Get your game on!

[Fitz]

Getting 60-80fps in the city with a 2070S at 1440p, using the non-RTX ultra preset with DLSS on Quality setting. Pleasantly surprised by the performance considering the mixed impressions on it before release.

95% of the bugs I've encountered so far are visual in nature and haven't occurred during story missions. The only annoying one is when an enemy stops respecting the existence of matter and just shoots/hacks you through any amount of walls. Other than that they don't detract from my enjoyment of the game.

I'm 21 hours in and just finished up the prologue to get access to the rest of the city and way more side quests. Next session, I'm gonna find some unfortunate gangoons to test out my shiny new mantis blades on.

[Sherwood]

I feel for folks playing it on last-gen consoles and having a bad time, but on my 2080 it’s going great. Brent has a saying for this...

[HiWire]

I just started playing Pillars of Eternity yesterday – what a great game! It's a spiritual successor to classic isometric party-based RPGs like Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale.

It's a free download on the Epic Store until December 17.

[TMoney]

I'm pretty sad to see what a disaster the CPunk launch has been. I'm putting the game aside until Q1-Q2 '21. I trust CDPR to make it right eventually, but it is just too buggy to want to play through right now. I can wait.

CDPR's stock price is getting devastated as the state of the game is even worse than I had feared, especially on the consoles. Lifetime sales projections I'm sure are getting revised heavily downward.

[Fitz]

For anyone wanting to squeeze some more performance out of CP2077, this mod combines a number of fixes into a single package. Highlights include it fixing the bug where the game doesn't use all the threads available on AMD CPUs, and enabling it to make use of more RAM and VRAM than it does out of the box. It won't be a miracle fix for most people, but my frametime lows improved significantly and as a result the game feels way smoother in busy areas.

In addition, Digital Foundry has released their recommended settings guide, which will give a nice bump to average framerate over having everything cranked up, without hurting how good things look. The settings are summarized in the video description so you don't have to watch the whole thing if you don't want to.

 

[Sherwood]

Sad to hear it, Adam.  My bugs have been few and far between, and the quality of the content is too good for me to turn away.  I have 31 hours into the game now, which is riding the line between "I'm glad you enjoy your new game" and "hey, are you alright"?

I love my wife, but she doesn't get me like Judy Alvarez does.

Edited December 15, 2020 by Sherwood

[Fitz]

11 minutes ago, Sherwood said:

My bugs have been few and far between

Same here, I'm 66 hours in and aside from the amusing visual and physics glitches, I've had very few bugs of any significance. Only once I've had to reload because a sidequest bugged out. I do have a bug where if I load a save anywhere in Watson, Johnny says a line (about the house rakin' it in) and the subtitles stay permanently on screen, but I can just go to another district, quicksave and reload, and it goes away.

[TMoney]

The visual bugs in the first two hours just repeatedly broke my immersion. I really don't mind waiting.

World of Warcraft is so good right now that honestly it'd be hard for CPunk to pull me away from it even if it had launched in a polished state. Blizzard tuned everything to be harder and the gear grind to be slower. I love that.

[Grahame]

The internet citizenry found these NSFW (or should that be NSFWFH these days) 'bugs' 

https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/10/22167349/cyberpunk-2077-penis-glitch-breasts

https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/14/22174284/cyberpunk-2077-butt-glitch-t-pose-driving

 

[swt61]

Yeah, but to be fair I've been trying to stop my penis from poking through my pants for quite some time. It's not a quick fix.

And as for drivers showing their butts...

Is there a way to view this game, without actually playing it?

Edited December 15, 2020 by swt61

[grawk]

there should be play through videos shortly

[naamanf]

I played for 5 minutes. BORING. 

[Knuckledragger]

In unrelated news, I bought SW Battlefront I and II (the new ones) on Steam for $15.  Downloading them took ages.

[TMoney]

Gonna be hard for CDPR to ever attempt an ambitious game again at this rate. This might kill their studio in its current form. Sad to see.

Edited December 18, 2020 by TMoney

[catscratch]

On 12/14/2020 at 9:08 PM, swt61 said:

Is there a way to view this game, without actually playing it?

