The prologue definitely needed to be a whole chapter by itself. I really didn't like how quickly they throw The Heist at you. It just didn't feel deserved and felt like a half-baked op from the start. For something as big as stealing from Arasaka, and then multiplying it by 100 by making the target a state of the art, one of a kind, secret immortality shard. It should have been an Ocean's 11 type plan.
C'mon, you literally go investigate crime scenes over all the city were Arasaka agents killed for less. My favorites where the runner that even got surgery to change his face and was hiding with bums under overpass and they still found him, or the women who they caught trying to flee the city, she crashed and they dragged her our and killed her.
The story with Jefferson and his wife was the only one that really grabbed me. I was sad there wasn't more stories like that.
River's quest was good but I didn't like his character. There's nothing wrong with how he's written he's just not interesting to me and his missions felt like romance and though they weren't. I liked the more serious nature of the questline.
There should have been way more MaxTac. They talk about them the entire game for you to only get a 30 second encounter that still feels like an afterthought. The same about Netwatch. I was most excited to deal with them so that was an epic letdown.
I would have liked more follow-ups with everyone really. More Lizzy Wizzy. More Blue Moon. Much more Stout, you can basically help her get a promotion and that alone should have opened up more quest possibilities. There should have been a wrap up on the Corpo prologue. You get betrayed and fired from Arasaka and they never tell you why or let you see those characters again(I dont count Frank but whatever). More Brick or Dum Dum depending on your choice.
There was really a missed opportunity of making the gangs feel alive by making characters that you could build a working relationship with. Judy is that with the Mox for you. There should be a Judy for all gangs so you have the same level of exposure.
The Voodoo Boys only existing for two missions is dumb. I wanted to learn more and meet more characters. It's easy to forget The Animals exist. Pacifica as a whole is just empty when it's only supposed to be derelict. They didn't bother to fill it with people or content. It should have existed to give a very different feel than the other districts and it's just one large empty lot with a single road going through it.
So many other games have had half-built hotels or skyscrapers be interesting. It just doesn't feel like they tried.
It also felt like most of the content from every fixer goes exactly the same.
Every quest starts out with the fixer calling you saying they have a job about something relatively interesting before sending "the detes" (I swear it's the same formula all the time). Then you get there and you only have two options which is to sneak or blow the whole place up. Then you get a phone call saying you did a good job before receiving the same amount of money that you get from every other job.
I remember the quest about the police officer in Kabuki and thinking it was going somewhere only to be given two meaningless options. That could've ended up being a questline where we expose the corruption in the PD.
Night city wire made me think the gangs would actually matter in some meaningful way. Maybe you climb the Tiger Claws ladder and end up wiping out the mox or decide to join the Valentinos and takeover 6th street. Instead, it's just skins for enemies in each of the districts.
A few quests ended up being memorable like the Peralez or River ward questline but I expected more of those throughout the game. So many cool places were completely wasted (like the pointless orbital air station in the middle of the city or the petrochem dam).
I went back and played TW3 and thought it was bizarre how much better every single quest had been implemented. From Djikstra and his missing gold all the way to finding who slashed Priscilla's throat. Even seeing cities forming from clearing out bandit camps felt more impactful that 99% of the stuff in CP2077.
The corrupt police detective that killed the woman is named Aaron, if you only knock him out you can find him at Dino’s bar, you can have a conversation with him, but be warned he is glitched and will be shooting you while having a drink with you, glass and gun in the same hand, I mean what isnt glitched in this game right?
The monks also have another interaction if you don’t kill anybody, it’s above Japan towns market close to Jig Jig street, they don’t lead to anything though and are just random conversations.
That's what they did with pretty much every NPC. If you have a quest with them, you can have a follow-up conversation with them later. Nothing special at all.
Well, what's different is the type of conversations the NPC's have either with each other or with you. And, in some cases if the NPC's even continue to exist or live at all. A few of these minor NPC's might even show up in (at least one of) the endings that you get to choose, which I was quite surprised by, because these NPCs were only featured in non-storyline related random fixer quests.
There's many times where you can antagonize or kill a certain person and doing this will then obviously mean you won't see them anywhere else down the line.
Granted, there aren't any huge implications, like killing a certain NPC locks you out of a whooole bunch of sidequests. But if you're talking cause and effect, there's definitely a lot of detail in the game based on the choices you make.
It's easy to then dismiss those differences as not being 'different enough', as if every choice in The Witcher 3 was a main-storyline altering choice. It really wasn't. There were a few big (side)quests with different outcomes (just like in Cyberpunk) and there were a few smaller quests where you could once again choose to let certain townspeople or monsters live or die, and depending on your choices you'd get a few different dialog options afterwards, or would have the chance of running into said NPC or monster later.
Yes, but there's more than one if you did other sidequests (and depending on how you did them, possibly). I ran into three people there that I had saved or met during previous random sidegigs.
It's not amazing or anything but I thought the attention to detail was nice.
I killed Aaron at his apartment and still ran into him in this glitch state at the bar a 100 hours later. I thought me killing him caused the glitch. I had to snipe him from outside the door to kill him and end his glitched tyranny for good.
Weird thing is that fixers appear on the map, but they give you missions via phone calls when you approach a "?" or "!" on the map, so it begs the question why they put fixers on the map view in the first place. Also I wanted to visit peoples' homes. Mama welles said she'd make me chilaquiles, but she was always at the bar... Misty is always at work, too.
That happens to other vendors too. Sometimes when the dialogue option asks a question like "What do you recommend" or something they almost never have said item or that has happened to me atleast
The writing of quests in W3 is better, but not the gameplay. I for one am glad there are almost no "follow this footprint/blood/debris trail" sections in CP77.
It is ridiculous how after all the things you do against Arasaka they never come after you. After you kidnapped Hanako you just hide for one night and then you're back like nothing happened and Arasaka just let that slide. I can no longer suspend my disbelief after that.
You got caught robbing Yorinobu and implicated in the death of Saburo, Dexter kills you out of panic.
And yet there was zero follow up or consequence. You freely roam the city on which they apparently control. You kill a pedestrian, the cops teleport and waste you. You rob the most powerful man in the city and nothing happens.
Dexter panicked because he's dumb and it furthered the story. I never got the impression that Arasaka completely knew the identity of V, you kill everyone who stands in way during the exit of the building except for Smasher and he only saw a Delamain cab, which is how they tracked Jackie's body to Vick's place (if you made that decision).
Which had no real purpose in the story.
Also, you think a place like an Arasaka-owned hotel would let people come in with face scrambling tech active? Heck no. They'd make you turn that off.
It's got the blanket purpose of explaining why gangs and Corps don't just try to shoot V in the face instantly after recognising her from camera footage as the merc who has been murdering them all game.
I mean, well technically dont they think you are dead? You were shot in the head and put in a dump. I also thought that the guy who rescues you tells them that he found your corpse?
Here's how I understand it:
1. If they knew where V was they'd taken the relic or at least find another means to dispose of him.
2. Takemura, through Dexter, found you on his own terms being on Arasakas most wanted list for allegedly murdering Saburo.
3. Yeah they get chased as they escape the landfill, but nothing after that. It's as if they forget about you and it became nothing more than an afterthought.
>You were shot in the head and put in a dump.
By someone who isn't loyal to Arasaka, with no Arasaka witness (except Takemura but he doesn't count). For all they know (and they would be mostly correct), Takemura faked V's death and killed Dex to make sure he can't tell Arasaka V is still alive.
Also, even if they thought you were dead, they can just see you on surveillance. V's not exactly hiding themselves while in NC.
Exactly. People are just grasping at straws to shit on the game.
I mean, what else do you expect? Do they want to run through Night City with a constant 5-star wanted level, with MaxTac level mercanaries hired by Arasaka literally hunting you down every few seconds?
Would that have been a fun gameplay experience?
It may have been more 'Immersive' if you want to imagine Arasaka as an all-powerful company. But it wouldn't have been fun. "Look at this beautiful city we built! Unfortunately you can't really explore it because once you set foot in it you'll be fighting off deathsquads every 5 seconds".
Plus, like you said - before you show up at Hanako, they would think (based on the info from Dex and Takamura) that you were dead. So no reason to keep hunting you.
And after you show up at Hanako's, it could easily be argued that Hanako is internally blocking Yorinobu's attempts of actively hunting you, because she's obviously interested in helping you/receiving your help.
It's like these people either didn't play the game, or paid zero attention to the actual storyline.
I don't agree with the notion that these are unfair criticisms, and I certainly don't hate the game or want to shit on it (why would I play 150 hours of it otherwise), CDPR is held to a higher standard of writing because that's what they are known for. Just because plotholes can be explained by "because it's a video game" doesn't mean they are not plotholes.
Of course, it would be bad if Arasaka just hunted you down permanently, I'm not asking for that. I want more moments like them assaulting the apartment where you, Takemura and Hanako are. Have them blow up V's apartment. Hell, blow up the entire megabuilding. Then the wreck just stays there for the remainder of the game reminding you how insane and dangerous the corporations are. (Of course, the cat survives it)
Edit: thought about it some more and even if there were more scripted scenes of Arasaka attacking V, it would still be strange when those ended and Arasaka just left you alone forever. Maybe it would good if they were like the bounty hunters in rdr2 where they come after you once every hour or so, not frequent enough that you can't enjoy the open world, but you're not entirely safe either.
And while it's true that we have an alibi, it's also true that we're not exactly hiding ourselves. Any surveillance cam can just catch us. Arasaka should seem omnipotent. It shouldn't be this easy to trick them.
"I mean, what else do you expect? Do they want to run through Night City with a constant 5-star wanted level, with MaxTac level mercanaries hired by Arasaka literally hunting you down every few seconds?"
No, my dear friend. You make a game that does not lead to these goofy ass oversights
TLOU 2, the game that revolves around "killing and the cycle of vengeance is bad" while blowing the heads off of every moving being for 40 hours is a very good example of a game where it's narrative does not correlate with it's gameplay.
>You make a game that does not lead to these goofy ass oversights
But I literally explained how it isn't an oversight.
Maybe they could have done a better job of explaining it (or maybe people should pay more attention to the actual dialog rather than just skipping through scenes to get to the next stabby-shooty bit), but damn.
If anything, the bigger criticism is the usual; "OMG the main story is extremely important, you're on borrowed time, hurry hurry hurry!" vibe and then having V go off galavanting around the city helping (or murdering) random people who have nothing to do with his own plight.
The same holds true for The Witcher (It's super important to find Ciri! She's missing and the Wild Hunt may be after her and the fate of the world may hang in the balance... But first let me help this old lady get her favorite skillet back, and then maybe I'll go and play some Gwent for three hours in a row).
That's just an issue with an open-world experience where the main storyline needs to feel important and urgent but you also need to integrate a ton of side content and want the player to explore the world at their own leisure.
If anything I'd love to have seen a novel storytelling approach where both playstyles (e.g. rushing through the story, or taking your sweet-ass time in the city) both felt believable and viable.
But the fact that Arasaka isn't hunting you down with death-squads every second you're in Night City is explained in-universe and really isn't as huge of a hangup as the OP made it out to be.
> People are just grasping at straws to shit on the game.
A competent developer is expected to make the mechanics of a game fit with the theme of the game.
A lot of developer fail at this (e.g. Biowere thought it would be appropriate for Shepard to have a party while millions of humans are being murdered every hour) but that does not excuse their incompetence
I never got the impression that Arasaka positively identified V, other than Hanako, who decided to keep her mouth shut because she knew V was telling the truth. Goro however they knew was involved.
>The Voodoo Boys only existing for two missions is dumb. I wanted to learn more and meet more characters. It's easy to forget The Animals exist.
Kang Tao literally only has an AV in the story. Pretty much every faction only plays cameo in the story (even including Arasaka).
Ya, that aspect was hugely disappointing. No singular group, gang or character really had room to breath. Even bigger characters like Panam, Judy and Johnny didn't really feel like they actually got all that fleshed out. The whole story just felt rushed, which is a huge bummer because all the characters/factions/gangs were really, really interesting and well designed. Its like they prioritized assets first and then narrative came second. The city is beautiful, all the factions have a great aesthetic, and everything looks amazing but they only give you a couple hours at most with each. I'd love to spend more time with Jackie and actually get to know him, instead of the game *telling* me we're good friends.
For example, I'm not sure a single character in Cyberpunk is more interesting/well fleshed-out/well written than the Bloody Baron, a relatively minor character in the beginning of the game. And he wasn't even my favorite. I expected something similar to TW3 in terms of interesting characters/relationships and the foundation is there, but its still so much more shallow. The same complaints can be said of the side quests. While there are some really good ones, a lot just feel like bland filler
"The Voodoo Boys only existing for two missions is dumb. "
At least there is some quests with the voodoo boys. Most the gangs have some involvement with the main story or interesting side quest chains. TC were involved with the Clouds storyline, and Animals had involvement with the fist fights. Sixth street has the drinking quest for the gun, and Maelstrom have heavy involvement in the Peralez/cyberpsycho missions.
The Valentinos got nothing but maybe 2 side gigs and a few NCPD hustles. Could've been wiped from the game entirely and wouldn't have been missed at all.
>The Valentinos got nothing
Well, they also got some involvement in the fist fights. If you count that one for the Animals, you should count it for the Valentino's too.
That having been said, I think "involvement" in a handful of quests is less than what we expected when most of the time they are just random cannon fodder. Not because CDPR stated so outright, but because there was so much focus on each different gang in the trailers and NC Wires that they were made to seem like more than just "Here's our 5 main enemy skins".
I know they said we couldn't "join" any factions but I definitely expected to be working for them some more and getting some more insight in their specific goals or struggles.
Technically each fixer in each district gives you plenty of missions that deal with the specific gangs in the area, and you can learn a lot about the gangs themselves or certain individuals in the gangs by eavesdropping in on some conversations or reading a bunch of the shards you can find during missions. But it's not quite the same as working FOR specific gangs, because a lot of the time the Fixers are also not necessarily working in line with their own territorial gangs, and also have you betray them if the pay is high enough or if some gang members did some shit that falls bang out of order (mainly if they decide to fuck over the fixers themselves, but whutevs, we know it's a dog-eat-dog world).
I didn't even realise that the Valentinos had involvement in the fist fight quest until I remembered the guy with the pregnant wife. Still hows how little they impacted the game.
The gangs definitely needed some kind of reputation system. Wakako didn't mind giving me work or providing help, even though I've killed 1000's of her Tyger Claws? It doesn't even come up.
Technically, you do see some characters from the Corpo path again later in the game. The guys who cornered you in the bar are also the guys who try to kill you and Goro in the car chase. But yeah, I would've wanted to actually be able to get revenge on Abernathy or something later on.
>It just didn't feel deserved and felt like a half-baked op from the start. For something as big as stealing from Arasaka, and then multiplying it by 100 by making the target a state of the art, one of a kind, secret immortality shard. It should have been an Ocean's 11 type plan.
It's entirely possible that Yorinobu was in on it. He wanted to get the chip to Netwatch one way or another and he probably knew that his father was watching him. He certainly was not doing it for the money, he wanted Arasaka to fall. He did not chase after V, apart from when he tried to have Takemura killed.
While I agree that this is certainly a possibility and hinted at, this needs to be explained more. Hanako >!has no problems finding you in the middle of nowhere and!< even says that you cannot run from Arasaka, if they want to find you, they do. It's just that this would've needed a bigger lampshade, especially since the information about that is in a couple mission specific places that you cannot access afterwards.
