Cyberpunk now rated "Overwhelmingly Positive" on Steam. Comeback story of the decade so far.

[Uttamattamakin]

Summary

Well chooms it finally happened thanks to being a game that had a great underlying IP that kept people engaged even through bugs CDPR was able to improve Cyberpunk 2077 into the game it always should've been.  On Steam where the godlike gaming PC gets its games it is rated overwhelmingly positive for recent reviews, and very positive for all time reviews. 

 

Quotes

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Recently, Cyberpunk 2077's rank in the "Recent Reviews" category reached "Overwhelmingly Positive" on Steam. This success on Steam is evident in the numbers, with 95% of the 7,103 user reviews filed in the last 30 days being positive, leading to the "Overwhelmingly Positive" classification. Cyberpunk 2077's all-time reviews on Steam are now "Very Positive" with 83% positive reviews out of 651,068. This positive reception reflects a stark contrast to the game's troubled launch. CDPR Associate Game Director, Paweł Sasko, thanked the players for a second chance on his recent Twitter post.

https://gamerant.com/cyberpunk-2077-reviews-steam/

 

My thoughts

I held off from getting this game when it came out because I knew I did not have the GPU for it.  I had a Nvidia 1080 (not Ti) which was great for games of the GTA IV era.  However, I knew that a good GPU with ray tracing is what it would take to run this game right.  When it came out consoles were not really up to the task, and the 30 series had either just come out or we were in the 20 series SUPER era.   Right at the boundary between those and right at the worst part of the pandemic shortage. 

Then I got an Asus 3080 Turbo and a great build to put it in and It was the first new game I got.  By patch 1.5 on a PC that is up to the task that game was just fine.  But it required a really strong but not unreasonable PC.  I have been gaming in a Linux KVM VM, with the underlying APU being a Ryzen 7 5700g.  Passing that 3080 through to it.   Any decent even budget PC that has a 3070 could run Cyberpunk just fine.   With my 3080 I even get path tracing and 30-50 FPS depending on the thermal state of the GPU. 

 

What really carries this game through though is the story.  It has a story mode that is like what games gave us before online was the whole point.  You play one character that has one of three different life stories prior to the game.  Then one can RPG it like that life path matters, or one can lean into the life path. 

 

There is one mission where (If you want to know why my character can walk here like she owns the place)

Spoiler

if your character is a corpo they can walk right into an Arasaka warehouse like they are there to inspect the place.  No need to kill anyone.  My last playthrough will be as a female corpo like my first was, but I really want to explore all the life paths and combinations first.

 

CDPR paid attention to so many little details of the game, even places that one might never really see much.    What really did it in was QA testing for some of the bugs, other bugs were just that the game was too much for the hardware of the time.  Now that it has hardware worthy of it, Cyberpunk 2077 is now the well regarded game it should've been from the start. 

 

Sources

https://gamerant.com/cyberpunk-2077-reviews-steam/

[Levent]

Only 30 months after release. Comeback or not, CDPR is not getting my money again. I have gotten bugged out of a main story line in two separate playthroughs 18 months after game was released .

[Uttamattamakin]

4 minutes ago, Levent said:

Only 30 months after release. Comeback or not, CDPR is not getting my money again. I have gotten bugged out of a main story line in two separate playthroughs 18 months after game was released .

They don't need to get your money again.  IF you don't care about the expansion all the updates that are not part of that are free. 

[TempestCatto]

Helldivers 2 is next, I betchya!

[xAcid9]

CDPR probably gonna announce their next game soon and use this comeback story to release another broken game at launch. 

[Blue4130]

1 hour ago, Uttamattamakin said:

They don't need to get your money again.  IF you don't care about the expansion all the updates that are not part of that are free. 

They do need peoples money again though. They can't just rely on one game to keep earning money forever. I assume when @Levent said that cdpr wasn't getting his money, he meant for any future games that they make, not just CP77.

[Caroline]

Controversial opinion: I played day 1 release and liked it.

 

It was deprived of content though. The lack of Metro was pretty obvious but it wasn't a game-changing mechanic or something you needed to complete a playthrough.

 

The starting area was pretty limited, and the megabuilding honestly looked and felt like a filler zone, with nothing other than the gun shop and the boxing guy. It's still like this to this day, with the broken elevator and all, you can tell it was meant to be more important but then cut to meet the release deadline.

