@colourful_hippie: its bizarre I've missed it then.

Not sure if PC has the same controller options as console but I've found turning off all the acceleration/ramp boost stuff makes it much better. Really appreciate all the controller options actually its so nice to turn that stuff off, I find many console fps games unplayable because of this ramp up turning speed thing.

Cyberpunk 2077 actually has the best controller configuration options I've ever seen, just a pity they reset every time I restart the game.

Edit: ok after watching the late title in a playthrough I can see I must of just not payed attention or forgot it immediately or saw it just as a loading screen. I was expecting something much more elaborate and flashy for some reason. Did nobody tell cdpr that to be truly edgy you need to break the 4th wall and have an in-game title card?

I don't have the game yet. I get the feeling I'm going to be conflicted about it, where the bugs and a few other aspects take away from the immersion of a beautiful environment and a potentially great story and characters (as long as dialogue/VO doesn't bother me).

I might get it as a Christmas present, I'm hoping. I was hoping to first play it on Xbox Series X or PS5, but that's not going to happen I assume so maybe the Xbox One X version (which from what I understand is the only decent last-gen version).

Anyway, what I actually came on to say is that for those that have an HDR screen and aren't aware, it's best to turn HDR off because it's reportedly broken, which is a huge, huge shame as this kind of game is made for HDR.

Read here and watch here.

After trying another session on the PS4, I sadly feel the game is rather unplayable on the last gen. The game being advertised and shown off in trailers is not the game in my console. I'll hold onto the game and maybe in a year from now I'll own a PS5 and the PS5 optimised version of the game will be available. I'll take the free upgrade and hope I can actually enjoy the game...really can't right now.

All of the cars kinda feel like ass but the bikes are pretty fun to zip around in.

It's weird how much of a regression the modernity of this game has expressed on CDPR's open world design. Plenty of people have pointed it out but let me join the chorus singing "why do you know I'm here already?!" This game would have felt much less overwhelming if you had to meet your taskmasters before they started assigning you tasks. I love glancing at a minimap and noticing shit popping off, but it's pretty bizarre when you see a question mark pop off, and then you're introduced to a new fixer that knows you're totally up for the task, only you keep dying while attempting it before checking your journal and realizing the risk factor or whatever is "very high". This was not an issue in The Witcher 3, but give a guy a phone and...!

I've seen this comment elsewhere but Cyberpunk is kind of clarifying for me what makes GTA games feel so good, Watch Dogs games feel so mediocre and (for example) LA Noire's open world feel so superfluous. Granted, there have been several moments where Night City feels like a unique experience and a valuable addition to the gaming canon, but there have been far more instances where it merely feels like an implication of value rather than a satisfaction of it. With certain games you find yourself seeking out the little details that make an open world really hum, and with others you find yourself watching out for the major glitches that make it warble. This game is definitely in the latter camp.

Stop and think for a moment how many random ? marks inthe Witcher 3 you could stumble upon and suddenly be fighting a skull level golem or whatever that punts you into the sun.

Or finding side quests that were literally dozens of levels above where I found them. That shit happened constantly.

Now I'm right there in the camp that an annoying thing in their previous game shouldn't also be an annoying thing in their new game but let's not put on rosy glasses here.

The weirdest thing about the whole cell phone mechanic is that it doesn't just leave voice mails. Like a lot of the stuff I have seen are one sided conversations, so why can't you just listen to them whenever the action slows down?

@efesell: For me the difference there was you would look at a thing and it would display in bright red text with a big number you hadn't seen before that the thing you were looking at was indifferent to your presence there. Whereas in this game I'm often left unsure if I'm ready for what I'm trying to do or not.

The game has gotten a little better but still fails to "wow" me. The graphics look sharper now that CDPR improved on some things. I can see it becoming another wallpaper generator like TW3. However, I have suffered a consistent dip of about 20fps. I was getting between 55 and 80fps prior to the most recent patch. When there are more than 3 corpses in a single small area, my framerate nosedives into the teens.

@nodima: I dunno I feel like this problem was way worse in the Witcher. Like I'm doin a quest at level 5 in this forest and it's full of level 5 things but also don't go over there cause there's a level 30 Leshen that's gonna one shot you with a flock of crows.

