Took a break for 2077

Don’t roast me alive, but I actually like Cyberpunk 2077.

I know that this game has gotten a lot of bad press. Bungled release, horrible game breaking bugs, and all that jazz.

But the thing I’m noticing is that the people that are complaining the most about the game breaking bugs are also performing exploits that cause issues with the game itself. Yes, you can buy a gajillion sodas by hitting every machine in an area, dismantle them for resources, sell the resources for more than you bought the sodas for, save, reload, and repeat. This abuses the spirit of the game’s crafting system, and yes the player can make a stack of cash faster than doing questlines, but this exploit bloats up the save file and eventually corrupts it so the game can’t be loaded. There’s other ‘game breaking’ bugs that involve item duplication techniques that, again, abuse the system.

As a game designer, I get it. This is a game with a lot of moving parts. There’s optimizations that need to be made (so pedestrians behind you may despawn to save on memory) and lots of other little things that I’m seeing people poke fun at are things that were set up to reduce the number of draw calls, aiming for better memory allocation, and the like.

I’ve encountered a couple bugs while playing the game fairly, but they’re minor enough that I’m willing to overlook them. I’ve fallen through the ground twice in the city, but the system tries to self correct once it notices you’re falling and reloads to the last auto-save. Sometimes a hand-held object (like a cigarette or data pad) continues to float in the air if the NPC changes their pose/animation halfway through. Alternatively, one item the NPC should be holding is swapped out for another item that is inappropriate for the animation.

If I was watching a movie, yeah these would irritate me. If Tony Stark snapped but the glove was on the other hand, yeah, I’d be all kinds of WTF.

Jackie going to pull a chip out of his head and winds up holding a gun instead? That’s an integer on a lookup table not cross referencing to the right static object he should be holding. I had to go through this exact kind of coding for my Pirate Island game and it took a lot of trial, error, and testing for one single player and twenty or so objects. Cyberpunk 2077 has hundreds of potential items that can be held by all manner of NPCs, but some only get held in specific NPC hands. I can imagine how convoluted the code could have potentially gotten, and having to link this over to combat or dialogue animations, and so on. I’m willing to overlook it.

Night City actually looks cool. I’ve been focusing on the storyline, and have been playing it pretty steady. I am always short on cash, so I hit the reported assaults or other crimes on the regular to fuel my need to buy legendary items. I’m considering buying some cars, too. I found the 2077 version of the General Lee and there’s a couple of armored vehicles that I want to get too.

The story is actually decent. I’m playing a Nomad, and I always use one of the Nomad dialogue options if it ever comes up in conversation trees. I have some suspicions on plot twists (being a writer, I see a couple things being set up) and there are ‘mini-stories’ in some of the random crime scenes too, by way of recorded conversations that explain why there are two dead cops and a lot of gang members in an area, and the like.

I feel like there’s a lot left to the game and I’m only about 30% of the way through. I’ll be updating again, of course, once I hit 100% on the questline. I think it’ll take me a while before I learn Night City like I learned Los Santos, but I think I’ll get the hang of it eventually.

Hope you are all being safe out there. I’ll be updating again soon. Have a great rest of 2020!