Cyberpunk 2077 Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Regularly Playing: October 2022 Edition

October 26, 2022 by Belghast

Good Morning Folks. It was this morning that I had the sudden realization that I seem to have let one of my long-term reoccurring segments just completely die. For years I have done this thing where I update my blog sidebar with the games that I am regularly playing, and then create a semi-monthly post talking about where I am with each game and the games that are cycling out of the mix. However, the last one of these that I have done was from March of 2021. Some pretty significant things took place last year that derailed a lot of events in my life, but it would be nice to get back in some sort of regular cadence with these posts as there are often games that I am playing but not really actively talking about.

Generally speaking, one of these posts is broken down into subsections:

To Those Remaining – The games that I am still actively playing or at least expect to be playing within the month.
To The New and Returning – The games that I am either dusting off and revisiting or are brand new experiences that I am enjoying.
To Those Departing – The games that I am finally removing from the list for one reason or another.
Ships Passing in the Night – Games that I don’t expect to regularly play but I spent some time with over the month and enjoyed enough to talk about.

Unfortunately given the length of time that has passed I am not sure if any of these really make sense for this “catch-up” post. Instead this time I am just going to talk about the games that I am poking a stick at periodically.

While waiting on the New World patch drop, I found myself in a bit of a doldrum where nothing much sounded good. When this hits, I tend to dive into some sort of open-world game like Fallout New Vegas, Skyrim, or Witcher 3… and more recently Cyberpunk has been in that “nothing else sounds good” rotation. Generally speaking, I tend to play for a few nights and then nothing much comes of it, but this time around I am precariously close to a second complete playthrough. I am also finding a ton of content that I missed the first time around, and I think I am way more attached to femme Nomad V than I was to my original male Corpo V. Judy is without a doubt the best romance option in the game and it ends up being super sweet.

I got a bit of a late start on Season 27, and because most of the conquests are sorta butts this time around… I have yet to finish things up. Essentially I need 3 Conquests to get Set Dungeon Mastery. I need to do this at some point but other things have just been drawing my attention. It is a bit harder than in past seasons because I am mostly soloing everything and don’t have my partner in crime Ace along with me. I need to buckle down and finish things off, but ultimately what caused me to fade for a bit was the severe performance issues that I was having. Hopefully those have passed now.

Another game that I have been poking around for a while now is Fallout 76. I am not playing it super often, but at least once a week I dive down into the world of irradiated West Virginia. Right now the AggroChat folks seem to be going through a bit of a renaissance launched by Thalen’s discovery of the game. I need to figure out a time I can join in, but I am way behind in levels due to a reroll recently. I spent some time fucking around in a custom world and it seemed as though I was gaining levels… but said levels did not carry over to the main game.

If you have been reading my blog lately you will know that I am back in New World and created a brand new character over on Themiscyra to experience the game from level one again. The new player experience is so much better and the leveling and balance are much better than it was at the original launch. I am closing in on level 60 without really trying terribly hard, and my goal is to effectively complete all of the quests in the game. For the moment I am filling all of the various stashes that I have access to with materials and I hope to grind up Armoring and Weaponsmithing to 200 so I will have a good start at the game. At some point, I will need to find the various legendary crafting materials that unlock the 600 item-level weapons and armor, but I have plenty of time.

I’ve wound down the experience of playing Path of Exile Lake of Kalandra league, and I have to say it was pretty frustrating overall. I feel like I chose a bad league to go all in on. I did manage to knock out a number of the achievements and completely unlocked my altas, so I accomplished the things I had set out the do. I am not sure if I am going to be quite so amped to dive into whatever the 1.20 league ends up being, however. I am just not sure if Chris Wilson’s vision for the game fits the sort of experience I actually want to have. I am still interested to see what mobile Path of Exile ends up being like and the 2.0 experience… but my hopes are being tempered greatly by the frustration we experienced with this past league.