While it's not as apparent as I would like in this game either you can generally look at the divided districts and determine which ones are above you. Whereas in the Witcher it was just sort of calvin ball where they decided to put their over leveled stuff sometimes.

@efesell: I suppose it's useful to keep in mind I'm playing on PS4 a game which Jeff playing on a capable PC described as struggling to generate faith in its action because of its bugs. Going back to the pachinko example from an earlier post, I've "approached the pachinko machines" or whatever the exact prompt is without the enemies reacting at all only to slaughter me right as I approach the icon and also killed the guard outside the gate and guy standing outside the pachinko parlor without anyone else reacting, only to then have the police called on me for using a weapon in public or whatever the charge was and being killed by them. I've also completed the quest experiencing a medium of those two experiences, leaving me constantly wondering how the dice will roll for me from moment to moment.

Which I suppose would be charming in a board game surrounded by friends but is pretty daunting in a first person action game pretending to let me roleplay.

Edit: to say I remember that Leshen, and at least it had the courtesy to present itself as fucking weird, whereas some of the enemies I can't handle in this game don't present as such with their crown of tree roots or bizarre Wiccan magic, but rather their bullets just shoot harder than their friends' bullets.

I’ve not completed the first real mission which they showcased extensively - the Flathead retrieval from the Maelstrom guys - and it’s pretty fun although as pointed out many times by many people also messy.

I’ve encountered small glitches so far - enemies holding thin air, Jackie suddenly animating at twice the speed, DPS numbers not fitting in the info box etc etc. Mostly though despite all the large tutorial windows I feel like I’m having a hard time coming to grips with the interface for this game. Keyboard controls feel pretty awkward which is a weird thing to say for what is ostensibly a PC RPG. The inability to move up and down the dialog choices using W/S is a real head scratcher. The camera control while in a car is pretty bad. Backing out of various things is either C or it’s Esc which is confusing.

Generally though I’m having a fun time. It’s a shame I have to bump a lot of graphic options down to get a good framerate but it’s what it is. That lens flare effect especially when Maelstrom guys are talking to you is pretty rough.

Yup the cars all feel like slippery boats. Bikes though have become my preferred mode of travel, they feel a lot better.

Also beep, beep, motherfucker

One of the biggest things that disappointed me when I started playing was the tone. I like my cyberpunk to be dark, bleak, and somber. This game is loud, garish, and goofy. Playing some more today, I realized that Night City is way more Transmetropolitan than it is Blade Runner, and that realization has helped me get into the tone more. Seriously, compare the color palette and general design sensibility:

I personally really like Transmetropolitan and having it as a touchstone has made me feel better about all the satirical ads plastered everywhere and how goddamned ridiculous everybody looks. A lot of folks have understandably compared the satire in the game to GTA or Idiocracy, but it's a lot more overt and stupid, akin to stuff in TM like the Sex Puppets. I still don't know if I'd call any of the writing or ads in the game clever, but I can at least appreciate that they're trying to ape a very distinctive cyberpunk property instead of just lamely stuffing GTA humor into a genre it doesn't belong in. Also, I'm definitely making my next character Spider Jerusalem and shooting everybody in the ass.

On the other side, I think that the constant invocation of TM is going to prove very unflattering as the game goes on, because unlike that comic, I really don't think this game has anything interesting to say about any aspect of society, future or present. 10 hours in, it hasn't even begun to explore the ramifications of any of the hot-button topics it's brought up (body modification, brain dances, corporate dominance, sex work, etc.), and if it tries to later on, I have very little confidence it will handle them with any nuance. So far it seems like an extremely boilerplate "scrappy underdogs fighting against comically evil corpos" that could be set any time in any place without having to be changed beyond set dressing. For fuck's sake, so far Arasaka and Militech fall short of Saint's Row 2's Ultor Corp in terms of being plausible and interesting villainous organizations. Hopefully it will improve, but the bathos surrounding (Act I spoilers) Jackie's death was extremely generic and bad.

My only major complaint with this game as I progress is becoming dealing with the inventory.

Just let me mark something I have as junk to be sold you've been making this game for like a decade how did you not pick up on that.

@efesell: I have the perk that automatically turns all junk you pick up into components for crafting which has proven quite useful.

