CD Projekt's Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.0 + Phantom Liberty Expansion Thread

[lukaszek]

It obviously lacked the most important of #currentday rpgs: wild, sweaty bear sex.

we are one wild bd away

 

[DJOGamer PT]

I'm confident to say that anyone who praised this game (and/or still does) is a shill or a young millennial/genZ that has not experienced gaming for more than half a decade.

Do tell what is it about this game that makes it worse than classic GTA (not to meantion modern R* games and Starslop)

 

[Gargaune]

Of course CP2077 wasn't an RPG. [...]

The average Codexer uses "RPG" as an indicator of quality rather than a structural descriptor. Didn't you know that if you concede that Cyberpunk's an Action-RPG, Temple of Elemental Evil will stop working on your computer?

That said, you don't wanna go too far in the other direction, and I'm taking issue with those "numerous" choices that affected your story here. Twelve instances of something might be called numerous absent context, but you wouldn't see it that way if you said "twelve out of a million." And CBP's examples of having player agency pale in comparison to all those when it could and should've had it but didn't. The game has the odd meaningful choice along its main plot, but most of the rest is fluff and fake yellow dialogue along linear progressions.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Yeah, but you go in with different expectations.

I mean, W3 was hardly some super deep RPG. If anything, post-2.0 CP77 is substantial improvement in terms of mechanics and build options and overall gameplay variety.

"Builds" were still a flavor thing. Style over substance. Choose in what way you would be awesome. Imitate nolifer youtuber X's "style of playing the game". Because rushing an enemy base by jumping from a bike and knifing enemies in slow-mo requires much more skill than headshotting them CoD-style without slow-mo. And makes... zero difference.

So what? It also makes zero difference whether wizards kills enemies with fireballs or Fighters kills them with a sword, or if you shoot dudes with a heaavy weapon or energy weapon in Fallout. In the end enemies are dead.

 

[lukaszek]

knifing enemies in slow-mo requires much more skill

especially since knife throws are homing on enemies heads. You can run around with regular mo and just throw in general directions

 

[roguefrog]

Been playing this over January into Feb. I'm basically unstoppable now. Hit max level somewhere in the DLC. Completed all the gigs, sidequests, killed all the cybercodexians, etc. Just making my way through the critical path now.

I think I'd say it's GTA mixed with Deus Ex. The ones outta Quebec. There's something to be said though how I can sit in a van outside a building, hack the camera network and basically kill everyone inside just through the feed without moving an inch.

 

[Jason Liang]

https://archive.org/details/cyberbang-2069-1.3-explicit

 

[Melcar]

I'm confident to say that anyone who praised this game (and/or still does) is a shill or a young millennial/genZ that has not experienced gaming for more than half a decade.

Do tell what is it about this game that makes it worse than classic GTA (not to meantion modern R* games and Starslop)

I did not say it was worse. It's not much better. Different.

 

[Joggerino]

Been playing this over January into Feb. I'm basically unstoppable now. Hit max level somewhere in the DLC. Completed all the gigs, sidequests, killed all the cybercodexians, etc. Just making my way through the critical path now.

I think I'd say it's GTA mixed with Deus Ex. The ones outta Quebec. There's something to be said though how I can sit in a van outside a building, hack the camera network and basically kill everyone inside just through the feed without moving an inch.

Yeah but I'm kinda regretful I didn't do a combat build. Seems to be much more fun than at release.

 

[Justicar]

"Builds" were still a flavor thing. Style over substance. Choose in what way you would be awesome. Imitate nolifer youtuber X's "style of playing the game". Because rushing an enemy base by jumping from a bike and knifing enemies in slow-mo requires much more skill than headshotting them CoD-style without slow-mo. And makes... zero difference.

Lol nigger what difference does using big guns or unarmed have in Fallout 1 or 2? Game plays the same just target the eyes rinse and repeat till the end of the game I guess Fallout is trash then.

 

[Crispy]

character creation

Right. You can choose cut or uncut.

character development

Via a mindless and stupid flow chart, sure

several different builds

Uh, you mean V or Fem V?

lots of exploration

This is true. So does Half-Life. And hundreds of other non-RPGs.

stat based action combat

choices and consequences that affected the story in numerous ways

I can't deny there is C&C involved in this game, but I'll be damned if I've ever noticed my choices really fundamentally affecting things. I guess I'll just have to take your word for it because there's no way I'll ever replay it.

5 main endings with dozens of variations based on how you dealt with different quests...

Sounds so familiar. Where have I heard this before?

wild, sweaty bear sex

I had wild, sweaty sex with Panam in a hover tank. What's your point?

 

[Yosharian]

Just finished Phantom Liberty. That was...very meh. The writing just isn't that good. There were some good moments I guess.

The bit with the robot chasing you was just a really bad version of Alien Isolation and it was painful to play through.

