this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
151 points (100.0% liked)
Gaming
30351 readers
393 users here now
From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!
Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.
See also Gaming's sister community Tabletop Gaming.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The game will never be what people wanted (and what was - to some extent - promised). It's too flawed and unfinished to be fixable through patches.
I still thoroughly enjoyed it (I'm just about to finish my first playthrough at 100+ hours), but the game has to be approached with the understanding that it's fundamentally flawed. I have no problems with that, Fallout: New Vegas is one of my favourite games so I'm comfortable with the situation and I'm used to fixing problems myself through mods (yes, even on a first playthrough).
The best comparison I can think of is Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines (though perhaps that game is now too old to be a relevant example). You can't play it expecting a finished, polished product, but it's still worthwhile and the good parts are really good.
The mods to fix bloodlines turned it into a fantastic experience. Did not expect to be thinking about reinstalling that today, but here we are!
Well, the mods do some heavy lifting for sure (I mean, the game is literally unplayable without the unofficial patch), but they can only fix so much. The game was - much like Cyberpunk - shipped in an unfinished state that is to some extent beyond the scope of repair for mods. The final third of Bloodlines is not great. You can tell they ran out of time and had to cobble together an ending somehow with what they had. It devolves into a series of combat encounters in a game that is not exactly famous for its combat gameplay. Compare the last sections of the game to Santa Monica to see what I mean; imagine if they were afforded the time to give the whole game the same amount of thought and polish as they could Santa Monica.
Still, much like Cyberpunk, when it's operating at full capacity it really hits the spot. Driving through the rain at night in first person through Night City gives me sort of similar vibes as walking the rainy streets of Santa Monica, listening to Rik Schaffer's phenomenal soundtrack. Both games nail the atmosphere, at least at times.
They're actually fairly similar, carried by their characters, stories, setting and atmosphere rather than gameplay.
I also have to mention the combination of Bloodlines cartoony art direction and the facial animation rigging of Source Engine. The characters are incredibly expressive for a 2004(!) game, it really holds up well.
In the voice of Alistair Grout: Damn it all, now I'm doing it too!