I think I hate Cyberpunk 2.0

I'll preface this by saying that I'm mostly an idiot with no imagination and so I'm complete shit at making builds. So, usually I'll just go with upgrading guns and getting better armor while getting a few skills to hack through doors and whatnot. The new update pretty much removes that playstyle as the reworked skill trees barely offer anything to truly upgrade your weapons, especially until you put way more attribute points into them. Seems like min maxing might be more important now as well. And now that there is enemy level scaling, enemies are just so spongey. I'm not playing this game for any major challenge, I just want a fun Cyberpunk somewhat power fantasy. I've started this game twice and am 15 hours into the 2nd go. No goddamn way am I restarting it again.

Its my fault for not reading all the patch notes I guess but holy shit I didn't expect them to completely rework everything like its pretty much a new game. And of course I'm on PS5 so no rolling the update back. I suppose one solution is to just play it on easy. Or I just say fuck it and uninstall forever. I'll give it a bit more time in the near future but I'm pretty annoyed that this is how it turned out since I waited a month to return for this patch. Even if they put level scaling as an option I'd be happy. I was really looking forward to finally sinking in and now I'm just real unhappy.

That's wild, aside from removing the ability to just spam healing items the game seems even easier to me. The Blade build is a terrifying dervish right out the gate and a ton of fun for it.

The scaling seems good to me, the weapons scale along with them so long as you get better tiers and nothing has seemed particularly spongy to me at all.

@spacemanspiff00: After wrapping up Starfield I've moved on to Cyberpunk after a brief dalliance when it came out. I was very eager to see whats changed after all the hype this patch has received.

While I'm still very early on I do admit some trepidation as I've creeped the various skill trees, I'm not seeing a whole lot that excites me down the attributes I had previously liked to play. Im considering restarting and going into cool or blades if I find out that I cant respec completely in the game.

FAR too early for me to have a real opinion but it is quite different. Ill update as I get further in.

@junkerman: You get a single full respec per game, but unfortunately that's all for Attributes, though you can refund perk points as often as you like.

I really don't understand the hesitation to just allow respecs, I thought this update would really be the time to finally put it in there.

I played the game back at launch and thought it was pretty good, but I'm liking it a lot more now in the time that I've spent with 2.0. The skills and cyberware all feel much more impactful, and there are a lot of fun combat options to experiment with - I'm really enjoying stealth with the throwing knives (which were essentially useless in the original launch version) and aggressive amounts of combat hacks.

I'm not really having any issues with respect to difficulty or bullet-spongey enemies. It all feels pretty fair playing on the hard difficulty option.

I only played for a couple hours but the guns I had/picked up in that time seemed way less effective than before. I get that its the scaling, however, it would be nice to have more options for upgrading weapons beyond getting Cybertech which is expensive. Cause yeah, most of the skills in the trees are pretty lackluster. I've noticed melee builds do seem pretty strong from what I read and watched. I need to play around a bit more with the guns cause that is normally what I go for in these type of games and its not working out well for me. I did also spec into a lot of the old gun skills. Netrunner builds are getting praise too from what I can tell. I'm was trying to play into charming characters more often but I think that spreads your attributes too far apart in the long run. I guess I was playing the scoundrel.

As far as respecs, that one kinda grinds my gears. Even if you have to pay for it in game, fine, just let it be unlimited. Like, you know you could just go look up an OP build online. I would still like to make those decisions cause then its my character. Even if its not greatly optimized lol.

My reaction was a bit kneejerk, its just that I didn't expect that level of change so long after release and was not prepared for it since I had installed the patch before I saw the posts about all the changes. Just turned my PS5 on and there it was. My fault, I know. As I mentioned, I'll give it more time before I make any major decisions. I haven't used the respec yet so I might muck around more with where I am at and then give that a go.

I think the trees are pretty interesting for the most part. Reflex lets you parry bullets, air dash all around the battle, and teleport back and forth between enemies half the time. Tech let's you start your best Edgerunner cosplay or alternatively turn your tech guns into Force Lightning.

Body doesn't seem as flashy but it does seem really effective if you just wanna hulk out.

Cool still seems like the least interesting tree by far, but throwing knives is really effective. I never bothered with quickhack gameplay so can't speak much about what the INT tree offers.

