Just a personal rant about cyberpunk 2077 (the game ) and the anime

[RedHunter]

I have seen that several complaints I wrote in the past will be changed in the future, but still the important point remains the same.

The Anime Edgerunners is not Cyberpunk 2077 (the video game)!

It is not the masterpiece of the century just because its best face comes from a medium outside the product. Star Wars movies are not good because their toys or novels are good, the movies are good on their own merits without needing anything extra.

Just because Cyberpunk has a very excellent anime, that doesn't make this game good by link.

The game is now playable, as a minimum, but the bugs are still there, not as much as when it came out, but they can be easily found in the normal course of the game. But Cyberpunk is even lucky that people only criticize its lousy performance at the start.

Leaving aside the bugs, let's say that an incredible fix arrived that erased all of them in one fell swoop. It still has problems even in the things it wants to bring to the table.

The game wants to sell itself as a create-your-own-adventure type of game like Skyrim or other similar games. Well that doesn't really happen. In the game you are V, V is a mercenary who accepts assignments that mostly boil down to killing people. You can't stop being a mercenary and start working as a cab driver, you can't work as an office worker, you can't be a hacker or netrunner as it's called here (sure you can hack people as a way to do damage, but you can't bypass the security of a server and steal data without killing anyone, something like t-bug, who just sat at his desk). V's path has already been sealed since before you could take control, no matter what you do, V is bound to complete the robbery to Arasaka where he will lose his best friend, V will always have that disease end no matter what you do. And V will always say the same things even if his backstory is different with his 3 origin stories that all end at the same point and don't affect anything afterwards.

The game want you to explore its Future city!. I'm not going to lie, NightCity is beautiful, it's one of the best places ever designed in a video game. But explore what? the city looks nice, but that's as far as it goes, there's nothing to do in it except drive around and pretend to do something in your house. The rest of the map? is either shooting galleries or the main mission levels. There are no side activities other than killing people like the rest of the game. You can't just go to a bar and drink until you lose control. In the story scenes V if you can drink and eat, because they are heavily scripted like a Call of Duty, you can't go back to the same place and see the eating or drinking animation again. It pains me to see that a game like Yakuza, with only one district of a city feels more like a living city than what is here.

To top it off NightCity looks pretty big, but it just looks, it's actually very flat, there are huge buildings which you can't enter, you can never go inside and look out a window at the top of a building and look at the scenery unless that's what the main story or V's department wants to show you. And even if you could enter an 800 story building there would most likely only be 3 stories in reality, the entrance and two story missions that will happen at some point.

The game wants you to build your own legend. Which in reality is both true and false at the same time. The story of the game is really about humanity, the mortality of the human being and the immortality of the machine, half way through. V after the prologue only cares about one thing, being a legendary mercenary(you have no say in that as I mentioned before but let's leave that aside for this segment) and in doing so he makes a big mistake by trying to eat more than he can swallow. He ends up accepting an assignment that is too shady but he doesn't care as long as he's famous. The assignment goes wrong, V loses his best friend and contracts a terminal illness that will kill him in 2 weeks at most, the game places a lot of emphasis on V's dying state.

The rest of the game is about V running around like crazy looking for a way to save his life no matter what or who he has to sacrifice to get it. Which contradicts its very nature as a video game, its mechanics with its story. The right way to play Cyberpunk 2077 as a game is to do all the side quests, optional quests and finally the main quests, to enjoy all the wonders of the city, which it has in the lore because they are not in the game. While its story tells you to run so fast to complete the main missions, BECAUSE V IS DYING!!! RUN !TIC TOC! TIC TOC ! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! Which will make the normal player to do everything main because it is logically urgent and leave aside everything optional, which sometimes is quite good or better than the main ones.

To make matters worse, the game has several endings but all of them are ugly or bad, or as people like to call them, artistic endings. No matter what you do, in the best case V only managed to extend his life 6 more months, in another he sells his soul to Arasaka who turn him into a mercenary puppet and in another he commits suicide because he doesn't want people to die because of him, in which V has been killing since he started his career as a mercenary and he didn't show any regrets until that very moment.

Also V is not the real protagonist of his story either, it's actually Keanu Reeves (sorry I mean Johnny Silverhand). It's all about him and his past, what he did, his friends. V is just picking up the pieces he left behind. On top of that Johnny Silverhand isn't even well written to begin with either, as there are things about him that you don't really know anything about that are important. Why does Johnny Silverhand hate mega-corporations so much? Nobody knows, they never say.

