Cyberpunk 2077

[Silver Sorrow]

Not 1977. I lived through that. An 8-track tape deck in a tan Opel. 

So I've been playing around with the chargen...pretty damn comprehensive, considering that there are no sliders. Preset parts, in other words. And you can give your female character a pecker.

Why, I have no idea. But you can. And I guess that's reason enough for some people.

At one point I found I could make what looked like a Chrissy Teigen crackwhore tranny, and I rejoiced...for I am just getting over the flu and my head is far more messed up than is usual. (For example, the other night I was in the midst of concocting an ambitious merging of Moby Dick and Paul Simon's "You Can Call Me Al" -- tentative name: "Call Me Ishma-Al" -- but then the fever broke and it just didn't seem all that important anymore.)

So I walked it back a bit and got a character I was happy with.

Still not sure about the setting of the game, however; I was never exactly a fan of this particular genre. (Besides Deus Ex, that is.) I'm more Star Wars than Blade Runner. But I'll give it a try.

And furthermore...

- Holy CRAPOLA that's a lot of keys to remap. Maybe I should try out my controller for this one....

- With that said, there doesn't really seem to be an "interact" key. I was told to talk to a guy, and I approached him, but couldn't figure out what key to hit. Then I walked right into him and dialog popped up. I don't think I like that.

- So my character looks good. Yay. When's Starfield coming out? 2022 or so? Oh, hell's bells.

[Starfox]

And you can give your female character a pecker.

Why, I have no idea. But you can. And I guess that's reason enough for some people.

Transexuals... it's a thing you know...  That aside, CDPR said they were not holding back on things like sex and sexual differences. I don't know to what extent it is true in game but at least the chargen is pretty explicit in that regard. First game I see where one can customize nipples (well that's not entirely true but the others where not of what we could call the "standard" game variety  ) Sure I can already see the same guys as in the Bethesda modding community starting to add bits an pieces for more variety but at least the base work is already done.

Bethesda modders looking at the "breasts" option: They call *that* big?

To be frank the current chargen is enough for me. It gets the job done, much better than say The Outer Worlds.

The standard interaction key on keyboards is "F" by the way -- it cannot be modified which immediately attracted the ire of a lot of people, for good reason. Not all conversations are automatically initiated. Only the important and unavoidable ones.

Myself I only run in one major problem, crackling audio. Considering that the said problem was reported by a lot of people across all platforms (PC and consoles), it's kinda ridiculous that it escaped control. But I guess they were too busy implementing RTX to pay attention to audio. I played 3 hours and spent two of them just trying to work around the bug then finally followed the general opinion and lowered the sampling rate of my audio device, then I spent the third hour making sure that the thing was "fixed" -- even though it's requiring a proper fix from the devs down the road.

This game was definitely not ready for prime time (I'd say keeping in the oven until next Spring would have been better -- but then CDP had other things to consider like investors wanting some of their investment paying off). On the other hand, neither was The Witcher 3 on its initial release (I remember the amusing bug that made you crash every time you accessed the inventory with V-sync on).

Other than that I haven't had too much time yet to pay attention to the game itself. And I think that now that the bug is "fixed" I'll have to start a game anew to be able to appreciate it without having my teeth grinding.

[Starfox]

Not all conversations are automatically initiated. Only the important and unavoidable ones.

Scratch that. The prompt automatically shows for all "real" conversations (those with multiple questions/answers). I hadn't caught on that sooner because I was focused on squashing the damn sound bug. To quit a conversation one has to walk away... this is... disturbing.

Not too heavy into the game right now. I'm just about to begin the first real main storyline mission (with a surprise at the end that is already ruined because it was all over the trailers).

Problem is it's the wrong period of the year for me to be playing that kind of game. I prefer to spend the holidays on the old classics, Thief, Skyrim... But that's not a real problem because this game still needs a lot of patching so I'm going to take it slow. After all The Witcher 3 ended up at version 1.32... Cyberpunk is at 1.04. There's room.

[Silver Sorrow]

I almost spat out my cough drop when I saw what they consider "big." Oh, that was good for a chuckle. Can't wait until the "thicc silly HUGE" mods start pouring in...

...or maybe I can. I'm not exactly doing cartwheels over this game, really. I guess I'm just not that interested. I haven't experienced any bugs (that I know of), but that's probably because most of my play time has been spent in facegen. I played through the Nomad intro, then got bored and wandered off for a couple of days. Then I tried the City Kid intro, and got bored right after the opening convo with the bartender and wandered off for a couple of days.