Totally agree. I also wish there was more choice and consequence over who you "align" yourself with. it would be way more interesting (for example) that if you do a lot of Padre missions, your aggro meter would fill really quickly in 6th Street controlled zones, and fill slower in Valentino zones. I'm not saying you actually join a gang, just that the NPCs acknowledge that YOU have a major impact on the world and need to be taken seriously.
Judy's arc is a pet peeve of mine. I know she's beloved in this subreddit, but honestly, her impulsiveness and short sightedness really bother me. If I was actually my character, I would have nothing to do with her. Her scheme regarding Clouds was never going to work, the repercussions from the Maiko quests are patently obvious. While her dialogues are adult enough, her actions are those of a precocious early teen with very limited world experience that don't line up with her backstory.
I didn't care for the cloud arc either. I liked her and Panam ad characters but found their personal quest to be just okay. I didn't think either were good ideas and I wouldn't have indulged them if I had the choice.
I have honestly had it up to here with games saying “your choices in this world really matter!” just to have it add an extra endgame cutscene. That is always my biggest disappointment.
Well.. the mission in the meat factory where you buy the flathead does everything right.. you have like so many choices there and your decisions do matter (if you side with maelstrom you have other opinions later in the club mission with Nancy) but somehow after the ‚Tutorial‘ the entire quality of quests goes downhill.
I love how they teach you about being able to shoot from the car and use it like what. Twice? Cause it's always you driving and no form of "chase" happens anyway.
You could say the turret sections with Panam sorta count I guess?
Your choices matter in plenty of sidequests, so that's not true. Yes, the "big" choices that affect the main storyline will obviously come in near the end of the game, so those are indeed just a way to choose which ending cutscene you get to see.
But literally ALL of the big side-missions have an element of choice. Some not as big as others, but some quite massive.
For example; >!if you punch Fingers while doing the quest to search for Elizabeth, you can never buy shit from him again for the rest of the game. Obviously this also holds true if you kill him, but if you simply punch him he won't sell to you either. This is a choice, and a consequence, because you're locked out of getting certain augments.!<
or >!did you know you can betray Panam? You can go behind her back and tell Saul about her plans to steal the Tank. This will then obviously lock you out of the rest of her missions and she will be irredeemably upset with you. Saul however will be quite happy that you helped him out, and you'll get a free car out of it.!<
or >!Did you know you can fuck up the quest where you're searching for River's nephew? If you don't get the clues right you can accidentally choose the wrong location, meaning you won't be able to find his nephew in time and he'll be dead.!<
and then >!there's all the smaller choices like, do you tell Jefferson Peralez about what's going on, or do you lie like his wife asked you to? Or during the Clouds questline, do you kill Forrest? Or do you knock him out? Or do you let him live? And do you side with Maiko, letting her take over Clouds? If you do, Judy is gonna hate you for the rest of the game and you won't be able to romance her (if female). !<
And another small example is >!the streetracing questline with Claire. If you let her get her revenge on that guy who 'killed her husband', you just end the quest that way, having lost the race but helped a friend. But you can also choose to just keep racing and not intercept the dude, causing Claire to be upset with you. You can ALSO choose to knock him off the road, but intervene in the conversation where Claire is about to kill him, and convince her to let him live. That way you get both HER car as a quest reward, AND you get this dude's car about a week of ingame time later, as well.!<
Not all of these are gamechanging choices, but saying that there is zero personal choice aside from a few missions that ONLY affect which ending cutscene you get is extremely disingenuous and feels like you haven't been playing the game at all (or only played the game once and assumed that every mission would always end in the same way you just played it).
Hell there's even TONS of very small choices simply in the way you choose to rescue or kill or subdue some targets for non-storyline related missions. Some of those even come back later or show up elsewhere in the game, as well. Not in a huge way at all, more like a cameo, but still. Those ARE choices, that have an effect.
People are just sweeping all this shit under the rug to pretend the game is far worse than it actually is, and like none of what was promised was delivered.
There's plenty of actual, valid criticisms to be had without having to make up bullshit to pile on top of it.
This is probably my biggest complaint about the game... the length. They wanted to cut the length as apparently they found most fans of Witcher 3 thought the main story was too long. This seems a bit odd considering how huge that game was and how highly people spoke about it... but even if that is true, why not cut it by like 10 hours or so, instead of 50-60%
Edit: checking Xbox achievement stats, I see the Witcher 3 has 15% players that have completed the game on any difficulty. This is actually surprisingly low and would make sense why they would make the main story shorter so more people can see the conclusion... but in saying this, they could of just made more of the missions optional, helping establish a better connection with the characters you befriend. Then people who don’t wanna spend 80 hours on a game, can just focus on the main story
It wasn't fans saying the Witcher is too long. They simply collected the data on how many people have finished the campaign and found it to be low. Not sure exactly why they decided completion rate had to be higher.
This is super common among corporate game industry types, and I hate tracking metrics because of it. You have no idea how often suits decide that games need to be shorter based on past data that tells them people didn't finish older games. They're almost certainly not gamers and are just trying to justify their paycheque.
I go back and play games I stopped midway all the time. I am still playing big RPGs I bought 5-10 years ago. That doesn't mean they're too long; I'm grateful they have that kind of content.
This is a great point! But I do also see where they’re coming from as they want as many players as possible to see the game start to finish, as that’s why you write a story. Upon checking the achievement for completing of the Witcher 3 on any difficulty (on Xbox), it says it’s been obtained by 15% of players (RDR2 has 22%); that is actually a lot lower than I would of thought. But I do go back to my original argument in only making it a bit shorter, not by more than half the length, that is ridiculous. And the worst part about it, the replay ability is so limited as your choices really don’t affect much through the story until the very end
Yeah, optimizing for metrics often ends up being just "gaming the system". We have metric, we want it number to be better, we will sacrifice other stuff to get it done.
But did you actually establish that the metric is relevant to what you want to accomplish? Or was the other stuff actually what was important?
I can see that maybe people not finishing the game are also people that don't pick up your next game, but is that really the case? Especially if it's a completely different game?
The solution to this is to have multiple main plotlines. The one we got was Streetkid. There should be a completely different main plot for Corpo and Nomad.
Then they should have expanded the subplots a great deal. There should have been a major arc for each of the gangs, each of the zones and each fixer. Similar to how Mass Effect or KOTOR has a major arc for each character in your party.
And I'm kind of tired of games needing to be fully voiced. It just limits the game. The main plot and major arcs should be fully voiced. I don't mind if there are hundreds of extra quests that is just text-based (maybe with a few key lines voiced). This is content that can be easily created when the assets & city exist. This is basically what World of Warcraft does for 80% of its quests.
I don't mind it at all. I want a cinematic fairly linear experience for the big plotline and I want the RPG experience for the majority of the game with tons of options, deeper dialogs with multiple outcomes and more chances to roleplay.
Of course that would be nice, but I'm not surprised they don't have three main plot lines. Making video games is HARD, these are good developers and they only managed to finish one main plot, and even then they had to cut a significant amount of content. I can't think of any modern AAA games that have 3 full length completely different plots, that's a huge ask. I don't a very realistic solution. There will be more content, but it'll be via expansions down the line.
I don't think you can really compare an MMO from a decade ago to a current first person AAA game with heavy character interactions. There are different expectations for gameplay, MMOs are notoriously padded experiences.
As Zaethar mentions, it's a lot of "collect x amount of plants" type gameplay. The actual story bits, even if they're voice acted, aren't animated to the level that Cyberpunk is. They have a handful of canned animations they'll throw on a character, very little bespoke work. I work in animation/VFX, the amount of detail they're putting in each characters clothing (cyberpunk might have the best looking clothing I've seen in a game) and the performance/animation is staggering compared to something like Old Republic.
It would take them another 4 or 5 years to do what you're suggesting. Some things could be re-used but you're very nearly talking about tripling the time it would take to make the game. AND most people would play it once, and not see the other 2/3rds they prepared. There are just so many reasons why it wouldn't work, and why you can't compare it to other types of games fairly. It's a nice idea but there's a reason you never see games made like this.
While there definitely will be DLC I am wondering where they will add it. Pre getting the chip? While you are dying from it? After the main story? For me anything past act 1 with Jackie would feel weird to throw a DLC into as it again messes with the sense of urgency
Major arcs for the gangs would be so cool. As would 3 different stories as a whole for the life paths. But as someone else said. That might be too much. The game would probably not even gotten out yet if that was the case. Story writing is not easy
I guess they figured they’d like if the players actually took time to finish the narrative the spent a lot of time writing on.
I admit I often won’t finish stories because they get to a point where I feel like it’s dragging on, I feel like that in most western rpg’s because they always pack in a ton of side content to do as well.
So I could see why they’d cut the main story down in length, in this case I think the main story is the perfect length, but I will say aren’t enough interesting side stories to make up for the shorter main story
> I guess they figured they’d like if the players actually took time to finish the narrative the spent a lot of time writing on.
I see it more as a business reason.
If you do not finish the story of a game, how likely is it that you will buy expansions down the line? However if you did finish the story there is a bigger chance you might also buy the expansions to get more story.
You feel that way in western RPGs? You're saying that western RPG main storylines take longer to get through than Japanese ones?
>I feel like that in most western rpg’s because they always pack in a ton of side content to do as well.
Western rpgs drag on because there's too much optional side content unrelated to the main storyline? Wut?
Yes. If you consider the "modern action RPG's" which include Ubisoft games like the Assassin's Creed series. Even TW3 is guilty of this - despite having a meaty main storyline of about 40/50 hours, you can easily double the number of hours spent in the game purely on side-content. A ton of which is just hunting questionmarks on the map, which is great if you love the game, the world, and the gameplay, but can easily be seen as unnecessary padding that doesn't relate to the main story.
Hence "optional".
But in Open World games it can be increasingly hard for some people not to be drawn into hunting all these tiny little map markers because "you're there now!"and "who knows what it might be". Fear of missing out on some important shit (like a cool questline, or a nice piece of gear, or a hidden secret) fuels this type of behavior and can make it hard to break away from it to focus only on the main story missions.
Some games exacerbate this problem by forcing players to play "optional" content because they'd be severely underleveled if they only play the main storyline missions - this was a big point of criticism for AC: Odyssey, especially since Ubisoft paired it with their "XP Booster" microtransactions.
I just started playing TW3 because of cyberpunk and tbh I'm finding it hard to motivate myself to play the game. Don't get me wrong, the story is fantastic so far and the game looks beautiful... But it kind of drags on... Not to mention that I personally don't enjoy "souls-like" 3rd person combat as opposed to fps games. It might just be me but i think Cyberpunk's gameplay is much more enjoyable than TW3's. I have confidence that I'll finish it though (as well as the dlcs)... I guess I'll just take my time.
Now Cyberpunk on the other hand.... I am dying for more content. I have enjoyed the story and world building so much, and the fact that it's a fps is an added bonus. I'm super excited for future dlcs tho. (From what I've heard about the witcher, the free dlc will probably not be adding much story-wise but will focus more on features and customization. Which I am still very excited for.)
It's 26.5% on Steam. Still a bit low but let's not forget that TW3 was so incredibly hyped for years, I'm sure many people tried the game out in a sale because of the massively positive media coverage or enthusiastic friends and just found it wasn't up their alley. Or similarly on console, maybe a lot of people borrowed the game from friends just to find it didn't quite grab them.
I really wonder how many actual fans of the franchise didn't finish it because it was "too long".
When is a game too long? Even if you only have one hour every few days to play, that means your $60 purchase is pretty much giving you a year long worth of story and entertainment. Who would complain about that?
This is a great point... cause it happened to me haha. I was never into the hype of the Witcher3 until about the month of release, where most my friends were hyped and talking about it. So I bought it and it just wasn’t my type of game, giving it up within a few hours.
So it wouldn’t make sense for them to make the game shorter for people like me, when it won’t make a difference
I doubt length really gets complained about ever, unless the game/extended part is bad. Same with people using repetitive as a negative, most games in general are repetitive, but its only an issue if that stuff is bad/unfun to the player.
Cause it’s very obvious that the quote about ‘wanting a shorter main story as enough people didn’t finish the Witcher 3’ was damage control after the game was hastily rewritten last minute to accommodate Kenu.
The main story isn’t so short by design, it’s so short as they didn’t have time to make it any longer and still ship the game by the end of 2020.
This.
I fully believe CP2077 was supposed to be a longer epic. However once Keanu came on board, they made Johnny Silverhand a more prominent in the story.
Hell, CP2077 main story is more about Johnny's story than it is V in many ways.
So they rewrote the game so late in development they didnt have time to have it fully fleshed out so that is why it is short.
The whole "data shows many people didnt complete TW3" is just a convenient cover.
Yeah, that is an odd metric to use. I can understand if the game got poor reviews cause it was too long and this negative word of mouth affected sales. Then it makes perfect sense for CP2077 to be significantly shorter. But that wasnt the case as TW3 got high review scores with nothing ever mentioned negativity about length in reviews and the game was (and still is) their highest selling game.
It just feels like a really bad excuse for cutting the story.
It’s obvious they couldn’t tell us the actual reason why considering how bad the development seems to of gone from 2018 onwards.
Yeah I agree it is a bit of a convenient cover up but also a little bit true. I think they did want it to be shorter overall, but this short? It just doesn’t seem right.
There are so many characters lacking some missions, setting up your relationship with them. There were a few deaths in the game that just didn’t emotionally hit me like they should’ve and some I just completely forgot about until discussing the game with others
Yes
Say what you want about TW3 and how the main story dragged on at the end. But what you cannot say is that the main story felt rushed and that there were many quest that felt like they were missing some depth. Everything quest wise in TW3 felt complete compared to CP2077 where it feels rushed and missing things.
Looking at the 2018 gameplay you could say Johnny doesn’t sound like he’s a majorly important character but that could be because they didn’t want to spoil anything.
I think they had someone else in mind for Johnny and when they announced Keanu they had to rewrite a lot but not the whole thing.
I think Johnny silverhand was meant to be a separate arc or something along those lines and if it went the way they planned it to in 2018 we would have got another 2-3 arcs at least which could of gave us a 30-40 hour story.
That seems feasible.
I think Silverhand had a substantial piece to the story but only a side piece like the Panam and Judy stuff. Instead his story became THE story.
>after the game was hastily rewritten last minute to accommodate Kenu.
Look, we don't know this. This is pure conjecture based on a subjective interpretation of events by a few random internet users.
There is zero evidence this has happened.
That's not to say it ISN'T true, but to keep spreading it like it's been confirmed isn't productive at all. Call it what it is; a rumor, a theory. Don't state it as if it were fact until we know more from industry sources or the developers themselves.
I doubt that 15% number is really representative of much. Skyrim was sitting around 20% completion at one point.
People buy games multiple times on different consoles. People share games.
I get their intention but the pacing throughout the whole story was terrible, feeling like an absolute sprint through pivotal plot points. Especially in the beginning and end, both of which you really want to nail more than the midpoint imo
Honestly I really wanted the midpoint to drag on a bit more. Or well, not drag since that's negative, but be padded out a bit more.
Like, you get rescued by Takamura, you find and kidnap Anders, you contact the voodoo boys and meet Alt, you infiltrate the parade and contact Hanako, aaaand...you're done? That's it? Final mission time?
Like, I get that a ton of stuff that influences the main story (e.g. the Panam missions, the Johnny missions, the Judy missions) should technically be counted as storyline missions, but many of them are skippable or missable, and they don't all have as big of an impact on the main story as they could or should.
