7 ms·

Part of the problem for example is the story swings between "good" and "great" only if you are on a particular path. The corpo path for example is a bad one:

Part of the problem for example is the story swings between "good" and "great" only if you are on a particular path. The corpo path for example is a bad one: 1. in the intro you litearlly do nothing, you only hear an NPC explain a mission to you, and right after that mission is cancelled and you are thrown in the game proper, you literally do nothing except hear people talking about stuff that later is completely irrelevant in the rest of the game. 2. The main quest seemly assumes you are a street kid, your character talk with street kid slang and all, the few times you can talk as if you were corpo, not only the character style of talking changes, even the volume changes, it is very jarring, whenever you click on the corpo option the character personality, talking style and the volume of the recording of his voice actor changes. 3. Some parts of 2, ditto for nomads, for example if you are playing as nomad, and do a certain nomad sidequest, they say "you don't understand our issues, you are not a nomad", because obviously they assume you are on the streetkid path. 4. It is easy to get lost in the story because of bugs, for example many people got quests totally derailed because they skipped triggers of the scripts or something else broke entirely, and also many people got confused because critical information on dialogue was missed because the constant phoen calls about gigs and delamain cars can play on top and hide the critical dialogue. So even though one specific path of the game, seemly has good story, even then people can feel like the story is crap because the game sabotages itself.

