TL:DR should be at the front of a post, not the end. Nutshell is Cyberpunk is not nearly as bad as it’s been made out to be, at least in the right hardware environment with patches as of October 2021.

So, due to the Tim Rogers Cyberpunk review, specifically the intro as I am following his advice to not watch the rest of it (or more specifically the 2 most interesting segments to me) before playing the main story, I decided to go ahead and just bite the bullet and play it.

Back at launch I played it for about 10 hours and got a ways into act 2 I was mainlining the core storyline with just a bit of exploring the open world, but hit a few too many moments of levitating pantsless above my motorcycle for me to keep it up. I was lucky enough to have an RTX 3080 that I got at MSRP through sheer luck last year (I just went on Best Buy's website and it was there so I bought it, 1 in a million luck) so it ran well enough outside of the quirky bugs, but those quirks were a little too much too often and I think I psychologically joined the dogpile zeitgeist of just stopping after a while, despite not having an awful time. My thought at the time was that I would wait for it to hit a proper 1.0 as the bugs did seems rather Alpha-build.

Anyway, I finally decided to play it again this past week due to the Tim Rogers review intro and I’m now about where I was before. Still not done but I have to say, I’m actually enjoying my time with it quite a bit. It’s not perfect and nothing could ever match the hype that the out of control marketing created and the criticism is got was and still is absolutely legitimate. Let me repeat, THE CRITICISM IS LEGITIMATE. But, this is really not a bad game. In fact, I gotta say, it’s actually pretty good.

So, three aspects that I want to talk about: the level/open world design, the story, and the lore.

First, the design: I have to say, this is one of the best cities I’ve ever explored. The twisty walkways, highways and cityscapes is really impressive. There is a bit of reused modular design to the interiors but the outdoors and amount of otherwise bespoke areas is actually quite impressive. I’m really having a great time Deus Exing my way through individual missions, and also just walking around the environments. A thing I hate about it, however, is the fake ads. This is beyond crass, these would be rejected jokes from the Idiocrasy script. The trans jokes on billboards, the raw grotesque gore and shit and body fluids on display are not actually in line with the world it is presenting. Billboards with a trans man proposing marriage to a female coded partner while leaking menstruation blood like they shit their pants as a tampon ad is a specifically disgusting example to me, along with the others like the Watson Whore ads, the dog food tittyfuck ads or the antidepressant ads graphically depicting a suicide. These show how far from the mark this game can be from the world it's actually trying to show with its characters and it's not successful in it being a contrast if that is what they were going for. These are the sorts of things a particularly stupid 12-year-old edgelord trying to shock his grandma would come up with. The characters in the game are intelligent and as such the world it’s presenting though it’s fake advertising just doesn’t line up right. It’s not satire, it’s just dumb and sort of betrays a basic misunderstanding of what a post-gender and/or post-race world where human body parts are swappable with hardware would actually represent. In a nutshell, the ads seem to be completely detached from the actually quite good design otherwise shown in almost all the rest of the game. And because advertising is everywhere (and ads being everywhere does make sense in this setting, the irony of that not being lost on me considering the hype train this game had) it is distracting and unseemly. In a world that can replace someone’s whole nervous system along with traditionally gendered body parts, companies would not be making up stupid biological fluid jokes in their marketing writers rooms.

The story is the second aspect, and it’s the shortest. This is a good future noire story. Is it the best, or even great? No, not at all. It’s retelling stories already retold a hundred times before. I don’t know the end of the main story but I think I see where the ending is heading and it’s not something I haven’t seen before. But it’s being told well so far. Characters are shown to have humanity and depth beyond their archetypes, at least in the quiet moments of exposition. The game is willing to have those scenes of contemplation and empathy with each other and those are some the best moments where you see a characters place in this setting more than their place in the general plot line. The bad guys are real bad, the good guys are also kinda bad guys, it’s people living within a highly compromised system of evil that took over the planet. It works, I like these characters and am invested in what happens, even if I see it coming.

