I like the verticality. Not to mention that it looks great, at least with ray tracing on a 3080.
There are plenty of times where I just kinda stop and admire the scenery, thinking that it could easily pass for a scene from Blade Runner or the like.
Not sure how many hours I’ll ultimately put into it. W3 I played for 90 hours, but didn’t finish the main quest and for whatever reason don’t feel like going back. I enjoyed it a lot at the time, but ultimately I think I’ll have fonder memories of CP.
It’s not quite a great game, though I think it’s close and maybe with a couple of patches they’ll get there. I haven’t seen too many bugs, though there were a couple that I had to go back to an old savegame to finish (one asked me to get into a car which was upside-down and on fire…). Polish this up a bit, maybe fill out some more NPC content, and it could be in great territory.
You are probably closer to the mark. When I first get into a game like this I tend to spend a lot of time looking into every nook-and-cranny and a few save-scums to get a feel for the game (e.g. is that deck of cards important?..and what things have loot and what don’t and so on).
Yeah but naked Yennefer in the opening scene is hard to beat.
Agreed about the models. They made a big deal out of how in-depth their character creator was going to be but… for what? And the “in game” version lacks the same fidelity in the rare events that you do see it. That said, I still give up a point or two of armor now and then for the sake of fashion.
Coming from the Witcher devs and with all the Night City seediness, I’m surprised that Cyberpunk is as tame as it is on the sex front. Not really disappointed as such (though some people on Reddit, etc are obviously disappointed) but I was expecting there to be much more potential nakedness aside from clothing/gear bugs
Yeah, I really don’t get the reddit complaints here. Like, ok, wanting the strippers to be nude rather than in a bikini? Whatever, I could see that. But there are threads on Reddit demanding they let you play BDs that are already in the game like “three mouths one desire”. Erm, WHAT? You expected them to put literal porn - not a sex scene, but actual PORN - in a game? It is rated M, not X.
Are you playing on console or PC? I’m only asking because I’ve seen multiple stories about Night City being awash in dildos and haven’t seen it myself. I haven’t seen any aside from on the shelves in the one sex store district. A couple friends who are playing (we’re all on PC) said the same thing – haven’t seen a one. But other people claim you can’t go three feet without tripping over a rubber dong and CDPR has put out a statement that they’d be adjusting it (they said they fall under the general “trash” category for world assets and get spawned randomly under that heading).
I see them all over - on people’s nightstands; on shelves in back rooms of warehouses full of criminals I just gunned down; as trash on the floor in alleys.
They aren’t intractable most of the time. I found one dildo I could pick up that was immediately deconstructed for crafting components by that perk (I regret taking it because I’m wasting money deconstructing watches automatically even though they sell for a lot). The rest of them (and all of the fleshlights, which are also everywhere) are just there - you can’t pick them up, though they do go flying if you step on them.
Sometimes when I walk into a crowd, I get slow-downs. But if I restart the game, the same crowd stops giving me trouble. Generally, I’ve been pretty low on glitches.
