I think I'm ready to finish this one off now. I've cleared 62 side quests, and I believe there are 80, and fuck doing Street races like it's a 2004 game. Looking to wrap it up and move on to 13 Sentinels.

It's weird that although I've specced exclusively in guns, I've completed two quests just stealthily today. Not sure I'm seeing massive substance in the points I'm putting into things, which when they factor into a 3% increase in X makes sense. Feels quite slight.

regmcfly wrote:

I think I'm ready to finish this one off now. I've cleared 62 side quests, and I believe there are 80, and fuck doing Street races like it's a 2004 game. Looking to wrap it up and move on to 13 Sentinels.

It's weird that although I've specced exclusively in guns, I've completed two quests just stealthily today. Not sure I'm seeing massive substance in the points I'm putting into things, which when they factor into a 3% increase in X makes sense. Feels quite slight.

Do the street races.

mistercrayon wrote:

regmcfly wrote:

I think I'm ready to finish this one off now. I've cleared 62 side quests, and I believe there are 80, and fuck doing Street races like it's a 2004 game. Looking to wrap it up and move on to 13 Sentinels.

It's weird that although I've specced exclusively in guns, I've completed two quests just stealthily today. Not sure I'm seeing massive substance in the points I'm putting into things, which when they factor into a 3% increase in X makes sense. Feels quite slight.

Do the street races.

Will do.

Come on man don’t ruin it before he’s done it.

Yeah same.

I've done 2 of them and it seems more like they're little mechanics rather than plot. Genuinely can't be fucked with the hand to hand as it is frankly appalling, so I've not done the others.

There’s not much of an overall narrative in the boxing but each fight is worth doing. You need to be pretty decent with the fighting and have the right equipment to have a chance though.

Buy gorilla arms, and people have been dropping a sword on the floor just before starting the fight, then picking it up as soon as they are able.

Which one is that? Pretty sure I've done it but can't remember it.

regmcfly wrote:

Theres an absolutely garbo side quest called Sweet Dreams. It isn't worth it at all, for any reason. Avoid.

Seriously

Smells like H is gonna give this game a grudging [7]

Not quite as bad as Div, who almost certainly blocked.me on WhatsApp, or at the very least changed my name to "tasteless fuckwit - Don't believe his lies"

Tis truly a marmite game.

regmcfly wrote:

Theres an absolutely garbo side quest called Sweet Dreams. It isn't worth it at all, for any reason. Avoid.

Seriously

I thought it was a fun twist

LivDiv wrote:

I changed your name to "Saudi Llewelyn Bowen".

.

I can see it, just put a proper shnoz on t'lad and Bilal's your uncle

The score bit.

Right. Finished Cyberpunk.
All Surface No Feeling *

Of all the Cyberpunk zeitgeist of the past month - the bugs, the ad campaign, the refunds, it is Night City itself that lingers. A disgusting monolith, crammed to the brim with activities and alleyways. The landscape evolves and dissipates as I enter and leave, the towers giving way to industrial sprawls, to shacks, and finally, to the desert. Night City itself, as a construct, feels like the one of the best realised environments I have encountered in a videogame. And when it all clicks, the world of Cyberpunk really comes to life in a grotesque and fascinating way. 
In one particular side mission that I've been replaying in my head, I spent the day accompanying a criminal who was going to atone for his sins in the most dramatic way possible. He was being supported by Corpos who saw a way to make a cheap buck from his torment, turning it into a media consumable by many. In the end, I became a passive participant in his suffering, watched from afar, but in an earlier conversation, I had put enough seeds of doubt into his head about his plan that it botched the media product. Completing the mission, I noticed the billboards around town advertising the event, as if the city itself was reminding me of the choices I had made. 
I keep thinking if there was a way for the outcome to turn out different - and at times I think there was, but when I also stack it up against several of the key 'systemic' choices in the game, I'm less inclined to believe this. It feels odd that a world where the overriding message about humanity's excess seems to be that you can do everything, but none of it matters or fulfils in the long run, the developers seem to have taken that to the core of the game's design.
Take that initial choice (not the size of your endowment) of the origin story for your V - Nomad, Streetkid or Corpo. In the run up to the release of the game, there was sizeable buzz, here and elsewhere about rolling the game multiple times to see how things could play out differently. But to what end? A few dialogue choices scattered in at opportune moments that don't serve to change events, but solely to provide a spot of colour? It feels like a system drawn over from the tabletop game that was too unweildy to package into the game for three diverse playthroughs. 
There are more systems that feel as though they have been shoehorned into the game in order to point at the origin source and say 'hey, we did that too'. The modifications options in the game at first can seem overwhelming, yet by about halfway through, aside from my mantis blade arms (which quickly were rendered useless by the weaponry I collected) any of the upgrades I purchased felt as though they made no real difference to how I actually played the game - it was all artifice. 
To a lesser extent, the skill trees offer a similar veil of depth. I specced pretty much exclusively in guns and body, and finished the game at level 40. Yet in several late game sequences and sidequests, I managed to effectively stealth my way through at no expense for the build I had created - in the world of every playthrough having viable options, the spectre of the Deus-Ex-hole-in-the-wall or convenient-pile-of-crates still rears its unweildy head, 20 odd years on. My gun perks allowed me 20% faster reloads, among other such delights, but by the time I was around 20 hours in, I possessed firepower that allowed me to one shot the thugs that ran aimlessly at me. 
The game crumbles under the illusion of choice, and as a result, everything in it seems to be less fully formed than if CDPR had been able to rein in things moreso, to reduce the 'need' to have a little of everything in the title. Regardless of what others may think, I absolutely feel the AAA pressures of creating the ur-game (I'll see you in 2022, multiplayer) akin to GTA or Ubiworld is where the fundamental failings of the game lie. Gigs fly in with nondescript abandon - always more to see. A half-baked police system is built in - drive twenty seconds down the road and a three star warning disappears. Fallout-esque items (though sadly fewer dildos than I expected) scatter across every environ, but I never really found a desire or reason to spend money. A character scolds me for killing everyone with gay abandon, but in looking up the quest line after completing the game, it actually changed no elements of what happens. It is a game in which I can do anything, but nothing actually carries any value. 
It's impossible to weigh up the content of the game without looking at the context within which I played it. I played on my PC which I only bought this year, and the game ran smoothly at ultra across the board throughout. Yes, I got my fair share of hilarious bugs, but only one of them hard crashed the game, and another glitched a quest necessitating a re-load. I was, by all accounts, lucky. Yet it does feel somewhat fitting that a game structured around a piece of faulty tech, with radio news stories talking about injuries caused by faulty tech... well, you get the rest. 
At the end of the game I chose my ending based on one of the two characters in the game that I genuinely enjoyed spending time with, and I can't see myself going back to see alternatives - there isn't enough meat to the bones of that ending to rush in for that. But I will keep dipping in and out of the city, watching the highrise mount and then dissipate as I run through the highways. That remained a constant joy for me, and throughout my playthrough I was never once inclined to fast-travel to a locale, even when it was several kilometers away. 
It seems CDPR have made the most Cyberpunk product  , not game, that they could. A game pushed out unfinished and half-baked by a Corpo hiding it behind the sheen of Keanu, the buzz of 'what could be' in 2021. A game where the voice of those pushing the relentless ad campaign to the trolls and easy targets of the net echoes loudest. A game in which I can modify what I do, what I wear, and how I do it to my hearts content, but where none of it really matters. 
And despite all that, it's raining in Night City, and my motorbike is only 31 meters away on autocall, there's road to be covered, and things to see that you people wouldn't believe.

All fur coat and no knickers.