I just find the pacing off and the game boring. I’m going to main line the narrative. The side quests feel completely uninspired and same old same old.

It’s a shame the hype train completely killed this for me. I’m heading into a vacation and I thought this would carry me...probably won’t last till next weekend. I’ll finish it and simply be done.

I've found some really good side jobs in here but also an awful lot of Hinterlands.

Best to be careful about getting wrapped up all of the stuff labeled as a Gig.

@notkcots: The problem I'm finding with the tone isn't so much it's goofyness but that it's wildly inconsistant. For example the 2nd (or maybe 3rd) braindance you have to do is quite violent in nature, but as you scan around checking things out V is jovially commenting on random things you can interact with in the scene, I bought this in the moment with the idea that hey it's 2077 it's just a recording my dude is desensitized to this shit or something, but then you exit the braindance and he's all 'holy fuck that was heavy'. It just didn't make sense.

I'm about 10 hours into the game on a base PS4 that I upgraded the hard drive on earlier this year and... it's been rough going, honestly.

I find the gameplay to be fine, really. Just fine. The shooting feels fine, not great; the melee can be fun, but it's also slippery and lacks real feelings of impact most of the time. I have a certain lizard-brain appreciation for all the side stuff there is, and I appreciate how much of it there is.

I've got a laundry list of things I don't like about it, including Male-V's voice acting and character in general, how bad the cars handle, how much inventory trash there is everywhere, how many systems and mechanics are thrown at you, and how crummy the UI is in general. I could handle all that if the story was more engaging and the game didn't look like my POV had Vaseline smeared on it.

The game. Looks. Awful. And FPS dips down into the teens at times.

The performance issues are even worse. I've experienced 3 hard crashes so far, each after about 3 hours of play which would suggest either a memory leak or my newish ssd is already dying. I've had one soft-lock; one more instance where a mission-critical enemy got stuck and was popping in and out of existence; one instance where my health bar glitched to 0/0 making me invincible; and a number of more harmless, if not still vexing, graphical and physics glitches like flying dead bodies, disappearing pants, and ghost guns.

I stopped after my most recent crash to make dinner, and I'm really thinking about shelving the game for 6 months. I just don't know if the game has grabbed me in any way enough for me to put up with regular crashes.

I’m about 9 hours in now. I’m playing on a base PS4, and it’s far from unplayable. Does it run like trash? Yes. Is it buggy? Certainly. But it’s not unplayable.

Granted, I’m probably the last person anybody should ask because the only technical problem that will make me straight up put the game down is screen tearing, because it instantly gives me a headache. And miraculously, I haven’t encountered any...yet.

But. I think the game itself just isn’t very good. I still don’t like any of the dialogue, or the voice acting, or the UI, or the various systems, and the main story feels like it was written by stoned high schoolers. Actually, no. I was a stoned high schooler and played Cyberpunk 2020 in the 90s for a few years, and our campaigns were far more imaginative and sophisticated than this story is.

But #2: I do very much enjoy walking around the city, not engaging with the actual game in any way. Just walking and looking at the buildings and the street planning and the various people throwing up or stuck in the sidewalk or whatever. Doing that makes me incredibly happy. Because that’s where the personality of the game really is.

I do wish more of the melee weapons had a better feel to them but you sure do knock the shit outta someone when you land a hit with gorilla arms.

@humanity: have you figured a way to not have it auto-disassemble? I love the perk in almost all situations, but today I found a couple of gold necklaces and such that would have sold for $750 if they hadn’t been scrapped for parts.

@noboners: I assumed it didn’t disassemble valuables but it doesn’t surprise me that it doesn’t. I assume they might patch it at some point but I dunno how to make it differentiate at the moment.

This is going to sound harsh, but I don’t mean it to: why is this even an open world RPG?

To me the game has a good story and main cast, but all the stuff around the edges (Night City, side quests, exploring, etc.) has been pretty unremarkable.

I feel like this could have been like a Bioshock game that’s more linear and it would have been more impactful.

@chaz934: A linear game is 8-12 hours. An open world RPG is potentially 100 hours. It’s the same reason Assassins Creed decided to go open world despite not actually crafting interesting or unique events in that world - it’s a better selling point and it’s popular right now.

