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IMO the real issue is less that it’s unfinished and more that the product at its best doesn’t seem to live up to its lofty expectations (disclaimer: have not pl

IMO the real issue is less that it’s unfinished and more that the product at its best doesn’t seem to live up to its lofty expectations (disclaimer: have not played it and don’t intend to until it goes on sale, just watched others and read a good number of reviews). From what I understand it’s a fairly anodyne action-RPG, with routine quests, an underwhelming plot, and not too many interesting choices for character development - nothing bad, but nothing great. It doesn’t have the script of The Witcher III, the humor and satire isn’t as clever as Watch Dogs, it doesn’t break new action-RPG gameplay ground like Fallout 4, and as an open world city it’s a shallow clone of a GTA game. And it doesn’t contribute anything particularly unique itself - outside of all the hype, the consensus seems to be that it’s a fine choice if you’re looking for a solid action-RPG, but not essential. Which would be fine if the game were finished and appropriately hyped! But neither were the case. People would be more forgiving of the bugs and even the unscrupulous marketing if the game was legitimately extraordinary and unlike anything else out there - the viral buggy footage would be offset by viral stories and videos of cool things in the game itself. But those cool things just aren’t there in Cyberpunk - it’s a B+ game, and doesn’t seem to have much to offer compared to its competitors.

