This does look pretty wonderful and I want to see more of it as soon as possible. I've read one of the previews and the phrase 'roughly four times the size of The Witcher 3 in a single load' popped out at me. That feels like a very heavy density of content and- well, if it's Cyberpunk Deus Ex + GTA I think I'd be okay with that.
Also, it's based on an old pen and paper RPG, the third edition of which couldn't afford to hire artists or models for photography because art is expensive, yo. Instead, they used dolls.
I've not really seen anything of this before, and that trailer fails my first test, which is "if this was a film, would I watch it?" The setting and aesthetic does very little for me.
Still, it's all down to the writing I guess, and the developers have pedigree.
The doll thing was not an isolated incident. Like, that shit is all over the place in the 3E book.
I know that Pondsmith is working on this game which is real interesting because the guy is kind of a legend in RPG circles at this point for going in the opposite direction to everyone else. My concern is that the metaplot (a thing that CDPR are pretty familiar with on the Witcher) went real fuckin' dumb as the game line went along including at one point everyone getting amnesia about anything to do with technology.
The one for the Witcher 3 had a lot of the same problems as that, but with a less Triple-A voice over.
I- I might be being too much of a lefty whingebag but I get a real bad sense off of it. All of the High Impact Terrible Gender Politics of a CDPR game ('did you assume my gender?' twitter 'jokes' aside, The Witcher is a Game of Throne-ish disaster of representation) mixed with all the ablist bullshit that Cyberpunk has saddled itself with. I really want to dig this game but I'm being put off by it at every chance it gets which is pretty concerning.
Absolutely 100% not for me. Looks foul. I mean, it looks "good" from a purely visual performance perspective, but that content… yeah, nope. I don't need that kind of thing in my life.
I thought it looked very impressive, in terms of scope and technical prowess, and generally pretty unappealing otherwise.
I’ve not given up on it entirely, as there’s obvious potential for something remarkable there, but having found the content to be alternatively uninspiring and offputting, I’m not exactly chomping at the bit either.
I'm still kind of hopeful that this is just a marketing effort to get people interested who wouldn't normally look twice at a stat-heavy, character-driven RPG, and that the final game will be much less "fuck yeah gunz" and more, y'know, cyberpunk.
I want paranoia and noir and ultimately-futile punching upwards at impossibly large corporate behemoths. I want to be a fucking nobody given a sliver of a chance to do one impossible thing that changes the world in ways nobody will ever know about.
So far it looks like a dudebro power trip, and I'm not sure I can think of anything less small-C cyberpunk.
I actually went reverse to some of the opinions here, from not thinking the initial footage was all that to being very impressed by that clip (the dialogue seemed pretty dumb though, yeah) especially the walking around town. I'd say 'smoke and mirrors' but to this day Novigrad kinda blew my mind even, so I trust em',
I have no doubts about the technical skill of CDPR to deliver a huge, immersive world - I'm just unconvinced that it's a world that I'd want to spend any time immersed in.
"Dude bro gunz fantasy" pretty much sums up my memories of how Cyberpunk 2020 games went down.
This was also the game that you could spend real world money to buy catalogues of stuff to spend your character's Eruodollars on, which might just be the most capitalist thing ever. Well, second to loot crates anyway.
Cyberpunk was never a game about fighting the system. The corporations have won, democracy is dead. You play contact hackers/soldiers/rock stars who take any old job as long as it pays well. Any attempts to make the world a better place are doomed to failure.
(The cyberpunk RPGs are also horrendously ableist, probably unintentionally. They equate prosthetics with a literal and irredeemable loss of humanity and if you get too many you will turn psychotic and go on a killing spree until someone puts you down.)
This has been delayed again, for about the fourth time: now coming out in December with developers in severe crunch and the actual next gen versions not due until next year. Is there any way this isn’t going to be a broken mess at launch?
It's built from highly advanced tech which probably barely works.
It's all about violence and style over substance.
It is being constructed in digital Dickensian workhouses.
It is going to be released in 2020.
We all have a moral obligation to pirate this game and hack it into something better.
This looks like it's coming in very hot, as expected. Sites which have reviewed it have talked more about the bugs than the actual gameplay. Several places have held off on their review, presumably because there's a big day one patch incoming. Apparently it's giving people epileptic seizures. CD Projekt Red have been accused of transphobia and racism. The next-gen patch might not make 2021. It's all going really well.