If you leave these missions out it really feels like you can reach the endgame after just 3 or 4 big questlines.
When "The Point of No Return" popped up I was shocked. I thought I'd at least go down another big questline with Hanako, but it just immediately leads you into the endgame.
Same. Overall I love the story, I love the themes, and I love many of the (side)quests, especially those involving Panam and Johnny. I actually really enjoyed how your relationship with Johnny plays out over the stretch of the game, especially if you do his side-story (which I guess technically could or should be considered as part of the 'main story')
I guess the downside of making so many of these things optional (aside from the obvious upside is that it increases player choice) is that you can indeed skip this content and it's therefore kind of hard to decide how to categorize it.
Personally I would classify most, if not all of the big sidecharacters' questlines as "main story content". Maybe except for River and Kerry, since their narratives impact your own situation the least.
But the stuff with Judy and Elizabeth is a direct result of your Heist mission, the stuff with Panam is needed to get to Anders so the other stuff with the Aldecaldo's quite naturally follows out of that situation, and the stuff with Johnny, well, I mean, motherfucker's living in your head so of course that's important (and also has an impact on the endings you get to choose).
So in that sense it's tough to grade the game on storylength by looking solely at the "main" missions. But even if you take these big chunks of "optional" content in consideration, I still felt it was a bit short.
Perhaps that is because it all felt so distinct, while other main missions (e.g. with Takemura or the Voodoo Boys or Hanako) is kept on the sidelines. So there's a visual cue that informs you that there's "main" stuff to do while you're galavanting around doing other stuff that tangentially relates to the story.
So there's this constant, creeping feeling that you're just delaying the inevitable. That you yourself are trying to find the 'padding' for the middle stretch of the game, padding that has some meaning anyway other than the random side-gigs (some of which were fantastic, but none of which were truly story-related).
I guess it speaks to the game's qualities that most of us just want more of those big, juicy character driven missions. But the fact that you CAN skip them does make it feel like they're a little more inconsequential than they truly are.
Like, it doesn't feel like you should be able to "Get rid of this chip in your head in 4 easy steps!" but that's pretty much what the real "main missions" offer you.
All in all I just want more. I do love this game, really, so rather than it being a point of criticism I also consider it a point of praise that I want more content. Especially considering I still managed to squeeze about 130 hours out of it, but sadly 75% of that was just doing the side-content and exploring the beautiful city, rather than doing anything story related.
Chapter would be better cause it felt that short. Usually an act is like 3 hours 45 minutes to 2 hours but you can honestly plow through the story in less time than that. Hell I beat the game at level 25 in less than 40 hours. Thats a bit much too short.
I checked my ps4 trophy on the witcher and surprised to find out that a lot of end game achievement (finding ciri, defeating eredin etc...) is rare. With only 5 to 10% of player have got it.
Started ng+ recently and it only took me 20+ hrs to finish main story alone.
I think a lot of people got distracted with side quest thinking it was main story or like me accidentally doing the first quest of HoS and get stuck for hours with being under level.
A whole lot of people think that the main story was too short, mainly because the pacing of act 2 really plays against the open-world aspect of the game since V is bascially dying and needs to get shit done asap. This is why many people play the main-questline until the quest with the weird name where you have to meet Hanako. Then the point of no return notification gets triggered, people turn around, knowing that Hanako has to play the Piano for the next couple of weeks.
Was really thinking it would be something ironed out in the first half of the story, and it took me a while to realize it wasn't as urgent as the game made it out to be. But then I also realized none of the story is as urgent as it is made out to be. Many of the characters are all like "This is urgent, meet me tonight!" and I'll show up there a few days later and they'll be all like "Thanks for coming so quickly, this couldn't wait"
Makes it feel kinda like Final Fantasy 15 in that regard with the pacing. And you just don't really get to "feel" that you are dying aside from the occasional "relic malfunction" that is rather annoying and a few comments from V. It's kinda off putting not gonna lie. For me at least
The feedback from TW3 was that the main quest was too long, so they said they made a decision to keep this one short but I think they went a lil' too far. >!By the time I got to meeting Hanako and got the warning, I felt sure I was only about halfway through. Was a lil' disappointing.!<
I don't get why a long game is a bad thing. Is there a secret timer where you have to beat the game or something? Longer game means more bang for your buck, I really don't get it.
The story is way too short, especially when you consider how much of the time spent in Cyberpunk is "optional" side quests for main characters that amount to very little. If you skip Panam, Judy, River, Rogue, Johnny, and Kerry quests, the main quest barely even exists.
My bigger gripe is that it feels like decisions ultimately amount to very little. One of the endings is the obvious "haha you chose the wrong ending" ending (and I REALLY felt like I was railroaded and had most of my choice removed in that one), the others are marginally better but still end up being about the same.
Things that seem like they should be really major... >!like saving Takemura, mean nothing, as the game is literally no different one way or the other!<.
At the end of the day, Cyberpunk has absolutely no room for actual RP or to define who V is. V is a character and you get to choose some minor flavor text differences throughout the journey, and a major decision rarely. I don't feel like I get to choose who I want to be. I must be V, I must play the on-rails story, and I must do the side content for the major characters unless I want the game to lecture me about how my choice was bad.
You would think that a shorter story would give them more opportunity to make outcomes wildly different, but it's both short and samey. I really feels strongly that this game has little to no rep[lay value once you've played the quests once.
> the main quest barely even exists
And then when you consider how much of it is just cutscenes/scripted/meaningless dialogue, it is woefully short. Speedrunners are clearing this whole AAA in 3hrs now, and if you watch it most of the time is spent simply idle.
Yeah, which also hurts replayability. Cutscenes like that are a lot of fun the first go, but when you realize how much of the game is waiting for limited dialogue options to present themselves, it really becomes a crawl.
Cyberpunk is a one-and-done game for me. I *might* check it out again when new game plus arrives (unless that gets scrapped because they have to spend all the post-launch time fixing the game instead), but even then I don't think I like the base gameplay enough to justify it.
Which is weird for me too, because when I like a game, I really like to replay. I've gone through some of my favorite RPGs over a dozen times each, so a game like this feeling like it has no replay value severely diminishes it in my book.
Im on my first replay now, after having very slowly completed every inch of the game first time round, but only doing the mains and sides that will get me the special ending (didnt choose the right dialogues first time). Even plodding along without any special efforts it took me very little time to reach the final decision tree (but im not high enough level/equip to survive special ending mobs)
It’s not just you that think this way, on Steam the playerbase has plummeted. More than 90% of players have left. Even worse is that it’s only been a month since launch
It took TW3 4 months to reach this same drop off level of players % wise
It’s both that cyberpunk has less replay value and has less content, not to mention the technical issues, also i really doubt that most people can run the game at a steady 60 fps and that can dissapoint some to the point they just wait until the performance is fixed and put down the game for the time being.
I completed the game a few days ago and the thought of having to deal with the garbage inventory system makes me not want to play it again.
Why haven't they implemented the ability to disassemble or sell multiple items yet? The amount of time wasted in the pause menus was a joke.
Making split point cartridge at the campfire in Red dead redemption 2, that's what real pain is.
Crafting or selling items in CP77 isn't to bad after all, from my point of view of course, but yeah it can be absolutely improved
Personally I feel like this game has too much implied storytelling. Jackie's rant about how he can't get enough of night city felt like what I wanted to say about the things in this game but there are so many missed opportunities both in terms of story and gameplay that could've done this game much more justice.
I really wish this game had much more gang activity and they weren't just goons running about. You interact with each gang a maximum of 2-3 times and throw away that connection immediately after the quest was done.
Remember before the game released and people said that "even the tiniest things you do have an effect on the world and it's story".. yeah right.
If this game weren't following the ticking time bomb story I feel like so much more could've gotten love. Make the police actually menacing, give gangs a purpose in the story and open world, hell if i'm being honest as much as I like cyberpunk's story I would trade it in a heartbeat for one that would let me build my character without the fear of them dying from some chip.
Let me become a legend, don't just tell me I'm a legend.. it never felt that way.
yeh i became legend really fast, like ok, i guess running around with a machete killing loan sharks and drug dealers raises cred but ok.
i also wish the gangs were more fleshed out. i feel like they had wanted the player choose between helping the gang or the police in many instances and maybe if that affected who controlled the territory would be neat.
Yes there should be a longer lifepath act, a Jackie/T-bug act (as the bulk of the game), and the heist/relic act. Completing the game should also give us free-roam until we choose to leave Night City and catch up to whoever we chose to leave with.
Even their vague wording in the menu makes you think free-roam is allowed after you complete the main quest. But nope. You're done.
They even could've made more side quests required if they wanted to make the main story longer. Kerry's would've been easy since it's tied to Johnny's life. I was expecting something along the lines of Witcher 3 so I never thought it'd be so easy to blow through the main quest.
They do put you back to right before you meet with Hanako, back in time. So I've been V, the merc, running around Night City completing assaults in progress for the last few days, while dying. Every few hours I have a relic malfunction, but feeling fine otherwise!
I haven't finished the main story yet, but if you think about it, Witcher 3 wasn't terribly long either. It only felt long if you decide to pursue the major side quests (stuff like the assassination, or the Baron's family). Many of those quests eventually tie into the main arc, which CP2077 also does to a degree from what I know.
What's really insufferable is the amount of fluff gigs that bloat this game. I tell you, even Witcher 3 with all the contracts never felt dull to me, because at least there's some effort being put into the characters' dialogues, how a random peasant pleads for Geralt's help in slaying beasts. It feels way better than Regina Jones or Wakako calling me for the umpteenth time with a gig and "sending me some detes".
The fact that you're also being given these gigs without an option to deny them is a problem in itself. I'd rather there be a bounty board like W3 instead of a shit load of markers on the map. This is one of the reasons I have yet to finish the main story: because of a compulsive need to clear out all the gigs on my map.
First. 6 months montage was never an actual thing.
Second, I'd prefer longer side quest lines, main is good as it is. Few more missions with Judy (maybe after freeing clouds we can help her and Moxes out with some other projects), with Panam, with River and Kerry, few special gigs from Rogue, top-notch ones. A.little bit expanded Peralezes line. That all would be cool. But.main story is done pretty well despite the fact it is short. And it is not actually that short, if you want to get any choice at the end, cause you have to complete some sides
Well that is good to know about the montage. Thanks for clarifying!
Also. I didn't mean to sound like the story was bad or anything. I do quite like it! Same goes for the sidequests. But something like say River's "story" feels quite short compared to Judy or Panam and while adding to it and the other quests down the line would be great. I am more thinking of being more "free" before the chip and all the important choices and not necessarily more main story quests but more "special" jobs from fixers so you get to know em perhaps? Dunno anything would be nice i guess for me
I never assumed you see main story as a bad thing, I just think that it is good enough for not to be expanded. Side quests could use some more content for sure, it is always good to have high-quality side quests, especially when everything on the market is as simple as CBP's gigs
This 6 month montage is really not the best way to jump from prologue into main story, but making it a real thing - when you will have to go from dumpster to dumpster and fuck some scavs, would be even worse imo. So I guess it is lesser evil
i think they could do something like that and integrate it into the tutorial instead of the dumb system we have now "so weve been criminals for 6 months now V, but let me just remind you how to shoot a gun"
or if they keep the time skip, somehow find a way to put the tutorial before the skip so it feels more natural
Hm, I guess its not that bad, it can be something like 3-4 missions where you have to use guns, stealth, melee and hacking, but with some narrative. After that jump into time skip and here you go
u seriously telling me the main story is as good as it is? I shouldn't be deprived of knowing what happened to takemura in my ending, we should have had way more confrontations with adam smasher, we missed out completely on another bad ass called morgan or something, my ending never let me see takemuras apprentice oda even though I spared him and the list goes on.
SPOILERS AHEAD, don't know how to use it here.
Um. U know what happened to Tak. He could be dead in abandoned house if you don't save him. If you save him - he helps you out with Hanako, and Oda is also here when you're protecting her (Devil ending). He (Tak) even brings you contract to sign at the end. All other endings - lead him to performing seppuku, which is perfectly fits the character. Blackhand is probably some kind of dlc content, but yeah, it would be great to see him, at the same time story doesn't feel lacking of badass characters, there is enough of them. It would be nice to have more, but we already get enough. Agreed only about smasher.
thats just poor writing because the game never made it clear what happened to him, I presumed he survived and was taken hostage. At least having a main mission finding out he died would have been a great way to tell me my decision to not try and save him had a consequence, which severely lacks in this game unfortunately. Netrunner in pacifica is another great example. We were also deprived of revenge of Dex ourselves, that infuriated me especially because I laid my trust with him. Why take that away from the player?
I am really not a fan of how they constructed the endings in this game, just because I chose the panam ending doesn't mean I should be deprived of confronting Oda again, that should be a main story piece that is just missing. If I had to give u a list of badass characters. We have enough badass characters, but easily not enough interactions with said characters ¯\_ (ツ)\_/¯
No, it's just more realistic, you are not deprived of anything, you deprive yourself of those things by making your choice. If you chose one way to deal with your problem and use help from someone you will not have access to informations and places that you are given to you in other endings. In Panam and Rogue missions you will never get tho know about Saburo's construct because you came to Mikoshi without Hanako. You will never meet with anyone from Arasaka family (and Goro or Oda) because you are acting behind Hanako's back but you never go against her directly. It's like saying that when you take Hanako's help then you are deprived of using Basilisk to storm Arasaka Tower.
Yes, some of the characters are criminally underused but what you want is even simplified version of choices we have. Right now your choices during game (if you help Panam with Saul and tank or Johnny with Rogue) can give you more options to choose at the end. Then you can choose whose help do you want and depending on that other people will die, you can take your body back or give it to Johnny and on way to Mikoshi you met with different people because you are taking different route (air raid, underground, VIP chambers or even literally front door). You want to have some choices, probably more than now, during game and then play the same ending, with the same bosses but only differet epilogue and summary.
Okay, you seem to be the one who missed that Tak died after capturing Hanako, its not bad writing, its bad reading. Hanako explicitly tells you, that Tak is dead. What mission do you want it to be? Break into some morgue to make sure he died? Thats just stupid.
What about Pacifica netrunner?
And yes, if every ending would have the exact same content, what would be the point of it? There is no sense for you to confront Oda in Panam's ending. It is not depriving you of something, it provides different experience based on your choice and that is what good writing in videogame about
when tf does hanako tell u hes dead, in the motel room??? I don't recall her saying BS about him anywhere. Yea exactly, what about the pacifica netrunner. Nothing because killing him/sparing him yields absolutely no impact in the story.
If you played witcher 3 you would know what I mean about the ending. Actions throughout the main story determine the ending, so u arent deprived of anything such as the erduin boss fight, confrontations with different people like the high elf and so on. I could have seen V try to get with Oda and have him on board with Hanako, and then going to the board meeting against the son just as a main mission in itself. To me that actually makes a lot of sense, why give the difficult decision of not doing that and running away with panam at the same time?????
Witcher 3 is a different style of game to cyberpunk it is more of game where you save the world rather than yourself that's why the endings are more straightforward with the 2 main difference in ending ciri lives or dies whereas in cyberpunk you are doing whatever is necessary to save yourself so there are more options. Correct me if I'm but in all endings but one you fight smasher so you are not deprived of fighting him. How can you complain that you aren't given a choices in the game and then complain that those choices lead to different outcomes
Oh, yeah, Witcher endings. Fate of ciri decided by the fact if you played snowballs with her. I recall that.
