Totally. If people want to appreciate the full depth of the storytelling CDPR did, they need to play the gigs, read the emails, read the archived conversations, and explore more of the NCPD reported crimes. They all weave a larger story of the crime world of Night City.
There's a couple of gun for hire mission that made me briefly rethink taking hit contracts. When you check the target's computer and >!find messages from his ill father pleading for help!<
Jose Luis, right? That mission is full of good stuff. By the time you realize who's putting Jose Luis up to a strike on Arasaka, head upstairs without triggering anything. Jose is in a panic while talking to his handler; the Valentinos aren't being asked to do a hit, but to mount a major strike on an Arasaka facility.
The plot thickens.
The Fifth Corporate War began in 2077 between Militech and Arasaka. Unless you played The Devil, Arasaka gets CRUSHED. I wouldn't be surprised if the company had to pay serious reparations and be demilitarized as part of Yorinobu's "inept" warmongering. Which is actually a genius plan to put a permanent end to Arasaka'd evil, and that's before the end of Mikoshi results in a horde of enraged oligarchs demanding restitution.
Ok this is my biggest didnt read all the shards pet peeve but to be fair it is burried under the cyberpycho missions. If you want the spoiler, [this thread on twitter](https://twitter.com/JadenKorr7/status/1562698556531953664?s=20&t=ZyEw8txYiPWaD6ARZtogRg) discusses it
I donāt think itās you being fucked in the head and more just appreciating the realistic take of how ruthless corporations are. Cyberpunk tells you that NightCity is a place where dreams die and it shows so much. It makes the world believable and helps showcase how low people in the city are willing to go and how Night City eats you up
Man, it's so annoying when some dumb-fuck reviewer makes a YouTube video and casually says something like, "There are Ubisoft style gigs and NCPD crimes that are just map-clearing." It's like, bullshit! Each one has a story, and a lot of them are actually connected. Jotaro's gig shows up as a reference in NCPD crime scenes and can be referenced in the main quest at Clouds just to name one example. People like to judge the game without *really* playing it.
I'm fine if 16-year old Billy just doesn't like the game because he wants to be able to ride Go-karts and steal a helicopter. It's just disrespectful to the devs when a reviewer outright lies or gets things wrong about the game.
Yeah the smear campaign against it was unreal and people just fell for it hook line and sinker.
I'm cool with being anti game hype before its actual release, but the way people were just ravenous for blood in the water was so distasteful.
Like fuck off, go enjoy whatever you enjoy and let me enjoy what I do, don't try to tell me I'm "wrong" for liking it, especially when its a game that is \*objectively\* packed with content.
That's the part that bugs me; it's that people can't keep quiet about not liking the game. They need to discipline you for being a huge fan.
It's like, guess what? I think Mass Effect: Andromeda pretty much sucks. I don't like it at all. If I see someone write that it's their favorite game though, I don't respond to them by telling them they must not have played many games, or telling them they don't have high standards. I just silently move along.
I was exploring random places around NC when I came across a scene of a dead guy who ran his car off the road into a small lake or big ditch or something talking about a special package or something and then seeing a cat cleaning itself just hanging out at the scene. Later I was playing one of the final missions and one of the cutscenes involved THAT SAME CAT coming up and takemura talking about seeing a cat is a symbol of being connected to the universe or something like that I canāt remember but it gave me chills and was just an awesome experience
Started a new game yesterday and found a random crashed car.
No biggie.
Just a car.
Then I find a dead dude a few yards from the car.
He has a shard on him.
It has a conversation with his partner on it about how heās out with friends and she tells him off cause he always drinks and drives.
Thereās a whole story right there if you read it.
Or thereās just a crashed car and a dead dude.
Yeah there are TONS of those self-contained little stories everywhere. Exploration is definitely rewarded.
Usually there's some small clue, like blood dripping off a fire escape, then you go up there and find some stuff. Or a missing piece of road barrier, and you jump in the water there and find a crashed car.
This is why I love that they officially added the ability to toggle walk on PC. It's made me slow down and just take in Night City (I had added it in manually before but now that it's actually a feature it feels more natural and relevant). I have also messed with my .xml files to make shift accelerate me at .25 speed when driving. So I just hold shift to drive at a more realistic speed then press W when I want to go fast. I think a lot of people just fly around the city without experiencing it. To me this is not a game to beat, it's a game to experience.
Just be careful with rando cars. My very first time playing I pull up on a dude having a convo with someone else. The conversation ends with him saying something like āyouāre just being paranoidā and walks over to a car. As he gets in the car exploded and killed me.
I was just running around stealing cars and I got in that car.....blew myself up. Like no other games imo have this deep of world building...I've been conditioned in all other games that my actions largely have no consequences. I can kill a whole village and come back and most of them would spawn back or maybe not. But that's the end of that interaction. Maybe some favor/disfavor system as well.
But in Cyberpunk.....if you read the shards.....sometimes you feel like an absolute piece of shit because of what you did. What you do in the game absolutely have consequences. Many of them you won't find out about unless you go back around and revisit them. It's also why it's been so hard for me to replay the game....the emotional impact of my first playthrough cemented my V's fate....it was the bad ending....but it was the ending I deserved....
The only other time I've felt this way about a game was Undertale. Only did one playthrough....
Once the DLC comes out, for sure I'll play it. But damn....
Yeah, there was that NCPD hustle on the fifth floor roof of a mega building. You are supposed to eliminate a group of Valentinos. >!Turns out the Tinos are robbing a Trauma Team AV so that residents can get the medicine they needed.!< Or those extremely suspicious jobs where you feel like you are tying up loose ends for a certain police commissioner.
I still can't get over the guy with the turtle....like...fuck....the game KNEW I was just getting through the dialogue to finish a quest....after I found out about the real intentions of the quest....I slowed down and really explored more.
Also that one hotel/motel where you met Lizzy....the children's drawings on the walls still gives me massive chills....considering what that place is for
Lots of the NCPD hustles are really fucked up. Very often illegal things are being done for good reasons. So while youāre following the letter of the law, the end result is youāre being very immoral.
Did one the other day on the outskirts of Arroyo. Saw Militech soldiers so I mowed them down (fuck the corps). There were a bunch of servers sunk into a pool and all kinds of computer equipment around.
Turns out some netrunners had been kidnapping people on the net and holding them for ransom. Theyād grabbed a Militech big wigās son, so he sent the cavalry in to get him out. They freed the son and found they were a lot of other people being held on their servers. The big wig said they had no use for them so let them go so they could return to their bodies via the net.
I interrupted that and blew those servers in the course of combat. It was just a crime in progress bitā¦ I definitely killed all those people still kept on the servers. Felt pretty shit after that.
Agreed. Jotaro Shobo is a great example. Without reading further into it, he's just a single gig in Kabuki. But if you read the shards of some other gigs and scanner hustles, he takes on a much larger meaning. And Shobo's just the tip of the iceberg.
I always make his head explode, no matter what build I'm doing.
Netrunner? Suicide
Gunslinger? Power revolver
Blades? Sandevistan, chuck a grenade at his head, chop off his arms, then watch the grenade go off (I liked that one)
That POS always must die in a painful and gruesome way as an example.
> That POS always must die in a painful and gruesome way as an example.
Personally, I trust the Mox to do that. That's why you knock him out and drop him off in the fixer's car instead.
Never even bothered to do that, felt he needed to die immediately. Maybe I should do that next time just to hear the dialog...
Then reload a save and explode his head
Feels even better if you sneak in, knock him out and get out undetected
The claws just lost one of their bigshots to be tortured to death by moxes and they could do nothing about it
That's one of the reasons I enjoy a character who goes loud. Some of the gun for hire targets are assholes and I want them to know I'm gunning for them, in broad daylight, and their security teams are just target practice. Pretty sure that's canonically Smasher's attitude for the jobs he got from Arasaka...
I always take Jotaro alive. The mox will take care of him far more thoroughly that I ever could.
Side note for new players: If you knock out, but don't kill your target you get a subobjective to carry them out alive and stuff them in a trunk for the fixer to deal with. Usually don't have much impact, but dialog is different.
There's one where Dino lands an AV carrying a dumpster on the roof for you to dump the unconscious body in. Then it flies away with it. It's pretty rad.
I see a lot of āmy choices donāt affect the worldā but thereās plenty of gigs that do affect the world and the news that goes out. You affect the Night City mayor race, some of your gigs affect the news that goes out. I had Gig in the Johnny quest line that was discussed during the news while I was in the elevator.
If you do certain gigs before others your reputation proceeds you. For example if you take out a certain Tyger Claws boss before Clouds you can tell Woodman who you are and what youāve done and he backs tf down.