Finally, the lore: it was a bit pre-built due to it being an established setting, albeit 50 years later from Mike Pondsmiths original setting (which was LAST YEAR, HA!). I enjoy little background things like the US government dissolving in 1996 and them committing to that inaccurate alternate timeline. There is a whole lot of legitimate criticism about the inevitable conclusions of capitalism. Honestly, I sadly think that a lot of what is presented as far as climate is likely in the real world within the game settings timeline. Radio hosts talking about terminator crops and books referring to cryptocurrency being a lead in to corporations replacing the financial viability of democratic governments sound like CNN right now and not like a futurist 'What If' novel. Its seems sadly all too likely in my opinion (I hope to fuck I’m just stupid and wrong, but I also predicted trump would be president as soon as he announced candidacy, so I hate my predictions.) That said, as sad as it is, it is really well done, both what Pondsmith original created and how CDPR expanded on it.

One small thing in the lore/world building that CDPR has done since the first Witcher game is that they have every shopkeeper have a chat line. Meaning you can just ask some item shop guy how his kids are or call out someone talking in haiku despite being tenth generation Japanese-american so they can sell robot factory-made clothes. It’s incidental and meaningless, but it adds character to the game. They do it the worst in cyberpunk, it was done better in the Witcher series where it was more about being the one Nilfgardian merchant in the north or how a shopkeeper is an elf so even though they have the best swords, no on in town will buy them, but it is still there and it still adds a depth to the world that most RPGs don’t bother with. Same for the side missions, there is always a little bit of drama to the quest giver talking about how his wife divorced him because he lost a leg in the war and can’t fuck good no more, even if the mission itself is just to essentially kill ten boars or hack a laptop. It is a trick they did better in the Witcher 3, but it remains an ok trick here.

In conclusion, Cyberpunk 2077 is pretty good. It’s a lot better now if you have the hardware to run it and the patches to keep your pants on, which I know most don’t have due to global shortages (another real life Cyberpunk problem.) In its ideal hardware environment, it’s now runs fairly smoothly and the bugs that I am running into are mostly acceptable and reloading a save from minute or two before solves like 99% of issues. If they delayed until right now, I think it would have been considered a good game universally, though nothing could have matched the hype.

It’s not the best game ever. It is a decent RPG in a decent setting with a decent story. It borrows the wrong things from GTA and the right things from The Witcher.

Side observation: Run The Jewels and Grimes being on the same soundtrack seems like a conflict of interest, considering one votes for Bernie and the other was married to Satan Musk.

PS: I wrote this long post on my phone and there are some autocorrect typos. Please read around them until I go back to it tomorrow morning to clean it up a bit.

I mostly agree with what you say here, especially about the city. I played it around launch and it ended up as one of my favorite games of the year, despite the numerous, numerous flaws (such as the final boss getting hung up on geometry and freezing so I could go up and whack it to death with a melee weapon at my leisure.)

I think that the issue with Cyberpunk was the marketing push and just the expectations because it was CDPR's next big game. And, of course, the technical issues. The many, many, technical issues.

The project was so problematic from so many angles (ranging from the crass transphobic ads to misleading marketing to broken 8th gen console versions) that it's hard to separate the actual game from that when it works. That actual game is far from perfect but it's pretty darned good, and the city is like no other environment in gaming.

I think with the ads they were going for political satire and they just kind of overshot. I agree that problematic issues aside they just don't fit in many of the areas of the game. They might make sense in the slums but the richer areas have a totally different aesthetic and they're there too. I'm not saying that rich people are better than poor people, but if you look at the aesthetic of the hotel you go into during the heist mission, it's going for elegant, not crass. Yet the ads in the area are all completely over the top crass and gross. I think they just didn't realize that maybe in the future we'll have even crasser ads than we do today but just like today those ads will be limited to certain areas and types of media.

Of course it may also be that they intended to create more diverse material but they ran out of time because this game was rushed and cut and pasted together, so we can't just assume this was vision rather than expediency.

I just want to be able to change my hair and the color of my cars without using mods.

I love Cyberpunk, even playing it at launch with all of its warts it was one of my favorite games of the year.

But there is a very important lesson to be learned here about building hype I think.

I redownloaded it on my PS5 earlier this month, and ran it on an external drive, which isn't an SSD, assuming this would be closer to what the performance would be on PS4. The first thing I did was walk into the club and it was completely empty. I had thought I remembered people being in there, but I hadn't played it since launch, so maybe I just forgot. I waited about a full minute, and then people just started to finally load into existence. I stopped playing immediately after that, and came to the conclusion that this thing probably should not have been put back on sale for PS4 and will probably never be in a state that it should.

