Good Morning Friends! As I alluded to yesterday, one of the major things that I did over the break was finish off Cyberpunk 2077. Now I have already written a large piece talking about some of my feelings and impressions of the game and I don’t feel like I need to retrace most of what was said there. That piece was largely spoiler free and my goal today is also to largely remain spoiler free. I might talk about some situations in the game in general terms but I am going to try my best not to give away major plot points save for a few that have been widely spoiled through trailers and such. Also warning… there is a dong in one of the images so if you react negatively to such things that maybe skip this post.
Another thing that I feel like I need to get out of the way. There are still a lot of tensions surrounding this game. CD Projekt Red as corporation, publisher and marketing wing are complete shit bags for a lot of the things surrounding this launch. I personally feel like the game itself is a much better product than you would get the impression of through the whirlwind of crap surrounding the game. That said if you are a console player… may god have mercy on your soul. Essentially I am not going to be going into any of this… even the fact that it got delisted by Sony.
That said I do feel like I need to set up a baseline for what system I ran the game on, since this is running so generally crappy for so many players. Here are the key important bits of my system configuration that might be relevant to performance.
Intel Core i7-5820k 3.3 GHz processor
24 Gb of ram
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics
Western Digital 1TB WD Blue 3D NAND SSD – Sata III Storage
On this system I can technically run the game in 4k but the framerates are unstable and too low for me to be able to enjoy the experience without drastically turning everything down. Instead I opted to play in 1440p with the above settings and get over 60 fps for a fluid gaming experience. The game still looks gorgeous so I don’t necessarily feel like I am missing much of anything in the drop from 4k to 1440p.
Another point that I should talk about is that this game has become meme fodder on the internet. During my play through I had a relatively limited number of issues. Most of the things I encountered are odd clipping problems like the above image where the car is spawned halfway through the ground, or an NPC is standing in the middle of some other object. These are generally the sort of odd bugs you experience in Bethesda games, and didn’t really damage my enjoyment. However if you are prone to be triggered by this sort of thing then Cyberpunk is likely going to kill your joy. Not that there were a ton of these but there were enough that I rarely went a play session without seeing something “goofy” happening.
What Cyberpunk does better than most games I have played is present a world with extremely rich and fleshed out characters that I deeply care about. The game is a marvel of writing when it comes to character interactions, and the team working on story and quest design should be winning awards. The game presents you with a cast of characters and then allows you to become involved with them in any number of ways, the vast majority of which have little to nothing to do with the main story arc. There is a through line of the game and you can beat the entire thing relatively quickly if you focus your way through it. However you would be missing a wealth of the best content I have experienced this year for certain… and honestly in MOST years.
Traditionally one of my core problems with a game that has romance elements, is that it is ultimately locking away some of the most interesting character development behind a system with a limited number of choices. Romance is one of those game systems that can be both amazing and terribly frustrating at the same time. Cyberpunk 2077 is no stranger to having a very limited number of options with absolutely strict requirements for them. Essentially your deeply limited options for romances follow:
Male V Options
Opposite Gender Relationship with Panam
Same Gender Relationship with Kerry
Female V Options
Opposite Gender Relationship with River
Same Gender Relationship with Judy
If you don’t happen to like your options, then you are more or less fucked… or not in this case. Panam and Judy however are two of the best written characters in the game so I was perfectly fine with my options were I to play a male or a female V. Which leads to a whole other issue with the game. During the character creation system you are given 3 options for your character… Masculine or Feminine Body, Masculine or Feminine Voice, and your choice between three genitalia options of Cut and Uncut Penis and Vagina. None of this actually seems to matter when it comes to any of the options in the game… and more or less it is the voice and occasionally body type that determines how someone reacts to you. This whole genital system just appears to be something that was put in just for kicks and has no bearing on anything other than causing memeworthy issues of dongs clipping through your pants on consoles.