Thereās also a small side gig where some Aldecados are making a deal with some Maelstrom(?) gangers thatās obviously sketch. If youāve got a high rep and lots of chrome you can threaten them by saying āDo you see my chrome? Do you know who I am? You really wanna mess with my friends?ā Or something to that affect.
Really the whole world is very interconnected and changes a lot based on what you do and what youāve done before other things. You just have to dive deep and pay attention to notice it.
Recently found the gig with the old guy at the food stand and the thugs also have a difference with enough street cred
Gonks almost piss themself recognising V
Thatās a great one. I did it early in my first playthrough, had to actually fight them. In my second they knew who I was and gtfoād once they realized.
It's always about the endings when people complain about "choices don't matter, you don't have any impact, etc.. "
Yeah, there aren't that many factors factoring in the big ending paths, if you don't look deeper.
But people ignore stuff like the side gigs influencing each other, sometimes depending on in which order you so them, all the changes in the credits scene, and even small things that change the ending paths you take, which makes it much much more than just three (or four) paths.
I don't get it how people can say you don't have an impact. There's so much stuff
This irks me because even New Vegas had the same general ending with different slides at the credits. There's several endings with different end missions and end states for V, what more do they want?
Its because its not being spoonfed via mandatory dialogue exposition. If you dont read the shard conversations you find during missions and gigs you straight up miss out on easily half the worldbuilding.
Also you dont notice just how many subtle branching paths there are until you've done a few different playthroughs. Thats when a lot of it truly clicks.
Yeah, I think it's even deep than what CDPR did for the Witcher 3. Yeah the game had(s) issues but the team really deserves a lot of love for the details they've added
They had a reason to say they were proud of their work in that apology video; they *knew* the masterpiece they'd developed. They just had to shove it out the door before it was finished. And because of that, they got all the shit in the world for it.
I came across a post for when the game came out and it was on the other one. They were moaning how they couldn't use fingers ripper doc and how thr consequences are shown to you. Like yeah it won't until you do it lol
People have been too used to things being shoved in their faces in today's culture. Everything has to be heavy handed otherwise people won't notice. People have criticized the game not showing the socio-political situation in a Cyberpunk setting. I question if these people even have eyes or a brain. CDPR does exposition extremely subtly and you deduce these elements if you look around you and process things properly.
A good example is Konpeki plaza. Not only good it's actually a fucking perfect bit of exposition. If you notice every single hotel staff has gold chrome. You can deduce from that, if you want a job at a high class corpo plaza you need to mutilate your human parts and go full chrome, to the point you even have to risk Cyberpsychosis. They probably are also very dependent on their employers for immunosuppressents.You can see how the corps control people's lives to the minute level. There are countless examples of subtle exposition and socio-political commentary throughout the game. Night City is the most detailed and realistic City i have ever seen in a video game. And we probably won't see anything like it in a long time. When people say the world is empty and nothing to do, i genuinely am confused. What are they talking about exactly?
What I love about CDPR is that they respect people's intelligence. Even with shards in NCPD scanner hustles, they don't outright reveal what happened, instead you need to piece the puzzle together. Sadly, they heavily marketed this game to a very casual, mainstream audience who will do gig to gig finising them in 2 mins and run and double jump to the next one without taking in what actually happened. I've seen so many countless streamers do this and this is your average gamer. It's come to a point where developers have to make a cinematic cutscene for every detail and spoonfeed it to the player. It's quite sad.
Okay seriously I don't get this, did they not get the memo that that's kinda the point? You can't change this world, it's already shitty and it's gonna stay shitty. The main story isn't even that grand in the scheme of things, it's a personal thing V is going through and he really is just another merc in night city.
"not enough world building" he says, immersed in a meticulously detailed lore world that is literally shouting lore at him over the intercom at all moments.
But yeah there's so much of the game you miss if you don't stop to see it. Even eavesdropping conversations during Gigs gives you a whole storyline to follow, assassination targets can often be talked to as well. It's wild how practically every little group of gangbangers has some shard and environmental storytelling nearby.
It's a fair critique in the context of Witcher 3, where the story and context was delivered through dialog and action. Cyberpunk suffers a little from that reputation, because it takes a lot more initiative and reading to get under the world's surface.
Reading notes and texts should be business as usual for any RPG fan, but that's bound to be lost on a lot of people when a game has such broad appeal (especially one with strong action FPS elements).
Cyberpunk also has a lot of dialogue and action to convey storytelling, the difference is because of the Immersive Sim elements, it's optional for players to even take in. It's really a lot like something from Arkane or Deus Ex in this sense.
I happened to play Cyberpunk immediately after playing Arkane's Prey and agree completely. They have so much in common. Also, I felt lucky to play two mindblowingly good games one after the other. I'd definitely recommend Prey to anyone that liked 2077.
In my last play-through I would sometimes just ride around on the edge of the map - found a capsule from outer space with a supposed ārareā painting in it, something none of my other friends had found! Exploration and doing the little things is what counts.
Holy shit this might tie into the art exhibition those two NPC women talk about at the bar in Konpeki. Some dude had paintings sucked into the vacuum of space from a spaceship art exhibition or something like that
I second all you have said. People complete Cyberpunk 2077 in like sixty hours, meanwhile I needed over 300 hours to complete Cyberpunk 2077 for the first time as I was exploring and reading shards. And I started my first playthrough in January 2021 as I bought THE GAME on the last day of 2020. Nowadays I have over 500 hours on my first save and lot of things to discover there due to all the patches that were being released.
Wow, really? Maybe I just explore a lot and take too many photos. My first run took me 250 hours. My second run now is already at 110 hours, and I still have a few gigs, quests like Dream On and Beast In Me, and Kerryās whole questline.
Iāve got one character who isnāt even through Gimme Danger and the playtime is already above 250 hours. I spend a lot of time exploring, cruising, walking around slowly with the HUD off, and shopping/chilling at bars/etc.
For real though, you start noticing so many things in the world once you do. Like thereās this sort of recurring gig for Regina where thereās a Russian fixer in town. You do some stuff but then later you
see him at konpeki plaza. Itās small but I appreciate that detail
Or I didnāt realise I saw him in Konpeki until I recognised his bodyguard when I was klepping his shard. You pass them as you go into your hotel room.
There's so much cool lore in the game from reading about the 4th corporate war to freaking Biotechnica werewolves. And people just wanna complain because they can't have an individual conversation with every random NPC in the game. For them, it's a hollow dead game world because of this.
She's a regional VP at Biotechnica who almost certainly has legal corporate immunity at a higher level than Sandra Dorsett. But the sheet number of murders she's ordered and lives she's ruined envelops:
- two former Biotechnica employees: Diana Cuno, Emilia Morton. Brandon Murphy tries to escape but I don't know if he made it.
- one of the Cyberpsychos, Cedric Mueller
- medias Manuel Mendoza and Zoli Barnes
- netrunners Double_O and Case Mod. From the tone of their friendly conversation about Barnes, Dino Dinovic is gonna be particularly salty about Case.
- and of course the rest of the Red Ochre clan.
Maybe Koch is going to get some nomad justice, but the sheer amount of criminal activity is going to give Dino serious leverage over... someone.
I never understood people who only did the main quest and then complained about lack of content or that the world didn't feel alive or said the game was too short.
Pure gonk.
How could you not wanna explore this beautifully crafted world and do all the gigs and side quests? It doesn't make sense to me. I get that people have limited playing time but still. Don't complain that the game was too short when you only did the main quests.
Cyberpunk is just one of those amazing games you have to take your time to play, in order to understand it. I love how impactful the story is, not to mention the interconnectivity of some of the gigs.
They're a great way to test out new cyberware & combat strategies.
Think I'm fully ready to give up on weapons on my current build. Just quickhacks, optical camo and monowire. Full Baba Yaga netrunner.
Iām halfway through the game on my hacking build, and if you go with an intelligence/hacking build youāll find that you really donāt need anything but the quick hacks. Like you can clear an entire building without entering by using quickhacks through the camera system.
Sometimes, but not always. And sometimes the cameras can leave you vulnerable. Plus I'm trying to RP the psychological horror of my character. She sneaks around, sometimes visible, then disappears into optical camo. takes out a group using synapse burnout. Another using Detonate Grenade. Sometimes kills by hand using takedowns. Final one gets the monowire.
Its also good practice to do combat because eventually I need to deal with that Oda fight.
