Cyberpunk 2077 | An Honest 50 Hour Review

hey guys disclaimer the following are just my i'm just pumpkin we don't do that here cyberpunk 2077 its very nature is split in two in more ways than one it's an alright game that exists in a market that expects nothing less than the golden gift of god but not all that can be blamed on some mysterious internet hype machine let's not forget the big part cd projekt red played in creating these expectations there are spoilers later i don't care about spoilers personally but i haven't made a video on why you shouldn't care about spoilers yet so i guess i'll put in a warning i'll say it again once we get there the hype machine cd project red was blessed and cursed to be the studio whose name was tied to the witcher 3 blessed because it's a budget and marketing wet dream and cursed because it's a difficult act to follow but merely creating a popular single-player role-playing game doesn't garner this kind of attention 1.4 million subscribers for a youtube channel and almost as many on twitter for a game before launch that's impressive but the hype for this game is absolutely unreal really it's a multitude of factors it's not just the witcher game series fans hyping this up nor is it the cyberpunk tabletop fanbase finally revealing themselves to the world let's take this back to my channel's default fury i mean bethesda bethesda holds the keys to a very interesting gameplay formula one i've spent hours analyzing and discussing on this channel and it's not uncommon for many in the community to claim that bethesda has abandoned us fallout 76 doesn't bode well and fallout 4 had a myriad of problems and it's almost been a decade since skyrim this creates an opportunity for the throne to be overtaken this extends broader to the single-player role-playing game genre after years and really decades at this point of being told that the genre is over that multiplayer's taken over and that the unnecessary and aggressive monetization of single-player games is the new normal cd project red is still proving to the industry that the old ways are viable the immersive sim crowd looks to cdpr as well idos montreal was corrupted from making deus ex games to making marvel's avengers a game which stains my library complimentary of my new cpu they hope then that cyberpunk will prove both the setting and the genre are still viable enough to avoid death by corporal strangulation and speaking of viable single-player genres grand theft auto has spent an entire console generation as an online platform for working a surrogate job so you can earn enough money to combat the myriad of griefers and hackers that infest its online mode not that that's its intended message it has no intended message the only intention is forking over cash to the tune of billions on microtransactions that's just a fraction of the hype not mentioning the pc gaming enthusiasts of old or the console players looking for something exciting to play on their new systems or the fact that cyberpunk is capstoning a pretty wild year you can see a lot of people have a lot riding on this game beyond its quality the game has to be good and it has to do well this encourages contrarians to come along who want or need the game to be bad in order to prove how intelligent they are compared to the plebs you fell for the marketing which is not to say you weren't allowed to have a negative opinion just that you should determine if your opinions being based on the game itself for public sentiment this coming from the guy who up to this point has yet to review a game the same year it got released yes cyberpunk is one of the five games i've played this year to come out in 2020. of course there were the death threats cyberpunk got delayed an additional three weeks now on the one hand that's definitely an extreme response that no adult should have on the other some companies i've worked four print schedules a month in advance and considering it was the ever elusive management that made the decision i think the response would have been more civil had they made the delay announcement two weeks earlier than they did it's not like cdpr didn't decide to have a massive zero day patch and the game is still well for the union the long development eight years eight and a half years of development that's not an entirely accurate statement to make though full development was closer to four and a half following the release of the witcher 3's blood and wine expansion which is still a long time for a game to be in development but necessary if the bar you're aiming for is play times in the hundreds of hours slated for an april 2020 release it was delayed november 19th is the date now and it missed three more weeks to december 10th to be honest i didn't assume anything until i had it in my hands you'd be seeing an oblivion video if they had missed it again and they had the crunch to get the product to market i feel that i just want to say this for anyone who doesn't know but crunch isn't a bad thing sustain crunch for months on end with the expectation that if you don't want to slave away 60 plus unpaid hours a week or you'll get fired that's a bad thing and if that's what's actually happening then yeah shame on cdpr but working an extra day a week for six weeks is not a sustained crunch i'm speaking as somebody who recently had to work overtime at my real job you know the thing that actually pays me money and crunched heavily to bring this video to market thanks to paige i mean sponsored influencers getting copious amounts of advanced time to release their videos before i could even start working on mine the urgency problem now while i would like to cover the story last unfortunately there's a massive problem sitting between us and a discussion to cyberpunk's world and that is the inherent conflict between cd projekt red storytelling