Cyberpunk 2077

[NotThePars]

56 minutes ago, BFTD said:

Except for Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines 2. That's going to be fucking sweeeeet.

I've bookmarked this tweet given some of the recent news floating out about it 

[BFTD]

23 minutes ago, NotThePars said:

I've bookmarked this tweet given some of the recent news floating out about it 

Trust me, choomba, I totally haven't wasted £150 on a preem resin statue of somebody from a game that's going to be anything less than nova.

Another moan about Cyberpunk (which I'm still enjoying, believe it or not) - the incidental text is dire. There's a lot of world-building bumph that you can pick up, and it's remarkably dry and boring. Even worse, there are hundreds of chat logs to be collected at the side quests, they all read like they were written by the same person, and almost all amount to this:

CHOOMBA 1: hey choom, did you steal that thing?
CHOOMBA 2: yeah i got it
CHOOMBA 1: are you taking it to the place?
CHOOMBA 2: yeah we're on our way
CHOOMBA 1: nice. i hope nobody kills you when you get there
CHOOMBA 2: me too
CHOOMBA 1: well, let me know how it goes
CHOOMBA 1: hey, you there?
CHOOMBA 1: choom?
CHOOMBA 1: Choom?
CHOOMBA 1: CHOOM?!

Bit more effort would have been nice. Also, I swear that certain names crop up multiple times, but there's no way you're going to remember who they are or what they did, so it's a wasted effort. There are probably story threads you're meant to follow through to discover the fates of certain characters, but they're just names, so you're unlikely to remember them. Pity.

[BFTD]

I'm approaching the end of the game - just sweeping up the last of the side missions for the sake of completion. Things have gone a bit weird, however. There's a quest where you have to batter all of Night City's toughest b*****ds with your bare fists one after another, and I got to the fight with the steroid pro-wrestler gang's top arse-kicker. I lost the first fight, as they all virtually one-shot you, but when I went to challenge her to a rematch, all chat options disappeared, so something's bugged out. In a Bethesda game you'd normally be able to use the console to reset the quest or whatever, but I'm not sure if that's an option in Cyberpunk. Been checking back in now and then to see if the game sorts itself out, but no luck so far.

However, the game's been doing some weird bugs since that happened. During phone calls, the caller's picture regularly stretches and distorts, which I put down to some kind of bad reception or something, but it obviously isn't. My smart weapons have become pretty unreliable, working fine on one mission, but on the next the bullets will ping about at random, hitting absolutely nothing. During combat, there always seems to be one enemy that starts breakdancing behind cover, literally rolling about and bodypopping on the floor, occasionally clipping through the earth so that nothing can kill them except guns that shoot through walls.

It's all a bit odd, and I'm putting it down to that one mission glitching, but it might be coincidence. It feels like the game's falling apart, but hopefully it can hold its shit together until I can ride off into the sunset with Keanu.

[BallochSonsFan]

On 19/01/2021 at 21:31, BFTD said:

I'm approaching the end of the game - just sweeping up the last of the side missions for the sake of completion. Things have gone a bit weird, however. There's a quest where you have to batter all of Night City's toughest b*****ds with your bare fists one after another, and I got to the fight with the steroid pro-wrestler gang's top arse-kicker. I lost the first fight, as they all virtually one-shot you, but when I went to challenge her to a rematch, all chat options disappeared, so something's bugged out. In a Bethesda game you'd normally be able to use the console to reset the quest or whatever, but I'm not sure if that's an option in Cyberpunk. Been checking back in now and then to see if the game sorts itself out, but no luck so far.

However, the game's been doing some weird bugs since that happened. During phone calls, the caller's picture regularly stretches and distorts, which I put down to some kind of bad reception or something, but it obviously isn't. My smart weapons have become pretty unreliable, working fine on one mission, but on the next the bullets will ping about at random, hitting absolutely nothing. During combat, there always seems to be one enemy that starts breakdancing behind cover, literally rolling about and bodypopping on the floor, occasionally clipping through the earth so that nothing can kill them except guns that shoot through walls.

It's all a bit odd, and I'm putting it down to that one mission glitching, but it might be coincidence. It feels like the game's falling apart, but hopefully it can hold its shit together until I can ride off into the sunset with Keanu.

So basically a re-hash of the Witcher 3 fighting side quest?

[BFTD]

1 hour ago, BallochSonsFan said:

So basically a re-hash of the Witcher 3 fighting side quest?