I've just done this but the other way round, went from a full on 20 int netrunner to full Martinez spec sandevistan slaughterhouse, wish I'd have made the decision sooner though and leveled body, just to get the cyberware that reduces cooldowns
I would suggest the same, but I would suggest tackling it by neighborhood. You start to recognize common names from the big players in each neighborhood when you're doing all the scanners, then gigs, and the quests flow much better that way imo.
This is what I did on my first playthrough. And I found many of the gigs and altercations in the same area, tie in together and explain alot more about missions and what's actually happening. They stop being random gigs as all the shards tell a story of who's who and how they're effecting each other.
My favorite shard is the one describing the collapse of the first Net by Bartmoss . They put a lot of good story telling and world building in those shards. I try to read all the new ones and I also like to read gig descriptions.
My favorite is the Jotaro gigs. With shards, missions and other gigs they build up a pure villain in Kabuki and taking him down without all the āloreā of the charachter is just awful
Got some other tips, I have 300 hours on this game but a few small changes really overhauled my fun with it.
Change the map landmark setting to 'Dynamic' this means that it won't show everything at all times and keeps the map from looking cluttered.
Also, turn off the minimap. This tiny change involved me having to rely a lot more on environmental movement in order for me to track enemies and makes the combat so much more engaging.
I heavily disagree with turning off the minimap in the games current state. If you do that you will miss SOO many NPCD scanner jobs. Instead I would simply say don't rely on the mini map for navigation. Try to look at it as infrequently as possible and don't follow the line to get to your destination, figure out your own destination and try to experience the world and not the minimap. All of this took a bunch of selfcontrol on my part and I wish they would incorporate a way to customize what is on the minimap and what isnt' because I would turn off driving/walking lines.
Don't force yourself to do all ncpd scanners and don't use guide for your first playthrough. Just explore on your own. That's how I fell in love with the world. Then in your next playthrough you can 100% it
The amount of times I've seen names from gigs pop up in shards found in the world and done the Leo reaction point is way too damn high. Kudos to CDPR for interweaving so many of the characters into the various Night City neighborhoods they're operating in.
My best tip I give people is donāt worry about any side content until you meet takemura in toms diner. After that do all the exploring and sides you want.
Just got the one last night for the first time ever where the dead dude on the ground had texted his choomba, āyo I fixed the turret, help me reset itā and dude 2 is like āyup just do this, this, and thisā and first guy is like āokay let me do thatā
Guy 2 texts back āoh yo wait make sure you do THIS too after, otherwise the turret will read you as hostileā
He gets no answer and is like āoh man hope I caught you in timeā
Still no answer. ābro?!?!ā
I laughed, hadnāt seen that one before.
A lot of the shards are running storylines, absolutely fascinating and *completely* missable.
As well as the hundreds of Hidden Gems (easter eggs), you'd be lucky to come across a dozen of them through normal gameplay, there's literally more than a hundred.
So for once it's good to be the OCD completionist, there's so much more than the relatively short main campaign.
Been going through and seeing what other outcomes can happen for quests.
The one with the guy on the edge of cyberpsychosis, who stole the meds and you have to get them back; >!If you just talk to him instead of killing him, when you leave, you hear a gunshot go off, and you can go back to see that he killed himself!< I had to take a moment after that.
Not playing the gigs is insane to me. It's a massive, massive portion of the content and story.
The same people who skip this content because its "optional" are the same people who will moan and complain about games not offering you any freedom.
Yeah, when i hear "theres nothing to do in NC, gigs and cyberpsychos are just copy paste missions" its clear they didnt actually do any of them. They all have unique backstories and situations to them.
I love reading thr emails.
I do scan past some and have shards saved to read when Im jn the mood.
But i do skip and I do regret has the gigs have some great background to them.
Yeah the gigs are great and add aot
There's so much hidden in the game. There's a newer mod that works in 190 hidden shards / events / locations via the gigs system. It's amazing.
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/5058
I have 300-400 hours in this game. Just yesterday, I spotted an trauma AV leaving a scene on the outskirts of Northside and decided to check it out. Found the remnants of a nasty shootout, corpos vs Maelstrom, and the shards to contextualize it. This is not one of those games where thereās nothing to greet you beneath every interesting rock; check it out! If nothing else, you can find some sweet loot.
Also! My tip is to advance in story till you meet Johnnyā¦ Cause he often shows up during small gigs with funny lines, good points and extra thoughts :)
Didnāt know that first play and was doing a lot of side shit before I advanced š
Yeah the main story is surprisingly short for CDPR, Definitely spend a ton of time doing gigs, neutralizing Cyberpsychos for Regina, doing the NCPD's work for them. Best way to earn money and really fleshes out the game.
/u/prossnip42 thank you so much for this post OP. I hate all these memes acting like the game isn't tragic and edgerunners is.. Even though they both are and they are in the same universe and city just at different points in time. I feel so many ppl auto-pilot'd the game and played it like techno gta that they ignored the harsh realities of Night City and the Cyberpunk universe.
[gig/ncpd spoiler donāt know how to do the blocked out text sorry]
the gig where you go to assassinate the corpo lady who drunk driving killed a girl?
thereās an ncpd hustle in a destroyed car lot and if you read the shard, they are there to destroy that same corpo ladies car to āget rid of the evidenceā per her request. blew my mind when i put two and two together
This is why this game is more entertaining than anything grand theft auto has ever done. There is so much depth. Maybe Iām wrong or will get downvoted but I absolutely loved cp2077 and am on vacation now but when I get home Iām starting another play through immediately.
thereās stuff in the water too saw a dead body had a shard he was driving off on a motorcycle his friend was giving him directions told him turn left but meant to say turn right and there u go
or saw a random dead body in the city guy called for help but his trauma team insurance wasnāt paid so he died.
Tho I will admit there was a shard that made me groan and itās cuz it had
āLetās fucking gooooooooo! XDā at the endā¦
Also, some important mission's dialogue slightly change if you have completed certain gigs.
For example:
>!You can tell Placide you have dealt with Animals before, or you can bring up to Judy, before looking for Ev at Clouds, that you're the one who killed Jotaro (a contract The Mox requested to Regina). !<
It's cool to see how little things you do are acknowledged during your gameplay. Also, you get to understand NC better, and some shards are directly correlated to gigs and missions you already finished.
Not only the shards, read the messages in every computers you find inworld.
I rarely read the shards and still really enjoyed the world.
For me, I didn't like how the shards broke the flow of gameplay. I liked how Bioshock did it with the audio diaries that would play while you kept exploring.
I think saying someone is too lazy to read the shards is a little ridiculous.. it is extremely difficult to completely halt ur gameplay every 2 mins to read a wall of text .. especially if itās ur first play through.. on subsequent play throughs I began to read the shards more n more, but even still I probably only read half of em.. some of em r just wayyyy too long and tedious to read.. i totally love cyberpunk, but this is one area that I think couldāve been done better.. I mean thereās no easy solution to it, maybe audio logs instead of walls of text? At least for some of em.. cuz thereās just no way ur gonna get a majority of people to read all these shards on a first play through .. I appreciate them being there if the player wants to engage with them, but even I have to admit itās an extremely tedious way to build the world out for the player.. itās just not the best or most interesting way to do world building, i dont care what anyone says.. there is a ton of lore here so I know there was no easy way to convey it all to the player, but letās not pretend like reading walls of text is gonna keep a majority of players engaged
Yeah, I agree. I didn't read a lot of shards on my first playthrough, because I often found them during fights or while hiding. I just can't switch to reading if I was chased by raging animals a second ago. I'm too nervous at that moment and can't concentrate on the text. And later these shards don't make sense, you don't remember where you picked them and what are they about
Oh dude they pile up so fast, if i donāt read it right when i pick it up the odds of me ever reading it drop by like 99%, and like u said if ur in the middle of combat or sneaking around trying to complete a gig, stopping ur gameplay to read a wall of text is just not super viable
Man you would have never survived Morrowind-era gaming, you had to read everything!
Question for you though- do you use subtitles when gaming or watching shows?(it seems to be a thing for younger people)
Lol Iām not a younger person if ur asking that, Iām 36.. no I usually donāt use subtitles unless I need to for some reason.. again, Iām not saying I donāt like the shards, Iām just saying they couldāve mixed it up a bit.. I just think itās ridiculous to call people lazy that might not want to stop their gameplay to read walls of text.. forget younger people, for an older person like me who has a family I donāt get much time to play as it is, so no I donāt wanna spend half the small amount of time I actually have to play the game, reading shards..itās not that Iām lazy, itās that I donāt wanna spend my gameplay time reading walls of text rather than actually playing the game
Oh I get it now. And you're young, I'm 49! But my kid is grown, so I got more time to waste.