What the game does absolutely nail perfectly however is the platonic relationship. Earlier I talked about my frustrations with romance systems in general and how they lock away some of the most meaningful character development behind whether or not you choose to try and get in a specific characters pants. This is not the case for Cyberpunk 2077, because for each of those four characters mentioned above there is both a romance path and a friendship path. I said that Judy was one of the best written characters in the game, and by the time you reach the climax of the story the two of you have “seen some shit”. You are battle hardened compatriots, and that deserves a fitting conclusion to that story even thought she has zero interest in me sexually.
The game does just that and from what I can tell there is a friend path and a lover path that sort of interweave as you go through the game. Similarly there is this excellent storyline that involves you and a former NCPD detective named River that turns into this whole Buddy Cop story as you try and solve a crime together. The ultimate climax of that could break off into a romance were I a Female character, but instead I got the tale of two buds having a great BBQ and shooting the shit now that things have settled down a bit. This isn’t just limited to the romance characters however, and you have what feels like meaningful connections to a large number of characters in the game.
A lot of the interactions between characters during the game are over the holo as they call you with details about your specific mission or to ask your help with some new issue. This connection that you have built with the characters ends up playing out in the final moments of the game as the credits roll. Regardless of the ending you are treated to a number of calls from various characters who are trying to get ahold of you. It seems that whether or not a character appears, is determined by how much of the story you managed to complete for each of them. There are even quirky side characters that make their appearance here that I never expected, but also had a similarly meaningful wrap up to their tale.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a game of phenomenal beauty and depth, but sadly only for players who chose to play it on the right platform with sufficient hardware. For others this is a frustrating and kludgy mess that is going to keep them from seeing just how damned well written some of the interactions are. For even more the horrific antics of the corporate wing of CDPR are going to keep them from ever picking up the game and seeing how hard someone worked on creating this. Cyberpunk 2077 is likely my favorite game of 2020, but it is also by that same token probably its greatest tragedy. As much as I enjoyed the experience there will always be a part of me that wonders what we could have gotten had the game been given a realistic development schedule and enough time to finish all of the finer points.
So I would be curious to hear your thoughts. Did you make it all of the way through Cyberpunk 2077, are you still chewing on it, or did you either nope out of it or skip it entirely? Drop me a line below. This is an extremely divisive experience, but one that I am thankful I got to have.
The post Cyberpunk Final Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good morning friends. When I sat down and decided to take a bit of a break I didn’t expect that a fortnight would pass before I put virtual pen to paper and start posting again. The weirdest thing about the entire experience is that I expected there would be this massive drop off in readership… yet for the most part my data stayed pretty normal. I figured eventually people would give up on me and forget that I existed, but that does not appear to be the case. I am not entirely certain if this means I am returning to my normal daily routine or if I will ultimately modify it slightly to be a little more forgiving.
Whatever the case I guess I am back and functional, but to be honest I am no less stressed now than I was when I ultimately decided to disappear. Part of that last bit might be because today is my first day back to work after having been off for a full week. During that week I allowed myself to get royally out of synchronization with my normal sleep schedule and as a result 5:30 this morning was a painful mess, as was attempting to get to sleep before midnight. Today will be hell but hopefully I readjust quickly to the normal routine.
I spent most of my break hanging out on the sofa remoted into my upstairs machine via Parsec and snuggling with cats. This is a pretty damned good existence if you ask me, and I would happily be on the sofa right now were it not for that whole need to be working thing. I played an excessive amount of Cyberpunk 2077 and love it so much… which seems to be counter to the wider opinion of the game for various valid reasons. I beat the game on one ending and started a second, and as a result I likely have a long form post in my breaking down my thoughts about the game as a whole. This morning is not that post however.
Another thing that I did over the break was to restart Jedi Fallen Order since around this time last year I stalled out on Kashyyyk. I originally played the game with a controller and this time around I decided to make the switch to mouse and keyboard which greatly improved my personal enjoyment. The problem with Jedi Fallen Order is it is not exactly clear in its directions of where you should be going… and when I stalled out the first time it was because I had misunderstood the games subtle hints that it was time for me to leave the planet. I probably have a lot of thoughts to share about this game experience, but again… that this not necessarily this mornings post.