In the meantime I've been plugging away at Outer Worlds here and there. My character looks better in this game, but OW has a little more...charm, I guess. That Vicar, though...kinda *earthy* for a man of the cloth, eh? Most clerics, when telling you that they cannot read another language, usually don't drop at least two f-bombs in telling you so.

(Which makes me wonder: so if you're playing the French localization of the game and he starts yelling...in French...that he can't read French, would this cause a glitch in the Matrix, or just induce a mild headache in the player?)

Anyway, Cyberpunk: I tried remapping "f" to "s" as that's my usual interaction key, but it refused. In this day and age: hard-coded key binds. Jesus wept.

People are already screaming for CDPR's blood over this thing ("it don't look pretty on my overpriced console thingy waaaaaaaaaah!"), so they'll be patching the living shit out of it. Definitely needed more dev time, yeah. To mangle an old saying: release in haste, patch in leisure.

Actually...what really has my attention at the moment is Star Wars Battlefront II. The SP campaign, I mean. It was a little under $12 on Steam and I figured I could get SOME enjoyment out of it. And so far, it's not bad at all. (I am...bad at it, that is.) The ship combat segments are kind of excruciating -- I keep flying into things and exploding -- but the boots-on-the-ground combat is...okay, a little excruciating, too. But it's more forgiving. I still don't like defend-the-base scenarios, but what can you do?

Out of curiosity I looked through the Nexus' SWBF2 site and found the single greatest mod ever made for any game in the history of moddable games (I may be exaggerating slightly): LeiaBAEder Remastered, which turns Vader into a Leia Sith lord.

I also picked up Doom Eternal for...$20? I don't recall. Probably overpriced even so, but oh well.

ANYWAY, back to playing as a tranny: I've seen a bit of outrage from the easily-outraged that the game is offensive to the LGBTUVWXYZ player, inasmuch as the game doesn't register that you're sportin' secret wood (or its anatomical opposite) unless you change your voice. So if you look like a girl but want everyone in the entire friggin' game to know that you're really a dude, but with breasts, you have to give your character a male voice. (And vice-versa, as each case requires.)

You *can* make this shit up, but no one would actually believe it. But it's really happening, folks.

I could analyze this further (for example: if I just met you, how vital is it that I know that, despite your feminine appearance, you have a penis? All I care about is that you make sure I get fries with my order, okay? Besides that, I don't care.), but gaaaaah. People make me so tired.

Look: if I'm going to make my character a ladyboy, it will be a mission of stealth.

[Starfox]

To be frank the whole commotion and wanting the blood of CDPR is revolving mostly around the old-gen consoles versions. And true enough the game is barely playable and very F...ing ugly on a PS4 or a Xbox One. CDPR should definitely have mentioned this little caveat a while ago "you can play on old gen consoles if you really want to but truly the game is meant for next gen; old gen is crap anyway and why do you think that if you have bought the old gen version, we give you the next gen version like in free of charge as soon as it is available".

On PC the situation is definitely different. There is a couple of technical bugs like the one I ran into but they don't concern all the rigs (for example the bug  is there with my Logitech G533 7.1 headset -- and disappears when I reduce the sound quality -- but not with my 7.1 wired no-name spare headset that I normally keep for bad days). But most gamers on PC play with recent or upgraded rigs. Consoles like the PS4 or the Xbox One are old, there can be no miracle. Especially considering that the game run OK but no great on a not even 3 years old computer. I get a 42 average fps on high (and curiously just 1 fps more on medium I'd like someone to explain that to me). But yeah, my graphic card is an old dog (relatively speaking, in computer terms -- a RX580). And to think that the game on a surge of optimism defaulted on "ultra" the first time I launched it.

Anyway most of the bugs currently on PC are quest related (mainly side quests) so if you don't play the game, you don't notice them  there were other funny bugs on the pre-release version that youtubers got to play but they should have been solved by the day 1 patch (which came at 9.9 GB).

Ah, the Vicar... Possibly one of my favorite characters in TOW. Yes, not what you'd imagine a Vicar to be but that's the fun side. I love his special ability with sentences like "Now I will take your confession" or "May the Lord show you mercy because I won't".

(Which makes me wonder: so if you're playing the French localization of the game and he starts yelling...in French...that he can't read French, would this cause a glitch in the Matrix, or just induce a mild headache in the player?)

I Couldn't tell you. I never play games in French as a rule of thumb because the voice acting is generally horrible. I'd guess that it's not French but English or Spanish or German... whatever. All I know is that when he said that I said "hey, wait. I can read French so why don't you give it to me?" But no, we had to go on a journey to find a "translator". But come on, French may not be the most spoken language in the world but it's not a dying one either. I would have understood with Esperanto which all in all must be spoken by 200,000 people in the world but French?!