The audio on the dialogue keeps cutting out. Sound effects are sometimes nonexistent or sound like it's gone mono. The music while driving the vehicles that are much like a forklift on ice works just fine. It's loud and clear. It's too bad most of the original soundtrack is filled with forgettable music.

My daily morning update: Another whole day with it. Time flies while playing it even though I wouldn't say I'm having.. fun? I guess it's engaging me.

Finally starting to get some bugs/glitches. Game crashed to desktop twice now, for example. Putting on clothes but my dudes just naked etc etc. The usual.

I did a mission (the one where you go to Clouds and investigate) aggressively at first until it went all sloppy and didn't feel right. So I had to restart it and that time I tried to be stealthy about it. Felt more enjoyable and certainly took more time but it felt better. Hacking cameras, sneaking around, looking around the environment and planning. The actual dialogue interaction/interrogation part of the mission didn't feel great. Ended up reloading a few times and trying it different ways until it went the way I wanted. Point is, it made me want to give stealth more of a try. Later did another whole big mission mostly stealth.

I do not think I have done a single side thing yet? The main missions have felt good enough that I keep moving onto the next one to see what happens next. Going to force myself to try out some side stuff now (just went up to my first side job this morning and game crashed) and see how that stuff is.

I find the controls awkward at times. Why put confirm on X? I'm sorta going back and forth between controller and M/KB in the moment and shit just feels weird. How do you even open the cross-menu (crafting/inventory/journal etc) on M/KB? And the way you can't seem to cycle through item pickups is INFURIATING! This has been solved in other games. I want to read the text chip thingy.. Oh, but wait, there are six drinks and snacks around it, even though I am clearly not looking at those, I can't read the text thing until I pickup every other item on the table first. Stupid bullshit.

And I wish I had a 3080.

@humanity: Haven't the AC games always been open world? They certainly have never been 12 hours long.

The thing I keep thinking about most as I playthrough this is Final Fantasy 15, in that both feel like they had a series of ideas/set pieces then, at some point years into development were like 'oh shit we have to make a game out of this'. The moments where an NPC has told me to sit down in Cyberpunk have all been neat, but those are surrounded by dozens of encounters in flat, ugly parking lots where I've killed 4-6 people for the cops.

The guns feel good, the skill tree seems like it give you a lot of room to specialize, but there are so many small UI/UX things that just feel like bizarre missteps, like the lack of touchpad swipes for menu options on the PS controller (A thing Witcher 3 had!) the impossibly massive lore shard list, I'm 20 hours in and the massive amount of meaningless text exchanges I've picked up has made the journal tab basically unnavigable; being totally unable to re-customize your character (even Geralt could get haircuts!) or the fact that outside of the eyes the create-a-character choice where extremely tame, the cyberware arms are the only thing you can do to really make yourself look less human.

Ended up with a lot more here than I thought I would, I guess I'm enjoying it as a piece of crime fiction, and the headshots are solid, but it hasn't been 'Cool' yet, and that feel like a major failure for something in this genre.

So, I have beaten the game and did a lot of side-content and some side missions. About 40 hours worth of playing. I was playing on Very Hard mode.

tl;dr : Combat feels fun. Open world feels like an afterthought. Story/Side missions are engaging and interesting, with decent acting and plots. Character building is difficult to extract the fun out of, but you can. If I didn't get this game as a gift I would have skipped it until everything was fixed.

PC with a i5-6600k and a GTX 1080, performance was *acceptable* but I have a pretty high tolerance for slowdown. Bugs were there, but mostly graphical.

For anyone curious (you're not but whatever) I ended up with a Body 20 / Technical Ability 18 with 3 in hacking and 5-8 in everything else. I almost always do a stealth/hacking character in other games, so I thought to mix it up and do something different. My playstyle was pretty much forced to sneak/stealth at the start because I didn't have a good gun however it finally evolved to crafting a million grenades and chucking them everywhere until everything died. When that didn't work I would 1-shot everything with a Grad sniper rifle. Any time I encountered a boss, I would punch/baseball bat them to death. Honestly I had a good bit of fun with the combat, I might try a lower difficulty in another run of the game just because Very Hard you get killed in 3-4 hits with 20 Body and the best armor/health cybernetics.