Lastly, once you finish the game you can't keep playing after!

The game wants you to appreciate the upgrade system, and which is a super important theme in Cyberpunk lore. A big part of the overall story of Cyberpunk is what makes a human human a human? if they are more metal than flesh. People are not afraid to modify their bodies or amputate their limbs to replace them with much better mechanical parts, and the more of these enhancements they have on their bodies the more they start to lose their sense of humanity and go insane. What does the game do with this interesting premise? Nothing, V could be a complete robot who won't see any side effects. Apart from a couple of very punctual improvements that do change some playable mechanics, like having a double jump or some daggers hidden in the arms, the rest is summarized in armor or doing damage in the numbers that appear. The same with the skills outside of throwing knives, everything is 5% more damage, 10% more armor, 5% resistance to lightning. There are no "skills" as such, it's all about moving bigger numbers, no new mechanics.

Lastly, their free upgrades are just the bare minimum to avoid being sued and cut their losses. The truth is that everything has been cancelled because of "unfounded criticism against the game". Multiplayer? Cancelled. New districts? Cancelled. New weapons? three. New vehicles? two, and no one really cares. A campaign mode +? Maybe but on the verge of being cancelled. Its biggest update? the anime.

But I'm sure you'll say what would I know, I'm just another hater of this great game which is amazing and was always good thanks to its anime.

I just want to remember that the anime and the game are different things, one thing doesn't change the other, the anime isn't even included in the game, except for a couple of easter eggs. Although the anime as such is excellent and I recommend it, unlike this game, which apart from exploring its beautiful city is not good for anything else.

Other than that, I'm really looking forward to their next update and DLC, where maybe hopefully it will go from being a horrible game to, well at least they made it playable.

[charly4711]

TLDR: No idea what you’re talking about. The game is much better than the mediocre anime.

[Bogmore]

Actually a few of the things you say you can't do you actually can. Like drinking at a bar.

A lot of things you say aren't actually true either. Like the game is based on the Anime.

Sorry but that post is far too long to actually read, maybe think about starting a blog?

[Sovereign]

Who is saying the game is good just because the anime was good? What a weird take.

People do actually enjoy the game for the game, the success of Edgerunners just brought attention back to the game, bringing with it both new and returning players.

[Zero McDol]

Originally posted by Bogmore:

Actually a few of the things you say you can't do you actually can. Like drinking at a bar.

It's Story only.

Racing is story only, shooting gallery is quest only, eating is story only. Once you clear the quests or story related to these things, then it goes bye bye. Unless you start a new playthrough of course.

The only good sandbox things in this game's current state are the clubs, apartments, and arcade game. Everything else is effectively locked behind a quest or the story, which locks right back up again once completed.

Others:
- Joytoys
- The rollercaoster is there, but locked behind a quest. It is permanently unlocked once the quest is complete.

[RedHunter]

Originally posted by Bogmore:

Actually a few of the things you say you can't do you actually can. Like drinking at a bar.

A lot of things you say aren't actually true either. Like the game is based on the Anime.

Sorry but that post is far too long to actually read, maybe think about starting a blog?

I'm not saying that the game is based on the anime, but that since it came out they suddenly forgave it all the flaws it had as if they never existed.

I'm not talking about the bugs, since that is obvious that they will be fixed at some point, but rather many things are conceptually wrong.

Originally posted by Zero McDol:

Originally posted by Bogmore:

Actually a few of the things you say you can't do you actually can. Like drinking at a bar.

It's Story only.

Racing is story only, shooting gallery is quest only, eating is story only. Once you clear the quests or story related to these things, then it goes bye bye. Unless you start a new playthrough of course.

The only good sandbox things in this game's current state are the clubs, apartments, and arcade game. Everything else is effectively locked behind a quest or the story, which locks right back up again once completed.

Others:
- Joytoys
- The rollercaoster is there, but locked behind a quest. It is permanently unlocked once the quest is complete.

Correct, many things are made just for the story mode and nothing else, once you finish their associated mission, it never happens again. The races were what hurt me the most, because it was easy to leave them permanently.