Fight with Hansen was really bad, just a worse version of the Oda fight and really boring, not to mention the shitty collision detection with one of his attacks that constantly knocked me down after i had dodged it by jumping into the air.

The dialogue in this expansion thinks it's really clever but it's often really trash, half the time I hear what a character says and my reaction is 'what the fuck does that even mean, nobody talks like this'.

Gigs also didn't impress me, I didn't do them all but I did a fair few and they weren't much of an improvement over the base game, one of them was straight up awful.

Yeah this was really disappointing.

 

[Yosharian]

Of course CP2077 wasn't an RPG. [...]

The average Codexer uses "RPG" as an indicator of quality rather than a structural descriptor. Didn't you know that if you concede that Cyberpunk's an Action-RPG, Temple of Elemental Evil will stop working on your computer?

That said, you don't wanna go too far in the other direction, and I'm taking issue with those "numerous" choices that affected your story here. Twelve instances of something might be called numerous absent context, but you wouldn't see it that way if you said "twelve out of a million." And CBP's examples of having player agency pale in comparison to all those when it could and should've had it but didn't. The game has the odd meaningful choice along its main plot, but most of the rest is fluff and fake yellow dialogue along linear progressions.

Yeah it's weird but even though PL has some quite big choices in it at key moments, I never really found them interesting and still felt overall that i was just along for a ride that I wasn't too invested in.

Like who do I betray? Umm I don't really care? I'll stick with Reed I guess, he's a bro and Songbird just seems to be lying all the time... but I don't really care... I mean I don't feel strongly about it either way.

The whole time I was playing the endgame sections I was just noticing how on rails everything was and I was never doing anything differently to anyone else who played this bit.

Like I don't solve the problem of the core by using my hacker skills or tech skills, I just press buttons on consoles while avoiding a robot... This is not good game design.

I noticed the same thing with dialogue with Songbird, and just dialogue in general, sure there's the odd option to tell her she's an ass but it doesn't feel like I'm driving the dialogue, I just pick the odd option and then watch things unfold the way the dev wrote it.

What's strange is that I never felt this way with the Witcher games, even though I'm sure they do the same thing, maybe it's because I actually like the characters and writing of those games I dunno

 

[roguefrog]

Yeah but I'm kinda regretful I didn't do a combat build. Seems to be much more fun than at release.

I respecc'd my attributes after hitting max level. I kept the same hacking skills but grabbed all the blade skills from the Reflex tree. Only needed a hand-full of perks from the third tier (15) Technical and Cool trees for cybernetics and stealth. Basically a stealth hacker samurai. It's good for gameplay variety. Being able to switch between hacking, stealth with a silent pistol, and a in-your-face all up in your grill Katana.

Also combo them together. Upload reboot optics to everyone, or memory wipe. Now they are blind/stunned. Katana time.

 

[jackofshadows]

What's strange is that I never felt this way with the Witcher games, even though I'm sure they do the same thing, maybe it's because I actually like the characters and writing of those games I dunno

Yup. CP's and especially PL's characters aren't exactly likable, not to me anyway. The favorite is probably Johnny (out of major ones) and he's technically a colossal asshole. And yet the whole time PL was expecting of me to really, really care, especially about this lying cunt Songbird. Which was just bizarre at times. And then they pull that twist with the redheads, basically the only likable characters in the whole expansion. For fuck's sake, man.

 

[Yosharian]

What's strange is that I never felt this way with the Witcher games, even though I'm sure they do the same thing, maybe it's because I actually like the characters and writing of those games I dunno

Yup. CP's and especially PL's characters aren't exactly likable, not to me anyway. The favorite is probably Johnny (out of major ones) and he's technically a colossal asshole. And yet the whole time PL was expecting of me to really, really care, especially about this lying cunt Songbird. Which was just bizarre at times. And then they pull that twist with the redheads, basically the only likable characters in the whole expansion. For fuck's sake, man.

Right. For example the Baron in TW3 is an asshole, but through the course of the quest you end up sympathizing with him a bit probably... or not, and that's cool too, but I seriously doubt most players finish that quest feeling apathetic about the whole situation.

And I never found the dialogue in TW3 to over-written or hard to follow, it felt a lot more natural

The moment-to-moment gameplay and open-world activities have improved so much in PL that I suspect a lot of reviewers/players/YTers haven't actually analysed the writing / characterisation in much detail. They just saw the great presentation and didn't bother to delve deeper.

And to be clear the presentation is at times extremely good, there's a bit right at the end where Reed kinda walks off into the sunset after SB is airlifted, and it was really quite poignant, I felt that scene in spite of my apathy towards the plot in general.

