Moa

8.5/10

CDPR definitely seemed to have read too much into their previous praise with the side content. A lot of stuff that should be mandatory story content was put into side missions in a way that felt like they were trying to force the high quality side content thing. Further spoiler-y responses to @Bacons posts:

What Remains of Edith Finch is fantastic and the perfect type of game for game pass being about 2 hours in length.

Not my general taste in music but this song kills.

So anyway I found this really good deal from someone named Kate...

I think I probably just didn't follow the ending since I didn't love where I ended up. More ending beef.

One of the things I really appreciated about the Witcher 3 that isn't present as much in Cyberpunk was the environmental progression. Moving from Velen to Novigrad to Skellige made the world feel much more substantial than the relatively homogeneous Night City.

I had the same ending, and I honestly hated it.

Yeah, this definitely feels like a CDPR game to me. I expected it to be a small step down in terms of quality from the Witcher 3 given that they spent a decade iterating on how to make a great Witcher game and only some of what they achieved with TW3 would transfer to a new IP and gameplay method. Overall, Cyberpunk basically met my expectations. In comparison to TW3, I liked the gameplay and main story more but didn't like the world or characters as much. I put 106 hours into TW3, including expansions, and was sad when it ended. I have 56 hours in Cyberpunk and felt like that was about the right amount of time.

I really think flight sim deserved the #1 spot.

Yeah, it's definitely bad design. "We'll literally pay you to miss out on content." I wonder if that actually ends the quest chain or not or if they find a way to pull you back in in the end.

If the launch had gone off without a hitch I think there would be some controversy around this quest line.

V's relationship with Panam feels like it develops much more naturally than with Judy. The romance with Judy is super abrupt and is mostly compressed into the last 10% of her quest line. I played as female so can't speak much to the male VA, but I thought female V was great throughout the game. I don't know how much of the writing changes between the genders, but I feel like the dynamic between Silverhands and V makes a lot more sense when they're opposite genders.

The world would be in a better place if we were all a little more like Tom Cruise.

Something about the chicken heater makes me very very uncomfortable.

I hope that cyberpunk's enduring contribution to culture is that people start referring to uncircumcised and circumcised dicks as penis 1 and penis 2.

The sound design goes a long way towards making the guns and combat feel impactful. It's especially impressive since sound design is often behind the general curve in these type of open world games.

Nightmare King Grimm took me at least 6 hours to finally beat. I honestly had a good time just bashing my head up against it while watching Netflix on a second monitor.

All of From Software's games, fight me.

I'm officially in the late game and, as someone with a soft spot in my heart for Californication, I'm enjoying where things are going with Silverhands. On a somewhat related note, I feel like the interactions between V, Silverhands, and Silverhands former friends make a lot more sense with a female V.

My post was basically subtweeting people who complain that DONTNOD and similar games ultimately funnel players down the same path.

I just assumed everyone else knew what that was all about and was too embarrassed to ask.

No, I get what you're saying and I agree that from my experience Cyberpunk doesn't accomplish making your decisions in dialogue feel important, and they split the difference between tabula rasa protagonist and well-defined protagonist in a way that isn't very satisfying. I was speaking more broadly about people's expectations for narrative games and generally that the more control a player has over the narrative the less well-constructed that narrative will end up being.

Complaints about lack of choice in games always bother me. It's absolutely impossible to write a good story with the amount of variability necessary to satisfy gamers' expectations. No game has ever done it or will ever do it. There's a reason choose your own adventure books are not a serious literary genre. The trick is not to make you decisions matter, it's to make it feel like your decision matter, and these are two very different goals.