I haven't played The Witcher 3 yet, but that's the same quest as in The Witcher 1, so I'm guessing there's a random bare-knuckle championship in The Witcher 2 as well  

I've just reached the final boxing match, which involves nanosecond-perfect dodging and punching literally hundreds of times to wear down your opponent, who can put you down in two hits, if you've stocked up on consumables and maxed out your Body stat beforehand. I guess the point is to emphasise your Rocky-like underdog status, but it's not fun at all, and incredibly tedious when you've been at it for ten minutes only to make a single timing error and lose. Even if you're the Cyberpunk bare knuckle masta, it must be boring as f**k to fight through.

Thankfully there seems to be a way to cheese the fight, so you can bet your ass that I'll be doing it!

[BFTD]

Just watched an excellent video about the Cyberpunk fiasco. I try not to watch preview stuff for games/movies that I'm interested in playing/seeing as I've found it more enjoyable to come to them with few expectations and, wow, it's just as well that I walked in to Cyberpunk fairly blind. I'd no idea exactly how much was explicitly promised over the years, even demonstrated to be included and working in many cases, that just isn't there in the final release.

It's very obvious that they did a lot of scaling back as they built the game, to the point that they're obviously never going to produce anything close to what was advertised. I don't know if it's even going to be possible for them to fix the majority of the remaining bugs considering they're supposed to be working on DLC and the online component all year, and it would surely take years of extra development time to include everything that CDPR talked about publicly. The final game is so bare-bones by comparison that it's not even funny. At some point, someone has clearly pulled the plug and said, "finish what's working, ditch the rest, we're shipping by Christmas 2020 by hell or high water". And it's very sad, considering that they've abused their workforce for the past year to bring out a pale imitation of what they seem to have wanted to make.

Also, I see CDPR have thrown their QA department under the bus in their latest communique, claiming that the game testers didn't tell them how poor the PS4/XBone versions of the game were. I presume this must have been more of an attempt to pacify shareholders than people who bought the game, as nobody familiar with the product could possibly believe that any QA team wouldn't see the general state of the game their bosses planned to release and question their sanity. However many of the proposed legal actions make it to court, CDPR deserve to be held accountable.

Don't pre-order anything, kids. Apart from Bloodlines 2, of course.

 

[Stellaboz]

Any sign of Ciri in it? I know it was mentioned that they might throw in a sighting of her.

[GiGi]

5 hours ago, Stellaboz said:

Any sign of Ciri in it? I know it was mentioned that they might throw in a sighting of her.

A really minor easter egg near the start, and only for one of the three paths.
 

Spoiler

 

If you chose corpo you can see this in your desk drawer. So it's more of a Witcher 3 reference than just a Ciri one

 

 

[BFTD]

6 hours ago, Stellaboz said:

Any sign of Ciri in it? I know it was mentioned that they might throw in a sighting of her.

GLaDOS pops up. And by pops up, I mean that they re-used a load of Portal voice files for one character.

Yes, one of them is about cake.

[GiGi]

22 minutes ago, BFTD said:

GLaDOS pops up. And by pops up, I mean that they re-used a load of Portal voice files for one character.

Yes, one of them is about cake.

I quite enjoyed that side quest. One of the better ones.

[BFTD]

20 minutes ago, GiGi said:

I quite enjoyed that side quest. One of the better ones.

Yeah, it's more interesting than "go here and shoot everyone". Just a shame that there's a bug during it that ruins any future phone calls.

I think maybe there's some kind of box that creates a duplicate of a character when they're on a call with you - I know it doesn't teleport the game world character, as I once finished a mission right in front of a fixer, and they called me while I was talking to them in person, so there were two of them. I think Delamain doesn't get scrubbed from the phone call room at some point, so he's always there, looming over the person you're calling. Pretty amusing.

Apparently it sometimes takes away the ability to answer calls too, which isn't quite so funny.

[GiGi]

Just now, BFTD said:

Yeah, it's more interesting than "go here and shoot everyone". Just a shame that there's a bug during it that ruins any future phone calls.

I think maybe there's some kind of box that creates a duplicate of a character when they're on a call with you - I know it doesn't teleport the game world character, as I once finished a mission right in front of a fixer, and they called me while I was talking to them in person, so there were two of them. I think Delamain doesn't get scrubbed from the phone call room at some point, so he's always there, looming over the person you're calling. Pretty amusing.

Apparently it sometimes takes away the ability to answer calls too, which isn't quite so funny.

I've done that mission in 2 playthroughs and didn't have any issues during or after. Sounds weird anyway.

[BFTD]

2 minutes ago, GiGi said:

I've done that mission in 2 playthroughs and didn't have any issues during or after. Sounds weird anyway.

There's an example at roughly 3:40 in this video. Just imagine that, but for every phone call you receive for the rest of the game  

Although this guy seems to have managed to get a call from everyone in the game at once!