jjoonathan 6y ago
> disclaimer: have not played it > routine quests, an underwhelming plot, and not too many interesting choices for character development Come on, man.
- throwanem 6y ago
  You left something out: > watched others and read a good number of reviews What's the point of reviews, if not to give people this kind of general sense of a game before they decide whether or not to buy it? Why else would AAA studios be so anxious to impose and enforce pre-release embargos, except to reduce the risk of the preorder hype and FOMO being in any way ameliorated by reality?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    First-hand reviews play an important role in the ecosystem, yes. When someone hasn't even played the game and comes out swinging, though, it comes across as a bit silly, especially if you've played the game and disagree with them.
    - ojnabieoot 6y ago
      I am not coming out swinging - my comment was very much about the reaction to the game and I never tried to pretend otherwise. I said my impression is that it's a B+ game at it's best, which means that its horrible technical failures and unscrupulous marketing are particularly glaring. It has not been regarded as a flawed masterpiece, but something more like 2001's Anachronox - a solid game with strong elements, but in many ways mediocre and hardly justifying a tortured development cycle and myriad bugs.
- haskellandchill 6y ago
  Well I've played it and is has routine quests, an underwhelming plot, and not too many interesting choices for character development. I was most disappointed that crafting is useless because I wanted to roleplay that skill tree. The game is so boring I've been playing Far Cry instead and Far Cry is trash. Coming from a Deus Ex background there is nothing there to Cyberpunk. However most people liked the game so what's the big deal, it works and the audience is mostly happy.
  - bitcharmer 6y ago
    > I was most disappointed that crafting is useless Crafting/engineering is one of the the most OP paths you can invest in. There's a great build posted some time ago on YT. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUMlmI685rc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUMlmI685rc
    - haskellandchill 6y ago
      I agree it is a viable combat path. I meant economically, it's a lousy way to make money. That's what my character was turning into a tech weapon build, but I wanted to get rich from making things.
  - slfnflctd 6y ago
    > Far Cry is trash Having recently played around with this series (3 and 5) for the first time in my life - since they were heavily discounted over the holidays - I have to say, for shooters they could be a lot worse. FC3 has clearly influenced other games that came out since. Production value is high, graphics are great, they run fine on 5+ year old computers and the stories are fun. I'm neither bored nor overly frustrated. Really my only issue is the lack of non-lethal play options, but you can play stealth most of the time and it's a good challenge for me. Not a shill or anything, I was just surprised to be enjoying them.
    - haskellandchill 6y ago
      I should have said trashy, though it is also super buggy and with poor quests/dialogue/etc. It's definitely a guilty pleasure of mine and something about the light RPG elements pull me in to completing the challenges.
mywittyname 6y ago
I thoroughly enjoyed the plot and felt like Panam is up there on the list of top NPCs in gaming. Like, you genuinely feel like you're becoming friends throughout the missions. I also thought Johnny was a really well executed. He really made me feel like some asshole is taking over my brain, and you slowly develop a bit of empathy with him and you can feel that he's doing the same with you. Plus, the scene where you play a gig as Johnny is so awesome. I've never played a first person game where something like that was done. Looking out on that crowd of people, I really felt like a rockstar. Yeah, the side missions were filler. And every NCPD job was identical. But they didn't feel any worse than Spiderman, and much better than FF7R (the cats...). You didn't even have to do any of them anyway. It was just something to occupy you if you wanted to run around and explore the city.
- munk-a 6y ago
  > And every NCPD job was identical. I actually disagree with this pretty solidly - I've seen absolutely trash side missions like Dragon's Age 2 where a handful of dungeon templates had slices taken off of them and were repackaged endlessly. The NCPD jobs (especially the Assault ones) are cheapo quests - but they're placed interestingly in the world with custom prop work and differing tactical options. Depending on your build it may be more or less of "Just rush in with a sword" but viewing them as the random world encounters they appear to be created as makes them rather high quality in my eyes. It's optional content for completionists or for you to trip over when wandering around and for that role I think it was well done.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    A whole lot of those NCPD missions amount to "kill these three-five bad guys." Yeah, they are in interesting spots, but I've cleared several of them in under a minute. Some of the "Assault in progress" can be done in <5 seconds late game. I'm not talking about the gigs that you get from the fixers in the different regions. Those are interesting, they are mostly the same concept, but you can choose to go in stealth or rambo, and for many, if you scope the place well enough and have the right build, you can b-line to the objective.
munk-a 6y ago
> lofty expectations Well there's your problem right there - don't accept lofty expectations ever. In terms of games that have been decade defining I can draw two examples: Skyrim and Age of Empires 2 - the first game came out after a real avalanche of negative PR around Oblivion being unfun at a basic level (the leveling system in that game was so horrible) and having the first exploitative DLC (see horse armor)... and the second game was mostly a dark horse that has somehow grown over the past two decades to have an incredibly strong e-sports community. Don't let yourself have lofty expectations for games - realize that a game costs about six or seven movie tickets and make sure you're not dropping 70$ on a game that you shelve after thirty minutes.
- ojnabieoot 6y ago
  OK - I didn't buy into the lofty expectations and I don't think you're understanding my point. My point was that even a platonic ideal of Cyberpunk wouldn't have lived up to expectations - I was surprised by how mediocre the reviews of the plot and quests were - which is a major part of why the blowback about the technical deficiencies has been particularly intense.
ShamelessC 6y ago
> and as an open world city it’s a shallow clone of a GTA game I have played about 200 hours of the game on Ultra with Ray Tracing and this is the only point I disagree on. The graphics and beautiful design of the city is _the_ major accomplishment of this game. It's significantly more dense in terms of graphical fidelity and polygon count. I found myself often just ignoring the actual gameplay and parkouring around the beautiful city. I can't speak to the ps4 version really, but I've seen screenshots and as far as I can tell they somehow made it look like a PS3 game. I don't think I could make it look that bad on PC even if I turned everything to low.
- rasz 6y ago
  you can check it out in motion here, does it really look like ps3 game to you? https://www.twitch.tv/ckplayer0ne/videos?filter=archives&sort=time https://www.twitch.tv/ckplayer0ne/videos?filter=archives&sor...
- ojnabieoot 6y ago
  I didn’t mean aesthetically so much as how vibrant the city feels (and again, I’ve only read about and watched the game). But traffic and pedestrians are far more brainless than even Vice City, the city itself is far less interactive or dynamic, and there’s way less opportunity for exciting emergent gameplay. > I found myself often just ignoring the actual gameplay and parkouring around the beautiful city. That’s kind of what I mean - and everyone I’ve watched play Cyberpunk has done the same thing, ignore the quests and abuse the quirky movement system to explore places they aren’t “allowed” by the developers to visit, and admire the pretty views. It does look fun and relaxing - I often dick around like that in open world games. But pretty views and nice models are only part of a good open world. In GTA the act of messing around in the city is real emergent gameplay explicitly supported by the game’s mechanics, and not just an improvised Mirror’s Edge. In GTA you can have an exciting chase across the city, and your actions have real (if transient) consequences for the surrounding cars and pedestrians. GTA’s cities do feel like real cities. The city in Cyberpunk seems like more of a set piece - impressively detailed and engineered, but without a lot of action.