defertoreptar 6y ago
I picked street kid and I still was confused by why the first part of the story was even necessary. The game could have taken a lesson from Kurt Vonnegut, who said to start a story as close to the end as possible.
- redisman 6y ago
  I'm fairly certain they cut out a big chunk of the "lifepaths" to make the deadline. They don't really make sense as a mechanic at this point. You choose your previous life as one of the main choices but then all the paths merge together after 15 minutes? Just doesn't make sense from a game design or story perspective as a intentional choice.
  - GLsimtam 6y ago
    Paradoxically, we call "cut content" what was recorded but not wired into the game. Abandonded ideas are not cut content, same as content that is cleaned up from the release thoroughly and leave no trace of it. Concerning the life paths, it's just a fancy rumor that something was cut there. True, the origin stories for life paths in CP2077 could be perhaps as long as in Dragon Age: Origins, but keeping them short and tight is also fine. Why have them at all? Broadly speaking, they may nudge the player into a specific ending. A lot of players vocal on forums would dismiss anything but completing all endings just for the sake of it, but if we are discussing this seriously as a role-playing game, what goes into the decision which ending to pursue matters.
    - deadbunny 6y ago
      > Why have them at all? The lifepath system was a key feature in the TTRPG, obvious handled a lot differently in the TTRPG than video game where they have merged the Roles with the Lifepath. I think people are disappointed as they were expecting DA:O levels of paths but got 15-20 mins and a few chat options (that don't add up to anything).
  - freeflight 6y ago
    There was certainly a lot cut, but already back in August interviews said that lifepaths wouldn't lead to completely different stories, but rather add a bit of a different flavor to the same over-arching story [0]: > Your choice of lifepath will influence parts of your journey throughout Cyberpunk 2077, and each one will have an entirely different introduction to the same overarching story. Tho it's a bit telling how one of the introduction quests is used as an example for how the lifepath choice makes a difference past the introduction. In my 30 hours of playing I've had only one situation where my choice of Nomad seemed to make a difference; During a Gig at Kabuki market I could ask another Nomad there about the location of a person I was looking for. Dunno how that quest would have played out otherwise without that. [0] https://www.gamesradar.com/cyberpunk-2077-lifepaths/ https://www.gamesradar.com/cyberpunk-2077-lifepaths/
    - 6y ago
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  > The game could have taken a lesson from Kurt Vonnegut, who said to start a story as close to the end as possible. I hadn't heard this maxim before, and I haven't played Cyberpunk, but this actually strikes me as something a lot of games do to a fault. The original Mirror's Edge (a personal favorite) is a good example. That game's story has many obvious issues, from stilted characters to cutscenes that look like cheap flash animations, but I think it all could have worked a lot better if you spent the first few chapters as a normal Runner doing standard deliveries, before things started going to hell. This would ground you in the world and provide a sense of what it's like to be a Runner, so you'd care about preserving their way of life later on. Games as a medium are uniquely good at this sort of thing, from the early days of Final Fantasy.
- noodle 6y ago
  Compared to Witcher 3, they DID do this with 2077. 2077's main storyline is roughly 20 hours long, while the Witcher's is about 50 hours. CDPR is kind of known for their longer story driven stuff, and its my understanding they took that feedback in this game and made the primary quest shorter while expanding the optional quest branching.
- hnick 6y ago
  Gamers unfortunately often make an argument equating number of hours to value for money. Padded open world games are the natural result. You trade a nice, tight narrative for an experience spread thin over more hours.
Aunche 6y ago
Any game with full voice acting is going to have certain limitations. Corpo V still grew up with Jackie, and it's pretty common for people from poorer backgrounds to have separate corporate and casual personas.
- neaden 6y ago
  The key is to accept those limitations. They should have just kept to the street kid start.
  - kmonsen 6y ago
    I mean this is they key for everything when making great products, accept your limitations and don't make it the users problem. It is so fundamental you should not have to say it but you are really right in this case.
- tstrimple 6y ago
  Also known as code switching. Many people do this all the time in the real world. I know black folk who have two distinct accents depending on the context and audience. Same with many southerners that I know. The drawl becomes a lot less pronounced in "professional" settings. That being said, V didn't grow up with Jackie. They met on a run. Corpo V might have grown up on the street as well, but then it's not really a different backstory.
  - Aunche 6y ago
    Corpo V never did runs with Jackie before the game. In the Heros sidequest Mama Wells references that they lived under the same roof, though in retrospect that could be referencing the time skip at the beginning.
gabereiser 6y ago
The first few missions of Corp path had me almost ask for a refund. Instead I started a new game as a street-kid. Makes way more sense now.
stuart78 6y ago
Had the same reaction to corpo path. I think it would actually be interesting to tell a story about that culture from the inside, rather than immediately retreating to the well-trodden anti-corp perspective. For a supposedly ambitious game, it seems entirely uninterested in challenging or evolving the rather tired cyberpunk tropes.
- deadbunny 6y ago
  I'm still on my first playthrough (and enjoying it) and am super disappointed to hear the other lifepaths are basically 15-20 minute prologues. I too was really hoping for my corpo playthrough to be playing it from the inside, lots of corporate espionage, dealing with situations with the full force of a megacorp behind me etc...
  - theshrike79 6y ago
    People's expectations about the life paths were really overblown, they took marketing bullshit and took it as gospel. Then their own imaginations took over. No game _ever_ has been like this. You just can't get three completely different fully immersive all-spoken-dialog games for the price of one - unless the main plot is like 10 hours max. Even the Fallout games have a few bigger decisions (FO3 had the choice of nuking either town), but the rest of the stat-based chat options are mostly for flavour. Maybe a few side quests have different endings or dead ends because of your stats, but the main plot is still essentially the same.
    - stuart78 6y ago
      Fantasy RPGs tend to do a pretty good job of this. The macro path your character follows is consistent, but there are choices and class-specific stories that create a sense of character. I think the question comes down to the ‘role playing’ portion. I have no problem with single character games, and am not a 2077 hater, but would love to see more ambition around narrative.
  - lrem 6y ago
    Ah no, that they made clear eons ago - V has broken off with her/his past and is just a merc now. But, they stated that different life paths would give you wildly different experiences. That they would change how others react to you. And one would assume that this would need separate voiceovers. What we get instead is "I used to ride with the Bakkers" "I would never have guessed".
simias 6y ago
The multiple path concept is evidence of CDPR biting more than they could chew. They spread themselves too thin, the game is less than the sum of its parts because half-finished subsystems weigh down what can be a very solid game when it focuses on its fundamentals. OP says "Some players expected this to be cyberpunk-themed RDR2/GTA5". I think some higher ups at CDPR wanted for it to be that at the start, and they only corrected course very late into development when they realized that they'd never meet the deadline. If they had cut off the driving completely for instance, and instead focusing on having things like taxis and public transportation, you'd get a much more immersive RPG setting and you wouldn't have the immersion breaking, performance tanking, AI-stupidity-demonstrating driving and car chase sequences. Then once the game is successful you can extend and improve it with expansions and sequels, building on top of a solid base. Instead they managed to miss the deadline twice in a row despite making their devs crunch and despite all that they released a completely broken, unfinished game.
- bird_monster 6y ago
  I believe I saw on Reddit a post that attempted to map all the dialogue/in game decision options, and found that 98% of choices ended up not mattering. Only 2% of player-choice decided which ending (of the 5) you got. edit To rephrase, I don't even think it's about the endings at all. Most of the choices in the game do not actual change the trajectory of your character. Most of the decisions put you on the same track. Kill steve, don't kill steve, even if it seems like it mattered to some part of the story, it actually did not.
  - folkrav 6y ago
    I'd be curious to see this for other games for comparison. The number seems high, but when I start really thinking about it, I can't think of many games where multiple endings relied on much more than a handful of key decisions.
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    It's not all about the endings though. Mass Effect famously only had 2 endings (which everyone raged about), but the plot itself is interesting to see the different branches in the story on their own.
oarabbus_ 6y ago
>The corpo path for example is a bad one: Honestly your description is an absolute 100% game wrecker as far as I am concerned. At least Mass Effect 3 tricked you into thinking your choices mattered until the very end, whereas this crap ruins the facade at the very start. Basically, if you care about NPCs and dialogue being believable, then you have to be the street kid. Pretty lame
theshrike79 6y ago
> The main quest seemly assumes you are a street kid, your character talk with street kid slang and all, the few times you can talk as if you were corpo, not only the character style of talking changes, even the volume changes, it is very jarring Ooh! This was it! I knew there was something bugging me about some of the dialogue options. First you can be calmly speaking about something, picking the lower dialogue options for more info. Then you pick the top one (progress the plot) and V is suddenly angry AF and shouts the question. Dunno if this is an omission because of lack of time or just bad audio direction.

