Post by Tig on Dec 13, 2020 13:04:49 GMT -5
I know a couple of you are playing this so sorry if I'm jumping anyone. Please add your full review or start a new thread as I'd love to hear what everyone thinks.
I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077 for a while now and I have to say it has exceeded much of my expectations, including what I figured would be issues with the game. Cyberpunk 2077 is set in a futuristic dystopia where the world went to hell after the 1990s and megacities rose from the ashes backed by a small number of major corporations. The setting and its visualization are very much the worlds of Deus Ex and Watch_Dogs. It is, in fact, a little too much like them as, despite the stunning cityscapes I've frequently paused to take in, everything has a somewhat familiar feel. That's not a bad thing, but I am surprised CD Projekt Red didn't switch things up a bit more for the setting. You play as V, a character you can customize fully and select one of three origin stories. The game is played in first person, however, so you rarely see your own character and, so far, my origin selection of "nomad" has only opened some excess dialogue trees. Still, I spent thirty minutes stressing over how long my hair should be and if I wanted a facial scar so the character customization is fun for me.
Let's get to the elephant in the room: poor starting performance. So CD Projekt Red slated the PC GTX 1060 card as the "recommended" card to run Cyberpunk. Then they released it across all current consoles. From what I've read of people playing it on last gen XBox and PS4, the game is almost unplayable, with horribly watered-down graphics and game-breaking bugs. That's unfortunate, especially when you consider there are no alterations on a console done by individual players so publishers had all the combinations of components optimize their game up front. Of course I'm playing it on my PC and while it's running impressively well, I fully understand much of the ire the game has drawn. I'm running this on an eight-year-old Pentium i7 2600k quad-core processor with an EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 6gb I added three years ago and backed by 16g of RAM. The game runs on my computer, and it runs well. I have the majority of the settings on "high" with antialiasing and particle and shadow effects turned down. The graphics card does warm up after a while, dropping me from 45fps to around 30 after several minutes, but the game does look good. The colors are a little muted and the shiny textures that are the centerpiece of the graphics engine are lost on my rig, but I have completed several harrowing missions with high-speed chases through the city with no stuttering or tearing and, most importantly, I've experienced zero crashes. I will say that CDPR made a bad move listing my card as "recommended" when it should have been "minimum required". Anything less than the settings I'm running on would be very disappointing to behold, as I've seen in other samples from other computers. I realize they wanted to include people who couldn't afford a GTX 2080 or snag a 3090 this year, but I do feel that it was false hope to say to someone on a 600 series card they can run the game no problem. Sure, you can "run" the game and play the story, but it's going to look like crap but at least you can make hardboiled eggs on your processor while you're playing.
The graphics are amazing to say the least, as well as the overall setting of the game, even with the reduced settings. Like GTA V or other major cityscape games, cars roll buy with purpose and at any point in time there are hundreds of people milling about doing different things. The people dress different in different parts of town but the ever-present thugs, transient camps, and beggars remind you that you're in a major city with a lot of problems. The architecture is a mix of modern and futuristic but, true to William Gibson's cyberpunk parameters, there is a layer of grunge at the base of everything. Stop what you're doing and look around and you'll see that there are wires and cables laced everywhere, designating the struggle to keep up with a rapidly growing infrastructure. The huge cooling fans on the sides of buildings resemble computer fans and lead me to believe the interior of a PC served as motivation for the overall structure. Cars are either shiny and slick or they're older, clunky models with cabling visible, parts markings on the mismatched panels, and external fuel conversion systems. No matter how much chrome someone slaps on their prosthetic limbs, there's always messy hair or dirt on their clothes or a bloody lip, something that really brings the reality of this future home. I will say what's impressed me most is the vast number of character models as I rarely, if ever, see the same character twice in the crowd, except for children. It's not uncommon to see unrelated twins or triplets running about. CDPR made a wonderful game you can just get out and get lost, and you lose nothing by stopping to smell the funk.