Go to Quebec and tell them "French is dead"... I guarantee you some very fun times  We're talking about people who think that the French are not French enough (which is possibly true... look at me).

You *can* make this shit up, but no one would actually believe it. But it's really happening, folks.

Sadly I'm not even surprised France have been spared most of the idiocy revolving around words and appellations but we still have some of it, directly imported from the US, thank you so much for the gift 

[Silver Sorrow]

Ominous: If they'd only waited to release next year, they wouldn't have been hit with the 2020 Curse.

Realistic: If they'd had people play it on different platforms first, they probably would've been able to avoid this shitstorm entirely.

Sardonic: If they hadn't tried to cram so much crap into one single game, it wouldn't have been in development for so long, leading to panicked investors screaming for a release NOW.

Philosophical: If I'd learned how to play the guitar, and if I'd gotten so good at it that I could have made a career out of it, then I could've died of a heroin overdose in a grimy motel room in the Midwest somewhere back in the late 1990's, and I never would have heard of this game.

While I sympathize with the people who were ripped off, I find the incessant whining irritating. Get a refund, post a scathing review on YouTube, and MOVE ON. But no. We're never going to hear the end of how CDPR performed the video game equivalent of murdering Christ.

However, it could be pretty entertaining to see just how bad it will get. I like to think of the various denizens of the internet like so:

As I gaze out the window at severely retarded children milling about a dusty playground, bumping into each other, getting their heads stuck in fence railings, etc., I swirl my drink around in the glass before I take a sip. "Just look at those little no neck monsters," I remark to no one in particular.

Somewhat grim, perhaps. Oh, well.

Anyway, it seems to run okay for me...my rig's just a couple of years old, but I wasn't expecting flawless performance. I haven't had any audio problems, but I wonder...if I had to rely on my headphones, I probably would have some issues. I just know it.   But I also turn off some of the bells and whistles that people just can't seem to live without (film grain, depth of field, etc.), so that may help. All the things that made me avoid ENBs for Skyrim: turning the game into a motion-sickness-inducing blurry smudge. Mazel tov.

Anyway most of the bugs currently on PC are quest related (mainly side quests) so if you don't play the game, you don't notice them 

Aha! Who knew that the way to avoid bugs was to simply not play the game?

Kind of funny, I was scrolling through some of the patch notes, somewhat bemused by the sheer number of bug fixes for various side quests...now it makes sense.

TOW: it seems to me that they should've included the ability to complete the quest if the player understands the language in question. Perhaps by answering a few questions, perhaps... Naaaaaaaaaaaaah. Too much work! Let's assume that not one single person playing this game knows French! It would make more sense if it were, in fact, written in Esperanto.

Or even Attic Greek. "We need to find a Jesuit."

Those wacky Québécois. I'm glad I'm not Canadian. I just don't think I could deal with Quebec. Then again, Canadians tend to get massacred a lot less than Americans when they travel abroad, so maybe...

...which reminds me: I had some distant relatives who loved to travel, and they were such die-hard liberals and -- as a result -- so embarrassed to be Americans that when they did go to foreign lands, they pretended to be Canadians. I regret not informing them that their ruse wouldn't work: since they were complete assholes, they would've been pegged as Americans immediately. 

That's actually how we Americans recognize each other in foreign countries. 

Sadly I'm not even surprised France have been spared most of the idiocy revolving around words and appellations but we still have some of it, directly imported from the US, thank you so much for the gift 

You're entirely welcome. It's the gift that keeps on giving.   "Our young people can't decide which gender they want to be, so everyone else in the world must suffer!"

[Starfox]

Hindsight 20/20 (and not 2020): CD Projekt should have cancelled the release of the game for old gen console versions altogether. They could have just said the truth "Sorry but considering the technology of our game we're not comfortable releasing it for the PS4 and Xbox One as we know those platforms are not capable to run it as we intend. In consequence we prefer to cancel the release on those platforms and focus on the PS5 and Xbox Series X."

Sure they would have taken heat for that because Console players would have all been like "What? You release the PC version before the consoles ones? You a**holes! What is this crap?" Still the heat would have been much less severe than it is now. Why? Because all the persons that I saw performing "Let's Play" on Youtube and other I talked too in real life are having a good time with the PC version of the game. Sure they acknowledge that there are bugs but really not more than in a standard Bethesda release (people don't really seem to remember the initial state of every Bethesda game ever released before the patches and the community fixes). The PC version is the only one that managed to increase its user score on Metacritic from 6.0 to 7.1 and I guess it could even reach 8 when the bugs are all fixed. And allegedly the game with all the bells and whistles is apparently superb (but sure, you need a RTX 3080 to know that everything below being too light to run the game at that level of graphic quality).