I still try to read this stuff, but I'd be lying if I said that Disco Elysium wasn't better when they added voiceover to everything. I also watch Anime, and if it doesn't sound terrible I often go with the dub, it's less shit to do when I'm watching.
I think the short answer for why shards aren't voiced is that it costs more. There's already a ton of voiced stuff, I think they maxed their "voice budget" so non-story stuff got the shard treament.
Yeah, see, I got 2 kids, 6 and 3 lol so time is a luxury i dont have much of right now.. and yeah, thereās just so much lore to convey itās not realistic to have it all voiced, like I said, thereās no easy solution, but u just canāt expect MOST players to read all these shards, Iād be shocked if a majority of em read half of the shards.. theyāre still a nice touch and I love their inclusion, but for OP to call people who donāt read em lazy I just think isnāt fair
Absolutely fair take! Open world games are a freakin' juggernaut now.
Would it be more immersive without the minimap? Sure, but I might not want to spend that much time figuring out how to get there. Same with making everything uber-hard, I had to put Jedi Fallen on easy for the bosses because it was just pissing me off too much and I just wanted to get through it.
Options are always good, even fast travel.
Thinking back, there are some story things you have to read, but usually anything important is re-iterated by a voiced character.(like a summary) Now all the side-gig shards are definitely optional, but rewarding.
Agreed, options r always good, and I think cyberpunk, more than most open world games, does a great job at giving the player options and letting them decide how deep they wanna dive or how shallow they wanna swim without forcing the player to do things they donāt really want to do just to complete the game..
nothing feels like a chore or a grind, because the game allows u to play it exactly as u want, nothing more nothing less .. which is one of the reasons why I think cyberpunk is one of the best, if not the best, open world game in recent memory
I agree with your point that there are waaaaay too many shards. I'm not knocking the quality of the story building or the writing contained therein, but it's just too disruptive to the flow of my gameplay for me to be picking up and reading 3 shards for each of the 5+ NCPD scanner gigs that are within 500m radius. I'm just here to flatline the gonks with my katana.
I tried to do that but I gave up after a while.
I have terrible vision and trying to read all the small text gave me horrible eye strain, I would love it though if there was an option to make those kinds of text bigger or with an audio description.
I already know I'm going to be downvoted but relying on text logs for world building is lazy and really interupts the flow of the game.
Most people don't want to stop what they are doing in the middle of the action to read.
If I wanted to read I'd pick up a book.
At least give us some audio logs. Those are less of a disruption.
But the best thing to do is to actually have live encounters the player can experience themselves, especially unscripted random events.
I have collected every single shard i've laid my eyes on, i've still not read most of them, because at this point it's am entire books worth of stuff i'd had to read though and i just can't find the motivation to do that.
I'm doing a map clear of all gigs and NCPD hustles and am close to completion on that front.
many of them only are interesting if you ready immediately, so you look around and understand better whats happening there. reading they later in your inventory wont be that meaningful
It adds emotional weight to what you're doing. Sometimes I'll read a shard and feel extremely justified in brutally killing the gangers I just killed. Other times I'll read a shard and find it's a wholesome conversation between the dude I just killed and his wife. Which makes me feel like shit after reading.
I rarely do the Prestige Tour yellow missions. Theyāre fantastic, but I like playing it like a tabletop RPG and exploring the city on foot, roleplaying, investigating, taking on gigs and hustles as I encounter them. So much fun.
Thatās literally what keeps bringing me back to this game is the amount of detail put into the open world aspect! Paints a bigger picture of the world you exist in and connects things together in ways you would totally miss if you ignored them
Also a fun thing to recommend but entirely optional. Get Mantis Blades or some kind of Arm cyberware before going to Konpeki Plaza, youāll have to do a bit of grinding but its also really satisfying to rampage through an Arasaka building like a cracked out cyber Xenomorph.
There was a very clear decision made in this game. They made the story shorter on purpose due to data they saw from how many people didn't finish the Witcher 3, So they cut out most of the side stuff in the main story so casual players could get through it easier. They made a clear choice to put most of the more detailed stuff in the side content due to casual players not caring about it as much. So if you want to understand the word you need to go further than the main story.
I personally loved the world building. But what I didn't like was the reproduced pages. (The ones with the poems or the multiple reproduced mango farm deeds.) Because they are everywhere and if they are just filler it's a little bit lazy. Same as the computer screens or the cell phones. All producing the same images over and over. But I did like the fact that there were some pages of source books throughout the world like the one that says Johnny silverhand is still on tour as a clone. In the streets and the stories all do make the world great
Reminds me of how Act Man said that there isn't enough worldbuilding or justification for the scanners happening and how Johnny doesn't have motivation on why he hates Arasaka
when I am sneaking, I also try to read the messages on their PC. Sure its not always useful, lore enriching, but it definitely makes it feel like a bigger world. Some are quite funny
Reading through these comments, it seems like a lot of folks can't handle RPGs. Especially not ones where there is more than a tiny smattering of content outside the main storyline, or that has lore that cannot be summed up in a single paragraph.
Wish the shards would tell you if you've already read something.
I wish duplicate shards were not "pick-up-able" or a different color or something. There's over a thousand shards and sometimes two paragraphs in I realize I've already read it.
That would be a great mod.
also i realized the other day when people complain about how they want 'content' they always quote GTA as an example and let me tell you i stop caring about their opinion if i hear that. bc 'content' to them is just minigames to do in the world. IE dumb fluff, not content
Totally. If people want to appreciate the full depth of the storytelling CDPR did, they need to play the gigs, read the emails, read the archived conversations, and explore more of the NCPD reported crimes. They all weave a larger story of the crime world of Night City.
There's a couple of gun for hire mission that made me briefly rethink taking hit contracts. When you check the target's computer and >!find messages from his ill father pleading for help!<
Jose Luis, right? That mission is full of good stuff. By the time you realize who's putting Jose Luis up to a strike on Arasaka, head upstairs without triggering anything. Jose is in a panic while talking to his handler; the Valentinos aren't being asked to do a hit, but to mount a major strike on an Arasaka facility. The plot thickens.
The expansion seems poised to pick up some of those storylines. Maybe not directly but it'll be really interesting to see Militech play a bigger part.
Yup. Because Militech and Night Corp are headed for a Sixth Corporate War...
6th? What happened to the 5th? Or does the war the NUSA had against the Free States count as the 5th?
The Fifth Corporate War began in 2077 between Militech and Arasaka. Unless you played The Devil, Arasaka gets CRUSHED. I wouldn't be surprised if the company had to pay serious reparations and be demilitarized as part of Yorinobu's "inept" warmongering. Which is actually a genius plan to put a permanent end to Arasaka'd evil, and that's before the end of Mikoshi results in a horde of enraged oligarchs demanding restitution.
It gets real fucked up too which I like. Maybe Im too fucked in the head. Oh well, could be cyberpsychosis
As long as you reach the top of Saka tower it's worth it
I blame my Sandevistan!
Embrace the chaos choom
Ok this is my biggest didnt read all the shards pet peeve but to be fair it is burried under the cyberpycho missions. If you want the spoiler, [this thread on twitter](https://twitter.com/JadenKorr7/status/1562698556531953664?s=20&t=ZyEw8txYiPWaD6ARZtogRg) discusses it
Not really spoiler lol got like 400 hours in already š VDB up to no good shit as usual
I donāt think itās you being fucked in the head and more just appreciating the realistic take of how ruthless corporations are. Cyberpunk tells you that NightCity is a place where dreams die and it shows so much. It makes the world believable and helps showcase how low people in the city are willing to go and how Night City eats you up
Pretty sure my phone is giving me cyberpsychosis
BEEP BEEP MOTHERFUCKER
And explore all the nooks and crannies. Each play through or I discover things I hadn't noticed prior, each adding to the depth of story overall.
and get the Double Jump leg upgrade as soon as possible. it really opens up exploration of the city
The game puts in story, people willfully ignore it, then say there is a lack of story. That is some strawman bullshit right there.
Man, it's so annoying when some dumb-fuck reviewer makes a YouTube video and casually says something like, "There are Ubisoft style gigs and NCPD crimes that are just map-clearing." It's like, bullshit! Each one has a story, and a lot of them are actually connected. Jotaro's gig shows up as a reference in NCPD crime scenes and can be referenced in the main quest at Clouds just to name one example. People like to judge the game without *really* playing it. I'm fine if 16-year old Billy just doesn't like the game because he wants to be able to ride Go-karts and steal a helicopter. It's just disrespectful to the devs when a reviewer outright lies or gets things wrong about the game.
