also yeah the driving is terrible, at least with keyboard and mouse. itās fine with a gamepad. except the rest of the game sucks with a gamepad. I literally just keep my dualsense plugged in a grab it when I have to operate vehicle. as with all the other janky bullshit compromises this game is saddled with, having to do this feels thematically congruous enough that it just doesnāt bother me that much.
3 Likes
im extremely stoked to play this game. hyper than a warm wet diaper. time to become number one apologist!
3 Likes
I will say, if you play it like a stealth game, itās like. a decent stealth game. considerably better than it is as a driving or shootman game. even all the optional side missions have fairly detailed, immersive sim-like level design. I havenāt encountered a single piece of side content that Iād call āfillerā in the way that you get used to with your average GTA-a-like or skyroom or whatever. I love that. the writing for all the side content is also consistently better and more detailed than it needs to be. the plot itself is consistently stupid but I wouldnāt say any dumber than what youād expect in the witcher.
it also has a lot of fun (if inconsequential) role-playing options. I like that you toggle to a slow walk speed at any time you want. I donāt think thereās a single mechanical use for this but it helps during cut-scenes if you want to be able to walk at the same speed as people, or explore indoor areas at a walking speed that doesnāt make you feel like an asshole physics-crazed psychopath. you kind of get a sense sometimes that the game really wants to care about your acting performance in these moments and for me that does a lot to enhance immersion. there are a few scenes where your character is served food or drink and you have the option to take a bite or have a drink in between dialog choices. none of this shit ever does anything but itās just in the game! probably because someone cared too much! and there was at least one scene where choosing to eat after a certain npc dialog was genuinely hilarious. I feel like no one ever talks about this kind of thing in games but I want more of it. you could ditch all the other bells and whistles and just give me a game where I can be this expressive during cutscenes and Iād still eat it up.
9 Likes
keanuās inclusion is probably one of the most genius things about the game, because he is a cyberpunk guy to a lot of people, and the character of johnny silverhand in the universe of the game is about as equally famous, so he fits into that role really well. it also means the player and valeries reactions to him are completely aligned which is interesting imo. but also his performance is just good as well, i actually think a lot of people underestimate that (including myself at first) because likeā¦ idk, when you first meet him on the engram he is super aggressive and more or less straight up tells you he is going to kill you and take your body. later when youāre stuck together heās a lot more personable and reasonable, even helpful, partially because you and he are forming a gestalt new person but also because a theme of cyberpunk the genre in general is that the body, the vessel that we inhabit, is just as crucially important as the data in our brains. his performance feels inconsistent because he is playing different characters: past johnny, flattened johnny on a wafer of silicon, johnny living again through you and with you. a theme of the game is kind of like, idk, the healing powers of intimacy. both of you are super fucked up people but by circumstance you are involuntarily put together in an extremely intimate way and have to learn how to be open and vulnerable with each other, and all the most interesting roleplaying in the game is based around how you interact with johnnyā¦it can be a death sentence or it can help both of you come to terms with your trauma and find friendship with a great many people. leave it to me to write a spirited defense of a game I loathe, apologies for making it almost sound interesting.
14 Likes
I played this game and I think it owns but I donāt really want to talk about that. I started playing and, at first, I was like, āThis game was not designed by anyone who has ever worn a skirt lolā but as I got further into it I think the cascading failure starts further back. They clearly forgot girl V can wear a skirt, but they also clearly just used the same poses as boy V, but also boy V sits in a way I donāt think any actual boy sits either
And, fear not, in the future youāll be able to show off the goods, even in cyberspace
Incredible game 10/10
19 Likes
yeah this one of many ways the game stumbles backwards into something almost resembling gender enlightenment. I donāt think anyone involved had a clear vision for handling gender stuff in one direction or the other tbh.