I'm kind of amazed at the complete nosedive my interest in this took between the first and second trailers.
Apparently it's giving people epileptic seizures.
According to one report I read, this could be intentional – they've included a specific kind of flashing light patterns that's used in medical studies to deliberately trigger seizures.
Apparently the rules and the direction they took with the setting were both great. If you ever needed a case study to prove the importance of good art though…
I managed 90 minutes of the PS4 version on PS5, and decided to wait for the free upgrade. It's not a pretty game, at all. It's got an N64-style vaseline smear, the load times (on the SSD) are upwards of 20 seconds per area, the shadows are hilarious.
Without wanting to sound like an entitled internet twat, I'm not sure why this took 7 years. It feels like an early PS4 game, even on PS5 backwards compatibility.
I have faith in the next-gen upgrade, and the patience to wait.
Without wanting to sound like an entitled internet twat, I'm not sure why this took 7 years. It feels like an early PS4 game, even on PS5 backwards compatibility.
Surely both of those things are conflated though? If it was started seven years ago, it WAS an early-ish PS4 game and would have taken the various limitations on tech (lighting, engine, animation, etc) into account. You can't keep binning off work every time something better comes along, you'd be restarting development into infinity.
It's an exasperating mix of good and bad really. Graphically I don't think I've ever seen a game swing between extremes of looking astonishing to complete dogshit in such small windows of time. It's also so tired and derivative in many ways but conversely fresh and interesting in others. One thing worth mentioning is the city - initially it was very much like "oh this is GTAV", but there really is a sense of it being a real, lived in place. We've all wandered around GTAV staring at things, but this sort of cranks it up a notch. It felt a lot like really walking around a new city for a first time, full of different levels, nooks, crannies, things to gaze at in shop windows etc. It's very dense, yet, get in a car and you could be playing any open world game from the last 15 years. The transition is really jarring. It really is a game to be walked.
I'm a few hours in now and the plot is yawn inducing at times, but often suddenly throws in a massive curve ball with something fascinating. Although it's partially ripped off from a Batman title there was a really interesting sequence I just didn't expect to be in the game. A sequence that you could argue could literally be the core of another title, but is just another idea in Cyberpunk. It was cleverly done and showed great potential, although it was also badly done in many ways: such is Cyberpunk's haphazard quality control. Still, I didn't expect it to be there and breaking expectations is usually a good thing.
Another thing worth mentioning (and Bioware should be mailed videos of this until they work out how to do it) is the fluidity of interactions between characters talking is a step up. People walk and talk. Or chat in a car. Or transition between multiple environments while having a conversation. Often this is needlessly embarrassing (the bar scenes at the start reminded me of returning to the old days where all the baddies were in frozen meat factories - only this variant was the awkward digital strip bar concept) but I do think it's a step up on most games. I like how it doesn't really give much of a shit about you entering this world and understanding it. There is the occasional person shouting exposition, but by and large as it doesn't rely on an amnesia trope it sort of treats you like it would treat anyone who already understand the gameworld. I have very little idea what's going on or who anyone is, but that's my usual state in games and novels, but you can still mop up the atmosphere.
Generally the bugs seem to have subsided a bit. Looking online though, with my rig I should be getting far better performance than I am, which is weird. I have tried all the performance hacks. But it still struggles to limp along at about 30fps. If you have the rig or a next gen console I think 60fps really does make a difference as the aiming is very precise and I think the entire experience would be all the more pleasant for it.
In conclusion: I also have no idea if it's good. I've played quite a lot of it, but spent a lot of that time irritated or bored with it, with brief moments of wonder. It is certainly a thing though.
Part of me hopes that this has a big impact on the culture of crunch, that it'll be seen as evidence that working teams relentlessly for years isn't the surefire way to critical and financial success. But at the same time, it's a pretty big outlier next to The Last of Us 2 and literally everything Rockstar does, so it's more likely to be dismissed as the exception that proves the rule.
A friend of mine works at Rockstar North and he is utterly baffled at the negative reporting they receive as he says it doesn't match the reality there at all. It's a big place though and he it just one voice so I'm not entirely convinced.
The industry has spent decades - and billions - entwining gamers' identities with franchises, brands, and corporations. Criticism of your preferences == criticism of you. Sega vs Nintendo, Sony vs Microsoft, CoD vs Battlefield. Of course they're going to stan for those corporations now, it's a Pavlovian response at this point.