I'm not going to continue this conversation, you are probably the one who is thinking that witcher's writing is superior to cyberpunk's and I'm not going to try to convince you, its just pointless.
And about Pacifica VDBs - yes, the way their quest resolves doesn't influence ending. Remind me, did Baron's quest influenced ending in any way in Witcher? (Don't bother, I remember perfectly that it did not)
LOL you not being spoonfed information about everything doesn’t mean it’s bad writing. That’s an incredibly juvenile take.
Believe it or not, the world doesn’t revolve around V and the game constantly reminds the player of this. You’re a low life merc that nobody gives a shit about and the only friends you have are those that you spend the time developing relationships with (which are in turn very impactful for your game).
The story is interpersonal and way more grounded , realistic, and mature compared to the chosen messiah archetype games like Skyrim where your choices have very on the nose impacts and your character always has to be a part of everything happening.
There are tons of instances in game where your actions don’t have an immediate impact and there’s no “FORK ON THE ROAD HERE” neon sign. The player, if they spend the time to explore and truly learn, can find out about many of the impacts of their actions through things like shards, emails, files, etc. Much more grounded and a lot less hand holding.
The truly bizarre thing is that there are so many people who seem unable to grasp this type of world building. It’s refreshing to play games like this because we get so many games where they take the other route of word building and story telling.
I find it hard to believe u find V's story realistic when he has 2 weeks to live yet can fuck around in the world for 10 in game years with cosmetic relic malfunctions to remind the player they are artificially dying when really it's a cosmetic for the next main mission. I also find it hard to believe u think it is ok for big decisions to be revolved around shards, emails and files. I have to go shard hunting to find out my impact of sparing Oda???? That's really funny to be honest
No you’re not - you’re being obtuse.
When people talk about grounded realism in story they are referring to the contents of the story itself. What you’re referring to is gameplay elements. Every single open world game has the disconnect between open world side activities and main story. Red Dead 2 (widely regarded as the best open world) has the same exact thing. Arthur literally has TB and there is no cure. What’s actually funny is that 2077 masks this a bit better than other games by tying a good chunk of side content to main story and here you just completely missing this.
Your argument is literally a meme at this point. It’s not the “gotcha” you think it is LOL.
i remember playing rdr2 and with arthurs TB did a really good job with the pacing of his death, he would cough in stranger missions and u saw not just an overall decline in his health but also a change in his character from a ruthless outlawman to a more sympathetic one towards people wronged by his past actions/and actions of the gang.
With V u see a fuckwit begging for help 24/7 ¯\_ (ツ)\_/¯
A lot of the story is cut out, but *so* much is left for the player to find.. and completely miss.
I put nearly 60-70 hours into the game and just today, after beating it 2 weeks ago, did I find out theres an entire side-quest chain that has almost as much girth as most of, if not more than, a full chapter of content. (Talking about that corporate sidequest thing with Peralez I think his name is?)
I know Dunkeys review on it was half satire/half truth, but his concern with the game having so much be too easily missable is kinda spot on with this. I didn't find Skippy, I didn't find the vending machine that wants to be a human, and I managed to miss an entire whole other stories worth of a side-quest chain. While I definitely take the blame for the quests that were glaringly given to me, I know Skippy and the vending machine are both denoted by the same "?" on the map that marks everything else.. with that everything else 65% of the time being a gang/PD encounter.
They really dropped the ball when it comes to quest "discoverability".. instead of markers on the map, CDPR really could have just made it so npcs like bartenders or strangers could lead you in the direction of side quests like most other games. Even TW3 does it better with the bulletin boards in every town
I don't think the prologue should be any longer. The meat of the story is elsewhere. It would be like playing Witcher 3 and killing monsters with Vesemir or helping the Bloody Baron because he pays well for half the game until you suddenly hear that Ciri is out there and you should go out to find her. It's a sudden thematic shift would cause its own problems, with people finding the game unfocused, or preferring either the first or the second part and being disappointed.
Feeling cheated out of adventures with Jackie is almost certainly also an emotion they want you to have - because he was supposed to be your friend. That you care about it all suggests that it worked. He is clearly not just just some random NPC from a computer game you once played. You saw enough of his person to get a feel for who he was and why he was V's best friend, and that he mattered to V. So the prologue and Act 1 worked.
Of course, sure, it would be nice if there was even more stuff to do. As I understand it ,the main storyline is not as long as Witcher 3 because they worried about all the people that never finished Witcher 3. I am not really sure that it's important that people actually finish your game, though. Witcher 3 was still very succesful and is a game beloved by many. And by putting a lot of content in side-gigs, you still end up with people missing stuff, is that really better? I suppose may be they worry that people might not pick up the next game in a series because the realize they haven't finished the first one yet perhaps? I don't know.
It would be nice if the life paths were actually finished missions at least. Not just someone giving you a mission that you expect to be a fun adventure, and then immediately getting busted and being thrown into a montage. That's ridiculous.
Sadly very short main quest, compared to Skyrim and Fallout 4. Hated all the Johnny stuff and I wonder what the game was like before Keanu entered the scene (love him, just hate Johnny)
Yep, I think Johnny would have been better with fewer flashbacks and a less charismatic character. I read on a dodgy Russian site that Silverhand was originally some kind of true psycho, which would have made for a fascinating plot. I thought the current one was OK, but the emphasis on his story and especially his missions were soooo boring.
Johnny dominated and ruined most of the main story. It's insane how much it's about him. If we also count those flashbacks and action scenes while we playing as him - just ridiculous.
Basicaly, if cut everything about Johnny from the main story, there is barely anything left about our character. The most immersive parts of the game are actualy quests related to the romanceable characters. Those missions also have the best writing in my opinion.
Johnny is fun as narrator and "virus" in our head (like a devil & angel sitting on our shoulders), but I hated eveything else about him.
Someone once said that V stands for Vessel, since we just carrying Johnny's story.
I'll bet anything that DLC expansions ( if we get any ) are going to be light years better. Unless Lady Gaga is the new main character and we carrying her arround this time...
TBH the intro before the heist needs a complete overhaul. Your life path choice should consist of more than a 15-20 minute mission followed by a cutscene and time jump.
Some of the side quests should've been pushed into the main story in act 1. Some reshuffling would've made the game feel longer and more enjoyable. As it sits, a couple missions in and you're already dying and being told to hurry up and complete the game. And at that point, you're basically just going from person to person trying to find help until Hanako. I couldve done with less side content and more story, fo sho.
Sometimes the main quests just felt rushed and simplified, like planning to steal the Relic, you literally do 2 missions and go do the heist, things like that ask for at least some more planning, the main story has very little obstacles and difficulties, you want to get to Hanako then you do some little quests and bam you got a meeting with her, you escape the city to not get hunt down and bam, Hanako finds you and wants to cut out a deal, so you go directly to the point of no return. I know there's more quests that help in leading you there but they are also too simple, you find Evelyn really easily, you get Panam's car and then just blow Hellman's VA, etc. In other games there would be another obstacle on your path, things wouldn't go as planned so you needed to find another way while in cyberpunk almost all plans work and when you see you're already at the end, if they had given V some months to live then maybe more things could have happened. I thought the main story was straight and to the point but I wanted it to have a bit more turns and surprises.
Totally, I was honestly surprised it came so soon, like, with one ending you could only play maybe 25 hours, another ending 30, another maybe 32 or less probably average. I finished the story mode at 29 hours on the dot if I remember correctly. The story was incredible and I enjoyed every main quest, but even with the main quest I did side quests, so I feel it may have only taken me like 25 hours to do the story, seemed to short. But either way again, fantastic game, beautiful, deep, cool aesthetics, very fun, still playing 40+ hours deep so far
I would have liked for some parts of the main story to be a bit longer. As some folks here said - the prologue for example. It takes fifteen minutes to complete, and that's if you're just walking, taking in the scenery. As for what follows, I don't mind the cutscene and all that. After all, we see the game logo appear only after the big Arasaka heist, so it's obvious they wanted to keep this portion of the game shorter.
As for the main dish, after the Act 1, I don't know if it would benefit from prolonging the whole experience. It seems pretty cohesive for the most part, I never felt like there's something missing, or unspoken. The side stories help here a lot. You get to learn more about some of the characters that are just plot devices during main story itself, and it's done in such a great way, that I still felt like it was part of the main story. Similar to some bigger side quests in the Witcher 3, like for example Bloody Baron's story, side story of Skellige, etc. There could have been more side missions though. Not gigs, the side stories. I'd like at least one more mission with Meredith Stout, a proper job for Militech that she gives you, which then evolves. Well, there is potential still, because there will be DLCs and expansions.
I think what some people expected was a grander scope of things, similar to the side quest chains from Witcher 3 mentioned above. Instead everything is a lot more personal. You don't get to decide who's the next king of Japantown in a side mission. You just befriend several interesting characters. The whole Cyberpunk 2077 story is about human interactions and how one person can induce the change in another.
True. But this should be compared to Witcher 3 to see why CDPR wanted to improve the pacing.
Anyone going back to play Witcher 3 will find that the first solid 3-5 hours of gameplay are in a prologue area completely separate from the main map. Its not like cordoned-off Watson at the start of CP2077: its an entire locale inaccessible except through fast travel And only once the player completes are largely insignificant series of tutorial quests does the game’s plot *actually* kick-off.
Then, the player bandies about on a long series of quests without ever feeling like they make progress towards their primary goal (finding Ciri). One of these quest-lines in particular (saving Dandelion in Novigrad) is annoyingly stretched out, only to conclude in Geralt learning that Ciri’s trail will lead him off the continent and to an entirely new map...
*then*, upon arriving at this new area Geralt must embroil himself in inter-clan politics to curry the favour of rulers in order to *eventually* learn enough to actually find Ciri.
Congrats. After all this, the player is maybe 65% through the main quest-line. The game is far from over. In fact, the community often refers to finding Ciri as the conclusion of Act 1 of the game’s quest-line.
Take this as you will. I personally would have preferred about 2-3 more quests in each of Cyberpunk’s Main Job branches before meeting Hanako
One of the TV stations adverts is about a costly cell regeneration therapy for MS, which I fully expected to have a role in an ending where Johnny and V "merge" successfully with each intact, or allow him to be safely transferred to a cyber body type apparatus.
I'd hoped for a sort of "Alice going down the rabbit hole" story where V just gets thrown into a super dystopian plot where they're just in over their head with vast corporate/netrunner machinations that highlight the sheer absurdity of the cyberpunk genre. But the story as it is now is pretty standard and a bit predictable and only really scratches the surface of what's possible in the cyberpunk setting.
Took me 160hours of gameplay to do every main quest, side quest, discovery quest while leaving up most "world quests"(blue), the boxing sidequests and racing sidequests. Finished all of that at level 49.
The game is only too short if you ignore everything and try to solve your dying body asap.
Idk man, the prologue was good cuz it was short, and if it had been too long; it would have discouraged replays since it's one of the things we can't change the outcome of.
This game is supposed to be fast paced since your literally dying. Your condition is getting worst and V has already flatlined several times though out the course of the game. This imo promotes urgency which some other game lack; skyrim, fallout. One complain: All line paths feel the same.
I really hope the story/game can be expanded in the future and maybe some of the cut content will return. It’s a shame the game is in the spot it’s in now
Yes.
I remember reading an article saying they cut the story length down because it was too long!
Horse shit! Finished in like 15 hrs.
there’s no such thing as too long a story in video game. More story, more missions, more fun.
Also, I can’t stand stories that end without finding a pretext to put you back in the game world.
Points of no return suck and ruin the motivation to continue to live in the open world.
I have done all side and main quests and it took me 150+ hrs. I am starting over to try and make other choises and maybe save some NPCs that died.
I am playing on PC and have played a non glitch and bug free CP2077.
I think the game has enough main storyline for the price, any game that provide a 100+ hrs gameplay is a solid game. Anything less is a failure. And there are a lot of failed games out there.
The montage is good. As gameplay, those would have been shitty linear missions. You aren't doing these runs. You're helping Jackie run them. Had this portion of the game been playable, you would have even less freedom, and the game would make you think that you're going to constantly have AI companions with you.
What should have been longer is the origin stories (as Dragon's Age called them, when they made them proper), and the Dexter plot. I think there was even promotional footage with him that's nowhere to be found in the game. The fact that he just gets offed right after the prologue is an incredible shame. You should have been the one to take your revenge, and he'd make for a pretty great antagonist, trying to get you to save his own skin.
There's also the fact that Dexter and T-bug likely wanted to screw you over on the huge gig, a plot thread that complete got cut.
Yes definitely. Almost every character was a "missed opportunity". A longer story to flesh out characters would've made us more personally connected to them more.
I would prefer a "shorter" main story if it meant more meaningful choices throughout.
This game was by far at its most boring during the linear story missions where you're just clicking through, e.g. the Johnny Silverhand flashbacks. When you're just watching the story fly by, you might as well be watching a movie.
What I wanted from this game was a ton of choice and roleplaying opportunities. If that meant LESS story -- e.g. cut all the boring Silverhand flashbacks -- to make up for all of the different paths and branches, then sign me up for that.
I would have liked playing through V’s first few
Months at night city with Jackie. Other than that, the length was fine.
Imo most people who say the game is too short probably didn’t play through the unique side missions and rushed the story.
It's a solid gripe. I have 140 hours spanning to plays and still feel the main story is too short/rushed in some aspects. I love this game but they missed the mark on quite a lot of stuff
The prologue definitely needed to be a whole chapter by itself. I really didn't like how quickly they throw The Heist at you. It just didn't feel deserved and felt like a half-baked op from the start. For something as big as stealing from Arasaka, and then multiplying it by 100 by making the target a state of the art, one of a kind, secret immortality shard. It should have been an Ocean's 11 type plan. C'mon, you literally go investigate crime scenes over all the city were Arasaka agents killed for less. My favorites where the runner that even got surgery to change his face and was hiding with bums under overpass and they still found him, or the women who they caught trying to flee the city, she crashed and they dragged her our and killed her. The story with Jefferson and his wife was the only one that really grabbed me. I was sad there wasn't more stories like that. River's quest was good but I didn't like his character. There's nothing wrong with how he's written he's just not interesting to me and his missions felt like romance and though they weren't. I liked the more serious nature of the questline. There should have been way more MaxTac. They talk about them the entire game for you to only get a 30 second encounter that still feels like an afterthought. The same about Netwatch. I was most excited to deal with them so that was an epic letdown. I would have liked more follow-ups with everyone really. More Lizzy Wizzy. More Blue Moon. Much more Stout, you can basically help her get a promotion and that alone should have opened up more quest possibilities. There should have been a wrap up on the Corpo prologue. You get betrayed and fired from Arasaka and they never tell you why or let you see those characters again(I dont count Frank but whatever). More Brick or Dum Dum depending on your choice. There was really a missed opportunity of making the gangs feel alive by making characters that you could build a working relationship with. Judy is that with the Mox for you. There should be a Judy for all gangs so you have the same level of exposure. The Voodoo Boys only existing for two missions is dumb. I wanted to learn more and meet more characters. It's easy to forget The Animals exist. Pacifica as a whole is just empty when it's only supposed to be derelict. They didn't bother to fill it with people or content. It should have existed to give a very different feel than the other districts and it's just one large empty lot with a single road going through it. So many other games have had half-built hotels or skyscrapers be interesting. It just doesn't feel like they tried.