I have to admit I am not playing a ton of this yet, but slowly easing into it. I would greatly prefer that it supported a controller and whenever that patch lands, I have a feeling that it will become my primary phone game. The touchscreen controls are not amazing, though probably better than most mobile games. The game seems way less greedy with its mtx or at least the things that you can buy with real-world cash don’t seem to matter that much yet. I need to try some of the other classes but so far I am digging the “not-barbarian” character. I am not playing much of the game on PC mostly because if I am sitting at my PC… I have other games I would rather be playing.

I think I am mostly winding down Tower of Fantasy. While I do enjoy it much more than I did Genshin Impact, I find myself in the old familiar trap of only logging in to collect my freebies and then logging right back out. I am not sure why the experience went flat for me, but I just stopped wanting to play it quite as much. I think maybe around the time I was winding this down is when the Brimstone Sands patch landed on the PTR and re-ignited my love of New World. As one star rises another sets, and as a result, Tower of Fantasy was on the losing end of that equation.

World of Warcraft – Dragonflight Alpha/Beta – PC

I played a ton of this game when I first got into the testing. I really liked the more directed testing phases of giving us a new zone to explore each week. I have to admit I ate that up and completed the quests in each of the new areas. Unfortunately when things opened up more and I was given access to play the entire experience from start to finish… I deflated a bit. I think the biggest frustration is that it seemed every single time I logged in, I had to reset my talent points and the profiles that I saved were getting wiped. There were several times I logged in… stared at the wall of talent points and noped out of choosing them and setting back up my bars again.

As far as Dragonflight itself… the pre-patch has landed and I still do not have a World of Warcraft subscription or own the expansion. While I had a lot of fun playing the test phases, I am not sure if it was enough to really draw me back into the game. I have to be honest… World of Warcraft feels like a really old game at this point. A lot of what I have been focused on of late is more action-oriented games, and Hotbar combat just feels weird. Like I never thought I would get to that point but here we are. I still don’t feel amazing giving Blizzard money either… so I guess time will tell if I get caught up in the expansion launch zeitgeist or not.

Then there are games that are bound by NDA that I can’t talk about other than in the vaguest of terms. One I have access to and is eating up a bit of my time, and another I have created an account but have not received the game client. I am torn on whether or not I like NDAs in general because, on one hand, it keeps the players from getting just completely burnt out and bored with listening to news about the game before launch. On the other hand as a content creator, it sucks having a void that you are afraid to talk about. I get to the point where I am almost afraid to cover even public news of a game for fear that maybe just maybe something that ISN’T public knowledge will slip out.

Farming the Fixers

October 11, 2022 by Belghast

I am still very much in a holding pattern until the drop of the New World patch on the 18th, but I’ve also gotten rather invested in Cyberpunk 2077 again. I did not realize the amount of content that I had never seen on my original playthrough and subsequent jaunts back into the game. I am not sure what has changed but it seems to be much easier to find side missions as they are now showing up on my minimap. Maybe this was always a thing that existed and I just was too engaged in the story to notice it, but as I start to wind down the main story elements… the game seems to be presenting more and more side content to consume me.

Right now I am in this mode of farming down the blue exclamation points on the map, which represent gigs from fixers. As I complete a set, another set will show up… and I am guessing this is ultimately how you can reach those lofty numbers being tracked on each of the fixers. I never understood how you could run 22 missions for Wakako for example, because I never seemed to get that many. I must have simply missed doing enough side quests to “uncloak” the next set of missions. Last night for example I stumbled onto one where I helped my Aldecado buds on a deal gone south and through sheer intimidation kept it from ending up in bloodshed. I think at launch there were a lot of glitchy behaviors that I just took for granted as the game rolled out in an unpolished state, and maybe assumed those mission counters were bugged as well.

