Videogame Discussion Thread

it's not bad but i'm not a big fan of the game.

80% of its core gameplay mechanics including the stealth, combat, inventory and character progression were stolen borrowed from Deus Ex: Mankind Divided except ubisoft montreal did it way better. another 10% is the same 'open world' 'city roaming' we've seen in many other triple A titles, except very watered down and annoying to actually complete due to poor driving mechanics and traffic AI.

the final 10% is CDPR trying to be original and making an immersive role playing experience. in some ways it pays off big time, the graphics do feel next gen (when they aren't glitching), the way your character casually enters and exits conversations with NPCs is very cool. the game falls short of Witcher 3 big time in the dialogue and plot department. dialogue is poorly written, you can choose which 1 of 2 cringeworthy responses your character grunts out, and most of the time the response of the NPCs is agnostic of what you actually said.

won't stop it from receiving 50 game of the year awards but I highly recommend to wait until this game is $20 and has seen half a dozen patches before buying. the game is full of bugs on both PC and console and the combat AI is Ghost Recon Breakpoint-tier bad. enemies will either charge you in single-file line or sit behind cover and never peek out. increasing the difficulty level simply changes damage modifiers to make enemies into bullet sponges.

7/10, being very generous to the amount of effort it takes to make a game of this ambition

 

I agree, it's closer to the originals than to Mankind Divided.

I like the quality of the environment but not an not the biggest fan of the type, not as much as the setting of, for example, the Witcher, which is much more to my liking.

 

I love me some classic fantasy/medieval but the cyberpunk aesthetic has been my favorite since I saw the first Ghost In The Shell flick. Just looking at the damned thing it feels like I've been waiting my whole life for a game like this to exist. I just look around and I'm like 'YAAAAASSSS"

Game by the Witcher people, only this time it's a cyberpunk dystopia? f**k yes. If Bethesda isn't going to give me "Skyrim, but the future is amazing and everybody fucks robots!" the game, I'll gladly take this. I might even prefer this.


People talk about graphics all day with this game. It's solid... as long as the bugs get ironed out. On a technical level, it's as good as any AAA title. It's the look and the art design, the outfits, the environments and all of the clutter. All of the little touches. This is stuff I think CDPR really nails, and why I think people get amnesia about the clunk in their games... and don't so easily forget about the clunk in Fallout or Skyrim. They do atmosphere so well, in every aspect. And they get creative with it where other games don't. So I forgive where it's buggy or where the gameplay is derivative. As long as those things are past a certain bar, I'm in it for the unique immersion factor, where I'm presented with this rich world I'm just happy to be in.

Also was just playing Fallout 4 recently. Have a bit of a love/hate deal with that game, but the reason I mention it is because of how much better the dialogue and npc behavior is in CP2077. There's a working choice system! Well... we'll see how it holds up, too early to judge that. I will say, the characters speak and act distinctively and organically. The idles are too real... like when you just look at an npc and it looks back at you, it almost feels like that's a real person - they make all of the subtle facial and posture expressions of a real human. Everything about interacting just feels really smooth and right.

Just... all sorts of little things. I can see how much time they put into everything encompassing 'the world'. I like the gameplay style that ties it together. We can say it's like this or that game, but I can't remember the last AAA title that stood out for truly unique gameplay. Again, what counts to me is that it's enjoyable enough to carry the rest. It is an RPG adventure game. So I don't expect super inventive action. I think combat actually feels better than I expected it would. I can't place exactly what it's like. Maybe not its strongest attribute but still decent.

It's a performance killer, but give it some time and I think most cards will run it. I'm thinking there are more driver/hardware specific issues here. I have heard of people with 30-series cards that can't run the game for shit. Which shouldn't be, since it isn't exactly Crysis level graphics. I think we're looking at a bad launch.

FWIW, I'm running high settings on my lowly RTX 2060. For 1080/60 it's been pretty smooth. So I don't see why a higher end card couldn't pull a good bit more than that. Depending on your system, you may be in luck with later optimizations. I think they really scrambled on the console-side... trying to make it run on current gen went abysmally bad. I'm sure there's more they could do for the PC version, but likely haven't gotten to. Sucks but at least one day soon it will probably run significantly better.