I made an attempt to play Red Dead Redemption II, and this is the point where I have realized that I just don’t like Rockstar Games. I’ve “attempted” to play Grand Theft Auto before, but never really got into it and playing RDR2 made me realize why. GTA and RDR both give you the illusion that the game world is this massive open place for you to wander around in… however the second you start a mission you are forced onto a narrow track essentially closing in the walls of that open world into a fixed corridor where the mission actually takes place. Instead of getting a quest asking you to gather 3 animal pelts, you are instead placed on a specific mission where you and another character go out in the woods together and hunt those animal pelts.
A game like Witcher 3 or even a Farcry game gives you broad objectives and doesn’t much care what order you complete them in or even when you actually get around to them. This allows you to stack up objectives similar to that of an MMORPG and do multiple things while in the same location. This feels way more natural to me than starting a specific mission that has hard constraints on what you can and cannot do during it. This means that if you are on a stealth mission… you have to be stealthy or you meet a fail condition unlike the more open world genre where going loud causes problems… but if you can deal with those problems you don’t have to sneak about. I just think the Rockstar model may not be for me.
Speaking of games that give me a play style I am more comfortable with… I also played a lot of Ghost of Tsushima and realized I am WAY further from the end of this game than I realized. Additionally the PS5 does a much better job of smoothly streaming a game remotely than the base PS4 did. I am nearing the end of Act 1 and there are 3 Acts in total. I’ve been spending most of my time wandering the country side and challenging Mongols to duels. I now have the perk that allows me to take out three encounters at once when I do a Stand Off, which is still one of the coolest mechanics for this sort of game that I have seen. When I realized this was not a game that I would likely be able to wrap up over the break, I returned to my leisurely pace of knocking out a few objectives and then walking away for awhile.
Last but not least… I seem to have fallen back into the nostalgia of Fallout New Vegas. During a lot of my conversation about Cyberpunk 2077, I compared it to this game and as a result it probably isn’t a massive shock that I would ultimately pick it up and start playing again. Now that I am engaged I am more than likely going to complete this playthrough. The hardest part about Fallout New Vegas to be honest is getting all of the mods installed that make this decade old game look fairly viable. You can also blame this video by HBomberguy that triggered all of the emotions and feels.
Finally I leave you all with this video that my friend Cylladora sent me over the break. It is amazing… true… and also sad. I hope you had an excellent break and for those of you still out there, thanks for sticking around. It might be a few weeks while I sort out what my normal pattern is going to look like. I have a bunch of topics for the next bit as I go through all of the end of the gear stuff. I also want to do a deep dive into Cyberpunk 2077 and Jedi Fallen Order after having beaten both recently. So I have some ammunition for several weeks, but when that runs out… I might allow myself another break because it seems to have at least improved my desire to sit down and write.
The post Games of the Break appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good morning friends. When I sat down and decided to take a bit of a break I didn’t expect that a fortnight would pass before I put virtual pen to paper and start posting again. The weirdest thing about the entire experience is that I expected there would be this massive drop off in readership… yet for the most part my data stayed pretty normal. I figured eventually people would give up on me and forget that I existed, but that does not appear to be the case. I am not entirely certain if this means I am returning to my normal daily routine or if I will ultimately modify it slightly to be a little more forgiving.
Whatever the case I guess I am back and functional, but to be honest I am no less stressed now than I was when I ultimately decided to disappear. Part of that last bit might be because today is my first day back to work after having been off for a full week. During that week I allowed myself to get royally out of synchronization with my normal sleep schedule and as a result 5:30 this morning was a painful mess, as was attempting to get to sleep before midnight. Today will be hell but hopefully I readjust quickly to the normal routine.
I spent most of my break hanging out on the sofa remoted into my upstairs machine via Parsec and snuggling with cats. This is a pretty damned good existence if you ask me, and I would happily be on the sofa right now were it not for that whole need to be working thing. I played an excessive amount of Cyberpunk 2077 and love it so much… which seems to be counter to the wider opinion of the game for various valid reasons. I beat the game on one ending and started a second, and as a result I likely have a long form post in my breaking down my thoughts about the game as a whole. This morning is not that post however.