defertoreptar 6y ago

I picked street kid and I still was confused by why the first part of the story was even necessary. The game could have taken a lesson from Kurt Vonnegut, who said to start a story as close to the end as possible.

redisman 6y ago
I'm fairly certain they cut out a big chunk of the "lifepaths" to make the deadline. They don't really make sense as a mechanic at this point. You choose your previous life as one of the main choices but then all the paths merge together after 15 minutes? Just doesn't make sense from a game design or story perspective as a intentional choice.
- GLsimtam 6y ago
  Paradoxically, we call "cut content" what was recorded but not wired into the game. Abandonded ideas are not cut content, same as content that is cleaned up from the release thoroughly and leave no trace of it. Concerning the life paths, it's just a fancy rumor that something was cut there. True, the origin stories for life paths in CP2077 could be perhaps as long as in Dragon Age: Origins, but keeping them short and tight is also fine. Why have them at all? Broadly speaking, they may nudge the player into a specific ending. A lot of players vocal on forums would dismiss anything but completing all endings just for the sake of it, but if we are discussing this seriously as a role-playing game, what goes into the decision which ending to pursue matters.
  - deadbunny 6y ago
    > Why have them at all? The lifepath system was a key feature in the TTRPG, obvious handled a lot differently in the TTRPG than video game where they have merged the Roles with the Lifepath. I think people are disappointed as they were expecting DA:O levels of paths but got 15-20 mins and a few chat options (that don't add up to anything).
- freeflight 6y ago
  There was certainly a lot cut, but already back in August interviews said that lifepaths wouldn't lead to completely different stories, but rather add a bit of a different flavor to the same over-arching story [0]: > Your choice of lifepath will influence parts of your journey throughout Cyberpunk 2077, and each one will have an entirely different introduction to the same overarching story. Tho it's a bit telling how one of the introduction quests is used as an example for how the lifepath choice makes a difference past the introduction. In my 30 hours of playing I've had only one situation where my choice of Nomad seemed to make a difference; During a Gig at Kabuki market I could ask another Nomad there about the location of a person I was looking for. Dunno how that quest would have played out otherwise without that. [0] https://www.gamesradar.com/cyberpunk-2077-lifepaths/ https://www.gamesradar.com/cyberpunk-2077-lifepaths/
  - 6y ago
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
> The game could have taken a lesson from Kurt Vonnegut, who said to start a story as close to the end as possible. I hadn't heard this maxim before, and I haven't played Cyberpunk, but this actually strikes me as something a lot of games do to a fault. The original Mirror's Edge (a personal favorite) is a good example. That game's story has many obvious issues, from stilted characters to cutscenes that look like cheap flash animations, but I think it all could have worked a lot better if you spent the first few chapters as a normal Runner doing standard deliveries, before things started going to hell. This would ground you in the world and provide a sense of what it's like to be a Runner, so you'd care about preserving their way of life later on. Games as a medium are uniquely good at this sort of thing, from the early days of Final Fantasy.
noodle 6y ago
Compared to Witcher 3, they DID do this with 2077. 2077's main storyline is roughly 20 hours long, while the Witcher's is about 50 hours. CDPR is kind of known for their longer story driven stuff, and its my understanding they took that feedback in this game and made the primary quest shorter while expanding the optional quest branching.
hnick 6y ago
Gamers unfortunately often make an argument equating number of hours to value for money. Padded open world games are the natural result. You trade a nice, tight narrative for an experience spread thin over more hours.