I'm going Cool for...whatever reason. I want to be Cool, I guess? From my memory of the original version of the game, Normal difficulty is hilariously stupid so I'm not too worried about my attribute choices mattering no matter what I do, really. At some point I'll find a pistol that auto-aims at headshots and also lights its bullets on fire and every combat encounter will be an amusement park bonfire.

So far what I'm most fascinated by is just seeing the game that some people had already seen in it way before it got Actually Good. I was one of the rubes that bought it on PS4, though I had read it'd probably be a rough go and can admit I bought the game partially because, as a non-PC gamer, I just wanted to see what it looked and felt like to play a game that's ugly as sin because the hardware just can't deliver it properly. Somehow, I squeezed 20 hours out of that particular nut before getting my refund.

For $30, it's nice to finally see how impressive this game can look, I already knew it had great sound design. I'm also not intentionally trying to ruin it this time so I've got the female V instead of the male. It's already been said a bazillion times but it's truly absurd how much better her performance is. I can't believe the same company that brought us Geralt was cool with...whatever male V was going for.

I've only dipped into it for a couple of hours, starting a new game rather than going back to my completed game save. Honestly, I'm not noticing much of a difference here. I'm sure my subpar memory, which can't remember exactly what's new and what's been there from day one, isn't helping. More structure to the skill trees is nice to have. I find that it's giving me a better sense of where I want to take my character, as opposed to before, where it just felt like I was haphazardly picking whatever ability sounded coolest at the moment. But the minute-to-minute playing of the game feels exactly like how I remember it felt.

On the downer side, this game seems to remain capable of producing some pretty remarkable glitches from innocuous sources. I've had the visual glitch caused by Silverhand's first attempt to bumrush your skull for about 2 hours now, and since my original experience with this game was an impressionist's oil painting interpretation of it, I'd been rolling with it and assuming I just needed to keep pushing the story forward.

Turns out, I called Johnny a "psycho" during a dialogue tree and, direct from CDPR themselves, it's a known issue that this response locks the visual effect in and it's a priority investigation for aan upcoming patch. I can't help but be a little impressed - and happy I don't have any visual issues that make this as utterly unbearable as I'm sure it would be for plenty of other players.

So heads up - don't diss Johnny!

I also hadn't touched the game since originally finishing it almost two years ago and I only ever put 30 hours into it to begin with, ignoring most of the systems the game had since I was still able to get through the story just fine, so all the finer details that 2.0 brings might just be unnoticeable to me.

I do regret not buying the base game for dirtcheap on PS4 when that was possible, cause while it does run fine and looks decent on on my PC (even if playing it makes the fans spin), it does look prettier on PS5 and also has a constant 60FPS there. I guess 60€ for a (discounted) base game and Phantom Liberty isn't too much for a supposed 30 hours of content, but still feels dumb.

I put a few more hours into it last night and I had a much better time. I started tweaking some stuff around without using the respec and its going good so far. I was putting attributes into mostly Tech and Intelligence, with a little Cooool on the side. Using Tech and Smart guns has certainly been better and going in heavier on the Netrunner has been fun.

I still haven't tried car combat yet so I hope that's a good time.

As Nodima mentioned, its still not without its bugs and glitches. I encountered one that I guess used to be a problem in the old build where you come down the elevator to talk to Johnny and your relic starts glitching out and it didn't stop. For awhile I thought I had to just get it fixed but turns out it was supposed to go away right after you talk to Johnny. Luckily I didn't have to load too far back. I also got stuck in a wall and when I managed to jump out the game would just freeze and stutter so I had to reload my last save.

I think, as it stands and bugs aside, I'm in it to win it now.

I'll be diving in for reals pretty soon. I avoided it early on given the reviews, then picked it up when they were offering it for like $5 as a mea culpa. Then other games happened and I never really looped back to it.

I was initially excited that they seem to have largely put the game in a good place, but then I read about the implementation of level scaling and I'm a lot more trepidatious. I have a reflexive hateof level scaling. It gives me the Inspector Dreyfus eye twitch just thinking about it. I mean, I get the arguments for it, but I have yet to find a game that has actually implemented it in a way that makes the game better/fun. It's always been a net negative, especially in an RPG.

So we'll see. People seem to be raving about the new update, but man, I don't know if I'm gonna take to it unless there's an option to turn that shit off.