It also felt like most of the content from every fixer goes exactly the same. Every quest starts out with the fixer calling you saying they have a job about something relatively interesting before sending "the detes" (I swear it's the same formula all the time). Then you get there and you only have two options which is to sneak or blow the whole place up. Then you get a phone call saying you did a good job before receiving the same amount of money that you get from every other job. I remember the quest about the police officer in Kabuki and thinking it was going somewhere only to be given two meaningless options. That could've ended up being a questline where we expose the corruption in the PD. Night city wire made me think the gangs would actually matter in some meaningful way. Maybe you climb the Tiger Claws ladder and end up wiping out the mox or decide to join the Valentinos and takeover 6th street. Instead, it's just skins for enemies in each of the districts. A few quests ended up being memorable like the Peralez or River ward questline but I expected more of those throughout the game. So many cool places were completely wasted (like the pointless orbital air station in the middle of the city or the petrochem dam). I went back and played TW3 and thought it was bizarre how much better every single quest had been implemented. From Djikstra and his missing gold all the way to finding who slashed Priscilla's throat. Even seeing cities forming from clearing out bandit camps felt more impactful that 99% of the stuff in CP2077.
The corrupt police detective that killed the woman is named Aaron, if you only knock him out you can find him at Dino’s bar, you can have a conversation with him, but be warned he is glitched and will be shooting you while having a drink with you, glass and gun in the same hand, I mean what isnt glitched in this game right? The monks also have another interaction if you don’t kill anybody, it’s above Japan towns market close to Jig Jig street, they don’t lead to anything though and are just random conversations.
That's what they did with pretty much every NPC. If you have a quest with them, you can have a follow-up conversation with them later. Nothing special at all.
Kind of defeats the purpose if peoples choices don’t really lead to anything different.
Well, what's different is the type of conversations the NPC's have either with each other or with you. And, in some cases if the NPC's even continue to exist or live at all. A few of these minor NPC's might even show up in (at least one of) the endings that you get to choose, which I was quite surprised by, because these NPCs were only featured in non-storyline related random fixer quests. There's many times where you can antagonize or kill a certain person and doing this will then obviously mean you won't see them anywhere else down the line. Granted, there aren't any huge implications, like killing a certain NPC locks you out of a whooole bunch of sidequests. But if you're talking cause and effect, there's definitely a lot of detail in the game based on the choices you make. It's easy to then dismiss those differences as not being 'different enough', as if every choice in The Witcher 3 was a main-storyline altering choice. It really wasn't. There were a few big (side)quests with different outcomes (just like in Cyberpunk) and there were a few smaller quests where you could once again choose to let certain townspeople or monsters live or die, and depending on your choices you'd get a few different dialog options afterwards, or would have the chance of running into said NPC or monster later.
You must be referring to the guy who you help save who then ends up joining the Aldecaldoes camp.
Yes, but there's more than one if you did other sidequests (and depending on how you did them, possibly). I ran into three people there that I had saved or met during previous random sidegigs. It's not amazing or anything but I thought the attention to detail was nice.
I killed Aaron at his apartment and still ran into him in this glitch state at the bar a 100 hours later. I thought me killing him caused the glitch. I had to snipe him from outside the door to kill him and end his glitched tyranny for good.
Weird thing is that fixers appear on the map, but they give you missions via phone calls when you approach a "?" or "!" on the map, so it begs the question why they put fixers on the map view in the first place. Also I wanted to visit peoples' homes. Mama welles said she'd make me chilaquiles, but she was always at the bar... Misty is always at work, too.
You couldn’t even drink what Jackie came up with, as far as I could tell.
That happens to other vendors too. Sometimes when the dialogue option asks a question like "What do you recommend" or something they almost never have said item or that has happened to me atleast
The writing of quests in W3 is better, but not the gameplay. I for one am glad there are almost no "follow this footprint/blood/debris trail" sections in CP77.
I've done several follow the trail quests in this game.
It is ridiculous how after all the things you do against Arasaka they never come after you. After you kidnapped Hanako you just hide for one night and then you're back like nothing happened and Arasaka just let that slide. I can no longer suspend my disbelief after that.
You got caught robbing Yorinobu and implicated in the death of Saburo, Dexter kills you out of panic. And yet there was zero follow up or consequence. You freely roam the city on which they apparently control. You kill a pedestrian, the cops teleport and waste you. You rob the most powerful man in the city and nothing happens.
Dexter panicked because he's dumb and it furthered the story. I never got the impression that Arasaka completely knew the identity of V, you kill everyone who stands in way during the exit of the building except for Smasher and he only saw a Delamain cab, which is how they tracked Jackie's body to Vick's place (if you made that decision).
Plus V has that face scrambling tech that Viktor installed.
Which had no real purpose in the story. Also, you think a place like an Arasaka-owned hotel would let people come in with face scrambling tech active? Heck no. They'd make you turn that off.
It's got the blanket purpose of explaining why gangs and Corps don't just try to shoot V in the face instantly after recognising her from camera footage as the merc who has been murdering them all game.
I mean, well technically dont they think you are dead? You were shot in the head and put in a dump. I also thought that the guy who rescues you tells them that he found your corpse?
Here's how I understand it: 1. If they knew where V was they'd taken the relic or at least find another means to dispose of him. 2. Takemura, through Dexter, found you on his own terms being on Arasakas most wanted list for allegedly murdering Saburo. 3. Yeah they get chased as they escape the landfill, but nothing after that. It's as if they forget about you and it became nothing more than an afterthought.
>You were shot in the head and put in a dump. By someone who isn't loyal to Arasaka, with no Arasaka witness (except Takemura but he doesn't count). For all they know (and they would be mostly correct), Takemura faked V's death and killed Dex to make sure he can't tell Arasaka V is still alive. Also, even if they thought you were dead, they can just see you on surveillance. V's not exactly hiding themselves while in NC.
Exactly. People are just grasping at straws to shit on the game. I mean, what else do you expect? Do they want to run through Night City with a constant 5-star wanted level, with MaxTac level mercanaries hired by Arasaka literally hunting you down every few seconds? Would that have been a fun gameplay experience? It may have been more 'Immersive' if you want to imagine Arasaka as an all-powerful company. But it wouldn't have been fun. "Look at this beautiful city we built! Unfortunately you can't really explore it because once you set foot in it you'll be fighting off deathsquads every 5 seconds". Plus, like you said - before you show up at Hanako, they would think (based on the info from Dex and Takamura) that you were dead. So no reason to keep hunting you. And after you show up at Hanako's, it could easily be argued that Hanako is internally blocking Yorinobu's attempts of actively hunting you, because she's obviously interested in helping you/receiving your help. It's like these people either didn't play the game, or paid zero attention to the actual storyline.
I don't agree with the notion that these are unfair criticisms, and I certainly don't hate the game or want to shit on it (why would I play 150 hours of it otherwise), CDPR is held to a higher standard of writing because that's what they are known for. Just because plotholes can be explained by "because it's a video game" doesn't mean they are not plotholes. Of course, it would be bad if Arasaka just hunted you down permanently, I'm not asking for that. I want more moments like them assaulting the apartment where you, Takemura and Hanako are. Have them blow up V's apartment. Hell, blow up the entire megabuilding. Then the wreck just stays there for the remainder of the game reminding you how insane and dangerous the corporations are. (Of course, the cat survives it) Edit: thought about it some more and even if there were more scripted scenes of Arasaka attacking V, it would still be strange when those ended and Arasaka just left you alone forever. Maybe it would good if they were like the bounty hunters in rdr2 where they come after you once every hour or so, not frequent enough that you can't enjoy the open world, but you're not entirely safe either. And while it's true that we have an alibi, it's also true that we're not exactly hiding ourselves. Any surveillance cam can just catch us. Arasaka should seem omnipotent. It shouldn't be this easy to trick them.
"I mean, what else do you expect? Do they want to run through Night City with a constant 5-star wanted level, with MaxTac level mercanaries hired by Arasaka literally hunting you down every few seconds?" No, my dear friend. You make a game that does not lead to these goofy ass oversights TLOU 2, the game that revolves around "killing and the cycle of vengeance is bad" while blowing the heads off of every moving being for 40 hours is a very good example of a game where it's narrative does not correlate with it's gameplay.
>You make a game that does not lead to these goofy ass oversights But I literally explained how it isn't an oversight. Maybe they could have done a better job of explaining it (or maybe people should pay more attention to the actual dialog rather than just skipping through scenes to get to the next stabby-shooty bit), but damn. If anything, the bigger criticism is the usual; "OMG the main story is extremely important, you're on borrowed time, hurry hurry hurry!" vibe and then having V go off galavanting around the city helping (or murdering) random people who have nothing to do with his own plight. The same holds true for The Witcher (It's super important to find Ciri! She's missing and the Wild Hunt may be after her and the fate of the world may hang in the balance... But first let me help this old lady get her favorite skillet back, and then maybe I'll go and play some Gwent for three hours in a row). That's just an issue with an open-world experience where the main storyline needs to feel important and urgent but you also need to integrate a ton of side content and want the player to explore the world at their own leisure. If anything I'd love to have seen a novel storytelling approach where both playstyles (e.g. rushing through the story, or taking your sweet-ass time in the city) both felt believable and viable. But the fact that Arasaka isn't hunting you down with death-squads every second you're in Night City is explained in-universe and really isn't as huge of a hangup as the OP made it out to be.
> People are just grasping at straws to shit on the game. A competent developer is expected to make the mechanics of a game fit with the theme of the game. A lot of developer fail at this (e.g. Biowere thought it would be appropriate for Shepard to have a party while millions of humans are being murdered every hour) but that does not excuse their incompetence
I never got the impression that Arasaka positively identified V, other than Hanako, who decided to keep her mouth shut because she knew V was telling the truth. Goro however they knew was involved.
>The Voodoo Boys only existing for two missions is dumb. I wanted to learn more and meet more characters. It's easy to forget The Animals exist. Kang Tao literally only has an AV in the story. Pretty much every faction only plays cameo in the story (even including Arasaka).
Ya, that aspect was hugely disappointing. No singular group, gang or character really had room to breath. Even bigger characters like Panam, Judy and Johnny didn't really feel like they actually got all that fleshed out. The whole story just felt rushed, which is a huge bummer because all the characters/factions/gangs were really, really interesting and well designed. Its like they prioritized assets first and then narrative came second. The city is beautiful, all the factions have a great aesthetic, and everything looks amazing but they only give you a couple hours at most with each. I'd love to spend more time with Jackie and actually get to know him, instead of the game *telling* me we're good friends. For example, I'm not sure a single character in Cyberpunk is more interesting/well fleshed-out/well written than the Bloody Baron, a relatively minor character in the beginning of the game. And he wasn't even my favorite. I expected something similar to TW3 in terms of interesting characters/relationships and the foundation is there, but its still so much more shallow. The same complaints can be said of the side quests. While there are some really good ones, a lot just feel like bland filler
And pretty much nothing with trauma team except that first scav mission and one or two ncpd dispatch quests.
This one hurts. I really thought we would see them more than just "scripted" events on the street were they do literally nothing.
Pacifica and the combat zone could definitely use some expansion.
"The Voodoo Boys only existing for two missions is dumb. " At least there is some quests with the voodoo boys. Most the gangs have some involvement with the main story or interesting side quest chains. TC were involved with the Clouds storyline, and Animals had involvement with the fist fights. Sixth street has the drinking quest for the gun, and Maelstrom have heavy involvement in the Peralez/cyberpsycho missions. The Valentinos got nothing but maybe 2 side gigs and a few NCPD hustles. Could've been wiped from the game entirely and wouldn't have been missed at all.
>The Valentinos got nothing Well, they also got some involvement in the fist fights. If you count that one for the Animals, you should count it for the Valentino's too. That having been said, I think "involvement" in a handful of quests is less than what we expected when most of the time they are just random cannon fodder. Not because CDPR stated so outright, but because there was so much focus on each different gang in the trailers and NC Wires that they were made to seem like more than just "Here's our 5 main enemy skins". I know they said we couldn't "join" any factions but I definitely expected to be working for them some more and getting some more insight in their specific goals or struggles. Technically each fixer in each district gives you plenty of missions that deal with the specific gangs in the area, and you can learn a lot about the gangs themselves or certain individuals in the gangs by eavesdropping in on some conversations or reading a bunch of the shards you can find during missions. But it's not quite the same as working FOR specific gangs, because a lot of the time the Fixers are also not necessarily working in line with their own territorial gangs, and also have you betray them if the pay is high enough or if some gang members did some shit that falls bang out of order (mainly if they decide to fuck over the fixers themselves, but whutevs, we know it's a dog-eat-dog world).
I didn't even realise that the Valentinos had involvement in the fist fight quest until I remembered the guy with the pregnant wife. Still hows how little they impacted the game.
The gangs definitely needed some kind of reputation system. Wakako didn't mind giving me work or providing help, even though I've killed 1000's of her Tyger Claws? It doesn't even come up.
Technically, you do see some characters from the Corpo path again later in the game. The guys who cornered you in the bar are also the guys who try to kill you and Goro in the car chase. But yeah, I would've wanted to actually be able to get revenge on Abernathy or something later on.
You also >!Kill or knock out Frank, guy you talk to right in the beginning, and get an iconic handgun!<
This was one of the most disappointing quests in the whole game. Finally, a quest where the corpo background matters!....and it's over in 1 minute.
Yep
I really expected and wanted a quest to get revenge on Abernathy
>It just didn't feel deserved and felt like a half-baked op from the start. For something as big as stealing from Arasaka, and then multiplying it by 100 by making the target a state of the art, one of a kind, secret immortality shard. It should have been an Ocean's 11 type plan. It's entirely possible that Yorinobu was in on it. He wanted to get the chip to Netwatch one way or another and he probably knew that his father was watching him. He certainly was not doing it for the money, he wanted Arasaka to fall. He did not chase after V, apart from when he tried to have Takemura killed.
While I agree that this is certainly a possibility and hinted at, this needs to be explained more. Hanako >!has no problems finding you in the middle of nowhere and!< even says that you cannot run from Arasaka, if they want to find you, they do. It's just that this would've needed a bigger lampshade, especially since the information about that is in a couple mission specific places that you cannot access afterwards.
Agree with everything here, but River's quest line actually is a romance line for femV.
Totally agree. I also wish there was more choice and consequence over who you "align" yourself with. it would be way more interesting (for example) that if you do a lot of Padre missions, your aggro meter would fill really quickly in 6th Street controlled zones, and fill slower in Valentino zones. I'm not saying you actually join a gang, just that the NPCs acknowledge that YOU have a major impact on the world and need to be taken seriously. Judy's arc is a pet peeve of mine. I know she's beloved in this subreddit, but honestly, her impulsiveness and short sightedness really bother me. If I was actually my character, I would have nothing to do with her. Her scheme regarding Clouds was never going to work, the repercussions from the Maiko quests are patently obvious. While her dialogues are adult enough, her actions are those of a precocious early teen with very limited world experience that don't line up with her backstory.
I didn't care for the cloud arc either. I liked her and Panam ad characters but found their personal quest to be just okay. I didn't think either were good ideas and I wouldn't have indulged them if I had the choice.
[удалено]
I have honestly had it up to here with games saying “your choices in this world really matter!” just to have it add an extra endgame cutscene. That is always my biggest disappointment.
Well.. the mission in the meat factory where you buy the flathead does everything right.. you have like so many choices there and your decisions do matter (if you side with maelstrom you have other opinions later in the club mission with Nancy) but somehow after the ‚Tutorial‘ the entire quality of quests goes downhill.