Im curious to play it too - I think its something that would be my jam. The number one thing I look for in a game is an immersive world to wander in. Games like the Darkness, or specifically the Collector's Ship mission of ME2, the new Guardian's of the Galaxy game, Death Stranding - none of these games are without flaw but something with enough atmosphere is generally enough for me to have a great time over whatever blemishes (Or gangrene) a game may have.

With Cyberpunk though its hard to weed out the commentary. It seems like it's do-able on a Rippin' modern PC. I'm stuck on console and anecdotes like @brian_'s has me staying away for now.

I'm on Series S at the moment. If anyone can speak of a positive recent experience on that machine I'm all ears. Otherwise I'll have to wait until these next gen releases in 2022.

A damn shame because I really wanted to finish that Mad'Man's review.

@junkerman: Old consoles are a rough experience but it doesn't require a crazy PC to run, and didn't even at launch. The majority of bugs were not performance so much as just weird shit happening.

@efesell: I suppose thats projection on my part as compared to my PC even a moderate is "Crazy".

That being said, as someone who enjoyed it, have you seen anything pointing to the Modern Consoles as being a comparable experience to the PC or do they fall closer to the Last Gen hardware in terms of performance?

I dont really care about Frame Rate, I'm on 1080p and will be until they stop making them, as long as its playable (ie. not sub30 while playing the game when there is no action). Are the bugs the same across platform or are consoles harder hit?

@junkerman: I don't know how things have evolved in the interim but Digital Foundry did their usual pass on the game with PS5, XbX/S, and ect at the time. They all seem to make the best out of a poor situation in regards to those versions of the game.

@junkerman: I played on a Series X and it was very playable. Honestly the performance wasn't bad (it doesn't look as nice as the PC game on strong hardware and lacks texture detail and lighting) and the main issue was the bugs, some of which were console specific some weren't. They did not make it unplayable or anything.

But why play it on PS5 or XSX now when they are going to have a version made for those consoles in a few months? I assume that will be better in a lot of ways. Or at least I would hope so after over a year of waiting!

@bigsocrates: True that!

I've still got Psychonauts, I assume Halo 6 and some other random gamepass games to checkout - so I dont imagine I'd be getting to it before the next gen re-release anyway.

I'm curious what will change - if anything. I think the next gen versions will be free upgrades so once I double check that I suspect I'll pick up a last gen version for pennies over the holiday on the off chance they try to charge 89.99 or whatever the "Next-Gen" games are rolling out at these days.

It feels like a million years since Cyberpunk came out, which probably says more about 2021 than Cyberpunk.

Only time will tell, but I don't think time will be kind to it. In a time when everyone's getting tired of the open world format, or at least the open world format as a collectathon map-clearing endeavor, Cyberpunk is almost the perfect stereotype of that trend, adding nothing new but sheer Volume of landmass and art.

It was, in my experience, competent-ish. Bugs and obvious transphobia aside, combat was fine, driving cars was terrible and bikes were slightly less terrible, the stealth was shallow, the story had some interesting concepts and didn't follow through on them, the level design was the first time CDPR attempted immersive sim setups and they felt like it, and the skills and leveling were so broken that almost every build ended in you not having to interact with the game's systems at all. (I feel mildly validated that I pointed this out in my blog post about it and this was echoed by Tim Rogers and everyone I've talked to who played into the late game.)

Of course, feel free to disregard everything I've said because I'm clearly a snob, I'm the same asshole that thinks Deathloop is disappointing, ha. (Although in that case, I can tell the game is clearly incredibly well made and achieves its design goal of making immersive sims accessible to more players impeccably, it's just that their method of doing so mildly killed what I like about the genre, player-driven discovery.)

Though, recommendation, anyone who likes the stealth and level design in Cyberpunk, check out Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Fantastic level design. (and this is more of a stretch, but on the subject of immersive sims, I've been playing Prey again and recently and oh my god it is so well done, literally zero complaints here)

@lapsariangiraff: I replayed Mankind Divided back in January and it was SICK! Prey also rules. Even though I posted a defense of Cyberpunk, your criticism are totally spot on as well and both DX:MD and Prey are better examples of cohesive games where all aspects come together (though DX:MD was just too damn short, it felt like half a game, and I wanted more of it.)