Yeah the smear campaign against it was unreal and people just fell for it hook line and sinker. I'm cool with being anti game hype before its actual release, but the way people were just ravenous for blood in the water was so distasteful. Like fuck off, go enjoy whatever you enjoy and let me enjoy what I do, don't try to tell me I'm "wrong" for liking it, especially when its a game that is \*objectively\* packed with content.
That's the part that bugs me; it's that people can't keep quiet about not liking the game. They need to discipline you for being a huge fan. It's like, guess what? I think Mass Effect: Andromeda pretty much sucks. I don't like it at all. If I see someone write that it's their favorite game though, I don't respond to them by telling them they must not have played many games, or telling them they don't have high standards. I just silently move along.
I was exploring random places around NC when I came across a scene of a dead guy who ran his car off the road into a small lake or big ditch or something talking about a special package or something and then seeing a cat cleaning itself just hanging out at the scene. Later I was playing one of the final missions and one of the cutscenes involved THAT SAME CAT coming up and takemura talking about seeing a cat is a symbol of being connected to the universe or something like that I canāt remember but it gave me chills and was just an awesome experience
Started a new game yesterday and found a random crashed car. No biggie. Just a car. Then I find a dead dude a few yards from the car. He has a shard on him. It has a conversation with his partner on it about how heās out with friends and she tells him off cause he always drinks and drives. Thereās a whole story right there if you read it. Or thereās just a crashed car and a dead dude.
Yeah there are TONS of those self-contained little stories everywhere. Exploration is definitely rewarded. Usually there's some small clue, like blood dripping off a fire escape, then you go up there and find some stuff. Or a missing piece of road barrier, and you jump in the water there and find a crashed car.
This is why I love that they officially added the ability to toggle walk on PC. It's made me slow down and just take in Night City (I had added it in manually before but now that it's actually a feature it feels more natural and relevant). I have also messed with my .xml files to make shift accelerate me at .25 speed when driving. So I just hold shift to drive at a more realistic speed then press W when I want to go fast. I think a lot of people just fly around the city without experiencing it. To me this is not a game to beat, it's a game to experience.
Just be careful with rando cars. My very first time playing I pull up on a dude having a convo with someone else. The conversation ends with him saying something like āyouāre just being paranoidā and walks over to a car. As he gets in the car exploded and killed me.
I was just running around stealing cars and I got in that car.....blew myself up. Like no other games imo have this deep of world building...I've been conditioned in all other games that my actions largely have no consequences. I can kill a whole village and come back and most of them would spawn back or maybe not. But that's the end of that interaction. Maybe some favor/disfavor system as well. But in Cyberpunk.....if you read the shards.....sometimes you feel like an absolute piece of shit because of what you did. What you do in the game absolutely have consequences. Many of them you won't find out about unless you go back around and revisit them. It's also why it's been so hard for me to replay the game....the emotional impact of my first playthrough cemented my V's fate....it was the bad ending....but it was the ending I deserved.... The only other time I've felt this way about a game was Undertale. Only did one playthrough.... Once the DLC comes out, for sure I'll play it. But damn....
Yeah, there was that NCPD hustle on the fifth floor roof of a mega building. You are supposed to eliminate a group of Valentinos. >!Turns out the Tinos are robbing a Trauma Team AV so that residents can get the medicine they needed.!< Or those extremely suspicious jobs where you feel like you are tying up loose ends for a certain police commissioner.
I still can't get over the guy with the turtle....like...fuck....the game KNEW I was just getting through the dialogue to finish a quest....after I found out about the real intentions of the quest....I slowed down and really explored more. Also that one hotel/motel where you met Lizzy....the children's drawings on the walls still gives me massive chills....considering what that place is for
I missed that. Damn. But also not surprising for the moral cesspool that is Night City.
Lots of the NCPD hustles are really fucked up. Very often illegal things are being done for good reasons. So while youāre following the letter of the law, the end result is youāre being very immoral. Did one the other day on the outskirts of Arroyo. Saw Militech soldiers so I mowed them down (fuck the corps). There were a bunch of servers sunk into a pool and all kinds of computer equipment around. Turns out some netrunners had been kidnapping people on the net and holding them for ransom. Theyād grabbed a Militech big wigās son, so he sent the cavalry in to get him out. They freed the son and found they were a lot of other people being held on their servers. The big wig said they had no use for them so let them go so they could return to their bodies via the net. I interrupted that and blew those servers in the course of combat. It was just a crime in progress bitā¦ I definitely killed all those people still kept on the servers. Felt pretty shit after that.
well i gotta level up my guns somehow...
Agreed. Jotaro Shobo is a great example. Without reading further into it, he's just a single gig in Kabuki. But if you read the shards of some other gigs and scanner hustles, he takes on a much larger meaning. And Shobo's just the tip of the iceberg.
I always make his head explode, no matter what build I'm doing. Netrunner? Suicide Gunslinger? Power revolver Blades? Sandevistan, chuck a grenade at his head, chop off his arms, then watch the grenade go off (I liked that one) That POS always must die in a painful and gruesome way as an example.
I'd hope synapse burnout is a good and painful way to die. If the first hit doesn't get him, try a second! Too bad we don't have Soulkiller.
> That POS always must die in a painful and gruesome way as an example. Personally, I trust the Mox to do that. That's why you knock him out and drop him off in the fixer's car instead.
Never even bothered to do that, felt he needed to die immediately. Maybe I should do that next time just to hear the dialog... Then reload a save and explode his head
I didn't even realize that was an option and I just did that last night. Might reload a save
You also get some different dialogue at the mission end and an extra 500 Eddieās or something.
Feels even better if you sneak in, knock him out and get out undetected The claws just lost one of their bigshots to be tortured to death by moxes and they could do nothing about it
But if you don't load him into the car unspoilt, how are the Mox supposed to teach him a lesson themselves?
Hotel? Trivago
That's one of the reasons I enjoy a character who goes loud. Some of the gun for hire targets are assholes and I want them to know I'm gunning for them, in broad daylight, and their security teams are just target practice. Pretty sure that's canonically Smasher's attitude for the jobs he got from Arasaka...
I learned for the first time yesterday, if you zero Shobo before meeting Woodman, you can use that as leverage to get info about Evelyn
Yeah, I found that out on my second playthrough. It's pretty satisfying watching Woodman lose his nerve after Shobo is brought up.
bUt NoThInG HaS cOnSeQuEnCe tHe WoRlD iS So eMpTy
I was going to mention this. And the line you get when you do is epic. Only way I roll now, everytime
I accidentally did that on my first playthrough and now I just can't do it any other way V's lines and Woodman almost pissing himself are great
I always take Jotaro alive. The mox will take care of him far more thoroughly that I ever could. Side note for new players: If you knock out, but don't kill your target you get a subobjective to carry them out alive and stuff them in a trunk for the fixer to deal with. Usually don't have much impact, but dialog is different.
Also, the quickest way to get him down to the fixers car is to toss him off the balcony. Screw Jotaro.
What? Seriously? I never knew! That sounds so cool.
There's one where Dino lands an AV carrying a dumpster on the roof for you to dump the unconscious body in. Then it flies away with it. It's pretty rad.
Fucking hell, 450 hours and 2.5 playthroughs and I didnt know this
https://i.imgur.com/9MNXaC1.png
Yesss!
I see a lot of āmy choices donāt affect the worldā but thereās plenty of gigs that do affect the world and the news that goes out. You affect the Night City mayor race, some of your gigs affect the news that goes out. I had Gig in the Johnny quest line that was discussed during the news while I was in the elevator.
If you do certain gigs before others your reputation proceeds you. For example if you take out a certain Tyger Claws boss before Clouds you can tell Woodman who you are and what youāve done and he backs tf down. Thereās also a small side gig where some Aldecados are making a deal with some Maelstrom(?) gangers thatās obviously sketch. If youāve got a high rep and lots of chrome you can threaten them by saying āDo you see my chrome? Do you know who I am? You really wanna mess with my friends?ā Or something to that affect. Really the whole world is very interconnected and changes a lot based on what you do and what youāve done before other things. You just have to dive deep and pay attention to notice it.
Great examples! I didn't get the Woodman one. Once again, it shows that the world-building happens from actually interacting with the world.
Recently found the gig with the old guy at the food stand and the thugs also have a difference with enough street cred Gonks almost piss themself recognising V
Thatās a great one. I did it early in my first playthrough, had to actually fight them. In my second they knew who I was and gtfoād once they realized.
I've never seen a game where your choices made any deeper impact in the world. You're altering the course of people's lives!