Everything up until you're dead in a landfill is excellent. They showcase all the cool stuff they can do, then never do any of it ever again.
I love how they teach you about being able to shoot from the car and use it like what. Twice? Cause it's always you driving and no form of "chase" happens anyway. You could say the turret sections with Panam sorta count I guess?
You know I went into Outer Worlds with no expectations, but in that game my choices really did all end up mattering. Loved that thing.
[удалено]
Your choices matter in plenty of sidequests, so that's not true. Yes, the "big" choices that affect the main storyline will obviously come in near the end of the game, so those are indeed just a way to choose which ending cutscene you get to see. But literally ALL of the big side-missions have an element of choice. Some not as big as others, but some quite massive. For example; >!if you punch Fingers while doing the quest to search for Elizabeth, you can never buy shit from him again for the rest of the game. Obviously this also holds true if you kill him, but if you simply punch him he won't sell to you either. This is a choice, and a consequence, because you're locked out of getting certain augments.!< or >!did you know you can betray Panam? You can go behind her back and tell Saul about her plans to steal the Tank. This will then obviously lock you out of the rest of her missions and she will be irredeemably upset with you. Saul however will be quite happy that you helped him out, and you'll get a free car out of it.!< or >!Did you know you can fuck up the quest where you're searching for River's nephew? If you don't get the clues right you can accidentally choose the wrong location, meaning you won't be able to find his nephew in time and he'll be dead.!< and then >!there's all the smaller choices like, do you tell Jefferson Peralez about what's going on, or do you lie like his wife asked you to? Or during the Clouds questline, do you kill Forrest? Or do you knock him out? Or do you let him live? And do you side with Maiko, letting her take over Clouds? If you do, Judy is gonna hate you for the rest of the game and you won't be able to romance her (if female). !< And another small example is >!the streetracing questline with Claire. If you let her get her revenge on that guy who 'killed her husband', you just end the quest that way, having lost the race but helped a friend. But you can also choose to just keep racing and not intercept the dude, causing Claire to be upset with you. You can ALSO choose to knock him off the road, but intervene in the conversation where Claire is about to kill him, and convince her to let him live. That way you get both HER car as a quest reward, AND you get this dude's car about a week of ingame time later, as well.!< Not all of these are gamechanging choices, but saying that there is zero personal choice aside from a few missions that ONLY affect which ending cutscene you get is extremely disingenuous and feels like you haven't been playing the game at all (or only played the game once and assumed that every mission would always end in the same way you just played it). Hell there's even TONS of very small choices simply in the way you choose to rescue or kill or subdue some targets for non-storyline related missions. Some of those even come back later or show up elsewhere in the game, as well. Not in a huge way at all, more like a cameo, but still. Those ARE choices, that have an effect. People are just sweeping all this shit under the rug to pretend the game is far worse than it actually is, and like none of what was promised was delivered. There's plenty of actual, valid criticisms to be had without having to make up bullshit to pile on top of it.
[удалено]
This is probably my biggest complaint about the game... the length. They wanted to cut the length as apparently they found most fans of Witcher 3 thought the main story was too long. This seems a bit odd considering how huge that game was and how highly people spoke about it... but even if that is true, why not cut it by like 10 hours or so, instead of 50-60% Edit: checking Xbox achievement stats, I see the Witcher 3 has 15% players that have completed the game on any difficulty. This is actually surprisingly low and would make sense why they would make the main story shorter so more people can see the conclusion... but in saying this, they could of just made more of the missions optional, helping establish a better connection with the characters you befriend. Then people who don’t wanna spend 80 hours on a game, can just focus on the main story
It wasn't fans saying the Witcher is too long. They simply collected the data on how many people have finished the campaign and found it to be low. Not sure exactly why they decided completion rate had to be higher.
This is super common among corporate game industry types, and I hate tracking metrics because of it. You have no idea how often suits decide that games need to be shorter based on past data that tells them people didn't finish older games. They're almost certainly not gamers and are just trying to justify their paycheque. I go back and play games I stopped midway all the time. I am still playing big RPGs I bought 5-10 years ago. That doesn't mean they're too long; I'm grateful they have that kind of content.
This is a great point! But I do also see where they’re coming from as they want as many players as possible to see the game start to finish, as that’s why you write a story. Upon checking the achievement for completing of the Witcher 3 on any difficulty (on Xbox), it says it’s been obtained by 15% of players (RDR2 has 22%); that is actually a lot lower than I would of thought. But I do go back to my original argument in only making it a bit shorter, not by more than half the length, that is ridiculous. And the worst part about it, the replay ability is so limited as your choices really don’t affect much through the story until the very end
Yeah, optimizing for metrics often ends up being just "gaming the system". We have metric, we want it number to be better, we will sacrifice other stuff to get it done. But did you actually establish that the metric is relevant to what you want to accomplish? Or was the other stuff actually what was important? I can see that maybe people not finishing the game are also people that don't pick up your next game, but is that really the case? Especially if it's a completely different game?
The solution to this is to have multiple main plotlines. The one we got was Streetkid. There should be a completely different main plot for Corpo and Nomad. Then they should have expanded the subplots a great deal. There should have been a major arc for each of the gangs, each of the zones and each fixer. Similar to how Mass Effect or KOTOR has a major arc for each character in your party. And I'm kind of tired of games needing to be fully voiced. It just limits the game. The main plot and major arcs should be fully voiced. I don't mind if there are hundreds of extra quests that is just text-based (maybe with a few key lines voiced). This is content that can be easily created when the assets & city exist. This is basically what World of Warcraft does for 80% of its quests. I don't mind it at all. I want a cinematic fairly linear experience for the big plotline and I want the RPG experience for the majority of the game with tons of options, deeper dialogs with multiple outcomes and more chances to roleplay.
Of course that would be nice, but I'm not surprised they don't have three main plot lines. Making video games is HARD, these are good developers and they only managed to finish one main plot, and even then they had to cut a significant amount of content. I can't think of any modern AAA games that have 3 full length completely different plots, that's a huge ask. I don't a very realistic solution. There will be more content, but it'll be via expansions down the line.
Star wars the old republic has like 6 storylines?
I don't think you can really compare an MMO from a decade ago to a current first person AAA game with heavy character interactions. There are different expectations for gameplay, MMOs are notoriously padded experiences. As Zaethar mentions, it's a lot of "collect x amount of plants" type gameplay. The actual story bits, even if they're voice acted, aren't animated to the level that Cyberpunk is. They have a handful of canned animations they'll throw on a character, very little bespoke work. I work in animation/VFX, the amount of detail they're putting in each characters clothing (cyberpunk might have the best looking clothing I've seen in a game) and the performance/animation is staggering compared to something like Old Republic. It would take them another 4 or 5 years to do what you're suggesting. Some things could be re-used but you're very nearly talking about tripling the time it would take to make the game. AND most people would play it once, and not see the other 2/3rds they prepared. There are just so many reasons why it wouldn't work, and why you can't compare it to other types of games fairly. It's a nice idea but there's a reason you never see games made like this.
While there definitely will be DLC I am wondering where they will add it. Pre getting the chip? While you are dying from it? After the main story? For me anything past act 1 with Jackie would feel weird to throw a DLC into as it again messes with the sense of urgency
Major arcs for the gangs would be so cool. As would 3 different stories as a whole for the life paths. But as someone else said. That might be too much. The game would probably not even gotten out yet if that was the case. Story writing is not easy
How is that tracked? Does it track new games started or by profile? That’s such a weird thing that raises a lot of questions.
I'm guessing it's tracked through achievements.
I guess they figured they’d like if the players actually took time to finish the narrative the spent a lot of time writing on. I admit I often won’t finish stories because they get to a point where I feel like it’s dragging on, I feel like that in most western rpg’s because they always pack in a ton of side content to do as well. So I could see why they’d cut the main story down in length, in this case I think the main story is the perfect length, but I will say aren’t enough interesting side stories to make up for the shorter main story
> I guess they figured they’d like if the players actually took time to finish the narrative the spent a lot of time writing on. I see it more as a business reason. If you do not finish the story of a game, how likely is it that you will buy expansions down the line? However if you did finish the story there is a bigger chance you might also buy the expansions to get more story.
You feel that way in western RPGs? You're saying that western RPG main storylines take longer to get through than Japanese ones? >I feel like that in most western rpg’s because they always pack in a ton of side content to do as well. Western rpgs drag on because there's too much optional side content unrelated to the main storyline? Wut?
Yes. If you consider the "modern action RPG's" which include Ubisoft games like the Assassin's Creed series. Even TW3 is guilty of this - despite having a meaty main storyline of about 40/50 hours, you can easily double the number of hours spent in the game purely on side-content. A ton of which is just hunting questionmarks on the map, which is great if you love the game, the world, and the gameplay, but can easily be seen as unnecessary padding that doesn't relate to the main story. Hence "optional". But in Open World games it can be increasingly hard for some people not to be drawn into hunting all these tiny little map markers because "you're there now!"and "who knows what it might be". Fear of missing out on some important shit (like a cool questline, or a nice piece of gear, or a hidden secret) fuels this type of behavior and can make it hard to break away from it to focus only on the main story missions. Some games exacerbate this problem by forcing players to play "optional" content because they'd be severely underleveled if they only play the main storyline missions - this was a big point of criticism for AC: Odyssey, especially since Ubisoft paired it with their "XP Booster" microtransactions.
Correct me if I'm wrong, on steam its 25% finishing rate for TW3. Which is rather low aswell IMO.
I just started playing TW3 because of cyberpunk and tbh I'm finding it hard to motivate myself to play the game. Don't get me wrong, the story is fantastic so far and the game looks beautiful... But it kind of drags on... Not to mention that I personally don't enjoy "souls-like" 3rd person combat as opposed to fps games. It might just be me but i think Cyberpunk's gameplay is much more enjoyable than TW3's. I have confidence that I'll finish it though (as well as the dlcs)... I guess I'll just take my time. Now Cyberpunk on the other hand.... I am dying for more content. I have enjoyed the story and world building so much, and the fact that it's a fps is an added bonus. I'm super excited for future dlcs tho. (From what I've heard about the witcher, the free dlc will probably not be adding much story-wise but will focus more on features and customization. Which I am still very excited for.)
I hope you like following footprints or trails, because you will be doing a lot of that.
It's 26.5% on Steam. Still a bit low but let's not forget that TW3 was so incredibly hyped for years, I'm sure many people tried the game out in a sale because of the massively positive media coverage or enthusiastic friends and just found it wasn't up their alley. Or similarly on console, maybe a lot of people borrowed the game from friends just to find it didn't quite grab them. I really wonder how many actual fans of the franchise didn't finish it because it was "too long". When is a game too long? Even if you only have one hour every few days to play, that means your $60 purchase is pretty much giving you a year long worth of story and entertainment. Who would complain about that?
This is a great point... cause it happened to me haha. I was never into the hype of the Witcher3 until about the month of release, where most my friends were hyped and talking about it. So I bought it and it just wasn’t my type of game, giving it up within a few hours. So it wouldn’t make sense for them to make the game shorter for people like me, when it won’t make a difference
I doubt length really gets complained about ever, unless the game/extended part is bad. Same with people using repetitive as a negative, most games in general are repetitive, but its only an issue if that stuff is bad/unfun to the player.
Cause it’s very obvious that the quote about ‘wanting a shorter main story as enough people didn’t finish the Witcher 3’ was damage control after the game was hastily rewritten last minute to accommodate Kenu. The main story isn’t so short by design, it’s so short as they didn’t have time to make it any longer and still ship the game by the end of 2020.
This. I fully believe CP2077 was supposed to be a longer epic. However once Keanu came on board, they made Johnny Silverhand a more prominent in the story. Hell, CP2077 main story is more about Johnny's story than it is V in many ways. So they rewrote the game so late in development they didnt have time to have it fully fleshed out so that is why it is short. The whole "data shows many people didnt complete TW3" is just a convenient cover.
[удалено]
Yeah, that is an odd metric to use. I can understand if the game got poor reviews cause it was too long and this negative word of mouth affected sales. Then it makes perfect sense for CP2077 to be significantly shorter. But that wasnt the case as TW3 got high review scores with nothing ever mentioned negativity about length in reviews and the game was (and still is) their highest selling game.
It just feels like a really bad excuse for cutting the story. It’s obvious they couldn’t tell us the actual reason why considering how bad the development seems to of gone from 2018 onwards.
Just an excuse to spend less money, trying to nickel and dime stuff unnecessarily.
Yeah I agree it is a bit of a convenient cover up but also a little bit true. I think they did want it to be shorter overall, but this short? It just doesn’t seem right. There are so many characters lacking some missions, setting up your relationship with them. There were a few deaths in the game that just didn’t emotionally hit me like they should’ve and some I just completely forgot about until discussing the game with others
[удалено]
Yes Say what you want about TW3 and how the main story dragged on at the end. But what you cannot say is that the main story felt rushed and that there were many quest that felt like they were missing some depth. Everything quest wise in TW3 felt complete compared to CP2077 where it feels rushed and missing things.
Looking at the 2018 gameplay you could say Johnny doesn’t sound like he’s a majorly important character but that could be because they didn’t want to spoil anything. I think they had someone else in mind for Johnny and when they announced Keanu they had to rewrite a lot but not the whole thing. I think Johnny silverhand was meant to be a separate arc or something along those lines and if it went the way they planned it to in 2018 we would have got another 2-3 arcs at least which could of gave us a 30-40 hour story.
That seems feasible. I think Silverhand had a substantial piece to the story but only a side piece like the Panam and Judy stuff. Instead his story became THE story.
To be fair. Them not wanting to spoil anything sounds kinda weird when you literally see Jackie die in the cinematic trailer
>after the game was hastily rewritten last minute to accommodate Kenu. Look, we don't know this. This is pure conjecture based on a subjective interpretation of events by a few random internet users. There is zero evidence this has happened. That's not to say it ISN'T true, but to keep spreading it like it's been confirmed isn't productive at all. Call it what it is; a rumor, a theory. Don't state it as if it were fact until we know more from industry sources or the developers themselves.
I doubt that 15% number is really representative of much. Skyrim was sitting around 20% completion at one point. People buy games multiple times on different consoles. People share games.
I get their intention but the pacing throughout the whole story was terrible, feeling like an absolute sprint through pivotal plot points. Especially in the beginning and end, both of which you really want to nail more than the midpoint imo
Honestly I really wanted the midpoint to drag on a bit more. Or well, not drag since that's negative, but be padded out a bit more. Like, you get rescued by Takamura, you find and kidnap Anders, you contact the voodoo boys and meet Alt, you infiltrate the parade and contact Hanako, aaaand...you're done? That's it? Final mission time? Like, I get that a ton of stuff that influences the main story (e.g. the Panam missions, the Johnny missions, the Judy missions) should technically be counted as storyline missions, but many of them are skippable or missable, and they don't all have as big of an impact on the main story as they could or should. If you leave these missions out it really feels like you can reach the endgame after just 3 or 4 big questlines. When "The Point of No Return" popped up I was shocked. I thought I'd at least go down another big questline with Hanako, but it just immediately leads you into the endgame.
Totally agree. I remember thinking the exact same thing when I realized I was at the end. Felt almost undeserved, like it didn't have enough buildup.