@therealturk: I get the trepidation about it, but honestly, once you level up a bit most encounters become pretty trivial to get through even with the level scaling. Aside from cyberpsycho and boss encounters, you're rarely in all that much danger - at least that's been my experience playing on hard, maybe it's different on very hard.

My experience with the scaling is that it isn't of the sort where every enemy is scaled to just be a little stronger than you so that you always feel left behind. Everything seems to be kept pretty equal to you but they have none of the tools that you have so you still end up tearing through everything.

So it's pretty well implemented and Cyberpunk lends itself well to the system anyway given the rather divisive nature of some of its content, so now you do not need engage with anything you don't want to just for the sake of XP or gear.

OK, soooo . . . started the game and my fears about the level scaling are 100% confirmed. Tried the Nomad background on hard. I kept getting wrecked in the very first car chase. Like, I absolutely could not beat it. Looked online and it turns out it may very well be impossible because of the way the level scaling was implemented.

Apparently, you're supposed to take set amounts of damage at pre-determined intervals. In the past, it was always tuned to leave you with a sliver of health to make it feel like you barely made it. Problem is, they didn't take into account the new scaling system, so on hard, the enemies will always do enough damage to kill you, no matter what.

While I was able to get through by bumping it down to normal, that's a shitty solution. If the very first encounter in the game demonstrates such a low level of care in implementing and testing the system, then I'll pass.

I guess it's BG3 for the foreseeable future.

@therealturk: I feel like you were primed to hate something and the smallest oversight is like well throw the whole thing in the trash.

Like I get it, bugs are frustrating but you bring up BG3 and I love that game but would not have survived numerous parts of it applying this same mindset.

I played CP77 when the PS5 version came out and did blades. That was so much fun. Glad to hear it's still fun.

The new healing system does make bosses a little sticky, at least on Hard. It’s fine when they’re melee but with those cyberpsychos who just stand there and shoot you at any range there aren’t a ton of great options when you can only heal a couple of times a minute.

I'm back to assault rifles and hacking and am having a pretty good time! I might flip it up to Hard just to get some challenge going, though, as I definitely feel like the fights are pretty easy on Normal difficulty. Maybe I'll wait until I find a smart sniper rifle, though; that was pretty key for my last playthrough.

@efesell: I'm pretty tolerant of bugs (Cyberpunk 2077 was a top 3 game for me in 2020 even though the final boss bugged out on me and just stood suspended in air while I killed him) but, if accurate, "the prologue is literally impossible to beat on hard" is kind of an unforgivable bug for a game that has been worked on for 3 years since release. Like that's a pretty easy one for playtesters to catch, and maybe I'd be more forgiving for a smaller company but this is a massive AAA game and they have the resources.

"You can't get past the first part of the game on hard difficulty" is such a massive QA failure I'm inclined to believe it isn't actually accurate under most circumstances, but if it is then someone needs a new job (either the QA manager or the producer who messed up the QA scheduling so badly that there was no time to properly test.)

@bigsocrates: I did a bit of looking around on YouTube/Reddit and saw clears of it for both Hard and Very Hard.

So while it is perhaps more difficult than a first encounter ought to be even for higher settings it isn’t a case of oops we didn’t notice that we made the intro impossible.

That being said they should clearly take another pass at it because I’ve always assumed it was purely meant to be cinematic.

Considering that the intro for the other life paths essentially are purely cinematic, they really should make that sequence for the nomads basically impossible to fail regardless of difficulty setting.

I dont want to defend anything Cyberpunk does as a bug like that is really shit, especially after all this time and the criminal release state of the game BUT...

I just want to say that I'm playing Nomad on hardest difficulty and I didnt have this issue so maybe its more complicated. Im playing Body/Tech, both of which yield health and armor so maybe that gave me a marginal enough advantage to make a difference. I dont know!

That being said I'm having a lot of fun. I really enjoyed my time with the game when it first launched, I'm a bit bummed that it still has that unpolished jank in the open world I was kind of hoping they'd fix. So other then the improved gameplay systems I dont think its much different then when I played 6 months after launch.

Those new gameplay refinements are REALLY good though, loving the changes to Ripperdocks, items, grenades, crafting, healing, upgrading. It feels a lot more satisfying of a gameplay loop to me.

Why cant the scanner be a toggle on console though! Leave my tired fingers alone.