I don't really want to spoil anything, but while I find the gigs to be fun in a mindless "do all these checkboxes" way with some of them having interesting vignettes, this game probably would have been better if it was just a menu instead of an open world. The character stuff in the game with the side-missions and the mission structure within them is varied enough to be interesting, but unless you're hand-crafting NPCs like in a Bethesda game, the open world is just lifeless to me.

People don't like Mankind Divided for various reasons, but I think they had a good idea with just having a single city block. Imagine if the developers didn't need to create a big open world, but instead could have packed it into a single district?

The one thing I hope Ubisoft takes note of in this game is that you can refuse to drink alcohol. I know it's a small thing, but the fact that you can do it makes me happy that it's an option. I am sick of games forcing that on my characters.

Loving it. Have 16 RAM to do quickhacks. I can generally clear out an area from far away with short circuit/overheat hack combos and not have to use guns at all. Some dodgy AI (one cyberpsycho got stuck which made killing him very easily, so the glitch was both good and bad) but fun as heck.

I think they've actually learned some good lessons in pacing as compared to The Witcher 3. The main story seems very straightforward and the weeds are off to the side if you're so inclined.

I feel like I've had a clear purpose to every main story mission and each one has appropriately resolved Something at least. There's been no searching for Dandelion in my opinion.

@bahbbarker: So have you experienced any emergent gameplay moments in the open world at all beyond just the hey shoot these thugs in the alley or do you really just get all of your missions big and small via phone calls?

Definitely enjoying the game the more I play. Also getting more bugs and crashes today than ever before.

I expected the skill/perks system to be kinda weak and overwhelming sprawling like I heard people say, but I think its fairly good and I'm constantly like.. Ugh, I want more levels and points because I want so many things.

I like that you level up in skills by using them, but with crafting.. I'm just supposed to spam crafting some crappy ass guns over and over?

I'm hoping there's something like a pseudo-end game in terms of gear and looks because I really wanna make my dude look cool.. except everything you find and use for the best stats is just a hideous confetti of clothing. I want to be able to reach a point where it actually makes sense to invest time, money, and mods into my gear/looks etc.

Driving feels fine to me. I cruise and take in the sights and music rather than racing from point A to point B.

Wish there was better stealth kill stuff. Smoother. Is it possible to knife someone from behind for an insta-kill or do I have to always grab them and then kill? Haven't had like a "Stab" prompt when sneaking up from behind. I only see that there are damage bonuses for stabbing from stealth.

My highest skill is Technical at this point (cuz I'm kinda mechanically inclined like that for real :P ) and got this precision rifle? Has made combat a breeze when I do get into it. Just charge and point at their head for usually one shot kills. The OP part is that I can shoot it through walls and stuff haha I feels broken. They take cover and I just shoot them through it!

The codex cracking thing is a little meh? Doesn't quite feel as satisfying as it could because it doesn't seem like you can get all three levels on every matrix. And more often than not, when I plan it all out to try and get three, somehow it fails and I don't understand why and it disappears off screen before I can see how I screwed up. Plus the shitty timer.

Personally, I would've really expected them to do a more proper terminal system in this game since its all about tech, "the net", l33t haX0rz etc etc. I want like some kinda in-world OS system that you can learn and get deep in. Have like a beginner level of interaction but then you could also do more advance stuff. I just think the big ugly, simple looking terminal interfaces in this are lame. I guess for people who complain about small text. Or console people who probably don't have a keyboard hooked up.

Again, the whole time I'm playing this, I just keep thinking about the next 10 years and how people are going to transform this game into something far more hardcore if the modding allows it.

@seikenfreak:

I love this game so far. It is amazing. With that out of the way, I hope that the devs fix stealth kills.

Blade weapons should have a stealth kill option when sneaking behind enemies. You should be able to pick up the knife after throwing it to stealth kill enemies. Silenced pistol headshot are too weak in the early game. I have a blue tier pistol and silencer and I have fully upgraded it and put points into the perk tree to boost stealth kills/headshots and STILL I shoot an enemy in the head once and they alert every enemy nearby.

I have broken probably close to 100 necks when I have a katana/knife in my hand.