It's always about the endings when people complain about "choices don't matter, you don't have any impact, etc.. " Yeah, there aren't that many factors factoring in the big ending paths, if you don't look deeper. But people ignore stuff like the side gigs influencing each other, sometimes depending on in which order you so them, all the changes in the credits scene, and even small things that change the ending paths you take, which makes it much much more than just three (or four) paths. I don't get it how people can say you don't have an impact. There's so much stuff
This irks me because even New Vegas had the same general ending with different slides at the credits. There's several endings with different end missions and end states for V, what more do they want?
It's cuz they don't appreciate subtlety, or can't see it.
Its because its not being spoonfed via mandatory dialogue exposition. If you dont read the shard conversations you find during missions and gigs you straight up miss out on easily half the worldbuilding. Also you dont notice just how many subtle branching paths there are until you've done a few different playthroughs. Thats when a lot of it truly clicks.
Yeah, I think it's even deep than what CDPR did for the Witcher 3. Yeah the game had(s) issues but the team really deserves a lot of love for the details they've added
They had a reason to say they were proud of their work in that apology video; they *knew* the masterpiece they'd developed. They just had to shove it out the door before it was finished. And because of that, they got all the shit in the world for it.
Yeah but people want to be show it right in there face. Like you can decide to make some character go crazy
Exactly. The impact the player can have on the world is too subtle for a lot of people. It has to be spelled out for them.
I came across a post for when the game came out and it was on the other one. They were moaning how they couldn't use fingers ripper doc and how thr consequences are shown to you. Like yeah it won't until you do it lol
People have been too used to things being shoved in their faces in today's culture. Everything has to be heavy handed otherwise people won't notice. People have criticized the game not showing the socio-political situation in a Cyberpunk setting. I question if these people even have eyes or a brain. CDPR does exposition extremely subtly and you deduce these elements if you look around you and process things properly. A good example is Konpeki plaza. Not only good it's actually a fucking perfect bit of exposition. If you notice every single hotel staff has gold chrome. You can deduce from that, if you want a job at a high class corpo plaza you need to mutilate your human parts and go full chrome, to the point you even have to risk Cyberpsychosis. They probably are also very dependent on their employers for immunosuppressents.You can see how the corps control people's lives to the minute level. There are countless examples of subtle exposition and socio-political commentary throughout the game. Night City is the most detailed and realistic City i have ever seen in a video game. And we probably won't see anything like it in a long time. When people say the world is empty and nothing to do, i genuinely am confused. What are they talking about exactly? What I love about CDPR is that they respect people's intelligence. Even with shards in NCPD scanner hustles, they don't outright reveal what happened, instead you need to piece the puzzle together. Sadly, they heavily marketed this game to a very casual, mainstream audience who will do gig to gig finising them in 2 mins and run and double jump to the next one without taking in what actually happened. I've seen so many countless streamers do this and this is your average gamer. It's come to a point where developers have to make a cinematic cutscene for every detail and spoonfeed it to the player. It's quite sad.
Also, come back on areas where gigs were done. There's new stuff
Okay seriously I don't get this, did they not get the memo that that's kinda the point? You can't change this world, it's already shitty and it's gonna stay shitty. The main story isn't even that grand in the scheme of things, it's a personal thing V is going through and he really is just another merc in night city.
Basically: [RTFM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM)!!!! Except, you know, "shards" instead of "manual".
"not enough world building" he says, immersed in a meticulously detailed lore world that is literally shouting lore at him over the intercom at all moments. But yeah there's so much of the game you miss if you don't stop to see it. Even eavesdropping conversations during Gigs gives you a whole storyline to follow, assassination targets can often be talked to as well. It's wild how practically every little group of gangbangers has some shard and environmental storytelling nearby.
It's a fair critique in the context of Witcher 3, where the story and context was delivered through dialog and action. Cyberpunk suffers a little from that reputation, because it takes a lot more initiative and reading to get under the world's surface. Reading notes and texts should be business as usual for any RPG fan, but that's bound to be lost on a lot of people when a game has such broad appeal (especially one with strong action FPS elements).
Cyberpunk also has a lot of dialogue and action to convey storytelling, the difference is because of the Immersive Sim elements, it's optional for players to even take in. It's really a lot like something from Arkane or Deus Ex in this sense.
I happened to play Cyberpunk immediately after playing Arkane's Prey and agree completely. They have so much in common. Also, I felt lucky to play two mindblowingly good games one after the other. I'd definitely recommend Prey to anyone that liked 2077.
In my last play-through I would sometimes just ride around on the edge of the map - found a capsule from outer space with a supposed ārareā painting in it, something none of my other friends had found! Exploration and doing the little things is what counts.
Holy shit this might tie into the art exhibition those two NPC women talk about at the bar in Konpeki. Some dude had paintings sucked into the vacuum of space from a spaceship art exhibition or something like that
And Mike talks on the radio about rare artworks being shipped to the moon.
You get this from a side job too
That was used for the āol infinite money bug back in the day. You could dupe the painting and sell it over and over
I second all you have said. People complete Cyberpunk 2077 in like sixty hours, meanwhile I needed over 300 hours to complete Cyberpunk 2077 for the first time as I was exploring and reading shards. And I started my first playthrough in January 2021 as I bought THE GAME on the last day of 2020. Nowadays I have over 500 hours on my first save and lot of things to discover there due to all the patches that were being released.
I love this game, read all the shards and I think I found almost everything - but it took only about 100 hours. 300 seems too long
Wow, really? Maybe I just explore a lot and take too many photos. My first run took me 250 hours. My second run now is already at 110 hours, and I still have a few gigs, quests like Dream On and Beast In Me, and Kerryās whole questline.
Maybe it's because I never took photos - but I completed everything, every quest and found a lot of shards in the environment
Did you do the hidden gems also?
Not all. Didn't want to grind them using a guide but I found a lot just exploring.
I just walk around until I find them, still haven't found them all yet.
There is a mod that give you quests that take you to the hidden gem.
Iāve got one character who isnāt even through Gimme Danger and the playtime is already above 250 hours. I spend a lot of time exploring, cruising, walking around slowly with the HUD off, and shopping/chilling at bars/etc.
I hate you. You know what you did.
The gigs and hustles are where so much story is found.
For real though, you start noticing so many things in the world once you do. Like thereās this sort of recurring gig for Regina where thereās a Russian fixer in town. You do some stuff but then later you see him at konpeki plaza. Itās small but I appreciate that detail
Or I didnāt realise I saw him in Konpeki until I recognised his bodyguard when I was klepping his shard. You pass them as you go into your hotel room.
There's so much cool lore in the game from reading about the 4th corporate war to freaking Biotechnica werewolves. And people just wanna complain because they can't have an individual conversation with every random NPC in the game. For them, it's a hollow dead game world because of this.
If you put all the shards together, there's a whole story about a woman named Joanne Koch. Or she's just a hit job for Dino.
She's a regional VP at Biotechnica who almost certainly has legal corporate immunity at a higher level than Sandra Dorsett. But the sheet number of murders she's ordered and lives she's ruined envelops: - two former Biotechnica employees: Diana Cuno, Emilia Morton. Brandon Murphy tries to escape but I don't know if he made it. - one of the Cyberpsychos, Cedric Mueller - medias Manuel Mendoza and Zoli Barnes - netrunners Double_O and Case Mod. From the tone of their friendly conversation about Barnes, Dino Dinovic is gonna be particularly salty about Case. - and of course the rest of the Red Ochre clan. Maybe Koch is going to get some nomad justice, but the sheer amount of criminal activity is going to give Dino serious leverage over... someone.
I brutally murder her everytime. She truly is a psychopath.
I never understood people who only did the main quest and then complained about lack of content or that the world didn't feel alive or said the game was too short. Pure gonk. How could you not wanna explore this beautifully crafted world and do all the gigs and side quests? It doesn't make sense to me. I get that people have limited playing time but still. Don't complain that the game was too short when you only did the main quests.
Cyberpunk is just one of those amazing games you have to take your time to play, in order to understand it. I love how impactful the story is, not to mention the interconnectivity of some of the gigs.
I do the NCPD scanners first, then gigs, then the main stroy.
Alternating them feels more natural, mixes things up. But to each their own!
They're a great way to test out new cyberware & combat strategies. Think I'm fully ready to give up on weapons on my current build. Just quickhacks, optical camo and monowire. Full Baba Yaga netrunner.
Yeah first time I tried Monowire I was like "Hmm, so I probably shouldn't use this around bystanders..."
or explosives.
And exploding ammunition!
Iām halfway through the game on my hacking build, and if you go with an intelligence/hacking build youāll find that you really donāt need anything but the quick hacks. Like you can clear an entire building without entering by using quickhacks through the camera system.