The single greatest change for me personally however remains the wardrobe. I cannot fully explain how much this improves my play experience to be running around the world as a cool-looking “V” rather than one that looks like a burning-crusade-era fury warrior. I shifted up my style last night as I had acquired a few new items and I am very on board with this. I love the jacket with the bumpy spikey bits. Last night I picked up Johnny’s pants which are sorta copper colored and go nicely with the blue accents on the jacket and the boots. One cool feature is there is a menu open when you go to a clothing vendor that will show you appearances that you have not collected yet.

I’ve dabbled with a few mods and I think I am at the point where I either need to stop using them or try and figure out how to make them work properly. Nexus Mods and Vortex are not quite ready for primetime when it comes to Cyberpunk 2077, and it does not do a good job of making sure you have prerequisites installed. It all started because I wanted to try using the flying cars mod showcased in the above video… and the failed state that the mod was installed in caused another quest involving stealing a car to completely bug out last night. After pulling my hair out and reloading past saves I finally disabled a slew of mods and realized those were the problem. Normally I am extremely pro-mods in games, but maybe wait until the vortex client does a reasonable job of sorting things out for you before dabbling in Cyberpunk modding.

All said I figure I will probably be playing Cyberpunk 2077 right up until the point that I do my reroll in New World. This game has rapidly joined a list of “favorite games” for screwing around in when nothing else quite sounds right. For years I have booted up Skyrim, Fallout New Vegas, or more recently Witcher 3 when I had a doldrum in gaming. Cyberpunk has the same sort of feel for me, of letting me roam aimlessly until something catches my eye… and they focus in on questing until I get distracted again. I really WANT Red Dead Redemption II to be that sort of game as well, and in theory, it should be… but the Rockstar brand of open-world questing just chafes me. It is too on rails and too focused on specific objectives, and doesn’t let me roam off the path easy enough. I need a game that lets me follow my whims, which reminds me the next time I go into the doldrums… I am probably going to revisit Dying Light 2.

Hopefully, you are all having a most excellent week out there. What games do you find yourself returning to over and over when you don’t have another game in mind? Drop me a line below in the comments.

The Edgerunner Life

October 3, 2022 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends! It is Monday and as is often the case you are about to get a rundown of the nonsense I have been up to recently. What started out as me poking my head into Cyberpunk 2077 looking for something to hold my attention, has turned into a proper replay of the game. At this point, I am starting to get closer to the endgame, and combined with the very excellent Edgerunners anime I am deeply engaged with this world right now. In theory, this will be my second full playthrough of the game, but I have started it over several times in the past without really gaining traction. I can’t say I am making all that many different choices than I did the time before apart from the inherit options that change from playing a femme V.

I am extremely happy with the wardrobe options that were patched into the game with the most recent update. Essentially now I no longer have to choose between looking cool and being functional. In my previous playthroughs, a lot of my early focus was trying to find the decent-looking gear that I could just keep upgrading. Now I basically throw on whatever item is better and ignore what the hell it looks like because I am always wearing this wardrobe outfit. I also really like that you can now go to any ripperdoc and just change your appearance on the fly. I’ve not actually done this because I am pretty happy with my current V, but having the option is nice nonetheless because I really did not love my original V appearance after a while… and mostly wore a mask as a result.

I also made a bit of progress in Diablo III Season 27 this weekend. As always I am keeping my season tracker on D3Resources updated to show where I am in the process. Basically, I am down to the stuff that is less fun to do… aka complete 3 conquests, complete a set dungeon, and extract a bunch of cube powers. I cannot believe that so far I have found six cow sticks but not a single puzzle ring, which means I have yet to get a Greed kill for that achievement. I started farming bounty caches in case I want to do the dumb and easy method for getting Avarice. I need to sort out which of the other conquests I am going to go for. I really really hate set dungeons, but at some point, I need to buckle down and get that completed so I can move on with my life. Basically, I have enough crap in my stash to do the extractions because I tend to hold onto a bunch of crap until I have finished the set dungeon given that I am never quite certain what set I will be going for.

I continue to poke my head into Path of Exile, but my stays are shorter each time I do. Playing both Diablo III and Path of Exile at the same time… I have come to realize that I enjoy the gameplay of Diablo more and the loot chase of Path of Exile more. I hate the process of getting geared in Path of Exile, but once you are geared… the loot grind remains slightly more exciting. There are so many aspects of PoE loot that could be added to D3 to spice things up a bit. Like imagine that you had a chase item, that was the equivalent of a Chaos Orb that would take any item and turn it into an Ancient version, or a similar item that was like a Divine Orb that would turn any item into a Primal version. I also think D3 could benefit from officially having an SSF mode that you could turn on and get unique rewards from. We’ve seen seasonal items like the Angelic Crucibles that come in and change the way the game works and it would be cool if more of those stuck around and continued to flesh out the loot chase.

Finally, I am still playing some New World every day. Mostly I log in and farm enough resources or craft enough items in order to get 3 gypsum bags and the gypsum you get from an aptitude chest. Then I port out to Shattered Mountain and craft two gypsum casts for whatever gear I am working on leveling. In doing this gradually I have capped sword, shield, spear, hammer, great axe, hatchet, and all armor slots to 600 expertise and am now working on void gauntlet and blunderbuss. This feels a little pointless given that my intent is still to reroll as soon as the timetable for the launch of the Brimstone update is a bit more certain. Mostly I am fine with it taking a little bit because I am hoping my friend Ace finishes their move so they can join in the reroll nonsense properly. I think my goal in the reroll is to level up Armoring and Weaponsmithing up to 200 so that I can make another set of Voidbent armor, mostly because I like the look of it.

Cyberpunk needs a Taxi System

September 28, 2022 by Belghast

Good Morning Friends. Sometimes in a game, it is the little things that you really enjoy. Last night I had this thought about how much I enjoyed Cyberpunk 2077 when someone else is driving the car. My entire adult life I have been the primary driver in our household, for various reasons… but not the least of which my wife has significant issues. As a result, I never get to just chill out and gaze out the window watching the scenery go by as I did as a child. So I deeply enjoy the experience of when an NPC drives me around from point a to point b while on a mission. There is just something so cool about the way that this tech works in-game, and I wish honestly that it were an option to just hop in a taxi instead of using the fast travel system.

Another thing that I really dig about Cyberpunk is how Night City has more of a sense of presence than almost any other game that I have played. While set in the future, there are absolutely places that feel like places I have been before. The texture of the city is recognizable, especially as it fades into areas that blend more and more industrial development. Living in Oklahoma there are lots of areas where there is prolific petroleum industry debris jutted right up against an attempt at residential areas. The poorer the area, the more the zoning lines blend and fade into each other. Basically, it is a believable space for me to inhabit while living in this future punk late capitalism hellscape.

I’m going through a weird time where I am bouncing pretty heavily between games. I spent some time over the weekend chipping away at Diablo III Season 27, and also some time poking around Path of Exile. While I have largely wrapped my goals up, I still have a stack of maps and tablets to run through and do when nothing else sounds right. I got this really dumb or lucky drop depending on your perspective and found 38 maps in one single kill. It seems that I had a combination of an affix that turns ALL loot drops into maps and that was combined with another affix that causes everything to drop a mirrored copy. So that means I have a ton of maps to play with and even managed to get a few divines to drop last night.

I am still in a bit of a holding pattern waiting for the Greatsword/Brimstone Sands patch to drop. I spent a lot of time poking around the PTR, but have largely tapered that off given that it is throwaway progress. I am sufficiently happy with what I have seen as far as leveling speed and ease of leveling professions. I am still angling for a restart when the patch drops, and I kinda just want to get that all over with. I hate living in this limbo of not quite knowing for certain what that process is going to look like and when it is going to happen. I am still occasionally poking my head in, farming a bit of gypsum and getting a few expertise raises a day on my main. However, I really want to start fresh and experience all of the new content from scratch… and have it NOT be on a PTR server.