I just finished the expansion, and I'm impressed that it unlocks a new path to the ending. Makes the later part of the story a lot less linear. You can now just entirely skip the Hanako and Panam plot and get to the ending. My character NEVER met Panam and Rogue. The Heist still sucks, though, especially on subsequent game replay.
A little jealous of people who skipped the pre 2.0 versions, and are only playing it for the first time now. Yeah, the game still had a bunch of shitty looter shooter busy work mechanics, but they cut down on a lot of that. Skill trees feel a lot more streamlined now, and feel more restrictive, but at the same time it pushes you into role-playing as a "class" archetype, rather than letting you be a jack of all trades, especially with how cyberware can now align with attributes.
More thoughts:
- Vehicle combat is mostly useless, but it's kind of fun to start a fight by pulling out machine guns out of your car and spraying lead everywhere. By the way, any tabletop fans around here? Did tabletop CB actually have vehicle combat? I wonder how that could work.
- There's some crazy end-game weapons now, such as lasers, rifles with chemical rounds, shoulder mounted explosive round launcher (like one in New Vegas). Makes end-game a lot more fun now.
- Armor on clothes makes sense now. At the start of the game you are running around in normal clothes, later on you get more specialized gear for your "class", like netrunner's visors, netrunning suits, which give you little stat bonuses. And additionally there's armor progression of sorts now that makes sense (not talking about cyberware). You can find bulletproof vests. I think they start at 5, or 10 armor bonus? And end game armors (from the expansion) have 25 armor bonus. You can transmog using wardrobe, but people like me who don't use transmog will be happy to see their character sport progressively more advanced armor.