Cyberpunk 2077 - Review @ Techraptor
 

Techraptor has reviewed Cyberpunk 2077:

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Well, what does constitute a deep RPG experience then?

That's a very generous score imo. I think CP 2077 easily has the potential to be a 9/10 game when most of the bugs and glitches are fixed, but I wouldn't rate it anywhere near that high in its current state.

On pc metacritic the critics score decreased to 87 (from 91) while the user score keeps increasing to 7.1 (from 5.8).
I didnt expect that low a score.

Are you getting that many bugs? (Honest question, I have yet to play it)

the longer you play the lower the score haha
i guess if you play only the story should be a high score, but you miss some fantastic side quests
well this is my goty even in this state, im still having lots of fun after 110h in it

How on Earth do you have 110 hours in it. Are you playing right now, typing this post with your toes, being fed intravenously?

Not quest-related bugs, but there's general glitchiness and poor AI throughout the game that's hard to miss. It's more just a series of small annoyances than anything, but it does break immersion sometimes.

Well, he said that he experienced minor bugs only. That might explain the generous score.

Most of the bugs I'm having would be considered minor. It's how often they occur that's annoying.

It's playable on PC. Should you? Not if you want to avoid horrors. I saw a noodle stand with 2 different NPC servers occupying the same space, merging in and out of each other. And I couldn't even order noodles.

That's the kind of game it is now, my friends.

I agree with this but for me it's not just the bugs but some of the design decisions.

Like for example the crime system, which there is none to be honest. If you do something police officers or bots appear out of nowhere and attacks. If you kill them all then you're fine, just walk away no repercussions.

Or when you steal a car, you just throw the person out and you get in and pretty much he/she does not care. They just walk away like they were taking a stroll.

It's things like this generally. I really cannot understand how it is possible to allow these things to go live.

@JFarrell71 :lol:
anyway, the game is huge, after the whole city opened, i stopped the story and did all police stuff/gigs/side jobs (i think there are over 200?), cleaned the map, now im on the story again but still get phones from fixers and other chars with cool side quests
like others said, plenty of glitches, but serious bugs? no; most annoying, sometimes the car doesnt start so i have to get out and get in again lol

Teleporting trashmobs in is nothing new. You do have a point where CP spawns them onto your nose instead of some distance. That should and can be fixed.
At least in this game there is no need for stupid GTA/WD driving all around town to escape but one can kill the posse and be done with it.

Carjacking should have been completely disabled in this game. I have no idea why is that idiocy even a thing in CP. I mean, you get a car park with dozens of different cars and bikes that you can summon on a whim.
Oh, but no, megalomanic V wants to drive only what belongs to others? Bah.

Oh there are definitely some design decisions that don't sit well with me. Thing is, a lot of those could still be tweaked or outright changed through patches. It just depends how much time and effort CDPR wants to put into it and of course whether or not they even feel like anything should be changed.

I agree about the things you mention, but, to me, the way loot was distributed is just as immersion breaking if not more. I mean, you can find high-level weapons in backpacks that are just laying in random alleys or on rooftops. It makes no sense. Weapons should really only be on enemies and in places where you would logically find them. i.e. a weapons locker, stashed in a gang hideout, etc.

Also, it's too easy to get XP from, and level up, some skills compared to others. For example, why do I get XP from simply using quickhacks on random things? When I use the 'Distract Enemy' quickhack on something, I shouldn't be gifted XP unless it actually distracts an enemy.

I just finished the game. It is very pretty, and the voice acting is superb. It's also buggy, though no bugs I found were gamebreaking. Once I got stuck in scenario, and once my car went flying into the sky, in both instances I actually lost some progress, but nothing nearly as bad as Wasteland 3, for example. For me, it was worth playing, though once again I regret not waiting for more polish.

What I liked less is the general quest design and AI. AI is really, really bad. It manages to break most of the immersion you gain by playing cutscenes and story content. The quest design is bland and generic. Basically go to (?) and kill some generic mobs that drop some generic guns. Some of the weapons are more fun than others, and talent trees feel kind of lackluster, but I found the perk progression through actually using related skills to be a nice thing.