[easy_going]

I wish the only bad thing about this game was the dissonance between what you do as a gamer and what the story asks you to do. I would be perfectly happy if all bugs and glitches magically disappeared from the game. Discussions about story, characters, lore etc. are the best. Not fighting for the game to be fixed.

When it comes to the anime-- or rather "payed animated advertisement", as I like to call it-- it causes more harm than good. It further misrepresents what cyberpsychosis is really about. It has poor animation (I still can't believe Trigger made this choppy crap), and has the most generic tragic story I've ever seen. How I judge if story is generic? If I could come up with it-- it's entirely generic.

The game can be technically corrected so at least one aspect of it is good. The anime cannot.

[Zebedee]

"The game wants to sell itself as a create-your-own-adventure type of game like Skyrim or other similar games" doesn't make sense to me. It's a CDPR game, it's not a create your own adventure sandbox, it's a narrative driven ARPG. There is a central story which drives everything, to the point of ludonarrative dissonance with the open world. I'm not sure how people got the impression otherwise prior to release, and I'm really not sure how it possibly can have persisted this long after release.

re. cyberpsychosis. Pondsmith is responsible for its portrayal in game and in every other format. He's talked about what it is and both game and studio trigger fit into that idea, albeit needing to know more than you would get from eg a shard ingame speculating on the causes.

[orcaa]

Originally posted by Zebedee:

"The game wants to sell itself as a create-your-own-adventure type of game like Skyrim or other similar games" doesn't make sense to me. It's a CDPR game, it's not a create your own adventure sandbox, it's a narrative driven ARPG. There is a central story which drives everything, to the point of ludonarrative dissonance with the open world. I'm not sure how people got the impression otherwise prior to release, and I'm really not sure how it possibly can have persisted this long after release.

re. cyberpsychosis. Pondsmith is responsible for its portrayal in game and in every other format. He's talked about what it is and both game and studio trigger fit into that idea, albeit needing to know more than you would get from eg a shard ingame speculating on the causes.

Some people want it to be different than it is and will not accept what the game is. They want this open world sandbox type game where they can wander around at their leisure and experience this decayed corrupt city. Go drinking, dancing, get a job, etc.
This game is not that.

[Circle]

Originally posted by RedHunter:

I have seen that several complaints I wrote in the past will be changed in the future, but still the important point remains the same.

The Anime Edgerunners is not Cyberpunk 2077 (the video game)!

It is not the masterpiece of the century just because its best face comes from a medium outside the product. Star Wars movies are not good because their toys or novels are good, the movies are good on their own merits without needing anything extra.

Just because Cyberpunk has a very excellent anime, that doesn't make this game good by link.

The game is now playable, as a minimum, but the bugs are still there, not as much as when it came out, but they can be easily found in the normal course of the game. But Cyberpunk is even lucky that people only criticize its lousy performance at the start.

Leaving aside the bugs, let's say that an incredible fix arrived that erased all of them in one fell swoop. It still has problems even in the things it wants to bring to the table.

The game wants to sell itself as a create-your-own-adventure type of game like Skyrim or other similar games. Well that doesn't really happen. In the game you are V, V is a mercenary who accepts assignments that mostly boil down to killing people. You can't stop being a mercenary and start working as a cab driver, you can't work as an office worker, you can't be a hacker or netrunner as it's called here (sure you can hack people as a way to do damage, but you can't bypass the security of a server and steal data without killing anyone, something like t-bug, who just sat at his desk). V's path has already been sealed since before you could take control, no matter what you do, V is bound to complete the robbery to Arasaka where he will lose his best friend, V will always have that disease end no matter what you do. And V will always say the same things even if his backstory is different with his 3 origin stories that all end at the same point and don't affect anything afterwards.

The game want you to explore its Future city!. I'm not going to lie, NightCity is beautiful, it's one of the best places ever designed in a video game. But explore what? the city looks nice, but that's as far as it goes, there's nothing to do in it except drive around and pretend to do something in your house. The rest of the map? is either shooting galleries or the main mission levels. There are no side activities other than killing people like the rest of the game. You can't just go to a bar and drink until you lose control. In the story scenes V if you can drink and eat, because they are heavily scripted like a Call of Duty, you can't go back to the same place and see the eating or drinking animation again. It pains me to see that a game like Yakuza, with only one district of a city feels more like a living city than what is here.