@tartyron: Totally, Mankind Divided's story ends so abruptly. I do love that final level though, it felt like an elegant smaller scale way to have a similar level of choice/divergence as the original Deus Ex but with modern gamemaking budget constraints (it all has to look great, animate in cutscenes, voice acting, etc. etc.) Also being able to find a code word that could kill the final boss without ever fighting him is a great nod to the original.

I want more Eidos Montreal Deus Ex, lol. Hopefully they don't get roped into another Guardians of the Galaxy or Tomb Raider.

It's interesting in that I had the actual problem with Mankind Divided that Cyberpunk gets so much for because that game would barely function. The performance was so terrible and I easily met the specs for that game at the time.

It seemed like an okay sequel and I would have played more of it but it was a total mess.

@efesell: Yeaaaa there are a couple totally innocuous graphics settings that are just Trouble for some reason. A couple of the ultra settings just made the game crash any time I walked through the square outside your apartment in Prague. Other than that, worked fine for me though. But as always, YMMV!

@efesell: I forget which, but there was literally just one setting that fucked up the frame rate, and flipping it to a lower setting fixed everything. This was both back in the day and when I replayed it recently, like they never got that patched right.

That setting was MSAA in Mankind Divided. It tanked the framerate of even great PCs of the time. Just turn it off and Mankind Divided should run fine.

I feel pretty confident that I would have tried that at the time and it was a bad experience but I’ll keep it in mind if I ever go back.

It still won't be the massive, "next generation of open-world adventure" game they promised and overhyped for nearly a decade.

"Overpromise, Sell, Underdeliver Cyberpunk 2077"

Crowbcat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omyoJ7onNrg

Mankind Divided is so damn good...

I'm thinking to buy this on PC by mid or fall 2022 while waiting for the developer to eliminate more & more bugs, based on what I've heard about the complaints during its launch day.

For CD Projekt, I only can trust them for PC gaming.

Edit: In reality, it depends on how well can the developers optimize for each specific platform.

Oh, I just realised that running this game on PS5 and Xbox Series X has superior performance to the PS4 and Xbox One versions.

Story is still bad and still a lot of dumb on rails mechanics. I always laughed at the promise NPC's have their own routine and such. I know a game that did that in 1999. Shenmue. They had jobs. Routines. You could follow them home. I know Jeff hates the game and that's fine but a 2020 game promising stuff as some next-gen thing even tho it was done decades prior. CP2077 even with all the glitches smoothed out. Still a typical mediocre AAA game as most are.

Indeed.

30 hours in on a decent PC and I'm probably ditto'ing everyones takes on it but the worst about 2077 is probably the combat. Point at people's heads, shoot, look down at their corpses and loot anything that isn't nailed down to the floor rinse repeat. There is nothing I ran into so far that made me change my tactics. I decided to switch the perks to a melee build and without any kind of smart pro gamer min maxing or anything and just equipping whatever green machete I had on hand: I found myself auto decapitating peoples heads off by holding left click. I will never run out of health medkits to spam, so there's no reason to hide behind cover. I bought the mantis blades to maybe spice things up, but other than a cool animation that just slows you down there's not even really a fun empowerment thing to be had here.

It's very clear that a lot of the systems were half baked just to get the game done. You cannot fix this with a patch, this game's combat needs to be remade from the ground up because even if you balanced some of this stuff I can't imagine the scenarios and the fights being anymore interesting than a single-player borderlands. Most of the core game feel generally plays awful, I dread even just the basic act of navigating menus

Having said all that, this is the only open world game I enjoyed actually walking around in. The pedestrian AI and the general goings on just feels like generic GTA, but there's always some neat architecture around the corner somewhere. I always look forward to the objectives that tell me to just drive to a far away place. The environment art team actually killed it and a lot of the cutscenes portray it well too. Getting a red Akira looking motorbike and blasting Kaneda's Theme while going top speed through the city on max settings and not having a frame drop is my favorite part about this game, but it's a very superficial "pretend it's something else and make the best of it" way rather than enjoying the game for what it actually is way.