The PC version of Cyberpunk 2077 is not horrible or bad. It is faulty, yes, but nothing that cannot be fixed with patches. It won't get to the level of The Witcher 3 (I haven't finished it yet but it's the feeling I get -- omitting the fact that I'm not big fan of cyberpunk settings, I simply don't see Cyberpunk raise to this particular challenge) but it isn't an horrible experience either. I've known much worse as games go. However the PC version is splashed by the whole console "scandal" and might as well drown with it, which is sad because it really doesn't deserve to be drawn in the whole debate.

There are lessons to be learned there. I don't know what exactly went wrong at CD Projekt. I guess it was a mix of investors and over-hype pressure, panicking execs, and total underestimation of the time needed to get the game ready, plus a curious denial of the fact that it was never going to be pretty or run well on old gen consoles.

Aha! Who knew that the way to avoid bugs was to simply not play the game?

Yeah. and avoiding every computer bug out there is as simple as... never buying a computer in the first place. it's only when you try things that they can go wrong (that should be a Murphy's law no?)

[Silver Sorrow]

CDPR had to know that this sort of underhandedness really doesn't fly; people WILL find out. I mean, we have an entire sub-culture of tech-oriented wannabe YouTube stars covering things like this in excruciating detail, someone's gonna notice eventually.

And this, I guess, is part of the multi-platform dilemma. You make one thing, then gotta adapt it every single gaming platform currently in use. But CDPR, please...when it won't run on the iFridge or the SmartDildo, just tell the bastards. ("BTW, this game won't run on your cellphone. At all. You moron.")

Ah, well. Another flareup in a complete dumpster fire of a year. Not even the new Wonder Woman movie survived unscathed, and it was foreseen as the holy grail of the feminist-in-bondage-gear ideal.

it's only when you try things that they can go wrong

Murphy's Corollary. 

Well, I see that I haven't posted a pic of my V yet. I've been just messing around with it here and there until I finally got one I can live with.

Yaaaaay. Now all that's left is to find some sort of motivation to actually play, since I'm just not feeling the whole cyberpunk thing.

Ironic, really...suffered through so many games with characters that were never quite what I wanted, and then I finally find one with a more-than-passable result (I mean, she *looks* like a Nomad, right?), and...what? Just wander off? Play something else?

Maybe I should've learned how to crochet. Make a few afghans, hang out with grandmothers, swap cookie recipes...

[Starfox]

From my experience, the first part of Cyberpunk main story (until the first main mission where you are tasked with stealing something) is treated as a tutorial. I wandered a lot wondering what I was doing there and not being enthused by it. Sure you can do side missions (a truck load of them) but my advice would be to not focus your attention there at first. Do the first main story mission as soon as available because only that really triggers things and give a meaning to the rest of the game. It was after that point that the game started to gain traction with me. After that you get places, meet new mostly interesting people, and gain more interesting side missions (which you certainly should do because they add to the back story of the game helping you to make sense of the universe).

I chose to go the "street kid" way myself. Amusingly my character has the same haircut as yours (because it's about the only one that I thought didn't suck)

The whole "choose your background" thing is really just pulling a Dragon Age Origins. You get three different starting stories after which the game becomes the same for everyone but you can use your background "knowledge" in conversations (my character has apparently an unhealthy knowledge of drugs, gangs, sex toys, and the criminal underworld in general. Definitely knows her way around Night City much better than me). She rides a bike because... let's face it. Vehicles driving is not what the game does best and I found that bikes are the freest mean to go from one point to another quick. Cars just get stuck in traffic and in general behave horribly and they are definitely the best way to kill an innocent bystander and attract the ire of the police (hey, those points are valid in real life too  ). Bikes can be ridden in first person with no problem while one struggles with cars unless one switches to third person.

The whole thing between CDPR and platforms revolves around an amusing misconception by console gamers. All the trailers and the gameplay videos of the game ever released during development where PC ones, CD Projekt never pretended that they had anything to do with consoles. Somehow, console gamers thought that the quality on old gen consoles would be the same as on current PCs and now they call CD Projekt liars to not having met their expections. Well, thing is, CDP never pretended anything regarding consoles. The most the head of the studio said at one point is that they were stunned that the game run as well as it does on old gen consoles (which was probably codeword for "we are stunned that the game run at all on this crappy old hardware").

But yeah, as I said they should have cancelled the game on old gen altogether, problem solved (and more people free to fix the PC bugs).