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claire russell, the only transgender individual in night city besides yourself (determinate) and you can tell because she has a badly cropped trans flag pasted to her windshield: Something Almost Resembling Gender Enlightenment
8 Likes
SARGE for short
3 Likes
Itās no unironed Amazon trans flag in the bedroom, but thatās a pretty accurate depiction of trans culture, yes
(There is at least one other trans character, in a scene that I would read as genuinely transphobic lol My biggest criticism of the game is that, keeping with cyberpunk traditions, itās clearly the work of the giant fucking posers. You play a GTA and itās all charhouse, strip club, red velvet, smokey room sleaze and you can tell itās made with love. Cyberpunk wants the sleaze but is made by a bunch of dorks so the best they can do is to make it loud and vulgar, and dress everyone like what a republican thinks a pride parade looks like)
7 Likes
i mean speak for yourself i guessā¦ i donāt have some flag on my wall and idk if i know anyone who does. i think my point still stands if the great trans culture we get in cp2077 is that and a character i have almost universally seen called transphobic
2 Likes
Iām gonna be 100% with you, what Toups is saying could lead to an actual discussion or analysis of the game. I think thereās probably lots of interesting things people could say about gender in a game where Keanu Reeves (spoiler warning) turns into a short transsexual with small tits [actual canon ending], and that your first instinct is to rush in to shout about how the trans woman character who was clearly introduced to a) give cis people a whoa moment when they find out the cool hot lady is actually trans and b) force reactionary dipshits to spend a mission driving the down with cis bus (hummer edition) around is really cringe in a way neither you nor your cool trans friends are instead of having any sort of interesting conversation is a good reminder why I donāt post here anymore
1 Like
Furthering the conversation
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but Iām not talking about the trans flag on the truck. though yes, any time the game tries to actively say something about gender itās in some cheap lazy way that backfires immediately. but these instances have been thankfully rare so far.
Iām talking about how passive implications like the skirt thing are just examples of how the gameās pathological avoidance of addressing gender stuff at times almost implies the exact kind of gender stance the game very badly doesnāt want to take. sometimes it almost feels nuanced! it never is, of course. thereās no coherent stance at all which makes the few stabs at inclusion feel insulting and bizarre at best, and none of this offsets the numerous instances of passive transphobia either. not trying to pat anyone on the back here. itās just funny sometimes.
3 Likes
āi couldnāt relate to this gameās representation of trans womenā is an entirely valid take? we donāt insult people because the convo isnāt going the way we want it to. if CP says a lot about gender, youāre more than welcome to talk about it (and i would love to read it!) but this aināt the vibe
8 Likes
I havenāt played this garbage game since launch but I am sad to learn that the floppy cartoon dick you can assign yourself in character creation no longer clips through all pants worn by the āfemale body typeā V
of all things, why did they have to deny me this
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also i saw the infamous girldick soda ad in the game itself and they made her cock smaller, just want to take a moment to acknowledge the poor gal who said āI just think trans women are coolā and got crucified for it after her bosses sent her out to take the fall for that one. This gameās shameful legacy.
4 Likes
I was very pleased to see that if you start a new game after installing phantom liberty you get to assign points up to like a 10-15 hour playtime since Iād originally quit like 2 hours after the long intro mission and that (plus having a fancy new GPU to put through its paces) was a significant incentive for me to give 2.0 a shot
game is still a not-great combination of tacky and fussy but with the benefit of a lot of patching, and divorced from the embarrassing dev takes and subsequent changelogs, itās at least easier to appreciate how much money they sunk into it which is usually my bar for Rockstar stuff ā and I think it took way too long for both CDPR and their audience to accept and communicate that they just wanted to be Polish Rockstar with this one
3 Likes
Every time the game almost lulls me into enjoying it GTA 4 style I realize I canāt call any of my friends up on the phone to play darts or get shitfaced or whatever and get pissed off
7 Likes
The more I play it the more I find a lot of the general complaints about the game to be very asinine but it certainly does feel half baked in a lot of aspects, from minor shit like having to grab people before you can do takedowns or not being able to like sit at the bar and order a drink to greater ones like the general diet william gibson malaise that seems to have eaten away at mikeās game (the way they changed the voodoo boys and valentinos, the similarities to the sprawl trilogy, etc) and general racism/misogyny that leaks through from the good ol polish boys at cdpr. Thereās a lot of fucking weird shit in it but it is funny how much less transphobic it is than people made it out to be for example. It reminds me of the last of us 2 in this way. The best thing in the game is all the sick one handed chamber checks V does whenever you equip a pistol for the first time, also that my characterās name is V so I can self-insert constantly. I gotta admit, it is nice to run around in a game kinda sorta based on a tabletop game I really love, until I see some shit that reminds me that itās not really the same fuckinā game
8 Likes