To top it off NightCity looks pretty big, but it just looks, it's actually very flat, there are huge buildings which you can't enter, you can never go inside and look out a window at the top of a building and look at the scenery unless that's what the main story or V's department wants to show you. And even if you could enter an 800 story building there would most likely only be 3 stories in reality, the entrance and two story missions that will happen at some point.

The game wants you to build your own legend. Which in reality is both true and false at the same time. The story of the game is really about humanity, the mortality of the human being and the immortality of the machine, half way through. V after the prologue only cares about one thing, being a legendary mercenary(you have no say in that as I mentioned before but let's leave that aside for this segment) and in doing so he makes a big mistake by trying to eat more than he can swallow. He ends up accepting an assignment that is too shady but he doesn't care as long as he's famous. The assignment goes wrong, V loses his best friend and contracts a terminal illness that will kill him in 2 weeks at most, the game places a lot of emphasis on V's dying state.

The rest of the game is about V running around like crazy looking for a way to save his life no matter what or who he has to sacrifice to get it. Which contradicts its very nature as a video game, its mechanics with its story. The right way to play Cyberpunk 2077 as a game is to do all the side quests, optional quests and finally the main quests, to enjoy all the wonders of the city, which it has in the lore because they are not in the game. While its story tells you to run so fast to complete the main missions, BECAUSE V IS DYING!!! RUN !TIC TOC! TIC TOC ! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! Which will make the normal player to do everything main because it is logically urgent and leave aside everything optional, which sometimes is quite good or better than the main ones.

To make matters worse, the game has several endings but all of them are ugly or bad, or as people like to call them, artistic endings. No matter what you do, in the best case V only managed to extend his life 6 more months, in another he sells his soul to Arasaka who turn him into a mercenary puppet and in another he commits suicide because he doesn't want people to die because of him, in which V has been killing since he started his career as a mercenary and he didn't show any regrets until that very moment.

Also V is not the real protagonist of his story either, it's actually Keanu Reeves (sorry I mean Johnny Silverhand). It's all about him and his past, what he did, his friends. V is just picking up the pieces he left behind. On top of that Johnny Silverhand isn't even well written to begin with either, as there are things about him that you don't really know anything about that are important. Why does Johnny Silverhand hate mega-corporations so much? Nobody knows, they never say.

Lastly, once you finish the game you can't keep playing after!

The game wants you to appreciate the upgrade system, and which is a super important theme in Cyberpunk lore. A big part of the overall story of Cyberpunk is what makes a human human a human? if they are more metal than flesh. People are not afraid to modify their bodies or amputate their limbs to replace them with much better mechanical parts, and the more of these enhancements they have on their bodies the more they start to lose their sense of humanity and go insane. What does the game do with this interesting premise? Nothing, V could be a complete robot who won't see any side effects. Apart from a couple of very punctual improvements that do change some playable mechanics, like having a double jump or some daggers hidden in the arms, the rest is summarized in armor or doing damage in the numbers that appear. The same with the skills outside of throwing knives, everything is 5% more damage, 10% more armor, 5% resistance to lightning. There are no "skills" as such, it's all about moving bigger numbers, no new mechanics.

Lastly, their free upgrades are just the bare minimum to avoid being sued and cut their losses. The truth is that everything has been cancelled because of "unfounded criticism against the game". Multiplayer? Cancelled. New districts? Cancelled. New weapons? three. New vehicles? two, and no one really cares. A campaign mode +? Maybe but on the verge of being cancelled. Its biggest update? the anime.

But I'm sure you'll say what would I know, I'm just another hater of this great game which is amazing and was always good thanks to its anime.

I just want to remember that the anime and the game are different things, one thing doesn't change the other, the anime isn't even included in the game, except for a couple of easter eggs. Although the anime as such is excellent and I recommend it, unlike this game, which apart from exploring its beautiful city is not good for anything else.

Other than that, I'm really looking forward to their next update and DLC, where maybe hopefully it will go from being a horrible game to, well at least they made it playable.

Yeah the game should've simply have you start out as a nobody and enter night city for the first time and have your main goal be to become successfull/rich.

Basically the intro that shows V and Jacky partying and meeting new people is what the game should've been. But no, linear story with keanu reeves is what they went with.

I promise you, the DLC will be EXACTLY like the main game. Linear with a bunch of dialog options with no real meaning or consequences.

[Gamefever]

OP,

V is a canon character in Cyberpunk 2077.

