by Nash » Fri Dec 11, 2020 12:30 am
[too long didn't read: I enjoyed CP2077, don't buy this game if you don't like first person RPGs cuz you definitely won't enjoy it. Oh and you can pet cats!!!!!!!!!]
Played 8 hours. Best I can describe this game, so far, is "Deus Ex with cars."
(Note: I will be drawing comparisons to Fallout New Vegas a lot in this simply because it is the closest game where these 2 games share common traits with; that is, being an open world first person RPG + shooter hybrid)
As a first person open world RPG (not talking about world size; I mean the game mechanic known as "role playing game"), Fallout New Vegas is way, WAY more open and free form. In New Vegas, there are far more characters to talk to and the dialog choices, or branching, are WAY more in depth, by orders of magnitude. NV feels more lived-in and organic, because of this.
In CP2077, the illusion of a lived-in world is created by spamming (literally) randomly generated NPCs that serve no purpose other than to create a "human body particle system" so to speak. They just walk around and perform a set of predetermined animations. By comparison, every living NPC in NV do tasks, eat, sleep, all that stuff. Almost every one of them has a real "home". The random NPCs in CP2077 will spawn dynamically as you move around the map.
I'm not saying CP2077 is a shallow RPG. Oh it is an RPG alright. The RPG-ness of CP2077 is, like I said above, more akin to a Deus Ex game. You have these missions, a hand-crafted level set piece, and you choose whether to use guns, hacking, stealth, be a pacifist, etc. You will meet several important characters and while most dialog choices only change the flavour (voice acting), there are several opportunities where the choice you make will change the outcome of something, or the course of the game. CDPR have generously made those dialog choices a different colour.
World detail is gorgeous. Map size is huge. Aesthetics is on point. They nailed the look. The game is visually noisy, but in a good way. There is just so much stuff going on on screen, so many colours and shapes being drawn. Everything visual and auditory in this game screams Bladerunner. Neon lights everywhere. Rad retro future fashion. Punk as fuck attitude everywhere. Screw the system. Yadda yadda. It's all in there. The atmosphere is amazing.
Bonus: you can pet cats. How awesome is that?
Gunplay is decent. Weapons look, sound and feel impactful. Visually the weapons are top notch and have superb animation and special FX. Unfortunately, because this IS an RPG, you're not going to get Doom/Call of Duty-style gunplay. It is a mix of real-life player skill and in-game character stats and numbers. Weapons have a "looter shooter" mechanic like Borderlands, with item rarity and things like that. Weapons deal different amounts of damage based on character and enemy stats. So don't go into this expecting to shoot guns like in Doom Eternal or something.
There are bugs but none of them are game breaking. Definitely no Bethesda-tier, progress-bricking bug. They're all visual bugs. Like NPCs standing in mid-air, lip animations not being synchronized with the voice, or characters just T-posing in the middle of the street. Just superficial stuff. It does take away from the immersion though, when you see this happen.
Game loading is ultra fast on an SSD. There is only one loading screen at the start, or if you reload a saved game, then that's it. After that there are literally no more loading screens as you progress through the campaign.
Graphical render performance is kind of abysmal at the moment. Hopefully they will optimize and patch it. That said, even if you crank down the settings to the Low preset, the game still looks gorgeous. It's playable enough on systems about 5 - 8 years old from today.
On my machine (i7 8700 @ 3.2, RTX 2080, 16 GB RAM), it auto-configured the graphics settings for "Ultra with raytracing" but it also enables DLSS, which makes the image a little blurry. I suppose it's the only way to enable raytracing without making the game run slower than a turtle. My monitor is at 1080p. I would rather get a sharp image (I don't like DLSS) so I turned the graphics down a notch to the "Ultra (no raytracing)" preset and for the most part it stays locked at 144 FPS.
As I said before, however, the game still looks gorgeous even at Low preset so don't be discouraged. For mid-range PCs, you can settle with Medium or High presets.
Be warned however that because of the Cyberpunk aesthetic, there will naturally be a lot of reflections and shiny surfaces. Shiny walls, puddles of water on the roads, things like that. And without raytracing, you are left with Screen Space Reflections, which, if you've been playing video games for a while, know its shortcomings: if you move the camera up or down, the reflections of objects tend to disappear or get cropped as they move away from your camera view. Some may find this distracting (especially more so if you've seen how it looks with raytracing; it may be difficult to go back to SSR after you've experienced RT firsthand). So your mileage may vary. Personally, I don't care. I think real raytracing is still at least 2 - 4 years away from being mainstream and runnable at max frame rate. Save your money, don't buy an expensive RT graphics card yet.
The hype surrounding the game is something else and deserves its own discussion, and YES I admit I bought into the hype. That said, I still find this game satisfying. It didn't disappoint me. Well, except for the performance issues. They need to sort that shit out ASAP because it is severely impacting the enjoyment of the game.
This is a good first person open world RPG experience and this is definitely the kind of game I mainly play. I'm enjoying it. Was it worth the 8 year wait? For sure. These kinds of games aren't trivial to make. I think they should not have announced the game's release date and should have just continued to silently work on it for another 1 year to get rid of all the outstanding bugs that tarnishes its polish and presentation. Gamers today are a difficult bunch to please.
Overall, I'd give Cyberpunk 2077 an 8.5/10.