 

[GiGi]

Ooft aye that would do my tits in! Thankfully have avoided that particular bug.

The biggest one I had was during the racing missions, I kept bugging out and even though I was always winning, the game kept telling me I was off track and dropping down places when I wasn't. I mentioned it earlier, I tried it several times including just dropping back to 2nd and following the lead car to the finish and it always bugged out at the same point. I reloaded it the next day and it worked fine.

It is a farce how shoddy the game ended up.

[BFTD]

1 hour ago, GiGi said:

Ooft aye that would do my tits in! Thankfully have avoided that particular bug.

The biggest one I had was during the racing missions, I kept bugging out and even though I was always winning, the game kept telling me I was off track and dropping down places when I wasn't. I mentioned it earlier, I tried it several times including just dropping back to 2nd and following the lead car to the finish and it always bugged out at the same point. I reloaded it the next day and it worked fine.

It is a farce how shoddy the game ended up.

The driving parts in general are hilarious if you don't stick to the script. You can't be killed in the early rails missions when you're supposed to be shooting other cars. Just go and get a cuppa, and wait 'til Jackie arrives at the destination. The races are rubberbanded so badly that I crashed towards the end of one and got wedged between some rocks and a barrier. Took me a couple of minutes to slowly extricate myself, only to discover the other cars waiting for me a few hundred yards away  

The most annoying part of the races, however, is that they include an on-road indication of your route, and it works brilliantly. Any other time you're in a vehicle, however, you have to rely on a wee automap that's so far zoomed in that you constantly miss turn-offs if you're going too fast. It's a futuristic cyberpunk game - why would you include an AR route overlay, a perfectly reasonable addition, then not allow the player to use it for virtually the whole game?  

[GiGi]

1 minute ago, BFTD said:

The driving parts in general are hilarious if you don't stick to the script. You can't be killed in the early rails missions when you're supposed to be shooting other cars. Just go and get a cuppa, and wait 'til Jackie arrives at the destination. The races are rubberbanded so badly that I crashed towards the end of one and got wedged between some rocks and a barrier. Took me a couple of minutes to slowly extricate myself, only to discover the other cars waiting for me a few hundred yards away  

The most annoying part of the races, however, is that they include an on-road indication of your route, and it works brilliantly. Any other time you're in a vehicle, however, you have to rely on a wee automap that's so far zoomed in that you constantly miss turn-offs if you're going too fast. It's a futuristic cyberpunk game - why would you include an AR route overlay, a perfectly reasonable addition, then not allow the player to use it for virtually the whole game?  

Aye driving is a nightmare. Most of the cars already feel like you're on ice road truckers. As for the rubber banding, it's not even that. If you check the minimap when you're driving, the cars behind you are actually constantly despawn/respawning throughout the race while you're not looking

[NotThePars]

Big updates out today for bug fixes. 17gb for consoles and about 100 for PC.

[BFTD]

1 hour ago, NotThePars said:

Big updates out today for bug fixes. 17gb for consoles and about 100 for PC.

Aye, I was up late and it kicked in during the wee small hours. People had already worked out that the actual new data in the massive download amounted to around 2 to 5GB.

Took a brief glimpse at the changelog. They seem to be doing a cracking job of tackling the fire on the roof while the exposed reactor churns away merrily  

[GiGi]

12 minutes ago, BFTD said:

Aye, I was up late and it kicked in during the wee small hours. People had already worked out that the actual new data in the massive download amounted to around 2 to 5GB.

Took a brief glimpse at the changelog. They seem to be doing a cracking job of tackling the fire on the roof while the exposed reactor churns away merrily  

Aye, huge patch - full of really minor bugfixes. They are absolutely hopeless.

[BFTD]

2 minutes ago, GiGi said:

Aye, huge patch - full of really minor bugfixes. They are absolutely hopeless.

There seem to be a disturbing number of folk who've convinced themselves that CDPR are working on putting out fires at the moment, but will get cracking on improving the game once it's stable for everyone and they've finished the obviously-temporary animations and scripting that were left in.

There's been nothing in their communications and attitude that would lead you to believe they've got any plans other than fixing it up until people stop complaining, then rolling out the DLC to keep the game in the news until the multiplayer comes out, which will be their main focus as the microtransactions will be their cash cow for the next few years. Anything beyond that will be left to the modding community.

It's not hard to imagine a future where these games are released as a bare-bones engine with assets and a rough plot, with everything else left to amateurs to add over time. "Well, we never actually promised that you'd be able to drive the cars outside of cut scenes..."