I went into it with very low expectations, but feeling kind of neutral about the bugs and played it a few months after release as I experienced very few. I doubt this will turn into the NMS success story that some people are pining for because adding stuff onto it won't actually improve it. The core needs to be revamped, that is... if anyone working on this game wants to touch it with a 10 foot pole after all that patching. The best I would hope for is some dedicated group of fans makes a 2 hour Bladerunner mod that recreates the movies events beat per beat. Then just reinstall Deus Ex again.

I hesitated getting it because of bugs and the critics on the story, but I got in on sale a couple months ago and it's one of the best games I've played. People talked pretty bad about the open world and I think it's great, they talked about the story etc, I like it a lot especially some of the side missions.

The only real critique is that it's too easy, I'm playing with blades and after leveling up I'm pretty invincible at anything at my level or lower.

And this is with never being able to get a steady 60 regardless of settings (i5 6600k gtx 1080) so I just capped it to 45fps. Also using lossless scaling to use FSR to get better upscaling so the game looks pretty damn good on my 4k screen.

Ran into maybe 2 or 3 bugs where my car just randomly exploded down the street, or some enemis get stuck in the air after being beheaded etc. But they are mostly fun skyrim esque bugs (had a character have a rocket launcher stuck in their hand during an entire mission lol).

Most of the ads in game are shitty, but it fits the theme of the game, it's a shitty place to be. Game has way better character moments than I was led to believe by reviews and stuff. I expected a mediocre story with bland open world, and got the opposite. Glad I bought it.

@oursin_360: I think part of the fun is that you can spec in a way that completely breaks the game. I remember getting a ton of stealth bonuses, first shot bonuses, headshot multipliers and pistol damage buffs - and then I found the biggest revolver in the game, slapped a silencer on it and I was doing like 14k damage for every headshot. I also played the game pretty much like Deux Ex so that fit my playstyle real well. Some people don't like just coasting through games but personally I love the power fantasy.

I ended up playing 2077 on a Series X and it ran well, with a steady frame-rate and resolution that was around 1440p (Graphics mode, or whatever it was called.)

Yes, it had some bugs, but none were of the game-breaking kind. Granted, I played it after a few patches.

I liked the combat, but the driving could have been better. I also like the open world, although I think they needed to cut back on the amount of NPCs. It seemed that I was constantly bumping into people as I was trying to sprint somewhere.

The overall story wasn't very interesting to me, but some of the characters were.

I will probably go back and play through one of the other paths (I finished a Corpo playthrough) when the actual "next gen" version comes out in 2022.

@humanity:lol, yeah it is still pretty fun but I do like SOME challenge. I can play stealth with a blade and just run around and one shot an entire room lol.

I didn’t mind it but it’s definitely true that the balance is way off. It’s one thing if a game has a specific broken path that people find that trivializes content but that’s basically every path in this game.

Stealth? Silent Assassin. Hacking? Pull up a lawn chair at the start of a zone and fry everyones brain. Cyberweapons? Just fuckin rip and tear until it is done.

@oursin_360: In my case it helped that it was a challenge for the first half of the game so by the second half I was ready to just rip and tear through everyone. Especially since early in the game I wandered into some high level zones and tried to outsmart quests way too high level for me - so coming back in the endgame and one shorting everyone and frying their cyber brains was very gratifying.

So I found it on sale for pennies and decided to give it a go on Series S.

About ten hours or so in and I'm actually loving it. This is in no way endorsing the irredeemable shittiness on how this was relased a broken mess but playing it on next get hardware a year later and so far I dont really have any complaints and unless it really goes off the rails later on I think a lot of the criticism is overblown.

At its worst its really no different then the quality of content we've seen from Ubisoft in the past. My immediate reaction upon seeing some of the ugly animations and flatness of the NPCs off the critical path reminded me of Valhalla.

That being said Night City really does feel like a real place and its a darn shame they didnt have the ability to really pull off that next level NPC design everyone was clearly hoping for.

As it stands it just feels like Deus Ex Mankind Divided with a cool story so far. And I'm okay with that. A solid 3 Star game elevated to a 4 or higher by its Cyberpunk Asthetic (which I feel they've nailed quite well.) I suspect in a few more years by the time they hand this thing off with an expansion pack or two it will be something worth replaying a time or two.

That opening mission where you're trying to find the kidnapped girl, jacking in and waiting for the medical team to arrive was one of the coolest gaming moments I've had in a long while. But that paints a picture on what I look for in games which is just to be immersed in cool stuff. Because the stealth "gameplay" before that was... sub par.