Has anyone figured out a workaround for these problems listed above?

@colourful_hippie:

Absolutely none. Even if you just wanted to fight the cops it's basically impossible to do so because they teleport right onto you and, at least on Very Hard, kill you in 3 shots.

The open world looks nice on the surface, but there's really nothing to do other than look at it.

Everything else is tied up in the Gig system where a fixer will tell you about a (!) on the map and you can go do that short quest.

EDIT: Actually, there's a system with helping the cops I forget is in here. It's a "go here and kill dudes." thing. There's even less depth to these than the gig missions.

@demonsoul:

Depending on your perk loadout, pistols can do something like 30k damage a shot, my baseball bat with no perks was still doing about 4k damage swinging it around. Early game on the harder difficulties is all about snapping necks until you get to the later game and have some toys.

@ares42: just curious, did you update your driver ( I am not sure of you are playing on PC) but I was having the same issues, and they improved after I installed the latest drivers. I do sit have all the usual bugs tbh

@bahbbarker: That's a bummer to hear. It's not going to stop me from playing because I'm enjoying what's going on in the missions but to hear how shallow the world is it's still disappointing. That may be the biggest disparity from what they were implying in the marketing.

My heart goes out to people having issues but I can only talk of my experience and 22 hours in and this game has been blowing my mind. I'm finding the city just so incredibly immersive to hang out and drive around in. The stealth/melee/shooting/hacking combat loop has given me some of the most memorable video game fights I've had in forever making side missions more engaging than most central story stuff from most games. Quickhacking makes for a cool way of handling traditional RPG 'Spellcasting'.

So yeah, playing System shock, Thief, Deus Ex and Shadowrun growing up and watching stuff like the Matrix and this game is like a lifelong dream to me.

Cheramigh Leigh is killing it as V as well. She's making V such a likeable protagonist. To say the least I am loving the game. It's exceeded my expectations!

All this makes me want to do is go back to Witcher 3. I put 60 hours in, but never beat the main story.

I hope that next gen version is out by summer.

TL;DR: You have until Dec 21st to request a refund from CDPR if your digital or brick and mortar retailer don’t refund you. (Console players only)

@el_tajij: Same, its been amazing experience for me so far. This is one of the best games i played this year. I can only say about the game on the Pc.

The city looks incredible in some districts.

Okay so I'm not the only who feels this. I've been literally saying that this is another Mass effect situation where the female version is the only version you should be playing it. Her V is just as sociopathic as anyone else in the game, but Leigh's performance really drives home how a lot of that is cover for her own insecurities of being a nobody. There's something to this character, and it really makes me enjoy her interactions with people in the game.

I originally downloaded the game on my base ps4 because that is the one located in the room I wanted to play in and it has handled most games acceptably well. Boy let me tell you does it run like garbage. First they downgrade the resolution to 720p and it just looks terrible. Was giving me flashbacks of early 2000's ports of PC games to Mac. Second, the framerate was seldomly above 20 fps from what I could tell and there is so much stuttering. And then of course there are the crashes, I would have one about every 30 mins. This game is absolutely unplayable in it's current state on a base PS4. So I downloaded it on my PS4 pro and moved that into my game room (it normally stays with the 4ktv in the living room). The difference between playing it on base PS4 and PS4 Pro is night and day. Still has its fair share of issues and crashes, but runs at 1080p for the most part with a not great, but totally playable frame rate. I know Sony would not allow it, but this game should be marketed as only working on the pro or better. I would be seriously disappointed if I didn't own a Pro and got this game.

@kemuri07: Yeah I was a little iffy of the performance right at the start but it has really grown on me as things have gone on.

Really nails the both bravado and all of the moments when things get especially fucked for the character.

I’ve not heard any of the guy but it’d be a real uphill battle and I’ve not heard good things about it anyway.

@seikenfreak: idk if you're joking or not but Johnny Mnemonic is already that movie

I have finally got hit with a major bug. This one is interesting. Maybe Johnny is auditioning to be the antagonist in the scary movie The Ring 4.

Note: PC with latest Nvidia driver and latest patch 1.04.

@superjoe said:

This was my first bug from the Nomad intro.

They've formed some sort of megaperson