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Cyberpunk 2077: Rockerboy Keanu Silverhand

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The flip side is that there aren't...really a lot of crimes you can do other than kill people in most of the Night City open world. I mean maybe traffic crimes but that would be too harsh. A lot of stuff can't be stolen, so what would the cops be after? Break-ins?
 
Random thought I just had about the Songbird route of Phantom Liberty and a conspicuously absent (or maybe not) character:
If Morgan Blackhand isn't Mr. Blue Eyes now then where the Hell is he. If he was still on Militech/American intelligence payroll out there then The Killing Moon would have certainly had a great boss fight since that seems like the time to call him in.
 
Squishy said:
The flip side is that there aren't...really a lot of crimes you can do other than kill people in most of the Night City open world. I mean maybe traffic crimes but that would be too harsh. A lot of stuff can't be stolen, so what would the cops be after? Break-ins?
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Carjackings, assault, vandalism and hacking seem to be the main ones.

That said, I don't see why they need beat cops. Just slap an 'assault in progress' on it and watch some merc kill everyone involved for the bounty.
 
I've been replaying the game for Phantom Liberty, very impressed with the overall glow up. Cyberpunk 2077 is basically the GTA: Future we never knew we needed. On the PS5 it plays like a dream.
 
Squishy said:
A lot of stuff can't be stolen, so what would the cops be after? Break-ins?
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There are a lot of times where you just go into other people's homes and take whatever's lying around. That's kind of a weird thing about computer RPGs, where the protagonist will just steal everything that's not nailed down, and everybody just kind of lets him.
 
It's great that Smasher will now use his Sandevistan, it's a rudimentary implant, after all. Though the patch note that more interests me is that the base game's visit to the Blackwall will apparently have entirely new visuals to better match with Phantom Liberty. That's interesting.
 
Despite the message from NCART stating that you're getting free rides for a year I still got charged 150ed for riding the metro.
 
Got Cyberpunk after hearing that most of the bugs had been fixed (but not all, as I found out! Nothing major and gamebreaking, just funny, like watching Deshawn and his goon drive away without the car they were in moving. Just phasing right through it and toodling on down the street, sitting on invisible chairs). Got about 300 hours of playtime, so I'd say I'm a tenth of the way through the game.

Liking it quite a lot.
Could see what was going to happen to Jackie a mile away with his talk about breaking into the big leagues with this job but the game still sold me on his death and how much it broke up V. Also, liking the gameplay, though some quickhacks are awfully overpowered. Contagion is just a squad deleter, for instance.

Today's gaming took me with Takemura, who obviously doesn't care for Night City (who can blame him) and V (which just hurts). Professional, though, and willing to work with people who are willing to work with him. Which leads me to the group I wrapped up tonight's play session on, the Voodoo Boys. Sure, the game said that I could walk out of their base unharmed, but let's be real, I was expecting them to sink a knife into my back for the third time in the past day. So I put a bullet in their front instead.
 
Riggnarock said:
Despite the message from NCART stating that you're getting free rides for a year I still got charged 150ed for riding the metro.
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Obviously, someone didn't read the terms and conditions sticker in the right hand corner.

I'd sue them like that guy who tattooed his forehead did for that radio contest, but something tells me I'd be in freefall by lunch.
 
The Narrator said:
There are a lot of times where you just go into other people's homes and take whatever's lying around. That's kind of a weird thing about computer RPGs, where the protagonist will just steal everything that's not nailed down, and everybody just kind of lets him.
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One of my favorite video game moments ever was from the 2000's Bard's Tale game, the parodyish one.

One of the first things you can do is break some crates in someones house, and you get a whole scene of them losing their minds and yelling at you for breaking their stuff and stealing from them.

It does create a weird situation where I tend to play my first playthough of something as like the most stalwart good I can possibly be... except for stealing everything that isn't nailed down.

One thing I really want to see more in games that kind of let you, or even encourage you to do something like is to give you a reason. Some do, and sometimes you CAN like you play a rogue or something. But i'm talking more like at the start of the quest, you are given some kind of authority by The Powers That Be that basically lets you take what you need.
 
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Some quietly interesting stuff. They finally fixed healing items getting unequipped after using the consumable menu, so that's one of my biggest annoyances resolved. That'll be great in like a year or two when I want to give another playthrough a go.

And we also now have a hard cyberware capacity limit at 450. So, if you were wondering what the devs intend to be the stopping point for the random shard drops, you have an answer now.
 
The Narrator said:
There are a lot of times where you just go into other people's homes and take whatever's lying around. That's kind of a weird thing about computer RPGs, where the protagonist will just steal everything that's not nailed down, and everybody just kind of lets him.
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This was a weird decision--I have to think it was exactly that--by CDPR, not implementing any sort of general purpose theft/ownership system. At all. The best I can tell, there are manually programmed triggers and flags on certain missions, most of them indoors, which will trigger an NPC response which amounts to "show anger at theft", related to making certain items mission critical. In other words, sometimes if you grab an item, an NPC will respond by suddenly getting angry at you. But that's very rare overall, especially compared to the other context-sensitive things you can do.