The RT effects really are glorious. But I keep it off for full 1080/60 pleb style gameplay. Just enjoying the game, trying to stay out of trouble. They're great... I really loved them with Control, reflections kinda blew my mind. But missing out on RT still isn't the worst thing in the world. Once they get the performance up, accuracy has to go wayy up to pass the plausibility check of "is it raytraced or just better?" As cool as it is, it's expensive, and all of the RT money can buy is still limited.

 

Btw tips, since i played (and it seems a lot of people had the same idea) The Witcher before, there are some workarounds regarding the difficulty to bind some keys.

I did a bit of editing and now i have my keybinding 95% to my liking. I will be more than glad to help if any1 needs it.

 

My only complaints so far:

1) The world is not as immersive as marketing would have you believe. I was expecting a level of world interaction like Elder Scrolls or Fallout, but aside from the numerous random events you can bump into there isn't much to do in Night City outside of missions.

2) Nevermind that this is an RPG in 2020, but it's a Cyberpunk RPG. The fact you can't change your physical appearance after character creation is an embarrassing omission. You can't even change Vs hairstyle!

Other than that it's been enjoyable so far. My PC needs some upgrades before running this so I've been playing on Xbox Series X in the meantime. It looks and runs good. CDPR put some enhancements on the Series X version of the game vs PS5.

Based on what I've seen, don't buy it if your playing on ps4 or Xbox One. Frame rates often drop sub 20 in scenes. Wait for some patches at least.

 

I spent an hour last night chasing rogue AI taxi cabs. There is an amazing Portal reference in that mission.

So far every mission or side gig I've done has been fun and interesting. I've yet to come across anything boring.

I have had two crashes so far in about 11 hours of playtime. Not the worst I've experienced but it is annoying because I have to get up and walk to my office to click "send" on the error report, since my Shield won't let me alt-tab to it.

The driving with mouse+keyboard is pretty bad, but motorcycles are way better than cars. Maybe I just need a better car? Time will tell.

 

I've wanted a Ghost in the Shell/Blade Runner open world RPGs since forever. I want robots and androids and maybe a bit more noir to it all, but I think Cyberpunk is likely the closest I will get from a good studio. I have a 1070 so I'm sure I could find a sweet spot to get decent framerates, but I have waited so long, that I want my first playthrough to be maxed out. Hopefully I can grab a 3070 or 3080 early next year after a few more patches come out for the game.

 

I have a similar plan with the RX 6800 XT, hopefully for less money in February/March, does that seem possible? I just got back into pc gaming late last year after 20 years of mac/consoles. AMD because I don't care about 4k, it works with my current power supply/monitor, and has a (very)remote chance of being hackintoshable on my dual boot system at some point in the future.

 

A screenshot of performance metrics while streaming to Nvidia shield. Like I said before, this is with a 1080 Ti on high/ultra settings. Rendering 1440p on PC, but the shield is at 4k. For some reason my Shield thinks TVs are 59hz.



I'm loving the low latency of ethernet vs wireless before.

 

I have always thought motorcycles are way better than cars. But I don't play video games.

 

https://support.microsoft.com/en-za...ndows-does-not-apply-the-user-selected-settin
Because both 59Hz and 60Hz are actually 59.94Hz under the hood. The difference in reporting is a TV (NTSC) vs PC thing. If you dig into the math behind it, it's how the frame times add up that gets you to that figure.

 

Turns out my Shield was set to 4k59, which was the "recommended" setting, I switched it to 4k60 and now it shows 60fps in cyberpunk. I vaguely remember it thinking my old LG TV was 1080/59hz, so maybe it's an LG thing?

 

So for the Ryzen users out there... as of now the game doesn't properly utilize Ryzen CPU's. For me, this ended up being a MASSIVE bottleneck. I was getting dips down in to 40s or even 30s in some places. My 3900x was apparently getting keeled hard, because after installing the little DLL fix I am seeing double the frame rates in those areas, in fact the game seems to be running consistently over 60fps at all times now. Crazy. Should've checked CPU util, but I'm used to the GPU being the bottleneck with this setup. Benchmarking and comparing analytics also isn't the most exciting proposition for me when I've got a new game to play. Worth messing with this time!

