Anyone been diving into Night City yet? How do you like it?

JLN Pro Tip: If you're playing on PC and don't have one of the beastly 3080/90 video cards, turn off ray-tracing immediately upon booting the game. The environments in the backstory intro (at least one of them) are pretty small, but once you embark on the prologue and venture into the city you won't be able to see or do much of anything (playing on a 2070S).

KD protip: use a Russian VPN and get it from GoG for less than $30

https://i.imgur.com/sSPfiE5.mp4

Getting horrible gameplay reviews on the PS5 and new XBox.

and being called an unplayable mess on the base PS4 and XBox current gens.


All versions are riddled with bugs.


You'd be a fool to buy this game right now. These are the same people who produced Witcher 3 which apparently was also riddled with bugs at the start. I didn't buy W3 until a year after release and the game was totally fixed by then. I'd recommend the same wait and see approach for this game.

_________________

I'm on PC and have definitely encountered some bugs, some of them funny (t-posing NPCs), some frustrating (companions on rails that don't react to my decision to GTFO away from a formidable robot enemy, melee attacks having a lunge effect that sometimes completely negates the dodging mechanic) but nothing entirely gamebreaking, but with last-gen hardware I can totally see how the world would bog down frame rates, which for an first-person game can completely ruin gameplay.

This is an ambitious game, if nothing else, though it certainly doesn't seem to be as groundbreaking as the hype made it out to be, which is kind of to be expected. It takes elements from Deus Ex, Fallout, Far Cry and GTA, sometimes well, sometimes not-so-well. I just got through the prologue missions, and the world is now wide open for me, so we'll see if the game falls into traps that a lot of open world ones do. I've already noticed that the base-raiding elements borrowed from Far Cry will be just as repetitive as in that title, but it remains to be seen whether the Fallout (New Vegas) type freedom to complete quests in your own way will carry throughout the game. A few missions in the prologue sequence seemed to have quest elements and freedom reminiscent of NV, though I don't think you are as free to accomplish the tasks in any way you can find like with that game. For instance (POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT) that prologue mission obtaining the robot was going to end in a firefight one way or the other, I don't think there was a way to get in and out peacefully or silently.

this is pretty funny. shit looks like its in alpha still

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPcPDanmeCQ

https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/17/22188007/sony-cyberpunk-2077-removed-playstation-store-full-refunds-policy

wow, can't recall this actually happening before.

wow, that is crazy. Big ups to Sony for having the guts to do something like this.

_________________

even without the bugs, it looks worse than GTA V?

_________________
the world will always the world. your entire existence is defined by your response.

Outside of the bugs and the obvious lack of attention given to PS4/Xbox One versions, the problem is that this game isn't nearly as deep as it was made out to be. Night City was heralded in the pre-release material put out by the studio as a living, breathing world that the player could explore and interact with in any way they desired. Turns out, the city is extremely one-dimensional and not worth exploring outside of where repetitive missions (given by disembodied NPCs that likewise have zero depth) take you. There's almost no dynamic verticality to the map, so the city, while it looks huge, actually plays like any other RPG that exists mainly in 2D planes.

The missions are, as I feared, pretty simplistic in their playability, with only "stealth" and "assault" options available on both main- and side-quests, and the RPG elements of the game really only factor into how either stealth or assault is accomplished, there are no other playstyles brought about by how you build your character, you either go in guns blazing or just crouch-walk everywhere. For reference, here is the quest flowchart for "Beyond the Beef", a side quest in Fallout: NV that is inconsequential to the main story arc. There is absolutely nothing like this in Cyberpunk, the supposed "next generation of open-world RPG".

It's funny because Fallout: NV was a bug-riddled game that didn't run all that well on the consoles of that generation, but it is still remembered as one of the greatest games of all-time because it was a deep and immersive world that could be played any number of ways, a game which built upon its predecessor to make a truly groundbreaking RPG set in an open world.