That's covering for the fact that, for 99% of world items, there is zero ownership data or system set up, the same way 99% of the world items in the game have no physics or collision model (and unless they're weapons, are represented by their containers or nondescript bags, as oppose to objects that can be knocked around by gunfire or explosions). It's...extremely crude, for a game as otherwise technologically advanced as CP2077 is. A bottle of beer, a glass syringe of narcotics, a box of pistol ammunition, a donut are all basically the same static, unmoving object in the world, and when you pick them up, they become numerical values in your inventory. It's extremely crude, but generally works. And coincidentally, NPCs occupying a space have zero awareness or programmed relationship to any item in said space (which to be fair, most of which can't be manipulated anyway, and are simply invincible permanently-fixed set pieces). I assume most people don't really notice or care, except for the fact that you can visit someone's home and take every single actual thing (as oppose to "fixed landscape object", like a permanently fixed chair, plate, bottle, plant, etc.) they "own" and they won't comment on it unless a response was programmed in for that specific mission, which it probably wasn't. :lol:

Starfield does it vastly better--putting aside that interior spaces in Starfield at their best are gorgeous (1970s spaceship cabins), and at their worst still look better than the same six interior locations reused over and over again for 99% of Cyberpunk 2077, which is probably the weakest part of the game visually (certainly when compared to a lot of amazing looking exterior spaces). But the crazy thing is that Starfield is just using the system that Bethesda has been using since Oblivion, if not earlier--flagging objects as having owners, allowing scripts and events to change ownership (so for example, if an NPC "likes" you, they are amenable to you taking their things and will even comment on it, but if they don't like you, there's a different response entirely), a system that is almost 20 years old. It even works in outdoor world spaces.

I guess they just decided, "Nah." Any game development is working with a finite amount of time and resources, and managing that effectively. Even with all the delays to CP2077, I have no doubt they used that time on something else. Except it does seem like a weird oversight in a game that kind of sells itself on criminal enterprises in a hypermaterialist, living world, heh.
 
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Part of the problem is that so many computer RPGs have decided to not only embrace the classic D&D attitude of looting everything that's not nailed down, but to take it to new extremes where you steal not just from people you've fought but literally everywhere and even steal random trash that you see on the street. This makes a certain degree of sense in the post-apocalyptic setting of Fallout, where most of the owners of these things are long dead and scrap is your only source of raw materials, but was it needed in Cyberpunk? What would actually be lost if they just hadn't implemented a system for stealing random junk? Less raw material for crafting? You could still get that by disassembling cheap guns or buying it in bulk like a normal person. It just wasn't necessary to implement a "steal everything you see" system, and would have avoided the problem entirely, but it's just because the idea of looting is so deeply ingrained in the genre.
 
CP2077 is taking a very odd "middle ground", borrowing from their previous RPG successes in The Witcher 2 and 3 (completely unreasonable), but directly responding to the massive juggernaut of the Bethesda RPG franchises, particularly Elder Scrolls, which probably has a strong claim as the best selling first-person RPGs globally (Oblivion was probably the most successful "western" RPG to come to the Japanese and East Asian markets on release, with an incredibly long tail thanks to the fan community and mod support). Even in the earliest reveal of game features, they emphasized on this desire for a "real, lived-in world", not defined just by sight and sound (which CPDR very did well, except for the abundance of identical, boring-looking apartments, drug dens, hotel brothels, that repeat over and over), but also by interaction, or in other words, people able to find an abundance of open-world "stuff" in your obligatory hypermaterialist cyberpunk setting that establishes you are, in fact, in a cyberpunk setting as oppose to just a crappier version of Los Angeles with looser advertising ordinances and more dust storms.

Again, that is something Bethesda has established as a world standard: useless crap that, normally, has little or no effect on the rest of the game. They are literally unmatched in this esoteric field. Sometimes they take it even further, like the ingredient crafting mechanic in Fallout 4 and Starfield, and sometimes they just know that a portion of their fanbase wants to enable god mode, carry six thousand wheels of cheese, drop them into a small lake and break their save. And CDPR....lets you sell junk for money. They'll write a sentence about each item of junk (not that there's that many of them), but they're just random junk in an MMORPG. And you can't drop them either, just like in an MMORPG. It's like finding a few eddies every time you open a locker, but with the extra step of stopping by a vending kiosk. It's a weird decision, only emphasized further when they completely redesigned how clothing and actual valuable inventory items (mostly ingredients), and implement level scaling for random items, so instead of finding fake teeth and an empty cigarette pack in a briefcase next to a cyberpsycho, you find a rare pump-action shotgun or Tier 5 crafting ingredients. More useful, but not actually more "immersive" by CDPR's own criteria.

It's a weird way they handled that aspect of the game, one they were (initially) very excited about. So it's kind of inevitable that there's no comparable system of theft or "illegal" actions based around it; if you want to commit a theft, you need to find a theft mission. If you want to commit a crime, you need to murder someone in front of a police NPC. They exist, but for such an advanced game, they're more minimalistic than games almost twenty years older.
 
so ive started a new playthrough mostly to mess with a net runner build from the start. a couple of things stood out to me. Arasaka has a carrier docked in Night City. Night City put Watson on lockdown. V and crew want to Fuck with Arasaka and yet dont question the carrier or the lockdown? is that ever explained or elaborated on?
 
wickedtruth said:
so ive started a new playthrough mostly to mess with a net runner build from the start. a couple of things stood out to me. Arasaka has a carrier docked in Night City. Night City put Watson on lockdown. V and crew want to Fuck with Arasaka and yet dont question the carrier or the lockdown? is that ever explained or elaborated on?
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The Kujira is how Saburo and Hanako got to Night City, if you steal Saburo's diary you can get a look at their trip, but apart from it featuring in a couple of news broadcasts it doesn't really factor in.
 
no i got that i mean for V and the heist gig. did anyone involved try and find out wtf was up with the SECURITY lockdown of Watson that had the hotel of Yorunobu Arasaka along with the presence of the arasaka super carrier just off/docked in Night City?
 
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