There are tons of let's plays all over youtube. CohhCarnage is generally a pretty good bet for long-form let's plays, and he tends to be more positive and mature than most streamers.

The state of affairs was pretty predictable given the constant delays and all symptoms of development hell, but I don't really have a horse in this race as I've never been a huge fan of CDPR to begin with. But this game is definitely something I would be interested in, so I'll give it a shot... eventually. And I wouldn't write CDPR off just yet, a rocky launch followed by months or years of patches to eventually become something good seems to be the new normal for ambitious launches, so I think in the long term they'll be fine.

[swt61]

I was only kidding, because of the bareass comment.

[HiWire]

In the grim darkness of the near future, there is only pork:

 

[Knuckledragger]

Steam Holiday Sale is live and ...boy is it not 10 years ago.  I mean there's some deals ...that have been as good or better quite recently.  The Steam Points Shop(tm) has a bunch of new baubles you can buy for your Steam profile!  (I mock, but I actually bought a few with the otherwise useless GabenPoints.

[Knuckledragger]

Brigador is currently free on GOG: https://www.gog.com/

Quite a good game.  The soundtrack is by Makeup and Vanity Set, who is one of the best synthwave artists, period.

[Fitz]

Haven't played it yet but I've had Brigador on my Steam wishlist. Looks pretty good from the little I've seen. I copped it on GOG, but plan to buy it on Steam if I ever actually get around to playing it.

My backlog is already a mile long though and I'm only halfway through my second (of three, for now) playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077.

[TMoney]

🍿

I think I'm going to wait to play it until the 1.2 patch hits. I'd rather experience it at its best.

[Sherwood]

I don’t regret preordering, and I had an excellent experience on a PC running a 9700k and a 2080. Minimal bugs and a generally clean, satisfying experience.

I’m glad they put it out when they did, and I believe they did not expect the backlash they got.

That said, I’m not sure it’s a “91” game even if everything works perfectly. I’ll revisit in 6 months or so once the DLCs drop, but outside of the core story and the better side quests it’s not a revelation. It looks fantastic, much better than anything I’ve ever played, but I think the artistic reach exceeded the gameplay grasp. A lot of seemingly complex systems are ultimately an unnecessary distraction. In Skyrim everyone ends up just playing a stealth archer because it’s too powerful to ignore, and the same goes for headshot pistol builds in Cyberpunk. I spent most of the game throwing weapons away and using revolvers and baseball bats. Every time I tried something new it was a punishment.

I’ve been playing a lot of Breath of the Wild again with my daughter, and that is a perfect experience to me. No other game so fulfills its core promise, Cyberpunk included.

[Fitz]

On 1/14/2021 at 3:11 PM, Sherwood said:

In Skyrim everyone ends up just playing a stealth archer because it’s too powerful to ignore, and the same goes for headshot pistol builds in Cyberpunk. I spent most of the game throwing weapons away and using revolvers and baseball bats. Every time I tried something new it was a punishment.

I relied a lot on a silenced Overture my first playthrough too, but once you get a handle on things, you can be disgustingly OP with nearly anything. One day I did a bit of experimenting to see how high I could consistently get damage with a weapon. Unsurprisingly with Overture I could get up to around 1.8-1.9 million headshot damage, but with Panam's rifle I could generally do 1.5-1.8 million headshot damage, with the massive benefit of it firing through walls. Those pale in comparison to the Breakthrough (iconic tech sniper rifle), where I was hitting just shy of 15 million headshot damage.

My current character I'm using a Crusher shotgun as my primary weapon, Comrade's Hammer if I want to make some pink mist, and a baseball bat with the wiffle ball bat skin just because how much it amuses me running around smacking people over the head with it. On my first character I used the mantis blades a fair bit when stealth failed, and never got tired of being able to leap across a great distance to impale people with them. Though the long animation for special kills with it was a bit of a hindrance at times.

[HiWire]

I think I'll need a new computer to run this (it's a 2-person Polish game company and one of the them worked on Witcher 3) – Early Access in February, so it will be a while before the finished game is released:

 

Edited January 21, 2021 by HiWire

[robm321]