Just like how Geralt of Rivia is a canon character of Witcher series, and a set of 30+ novels.

Speaking of which, V is a lore character and has much written about them as well.

Oh man, all your choices were meaningless in Witcher as well man.

Wow its almost like the whole thing is on rails sort of like reading a story book.
___________________________________________________

For sake of completeness,
No I did not watch the anime, had no idea there was an anime until saw ppl talking about it in the forum.
Played this game on 2nd day of its release.
Played without bugs just fine on my old PC.

So no, I dont give a carp about anime show they made, not enough to go see it or enough that it effects if I like this game or its DLC which is still not out yet.

Also how in the world did you think this game was Skyrim?

See that mountain over there you can climb it!
haha, Todd Howard

[Gamefever]

Skyrim
+
Cyberpunk 2077

Cyskyberim 2077 !!!

Where you can ignore the main quest line to become the Cyberborn!

Preem DO RAH!!!

[Triggerhappy]

Originally posted by charly4711:

TLDR: No idea what you’re talking about. The game is much better than the mediocre anime.

Oh man, the anime has actual character progression and a plot though. You can argue the main story structure and the johnny sidequests can qualify as a plot, but there is no real character progression for pretty much anybody or anything you come across (aside from the freggin taxi or a vending machine??). There are no interconnected or weaving plots in cp77, and is largely just an amalgam of many tiny no-nothing "gigs" to do to fill in dead space with slightly less dead space. The reason the show does so much better is because it didn't have to try and fill in dead space.

[Gamefever]

Originally posted by Triggerhappy:

Originally posted by charly4711:

TLDR: No idea what you’re talking about. The game is much better than the mediocre anime.

Oh man, the anime has actual character progression and a plot though. You can argue the main story structure and the johnny sidequests can qualify as a plot, but there is no real character progression for pretty much anybody or anything you come across (aside from the freggin taxi or a vending machine??). There are no interconnected or weaving plots in cp77, and is largely just an amalgam of many tiny no-nothing "gigs" to do to fill in dead space with slightly less dead space. The reason the show does so much better is because it didn't have to try and fill in dead space.

Preem Doh Rah!

My fellow Cyberborn!

False, V spends not really much time with Johnny and a lot of character progression happens.

May the dragons scales sunder under the weight of your katana and your 9 mili find there mark Cyberborn.

[Ichbin]

Not even gonna bother reading that essay...

The game's actually really good, if you forget the whole, "It was supposed to be a Sandbox to surpass GTA!" It literally has the same gameplay pacing as The Witcher 3. You're set on a certain path, and occasionally go off on side stories to get extra stuff. Thats it. And somehow W3 is a masterpiece, and this isnt. Was W3 a better game than this? Objectively, yes. I'd think so. Still doesn't mean it's (Cyberpunk) trash that needs an hour long rant about it.

[Gamefever]

Originally posted by Triggerhappy:

Originally posted by charly4711:

TLDR: No idea what you’re talking about. The game is much better than the mediocre anime.

Oh man, the anime has actual character progression and a plot though. You can argue the main story structure and the johnny sidequests can qualify as a plot, but there is no real character progression for pretty much anybody or anything you come across (aside from the freggin taxi or a vending machine??). There are no interconnected or weaving plots in cp77, and is largely just an amalgam of many tiny no-nothing "gigs" to do to fill in dead space with slightly less dead space. The reason the show does so much better is because it didn't have to try and fill in dead space.

Most of the gigs actually help create the world space of Night City,
Fill in the gaps,
Inform the player of the various groups that occupy the city and what they do.
Also many side gigs are multiple stages that tie up loose ends that happened earlier in the story.
A large number of gigs fill out the details of the personal lives of characters involved with V and before V, actually Johnnies life.

So largely you leave the impression that you just moved to fast or just dismissed evidence that was immediately available to you withen the game itself, something that I have observed younger gamers do.

We can even find Dexter Deshawns remains but heck they did not have to go that far did they?
We can also find other peoples remains as well for relavent characters that died but hey I guess you did not or could not pin down who they were.
Side gigs are actually important for filling out V and the story, unlike so many other games you may have played cough Skyrim, cough.
There are side gig choices that if not done correctly lock you out of an ending, classic CDPR move.

Cyberpunk did a good job at making sure that everything the player did was getting notice and that was not just in the news but other characters that V associated with.