 

[Itoh]

I think the conflict between Hansen and Myers could have been very interesting - why did a weapons dealer who runs a shitty neighborhood take a shot at the president of a big, fairly powerful country like the NUSA? He had to have some reason to think he'd get away with it, right? I mean, revenge was part of it, but it couldn't be the only part. Was there some ideological conflict with Myers that led to this beef in the first place? The story doesn't really get into this and we don't get the chance to find out, because both characters are sidelined in short order to make way for the much less interesting Songbird and Reed, and who gives a shit about either of them? I think the problem is that Songbird's story is just a cheap knock off of V's - it would have made more sense for the expansion to focus on bigger picture stuff like politics and AI, because the main game is already about a character trying to stave off a painful death caused by advanced technology.

I did feel the gigs and side missions were an improvement over the main game, however. They offered some level of interactivity and C&C even if the leadup to some of them felt really contrived. My main complaint there is that they brought back the Voodoo boys. It sounds petty but I vastly preferred the notion that you could just wipe them out after Transmission and that would permanently change something about the setting. Now, clearly, there are just an infinite supply of Voodoo boys to be antagonists in various side missions and no matter how many you kill it won't make a difference.

 

[Yosharian]

I think the conflict between Hansen and Myers could have been very interesting - why did a weapons dealer who runs a shitty neighborhood take a shot at the president of a big, fairly powerful country like the NUSA? He had to have some reason to think he'd get away with it, right? I mean, revenge was part of it, but it couldn't be the only part. Was there some ideological conflict with Myers that led to this beef in the first place? The story doesn't really get into this and we don't get the chance to find out, because both characters are sidelined in short order to make way for the much less interesting Songbird and Reed, and who gives a shit about either of them? I think the problem is that Songbird's story is just a cheap knock off of V's - it would have made more sense for the expansion to focus on bigger picture stuff like politics and AI, because the main game is already about a character trying to stave off a painful death caused by advanced technology.

I did feel the gigs and side missions were an improvement over the main game, however. They offered some level of interactivity and C&C even if the leadup to some of them felt really contrived. My main complaint there is that they brought back the Voodoo boys. It sounds petty but I vastly preferred the notion that you could just wipe them out after Transmission and that would permanently change something about the setting. Now, clearly, there are just an infinite supply of Voodoo boys to be antagonists in various side missions and no matter how many you kill it won't make a difference.

I think with a way more talented writing crew they could have pulled it off, but yeah it does seem like they just bit off more than they could chew with all those characters.

I think Songbird and Reed both have the seeds of good characters, but the development just isn't there. It's like the whole thing is just superficial on every level.

Perhaps I didn't do enough gigs, I just found them very boring. I think part of the issue is that I started from scratch with a new character so I had the entirety of the base game AND Phantom Liberty to play though, and the base game already had way too many fucking side quests as it is. So when I arrived in PL I wasn't really too bothered about completing all the gigs, whereas if I had just been continuing an old character I probably would have spent more time with that.

I did quite a few of the car stealing activities in order to unlock the car that Mr Car Man gives you, but honestly I didn't even use it that much, I kinda wasted my time there. All you really need in this game is the Akira bike and you're set, it doesn't really get better than that. Racing that bad boy through NC in 1st-person mode is actually pretty cool.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Just about my impression as well. Gameplay mechanics and immersiun-wise it's much better RPG than last Witcher, but plot somehow always feels on rails even when it isn't and muh big decisions never pay off in a satisfying way.

 

[Gargaune]

Yeah it's weird but even though PL has some quite big choices in it at key moments, I never really found them interesting and still felt overall that i was just along for a ride that I wasn't too invested in.

Can't comment on PL's main plot as I haven't gone through it yet, but I'd be surprised if it made a much different impression from the main campaign.

What's strange is that I never felt this way with the Witcher games, even though I'm sure they do the same thing, maybe it's because I actually like the characters and writing of those games I dunno

Ah, but there I might be able to offer a hypothesis! Are you familiar with my authoritative blog Codex post on the superiority of stoics among voiced protagonists in RPGs?

There is another fundamental disadvantage that CP77 suffers from, and that can't be compesanted. The player can't ever develop the same kind of attachment to V as he could to Geralt, because the game is first-person and the character himself is a blank slate. This is so huge that I can't understand how CDPR have overlooked it when they decided to make Cyberpunk first person.

I don't believe that's the main thing here, I think there's a subtler but more serious conflict. Sure, the cinematic presentation of third-person can help in some respects, and you've got Deus Ex as a good example of striking a balance, but then you've also got titles like Thief, exclusively first-person with no plot agency, and yet Garret's still a more engaging protagonist. The rub, I think, is in the writing...

