And they still do this, in 2022. I have to admit, that I play non official version, because I have no money, but it gives me perspective. It's v1.06, so it's pretty old at this point, but despite some bugs and glitches, I haven't seen anything so broken that game isn't enjoyable or unplayable. I think that people very quickly forget what piles of trash used to be common a decade ago. I'm talking about games that are so broken and fucked up, that they can be used for masochism. C2077 is not even close to that level.
Hah, you're not actually wrong. Honestly, I'd say Cyberpunk is pretty easy to get into a flow with. My ADHD brain loves it, you can really pivot at any moment. It's pretty openly reactive to the player just tossing out impulses. There are always several ways to approach every step of damned near everything you can possibly do. The AI still isn't the smartest but the way everything is set up allows you to basically do enemy engagement in multiple playstyles at once. The overworld experience has a similar snappiness to it. Vehicles are arcadey to the max (personally I like it in that it's fast-paced but also pretty relaxed - if it were too serious, getting across the world would be fatiguing,) but exploring, getting stuff, and doing jobs feels pretty seamless. And then everything looks great. I can actually lose some time taking in the dynamic, multisensory atmospheres as I flow impulsively from task to task. The feel of traversal, shooting, hacking, special cyberware, melee, all of that, yields this sort of 'transparent' quality. They put a lot of thought into the little touches with sounds, animations, and general behaviors of all of these things. It kind of lifts a few more layers of that whole "I am physically interacting with a machine." barrier.
Like, it really isn't a hard game to get into. At least, I don't think so. It can just be a simple, intuition-driven excursion. It's almost like you get different forms of immersion from different levels of investment. It's a game you can come at in different moods, or at different energy levels, and appreciate in different ways. That's part of why I consider it a grower. It's a wholly positive thing.
Yep. Some people compared it to Deus Ex games and basically called last Deus Ex game (Mankind Divided?) a Cyberpunk that's not buggy and while those games may be great in their own right, imo they are nothing like Cyberpunk 2077, despite some minor similarities. I facepalm really hard, when people do that, but to be fair I remember people being dump and calling games like Sleeping Dogs, Yakuza 0, Saints Row being GTA clones, that shit hurted badly, because many great games were forgotten and quickly discarded, despite not really being GTAs.
Oh god, I remember when the GTA comparisons were flying. It does seem unfair that every remotely similar game must be compared to a touchstone title. I think that's part of things becoming more stagnant, tbh. People who do that essentially clamor for sameness. They speak for that obnoxious status quo that the developers then answer to. It does have a way of dooming truly unique titles to undue obscurity.
I will however say that when it comes to Deus Ex, I would compare Cyberpunk favorably to the whole Deus Ex concept. They definitely studied and learned from those games. I think Cyberpunk actually embodies what a lot of people love about Deus Ex in a way that can be both deeper and more accessible. The absolute best way to play Cyberpunk is to gradually build a diverse playstyle, by exploring different ways of approaching situations in your actual run and bit by bit branching your character into the skills that most suit the answers you favor along the way. You can even change your mind a bit as you go. Maybe you find a special weapon that makes you want to incorporate new approaches. Just do it! Try it out. You can do that, and decide if you want to move further in that direction organically. Your character is basically molded by their experiences and outcomes. The path you carve can start with just a few approaches and then become clearer as it expands to more. Every playthrough is one of a kind. That's a major part of the Deus Ex ideal, isn't it? If anything, it is what Deus Ex could be if it were more fun and streamlined/immediate. It has quite a wide web of potential gameplay avenues, but never does it feel overwhelmingly open or overly cramped. It's not one of those games that makes you crawl up into its meta with how you play and make your character.
I think the word for it is 'horizontal progression.' It's actually the harder way to do things. It's easy to make it about power scaling, verticality. But with Cyberpunk, it's more like you are just unlocking different ways in and out of situations. I personally think it's far more interesting to access new capabilities than have something do x amount more damage than it used to. In Cyberpunk, that aspect of stats/builds is used to 'carve out' the skills you most want to use. I think some people try to fight the game's systems and make it about the power scaling and wind up having a bad time with it. It can be really intuitive though. You just have to realize that it's more about the range of things your character can do than necessarily being really good at one thing. You can max 3 attributes that each grant access to multiple discreet skill sets for a reason. There really aren't too many rules on how to combine them, either. It just changes the sets of options you have in combat, stealth and entry. Attributes determine the types of cyberware you wear best. You can even buy cyberware that fills in weak areas rather than boosting the strongest. Sometimes I run a preem Cyberdeck on an ass-kicking, slug-chucking, giblet-eviscerating monster. It doesn't force you to max optimization. In fact, I'd say it actually rewards that slightly less than branching out. It's in the organic side of the gameplay, separate from the numbers.
Absolutely, not to mention that they also managed to please our inner weebs a bit too and actually included some interesting multicultural details in dialogues, text and other things. It's integrated in classy way that isn't overdone or annoying in some way. You can say whatever to me, but what's even more impressive is that such game came out from Polish studio. It's definitely a country not associated with great games. I had an attitude that Poland is quite backwards, strongly homophobic and hardly advanced country and while they have made some Witcher games before, Cyberpunk was way above Witcher games in overall quality of gameplay. I have to admit, that it increased my attitude about Poland a bit. It's almost like Stalker coming out from Ukrainian studio, but now everyone actually cares about it and buys it and talks for years. That didn't happen to Stalker (although it gained some cult appeal), but it certainly happened to Cyberpunk. It's a huge achievement for quite unlikely challenger. These things makes me even more surprised and appreciative of this game and what a great achievement it really is.
It's an excellent point that they surpassed anything they did with TW3. They expanded so much in their systems and their approach to building complete atmospheres with Cyberpunk. It's far more advanced. It's funny how nobody seems to mention that. They really did come a long way from their last big hit.
Oh... I remember reading something about them changing a lot of things around internally. I think they're opening up shop outside of Poland, hiring on more creative staff. I still put some faith on them to learn from their setbacks. You're playing an older version so you haven't seen, but they've done a really good job of listening to their supporters and re-jigging the game in step with that back and forth. They have changes and added so many features that have made a lot of things smoother and more interesting. The version that's up right now is more polished than I even expected them to go for. They have come a long way with it and there's a chance for a bright future for CDPR titles. We shall see.
And speaking of weeb matters, I've been meaning to check out the anime.
I don't particularly care about open world, most of the time that "openess" just makes games feel dead, full of sterile bots and even deader environment.
It's so ubiquitous at this point, it's almost meaningless. It kind of became a problem when major studios realized that they could just adapt anything to the open-world platform and make billions. People who seek to protect assets cannot see full ambition. Translation: big, but empty. Not focusing on open-world is probably the smart thing to do right now. I think the forward-looking attitude says there's progress to be made elsewhere going unconsidered. Not everything needs to be open-world. Maybe being open-world is not what makes a game good. Why does that feel like a hot take right now? It's a crime though! They're lining up good ideas to be castrated on a multi-billion dollar assembly line. Cyberpunk itself is a victim of that. The world of big open-world games is actively hostile to deeper novelty. It simply is not permitted by the commonly prescribed formulae.