The game is also sexually loaded, both implicit and explicitly, which honestly, year 2020, it's not a bad thing, but makes me wish they had found a stronger selling point in the quality of the RPG than its sexual forwardness. The game is aimed to the target audience it is, and if it sells, it sells. Nothing to blame them for here.

All in all, 8/10 is fair-ish, potentially a bit higher if it gets polished, but I feel the game lacks the fundamental quality as a RPG to be a memorable masterpiece.

You're right.
annoyance = bug frequency * bug severity

I doubt it's the right formula.

Game breaking bug forcing give up ever finish the game or load an old save are a lot more annoying, and one can be enough to throw in trash the game. In practice, some players won't do it, and many will never have the game-breaking bug.

A forced computer restart is also a lot more annoying, they break a game session, the effect seems absurdly wide, and makes the product look like made by amateurs then make feel it a lot worse than it is really.

Game forced restart is also brutal hence rather negative, and then its negative impact relies a lot on frequency.

There are bugs you can manage, if you don't throw the game into the trash, you get more and more used to manage them or at least ignore them, then the frequency isn't the point, more the real effects on gameplay. The visual/sound bugs postulate to a similar formula, if you learn to accept them, they become part of the gameplay, and then the frequency isn't a point. I gave myself a good example of that. When MEA was release with facial synch problems with voice acting, I played the game a while and started to enjoy it more and more play for once the main hero handicapped, probably with some mental handicap but still a smart one. I even started thinking she was a provocative rebel playing with social relationships. When I learned it was bugged and it broke all the charm I had acquired by learning and practicing.

The list is long and for many bug types, annoyance <> bug frequency * bug severity.

But ok for Yahoo generations, annoyance = bug frequency * bug severity.

I am 42 hours into Cyberpunk 2077 and just 9% through the main story (according to the stats indicated by the Gog Galaxy overlay), and I am having a lot of fun with it. It is too early for me to say whether or not this is a great game, but it is at least a very good game.

I have encountered two pretty bad bugs in which quests were stuck, but in both cases I was able to load an earlier save from 15-30 minutes earlier to resolve the issues.

I won't argue that this isn't true. There's no crime system, and the A.I. in general is lacking.

However, I do wonder if the emphasis being put on this by players is a byproduct of the GTA comparisons, because RPGs in general do not have good crime systems either. Either nothing happens when you commit crimes, or the entire city you're in aggros through telepathy. Skyrim, Fallout, Outer Worlds, none of these games have even decent crime systems. GTA is built around crime and car chases and whatnot, and yeah, it's better at modeling police. But Cyperpunk 2077 is not GTA. Maybe everyone will believe that now. ;)

I haven't tried stealing any cars. I'm kind of surprised there's no reaction because when you drive into cars, there is one. That seems like a weird oversight.

I was planning in picking this up eventually but everything I've read so far makes me lean towards skipping it instead.

If by eventually you mean after a few more patches, I wouldn't let negative comments scare you away (assuming you're getting it on PC). It's a good game with the potential to become a great one.

I don't mind them occupying the same space at all. I DO mind being unable to order noodles.

You should keep in mind that those with complaints are much more likely to write about them than those who are enjoying the game. In some places, like the subreddit, those who want to focus on the negative are outwardly hostile to people who don't. Not saying there aren't issues, but I am saying they are overblown and likely giving you an inaccurate picture of the overall player experience (assuming you have the hardware to run the game well)

For my part, The Last of Us is 2 is my GOTY, but Cyberpunk 2077 is my favorite game of the year. And I've really loved some other ones (Ghost of Tshushima, FFVII Remake, AC: Valhalla, Hades, the aforementioned TLOU2, etc)

One of the most annoying things that has happened to me in my 45 hours is a proprietor of a resturant telling me they had a special Silverhand sirloin, and then finding no such thing on the menu. >:(

Yep as usual the vocal minority is always loudest and gets what it wants.:(

Wont deny the game has issues also and I shared what bugs I had. It still didn't stop me from enjoying my first play-through. It was a great story driven experience.

It's a shame the main campaign is meh but the side quests are where the meat is. I'm also glad I didn't play the game on older consoles with their inferior hardware.