jjoonathan 6y ago

> disclaimer: have not played it > routine quests, an underwhelming plot, and not too many interesting choices for character development Come on, man.

throwanem 6y ago
You left something out: > watched others and read a good number of reviews What's the point of reviews, if not to give people this kind of general sense of a game before they decide whether or not to buy it? Why else would AAA studios be so anxious to impose and enforce pre-release embargos, except to reduce the risk of the preorder hype and FOMO being in any way ameliorated by reality?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  First-hand reviews play an important role in the ecosystem, yes. When someone hasn't even played the game and comes out swinging, though, it comes across as a bit silly, especially if you've played the game and disagree with them.
  - ojnabieoot 6y ago
    I am not coming out swinging - my comment was very much about the reaction to the game and I never tried to pretend otherwise. I said my impression is that it's a B+ game at it's best, which means that its horrible technical failures and unscrupulous marketing are particularly glaring. It has not been regarded as a flawed masterpiece, but something more like 2001's Anachronox - a solid game with strong elements, but in many ways mediocre and hardly justifying a tortured development cycle and myriad bugs.
haskellandchill 6y ago
Well I've played it and is has routine quests, an underwhelming plot, and not too many interesting choices for character development. I was most disappointed that crafting is useless because I wanted to roleplay that skill tree. The game is so boring I've been playing Far Cry instead and Far Cry is trash. Coming from a Deus Ex background there is nothing there to Cyberpunk. However most people liked the game so what's the big deal, it works and the audience is mostly happy.
- bitcharmer 6y ago
  > I was most disappointed that crafting is useless Crafting/engineering is one of the the most OP paths you can invest in. There's a great build posted some time ago on YT. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUMlmI685rc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUMlmI685rc
  - haskellandchill 6y ago
    I agree it is a viable combat path. I meant economically, it's a lousy way to make money. That's what my character was turning into a tech weapon build, but I wanted to get rich from making things.
- slfnflctd 6y ago
  > Far Cry is trash Having recently played around with this series (3 and 5) for the first time in my life - since they were heavily discounted over the holidays - I have to say, for shooters they could be a lot worse. FC3 has clearly influenced other games that came out since. Production value is high, graphics are great, they run fine on 5+ year old computers and the stories are fun. I'm neither bored nor overly frustrated. Really my only issue is the lack of non-lethal play options, but you can play stealth most of the time and it's a good challenge for me. Not a shill or anything, I was just surprised to be enjoying them.
  - haskellandchill 6y ago
    I should have said trashy, though it is also super buggy and with poor quests/dialogue/etc. It's definitely a guilty pleasure of mine and something about the light RPG elements pull me in to completing the challenges.

mywittyname 6y ago

I thoroughly enjoyed the plot and felt like Panam is up there on the list of top NPCs in gaming. Like, you genuinely feel like you're becoming friends throughout the missions. I also thought Johnny was a really well executed. He really made me feel like some asshole is taking over my brain, and you slowly develop a bit of empathy with him and you can feel that he's doing the same with you. Plus, the scene where you play a gig as Johnny is so awesome. I've never played a first person game where something like that was done. Looking out on that crowd of people, I really felt like a rockstar. Yeah, the side missions were filler. And every NCPD job was identical. But they didn't feel any worse than Spiderman, and much better than FF7R (the cats...). You didn't even have to do any of them anyway. It was just something to occupy you if you wanted to run around and explore the city.