and open world game design so to explain this we're going to use a spoiler-free example from the witcher 3 because it has the exact same problem i like this game i enjoy having to prepare specialized oils and potions to fight creatures i like finding the materials to create my equipment i like finding places of power and meeting people and hunting monsters except oh my god there's a giant griffin going around it just attacked this guy and he's lucky we managed to hurt it so it flew off with justice horse oh man it's wiping out entire squads of soldiers too and the villagers are having run-ins with it every couple days i bet it kills at least one person every day luckily there's a monster slayer in town here who has to kill it in order to get information on his missing girlfriend wait no girl why are you solving an arson case girl this is a tomb is now really the time to be looting bandit camps surrender geralt somebody's probably being eaten right now the griffins like the toy with their prey eat it alive piece by piece oh god see the problem well if you can't the problem is that the plot progression is creating a pressure that's smothering the open world elements of the game i discussed this in my moral wind review how the desire to write a story that in a traditional linear narrative would create tension instead shatters it in an open world context a problem that morrowind resolved by presenting an opportunity at the end of its first main quest to step off to go do whatever the player wants as well as opportunities during its first act to go back to the witcher 3 once geralt is deposited into the world proper there's nothing to stop me from going off on my open world adventure except the fact that every time i do a main quest something happens that tries to invoke the timing of the story oh man the wild hunt just missed us they're hot on our trail would that be true if i'd gone off adventuring and come back to this quest weeks if not months later yes i have a hard time enjoying the open world because the story is told in such a way that i can't just ignore it and i have a hard time enjoying the story because the open world keeps trying to draw me away you'll probably need some better equipment to handle the next quest just a couple contracts to earn some cash and then maybe we need to go hunting for these materials to make an item and then before you know it three days have passed and someone's still wondering when i'm gonna get back to them about their missing family now of course you could say that's the point it's about finding a balance and doing what's important so the pressure isn't bad design it's the pressure a monster hunter or freelance mercenary would feel living in a world where there's more monsters or contracts than they alone can handle it's all intentional right wrong i'm not dodging the griffin fight because i'm trying to balance geralt's work and personal life i'm dodging the fight because it'll progress the plot an arbitrary bit of programming that says it's time to move on as long as i put off the most urgent thing i could be doing right now time is effectively frozen it's hard to you know role play unless the character i meant to be playing as is the most irresponsible human being on the planet i don't know and it's because of that arbitrary uncertainty i have to go up the hill and banish a ghost that hasn't killed anyone before i slay the griffin that's actively hunting villagers cyberpunk has this exact same problem it's hard to step off and admire night city when the next bit of story is being shoved in your face at all times this was apparent as early as the 2018 gameplay demo which had problems that are still present in the release version of the game the world of cyberpunk opens up once the player reaches act 2 of 2. but before you can go off on your adventure the game tacks on a terminal case of imminent death only curable by the main quest a terminal case it often reminds you of that's not a spoiler by the way it's the game's premise we'll get to that don't worry many of the game's jobs present a sense of urgency to what you're doing i honestly wanted to punch v in the face for the number of times he made a commitment to someone that he would be somewhere without first consulting his calendar to see if this meeting would conflict with the other five people i'm supposed to meet after sundown what's sad is the game comes with a way to fix this problem the player has access to a phone and can call and send text messages to characters instead of agreeing upfront to meet officer ward and then setting that job aside for a week because there's been a main plot development let me the player call ward and set up the meeting whenever i want to so then there's at least a semblance of control i want to wager that in the 19 hours i was playing the main story i at any given time had at least four people sitting somewhere waiting for me to show up and at its peak i would say there were 11 people in night city just sitting around because i had made commitments to meet them once i was done with the main story i was able to clean this up handily but up until that point i felt like a circus clown desperately motioning to my fellow carnies to step in and help due to the number of balls i'm juggling the gameplay cyberpunk 2077's gameplay is interesting and prone to about a billion different dominant strategies want to run around like a lunatic because double barrel shotguns are apparently still the king of firearms even in the future go ahead want to stealth around melee take downing people and hiding bodies better hope they put enough body dumping areas in the level want to hack into the cameras and turn off everyone's nervous system without even entering the building it's a lot easier than you think and this thing this is god's sniper rifle i call it that