10/10

To be honest, I'd be fine with the Skyrim crime system, guard telepathy and all. Unlike in Skyrim, it would make sense in Cyberpunk.
"We have you in our ubiquitous, omniscient policing system; pay a bribe to our incredibly corrupt officers or face imprisonment - whereupon you can bribe our incredibly corrupt guards."

I liked the crime system in Gothic. You got caught committing a crime, you got your ass beat. End of story. :)

It would be nice if NPCs reacted to you taking stuff from a dwelling or store. I wouldn't want cops showing up or a fight every time, but at least call me a thief or something.

Well, I'm not especially worried about the bugs to be honest. How bad can it be? (Coming from someone who loves both Arcanum and V:tMB.)

What puts me off is rather what I read about mechanics like poor crime system, bad and immersion breaking loot system, meatshield combat, poor stealth mechanics etc. Add level scaling and it's starting to sound like a game I'll be annoyed by as much as I'll be enjoyed by it. That ratio should definitely be less than 1:1…

So… I’ve played only 33 hours. The game looks phenomenal, the atmosphere and attention of details in making this city is off the charts, can't compare it to any other games I've played.
Yes, there are bugs, but I've played many games full of bugs and I've never seen those games so insanely criticized. Then again the other companies did not promised that the game will work on 7 years old ps4 shit console… which was even then dated hardware compare to a decent PC.
PS1: yes the crime system is a crime :) also yes anything from Gothic should be in any decent open world game, THEY SHOULD TEACH THAT IN game development schools!!!

PS2: The Last of Us is 2 is shit. Ghost of Tshushima rules.

Their biggest mistake was trying to support outdated consoles. They should have just dropped them from the support list. Someone got greedy most likely and wanted to sell more. Now it bit them in the butt. I doubt their would have been such a shit storm otherwise.

I think dropping the existing consoles would also have hit them badly. That would be the biggest chunk of the market gone in a stroke, and a massive drop in sales. I think their problem was just the reality of getting all the work done, vs the dates and expectations they created for investors.

So one is your "game of the year" and the other is your "favorite game of the year". What's the difference?

Best and favorite are not the same thing.

Only one of those things is true, from my perspective. The crime system is poor/nonexistent.

Loot, well, that's something everyone seems to complain about in every game. I think it's very good. A good variety of guns, mods, lots and lots of armor/clothes, conversation shards… I find useful items all the time, even after 45+ hours.

I play on hard, and enemies aren't meatshields. It doesn't take me that long to kill anybody, especially with headshots.

Stealth is well implemented and has tons of options with perks and hacks. I don't know why anyone would consider the stealth mechanics to be poor.

There is no level scaling, so I don't know where you got that from. Missions are rated in difficulty relative to your level and it's a persistent rating. In other words, if it's "very hard" and you level up several times it will become "hard", then "moderate" and so on. If there was level scaling, it would remain the same difficulty no matter what your own level was.

So what's the difference then?

I'm asking because for me it's the same. The game I have most fun with is my vote for the GOTY.

Thanks @JFarrell71! Good to hear regarding stealth. The loot system still doesn't sound good to me but glad you enjoy it. Great to hear there is no scaling, that's my biggest pet peeve.

The Last of Us 2 was, for me, a rewarding but also punishing experience. Put me through the emotional wringer. So it was fun to play, but also not, if you get me.

It is the sort of game I like, but Cyberpunk is moreso the kind of game I like (the setting interests me more, partly because of its relative novelty, and I like large RPGs more than I like focused action adventures).

TLOU2 is a highly polished game by a studio at the peak of their powers. Cyberpunk 2077 is messier, buggier, good but not as good in the areas of writing, acting and visuals. But again, its basic structure and makeup is something that I enjoy playing more, and will play for much longer. I also look forward to DLC for Cyberpunk. I wouldn't want DLC for TLOU2 even if it were planned (the story was told, and very well; nothing more is needed or wanted by me)

To sum up, TLOU2 is an extremely well made game of a sort that I like a bit less than the sort of game Cyberpunk 2077 is. So even though Cyberpunk is not made as well, I have more fun with it. (and it is made pretty darn well imo, bugs notwithstanding)