munk-a 6y ago
> And every NCPD job was identical. I actually disagree with this pretty solidly - I've seen absolutely trash side missions like Dragon's Age 2 where a handful of dungeon templates had slices taken off of them and were repackaged endlessly. The NCPD jobs (especially the Assault ones) are cheapo quests - but they're placed interestingly in the world with custom prop work and differing tactical options. Depending on your build it may be more or less of "Just rush in with a sword" but viewing them as the random world encounters they appear to be created as makes them rather high quality in my eyes. It's optional content for completionists or for you to trip over when wandering around and for that role I think it was well done.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  A whole lot of those NCPD missions amount to "kill these three-five bad guys." Yeah, they are in interesting spots, but I've cleared several of them in under a minute. Some of the "Assault in progress" can be done in <5 seconds late game. I'm not talking about the gigs that you get from the fixers in the different regions. Those are interesting, they are mostly the same concept, but you can choose to go in stealth or rambo, and for many, if you scope the place well enough and have the right build, you can b-line to the objective.

munk-a 6y ago

> lofty expectations Well there's your problem right there - don't accept lofty expectations ever. In terms of games that have been decade defining I can draw two examples: Skyrim and Age of Empires 2 - the first game came out after a real avalanche of negative PR around Oblivion being unfun at a basic level (the leveling system in that game was so horrible) and having the first exploitative DLC (see horse armor)... and the second game was mostly a dark horse that has somehow grown over the past two decades to have an incredibly strong e-sports community. Don't let yourself have lofty expectations for games - realize that a game costs about six or seven movie tickets and make sure you're not dropping 70$ on a game that you shelve after thirty minutes.

ojnabieoot 6y ago
OK - I didn't buy into the lofty expectations and I don't think you're understanding my point. My point was that even a platonic ideal of Cyberpunk wouldn't have lived up to expectations - I was surprised by how mediocre the reviews of the plot and quests were - which is a major part of why the blowback about the technical deficiencies has been particularly intense.

ShamelessC 6y ago

> and as an open world city it’s a shallow clone of a GTA game I have played about 200 hours of the game on Ultra with Ray Tracing and this is the only point I disagree on. The graphics and beautiful design of the city is _the_ major accomplishment of this game. It's significantly more dense in terms of graphical fidelity and polygon count. I found myself often just ignoring the actual gameplay and parkouring around the beautiful city. I can't speak to the ps4 version really, but I've seen screenshots and as far as I can tell they somehow made it look like a PS3 game. I don't think I could make it look that bad on PC even if I turned everything to low.

rasz 6y ago
you can check it out in motion here, does it really look like ps3 game to you? https://www.twitch.tv/ckplayer0ne/videos?filter=archives&sort=time https://www.twitch.tv/ckplayer0ne/videos?filter=archives&sor...
ojnabieoot 6y ago
I didn’t mean aesthetically so much as how vibrant the city feels (and again, I’ve only read about and watched the game). But traffic and pedestrians are far more brainless than even Vice City, the city itself is far less interactive or dynamic, and there’s way less opportunity for exciting emergent gameplay. > I found myself often just ignoring the actual gameplay and parkouring around the beautiful city. That’s kind of what I mean - and everyone I’ve watched play Cyberpunk has done the same thing, ignore the quests and abuse the quirky movement system to explore places they aren’t “allowed” by the developers to visit, and admire the pretty views. It does look fun and relaxing - I often dick around like that in open world games. But pretty views and nice models are only part of a good open world. In GTA the act of messing around in the city is real emergent gameplay explicitly supported by the game’s mechanics, and not just an improvised Mirror’s Edge. In GTA you can have an exciting chase across the city, and your actions have real (if transient) consequences for the surrounding cars and pedestrians. GTA’s cities do feel like real cities. The city in Cyberpunk seems like more of a set piece - impressively detailed and engineered, but without a lot of action.