because it possesses the ability to shoot through thin surfaces and thick surfaces and buildings which when paired with the ability to mark people means i can just ping the first person i see which will highlight everyone around them and proceed to drop an entire area's worth of enemies you may have seen this thing it's a non-lethal option and i can only hazard a guess that it's for the people who like to do pacifist runs good luck with that there's a couple levels where non-lethal really isn't an option which begs the question of why it's there in the first place the game does almost nothing with the concept you will very rarely be asked to avoid killing someone and sometimes when i did avoid killing people the game just assumed i'd gone lethal anyways of course this is all in reference to gameplay when it's there which was mostly in the latter half of my playthrough after the first time i beat the final mission in the first half much of the game is going through its most challenging mechanic yet the dialogue the dialogue system itself works great i could tell who i was talking to with what lines the quick decisions were always interesting and there were plenty of skill checks with palpable changes to how missions would play out but the dialogue was just so dense you can potentially go over an hour before the game remembers its interactive and sends you to a level and then when i basically ran out of story missions at the 40th hour there was next to no dialogue at all it felt like the open world game design and the storytelling were outright enemies refusing to share in each other's systems is this a game about doing minor jobs for people and getting equipment that can be improved or is this a narrative with tension and stakes it depends on which of the game's personalities we ask did i feel rewarded for climbing equipment mountain to the top no not really i found the style i wanted my character to have early on and the later equipment was used out of necessity there's no vanity slots here style comes at the cost of effectiveness something that shocked me was the inability to customize my character after starting the game we're in a world where full-body modification is not only possible but expected and there's not a single barber to be found in night city i had to stick with my corporal hairstyle the entire game that from the start i intended to change as soon as i hit the streets oh but haha there's a penis option it's not even a slider and not the v was getting any anyways [ __ ] pan am wasn't even my first choice and it just of happened meanwhile johnny was busy cucking me with my own body i expressed purely playtonic interests and carry and still got turned down meanwhile river was giving me bedroom eyes for a battle buddy ass slamming he won't perform and judy made her labial interests very clear at the end of her questline didn't these guys make the witcher [Music] you're tuning in games look who's alive hey did you sleep all right good work v all style ready there are three starting paths no mad street kid and corporal agent the difference is 20 minutes of story and dialogue options later in the game judging by where the story went i'd say my choice of corpo was probably best as the bulk of the game's plot revolves around dealing with corporations this is something we'll know more about when braver and more patient souls than i play through the game a second time with a different life path to record the differences one thing that's missing from the game are some of the other life path options shown in the 2018 gameplay demo no more childhood hero key life event or reason to be in night city but thank god we kept the quest markers speaking of night city it's a great setting the city uses color well i like that no matter how dystopic the world becomes at least the city planner could make things look nice the city felt like i was driving through about a hundred different albums movies and video games but then i was driving and it's not great the best way i can describe it is it feels like how it feels to drive in a ubisoft game and they give you one of the best vehicles in the game for free at the beginning of the second act bugs alright i'm going to try and avoid just listing a bunch of minor issues the game has because it has a lot of them and focus on just the game breaking stuff while it is pretty disgraceful that releasing broken games and patching them in the first week is standard practice in the industry i could at least say that in my entire run time i only had a quest bug its progression once and it didn't soft lock the quest most of the bugs i encountered were visual and were fixed simply by quick saving and then loading the quick save because for some reason there's no quick load button the game is fairly solid in regards to how it kept running i was actually surprised to see a steam guide related to crashing considering how stable my experience was and most of my footage came from the first five days i guess it's my fresh windows 10 install on my new computer thanks to the morrowind video finally being finished on the contrary the game would stay open in the background after closing and had to be killed in the task manager so what are the big problems fairly consistently i've had an issue with ui elements mostly not appearing but sometimes not disappearing as well commonly the quick hack indicators didn't load requiring i reload the save to get him back a few times the health bar didn't appear once the lower left items didn't disappear humorously one of the first side quests i did after beating the story and setting off for the next 30 hours had a profound effect on those 30 hours this character supposed to glitch out on his holo profile well he decided to stick around and haunt all the other character hollow profiles as well while his model is no longer