Another thing that I did over the break was to restart Jedi Fallen Order since around this time last year I stalled out on Kashyyyk. I originally played the game with a controller and this time around I decided to make the switch to mouse and keyboard which greatly improved my personal enjoyment. The problem with Jedi Fallen Order is it is not exactly clear in its directions of where you should be going… and when I stalled out the first time it was because I had misunderstood the games subtle hints that it was time for me to leave the planet. I probably have a lot of thoughts to share about this game experience, but again… that this not necessarily this mornings post.
I made an attempt to play Red Dead Redemption II, and this is the point where I have realized that I just don’t like Rockstar Games. I’ve “attempted” to play Grand Theft Auto before, but never really got into it and playing RDR2 made me realize why. GTA and RDR both give you the illusion that the game world is this massive open place for you to wander around in… however the second you start a mission you are forced onto a narrow track essentially closing in the walls of that open world into a fixed corridor where the mission actually takes place. Instead of getting a quest asking you to gather 3 animal pelts, you are instead placed on a specific mission where you and another character go out in the woods together and hunt those animal pelts.
A game like Witcher 3 or even a Farcry game gives you broad objectives and doesn’t much care what order you complete them in or even when you actually get around to them. This allows you to stack up objectives similar to that of an MMORPG and do multiple things while in the same location. This feels way more natural to me than starting a specific mission that has hard constraints on what you can and cannot do during it. This means that if you are on a stealth mission… you have to be stealthy or you meet a fail condition unlike the more open world genre where going loud causes problems… but if you can deal with those problems you don’t have to sneak about. I just think the Rockstar model may not be for me.
Speaking of games that give me a play style I am more comfortable with… I also played a lot of Ghost of Tsushima and realized I am WAY further from the end of this game than I realized. Additionally the PS5 does a much better job of smoothly streaming a game remotely than the base PS4 did. I am nearing the end of Act 1 and there are 3 Acts in total. I’ve been spending most of my time wandering the country side and challenging Mongols to duels. I now have the perk that allows me to take out three encounters at once when I do a Stand Off, which is still one of the coolest mechanics for this sort of game that I have seen. When I realized this was not a game that I would likely be able to wrap up over the break, I returned to my leisurely pace of knocking out a few objectives and then walking away for awhile.
Last but not least… I seem to have fallen back into the nostalgia of Fallout New Vegas. During a lot of my conversation about Cyberpunk 2077, I compared it to this game and as a result it probably isn’t a massive shock that I would ultimately pick it up and start playing again. Now that I am engaged I am more than likely going to complete this playthrough. The hardest part about Fallout New Vegas to be honest is getting all of the mods installed that make this decade old game look fairly viable. You can also blame this video by HBomberguy that triggered all of the emotions and feels.
Finally I leave you all with this video that my friend Cylladora sent me over the break. It is amazing… true… and also sad. I hope you had an excellent break and for those of you still out there, thanks for sticking around. It might be a few weeks while I sort out what my normal pattern is going to look like. I have a bunch of topics for the next bit as I go through all of the end of the gear stuff. I also want to do a deep dive into Cyberpunk 2077 and Jedi Fallen Order after having beaten both recently. So I have some ammunition for several weeks, but when that runs out… I might allow myself another break because it seems to have at least improved my desire to sit down and write.
The post Games of the Break appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring:Â Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we start the show talking about Monster Sanctuary a blend of Pokemon and Metroidvania. From there we talk about the periscope through which we view the media and how it can be wildly different for two people who are in regular communication. We talk about the problems with Cyberpunk 2077 and then Bel shares his experience playing through the campaign and finishing the game. From there we talk about the Nintendo Direct and more specifically the games Cyber Shadow and Calico. Lastly Bel talks a bit about his down cycle with World of Warcraft and how he is lacking the drive to keep playing.