@junkerman: The game's prologue has a lot more cool moments than the rest of it. It's clear that what they wanted to do from a mission design and "choice" perspective was much greater than what they actually pulled off.

However...I really liked the game. I loved Night City, I thought there were some good quests, some fun NPCs, and the stealth and combat were...fine. Not great, not awful (though terribly balanced, which means a lot of min-maxers hate it.) It was buggy as heck even on the Series X, though some of that has been ironed out.

The driving in cars is terrible, but the motorbikes are acceptable so it doesn't matter that much once you get your hands on a bike.

The problem is that this game was hyped beyond the moon to be like a GTA 5 level super polished experience and instead it was more like a Bethesda game....buggy as hell and kind of shallow but with some good aspects if you could overlook the bad parts. It's a victim of its own hype.

And, of course, the technical difficulties on the Xbox One and PS4 were totally unacceptable and a large reason why the game was so poorly received. It's easy to overlook that if you're playing on PC or a 9th gen platform but it's very important.

I just picked up the ps4 version on the Black Friday sale (for the eventual free upgrade) and it’s a relatively pleasant experience on PS5. The lighting seems a little flat of course but it’s probably more consistent overall than my much nicer looking PC play through. I might actually continue on for a full run of it.

I would imagine that on an actual PS4 though $25 is still too much.

I got it on PC at launch and put 130hrs into it by February 1st. I got to the middle of the 2nd act. I want to finish it soon.

Still chipping along nicely and really enjoying my time with the game. About level 15 or so, just been going around knocking off the Gig jobs for the Watson Fixer - I think I'll be finishing Act 1 tonight which I imagine will open up the rest of the game world to me.

I reckon I'll fall off the side stuff immediately once that happens as taking on anything larger then Watson is likely beyond what I have the interest in. For right now its just fun existing in that world and I find the Augmentation/attribute/skillpoint system to be quite satisfying to play with and I've really been able to steer my character to the build I want in a satisfying way. I seem to be seeing a nice mix of option for each of the attributes too coming up in gameplay.

I'm not sure if this is a complaint or a criticism or maybe even its a good thing I'm not sure - but initially I was encountering quests with no real "crafting" way of getting around them. So I just started refusing to progress in the quests without searching every nook and cranny and low and behold I could always find a window or a skylight or something, even if it required some very videogamey ways of jumping to access. TLDR; it seems like there really is a unique way using your skillset to approach challenges but its just not overtly clear at all and thats probably not a good thing. Its all kind of moot anyway as the game poses no challenge so far even though I have zero combat abilities.

The first person dialog is pretty cool so far - it doesnt happen very often but I've run into some side quests/gigs that handle it in some interesting ways. This one had me track down some stolen meds to this washed out Veteran who pulls a gun on me as soon as I open the door. I almost just nuked his cyberwear instantly but realized I could talk to him so I was doing so I started walking into the room not really considering that he asked me to stay outside and not to move. He pulls his gun again and offers another warning and the dialog available/context changed. So we get to talking and then I forget again and move and he opens fire.

I reloaded a few times just to see how that encounter could play out and it was quite varied. I had to stop thinking about playing a video game and consider how to approach him more authentically.

That being said it all amounts to three or four permutations on a 30 second exchange on a throw away quest but in my opinion those are the moments that matter in interactive media.

Anyway I'm eager to see where it all goes - I suspect the wheels will start to fall off the further out I get from the starting point but maybe I'll be surprised. I wish they condensed the whole game down to something Watson sized and really hammered out the handcrafted, curated content. No cars, just on foot on a busy street booming with adds and crowds and heavily scripted beats around every corner. I think thats where the game would really excel but we only ever see the faintest shadows of it.

I think you mean chippin' in?

@junkerman: quick thing: save some of the gigs for the end. Time moves towards based mostly on how many quests you complete. I killed all the gigs early in act two, but then with some of the more story heavy side character content, the next step would not trigger for the longest time between missions, because I didn’t have little missions to tick down time with between stages. This is not a problem for the main story, but the romances for example can get hung up with this.

Wow, a questionable design choice in Cyberpunk!? Anyway, don’t clear the board completely, save like ten or so.