Aunche 6y ago

Any game with full voice acting is going to have certain limitations. Corpo V still grew up with Jackie, and it's pretty common for people from poorer backgrounds to have separate corporate and casual personas.

neaden 6y ago
The key is to accept those limitations. They should have just kept to the street kid start.
- kmonsen 6y ago
  I mean this is they key for everything when making great products, accept your limitations and don't make it the users problem. It is so fundamental you should not have to say it but you are really right in this case.
tstrimple 6y ago
Also known as code switching. Many people do this all the time in the real world. I know black folk who have two distinct accents depending on the context and audience. Same with many southerners that I know. The drawl becomes a lot less pronounced in "professional" settings. That being said, V didn't grow up with Jackie. They met on a run. Corpo V might have grown up on the street as well, but then it's not really a different backstory.
- Aunche 6y ago
  Corpo V never did runs with Jackie before the game. In the Heros sidequest Mama Wells references that they lived under the same roof, though in retrospect that could be referencing the time skip at the beginning.

gabereiser 6y ago

The first few missions of Corp path had me almost ask for a refund. Instead I started a new game as a street-kid. Makes way more sense now.

stuart78 6y ago

Had the same reaction to corpo path. I think it would actually be interesting to tell a story about that culture from the inside, rather than immediately retreating to the well-trodden anti-corp perspective. For a supposedly ambitious game, it seems entirely uninterested in challenging or evolving the rather tired cyberpunk tropes.

deadbunny 6y ago
I'm still on my first playthrough (and enjoying it) and am super disappointed to hear the other lifepaths are basically 15-20 minute prologues. I too was really hoping for my corpo playthrough to be playing it from the inside, lots of corporate espionage, dealing with situations with the full force of a megacorp behind me etc...
- theshrike79 6y ago
  People's expectations about the life paths were really overblown, they took marketing bullshit and took it as gospel. Then their own imaginations took over. No game _ever_ has been like this. You just can't get three completely different fully immersive all-spoken-dialog games for the price of one - unless the main plot is like 10 hours max. Even the Fallout games have a few bigger decisions (FO3 had the choice of nuking either town), but the rest of the stat-based chat options are mostly for flavour. Maybe a few side quests have different endings or dead ends because of your stats, but the main plot is still essentially the same.
  - stuart78 6y ago
    Fantasy RPGs tend to do a pretty good job of this. The macro path your character follows is consistent, but there are choices and class-specific stories that create a sense of character. I think the question comes down to the ‘role playing’ portion. I have no problem with single character games, and am not a 2077 hater, but would love to see more ambition around narrative.
- lrem 6y ago
  Ah no, that they made clear eons ago - V has broken off with her/his past and is just a merc now. But, they stated that different life paths would give you wildly different experiences. That they would change how others react to you. And one would assume that this would need separate voiceovers. What we get instead is "I used to ride with the Bakkers" "I would never have guessed".

simias 6y ago

The multiple path concept is evidence of CDPR biting more than they could chew. They spread themselves too thin, the game is less than the sum of its parts because half-finished subsystems weigh down what can be a very solid game when it focuses on its fundamentals. OP says "Some players expected this to be cyberpunk-themed RDR2/GTA5". I think some higher ups at CDPR wanted for it to be that at the start, and they only corrected course very late into development when they realized that they'd never meet the deadline. If they had cut off the driving completely for instance, and instead focusing on having things like taxis and public transportation, you'd get a much more immersive RPG setting and you wouldn't have the immersion breaking, performance tanking, AI-stupidity-demonstrating driving and car chase sequences. Then once the game is successful you can extend and improve it with expansions and sequels, building on top of a solid base. Instead they managed to miss the deadline twice in a row despite making their devs crunch and despite all that they released a completely broken, unfinished game.

bird_monster 6y ago
I believe I saw on Reddit a post that attempted to map all the dialogue/in game decision options, and found that 98% of choices ended up not mattering. Only 2% of player-choice decided which ending (of the 5) you got. edit To rephrase, I don't even think it's about the endings at all. Most of the choices in the game do not actual change the trajectory of your character. Most of the decisions put you on the same track. Kill steve, don't kill steve, even if it seems like it mattered to some part of the story, it actually did not.
- folkrav 6y ago
  I'd be curious to see this for other games for comparison. The number seems high, but when I start really thinking about it, I can't think of many games where multiple endings relied on much more than a handful of key decisions.
- chrisco255 6y ago
  It's not all about the endings though. Mass Effect famously only had 2 endings (which everyone raged about), but the plot itself is interesting to see the different branches in the story on their own.

oarabbus_ 6y ago

>The corpo path for example is a bad one: Honestly your description is an absolute 100% game wrecker as far as I am concerned. At least Mass Effect 3 tricked you into thinking your choices mattered until the very end, whereas this crap ruins the facade at the very start. Basically, if you care about NPCs and dialogue being believable, then you have to be the street kid. Pretty lame

theshrike79 6y ago

> The main quest seemly assumes you are a street kid, your character talk with street kid slang and all, the few times you can talk as if you were corpo, not only the character style of talking changes, even the volume changes, it is very jarring Ooh! This was it! I knew there was something bugging me about some of the dialogue options. First you can be calmly speaking about something, picking the lower dialogue options for more info. Then you pick the top one (progress the plot) and V is suddenly angry AF and shouts the question. Dunno if this is an omission because of lack of time or just bad audio direction.