Grab it on the nexus if you've got a Ryzen CPU: https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/107?tab=description

Goes into [game folder]\bin\x64 ezpz. The zip file you get has a weirdly named subfolder in it with a second DLL. Wasn't sure what to do, so I copied the whole deal as-is, but also pulled a copy of the DLL from the subfolder into the main one with the rest of the game's DLLs for kicks. Doesn't overwrite anything and it did in fact work for me.

 

Wow this actually made a big difference for me. Before on full ultra I was getting 45-50 fps with dips down to 30, which is why I was using high/ultra custom settings, now on full ultra I'm getting a solid 60 fps.

I'm always surprised by how much performance can be unlocked by certain mods, and that the devs didn't do it themselves.

 

I'm sure they have their own fix for this - after all both new consoles are rizen-based - but on PC it's probably not as high priority as making sure it works at all to begin with.

As popular as the new rizen cpus are, amd is a pretty small minority of the steam survey that clears minimum requirements, and that's just not as high priority as showstoppers that affect everyone.

Given the repeated delays I'm guessing they had quite a few key issues quite late into prerelease.

 

I hear you on Ryzen users, but it's a full 25% minority on steam alone. And that's 25% of what? 100 million odd people?

So I think it's the latter. I think they had some problems with planning and optimization. Honestly, I sort of blame the push to get the game working on the fading older consoles. Those still count for a lot in sales, after all. Lot of people own those, while adoption for the latest takes a while. In the meantime, I'm sure lots of people bought the PS4 version and so they would've wanted to avoid how that all went down lol. Actually retain those customers for DLC later. PC is still the most popular platform, I think. But not by much. And the console versions clearly needed a lot more help.

I think they should've known better with the release, that the consoles would take more time. For latest gen they didn't even get anything for the job until this year. Gotta remember, when working on console games, you as a dev are beholden to the schedule of the console makers and their info/resources flow.

Older models, they HAD time, but that doesn't mean anything when you're at that weird point where the game you need to make is probably going to cripple them in order to make use of the latest hardware. How far can you backport before the engine loses vital functionality? Can hit some serious walls there... stuff that requires totally different optimization things... a technically different engine, not just different parameters.

But then you hit the money side of things... and it's very real. Market share waits for nobody and it is the life and death of developers and the publishers they rely on for exposure and distribution. The loss in sales waiting to have it totally finished might actually be worse than dropping it with these problems. I don't think people consider that, or they see it as greed. But when even the most revered as 'good' do it, you start thinking maybe it's just survival. I'm being a little forgiving here, but I really think this is generally how things are. The gaming market ups its pace significantly every two years or so.

Ooohh... that's a thing! The game was in development for almost a decade. If you were planning it all out back then, you wouldn't be able to anticipate how much shorter the timeframes would be now. I do still wonder about the general project management over at CDPR though... I think they share a little bit of bethesda's issue in that they dream very big, but don't always recognize the scope of the nitty-gritty side. Or they have a lot of yes-men.

I'm sure there is plenty more they can fix with the PC version, too. Like you said, it does generally work, which is more than can often be said for PS4. Though... there's even more that WE can fix ourselves, that can't be fixed at all on console. That's one thing really on their side here. There is a modding community out there who's ready to fix it all down to the smallest micro-improvements. The engine isn't brand new. Give it a month or two and the mods will start cropping up, I bet.

 

I'm actively avoiding ANY coverage of this because I'm rather determined to get a copy for myself in a few months when I move to a new desktop but the comparisons to Altered Carbon (the book?) and Deus Ex are green flags in my book.

Also who cares about GTA cloning if it's an enjoyable experience overall? The setting is massively different from any GTA I've seen before so as long as it's not just completely derivative and adds some new context to things then having the prototypical open world experience as a baseline doesn't seem all that bad. Blegh, people who just up and call games "GTA clones" make me think that's the only game they've really played before.

Much as I trust tomshardware's input, does anyone hereabouts know what the cheapest graphics card I can get away playing this at high-ish settings on a 1080p monitor with will be? Yes that'll be one of my main considerations, haha.