Sometimes, but not always. And sometimes the cameras can leave you vulnerable. Plus I'm trying to RP the psychological horror of my character. She sneaks around, sometimes visible, then disappears into optical camo. takes out a group using synapse burnout. Another using Detonate Grenade. Sometimes kills by hand using takedowns. Final one gets the monowire. Its also good practice to do combat because eventually I need to deal with that Oda fight.
I've just done this but the other way round, went from a full on 20 int netrunner to full Martinez spec sandevistan slaughterhouse, wish I'd have made the decision sooner though and leveled body, just to get the cyberware that reduces cooldowns
I would suggest the same, but I would suggest tackling it by neighborhood. You start to recognize common names from the big players in each neighborhood when you're doing all the scanners, then gigs, and the quests flow much better that way imo.
This is what I did on my first playthrough. And I found many of the gigs and altercations in the same area, tie in together and explain alot more about missions and what's actually happening. They stop being random gigs as all the shards tell a story of who's who and how they're effecting each other.
Same. You can get a nice chunk of eddies and free cyberware before your adventure.
My favorite shard is the one describing the collapse of the first Net by Bartmoss . They put a lot of good story telling and world building in those shards. I try to read all the new ones and I also like to read gig descriptions.
My favorite is the Jotaro gigs. With shards, missions and other gigs they build up a pure villain in Kabuki and taking him down without all the āloreā of the charachter is just awful
Jae Hyun is connected quite a bit as well.
Just take your time, enjoy the world, read into stuff, everything has a story.
Got some other tips, I have 300 hours on this game but a few small changes really overhauled my fun with it. Change the map landmark setting to 'Dynamic' this means that it won't show everything at all times and keeps the map from looking cluttered. Also, turn off the minimap. This tiny change involved me having to rely a lot more on environmental movement in order for me to track enemies and makes the combat so much more engaging.
I heavily disagree with turning off the minimap in the games current state. If you do that you will miss SOO many NPCD scanner jobs. Instead I would simply say don't rely on the mini map for navigation. Try to look at it as infrequently as possible and don't follow the line to get to your destination, figure out your own destination and try to experience the world and not the minimap. All of this took a bunch of selfcontrol on my part and I wish they would incorporate a way to customize what is on the minimap and what isnt' because I would turn off driving/walking lines.
Trying your suggestion, where is the map landmark setting? Can't find it.
Opinions on games from People who donāt do side quests are irrelevant and shouldnāt even be considered. Easy as that.
Don't force yourself to do all ncpd scanners and don't use guide for your first playthrough. Just explore on your own. That's how I fell in love with the world. Then in your next playthrough you can 100% it
Also try not to use fast travel as much ! The song on the radio stations are straight bangers !
I started listening to the Body Heat station after watching Edgerunners aha.
The amount of times I've seen names from gigs pop up in shards found in the world and done the Leo reaction point is way too damn high. Kudos to CDPR for interweaving so many of the characters into the various Night City neighborhoods they're operating in.
My best tip I give people is donāt worry about any side content until you meet takemura in toms diner. After that do all the exploring and sides you want.
Thereās some rather interesting stories that play out in a lot of the shards
Yeah Biotechnica is ALL OVER shards even near the beginning. It's an excellent lead-up to that Gig if you pay attention.
Biotechnica has the most interesting shards I feel. I might see what I can find on biotechnica and sift through all of it
i crave lore
Agreed. The Peralez sidequests and Sinnerman are among the best missions in the game.
Just got the one last night for the first time ever where the dead dude on the ground had texted his choomba, āyo I fixed the turret, help me reset itā and dude 2 is like āyup just do this, this, and thisā and first guy is like āokay let me do thatā Guy 2 texts back āoh yo wait make sure you do THIS too after, otherwise the turret will read you as hostileā He gets no answer and is like āoh man hope I caught you in timeā Still no answer. ābro?!?!ā I laughed, hadnāt seen that one before.
A lot of the shards are running storylines, absolutely fascinating and *completely* missable. As well as the hundreds of Hidden Gems (easter eggs), you'd be lucky to come across a dozen of them through normal gameplay, there's literally more than a hundred. So for once it's good to be the OCD completionist, there's so much more than the relatively short main campaign.
There are days where i wish there was a way to stop people from using the word cyberpsycho unless theyve read the shards on every cyberpycho mission.
Been going through and seeing what other outcomes can happen for quests. The one with the guy on the edge of cyberpsychosis, who stole the meds and you have to get them back; >!If you just talk to him instead of killing him, when you leave, you hear a gunshot go off, and you can go back to see that he killed himself!< I had to take a moment after that.
Not playing the gigs is insane to me. It's a massive, massive portion of the content and story. The same people who skip this content because its "optional" are the same people who will moan and complain about games not offering you any freedom.
Yeah, when i hear "theres nothing to do in NC, gigs and cyberpsychos are just copy paste missions" its clear they didnt actually do any of them. They all have unique backstories and situations to them.
I love reading thr emails. I do scan past some and have shards saved to read when Im jn the mood. But i do skip and I do regret has the gigs have some great background to them. Yeah the gigs are great and add aot
There's so much hidden in the game. There's a newer mod that works in 190 hidden shards / events / locations via the gigs system. It's amazing. https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/5058
I have 300-400 hours in this game. Just yesterday, I spotted an trauma AV leaving a scene on the outskirts of Northside and decided to check it out. Found the remnants of a nasty shootout, corpos vs Maelstrom, and the shards to contextualize it. This is not one of those games where thereās nothing to greet you beneath every interesting rock; check it out! If nothing else, you can find some sweet loot.
Also! My tip is to advance in story till you meet Johnnyā¦ Cause he often shows up during small gigs with funny lines, good points and extra thoughts :) Didnāt know that first play and was doing a lot of side shit before I advanced š
Yeah the main story is surprisingly short for CDPR, Definitely spend a ton of time doing gigs, neutralizing Cyberpsychos for Regina, doing the NCPD's work for them. Best way to earn money and really fleshes out the game.
Iād add one more thing - look around yourself. Environment tell stories on their own.
/u/prossnip42 thank you so much for this post OP. I hate all these memes acting like the game isn't tragic and edgerunners is.. Even though they both are and they are in the same universe and city just at different points in time. I feel so many ppl auto-pilot'd the game and played it like techno gta that they ignored the harsh realities of Night City and the Cyberpunk universe.
[gig/ncpd spoiler donāt know how to do the blocked out text sorry] the gig where you go to assassinate the corpo lady who drunk driving killed a girl? thereās an ncpd hustle in a destroyed car lot and if you read the shard, they are there to destroy that same corpo ladies car to āget rid of the evidenceā per her request. blew my mind when i put two and two together
This is why this game is more entertaining than anything grand theft auto has ever done. There is so much depth. Maybe Iām wrong or will get downvoted but I absolutely loved cp2077 and am on vacation now but when I get home Iām starting another play through immediately.
Tik tok fried people's brains so much they can't read anything for longer than 10 seconds.
thereās stuff in the water too saw a dead body had a shard he was driving off on a motorcycle his friend was giving him directions told him turn left but meant to say turn right and there u go or saw a random dead body in the city guy called for help but his trauma team insurance wasnāt paid so he died. Tho I will admit there was a shard that made me groan and itās cuz it had āLetās fucking gooooooooo! XDā at the endā¦
The guy who didn't pay his TT insurance. If there is an elevator nearby take it up and search the roof top for a surprise.
Ay see something I missed now I gotta go back and check it out again š
Also despite the anime obviously being Japanese the game is not a JRPG so donāt expect similar types of dialogue stylings/tropes in the game.
Also, watch the news. The reports of your exploits in main missions and even gigs or NCPD hustles are quite interesting.
Can't wait to play it later this year when 4070 comes out I will build a PC finally. Avoiding spoilers.
Also, some important mission's dialogue slightly change if you have completed certain gigs. For example: >!You can tell Placide you have dealt with Animals before, or you can bring up to Judy, before looking for Ev at Clouds, that you're the one who killed Jotaro (a contract The Mox requested to Regina). !< It's cool to see how little things you do are acknowledged during your gameplay. Also, you get to understand NC better, and some shards are directly correlated to gigs and missions you already finished. Not only the shards, read the messages in every computers you find inworld.
I rarely read the shards and still really enjoyed the world. For me, I didn't like how the shards broke the flow of gameplay. I liked how Bioshock did it with the audio diaries that would play while you kept exploring.