@tartyron: I’m not sure this is a thing? I’m a do all the things on a map type before continuing on and I didn’t hit any gaps between quests showing up.

@efesell: it was mostly towards the end. Folks like Judy that I hadn’t finished the quest lines for we’re not calling me for the next step, sometimes for hours in real time. I actually finally gave up trying to finish Kerry’s quest because I had nothing left to do (I mean gigs where the fixer talks to you, the little assault in progress and stuff I’m not counting because they are too dull to bother with and don’t seem to tigger things either). The thing folks on forums seemed to settle on is that where a quest says “kill time and wait for a call” if you don’t complete objectives, that time doesn’t pass, or passes slowly. I tried it with sleeping and waiting too, honestly, it wouldn’t have been 2077 on the calandra anymore with how many times I tried sleeping a week or two to get quests to trigger.

Maybe it was a just me bug? All I can say is that it doesn’t hurt to leave a few side quests to avoid my problem, the game gives you a warning before the point of no return, it’s not a problem to mop up the few you might have left.

@efesell: it was mostly towards the end. Folks like Judy that I hadn’t finished the quest lines for we’re not calling me for the next step, sometimes for hours in real time. I actually finally gave up trying to finish Kerry’s quest because I had nothing left to do (I mean gigs where the fixer talks to you, the little assault in progress and stuff I’m not counting because they are too full to bother with). The thing folks on forums seemed to settle on is that where a quest says “kill time and wait for a call” if you don’t complete objectives, that time doesn’t pass, or passes slowly. I tried it with sleeping and waiting too, honestly, it wouldn’t have been 2077 on the calandar anymore with how many times I tried sleeping a week or two to get quests to trigger.

Maybe it was a just me bug? All I can say is that it doesn’t hurt to leave a few side quests to avoid my problem, the game gives you a warning before the point of no return, it’s not a problem to mop up the few you might have left.

I got it, and just due to other games and life events fell off of it.

Seeing there are people who still look at this game fondly to an extent, despite its flaws and the flaws surrounding it definitely makes me want to try and dedicate some time.

With state of my relationship with multiplayer games nowadays, I'm definitely looking into my single-player/story game backlog and will slap this on the list.

@tartyron: Oh wait, is *THAT* why the Judy quest completely dropped dead for me? I assumed I had just reflexively responded to her with "yeah I'll get to you later" not realizing that'd kill the questline at some point, but I *did* mop up all the gigs between story missions pretty early on, so that's a better explanation.

Maaaaaaaaan that SUCKS.

@lapsariangiraff: I know, right!? And Judy’s later stuff is great. I was able to get calls eventually, but it seemed to be real time, maybe it was from doing the little assaults in progress that suck and aren’t otherwise worth doing, but I’d have to stake up like 10 of those between calls, whereas earlier in the game doing just one fixer gig would make a call come in. I did manage to finish Judy’s quest line but Kerry will forever be a mystery to me, because even though I ended up mostly liking the game, I’m sure as shit not going back to it any time soon unless significant and not-broken dlc comes out, which, you know, doesn’t seem likely at this point.

I feel that’s gotta be one of a myriad bugs cause I got that chain pretty much one after the other I think.

Or at the very least no gaps in there long enough to notice.

Tough to say what kind of variables are running under the hood.

My current hurdle - the game gives me terrible eye strain I've determined.

I'm a fit, healthy dude who gets regular eye evaluations for work so I know my vision is good. I've been consuming digital content my entire life. And over the last week or so of playing I've noticed my eyes hurting and fatiuging, losing the ability to focus. Decided to cut out Cyberpunk, still playing games and it went away within a day.

I really like this game but man is it making it hard.

I was trying it on a 1070 ti/2700x/32GB RAM at launch. That isn't "crazy hardware" in 2020 and I would never claim it to be. However, the only other game I encountered that I couldn't run on mostly High/60FPS minimum/1440p at that time was Control. Cyberpunk 2077 hammered that hardware pretty hard - to even maintain something above 45 FPS, I had to go mostly Medium, some Low, 1080p. I tried it again a few months ago and it was much better, playable on better settings, but still not really what I wanted out of it, so I held off again.

...all of that said, I have a 3080 ti now and it would be a crime not to spend a decent chunk of time in this game rather soon, so I'll probably play it early next year. I have some other things I want to play beforehand.