 

Out of all paths only the "street kid" one feels right and complete, the other two feel rushed because they all cut to the same 'prologue ending' after some minutes, the nomad could make sense but the corpo one is like... you're an office worker, lose your job and become a ruthless ninja killer with blades for arms in, what, a month? oh but the implants and training software can explain it. idk , it just feels odd or rushed to me, like the prologue should be longer and have different ways of meeting Jackie and the other characters, not "you're unemployed, anyway here's a rifle, enjoy"... oh, but that does happen from time to time lol

It's like Fallout's 4 Nora, you're a lawyer, get in the freezer for 200 years and come out knowing how to use every gun, hack computers, etc. Feels forced, at least the Nate character was a soldier, that'd make more sense.

 

DLC is shorter but better, there's a lot more detail in the DLC area than the rest of the map, well written characters & a coherent storyline.

 

But I still enjoyed the game despite all of that. One thing I don't like is that the missions aren't replayable without restarting the game from 0, other games offer replays with more or better enemies depending on your level.

[MarkPol88]

If I am buying a car and I get it with three normal wheels and one from shopping cart, and manufacturer finally delivers the fourth one two years later - that is not a comeback, that is bare minimum...

 

I know that comparison above is not completely fair, but gamers just show time and time again that they do not care about being lied to, manipulated or in some examples completely scammed. And developers take notice.

 

I played Cyberpunk 2077 month or so after release and I needed to restart portions of the campaign three times.

But most of all - it was boring for me. Low number of relevant guns, hacking that gets pretty repetitive "gigs" that usually were glorified question marks on map and so on.

 

Plot wise it was not bad - not great by any means - but not bad. But that is my personal opinion of a guy who seen almost all sci-fi tropes to date so maybe that is why i feel that way.

 

All in all I too would not buy from CDPR unless on very deep discount.

[jagdtigger]

It was one of the very few games i preordered and tbh the bugs on pc got blown out of proportions IMO......

I just hope they hold back on the hype next time until the game is really ready to be released, say whatever you want but pressure from the community was a big part why the game got a premature release. Even Sony and MS is starting to feel the consequenced of ignoring their community.

[Doobeedoo]

Game was always good, huge mess was old consoles, but who cares, should never release on those. Bugs were nowhere near some other AAA series that didn't get flack enough and still continue releasing unfinished, broken and more expensive games. Quite over blown.

On release game work very well on my PC before that was 3800X 5700XT so yeah.

[WereCat]

Bought it in middle of February again this year with the DLC on sale (I refunded the game after it released due to many issues)... the game still sucks imo. Still tons of visual glitches, animation glitches, physics glitches,... Often the game looks terrible even on Ultra settings due to LOD issues and sometimes it looks stunningly good, it's just so inconsistent... Story is kinda okay, few side quests are good and most of them suck. Haven't got to the DLC part yet but I feel like I have to force myself to play trough it.

Meanwhile I just finished GTA IV which is a significantly worse game than GTA V imo, yet I enjoyed it more than I'm enjoying Cyberpunk. Something just feels really off when I play CP for some reason and it's really annoying me.

[RejZoR]

Still has HARDCODED controls. idiotic in 2024 and so bad I literally cannot play it because I can't bind controls the way I want them.

[05032-Mendicant-Bias]

The patches are free, and the new augmentation system is amazing.

Spoiler

The expansion is worth it, Song Bird questline is the best one in CP77.

Spoiler

Frack Reed. Frack Mayers. Frack the NUSA.

 

 

 

[Taf the Ghost]

To borrow from the Honest Trailers review of Pacific Rim, CB2077 is either one of the Best Bad Games of all-time or one of the Worst Good Games. There's enough good and bad for anyone to hone in on and how stable your playthroughs were would really dictate your experience. 

[Caroline]

Oh and by the way, play this in a CRT (or OLED?) if you can, it looks WAY better when you get to see the actual contrast at night or inside closed buildings, the lighting is really well done. There are ENB presets you can get to change colours and brightness but imo they're not needed unless you go for the 'realism' mods.

 

Pressing V turns on the lights in some bikes, this is never told to you during gameplay and I just found out with the latest patch. It also turns on/off the low beams in cars and the police siren. Hold for 1 second and you get the high beams.

 

I don't have a super high end PC and somehow NEVER encountered any glitches, game-breaking bugs, corrupted saves, or crashes. I'm playing the GOG version by the way, could it be the Steam version has all these issues? I see that's the #1 complaint to the day but I never got any of those issues, the NPCs were a bit goofy at first, and there was the infinite police "bug" that made cops spawn indefinitely near you, but those got fixed.

 

6 hours ago, WereCat said:

Something just feels really off when I play CP for some reason and it's really annoying me.

[TetraSky]

8 hours ago, RejZoR said:

Still has HARDCODED controls. idiotic in 2024 and so bad I literally cannot play it because I can't bind controls the way I want them.

May I introduce you to mod called...

 

No More Hard-coded Keybinds (Better Controls Menu continued)

https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/4008

 

I found that one by looking at the pcgamingwiki entry for this game. 

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Cyberpunk_2077#Input

 

Could be just what you need. Sure it sucks to need a mod to change something as basic as controls... Especially coming from CDPR, the makers of The Witcher video game franchise...  But it is possible to some extent.

 

_{Disclaimer : I have not tried the mod. I don't even have the game.}

[BINBASH]

Really glad CDPR turned it around, I've revisited the game a few times since launch and have always been pleased with the bits of progress made since the previous time I picked it up. Comeback story of the decade, however, HAS to go to No Man's Sky, there's too much to say in one post about all the incredible stuff that Sean and the team at Hello Games have done over the last 8 years.

[Uttamattamakin]

18 hours ago, Caroline said:

different ways of meeting Jackie and the other characters, not "you're unemployed, anyway here's a rifle, enjoy"... oh, but that does happen from time to time lol

 

Corpo V isn't an office worker but a corporate intel agent.  Arasaka Counter intel.  So a corprorate spy.  Think Michael Weston in Burn notice. In the corpo life path there is dialogue that indicates that the way Corpo V met Jackie was.

 

Quote

Much earlier at least a mission in Mexico that went sideways at least a couple years before that.  Both are NC natives so maybe knew eachother before that.  Hence going on the mission in Mexico together. 

Plus you know Corpo V is on the phone with Jackie in the first mission CorpoRat.

So, they knew him already.   Your opinion is far from controversial.  Corpo's like me who think that path was pretty good.  Most miss the detail of them being a corporate intel agent hence having a contact like Jackie, and having skills that can be a freelance merc while also knowing how to work with suits. 

11 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

Game was always good,

Of course you think so choombatta.  

 

11 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

huge mess was old consoles, but who cares, should never release on those. Bugs were nowhere near some other AAA series that didn't get flack enough and still continue releasing unfinished, broken and more expensive games. Quite over blown.

I know right.  GTA V has SOOOOOOOOOOO many bugs still to this very day.  Yet it gets almost no flack.  Everyone loves it. 

11 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

On release game work very well on my PC before that was 3800X 5700XT so yeah.

 

11 hours ago, WereCat said:

Bought it in middle of February again this year with the DLC on sale (I refunded the game after it released due to many issues)... the game still sucks imo. Still tons of visual glitches, animation glitches, physics glitches,... Often the game looks terrible even on Ultra settings due to LOD issues and sometimes it looks stunningly good, it's just so inconsistent...

If you are running the game on ULTRA everything cranked to the right.  Do you have a 3090 or 4080 level GPU?  If not then that's not going to go well at all.  Even with a 3080 that's not doable.  The way to play it is with the settings high enough to get ray tracing, or path tracing and about 30 or more FPS.  This game is not about high FPS it is about being cinematic like a movie that you interact with. 

 

11 hours ago, WereCat said:

 

Story is kinda okay, few side quests are good and most of them suck. Haven't got to the DLC part yet but I feel like I have to force myself to play trough it.

You can skip straight to Phantom Liberty if you want.  Though I do feel like that would loose something.  Like... building up and getting to know my V and how this V works in the world.  The sequence you do things in matters in such a way that even if you do the same things... but with a different path it makes a bit of a difference.  The ultimate start and finishes are the same but how you move from one to the other is the journey that is life.   

IRL we all end up the same way too. 

 

11 hours ago, WereCat said:

Meanwhile I just finished GTA IV which is a significantly worse game than GTA V imo, yet I enjoyed it more than I'm enjoying Cyberpunk. Something just feels really off when I play CP for some reason and it's really annoying me.

I mean I get this.  I've been trying HOI4 and I just can't seem to get into it.  LIke I know it's the kind of thing I'll like a modern RTS game on the grand scale of WWII but I can't even conquer Ethiopia in the tutorial yet. 

 

4 hours ago, Caroline said:

Oh and by the way, play this in a CRT (or OLED?) if you can, it looks WAY better when you get to see the actual contrast at night or inside closed buildings, the lighting is really well done. There are ENB presets you can get to change colours and brightness but imo they're not needed unless you go for the 'realism' mods.

I've played 1000's of hours of this game and never noticed that.    What I did notice is that in phone calls I can see my V's mouth move if they are on a bike.  Not every call every time but most of them most of the time.  I think I need to be looking at V's face when the call starts for the animation to happen.   3rd person when walking should've been done.  

At the same time making it first person only did make it very immersive.  Like we don't go through life in 3rd person either. 

 

 

[PhantomJaguarr]

Bought it at launch in 2020 and did another playthrough with Phantom Liberty. Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the few games I finish playing and think “What do I do now?” Also playing it after watching Edgerunners hit different, especially when certain songs play in the background.

[Salted Spinach]

Yes it did redeem itself and gladly so not in the same way as No Man's Sky where they kept releasing system overhauls and everyone kept having to re-learn the meta and rebuild their broken bases.

 

I am particularly impressed with the modding scene for extensive graphic tweaks allowing even my 4070S to turn the game almost photo realistic as seen in Nova LUT videos. In part thanks to DLSS I am able to keep the photo-realism at ~120fps at 1440p

 

And no thanks to Mr Hands' still broken lift and the one greedy bugger putting Dreampunk behind a Patreon paywall.

[WereCat]

5 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

 

If you are running the game on ULTRA everything cranked to the right.  Do you have a 3090 or 4080 level GPU?  If not then that's not going to go well at all.  Even with a 3080 that's not doable.  The way to play it is with the settings high enough to get ray tracing, or path tracing and about 30 or more FPS.  This game is not about high FPS it is about being cinematic like a movie that you interact with. 

The issues I have with this game cannot be salvaged by RayTracing or PathTracing. I don't play with RT because of performance reasons but I did try it and even that was kinda meh. Did not try PathTracing at all as my system wont run it.

I play with overclocked RX 6800 XT and I get well over 100FPS at 1440p on max settings without upscaling. With RT Medium and all RT effects enabled I get around 35-50FPS depending on where I look (with upscaling) which is unplayable for me.

With just RT reflections it's roughly the same performance but without upscaling.

Now I'm on Linux so I can't run the same OC as on Windows so I get around 10%-15% worse RT performance as I'm being both power and current limited. I am able to run up to 400W on Windows with around 100A TDC more but I'm confined to 312W on Linux and stock TDC and also can't OC VRAM on Linux.

 

It says Windows 10 Pro but it's Fedora 40. All settings maxed out besides SSR which is set to Low for the reasons mentioned later.

Spoiler

 

 

The biggest issue if I'm going to try to describe this is that my immersion is being broken constantly each time I turn around in the world. (and no, it's not because I run overclocked GPU)

 

- There is distracting LOD pop-in EVERYWHERE I look and especially when driving. I don't remember last time I've seen LOD pop-in this bad in any game. I'd rather suffer the FSR edge flicker than this. This can't be solved with RT or PT.

- Both with and without RT the lamp posts in distance are off and turn on and shine more brightly the closer you get. It's quite funny actually...

- Screen Space Reflections are one of the worst I've ever seen. They look more like a grain rather than reflections. The max setting is barely visually different than the low settings yet the performance hit of the max settings is almost as big as enabling RT.

- When I've tried RT there was stuff missing in some of the reflections that even SSR was able to capture and the RT barely looks better considering the performance hit. Path Tracing from what I've seen looks much better (in still images) not sure how it is in motion.

- Cars appear out of nowhere. Sometimes there is nothing behind me then I turn around and suddenly there are cars... same with NPCs sometimes.

- Jackie likes to walk trough stuff and make them explode. Like walking trough the closet near the door where I dropped off the girl for trauma police and everything from the cabinet started flying across the room. Also when he dropped me off near his bike and started driving away and just noclipped trough 5 cars on his way...

- Driving feels weird.

- Aiming feels weird even on high FPS.

- FSR sucks, XeSS sucks as both cause some massive visual artifacting in some areas especially visible during movement, they look fine in still images/static camera shots. DLSS is nice but I don't play with my RTX 3060ti anymore but I wouldn't get that kind of performance even with DLSS on that card anyways.

 

So sometimes the game looks absolutely great, usually when standing still and looking around... then during movement it falls apart and the illusion breaks and I feel like I play alpha version of a Bethesda game.

Now since I don't mind actually playing old games with bad graphics this may sound hypocritical but Cyberpunk just looks bad... because it's so inconsistent. And while it still looks better than many of the older games I tend to play, the constant flipping between good and bad during gameplay just gets on my nerve.

 

I know I'm not alone in this since there are supposed to be mods to fix the LOD issue but I never actually managed to get it to work. And also apparently it's worse if I increase FOV above certain level... which I absolutely have to if I don't want to feel motion sickness during gameplay as the default is too narrow.

[Brian McKee]

No, this was how the game should have been at launch. We shouldn't be awarding big studios with pats on the back when they rush trash out the door and fix it later. At least with No Man's Sky it was a small studio that bit off more than it could chew, there was absolutely no excuse for CDPR.

[RejZoR]

9 hours ago, TetraSky said:

May I introduce you to mod called...

 

No More Hard-coded Keybinds (Better Controls Menu continued)

https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/4008

 

I found that one by looking at the pcgamingwiki entry for this game. 

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Cyberpunk_2077#Input

 

Could be just what you need. Sure it sucks to need a mod to change something as basic as controls... Especially coming from CDPR, the makers of The Witcher video game franchise...  But it is possible to some extent.

 

_{Disclaimer : I have not tried the mod. I don't even have the game.}

Yeah, to need a mod to adjust stupid controls the way you want them is just absolutely unforgivable. Especially because this kind of crap is not the norm, it's a huge outlier as nearly everyone except CDPR learned that it's an asshole thing to restrict controls to some arbitrary bullshit and locked so user can't change it. It's terrible for handicapped people and I have a habit from old days to play all games with arrow keys and not WASD which puts me in weird position where I can't bind controls on keys around arrow keys and I'm forced to use letter keys on left of keyboard which I basically don't use at all in any games. In Cyberpunk 2077 specifically, the hack key I couldn't put ANYWHERE usable, meaning I couldn't even complete the initial tutorial comfortably because I couldn't use hack key without twisting my arms into a pretzel. I haven't touched the game since then and it has been months at this point...

[Stahlmann]

I unironically loved it at launch. Even though the gameplay wasn't nearly as polished as it is now, the story was still the same amazing and tragic tale. The bugs were sometimes annoying, sometimes funny, but I personally never encountered any game-breaking ones. The extra updates and DLC were just the icing on the cake to make it one of my favorite games of all time. The modding community around this game is also great, but similar to Skyrim, you have to wade through a lot of NSFW content to get there.

 

I love the cyperpunk setting, and the gritty and unapologetic way of storytelling drew me in from the start. Combine that with top-notch character animation, great voice acting, writing and insane graphics, and you have one of the most immersive gaming experiences you could possibly ask for.

And holy shit, have you all seen what kind of graphics this game can achieve with a few mods? When I first saw this video, I couldn't help but gaslight myself into thinking that this was just a real-life recreation of CP2077. All while running at a smooth FPS. I look forward to playing the game again with these mods after my next GPU upgrade.

 

 

[DeerDK]

I was really hyped up to the release, the reviews and backlash calmed me down very much down again and I waited years before buying it. When I got around to it last winter, partly due to the jungle drums indicating that the bugs were getting whacked out to a large degree and the fact that i could buy it for 50 % off at a Steamsale, it was a very positive experience for me. A great and immersive world and a story that really stuck with me after completion.

Its a shame that it took so long for CDPR to get their sh..tuff together, and they still have to pull their next releases off in a way better manner before I will say that trust is regained, but overall, its great to have the game claw its way back to what it was supposed to be.