Cyberpunk 2077

[NealBor]

I'm generally against pre-ordering, no matter what it is. I just don't think it's a good practice. But yeah, I buckled and pre-ordered Cyberpunk too. But only after that gameplay video. haha

[NiGHTMARE]

Right now, CD Projekt Red is the best company in the gaming industry. They not greddy like other companies. Also, lots of free DLCs, huge expansions like stand alone game without any kind of stupid DRM.

Except you probably wouldn't want to work there.

[Blake00]

This awesome E3 trailer with Keanu Reeves is old news now I know.. but apparently the full big gameplay footage they privately showed at E3 will be out soon publicly at Gamescon. Can't wait to sit down and take it all in like I did with the last big 45min one haha.

https://youtu.be/pwgrsjHlqas

[Blake00]

Sadly it looks like they decided not to show that rumoured long private E3 gameplay demo however they've made a new 15min 'Deep dive' video for Gamescon followed by a half hour Q&A session with the Devs. Man that nethacker whip thing looks awesome!

[Blake00]

Have been drooling over all the videos CD Projekt Red have been releasing on youtube lately. Eg just look at the amazing views of the huge city in this one!



Over the last few months they’ve been doing a really good behind the scenes series called ‘Night City Wire’ with heaps of amazing new gameplay footage. Here’s the first few episodes!

[Blake00]

Looks like Night City Wire Episode 4 came out a little while back..



Along with yet ANOTHER delay announcement lol! Doesn't bother me as like I said previously I don't have a computer that can run it anyway haha. Apparently the devs have been getting death threats from impatient wackos out there though which is a bit messed up!

Maybe all those impatient ones should check out what I just found... Today I noticed a review in a recent PC Gamer magazine of a small indie game called 'Cloudpunk' that has you piloting a flying taxi around a rainy cyberpunk city at night. Looks and sounds awesome as that cockpit has massive Blade Runner vibes, the taxi reminds me of 5th Element and that creepy stormy sky reminds me of Highlander 2 lol!

Apparently there's not much depth to the gameplay sadly as it's more about immersion. However considering I was more looking forward to driving around Cyberpunk 2077's city at night listening to synth tunes instead of just running around shooting people then I suspect this little game will be right up my alley haha! Apparently you get your own apartment in a sky scraper with a balcony looking over the city that you can decorate and play retro video games in, so hmm yup that's got me written all over it too lol! Although yet again my old computer probably can't even run this one either arrrgh haha!

[Nash]

[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.

[Player701]

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.

Good news, then my 2080 Ti will probably manage at least 60 FPS with raytracing at Full HD. Though I think I'm gonna wait for patches that fix those visual glitches before I play this game. I did pre-order it when I first heard of it, but only to support CD Projekt RED and their DRM-free GOG.com distribution platform. (No DRM is always a good thing)

BTW, now that you've mentioned Deus Ex, I must resist the urge to replay it yet again... (Deus Ex: every time you mention it, someone will reinstall it... not gonna be me this time )

[Nash]

Yeah I think overall, without RT, the game is actually quite performant, IF they optimize it. After optimization, I suspect cards like a 1060 or 1070 WILL be able to run the game at Medium or High preset in 1080p at 60 FPS locked.

RT, on the other hand, will kill the frames for the next few years, no matter what. We're just not there yet. You must enable DLSS to get playable RT for now - at the cost of blurriness.

Gameplay-wise, overall, CP2077 definitely isn't a Bethesda-killer. They're ultimately two different kinds of games. While the visual presentation of CP is far superior, of course... at the core, Bethesda still owns the "go anywhere, do anything" first person RPG throne.

I enjoy both CP and all the Beth RPGs but CP is not going to replace my Beth RPGs. I will continue to play and replay (and mod - most important feature!) the old Beth RPGs many years from now.

[ramon.dexter]

So, here is my humble exprience.
My rig is this: laptop Ryzen 3750H, 16GB RAM, basic laptop RTX2060 with 6GB RAM, game is installed on NVMe SSD next to the OS.