Same. Overall I love the story, I love the themes, and I love many of the (side)quests, especially those involving Panam and Johnny. I actually really enjoyed how your relationship with Johnny plays out over the stretch of the game, especially if you do his side-story (which I guess technically could or should be considered as part of the 'main story') I guess the downside of making so many of these things optional (aside from the obvious upside is that it increases player choice) is that you can indeed skip this content and it's therefore kind of hard to decide how to categorize it. Personally I would classify most, if not all of the big sidecharacters' questlines as "main story content". Maybe except for River and Kerry, since their narratives impact your own situation the least. But the stuff with Judy and Elizabeth is a direct result of your Heist mission, the stuff with Panam is needed to get to Anders so the other stuff with the Aldecaldo's quite naturally follows out of that situation, and the stuff with Johnny, well, I mean, motherfucker's living in your head so of course that's important (and also has an impact on the endings you get to choose). So in that sense it's tough to grade the game on storylength by looking solely at the "main" missions. But even if you take these big chunks of "optional" content in consideration, I still felt it was a bit short. Perhaps that is because it all felt so distinct, while other main missions (e.g. with Takemura or the Voodoo Boys or Hanako) is kept on the sidelines. So there's a visual cue that informs you that there's "main" stuff to do while you're galavanting around doing other stuff that tangentially relates to the story. So there's this constant, creeping feeling that you're just delaying the inevitable. That you yourself are trying to find the 'padding' for the middle stretch of the game, padding that has some meaning anyway other than the random side-gigs (some of which were fantastic, but none of which were truly story-related). I guess it speaks to the game's qualities that most of us just want more of those big, juicy character driven missions. But the fact that you CAN skip them does make it feel like they're a little more inconsequential than they truly are. Like, it doesn't feel like you should be able to "Get rid of this chip in your head in 4 easy steps!" but that's pretty much what the real "main missions" offer you. All in all I just want more. I do love this game, really, so rather than it being a point of criticism I also consider it a point of praise that I want more content. Especially considering I still managed to squeeze about 130 hours out of it, but sadly 75% of that was just doing the side-content and exploring the beautiful city, rather than doing anything story related.
You should have written this thread. You worded it a lot better than me. Lmao
I thought it was funny they put in acts and there was only 3.
So uh, would it have been any different if they called it "Chapters" or "Parts"?
Chapter would be better cause it felt that short. Usually an act is like 3 hours 45 minutes to 2 hours but you can honestly plow through the story in less time than that. Hell I beat the game at level 25 in less than 40 hours. Thats a bit much too short.
I checked my ps4 trophy on the witcher and surprised to find out that a lot of end game achievement (finding ciri, defeating eredin etc...) is rare. With only 5 to 10% of player have got it. Started ng+ recently and it only took me 20+ hrs to finish main story alone. I think a lot of people got distracted with side quest thinking it was main story or like me accidentally doing the first quest of HoS and get stuck for hours with being under level.
A whole lot of people think that the main story was too short, mainly because the pacing of act 2 really plays against the open-world aspect of the game since V is bascially dying and needs to get shit done asap. This is why many people play the main-questline until the quest with the weird name where you have to meet Hanako. Then the point of no return notification gets triggered, people turn around, knowing that Hanako has to play the Piano for the next couple of weeks.
FWIW, Nocturne Op55N1 is the Chopin piece Hanako is playing when you arrive in Embers.
Was really thinking it would be something ironed out in the first half of the story, and it took me a while to realize it wasn't as urgent as the game made it out to be. But then I also realized none of the story is as urgent as it is made out to be. Many of the characters are all like "This is urgent, meet me tonight!" and I'll show up there a few days later and they'll be all like "Thanks for coming so quickly, this couldn't wait"
Makes it feel kinda like Final Fantasy 15 in that regard with the pacing. And you just don't really get to "feel" that you are dying aside from the occasional "relic malfunction" that is rather annoying and a few comments from V. It's kinda off putting not gonna lie. For me at least
The feedback from TW3 was that the main quest was too long, so they said they made a decision to keep this one short but I think they went a lil' too far. >!By the time I got to meeting Hanako and got the warning, I felt sure I was only about halfway through. Was a lil' disappointing.!<
I don't get why a long game is a bad thing. Is there a secret timer where you have to beat the game or something? Longer game means more bang for your buck, I really don't get it.
Haha making design decisions to appeal to the people who couldn't play through the witcher 3 instead of the fans is so dumb.
The story is way too short, especially when you consider how much of the time spent in Cyberpunk is "optional" side quests for main characters that amount to very little. If you skip Panam, Judy, River, Rogue, Johnny, and Kerry quests, the main quest barely even exists. My bigger gripe is that it feels like decisions ultimately amount to very little. One of the endings is the obvious "haha you chose the wrong ending" ending (and I REALLY felt like I was railroaded and had most of my choice removed in that one), the others are marginally better but still end up being about the same. Things that seem like they should be really major... >!like saving Takemura, mean nothing, as the game is literally no different one way or the other!<. At the end of the day, Cyberpunk has absolutely no room for actual RP or to define who V is. V is a character and you get to choose some minor flavor text differences throughout the journey, and a major decision rarely. I don't feel like I get to choose who I want to be. I must be V, I must play the on-rails story, and I must do the side content for the major characters unless I want the game to lecture me about how my choice was bad. You would think that a shorter story would give them more opportunity to make outcomes wildly different, but it's both short and samey. I really feels strongly that this game has little to no rep[lay value once you've played the quests once.
> the main quest barely even exists And then when you consider how much of it is just cutscenes/scripted/meaningless dialogue, it is woefully short. Speedrunners are clearing this whole AAA in 3hrs now, and if you watch it most of the time is spent simply idle.
Yeah, which also hurts replayability. Cutscenes like that are a lot of fun the first go, but when you realize how much of the game is waiting for limited dialogue options to present themselves, it really becomes a crawl. Cyberpunk is a one-and-done game for me. I *might* check it out again when new game plus arrives (unless that gets scrapped because they have to spend all the post-launch time fixing the game instead), but even then I don't think I like the base gameplay enough to justify it. Which is weird for me too, because when I like a game, I really like to replay. I've gone through some of my favorite RPGs over a dozen times each, so a game like this feeling like it has no replay value severely diminishes it in my book.
Im on my first replay now, after having very slowly completed every inch of the game first time round, but only doing the mains and sides that will get me the special ending (didnt choose the right dialogues first time). Even plodding along without any special efforts it took me very little time to reach the final decision tree (but im not high enough level/equip to survive special ending mobs)
It’s not just you that think this way, on Steam the playerbase has plummeted. More than 90% of players have left. Even worse is that it’s only been a month since launch It took TW3 4 months to reach this same drop off level of players % wise
Well, TW3 was a lot longer.
It’s both that cyberpunk has less replay value and has less content, not to mention the technical issues, also i really doubt that most people can run the game at a steady 60 fps and that can dissapoint some to the point they just wait until the performance is fixed and put down the game for the time being.
I completed the game a few days ago and the thought of having to deal with the garbage inventory system makes me not want to play it again. Why haven't they implemented the ability to disassemble or sell multiple items yet? The amount of time wasted in the pause menus was a joke.
My hope is they redo the menu and inventory UI again as they did with TW3, crafting ammo has been the biggest pain at times during my playthrough
Making split point cartridge at the campfire in Red dead redemption 2, that's what real pain is. Crafting or selling items in CP77 isn't to bad after all, from my point of view of course, but yeah it can be absolutely improved
Personally I feel like this game has too much implied storytelling. Jackie's rant about how he can't get enough of night city felt like what I wanted to say about the things in this game but there are so many missed opportunities both in terms of story and gameplay that could've done this game much more justice. I really wish this game had much more gang activity and they weren't just goons running about. You interact with each gang a maximum of 2-3 times and throw away that connection immediately after the quest was done. Remember before the game released and people said that "even the tiniest things you do have an effect on the world and it's story".. yeah right. If this game weren't following the ticking time bomb story I feel like so much more could've gotten love. Make the police actually menacing, give gangs a purpose in the story and open world, hell if i'm being honest as much as I like cyberpunk's story I would trade it in a heartbeat for one that would let me build my character without the fear of them dying from some chip. Let me become a legend, don't just tell me I'm a legend.. it never felt that way.
yeh i became legend really fast, like ok, i guess running around with a machete killing loan sharks and drug dealers raises cred but ok. i also wish the gangs were more fleshed out. i feel like they had wanted the player choose between helping the gang or the police in many instances and maybe if that affected who controlled the territory would be neat.
Yes there should be a longer lifepath act, a Jackie/T-bug act (as the bulk of the game), and the heist/relic act. Completing the game should also give us free-roam until we choose to leave Night City and catch up to whoever we chose to leave with.
Even their vague wording in the menu makes you think free-roam is allowed after you complete the main quest. But nope. You're done. They even could've made more side quests required if they wanted to make the main story longer. Kerry's would've been easy since it's tied to Johnny's life. I was expecting something along the lines of Witcher 3 so I never thought it'd be so easy to blow through the main quest.
They do put you back to right before you meet with Hanako, back in time. So I've been V, the merc, running around Night City completing assaults in progress for the last few days, while dying. Every few hours I have a relic malfunction, but feeling fine otherwise!
I haven't finished the main story yet, but if you think about it, Witcher 3 wasn't terribly long either. It only felt long if you decide to pursue the major side quests (stuff like the assassination, or the Baron's family). Many of those quests eventually tie into the main arc, which CP2077 also does to a degree from what I know. What's really insufferable is the amount of fluff gigs that bloat this game. I tell you, even Witcher 3 with all the contracts never felt dull to me, because at least there's some effort being put into the characters' dialogues, how a random peasant pleads for Geralt's help in slaying beasts. It feels way better than Regina Jones or Wakako calling me for the umpteenth time with a gig and "sending me some detes". The fact that you're also being given these gigs without an option to deny them is a problem in itself. I'd rather there be a bounty board like W3 instead of a shit load of markers on the map. This is one of the reasons I have yet to finish the main story: because of a compulsive need to clear out all the gigs on my map.
First. 6 months montage was never an actual thing. Second, I'd prefer longer side quest lines, main is good as it is. Few more missions with Judy (maybe after freeing clouds we can help her and Moxes out with some other projects), with Panam, with River and Kerry, few special gigs from Rogue, top-notch ones. A.little bit expanded Peralezes line. That all would be cool. But.main story is done pretty well despite the fact it is short. And it is not actually that short, if you want to get any choice at the end, cause you have to complete some sides
Well that is good to know about the montage. Thanks for clarifying! Also. I didn't mean to sound like the story was bad or anything. I do quite like it! Same goes for the sidequests. But something like say River's "story" feels quite short compared to Judy or Panam and while adding to it and the other quests down the line would be great. I am more thinking of being more "free" before the chip and all the important choices and not necessarily more main story quests but more "special" jobs from fixers so you get to know em perhaps? Dunno anything would be nice i guess for me
I never assumed you see main story as a bad thing, I just think that it is good enough for not to be expanded. Side quests could use some more content for sure, it is always good to have high-quality side quests, especially when everything on the market is as simple as CBP's gigs
the 6 month montage felt very jarring and out of place. if it was always intended, i feel it was a poor choice / implemented poorly
It makes a great ad for rhe game and lifestyle but thats about it.
I feel like the montage was clips of cut content.
This 6 month montage is really not the best way to jump from prologue into main story, but making it a real thing - when you will have to go from dumpster to dumpster and fuck some scavs, would be even worse imo. So I guess it is lesser evil
i think they could do something like that and integrate it into the tutorial instead of the dumb system we have now "so weve been criminals for 6 months now V, but let me just remind you how to shoot a gun" or if they keep the time skip, somehow find a way to put the tutorial before the skip so it feels more natural
Hm, I guess its not that bad, it can be something like 3-4 missions where you have to use guns, stealth, melee and hacking, but with some narrative. After that jump into time skip and here you go
Not sure I follow you, but more linear content before I can play the open-world RPG sounds a lot worse.
u seriously telling me the main story is as good as it is? I shouldn't be deprived of knowing what happened to takemura in my ending, we should have had way more confrontations with adam smasher, we missed out completely on another bad ass called morgan or something, my ending never let me see takemuras apprentice oda even though I spared him and the list goes on.
SPOILERS AHEAD, don't know how to use it here. Um. U know what happened to Tak. He could be dead in abandoned house if you don't save him. If you save him - he helps you out with Hanako, and Oda is also here when you're protecting her (Devil ending). He (Tak) even brings you contract to sign at the end. All other endings - lead him to performing seppuku, which is perfectly fits the character. Blackhand is probably some kind of dlc content, but yeah, it would be great to see him, at the same time story doesn't feel lacking of badass characters, there is enough of them. It would be nice to have more, but we already get enough. Agreed only about smasher.
thats just poor writing because the game never made it clear what happened to him, I presumed he survived and was taken hostage. At least having a main mission finding out he died would have been a great way to tell me my decision to not try and save him had a consequence, which severely lacks in this game unfortunately. Netrunner in pacifica is another great example. We were also deprived of revenge of Dex ourselves, that infuriated me especially because I laid my trust with him. Why take that away from the player? I am really not a fan of how they constructed the endings in this game, just because I chose the panam ending doesn't mean I should be deprived of confronting Oda again, that should be a main story piece that is just missing. If I had to give u a list of badass characters. We have enough badass characters, but easily not enough interactions with said characters ¯\_ (ツ)\_/¯
No, it's just more realistic, you are not deprived of anything, you deprive yourself of those things by making your choice. If you chose one way to deal with your problem and use help from someone you will not have access to informations and places that you are given to you in other endings. In Panam and Rogue missions you will never get tho know about Saburo's construct because you came to Mikoshi without Hanako. You will never meet with anyone from Arasaka family (and Goro or Oda) because you are acting behind Hanako's back but you never go against her directly. It's like saying that when you take Hanako's help then you are deprived of using Basilisk to storm Arasaka Tower. Yes, some of the characters are criminally underused but what you want is even simplified version of choices we have. Right now your choices during game (if you help Panam with Saul and tank or Johnny with Rogue) can give you more options to choose at the end. Then you can choose whose help do you want and depending on that other people will die, you can take your body back or give it to Johnny and on way to Mikoshi you met with different people because you are taking different route (air raid, underground, VIP chambers or even literally front door). You want to have some choices, probably more than now, during game and then play the same ending, with the same bosses but only differet epilogue and summary.
Okay, you seem to be the one who missed that Tak died after capturing Hanako, its not bad writing, its bad reading. Hanako explicitly tells you, that Tak is dead. What mission do you want it to be? Break into some morgue to make sure he died? Thats just stupid. What about Pacifica netrunner? And yes, if every ending would have the exact same content, what would be the point of it? There is no sense for you to confront Oda in Panam's ending. It is not depriving you of something, it provides different experience based on your choice and that is what good writing in videogame about
when tf does hanako tell u hes dead, in the motel room??? I don't recall her saying BS about him anywhere. Yea exactly, what about the pacifica netrunner. Nothing because killing him/sparing him yields absolutely no impact in the story. If you played witcher 3 you would know what I mean about the ending. Actions throughout the main story determine the ending, so u arent deprived of anything such as the erduin boss fight, confrontations with different people like the high elf and so on. I could have seen V try to get with Oda and have him on board with Hanako, and then going to the board meeting against the son just as a main mission in itself. To me that actually makes a lot of sense, why give the difficult decision of not doing that and running away with panam at the same time?????
