It’s why I’ll never get it unless obtained for the good ol’ price of free. I’m glad people are enjoying it and it’s much improved over the trash pile they delivered! But it’s still a very different game than advertised.
Frankly, it’s concerning how quickly the narrative shifted on this. You’d think with the internet recording the whole fiasco, there wouldn’t be a quick narrative shift and misinformation on the subject, but people have convinced themselves the launch wasn’t that bad, Sony somehow screwed them and this is what they said the game would be!
UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They arguably did worse, because NMS didn’t just polish the game, they retroactively added most of the content + didn’t release a DLC. Cyberpunk falls short of what has been promised to this day.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
I’m not sure what most people were expecting but I finally got around to playing the GOTY edition recently.
I got a game with great characters, writing and story, slightly average gameplay, all shackled to a bizarre open world that completely destroys any pacing and urgency. It really did not need all those fixers and like 150 police mini missions, which detract from it all in a major way.
Having also played Witcher 3, that’s kind of what I was expecting, I guess. I genuinely think CDPR should abandon their open world ideas, because they’re excellent at story telling, but really bad at filler bullshit.
Phantom Liberty ups the package to a flawed masterpiece.
UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That’s funny, I would point put the amazing gameplay in particular as their no. 1 selling point, if I had to choose anything. But the discussion what’s good and what’s bad aside, they just didn’t deliver on their promises.
I was fed the story of a GTA contender. A life-sim where your choices matter, starting with your origin story, which was supposed to already have great impact. And what does reality look like? Well, your origin story gets you a different tutorial mission and you get a few extra dialog options that do nothing. Your character always behaves exactly the same outside of that and it changes nothing about the story. It’s hardly even referenced by other characters at all, something Mass Effect and Dragon Age did better forever ago. The one big difference I noticed is that Jackie matters even less to you as corpo, which makes all the emotional stuff feel even more out of place and awkward, since you lose the offrenda mission. Hurray.
As for life-sim aspects, you can eat in some select few cut scenes, otherwise eating is useless and doesn’t even come with generic animations. You cannot even eat your useless food at a stall in the city or have a drink at the countless bars in the game just for fun. Except for cutscenes and in your, save for the wardrobe, useless apartment of course. You can also take a useless shower, or wait in bed instead of literally anywhere else. Wow.
You can randomly date a select few characters out of nowhere by choosing a random dialogue option. At least this yields you an almost sex-scene and a bonus quest… Followed by optional, awkward staring in your apartment and no further impact at all. Funnily enough your gender has a greater impact on the game than your backstory that way.
NPCs are generally dumb and you can’t really interact much with them at all. Police is dumb and easily outsmarted as well, but also always punishes you by death for anything. MaxTac is really tough actually and beating them yields you… Nothing! Nothing at all.
You do get a couple of choices throughout the story, but do they really change all that much? I would argue no, they don’t. Most of the time they cause some characters you barely know to live or die. Not the really important ones of course! We need those and there aren’t that many. I think one of the most interesting interactions in the entire game is the one with the ranom Natwatch guy, because you can’t really forsee the consequences for once.
Then there are a couple of different endings, some of which are actually hard to find. I think in retrospective, they are the main thing, besides the very varied gameplay, offering replay-value. The thing is, you don’t need to replay the game to see them all.
Is Cyberpunk trash? No, of course not, I’ve had my fair share of fun. I’m actually in my third playthrough to do liberty city, because everyone says it’s amazing. As for the main game only, I can’t help but be disappointed by the countless things this game doesn’t do. Including many low hanging fruits.
NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 3 weeks ago
People were expecting the game that was promised in all the lead-up marketing.
Basically all of the marketing turned out to be lies and the game that CDPR promised never existed.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
@UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world
I think the main issue people have is that they got Peter Molyneux’d on it. Which is fair enough, and why I don’t really read much about games before I play them.
I’m glad I held off until PL came out, because it looks like the 2.0 update fixed a lot of things that would irritate me, like gear and levelling blocking off missions. It does rob you of a sense of progression, but I’ll trust their decision to drop that.
There’s enough RPG elements to get in the way of it being a shooter, but not enough to actually satisfy anybody who wanted a full blown RPG. Decisions especially are very binary and I gave up on the platinum trophy after seeing I’d have to save a guy I let die about 60 hours of gameplay ago, in a save long since overridden.
I guess I’ve been around the block enough times to filter out any claims of amazing AI and day/night cycles. We’ve heard those claims before with Fable and Oblivion, and all it really meant is “the shops shut at night”. And here it didn’t even do that, at least beyond a handful of locations where you had to press a button to wait until they opened before you could do the quest inside.
I think I’ve had a lot better experience going into this late and blind.
Patches mean we’re no longer in the days of bad games being bad forever, but they’re certainly remembered that way.