The other bugs to report are plenty but none of them have been game-breaking. Someone walks off and their coffee cup or gun is still floating in the center of the street and I had one character in a side mission disappear through the stairs, causing me to restart from the last checkpoint and it did not repeat. My car got totaled for no reason once. I parked it, walked off, and came back to find a crushed heap with no explanation of what happened. That was odd to me because, driving around, the collision detection is at a minimal, making all cars almost indestructible with no indication they're taking damage until the wheels catch fire. Disappointing considering the driving handles fairly well, little twitchy, but certainly better than Watch_Dogs. So I'm listening to other PC gamers talk about the game being unplayable and I have to tell you I don't see how that's possible. My computer is basically a half-step above two potatoes plugged into a clock and I'm pushing upper range graphics. I've made it through the first two acts without issue; I don't see how anyone else isn't accomplishing at least that much but I won't argue.
The story itself is, so far, very intriguing. V (you) makes a living working odd jobs, running packages, intercepting stuff, countering the opposition, etc., for a number of "fixers" who give you jobs throughout the game. Like CDPR's Witcher series, you can spend just as much time doing side jobs as you can on the main story, more so in my case. I was sixteen hours in before the title screen flashed on my monitor. I was like "oh...I guess that was the beginning of the game". That's actually a pet peeve of mine but so is unskippable cutscenes, which Cyberpunk does NOT have so it evens out. The story itself is rich with characters and twists, including a HUGE one at the end of Act 1 that left my jaw on the table. It's also very touching as you get attached to some of the characters through extensive dialogue trees. Unless it's a story arc dialogue, you can walk away at any time without consequence and learn as much or as little as you care from talking to someone. True to the Witcher games, many of the NPC's are long-winded with a penchant for too much detail but you can easily skip through conversations and even repeat some parts if you go too fast.
The gameplay is a mix of Deus Ex and Dishonored if you play stealth, and to me that's the best way to play. Sneaking, hacking, sneaking, hacking, it is all way too much fun with the different possibilities and options available to you. You can hack the environment to unlock doors, shut down cameras, and create distractions, or you can hack a person with implants, making their eyes go haywire while you slip by, or reduce their defense attributes so you can beat them to a pulp. All-out gunplay is fun and the weapons handle surprisingly well, with a wide array of different options to suit your gameplay. It's not my style because, on the ground, the AI moves quickly, dodges back and forth making aiming difficult, and will work to flank and pin you down. I will say that, taking a stealth approach before engaging, I have frequently found a higher position to attack and that seems to throw the AI off. Suddenly they're not so aggressive, approaching you one at a time, and even standing out in the open. It's like the coding for direct combat was specifically made for fighting on the same plane and if you have some sort of advantage from the environment, the IQ of the AI seems to drop significantly. I don't know if that was intentional to reward you for planning before attacking or not.
Regardless, it's a blast and you can engage as much or as little as you wish even just walking across town. One poor lady was being mugged in the street and I tried to intervene. Ten reloads later after being turned into Swiss cheese, I had to just wave at her and walk on because it wasn't happening for now. As the game progresses you have access to armor and can upgrade your guns via crafting system or just buy new guns and components directly. It's all very fun and I noticed the more time I spent learning my weapons and upgrading, the better I was at gunplay. The gameplay mixes well with the story where, after sneaking my way out of a corporate building, I had to sprint across a hail of gunfire to my car for an escape followed by a pulse-pounding pursuit. You get all angles of the action eventually, and that's not a bad thing. You are, in the end, playing their story, and CDPR wants to make sure you hit all the angles. The game does trigger my adrenaline and a friend was watching me stream and even he was getting into it during an insane stealth run. I almost rage quit several times, but the game pulled me along and eventually I made it out with a tremendous sense of accomplishment for how I handled things. Again CDPR is the master of immersion and interactive storytelling.
I'm hooked. I'm sold on this game. I know the howling has been loud but so much of that was the pre-release over-hype followed by tremendous pressure to release the game before it was ready so what did you think was going to happen? The latest patch, 1.04 released just a couple days after launch, immediately caused an uptick in my graphics processing so I'm anxious to see what the future holds. Meanwhile, I'll keep walking through this beautiful masterpiece, cautiously, but with a smile. Now I need to find that poor lady and rescue her.