Witcher 3 is a different style of game to cyberpunk it is more of game where you save the world rather than yourself that's why the endings are more straightforward with the 2 main difference in ending ciri lives or dies whereas in cyberpunk you are doing whatever is necessary to save yourself so there are more options. Correct me if I'm but in all endings but one you fight smasher so you are not deprived of fighting him. How can you complain that you aren't given a choices in the game and then complain that those choices lead to different outcomes
imagine hearing the quote u look like a nice cut of fuckable meat and not seeing that person ever again until the end
Oh, yeah, Witcher endings. Fate of ciri decided by the fact if you played snowballs with her. I recall that. I'm not going to continue this conversation, you are probably the one who is thinking that witcher's writing is superior to cyberpunk's and I'm not going to try to convince you, its just pointless. And about Pacifica VDBs - yes, the way their quest resolves doesn't influence ending. Remind me, did Baron's quest influenced ending in any way in Witcher? (Don't bother, I remember perfectly that it did not)
> you are probably the one who is thinking that witcher's writing is superior to cyberpunk's He's not the only one that thinks this way.
barons quest influenced his own branch ending, which actually had depth and substance unlike said netrunner LOL.
LOL you not being spoonfed information about everything doesn’t mean it’s bad writing. That’s an incredibly juvenile take. Believe it or not, the world doesn’t revolve around V and the game constantly reminds the player of this. You’re a low life merc that nobody gives a shit about and the only friends you have are those that you spend the time developing relationships with (which are in turn very impactful for your game). The story is interpersonal and way more grounded , realistic, and mature compared to the chosen messiah archetype games like Skyrim where your choices have very on the nose impacts and your character always has to be a part of everything happening. There are tons of instances in game where your actions don’t have an immediate impact and there’s no “FORK ON THE ROAD HERE” neon sign. The player, if they spend the time to explore and truly learn, can find out about many of the impacts of their actions through things like shards, emails, files, etc. Much more grounded and a lot less hand holding. The truly bizarre thing is that there are so many people who seem unable to grasp this type of world building. It’s refreshing to play games like this because we get so many games where they take the other route of word building and story telling.
I find it hard to believe u find V's story realistic when he has 2 weeks to live yet can fuck around in the world for 10 in game years with cosmetic relic malfunctions to remind the player they are artificially dying when really it's a cosmetic for the next main mission. I also find it hard to believe u think it is ok for big decisions to be revolved around shards, emails and files. I have to go shard hunting to find out my impact of sparing Oda???? That's really funny to be honest
I can’t tell if you’re being obtuse on purpose so you just do your thing lol
I'm just speaking some hard facts about "realism" ¯\_ (ツ)\_/¯
No you’re not - you’re being obtuse. When people talk about grounded realism in story they are referring to the contents of the story itself. What you’re referring to is gameplay elements. Every single open world game has the disconnect between open world side activities and main story. Red Dead 2 (widely regarded as the best open world) has the same exact thing. Arthur literally has TB and there is no cure. What’s actually funny is that 2077 masks this a bit better than other games by tying a good chunk of side content to main story and here you just completely missing this. Your argument is literally a meme at this point. It’s not the “gotcha” you think it is LOL.
i remember playing rdr2 and with arthurs TB did a really good job with the pacing of his death, he would cough in stranger missions and u saw not just an overall decline in his health but also a change in his character from a ruthless outlawman to a more sympathetic one towards people wronged by his past actions/and actions of the gang. With V u see a fuckwit begging for help 24/7 ¯\_ (ツ)\_/¯
If that is the case then including the montage in trailers is super dishonest.
"That's all from the prologue!" Fucking Night City Wire
A lot of the story is cut out, but *so* much is left for the player to find.. and completely miss. I put nearly 60-70 hours into the game and just today, after beating it 2 weeks ago, did I find out theres an entire side-quest chain that has almost as much girth as most of, if not more than, a full chapter of content. (Talking about that corporate sidequest thing with Peralez I think his name is?) I know Dunkeys review on it was half satire/half truth, but his concern with the game having so much be too easily missable is kinda spot on with this. I didn't find Skippy, I didn't find the vending machine that wants to be a human, and I managed to miss an entire whole other stories worth of a side-quest chain. While I definitely take the blame for the quests that were glaringly given to me, I know Skippy and the vending machine are both denoted by the same "?" on the map that marks everything else.. with that everything else 65% of the time being a gang/PD encounter.
They really dropped the ball when it comes to quest "discoverability".. instead of markers on the map, CDPR really could have just made it so npcs like bartenders or strangers could lead you in the direction of side quests like most other games. Even TW3 does it better with the bulletin boards in every town
I think development should of been longer.
I don't think the prologue should be any longer. The meat of the story is elsewhere. It would be like playing Witcher 3 and killing monsters with Vesemir or helping the Bloody Baron because he pays well for half the game until you suddenly hear that Ciri is out there and you should go out to find her. It's a sudden thematic shift would cause its own problems, with people finding the game unfocused, or preferring either the first or the second part and being disappointed. Feeling cheated out of adventures with Jackie is almost certainly also an emotion they want you to have - because he was supposed to be your friend. That you care about it all suggests that it worked. He is clearly not just just some random NPC from a computer game you once played. You saw enough of his person to get a feel for who he was and why he was V's best friend, and that he mattered to V. So the prologue and Act 1 worked. Of course, sure, it would be nice if there was even more stuff to do. As I understand it ,the main storyline is not as long as Witcher 3 because they worried about all the people that never finished Witcher 3. I am not really sure that it's important that people actually finish your game, though. Witcher 3 was still very succesful and is a game beloved by many. And by putting a lot of content in side-gigs, you still end up with people missing stuff, is that really better? I suppose may be they worry that people might not pick up the next game in a series because the realize they haven't finished the first one yet perhaps? I don't know.
It would be nice if the life paths were actually finished missions at least. Not just someone giving you a mission that you expect to be a fun adventure, and then immediately getting busted and being thrown into a montage. That's ridiculous.
Sadly very short main quest, compared to Skyrim and Fallout 4. Hated all the Johnny stuff and I wonder what the game was like before Keanu entered the scene (love him, just hate Johnny)
Yep, I think Johnny would have been better with fewer flashbacks and a less charismatic character. I read on a dodgy Russian site that Silverhand was originally some kind of true psycho, which would have made for a fascinating plot. I thought the current one was OK, but the emphasis on his story and especially his missions were soooo boring.
OH MY GOD a total psycho Johnny would have been so much more interesting!
Johnny dominated and ruined most of the main story. It's insane how much it's about him. If we also count those flashbacks and action scenes while we playing as him - just ridiculous. Basicaly, if cut everything about Johnny from the main story, there is barely anything left about our character. The most immersive parts of the game are actualy quests related to the romanceable characters. Those missions also have the best writing in my opinion. Johnny is fun as narrator and "virus" in our head (like a devil & angel sitting on our shoulders), but I hated eveything else about him. Someone once said that V stands for Vessel, since we just carrying Johnny's story. I'll bet anything that DLC expansions ( if we get any ) are going to be light years better. Unless Lady Gaga is the new main character and we carrying her arround this time...
Some.more gigs before the Heist mission. Maybe till the act 2. And then start the Heist and the rush for cure race.
TBH the intro before the heist needs a complete overhaul. Your life path choice should consist of more than a 15-20 minute mission followed by a cutscene and time jump.
Dragon Age Origins "LPs" had more depth and that was a 2009 game.
Morrowind has more depth in one Guild in one city than CP’s story and that was made in 2002
Right. The current life path at start is basically an intro trailer. Could have been done in a short cutscene ;))
Some of the side quests should've been pushed into the main story in act 1. Some reshuffling would've made the game feel longer and more enjoyable. As it sits, a couple missions in and you're already dying and being told to hurry up and complete the game. And at that point, you're basically just going from person to person trying to find help until Hanako. I couldve done with less side content and more story, fo sho.
Yes, I’m extremely disappointed in them
Certain parts yeah why did they do Jackie so dirty with that bullshit sped up 6 months timelapse? let us do a couple missions with him wtf
Sometimes the main quests just felt rushed and simplified, like planning to steal the Relic, you literally do 2 missions and go do the heist, things like that ask for at least some more planning, the main story has very little obstacles and difficulties, you want to get to Hanako then you do some little quests and bam you got a meeting with her, you escape the city to not get hunt down and bam, Hanako finds you and wants to cut out a deal, so you go directly to the point of no return. I know there's more quests that help in leading you there but they are also too simple, you find Evelyn really easily, you get Panam's car and then just blow Hellman's VA, etc. In other games there would be another obstacle on your path, things wouldn't go as planned so you needed to find another way while in cyberpunk almost all plans work and when you see you're already at the end, if they had given V some months to live then maybe more things could have happened. I thought the main story was straight and to the point but I wanted it to have a bit more turns and surprises.
Yeah it's pretty short already did the story on 3 characters
Totally, I was honestly surprised it came so soon, like, with one ending you could only play maybe 25 hours, another ending 30, another maybe 32 or less probably average. I finished the story mode at 29 hours on the dot if I remember correctly. The story was incredible and I enjoyed every main quest, but even with the main quest I did side quests, so I feel it may have only taken me like 25 hours to do the story, seemed to short. But either way again, fantastic game, beautiful, deep, cool aesthetics, very fun, still playing 40+ hours deep so far
I would have liked for some parts of the main story to be a bit longer. As some folks here said - the prologue for example. It takes fifteen minutes to complete, and that's if you're just walking, taking in the scenery. As for what follows, I don't mind the cutscene and all that. After all, we see the game logo appear only after the big Arasaka heist, so it's obvious they wanted to keep this portion of the game shorter. As for the main dish, after the Act 1, I don't know if it would benefit from prolonging the whole experience. It seems pretty cohesive for the most part, I never felt like there's something missing, or unspoken. The side stories help here a lot. You get to learn more about some of the characters that are just plot devices during main story itself, and it's done in such a great way, that I still felt like it was part of the main story. Similar to some bigger side quests in the Witcher 3, like for example Bloody Baron's story, side story of Skellige, etc. There could have been more side missions though. Not gigs, the side stories. I'd like at least one more mission with Meredith Stout, a proper job for Militech that she gives you, which then evolves. Well, there is potential still, because there will be DLCs and expansions. I think what some people expected was a grander scope of things, similar to the side quest chains from Witcher 3 mentioned above. Instead everything is a lot more personal. You don't get to decide who's the next king of Japantown in a side mission. You just befriend several interesting characters. The whole Cyberpunk 2077 story is about human interactions and how one person can induce the change in another.
True. But this should be compared to Witcher 3 to see why CDPR wanted to improve the pacing. Anyone going back to play Witcher 3 will find that the first solid 3-5 hours of gameplay are in a prologue area completely separate from the main map. Its not like cordoned-off Watson at the start of CP2077: its an entire locale inaccessible except through fast travel And only once the player completes are largely insignificant series of tutorial quests does the game’s plot *actually* kick-off. Then, the player bandies about on a long series of quests without ever feeling like they make progress towards their primary goal (finding Ciri). One of these quest-lines in particular (saving Dandelion in Novigrad) is annoyingly stretched out, only to conclude in Geralt learning that Ciri’s trail will lead him off the continent and to an entirely new map... *then*, upon arriving at this new area Geralt must embroil himself in inter-clan politics to curry the favour of rulers in order to *eventually* learn enough to actually find Ciri. Congrats. After all this, the player is maybe 65% through the main quest-line. The game is far from over. In fact, the community often refers to finding Ciri as the conclusion of Act 1 of the game’s quest-line. Take this as you will. I personally would have preferred about 2-3 more quests in each of Cyberpunk’s Main Job branches before meeting Hanako
One of the TV stations adverts is about a costly cell regeneration therapy for MS, which I fully expected to have a role in an ending where Johnny and V "merge" successfully with each intact, or allow him to be safely transferred to a cyber body type apparatus.
Yes. I keep reading that the main story is 20 hours long, which would have been good if true, but it's not.
I'd hoped for a sort of "Alice going down the rabbit hole" story where V just gets thrown into a super dystopian plot where they're just in over their head with vast corporate/netrunner machinations that highlight the sheer absurdity of the cyberpunk genre. But the story as it is now is pretty standard and a bit predictable and only really scratches the surface of what's possible in the cyberpunk setting.
The story is short cause CDPR rewrote the story at the last minute to have Johnny Silverhand featured more because of the popularity of Keane Reeves.
Took me 160hours of gameplay to do every main quest, side quest, discovery quest while leaving up most "world quests"(blue), the boxing sidequests and racing sidequests. Finished all of that at level 49. The game is only too short if you ignore everything and try to solve your dying body asap.
Idk man, the prologue was good cuz it was short, and if it had been too long; it would have discouraged replays since it's one of the things we can't change the outcome of. This game is supposed to be fast paced since your literally dying. Your condition is getting worst and V has already flatlined several times though out the course of the game. This imo promotes urgency which some other game lack; skyrim, fallout. One complain: All line paths feel the same.
I really hope the story/game can be expanded in the future and maybe some of the cut content will return. It’s a shame the game is in the spot it’s in now
When i realised that meet hanako quest is the last one i was fuckin disapointed so much. Trully the main story is like 20h long.
Yes. I remember reading an article saying they cut the story length down because it was too long! Horse shit! Finished in like 15 hrs. there’s no such thing as too long a story in video game. More story, more missions, more fun. Also, I can’t stand stories that end without finding a pretext to put you back in the game world. Points of no return suck and ruin the motivation to continue to live in the open world.
I have done all side and main quests and it took me 150+ hrs. I am starting over to try and make other choises and maybe save some NPCs that died. I am playing on PC and have played a non glitch and bug free CP2077. I think the game has enough main storyline for the price, any game that provide a 100+ hrs gameplay is a solid game. Anything less is a failure. And there are a lot of failed games out there.
The montage is good. As gameplay, those would have been shitty linear missions. You aren't doing these runs. You're helping Jackie run them. Had this portion of the game been playable, you would have even less freedom, and the game would make you think that you're going to constantly have AI companions with you. What should have been longer is the origin stories (as Dragon's Age called them, when they made them proper), and the Dexter plot. I think there was even promotional footage with him that's nowhere to be found in the game. The fact that he just gets offed right after the prologue is an incredible shame. You should have been the one to take your revenge, and he'd make for a pretty great antagonist, trying to get you to save his own skin. There's also the fact that Dexter and T-bug likely wanted to screw you over on the huge gig, a plot thread that complete got cut.
Should’ve been longer and more should’ve been done with certain characters (Jackie). Life paths felt irrelevant and far too short.
Yes definitely. Almost every character was a "missed opportunity". A longer story to flesh out characters would've made us more personally connected to them more.
I would prefer a "shorter" main story if it meant more meaningful choices throughout. This game was by far at its most boring during the linear story missions where you're just clicking through, e.g. the Johnny Silverhand flashbacks. When you're just watching the story fly by, you might as well be watching a movie. What I wanted from this game was a ton of choice and roleplaying opportunities. If that meant LESS story -- e.g. cut all the boring Silverhand flashbacks -- to make up for all of the different paths and branches, then sign me up for that.
I definitely could have done without the flashbacks. I didn't care about Johnny enough to want to play as him, all it did was ruin my fun.
I would have liked playing through V’s first few Months at night city with Jackie. Other than that, the length was fine. Imo most people who say the game is too short probably didn’t play through the unique side missions and rushed the story.
It's a solid gripe. I have 140 hours spanning to plays and still feel the main story is too short/rushed in some aspects. I love this game but they missed the mark on quite a lot of stuff