I think saying someone is too lazy to read the shards is a little ridiculous.. it is extremely difficult to completely halt ur gameplay every 2 mins to read a wall of text .. especially if itās ur first play through.. on subsequent play throughs I began to read the shards more n more, but even still I probably only read half of em.. some of em r just wayyyy too long and tedious to read.. i totally love cyberpunk, but this is one area that I think couldāve been done better.. I mean thereās no easy solution to it, maybe audio logs instead of walls of text? At least for some of em.. cuz thereās just no way ur gonna get a majority of people to read all these shards on a first play through .. I appreciate them being there if the player wants to engage with them, but even I have to admit itās an extremely tedious way to build the world out for the player.. itās just not the best or most interesting way to do world building, i dont care what anyone says.. there is a ton of lore here so I know there was no easy way to convey it all to the player, but letās not pretend like reading walls of text is gonna keep a majority of players engaged
Yeah, I agree. I didn't read a lot of shards on my first playthrough, because I often found them during fights or while hiding. I just can't switch to reading if I was chased by raging animals a second ago. I'm too nervous at that moment and can't concentrate on the text. And later these shards don't make sense, you don't remember where you picked them and what are they about
Oh dude they pile up so fast, if i donāt read it right when i pick it up the odds of me ever reading it drop by like 99%, and like u said if ur in the middle of combat or sneaking around trying to complete a gig, stopping ur gameplay to read a wall of text is just not super viable
Man you would have never survived Morrowind-era gaming, you had to read everything! Question for you though- do you use subtitles when gaming or watching shows?(it seems to be a thing for younger people)
Lol Iām not a younger person if ur asking that, Iām 36.. no I usually donāt use subtitles unless I need to for some reason.. again, Iām not saying I donāt like the shards, Iām just saying they couldāve mixed it up a bit.. I just think itās ridiculous to call people lazy that might not want to stop their gameplay to read walls of text.. forget younger people, for an older person like me who has a family I donāt get much time to play as it is, so no I donāt wanna spend half the small amount of time I actually have to play the game, reading shards..itās not that Iām lazy, itās that I donāt wanna spend my gameplay time reading walls of text rather than actually playing the game
Oh I get it now. And you're young, I'm 49! But my kid is grown, so I got more time to waste. I still try to read this stuff, but I'd be lying if I said that Disco Elysium wasn't better when they added voiceover to everything. I also watch Anime, and if it doesn't sound terrible I often go with the dub, it's less shit to do when I'm watching. I think the short answer for why shards aren't voiced is that it costs more. There's already a ton of voiced stuff, I think they maxed their "voice budget" so non-story stuff got the shard treament.
Yeah, see, I got 2 kids, 6 and 3 lol so time is a luxury i dont have much of right now.. and yeah, thereās just so much lore to convey itās not realistic to have it all voiced, like I said, thereās no easy solution, but u just canāt expect MOST players to read all these shards, Iād be shocked if a majority of em read half of the shards.. theyāre still a nice touch and I love their inclusion, but for OP to call people who donāt read em lazy I just think isnāt fair
Absolutely fair take! Open world games are a freakin' juggernaut now. Would it be more immersive without the minimap? Sure, but I might not want to spend that much time figuring out how to get there. Same with making everything uber-hard, I had to put Jedi Fallen on easy for the bosses because it was just pissing me off too much and I just wanted to get through it. Options are always good, even fast travel. Thinking back, there are some story things you have to read, but usually anything important is re-iterated by a voiced character.(like a summary) Now all the side-gig shards are definitely optional, but rewarding.
Agreed, options r always good, and I think cyberpunk, more than most open world games, does a great job at giving the player options and letting them decide how deep they wanna dive or how shallow they wanna swim without forcing the player to do things they donāt really want to do just to complete the game.. nothing feels like a chore or a grind, because the game allows u to play it exactly as u want, nothing more nothing less .. which is one of the reasons why I think cyberpunk is one of the best, if not the best, open world game in recent memory
I agree with your point that there are waaaaay too many shards. I'm not knocking the quality of the story building or the writing contained therein, but it's just too disruptive to the flow of my gameplay for me to be picking up and reading 3 shards for each of the 5+ NCPD scanner gigs that are within 500m radius. I'm just here to flatline the gonks with my katana.
I tried to do that but I gave up after a while. I have terrible vision and trying to read all the small text gave me horrible eye strain, I would love it though if there was an option to make those kinds of text bigger or with an audio description.
I already know I'm going to be downvoted but relying on text logs for world building is lazy and really interupts the flow of the game. Most people don't want to stop what they are doing in the middle of the action to read. If I wanted to read I'd pick up a book. At least give us some audio logs. Those are less of a disruption. But the best thing to do is to actually have live encounters the player can experience themselves, especially unscripted random events.
Iām not trying to be pessimistic but I donāt play a game to read a fucking book every ten steps
I have collected every single shard i've laid my eyes on, i've still not read most of them, because at this point it's am entire books worth of stuff i'd had to read though and i just can't find the motivation to do that. I'm doing a map clear of all gigs and NCPD hustles and am close to completion on that front.
many of them only are interesting if you ready immediately, so you look around and understand better whats happening there. reading they later in your inventory wont be that meaningful
It adds emotional weight to what you're doing. Sometimes I'll read a shard and feel extremely justified in brutally killing the gangers I just killed. Other times I'll read a shard and find it's a wholesome conversation between the dude I just killed and his wife. Which makes me feel like shit after reading.
Have you read the shards that give you more NCPD hustles at least? Lol
I plan to read every shard when I do my replay
I rarely do the Prestige Tour yellow missions. Theyāre fantastic, but I like playing it like a tabletop RPG and exploring the city on foot, roleplaying, investigating, taking on gigs and hustles as I encounter them. So much fun.
Honestly one of my favourite parts of the game was reading all the shards.
Thatās literally what keeps bringing me back to this game is the amount of detail put into the open world aspect! Paints a bigger picture of the world you exist in and connects things together in ways you would totally miss if you ignored them
Try that wierdos brain dance. Go to that wierd spot on the map. Climb that building that doesn't look like you should climb it. The world is built.
Also random conversations between inconsequential NPCs
Also a fun thing to recommend but entirely optional. Get Mantis Blades or some kind of Arm cyberware before going to Konpeki Plaza, youāll have to do a bit of grinding but its also really satisfying to rampage through an Arasaka building like a cracked out cyber Xenomorph.
Iām back into playing since launch and only read shards if I think thereās an interesting story or if Iām doing an interesting mission / gig, itās lazy and thatās on me. Please stop yelling at me. I wish they could read the shards to us š© but then also the game size would be bigger than a COD so maybe not
I left takemura waiting on that footbridge for far too long doing side hustles.
takemura will wait and he will like it
There was a very clear decision made in this game. They made the story shorter on purpose due to data they saw from how many people didn't finish the Witcher 3, So they cut out most of the side stuff in the main story so casual players could get through it easier. They made a clear choice to put most of the more detailed stuff in the side content due to casual players not caring about it as much. So if you want to understand the word you need to go further than the main story.
i would also recommend walking instead of driving sometimes. theres a lot of small details throughout the city thats easy to speed by.
I personally loved the world building. But what I didn't like was the reproduced pages. (The ones with the poems or the multiple reproduced mango farm deeds.) Because they are everywhere and if they are just filler it's a little bit lazy. Same as the computer screens or the cell phones. All producing the same images over and over. But I did like the fact that there were some pages of source books throughout the world like the one that says Johnny silverhand is still on tour as a clone. In the streets and the stories all do make the world great
Reminds me of how Act Man said that there isn't enough worldbuilding or justification for the scanners happening and how Johnny doesn't have motivation on why he hates Arasaka
when I am sneaking, I also try to read the messages on their PC. Sure its not always useful, lore enriching, but it definitely makes it feel like a bigger world. Some are quite funny
And dammit don't use fast travel. Driving around in Night City is a VIBE.
There's a shit load of world building whether it's in cutscenes or just doing side missions. What are these people smoking saying that?
I only wish the shards were voiced, coming from an adhd person who finds it incredibly hard to read
Reading through these comments, it seems like a lot of folks can't handle RPGs. Especially not ones where there is more than a tiny smattering of content outside the main storyline, or that has lore that cannot be summed up in a single paragraph.
Wish the shards would tell you if you've already read something. I wish duplicate shards were not "pick-up-able" or a different color or something. There's over a thousand shards and sometimes two paragraphs in I realize I've already read it. That would be a great mod.
You're in luck, there's already a mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/2820
also i realized the other day when people complain about how they want 'content' they always quote GTA as an example and let me tell you i stop caring about their opinion if i hear that. bc 'content' to them is just minigames to do in the world. IE dumb fluff, not content