I was baffled by how quickly the game loads, considering the amount of data needed to load. Loading times are under minute, when loading the save after starting the game. Good, good. Also, the performance is great. I'm playing without RTX and DLSS. When I tried setting on RTX, it worked pretty well, but only on 30-60FPS (I'm playing on fullHD). It was fluid, but honestly, the RTX and no-RTX has minimal difference - the RTX IS noticeable, but it's not a killer feature. So I'm turning that off.

After playing like 6 hours, I can approve Nash's "Deus ex with cars". Yeah, the first thing that came to my mind was "looks like Deus Ex, but its wasy bigger". The size of the city will need a lot of using to to even remember the layout of the streets. Basically, it's one big maze.

For the game machanics: Shooting feels wonky at first gunfight. It's just little bit different, but not game breaking. The only thing that troubles me is the enemy level - come on, when I hit a guy in a head mutliple times with a charged assault rifle, he should be dead no matter his level. The shots landed on his non-cobvered head! But this is the problem for most RPG shooters, thats not a bug at all.
Different is driving. This takes my rig to it's limits, so I gotta be careful and ride slower. Because, when I try to ride faster, FPS drops like hell, especially when using third person view for driving.

But what is really fantastic, is the overall feel of the world. Yeah, the city feels alive, streets are crowded with people (there is even slider in the menu to set the crowdiness, nice). There are like no cut-scenes, in the classical meaning. All cut-scenes are viewed from first person view, which is really immersive. I chose the street kid path for forst playthrough. So, I met with Jackie, accepted Dex's job and started with the big. But the start is really slow, I havent even seen the CP2077 logo.

edit: I hate only one feature of the game - level limitation on equipment. No, just no. I cannot buy better clothing, because I have low level. What the hell? I can understand level limitations in fantasy RPG's (like, "the sword is so sharp that you would cut you arm with low skill level"), but I really dont understand why I cannot wear the better jacket...

[Nash]

For those having performance problems on PC, check this video out.

If you're too impatient to watch it, check the description.

Unfortunately this game's performance is very poor even with high end cards. I couldn't get it to do 144 FPS locked with my RTX 2080. Getting around 60 - 70 FPS on average - which would usually be fine, except I'm on a 144 hz display and anything below 144 locked will produce strange jittering.

With Alex's settings, I'm still not 144 locked but average framerate is MUCH smoother (probably around 120 - 144).

[NeuralStunner]

Optimization would probably be better if the dev team wasn't working themselves half to death for an arbitrary deadline.

I'm still on the fence about even getting this later at a steep discount. CDPR keeps looking worse and worse.

[Nash]

Yes, even as a person who is enjoying the game (30+ hours so far) I have to admit that the cracks are starting to show the more and more the game is played - I'd suggest getting this game on a discount and after many, many patches.

I bought into the hype (partly my own fault for expecting it to be a Beth-killer) and mistakes were made.

Not gonna defend or shill this game, but I still think it's a cool game. It's just very, VERY rough right now. Feels like an unfinished GTA clone with Deus Ex gameplay elements thrown in.

One really positive thing I can say right now though is the main quest is very well written and the voice acting and motion capture is very high quality.

[Blzut3]

which would usually be fine, except I'm on a 144 hz display and anything below 144 locked will produce strange jittering.

Even if you don't have an adaptive sync display, I'm not aware of one that won't sync to lower refresh rates if you change the display mode. Windows doesn't make this particularly easy to do anymore, but if you go to your display adapter settings and then list display modes you can select the actual display mode. Should be able to drop it to 60Hz at least without custom resolutions.

What happened to the days when we thought it was great when a new game came out and literally no hardware could run it? (I have no opinion on Cyberpunk 2077, maybe it is terribly programmed. Just commenting in general.)

[Rachael]

What happened to the days when we thought it was great when a new game came out and literally no hardware could run it?

Thank god that phase was short-lived...