Consider this - what do Geralt of Rivia, JC Denton, Adam Jensen and even Garret all have in common? No, really, take a moment to think about it before you read on. Okay? Right, well if you answered "they're all stoic types", you're right on the money. The way these characters speak, what they say and how they say it, presents them as reserved, calculated, even-tempered individuals, which creates a fictional space between what they're saying and why they're saying it, a space for the player to insert themselves into. So even as Geralt has far more backstory and established relationships, his measured, often laconic mannerisms allow the player to put their own spin on interpreting the character's inner processes, on "what he's actually thinking."

This is not the case with Cyberpunk's protagonist, who is consistently impulsive and extroverted. While lacking much of a personal history, V's character is right there on the page - Stupid Asshole™. And if you can't relate to that, well, tough luck, there's no room for you to read things differently. And while I can understand that this sort of scumbag archetype goes well with a cyberpunk story in general, it can be a really bad fit for a videogame promising character agency. So even though V's role is well performed, plenty of players will have trouble investing themselves into that role.

To sum up, if you're gonna have a fully-acted protagonist in the context of an RPG, you're best off making them the strong, silent type, because with a stoic PC, less is literally more. Have I already made this argument? I forget. It's a big thread. I'll probably make it again at some point.

The favorite is probably Johnny (out of major ones) and he's technically a colossal asshole.

It's an unpopular position around here, but I think Johnny's well written and well executed. He's pretty much a sociopath, but it's a compelling portrayal.

 

[Yosharian]

Yeah it's weird but even though PL has some quite big choices in it at key moments, I never really found them interesting and still felt overall that i was just along for a ride that I wasn't too invested in.

Can't comment on PL's main plot as I haven't gone through it yet, but I'd be surprised if it made a much different impression from the main campaign.

What's strange is that I never felt this way with the Witcher games, even though I'm sure they do the same thing, maybe it's because I actually like the characters and writing of those games I dunno

Ah, but there I might be able to offer a hypothesis! Are you familiar with my authoritative blog Codex post on the superiority of stoics among voiced protagonists in RPGs?

There is another fundamental disadvantage that CP77 suffers from, and that can't be compesanted. The player can't ever develop the same kind of attachment to V as he could to Geralt, because the game is first-person and the character himself is a blank slate. This is so huge that I can't understand how CDPR have overlooked it when they decided to make Cyberpunk first person.

I don't believe that's the main thing here, I think there's a subtler but more serious conflict. Sure, the cinematic presentation of third-person can help in some respects, and you've got Deus Ex as a good example of striking a balance, but then you've also got titles like Thief, exclusively first-person with no plot agency, and yet Garret's still a more engaging protagonist. The rub, I think, is in the writing...

Consider this - what do Geralt of Rivia, JC Denton, Adam Jensen and even Garret all have in common? No, really, take a moment to think about it before you read on. Okay? Right, well if you answered "they're all stoic types", you're right on the money. The way these characters speak, what they say and how they say it, presents them as reserved, calculated, even-tempered individuals, which creates a fictional space between what they're saying and why they're saying it, a space for the player to insert themselves into. So even as Geralt has far more backstory and established relationships, his measured, often laconic mannerisms allow the player to put their own spin on interpreting the character's inner processes, on "what he's actually thinking."

This is not the case with Cyberpunk's protagonist, who is consistently impulsive and extroverted. While lacking much of a personal history, V's character is right there on the page - Stupid Asshole™. And if you can't relate to that, well, tough luck, there's no room for you to read things differently. And while I can understand that this sort of scumbag archetype goes well with a cyberpunk story in general, it can be a really bad fit for a videogame promising character agency. So even though V's role is well performed, plenty of players will have trouble investing themselves into that role.

To sum up, if you're gonna have a fully-acted protagonist in the context of an RPG, you're best off making them the strong, silent type, because with a stoic PC, less is literally more. Have I already made this argument? I forget. It's a big thread. I'll probably make it again at some point.

The favorite is probably Johnny (out of major ones) and he's technically a colossal asshole.

It's an unpopular position around here, but I think Johnny's well written and well executed. He's pretty much a sociopath, but it's a compelling portrayal.

That's interesting, it might well be the explanation.

 

[Yosharian]

I will add this. I did the epilogue today where you go through with the operation.

Not bad. That was a neat ending.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Cologno]

The favorite is probably Johnny (out of major ones) and he's technically a colossal asshole.

It's an unpopular position around here, but I think Johnny's well written and well executed. He's pretty much a sociopath, but it's a compelling portrayal.

Johnny Silverhand and that girl at the beginning, Evelyn Parker, were great characters. I did not like Silverhand, the person in the story, but I really liked the character. Others, like Jackie in particular, felt like goofy Disney sidekicks to force you to like them.

 

[Wesp5]

I did not like Silverhand, the person in the story, but I really liked the character.

I agree. In the German translation he curses a lot in a kind of language that I would guess an American developer wouldn't have allowed, but which fits so great to him being an asshole most of the time.