loading inside of their model the glitched effect remained for the next 25 hours there was also a point where the game forgot to unload an intentional effect that glitches out the ui and it lasted a while because i thought it was intentional at another point the game started gaslighting me into thinking that an fov of 70 was in fact an ffv of 100. there were also a number of animation glitches the occasional t-posing civilian or enemy i can handle my character t-posing while naked from the waist down while riding a motorcycle less so flooding props that haven't been deleted were common and there were even z fighting issues with textures on character models this dragon is supposed to be holographic also without fail each time i ended the game it would be busy having a dramatic moment and there would be some kind of visual glitch uh this makes sense in context lastly sloped surfaces if you play this game jump on a sloped surface this is what a world without friction looks like under performance it's terrible my rig is past the recommended specs for 2k and i'm not playing with any demanding effects on yet the game could barely crack 45 frames per second i followed a guide and changed a bunch of settings and only got up to 50. being big on ray tracing is all well and good but i can't help the feeling that maybe that effort should have gone towards the fundamentals and not a gimmick used to sell expensive rtx cards story time i'm going to be going over cyberpunk's main story here if you care then here's a time stamp to my conclusion i warned you cyberpunk 2077 more than anything is about living with imminent death the game has a lot to say on the subject throughout the entire game and i think it handles this theme surprisingly well if it were a linear narrative the problem is that the story the game wants to tell and the genre the game wants to be are mutually incompatible this is an unsolvable problem our condition starts after a heist gone wrong we're tasked with stealing an advanced biochip that requires specific environmental conditions to work but its casing is compromised the chip is initially implanted in our partner jackie before he dies and we take the chip all is well until we're betrayed and left for dead upon our rescue by the bodyguard of the assassinated emperor arisaka we're taken to our river dock who eventually informs us that we have at most a couple weeks to live the chips gradually killing us and can't be removed and it's replacing our consciousness with a new personality the one of one johnny silverhand a rockstar terrorist who nuked arisaka's headquarters in 2023 before having his soul ripped out and put in storage none of this is actually news if you've seen the game's promotional material like i said it's the premise of the game the theme of living your life knowing that you'll be dead soon is explored throughout the game we all live life knowing fundamentally that death is inevitable even if you were to become immortal you'd still have the prospect of the heat death of the universe or the big rip or the big crunch being your end three endings that all lead to the same certain fate the thrust of the game's actions is the consequence of saboro arasaka emperor and ceo of the arasaka corporation each of his children represented some deistic aspect an intentional design as his goal was in fact godhood in one ending of the game after the engram of johnny silverhand is removed it's revealed that saburo took the place of his killer and son yobanuro arasaka effectively ensuring his immortality yobanuro was intended for this purpose living his life knowing full well that once his father had a mechanism for soul transfer his body would be stolen it's the reason he stole the biochip and specifically took with him the soul of the man who hurt his father the most johnny silverhand we find him sitting in his office a gun with a single round in it beside him he's contemplating suicide a choice we take away from him a choice that in another ending we had made suicide is a difficult topic especially so in regards to the topic of terminal illness it's something i think the game handles well it's only issue being that i kind of wish the game signposted that's what the actual choice is like yeah i knew it was one of the options but i thought the choice would branch i thought when we throw the pills away that inhibit the chip from progressing we'd have another choice like let the chip take us over or commit suicide in actuality it is a choice just not my first time through as i hadn't done the necessary quests that's a consequence of the game's urgency problem still i think it's worth it to beat the game as soon as possible then go back and beat it again once you're truly done to see how differently things shake out it's a great scene johnny a character who starts off hostile but gradually comes around to the player respects his decision his opposition to arasaka turned terroristic after he discovered that they possess the power to take souls he says in essence that corporations have been taking everything away from common people and now they want to take away their ability to die johnny had lived 54 years in a dreamlike state on the chip being denied his ability to die by arisaka it's not just about being able to die though it's about being able to choose this is the easy way out and a really tragic ending is while the credits roll every character you formed a relationship with attempts to call you your final choices decide with hanukkah arasaka the emperor's daughter this would be a betrayal of johnny's anti-corpus sentiment but is the root of last resort that can potentially save v's life spoilers it doesn't after johnny's removal and an attempt at recovery the players presented with a dilemma the chip while removed still did some substantial genetic damage we have at