Personal responsibility, personal responsibility!
The teaser song is still in my head after 8 years of watching it. When the teaser first came out many years ago, I was over the moon. I have always been, and probably will be in the future, a huge fan of Science Fiction and futuristic/tech-related games. Watching Cyberpunk's teaser trailer back in the day made me really excited, it really looked like the game I had always wanted, a futuristic open-world RPG where there wouldn't be any "freedom-restricting" game limitations. That was the premise.
After waiting for years, after a bunch of delays, after a bunch of trailers and the biggest PR campaign/hype train I've seen so far in the gaming industry, the game was released about a week ago. Before I get started on my comments, I should mention this: I finished the game. I did the side missions, I did the crafting, I believe I've seen most of the things the game wants to show you. I've went through different character routes such as "melee god" to a "sniper hacker" etc. I really like the game... BUT!
The game has issues. Lots of them, in fact. Some of them are definitely issues that can be patched up later with additional fixes coming in every week or every two weeks. That part is fine, however, I think that the game design itself is quite flawed. I remember CD Projekt Red said that a lot of players who started playing The Witcher 3 did not actually finish the game because of its sheer size and how that Cyberpunk 2077 would be a game that is smaller in scale but denser in comparison to Witcher 3. However, I believe that actually came back to bite the game in the ass.
The game offers a lot of "in-depth" choices on whatever you think. Classes, weapons, augments, cars etc. Usually, this would be a redeeming feature for any game, since it gives you hundreds of options where you can pick and shape your gameplay in the direction you really want it to be. It really backfires here. I will divide them into categories to explain them easily.
Perks:
There are a lot of perks, you choose what you want to be as you level up, you can directly level them up or just "play them" and you gain experience over time as you do the actions. (Hack something, get XP in hacking, craft something, get XP in Crafting) but the issue is, the current balancing is just way too off where you are very weak unless you obtain certain perks, which makes you waste a lot of perk points and prevents your character from actually being what you want it to be, it ends up being what the game forces you to be.
My example for this is my character, as soon as I got into playing the game, I had a certain goal in mind. I was going to finish this game in full stealth. So I wanted the best "full-stealth" build. A pistol with a silencer, never leaving the crouching stance, a long-range sniper (that you can't attach silencers to them for whatever reason) and obviously hacking, since hacking could get you into things without having to destroy everything along the way.
The game doesn't let you finish it in full stealth. A lot, and I mean a lot of the missions available in the game will force you into firefights, not to mention that pistols with silencers are LITERALLY useless, as you can never one-hit anyone no matter how strong your character or how strong your gun is, if you headshot someone with your silenced pistol, the enemy loses, at most, 20% of their health. Alas, you just alerted everyone and the big fight begins. (I also got bugged several times when I was trying full stealth, the missions wouldn't proceed, but I believe those will be fixed)
Eventually, the character I started to be full-stealth hacker turned into a Samurai, literally, as I only had a Katana in hand and levelled just Katana/Melee perks, it was so overpowered that I was one-hitting any normal mob and two-hitting any elite/boss units throughout the game.
Crafting:
The whole crafting system is quite useless. I tried farming and crafting basically every weapon I used throughout the whole game, I really can't say much about this. It's no different than a regular grinding in other RPGs. However, there is one BIG flaw that makes this whole system useless. No matter what level in Crafting you are, no matter how good you are, no matter what perks you have unlocked for crafting, whatever you craft is useless. A random pistol that I had found by shooting one of the random gang NPCs I found on the street stayed with me for hours at one point. It had a DPS so high that nothing could rival it. I was using a pistol with a DPS of 350 while the best gun I could craft had a DPS of 190. It made no sense to craft a pistol.
Missions:
Missions are fun, for sure. If you play them. The game holds your hand throughout all the main missions, any side mission is completely at your discretion. The game doesn't really give you an incentive to finish the side missions, all you get is some XP and some money. That's it. No loot, no big reward or anything. Sure, some side missions are unlocking alternative endings but that is about it. As I said previously, a random pistol you find on the streets is a lot better than what you are getting from any mission whatsoever. You do not need money or anything as well, I just looted everything, any junk I can find throughout the game and just sold them. By the time I finished the game, I had over 4 cars that were relatively expensive, and still had over 200k Eurodollars (the in-game money) available.
Optimization and Bugs:
A lot, there are a lot of issues. Sometimes the missions don't start or end because of the bug, you either have to restart the game completely. (I am not talking about shutting it down and starting it, you literally have to click "New Game") The game is quite broken. Police spawn right behind you, they disappear faster than you run out of ammo while you fire. You fire once, civilians start to run, you turn your mouse around and boom. Everyone disappeared. Cars change colours, you get stuck inside cars. Flying cars, no not the new-tech flying cars, like flying cars that shouldn't be flying.
The game also runs really poorly. This is probably because of how they tried to optimize the game for PS4 and Xbox One and didn't pay too much attention to the PC optimization until Hotfix v1.05 - the game did not even support AMD's SMT (Intel calls it hyperthreading) causing the game to use fewer cores than it should, lowering the FPS greatly. Someone actually shared a tutorial on Reddit about how you could edit the HEX of Cyberpunk2077.exe and change a specific part where it would make the game use SMT properly, I couldn't believe it when I followed this tutorial, it boosted my FPS so high that I was finally playing 1080p Ultra in 60 FPS.
Summary:
This post is getting too long. So I want to end this with a TLDR.
The game is good and fun. It's an enjoyable experience. But it was released way too early. It needed at least another year for a proper release. They needed to flush the game design out, test the game a bit more, check the balancing of the weapons to characters and obviously fix the bugs.
Deathwing's score: 7/10.
For anyone who did not play the game yet and wants to play it, I'd heavily recommend you to wait for the time being, start playing in a few months as the developers patch out big bugs and fix the balancing over the next couple of months.
I'm playing it right now and actually enjoying it a fair bit. It glitched at the end of heist quest, but so far no show-stopping bugs. Great review!
Last thing I heard was that Sony put the game on halt, until bugs and performance issues have been mended. Performance is said to be better on the PS5 - but who has a PS5 yet? And people don't want to spend 70 bucks for a faulty game nowadays.
PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game sucks. Even CDPR admitted that they were barely able to "get it done" in time for the December 10th launch. No surprise there.
Well, perhaps they get it ready for the launch of the PS7... :)
Nice review, I'm right there with you and don't plan on playing it until the bugs are worked out. Good advice
the bugs barely effected me, maybe 4 missions out of 95 hours of gameplay, i do 100% completion and the side quests dont seem to have many issues. Doors dont open, cars dont spawn well, but nothing fatal to the user experience.
im 95 Hours in and still have only had about 4 glitches that effected the outcome of a mission. The worst being the twins that wouldnt fight me making it easy to win, when supposed to be a harder fight.
Congratulations @deathwing! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPDo not miss the last post from @hivebuzz: