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S2 Ep137: Cyberpunk 2077
73 Plays5 years ago
Join Dave and Jake as they chip in for last year's most hotly anticipated title that one of them took extensive time off for!
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Thoughts? Comments? Requests for new episodes? Feel free to email them in!
SoapstonePodcast@gmail.com
Like our podcast? Like our podcast! We'll post when new episodes are uploaded!
https://www.facebook.com/SoapstonePodcast/
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Transcript
Introduction and Chili Talk
00:00:43
Speaker
How's it going, everyone? Welcome to another episode of Soapstone. My name is Jake. I'm joined by my co-host, as always, Dave. How's it going, Dave? It's going awesome. I am sated by Hot Chili. Ooh, that sounds pretty good. How hot is it? I mean, it's.
00:01:02
Speaker
like hot enough temperature wise, as far as spice, I didn't go too crazy because it's going to have to come out of me at some point. And we just don't play those games as much as we used to, I feel. Just so not crazy for you. Is that just like only a handful of scorpion peppers? I think I just did like some dry seasoning, no jalapeno, no habanero, no, no ghost, no scorpion.
00:01:30
Speaker
I think I did like a little bit like a Tapatio, just for shits and gigs. Mostly the gigs. We need more gigs. Now that sounds surprisingly edible. Yeah. I think you guys could appreciate the chili as well. Yeah. It's not like the best thing in the world. It's just it's ingredients, but it hit a good spot.
00:01:57
Speaker
Yeah. Better chili. Father Dave's. No, that's good though. I mean, chili is pretty legit. It's been a while since I had chili and it's, it's, it's up there for one of my favorite, like comfort dinner foods. I think it is amazing. Cause you can like take so many variations on how you want to prepare it. Um, like have you heard of Cincinnati chili? It sounds familiar, but I'm not sure what it is.
00:02:27
Speaker
Uh, it's a chili style. I assume from Cincinnati, but the key thing is it's more, how do I describe it? They put chocolate powder in it. Hmm. Your cocoa powder. Yeah. Or something like shredded chocolate, but it adds like a sweetness to it. Whereas if you think of like a standard hormonal chili, you're like, Oh, beef and beans type thing. Cool. Yeah. Or like Southwest is like a certain profile. Cincinnati chili is more.
00:02:59
Speaker
It's definitely sweet.
Cyberpunk 2077: Anticipation and Release Issues
00:03:00
Speaker
I'm trying to remember other aspects of it. It's been a couple of years. Yeah. I don't know if I'm like a chili connoisseur quite yet, but periodically the, uh, uh, the significant other will like throw stuff in a crock pot and like let it go for a day or so. And that's really good. Chili goes on vacation. Oh, fuck the chili flies down.
00:03:24
Speaker
That's the nice thing about Crock-Bots is for a lot of things, you're like, oh, I forgot about, I don't care. It doesn't matter. It's just going to keep, you know, stewing forever. But a game that probably could have sued for a little bit longer, this Cyberpunk 2077.
00:03:43
Speaker
I like that transition. My one joke I want to insert it here is, hey, everyone, remember when people were really upset that the Last of Us 2 wasn't what they expected? Remember that? Okay, let's move on to a much bigger catastrophe. Yeah.
00:03:58
Speaker
This episode was like 100% guaranteed to happen and I was like kicking around like, do we invite other people? We had a large group of people who could have come in for this, but I don't know. There's been a lot of discussion out there and I have a lot to say.
00:04:19
Speaker
Sorry, guys, this one's, this one's us. As we literally just take from the separate discord chat and just be like, also, this was a thing. Yeah. Yeah. No, I deleted the channel, the cyberpunk channel. Oh, did you? Yeah, it's gone.
00:04:37
Speaker
It's not even like historically archived, just no more. I briefly considered the viability of archiving a Discord text channel and I decided that was actually insane and just deleted it. Yeah, there wasn't there wasn't many messages in it anymore.
00:04:52
Speaker
I think we're on the tail end of a lot of reviews, criticisms, everything like that that's come out about Cyberpunk. And so anyone who was actively following that scene probably already has an idea of what the situation was. But we're going to pretend you don't.
00:05:11
Speaker
All right, so the year is 2077. Let's talk early days. I mean, obviously this has been upcoming for quite some time, was announced many years back. It's been like eight years. I think it's eight years.
00:05:28
Speaker
Were you hyped eight years ago? When did you jump on board the terrain, so to speak? I mean, pretty much off the initial trailer, which just showed a woman. It was like a slow motion kind of like camera moving through a frozen frame or very slow moving frame. And she was just like tearing into a bunch of people in the street with mantis blades.
00:05:51
Speaker
Um, when she gets captured by like the police and then like the last frame shows her in the police car, like with all the police equipment, stuff like that, with the idea of like, Oh, she's being reprogrammed or something like that. She's now going to be an enforcer for the police. I was like, this is a cool short story. You know, a lot of things we can go, a lot of places we can go with this. So I was, I was on from the get go. Um, I love that trailer.
00:06:17
Speaker
I think I did see it a long long time ago. I thought it was cool. And then it quickly faded out of conscious memory because there wasn't any news about it until
00:06:28
Speaker
What was it, year and a half, two years ago? Yeah, last year, maybe two years back, we finally got some information that we were approaching a release date. And then we approached many a release date. How many times did you have to move your vacation to try and align? So I kind of lucked out because I didn't dedicate a crazy amount of vacation the first time, but
00:06:57
Speaker
I think altogether I was planning on taking vacation for three of the release dates. Um, so it was April of this year was the first one. Um, but that was mostly over a weekend, so it wasn't going to take a lot. And then it was no, and then it was September, but I hadn't taken vacation for that time yet before it got rescheduled to November. Then I took vacation for that. Then it got rescheduled to December and I took vacation for that.
00:07:27
Speaker
So all of my vacation this year, basically, it was based around cyberpunk. Man, you're like trying to think of a good analogy. It's like someone's like, hey, you want to hang out? It's like, yeah, yeah, I'll be free whenever. And you just like plan to be free. And they're like, hey, sorry, someone came up tonight. It's not good. And you're like, OK. And it's like you literally took Tuesday off of work. It's like it'd be like a whole field trip day.
00:07:52
Speaker
That sucks. Yeah, keep do that. And they should be ridiculed for it, I think, to a certain extent, because they did, you know, whoever was in charge of the Twitter account was straight up confirming with people. There was a guy there was a famous post that was like a guy that was like, hey, November 19th, for sure, though.
00:08:15
Speaker
Cause I'm about to put in my PTO request and then Twitter's like November 19th for sure. And then the day afterwards they pushed him back. I had to release a new message. Like it's obviously the Twitter person didn't know that, right? They're not going to be given secrets. Yeah. But it shows it was a late decision in every case, like September, November, December, those are all like,
00:08:44
Speaker
What that tells me is they thought they were way closer than they actually were. You know what I mean?
00:08:52
Speaker
It's really weird because I work at a job and sometimes estimations are needed as far as business plan. Hey, we want to do this project. When can we have it done by? And people usually will put in their two cents of, oh, I know this type of work has taken me this long before. We should probably account for some time for testing, maybe some user acceptance, something else.
00:09:15
Speaker
It sucks a lot to like, hi, I'm a developer. Hi, here's this product. Hey, it doesn't fucking work. Or we keep needing to like push stuff back. Yeah. Because my word is my bond, so to speak. And like, let's say I tell you one either unintentional mistruth or a falsehood unbeknownst to me.
00:09:38
Speaker
Okay, that's I mean he might have just something came out whatever it's yeah, we'll forgive it and then the second one happens you're like Alright, it seems kind of but third one. You're like, I don't really trust this person so much exactly it keeps building from there So like even before the game came out, it seems like they've dug themselves in such like a reputation hole. Mm-hmm
00:10:01
Speaker
which is like pretty far to fall from Witcher 3, which is up there with The Last of Us when people are like, oh, we know this game. It was solid. Case ass in all these areas.
00:10:12
Speaker
A lot of people consider The Witcher 3 to be the best open world game that's ever been made. They haven't played MGS 5 then have. Right. Or the top contender now is probably Breath of the Wild. Breath of the Wild is really good for an open world game. Coming off of The Witcher 3, I think everyone had crazy high expectations of this.
00:10:35
Speaker
And there was really no early indications that any part of this was rushed. If a game takes eight years to be made, like from the point that there's the initial teaser, you don't feel like when it comes out the door, it's like that year, that last year, that it's going to have a bunch of like basic issues and things like that. But that was the case. So clearly there was some misunderstandings about how far along this was.
00:11:02
Speaker
and a lot of over optimism about how close they were going to get there at the end.
00:11:10
Speaker
I don't want to label it as optimism or misunderstanding because that kind of removes blame from the people who made the decision to go live. And they had to know like, oh, certain things are not tested that well. Maybe we didn't test certain systems enough. Or even just playing the game on not the perfect setup to be optimized for cyberpunk.
00:11:34
Speaker
Mac computers decent, but holy fucking shit. It doesn't take long to be like, oh, that's weird. Oh, that doesn't seem right. And then you start to notice these issues and then you get the Bethesda syndrome where you're just kind of like, I'll put it in the background. Oh, that's just cyberpunk being cyberpunk.
00:11:52
Speaker
Yeah, they clearly only tested this on specific high-end hardware, and it doesn't really work on a range of systems. We haven't talked about how abysmal the debacle was with PS4 version or the Xbox version.
00:12:09
Speaker
But those are both real bad. Got taken off PS4, PS Store. Presumably, it might be added back in once there is a PS5 version, which they said they were going to make. But we may never have a digital release for PS4. Again,
Game Experience: Bugs vs. Enjoyment
00:12:29
Speaker
depending on how well they can actually patch it up, because it was really bad. People are having massive frame rate drops. Both Xbox and PlayStation offered refunds.
00:12:39
Speaker
I didn't have that extent of issues because I have pretty good up-to-date hardware on PC. And that was apparently the only thing they tested it on, really. That and maybe pre-release PS5 and whatever the new Xbox is.
00:12:55
Speaker
So quick joke, it'd be cool if they added it to the PlayStation 5 so you could have haptic feedback for when a bug was occurring. Right. So in your experience, did you run into a lot of issues?
00:13:10
Speaker
I think, yeah, I think honestly, I have to say yes. I think the severity of issues depended on hard people's hardware a lot of the time. So if you're on like slightly older hardware, a lot of it was like debilitating. Um, but that's not to say I didn't run into game breaking issues. I did have to reload my game two or three times, I think across like 70 hours of play time, just because a quest became unresolvable. It entered a state. I couldn't fix it. And it was, it was just bugged out. Um,
00:13:41
Speaker
I had a few hard crashes, maybe two or three, and a fair amount of graphical bugs and some engine bugs and things like that. Really stuff that it all seems like it should have been caught.
00:14:00
Speaker
Very much this game did not have a year of polish, right? Like they weren't like here's it. Here's our finished product Now, let's go through the finished product and fix all these issues This game never reached that stage it was pushed out well before then because you can tell people are making changes like right up to the end Yeah It fucking shows and does not feel good. Mm-hmm Trying to think um
00:14:31
Speaker
for you, would you say it detracted as soon as like you started noticing issues or did you kind of have what I'm calling the Bethesda syndrome where you kind of just put it in this category of like, oh, it's going to be a buggy boat? Yeah, I think I think a little bit of a little bit of both. The game is like really pretty and that makes Night City feel really lived in and awesome. And I was in that immersion for a bit, right? Like,
00:15:00
Speaker
turn off the other two monitors on the side, dim the lights. Here we are, budget VR experience, staring into the main monitor. And bugs kill that like immediately, especially game breaking bugs, things like that.
00:15:17
Speaker
Um, and that was a concession I had to make like pretty early, I think, but I don't think it ruins the experience overall. It just, it put a cap on how immersive the game could be for me when you have to accept like vehicles might just spawn kind of stuck in the ground. Um, or other random things can occur. Sometimes NPCs won't say the dialogue or they'll talk over themselves with dialogue and things like that.
00:15:45
Speaker
Yeah, it's, I don't know what to say, but it's just a fucking shame. It is. Because like, I can, I'm not gonna make a list, but I can think of like any current gen game that like does not have these issues. Yeah. Or even things are like lower budget took less time. But obviously those other products went through a lot of attention to detail to make sure things didn't fucking break.
00:16:12
Speaker
Yeah, and it feels good for a seamless experience Whereas it's like being on the phone I want to keep making dumb analogies It's like being on the phone with your mom But you're like next to a highway and like cars are driving by and they're like, oh that's kind of distracting from the experience of talking to my mom.
00:16:28
Speaker
Yeah, again, really bad analogy, but I get what you're saying, though. It's it's something that takes you out of it. And I feel like if if we took like if we took like MGS five or like Breath of the Wild or something like that. And in MGS five's case, you set it back like here. And in Breath of the Wild's case, maybe you set it back like three years. It could have been in an unpolished state like this. But like if they were just were released. Right. I have the by that, I mean,
00:16:55
Speaker
I feel like if Cyberpunk had another year of good, normal, work week development, it would have been absolutely amazing. And the fact that it didn't taints the whole thing. I entirely agree. It's like you get one release. They screwed over specific consoles. They have all these bugs.
00:17:25
Speaker
It's good. It was rushed. That's the thing. It was a game that took this long to make and people would have been fine waiting a little bit longer, but somehow it ended up being rushed. And that's why I think it was like a high level mistake because clearly leadership at CD Projekt Red thought it was going to be done.
00:17:46
Speaker
Eh. Again, I'm not. I just don't want to say they're like, oh, we thought it was good. Everyone said it was good. I fucking doubt that. I'm sure people who are at lower level who are actually coding things or testing things are like, hey, here's where things are at. I think probably at a higher level, though, there are stakeholders who are like, oh, needs to be out by a certain date. And somebody made an executive decision to rush it out.
00:18:13
Speaker
But I don't want to even propose that they were like under some misinformation of, oh, I didn't know it wasn't perfect. Yeah.
00:18:23
Speaker
If it was the case that the leadership just didn't know how far away from a finished product they were, that's still a failure on their hands. In either case, the failure is entirely there. Sorry, go ahead. To go back to what you said and reiterate what I said, that it is a shame because you were talking about how beautiful Night City is. Graphically, even on my potato PC,
00:18:49
Speaker
It's fucking gorgeous. And it really is immersive. And they actually highlight when you're doing certain story missions, you might have to go in a car and just ride with somebody. They'll talk to you. You have some prompts. But it gives you a chance to see the city. And it's all done in engine. And it's really fucking cool. You see people, you see cars, you see the buildings of a familiar city that you get to know. And it kind of brings it to life.
00:19:17
Speaker
Yeah, so like aspects like that are really fucking cool and I appreciate them. But now I have to go back to saying like, but and I keep talking about these issues like it's so the parts of the game are good. I think we both agree on that. Like visually, the writing and characters are fucking awesome. The story is good.
00:19:40
Speaker
I like the mechanics. I think hacking's basically the best it's been in a hacking type game. If I hack and slash with Katana, I agree. Right. The intelligence net deck.
00:19:58
Speaker
like peeking around walls and making enemies blind, hacking the cybernetics and things like that. If you assume that all people are basically augmented, they all have cybernetics, you can build a whole hacking system around that. And Cyberpunk is like that. And it was really fun. A hacking-based playthrough, by the end of the game, we're basically one of our friends, a guest, actually, of the show, Ian, who's come on in the past.
00:20:24
Speaker
was talking about how, for a mission, he came down an elevator and then saw a camera, hacked into the camera, just went through the surveillance system, wiped out all the enemies or whatever, took care of whatever he needed to do, and then just exited the surveillance system, hit the elevator button, and went back up. He never entered the complex. And that's a really awesome thing you can do in this game.
00:20:53
Speaker
And it's such a shame that it's got these fundamental issues that hold that back. Can we just edit in the Game of Thrones shame every time we say shame? There's going to be a lot. There's going to be a lot. Probably too many. There's actually
00:21:14
Speaker
There's a subreddit. So the main Cyberpunk subreddit was full of this negative sentiment, I think completely deserved as the first 20 minutes of this episode would indicate. But there's one where it's like for the people who didn't want that.
00:21:29
Speaker
who just wanted to see the cool stuff in the game. It was a low sodium cyberpunk. And they're just like clips and videos and pictures of like gorgeous details or somebody slowing time and engaging in really interesting combat with a katana or mantis blades. And it really shows like what the game could have been like.
00:21:55
Speaker
It's just, you always come back to the main subreddit, right? You always come back to the little issues that take you out. It was nice to follow just because of, I always appreciate good memes and I wanted to be a part of the Zeitgeist experience of Cyberpunk. So I mean, it looked good from the trailer. I'm like, oh, this would be a fun thing, fun experience. And it'd be a cultural experience because everyone's really hyped for it. Hmm.
World Building and Storytelling in Cyberpunk
00:22:19
Speaker
So I still like, I don't like bandwagon like shitting on something. Um, like if it's sucks, I'll kind of say it sucks once and then leave it at that. Unless it's like a company doing something really shitty, then it gets ban hammered. So this one must really suck. We definitely never said it once.
00:22:38
Speaker
But still, we're trying to balance out the praise of the cool things with the negative aspects because it's not blatantly good or blatantly bad. It's a huge fucking mix.
00:22:53
Speaker
The stuff that I love about the game is like up here. These are features and aspects of his hand is above his head. Yeah. Like of a game that I think deserves a 10. The stuff that's best in this are things that I think would go into a game that was a 10. Unfortunately, the stuff that's the worst in this is stuff I expect from games that are like five or lower, like an act unplayable trash, you know, like, um,
00:23:22
Speaker
And there's plenty of examples of that. I just, I don't know. I put a lot of time in the game. I don't regret playing it. My playthrough was like 70 hours. I bought all the cars. I maxed out my characters level. I did almost every side quest that I could. So you fully binged the content. So you explored all options for like net deck, melee combat, run and gun.
00:23:49
Speaker
I kind of didn't do run and gun or melee combat as much just because you do have to make some decisions on the way through. So it's like, what do you mean by decisions? So like the skill tree is spread out into main cyberpunk attributes that came from like the pen and paper game. There's things like cool, there's tech, there's, I'm gonna forget all of these, I shouldn't have been started mentioning them.
00:24:16
Speaker
Um, it's reflex body intelligence, cool tech, and there's the sixth one. Yeah. Um, but the level cap is, uh, 20, not 20, 50 is what I meant to say. 20 would be really low and you can max out like three of those things, probably.
00:24:37
Speaker
Oh, okay. I never actually got that far. I started branching. First, I'm like, oh, guns. I have guns. I'll use guns. And then I saw some cool things in melee with blades and then cold blood under cool. Where after you kill an enemy, you get a certain stack of cold blood.
00:24:58
Speaker
But then there's all these, if you have cold blood, you also have this. So it encourages you to run and burn through all these people and then get these bonuses of extra fast. You get health back on kill. You get mana back on kill. So many cool options you can explore into that, even though I didn't go into tech deck stuff like you did,
00:25:22
Speaker
which is what I'm going to call it from now on. Um, it still sounds cool, but like, if I do another play through in a year or two from now, my check it out. Yeah, I definitely like started stealth Archer. And by that, I mean, stealth with a pistol and a silencer. Um, cause it was, it was pretty good. And by the end of it, I was doing a lot less sneaking and a lot more.
00:25:48
Speaker
the elevator experience of like, I found a camera, this part of the game is done. Like, because the surveillance systems are all hooked into the same network. So if you're or they don't have to be. But usually like a building, they're subnets. Yeah, exactly. For like more secure areas, they probably wouldn't link everything in. But there still would be like three or four cameras.
00:26:11
Speaker
And then you can hack people through cameras. So you hack one camera, switch to look through the building, mark them all so you can see them through walls and stuff, and then be like, and that person's going to become the vector for this virus that's going to destroy everybody. I don't know. It's really fun gameplay in that way.
00:26:37
Speaker
I don't know. I didn't do much of the running gun, though. We got there. I did a little bit, though. There's some guns that feel really good to shoot, like shotgun stuff felt really good. The weapon that's bad to use. Everything felt like it had some weight and impact. Mm hmm.
00:27:01
Speaker
Like I hate when any type of combat or violence in a game, if what you're hitting does not react to how you hit it, fucking hate it. Like I just played, I was telling you this like 30 minutes of mortal shell. There's not that feedback and it feels off. It actively feels wrong. So I'm glad that they did nail that.
00:27:26
Speaker
as far as melee with Katana's was good too. There's a particular character in the game that you get a flashback sequence as and you get to use their signature weapon. And their signature weapon is like incredibly dangerous. It is a hand cannon. And I was like going for a head shots and stuff like that. And it took me not that long to realize that it's
00:27:55
Speaker
It's caliber with such, it would shoot through walls. So if people were behind cover, doesn't matter. You just shoot through the cover where they're at and they'll die. But like if you shoot them in the arm, that arm is gone. Like it was a dead space weapon. It dismembered on impact with like just projectiles and it just felt so good.
00:28:18
Speaker
Um, it was it was great to have that but then after the flashback sequence ended i'm like, why does my gun suck? Yeah, uh-huh Yeah, no, it's uh, the game does have like a couple really cool guns and it has an iconic weapon system Which is like their uniques, I guess um and i'm
00:28:43
Speaker
I love that. You can upgrade the weapons repeatedly, especially if you go into crafting, then there's like a whole crafting system for making gear and clothes and ammo and whatnot. And you can repeatedly upgrade the weapon to the higher tier version of it.
00:28:59
Speaker
to keep it relevant. I think that's really cool. So if you get a unique quest reward and you're just like, this is awesome, you can invest resources to keep it relevant. And I think that's just chef's kiss because nothing sucks worse than
00:29:15
Speaker
like old Oblivion or Skyrim. If you got like a legendary Jaedric artifact at level four, it was now trash as soon as you got to like level 10. Right. You find this like a current level sock with a rock in it. You're like, well, this is a bitter DPS. And then you have to give up the cool, the cool shiny you worked so hard for.
00:29:37
Speaker
Yeah, the sword that speaks to you when it's like unsheathed or whatever, you're like, I'm not going to use that anymore. Damage is too low. So the iconic weapon system was a solution to that. The problem was you couldn't recraft the base versions.
00:29:50
Speaker
of iconic weapons and the game and the strategy guide told you that you could. And I think that's just because they were working on so many things at the end of the game, they literally never came back and fixed it. So you could, can you do different upgrade paths where if you upgraded Katana A that was iconic, that you'd want to have the base version again?
00:30:17
Speaker
So you would upgrade the rarity. So they use standard MMO-like rarity, where it's white, basic tier, blue. Rare is uncommon. Yeah, green is uncommon, blue is rare, purple is epic, and then orange is legendary. And you have to level your crafting to continue to make stuff that good. And it's almost always better to have the next tier.
00:30:45
Speaker
But this system allowed you to recraft things. So there could be a random number of sockets for certain pieces of gear. You might get random affixes. There's a lot of cyberpunk that's actually a looter shooter, which is kind of funny. There's a fair amount of it is random attributes on weapons and things.
00:31:07
Speaker
I like that though, because it, it always feels interesting to find something rather than like, I know I'm going to have a different experience from you or Ian playing based on like what I find and how I approach the game. Like when I watch Ian play, he went heavily into crafting and he had guns that had like six slots and like weapon attachments. Whereas I had one, whatever my best DPS weapon was, like, and
00:31:38
Speaker
I think that your way is the more sane way, having played through the game, unless they come back and they fix it. Crafting is such a pain to level up. Like, actually ridiculous. I think it's the hardest thing to level in the game. And also, their leveling is based off of, if you want experience in a thing, do that thing. Which I'm running around a lot. You get athletics. Yes. It's like the Skyrim or anything else. Yeah, it's a good system. But it can take time.
00:32:07
Speaker
Yes, it very much can. I found myself. Actually, this is this is possibly the outcome of a system like this. I found out like I want stealth experience, which you get if you like choke out people from behind, if you sneak up to them and like choke them out. Stealth experience. Awesome. But I really want cold blooded experiences, which is what you get if you kill multiple enemies in rapid succession. And I think you also got some stealth experience for like hiding bodies.
00:32:37
Speaker
You did, yeah. I didn't ever do it outside the tutorial, but I've heard that it's true. I did it somewhat obsessively. There's many filled garbage cans in my cyberpunk world, and it's entirely my fault.
00:32:54
Speaker
But it led to this efficient, I'm doing air quotes right now in real life and coughing, efficient gameplay where I would hack everybody's optics so they couldn't see me run up, choke like a group of three people out, take out my silence pistol, execute each of them.
00:33:14
Speaker
So the first one was self-experience. The next one was the cold-blooded experience. Then pick up the bodies and throw them in a dumpster. I was like, all right, extra self-experience. There you go. Gameplay.
00:33:28
Speaker
I can't argue with that because in the same way, I discovered that I could take a katana and run through civilians to a point because the police will get mad. Oh, yeah, you mentioned the police. How do you feel about the police and cyberpunk?
00:33:46
Speaker
I thought they were kind of just there in general as NPCs. They didn't really do too much. They kind of just exist in the world. But if you start causing a lot of issues, they start teleporting behind you as they kind of just spawn them in. Yeah, they're just starting.
00:34:09
Speaker
It's a lazy implementation. It's the most lazy implementation. We have to prevent people from just going on a rampage for some reason. But I kind of just hate the way that police were implemented here. You can't hack them. They're immune to hacks. You literally just can't use any of your cyberware on them. There's no reason, I think, I can come up with why that's the case. Nobody else has that immunity.
00:34:38
Speaker
If you kill a person or you hit an NPC or whatever, it will spawn a police drone or a police officer on your position, even if it makes no sense.
00:34:51
Speaker
There was a short clip of someone who was like on top of a tower. It's like this debris, like almost completely destroyed tower. Nothing else around them made no sense for anyone else to like be up here. And they like, like shot a civilian or something like that. And the police just spawned on the ledge right next to them. Just a stack of cops, actually, all in the exact same spot.
00:35:16
Speaker
is the stupidest thing. Yeah, that's dumb. It seems like a way to impede gameplay, because obviously we're going back to talking about there's different approaches to play style. I want more melee mass murdery, but if you are somebody who went more hacky, that's your main line of defense is like, this is how I deal with the problem of enemies. I will hack them and disable them and deal damage through hacking.
00:35:45
Speaker
And then suddenly like, hey, how is your gun played? And you're like, well, that sucks. And it literally just kneecaps it for somebody who's going that play style.
00:35:57
Speaker
And the other thing is there's no fighting the police. Like actually, there's no fighting the police. Because if you kill police, it will get more stars. And if you fill up to like four stars or something like that, it'll say like anti-crime. You'll get a very brief pop-up. This is the last thing you'll see, which is like anti-crime prevention measures deployed. And then you'll die. And the reason you'll die is because there's rocket turrets
00:36:26
Speaker
all throughout Night City that are just hidden, like deployed into buildings and things like that. And if ever you become wanted enough, they kill you.
00:36:38
Speaker
You die. And it's like a one-hit kill. It'll blow up your car, you'll die immediately. I fucking hate the one-hit kills in that game. I didn't experience rockets, but for a lot of missions, I experienced land mines. And somewhere along the way, I got a body enhancement for, hey, if you ever take lethal damage, we'll put you back to like 20% and we'll put that shit on cooldown. I'm like, oh, this is good.
00:37:02
Speaker
Yeah. Panic backup measure, right? And then I walked near a landmine and it's like, your game is over. I'm like, what about that thing that we just talked about where you would revive me here? And they're like, not for landmines though. I'm like, okay, cool. Glad that that's the one thing that instant, no matter how much health you put in, it doesn't fucking matter.
00:37:24
Speaker
Yeah, I wasn't too much a fan of that. Most infamous bug related to incident deaths for me I think was if you're on like a slight incline, you get tons of acceleration instead of any amount of reasonable acceleration to the point where jumping off of a slope and just like taking fall damage on impact is way safer than trying to slide down anything.
00:37:48
Speaker
Because you'll go like 80 miles an hour to it and then just impact on the bottom and die. Yeah, I definitely left a mission like three times. I'm like, OK, I'm not going to die this time. But due to weird movement and momentum calculations, it didn't really appear to me that I was going super fast. But it must have thought I did because I would just went dead. Yeah, flat lines.
00:38:13
Speaker
You mentioned the cyberware though. You said you picked up some cyberware. My playthrough had, I had like a couple related hacking pieces, things like that, but because my body stat was such trash, I couldn't install a lot of cyberware. A bunch of it was locked out for me. How did you feel about that system in the game? Was there anything that stood out to you as particularly useful or something cool?
00:38:40
Speaker
I liked that it's an option because anytime I play games, I love passive abilities. Tell me you'll give me 10% to do a thing, I'll opt into it. And I'll be like, what if I had another thing that also gave me 10% and my mind gets the ball go from the possibilities. So in that way, you can upgrade your legs, arms, head, shoulders, knees and toes to accommodate whatever your build is.
00:39:08
Speaker
But it felt like the options they had were very limited. So like, I think something with body had like two slots, like, Oh, I'll take more health and I'll deal more melee damage. So I had a percentage bonus to both of those, but that's it. Yeah. Like there wasn't a cool shiny.
00:39:29
Speaker
I would have loved if there were 10 options per slot. I'm like, oh, I really have to think about how I want to optimize my build. Where it's like, oh, this is the best one. Let me just pick that. Yeah, and the tabletop game was literally tons of options per slot, and they clearly just didn't have time to implement all of them for this. There are a couple really cool standouts. There's several options to slow time. So I had one that was like,
00:39:56
Speaker
If I get detected while I'm in stealth, if someone like goes into the yellow state of they are beginning to detect me, I'll get hit with a time slow. And there's like a 30 second cooldown. And that sounds like a really basic thing.
00:40:09
Speaker
but it turned into a Spidey, it's Spidey sense is what it is. Cause it's like, Oh, someone behind me started to detect me time slow. Oh, okay. How do I react to this really quickly to get from actually like getting called out? Um, there's other, there's like combat time slow as well. And there's like a pretty infamous book where, um,
00:40:29
Speaker
If you start combat time, so I think it's by aiming down sites. Um, and you like dash while time is slowed, which is like double tap button to, to dodge. Um, dash doesn't go on cooldown. So if you mash it like really fast, you just go like 200 miles an hour, right out of it. And you can bunny hop to maintain that speed.
00:40:55
Speaker
And it looks great. Like it's like the kind of thing people would be disappointed if it was taken out of the game because they used it to like clear with the mantis blades to like engage in a situation by just jumping in at 200 miles an hour and impaling somebody. I don't know. It's great stuff. I think I didn't get those fun bugs, I guess. Yeah.
00:41:19
Speaker
Um, I also want a tangent here. There's scripture 40 minutes in. Sure. Characters. Yeah. I love Pan Am. She's the best. Did you have a favorite character? If so, who and why? Um, that's tough. There's a lot of really good characters in the game. Um, Pan Am's really good. I think, I think like if I were to,
00:41:46
Speaker
Oh, man, I got to answer the question first before I go into detail. So I think it's probably Johnny, actually. I do think it's Johnny.
00:41:53
Speaker
My next question is, what genitals did you choose? I just I was a guy with a penis. So masculine form. Wow. So fucking sis of you. I know. Right. Anyway, literally sis. So why Johnny? So the reason this answer actually applies to like a lot of NPCs, I think that the writing in the game is like, for the most part, really good.
00:42:22
Speaker
There's some, uh, content out in the world that's kind of like copy pasted, but the characters by copy paste, I mean, inform. You're doing similar things a whole lot for a thing. Beat down these criminals. Like, yeah. Yeah. Not kill this guy. Do this. Whatever. Very formulaic. But the characters, especially like the side quest characters, um, and the main like friends and people you can interact with, they,
00:42:49
Speaker
follow this golden rule of world building where they're like, have these characters have motivations and then make those characters act based off of those motivations. And that makes them so believable. It makes it so much better because other people have things going on and they might want you to help out because you're very useful to have. But it doesn't feel like their worlds revolve around you.
00:43:19
Speaker
specifically, and they have a lot of other concerns and things they're worried about. And that just makes them much better. In the case of Johnny, it's like he is very much himself, right? Like he has his own motivations. He doesn't particularly care if they're your motivations, right? Like
00:43:45
Speaker
Yeah. And I stubborn in that way. Yeah. Um, I found myself like, like Keanu Reeves is great. I love Keanu Reeves. I didn't realize he was going to be like as big of a factor in this game as he was, but it's like front to back. Like he's, you're going to see a lot of Johnny. Um, and I found myself being like,
00:44:11
Speaker
All right, yeah, we'll do things your way, Johnny. Like just we'll see how this goes. This seems like it could be a more interesting exploration of this issue. Um, and he's got some depth to him. He doesn't like, he's not like a mercenary and that he like always just cares about money. He's not super selfish and that he always just cares about himself. He just cares about personal freedoms more than anything else, more than even rebellion or like punkiness or anything like that.
00:44:41
Speaker
And, uh, I dunno, it makes him, it makes him interesting since he stays with goals. Yeah. I, I can't disagree with that. I also asked you what your opinion was. So yeah. Well, you said it was my favorite character and that's, that's, uh, that's Johnny for sure. I think, um, it might be the most vanilla answer because he's the character that's, you know, with you for so long, but yeah.
00:45:11
Speaker
Um, what are you gonna say? Um, you could have asked me like what mine was. I thought your answer was Penam. I thought your answer was Penam. Yeah. Yeah. What did you like? What did you like about the relationship with Penam or your interactions with Penam? I should say, um, as they were portrayed in cyberpunk. That's the best way to put it. Um,
00:45:37
Speaker
I think for me, uh, one of the endearing qualities about her is she doesn't need you. Like she has all these plans, like do these things by herself. And usually like these over the top schemes are just like, that seems a little dangerous. She's like, yeah, no, it'll work. It'll be fine. Um, but she always seems like have the capability. There's never a point like, Oh, she can't handle herself. Yeah.
00:46:05
Speaker
Cause a lot of females in video games get the representation of I'm the princess. I need to be rescued in some way. So it's nice that there were multiple characters, not just Pan Am who were like, I just happened to be a lady. So, but like everyone is out there trying to do their own shit, take care of their own people and thrive in Night City or the outskirts. But like her writing is just,
00:46:34
Speaker
She's interesting because she has her own...
00:46:38
Speaker
code of conduct for like what should be done. But she's also kind of battling through like she doesn't want to go against her family who she's ultimately doing all of this for. She's like, I truly think this is the best thing. It's just I have this confrontation I keep having to deal with. But she always feels conflicted. Also, early on, you can be like, hey, you're kind of hot. And she's like,
00:47:06
Speaker
That's okay. Yeah. I don't, I don't particularly care about that. I did, I did like that. I think that, um, for a game that lets you like choose your genitals, as you were asking, you know, earlier, very personal question, by the way, show me your genitals, genitals, genitals. Yeah. Um, genitalia. No, the, uh, uh, for game that has that be part of character creation, and then there's like lots of sexuality and advertisements, um,
00:47:36
Speaker
There's not all that much of anything like that in the rest of the game. No, you can hire a joy toy, which I did just because. Yeah. I should have also had sex with a guy, but I had sex with a girl. But to be fair, I was a girl with a guy's voice. There you go. I went the doctor girlfriend route because I thought it was the most entertaining. And I would often forget that I was a girl because I had this, I had the guy V voice.
00:48:06
Speaker
Yeah. So you pick like masculine, feminine form, masculine, feminine genitals, masculine, feminine voice. You can go full, full chromanticore.
00:48:21
Speaker
Yeah, but it was nice that they let the characters be characters. And there are romance options if you go down that route and make all the right decisions. But it's not the, hey, here's your fuck piece on the side. Yes. They didn't have characters have sex for the sake of having sex, which I've said every fucking episode, do not do that to your characters.
00:48:44
Speaker
Yeah. What's funny about this? Like there's a lot of stuff that was screwed up here. Like when we talk about relationships, side characters, things like that, I feel like you have to mention like Bioware, right? Like they did that in all their games, Dragon Age, Mass Effect, all of that. Like romancing was an option.
00:49:01
Speaker
Oh, you mean Bioware, like the game company, not like cyberware. Yeah. And what's funny is I feel like in cyberpunk, they actually have a more mature take because Bioware is always like, here's your straight romance option. Here's your gay romance option. Here's your bi-romance option. Maybe we'll give you two straight options. And like that's basically kind of the game. And you didn't have to explicitly have
00:49:31
Speaker
sections with these people, but it felt like it was always kind of leading there. And it's so de-emphasized for the majority of Cyberpunk that it almost feels
00:49:45
Speaker
when sex scenes actually happen. It's like, why is this in the game? Like, it would be more tonally consistent if this just wasn't here, actually. I'm going to have to go back once I can actually run the game and maybe see one of those sex scenes because when I played through, it's kind of, again, a bit potato-y. Like, some of the animations felt a little bit janky. Yeah. In the moment.
00:50:10
Speaker
They're not worth watching. That's that's that's I mean, even regardless of what your intent would be trying to watch one of these. It's not like you don't see like barely. You barely see anything. It's like top female nudity, as I think like the furthest this game goes outside of character creation is legal on beaches already like. Yeah. Yeah, not to downplay boobs in any thing, but yeah, it's. This isn't a point of like this judgment in the game. Yeah.
00:50:40
Speaker
It's it's it is actually misleading that they like let you pick genital stuff for your character at all. Are there's any customization? You really don't see it outside of glitches. Yeah, the game's not about that. It's like, oh, are you showering? OK, now you can see whatever is down there. If not, or is there a glitch where your stuff's just sticking out of your pants outside of those two situations? Doesn't matter. Yeah. How did you feel about all the advertising and universe style?
00:51:11
Speaker
I think it was, I think it was pretty well done. Um, and they had some people like come in and like dedicated people, like making a lot of these advertisements for different products and things like that. And like, um, it really does emphasize like.
00:51:28
Speaker
The 90% of all this sexual content is just advertisement in the future. When people are all beaten down and they're just basic needs oriented, we're just going to keep shoving this stuff, trying to sell them crap.
00:51:46
Speaker
Well, yeah, it's like, hey, you can afford X amount of stuff for like your normal daily life of here's my food and shit to get by. How do I get my release for my shitty life? Is it alcohol? Is it drugs? Brain dances. Or do I hire a joy toy? It's like one of the two in Night City. Yeah, there's only two prostitutes in the whole fucking game. And there's four romance options. Two guys, two girls.
00:52:16
Speaker
In my headcanon, that's the reason that there's so much violence in Night City. It's because there's literally no outlets. It's just like the tearjoy toys in the one location and everybody else is just bent up. Do you remember, what is it, Assassin's Creed 2? It's like Ezio, you need an outlet. I have outlets, Ezio, not vaginas.
00:52:46
Speaker
Oh, man. Assassin's Creed 2. It's still the best Assassin's Creed, probably. I agree. It's still not what I played, but something I ran into a lot with the game. I enjoyed a lot of the side missions because they had cool content that helped flesh out the world of like, here's a futuristic scenario that's also possibly relatable to your standard, current age day to day. There were times that quests would just terminate.
00:53:16
Speaker
And I didn't know what I did wrong or I couldn't undo it. It's just like, hey, you fucked up a thing because the game was a little bit laggy and didn't tell you, hey, stop doing that. And now it's done. So you can either keep going on and not do the quest or go back to the last time the game saved before that and try again.
00:53:37
Speaker
And that felt shitty. Yes. I didn't finish the whole fucking Delamain quest because I was shooting a car. It didn't tell me how much damage it was taking. And then it fucking exploded. And it's like, our business is done, sir.
00:53:51
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's I get what they were going for. There's a lot of quests in the game. You can fail if you just don't do what you're told for the quest or if you don't react quick enough. If it seems like there's a time limit or something like that, there may actually be a time limit. It doesn't do the classic RPG thing where everyone just like stands around and waits for you. But
00:54:14
Speaker
Based off what I just said, it's like, oh, that sounds like a positive development in RPGs. Not all the time, because you really need it to be clear that this is on a time limit, because otherwise, you're kind of interfering with whatever people want to do in the game. Yeah. It sucks to have a restriction that you don't know about, and then you get punished for it. It's game on you. You're like, what did I do?
00:54:40
Speaker
Like I didn't fail quests due to glitches and I still had two or three, I think, that failed just because I didn't even get to them in time. Or I like walked away thinking that I had a moment.
00:54:54
Speaker
And then it's just like incident failure. I'm like, Oh, okay. Probably should have given me a warning for that one. Yeah. It is nice though, that a lot of the game does feel more real time.
Potential and Future of Cyberpunk
00:55:05
Speaker
So if you are talking to somebody, you don't respond. They're going to be like, Hey, are you still there? Like you spaced out what's going on. Or if you walk away, they're like, okay, I guess we're done here.
00:55:16
Speaker
And that allowed me to know that somebody still had dialogue. I'm like, oh, I have to go back and throw this in. It's not going to just play on the intercom as I walk away. I'm sorry, one last thing is also some of the missions. Maybe you'll interact with somebody like, oh, come back in a day. And then you actually have to wait that game time to come back and do a thing.
00:55:37
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, you get the feeling people are out doing stuff and they contact you when they need your help with something completely different, right? Like there's a lot of recurring characters there or some callbacks, the things you did in the past. Yeah. Like I missed out an entire quest line, I think, because I just didn't really help somebody out in a certain situation. And so they're like, why would I contact him again? He wasn't particularly useful the first time. Yeah.
00:56:03
Speaker
I was going to mention to the buggy side of the people are like, oh, guess you're walking away when you leave in the middle of a conversation or when they're saying something to you. Did have a bug related to that, or it had a particular vendor. He could have been a ripper doc or something like that.
00:56:20
Speaker
And every time I went back to this guy, he's like, oh, okay, I guess you're here to finish what I'm like. Now you're now you're here to listen. I'm like, what are you talking about? It's been like, it's been like four days since I was here. Oh, my God. When stuff like that happens where it's like a repeat trigger, like a mis-trigger, there were so many times that I would
00:56:44
Speaker
leave combat. I'm not near anybody. The music's still going full blast. I'm trying to buy sushi out of the store. Or maybe there was a weapon pickup. And I'm like, I moused over. I'm like, no, I don't want that. And I walk away. And it's been 20 minutes. And it's still like, this gun, these are the stats of this gun. I'm like, no, I'm not even physically buy it anymore.
00:57:08
Speaker
You I get stuck that that can be unfortunate because there's certain actions you can't do in combat. I don't think you can save while you're in combat. Probably not. Um, stuff like that. So anyways, the game could have used another year in development. Yeah. Here's the tough part though, with the highs and lows of the game, what kind of score would you give it? You could use a five point score, 10 point score, English word score.
00:57:40
Speaker
It's hard for me to score things. I don't know how much I'd actually dock.
00:57:46
Speaker
But from an English description, kind of going back to what I said near the beginning, I really did enjoy the writing. I enjoyed so many of the characters and side quests. The world itself is beautiful. The music's enjoyable enough. Nothing like really blew me out of the water. But it was such an all around good time with like a lot of cool mechanics. So many great aspects of it. But
00:58:13
Speaker
It needs to go down at least three imaginary points on a scale out of imaginary 10, at least, because so many things have issues that should not be issues. It's like if TI made a new calculator and they're like, well, multiplication sometimes has issues. You're like, what? What does that mean? We've had calculators for fucking years.
00:58:35
Speaker
It's like shit like that is unexcusable. And it really, again, it's a fucking shame. So many other aspects are good, but then sometimes game breaking issues like game crashes, UI issues that cause other issues.
00:58:50
Speaker
It's like a perfect recipe. And they were like, got to the last stage of preparing it. And then they're like, let's just dump in a quart of paint and just put a quart of paint into this mix and see how it ends up. You won't always taste paint, but when you taste the paint. Yeah, it's just there's some shit mixed in there. I do want to go back and maybe do another play through as a different
00:59:18
Speaker
I don't want to say class because the intro doesn't really matter that much. Men with a woman's voice this time. Yeah. I do want to go back once some things are more polished out and maybe have a more higher end PC because the experience itself is good and I did enjoy it. I would like to at some point re-experience it. Yeah.
00:59:44
Speaker
Yeah, after 70 hours, I don't know if I can be like bad game, but I play bad games.
00:59:50
Speaker
a lot sometimes that doesn't mean it was a week. If you play Fallout 76, I would message you on scene like, bro, you okay? Talk to me. What's going on? I think, I think that if you don't have high end hardware, it's probably a hard pass right now. Like give it a 60, which should be a hard pass for people. If you have like top of the end hardware, it could be like an 80, but probably like a 70.
01:00:21
Speaker
because of the paint. You shouldn't have to taste paint, and sometimes you taste paint. That's unfortunate, though. Hopefully we can do a revisit in like a year, and they fixed all the issues, and we do new playthroughs, and we're just like, this game is the second coming of Cyberpunk 2077. But that's not something you count on when you're doing serious review critical business like we do.
01:00:52
Speaker
Yeah, they definitely bought it. Yeah. If you did play it, I hope you enjoyed the parts that you were able to. But yeah, if you haven't picked it up, there's no harm in waiting. So many good games I have played after the fact. I've been like, wow, it's a good time. And I didn't need to play at the same time everyone else did. Save some
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
01:01:18
Speaker
money, and in this case, should be less issues.
01:01:22
Speaker
I think so. I would agree with weight on this one. Unfortunately, not Game of the Year this year. We can figure that out later. Tune in next week to hear what our Game of the Year was.
01:01:36
Speaker
Yeah, hopefully. This is the next week out, one of these weeks. You can tell us what your Game of the Year was. You can always send that in. If it's a private thing, you can do so at soapstonepodcast.gmail.com or publicly tell the world what your Game of the Year was at facebook.com slash soapstonepodcast. And as always, we'll see you next one. And as always, please check our only fans in the year 2021 to get the best exclusive gaming product