most six months to live and are given a choice arisaka will permit us to create an engram of our soul continuing our existence but compromising our ideals further or we walk away go home and live out the rest of our life note how i phrased that if i hadn't told you about the six months to live part it would seem like we'd recovered every time you leave the house you could be said to be going out to live the rest of your life because death is inevitable a fact symbolized by our necklace a memento to the bullet we took to the head a bullet we survived thanks to johnny silverhand once i went back and played another 30 hours i had another go at the ending this one had more options one option is to give johnny control and ask rogue for help she's the best fixer in the city and can organize the raid on arisaka the other option is to take control and ask pan am for help if you complete her story she's one of the leaders of the aldocados a faction and nomads who are capable of raiding arasaka hq each path leads to a final choice v can take control of his body but will only live six months johnny can take control of the body and live out the rest of its natural life for each i chose the other so as johnny i gave the body to v and his v i gave the body to johnny there are two fairly good endings to this story and johnny getting the body isn't either of them if you go with pan am and v gets his body back he sets out with the aldocados with all of his friends to try and find someone who can help with our illness a happy ending for the person invested in the other characters of the world if you let johnny go with rogue and v gets his body back he takes advantage of the downfall of arisaka to take rogue's spot as the top fixer in night city and organizes the greatest heist in human history a happy ending for the person who wants v to realize his ambition of becoming a living legend each ending rolls with credits with the characters you've met calling you yet these endings didn't set well with me the problem is that the ending dilemma is contrived removing the engram of johnny and v from v's body is not lethal for either party the only reason there's a choice is because no one thinks this suggests that v take his money back and transfer johnny to another shard until the day a robotic body can be built for engrams the game plays really fast and loose with ai and i think that's the main problem here alt the ai involved in the transfer glosses over the possibility of either person being stored for the future i mean i get it that would remove the stakes and drama and it's still a bittersweet ending conclusion cyberpunk 2077 has a lot of problems i think it's going to be the focus of analysis for some time because there's a lot to chew on here but fundamentally here are the core faults of the game urgency removes agency i said this in positive regard to morrowind and i say it here in negative regard to cyberpunk the game's primary thesis is reliant on this urgency it's a problem with no possible resolution you could remove the urgency while keeping the premise of having silverhand live in your head but it would undercut what the game is trying to say you could remove silverhand entirely and cyberpunk would join the list of sandbox worlds that don't really have anything to say unlike the multitude of bugs glitches and performance issues that plague the game this isn't a problem that's going to be fixed in 5 years leveling is another problem the game reached a point where i was really starting to dread leveling i didn't realize until hour 45 that perk unlocks were tied to attribute levels and not the skill levels themselves so when i wanted to craft some orange colored equipment i needed to gain six levels to unlock the perk because while you can buy an item that resets your perk allocations you can't reset your attribute allocations and there's a lot of talking is this an rpg or a dating sim well not the latter i wouldn't call what you do in this game dating it's amazing because despite how much communication there is everyone still talks past each other i play games to get away from this kind of stuff i don't need characters irrationally ignoring me here too even in a bunk-ass bethesda game like fallout 4 i could pull out my gun and kill someone for being reprehensible the game has something to say though so it won't let me shoot and there it is my hypocrisy is bare at last i laid out my impossible expectation that cyberpunk would be the chosen new vegas sequel hey that's not a bethesda gate shut up ultimately i wanted cyberpunk 2077 to fail because then i could take advantage of the chaos to build my online career that's less of a joke than you may think i have a vested stake as a content creator to focus on the negatives and take advantage for my own gain i tried to avoid reading or watching anything online about this game up to this point because i wanted to create as honest a review as possible about this game untainted by sentiment or groupthink was it worth it who knows i'm coming down from a 7 day dopamine high after the morrowind video did much better than i could have hoped so forgive me if i sound melancholic thanks to everyone who sticks around for the end for your support this video was a long time coming and i'm glad to see more people are joining the channel and spreading the good word see you around a bid for control for power i see you there are other ways out beside suicide what therapy a colossal waste of time shrinks hate vehicles we don't have mothers

Channel: PatricianTV

Views: 108,728

Keywords: cyberpunk honest review, cyberpunk 2077 honest review, cyberpunk review, cyberpunk 2077 review, cyberpunk2077, cyberpunk 2077 honest 50 hour review, cyberpunk 50 hour review

Id: F22E9kwzjwk

Length: 25min 0sec (1500 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 18 2020