***Hmmm Steam says my review is too long. I'll do an abridged version later.
I've been playing Cyberpunk 2077 for a while now and I have to say it has exceeded much of my expectations, including what I figured would be issues with the game. Cyberpunk 2077 is set in a futuristic dystopia where the world went to hell after the 1990s and megacities rose from the ashes backed by a small number of major corporations. The setting and its visualization are very much the worlds of Deus Ex and Watch_Dogs. It is, in fact, a little too much like them as, despite the stunning cityscapes I've frequently paused to take in, everything has a somewhat familiar feel. That's not a bad thing, but I am surprised CD Projekt Red didn't switch things up a bit more for the setting. You play as V, a character you can customize fully and select one of three origin stories. The game is played in first person, however, so you rarely see your own character and, so far, my origin selection of "nomad" has only opened some excess dialogue trees. Still, I spent thirty minutes stressing over how long my hair should be and if I wanted a facial scar so the character customization is fun for me.
Let's get to the elephant in the room: poor starting performance. So CD Projekt Red slated the PC GTX 1060 card as the "recommended" card to run Cyberpunk. Then they released it across all current consoles. From what I've read of people playing it on last gen XBox and PS4, the game is almost unplayable, with horribly watered-down graphics and game-breaking bugs. That's unfortunate, especially when you consider there are no alterations on a console done by individual players so publishers had all the combinations of components optimize their game up front. Of course I'm playing it on my PC and while it's running impressively well, I fully understand much of the ire the game has drawn. I'm running this on an eight-year-old Pentium i7 2600k quad-core processor with an EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 6gb I added three years ago and backed by 16g of RAM. The game runs on my computer, and it runs well. I have the majority of the settings on "high" with antialiasing and particle and shadow effects turned down. The graphics card does warm up after a while, dropping me from 45fps to around 30 after several minutes, but the game does look good. The colors are a little muted and the shiny textures that are the centerpiece of the graphics engine are lost on my rig, but I have completed several harrowing missions with high-speed chases through the city with no stuttering or tearing and, most importantly, I've experienced zero crashes. I will say that CDPR made a bad move listing my card as "recommended" when it should have been "minimum required". Anything less than the settings I'm running on would be very disappointing to behold, as I've seen in other samples from other computers. I realize they wanted to include people who couldn't afford a GTX 2080 or snag a 3090 this year, but I do feel that it was false hope to say to someone on a 600 series card they can run the game no problem. Sure, you can "run" the game and play the story, but it's going to look like crap but at least you can make hardboiled eggs on your processor while you're playing.
The graphics are amazing to say the least, as well as the overall setting of the game, even with the reduced settings. Like GTA V or other major cityscape games, cars roll buy with purpose and at any point in time there are hundreds of people milling about doing different things. The people dress different in different parts of town but the ever-present thugs, transient camps, and beggars remind you that you're in a major city with a lot of problems. The architecture is a mix of modern and futuristic but, true to William Gibson's cyberpunk parameters, there is a layer of grunge at the base of everything. Stop what you're doing and look around and you'll see that there are wires and cables laced everywhere, designating the struggle to keep up with a rapidly growing infrastructure. The huge cooling fans on the sides of buildings resemble computer fans and lead me to believe the interior of a PC served as motivation for the overall structure. Cars are either shiny and slick or they're older, clunky models with cabling visible, parts markings on the mismatched panels, and external fuel conversion systems. No matter how much chrome someone slaps on their prosthetic limbs, there's always messy hair or dirt on their clothes or a bloody lip, something that really brings the reality of this future home. I will say what's impressed me most is the vast number of character models as I rarely, if ever, see the same character twice in the crowd, except for children. It's not uncommon to see unrelated twins or triplets running about. CDPR made a wonderful game you can just get out and get lost, and you lose nothing by stopping to smell the funk.
