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Cyberpunk Video Games

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Re: Cyberpunk Video Games

#42
post #7
post #6

Cyberpunk 2077: > Gameplay Type: First Person Shooter Role Playing Game Summary: A long anticipated release with eight years of development time, the game’s launch has been plagued with bugs and poor performance as well as decidedly mixed reviews. Regardless, the title offers gamers the largest open world cyberpunk universe thus far, so despite the rather uninspired art design and a plot that brings nothing new to th…

> this game is the best available to allow players to immerse themselves in a cyberpunk setting Depends what you mean by "immerse". If it means driving through Night City on your bike and enjoying the view, sure. If it means role-playing as a character and building it your position in the city via meaningful choices with consequences, really not.

I agree with that, and there was another thing that really bothered me: The combination of "realistic" graphics and weaponry with "RPG-style" hit-points and combat mechanics simply doesn't work. It can't possibly work. When you empty a magnum revolver's cylinder directly into somebody's face, and they're just fine, still fighting you at 100% capacity -- there's too much dissonance between what you see and what you must expect to see.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution got around this by making gunplay genuinely dangerous, especially to your enemies. (Okay, much-maligned boss fights aside...)

In CP2077, the majority of enemies were just bullet-sponges, though. It was frankly terrible.

And, yeah, the world was disappointingly empty and lifeless. I don't think that the aesthetics were bad -- the game hewed closely to the fairly generic 2005-2015 "cyberpunk" tumblr aesthetic, and didn't do anything too interesting or take too many chances, but it was okay for all that. The setting was just vacant and boring, though.

Re: Cyberpunk Video Games

#43
Not mentioned, but probably my favourite cyberpunk game of all time: Satellite Reign (2015).

It's a modern Syndicate remake in spirit, and a relatively small indie game (to set expectations), but the gameplay loop is tight and rewards experimenting. I still like to do a quick playthrough occassionally and it has aged great.

Re: Cyberpunk Video Games

#44
post #15
post #6

Cyberpunk 2077: > Gameplay Type: First Person Shooter Role Playing Game Summary: A long anticipated release with eight years of development time, the game’s launch has been plagued with bugs and poor performance as well as decidedly mixed reviews. Regardless, the title offers gamers the largest open world cyberpunk universe thus far, so despite the rather uninspired art design and a plot that brings nothing new to th…

Calling art design uninspired and plot that brings "nothing new" has to be the dumbest take about art I've seen in a while. I wonder if they actually played the game to write such nonsense.

Dude they literally just aped the styles that were popular on tumblr in the decade before the game was released. Here you go:

> https://tacticalneuralimplant.tumblr.com/archive/2013/4

> https://cyberpunktech.tumblr.com/archive/2015/8

Aesthetically, what the game did was literally the very definition of "nothing new" and "uninspired." It wasn't bad, but they definitely weren't pushing any new angles or visions.

Re: Cyberpunk Video Games

#45
Also the author forgot Cataclsym DDA:Bright Nights. Contrary to the former CDDA, here you have a proper ending.

If you like something like a blend between a 2D Minecraft, object crafting, zombie/mutant/cyborg survival and tons of Cyberpunk references this is almost the game. It has everything.

https://github.com/cataclysmbn/Cataclysm-BN

Re: Cyberpunk Video Games

#46

Syndicate (1993) should be on the list.

I loved Syndicate, but I never beat it. There was a mechanic I couldn’t figure out that caused my whole operation to fall apart after a certain amount of time.

Try Satellite Reign. It's also almost retro by now (2015), but it's essentially a modernized Syndicate.

Re: Cyberpunk Video Games

#48
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I call this genre of game, "Illusion of choice" games, but to be fair to cyberpunk 2077 it still does it better than any other games of its type. If you think of it as a tree and each decision point branching out to millions of possibilities and outcomes then you'll be extremely disappointed, but if you think of it the other way, of a strong narrative that has a funnel of lots of different ways to reach the same outc…

That is such an old school way of describing dialog trees. This isn't how it's done anymore. You're going to see more NN's making the decisions than fuzzy matching. That said, I think CDPR kicked the can when they didn't add more "lived in" scenarios in CP2077. The story was good but the world was hollow.

Which games currently use NN's for managing decisions-consequences in the story?

Re: Cyberpunk Video Games

#49
post #6

Cyberpunk 2077: > Gameplay Type: First Person Shooter Role Playing Game Summary: A long anticipated release with eight years of development time, the game’s launch has been plagued with bugs and poor performance as well as decidedly mixed reviews. Regardless, the title offers gamers the largest open world cyberpunk universe thus far, so despite the rather uninspired art design and a plot that brings nothing new to th…

I mean, yes the technical problems have been fixed, but it's still the same old boring story, repetitive gameplay and a very abrupt ending. And for being a cyberpunk game there's definitely too little cyberspace and 'netrunning' in the game. It's essentially a "GTA 2077" with slightly better gunplay (FWIW though, I still enjoyed the first playthrough for what the game is - e.g. a first-person-shooter with some very l…

To be fair, I think it is probably hard to implement actual netrunning without losing immersion. Netrunning is its very own world there. Not sure what are good examples of netrunning implementations in videogames. In shadowrun series it was ok, but esp in the last one it became a bit tedious.
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