The other bugs to report are plenty but none of them have been game-breaking. Someone walks off and their coffee cup or gun is still floating in the center of the street and I had one character in a side mission disappear through the stairs, causing me to restart from the last checkpoint and it did not repeat. My car got totaled for no reason once. I parked it, walked off, and came back to find a crushed heap with no explanation of what happened. That was odd to me because, driving around, the collision detection is at a minimal, making all cars almost indestructible with no indication they're taking damage until the wheels catch fire. Disappointing considering the driving handles fairly well, little twitchy, but certainly better than Watch_Dogs. So I'm listening to other PC gamers talk about the game being unplayable and I have to tell you I don't see how that's possible. My computer is basically a half-step above two potatoes plugged into a clock and I'm pushing upper range graphics. I've made it through the first two acts without issue; I don't see how anyone else isn't accomplishing at least that much but I won't argue.
The story itself is, so far, very intriguing. V (you) makes a living working odd jobs, running packages, intercepting stuff, countering the opposition, etc., for a number of "fixers" who give you jobs throughout the game. Like CDPR's Witcher series, you can spend just as much time doing side jobs as you can on the main story, more so in my case. I was sixteen hours in before the title screen flashed on my monitor. I was like "oh...I guess that was the beginning of the game". That's actually a pet peeve of mine but so is unskippable cutscenes, which Cyberpunk does NOT have so it evens out. The story itself is rich with characters and twists, including a HUGE one at the end of Act 1 that left my jaw on the table. It's also very touching as you get attached to some of the characters through extensive dialogue trees. Unless it's a story arc dialogue, you can walk away at any time without consequence and learn as much or as little as you care from talking to someone. True to the Witcher games, many of the NPC's are long-winded with a penchant for too much detail but you can easily skip through conversations and even repeat some parts if you go too fast.
The gameplay is a mix of Deus Ex and Dishonored if you play stealth, and to me that's the best way to play. Sneaking, hacking, sneaking, hacking, it is all way too much fun with the different possibilities and options available to you. You can hack the environment to unlock doors, shut down cameras, and create distractions, or you can hack a person with implants, making their eyes go haywire while you slip by, or reduce their defense attributes so you can beat them to a pulp. All-out gunplay is fun and the weapons handle surprisingly well, with a wide array of different options to suit your gameplay. It's not my style because, on the ground, the AI moves quickly, dodges back and forth making aiming difficult, and will work to flank and pin you down. I will say that, taking a stealth approach before engaging, I have frequently found a higher position to attack and that seems to throw the AI off. Suddenly they're not so aggressive, approaching you one at a time, and even standing out in the open. It's like the coding for direct combat was specifically made for fighting on the same plane and if you have some sort of advantage from the environment, the IQ of the AI seems to drop significantly. I don't know if that was intentional to reward you for planning before attacking or not.
Regardless, it's a blast and you can engage as much or as little as you wish even just walking across town. One poor lady was being mugged in the street and I tried to intervene. Ten reloads later after being turned into Swiss cheese, I had to just wave at her and walk on because it wasn't happening for now. As the game progresses you have access to armor and can upgrade your guns via crafting system or just buy new guns and components directly. It's all very fun and I noticed the more time I spent learning my weapons and upgrading, the better I was at gunplay. The gameplay mixes well with the story where, after sneaking my way out of a corporate building, I had to sprint across a hail of gunfire to my car for an escape followed by a pulse-pounding pursuit. You get all angles of the action eventually, and that's not a bad thing. You are, in the end, playing their story, and CDPR wants to make sure you hit all the angles. The game does trigger my adrenaline and a friend was watching me stream and even he was getting into it during an insane stealth run. I almost rage quit several times, but the game pulled me along and eventually I made it out with a tremendous sense of accomplishment for how I handled things. Again CDPR is the master of immersion and interactive storytelling.
I'm hooked. I'm sold on this game. I know the howling has been loud but so much of that was the pre-release over-hype followed by tremendous pressure to release the game before it was ready so what did you think was going to happen? The latest patch, 1.04 released just a couple days after launch, immediately caused an uptick in my graphics processing so I'm anxious to see what the future holds. Meanwhile, I'll keep walking through this beautiful masterpiece, cautiously, but with a smile. Now I need to find that poor lady and rescue her.
***Hmmm Steam says my review is too long. I'll do an abridged version later.