Cyberpunk 2077

Steam Pal

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Good Morning Friends! I am currently like many in the holding pattern for the Steam Deck, checking my purchase history page to see if it has shipped yet. In my travels, I have found out that this exists, and feel like you all need to know as well. I introduce to you Steam Pal, which is apparently the original name of the Steam Deck when it was in development. Since everything in Japan needs to have a mascot, this comes from the Steam Deck Japan regional Twitter account. I love this mascot so much, and I especially love the fact that there is a tiny valve on top of its head.

It has apparently been seen at the Tokyo Game Show attached to the carrying case on display in the Steam Deck booth. I have to admit I really hope that this is something that crosses the ocean because I think everyone would be better off with a tiny Steam Pal guarding their expensive toy. I think that I have reached peak excitement for the Steam Deck, and I am sure like always you will be flooded with testing information when I get my hands on it. I fully expect to install lots of unsanctioned things on mine so will hopefully be able to report how well things like the Epic Game Store and Xbox Game Pass work on the device. I’ve also been holding off on any more emulation devices because I knew that eventually, the Steam Deck would blow them all out of the water.

In other news, I have been playing quite a bit on the New World PTR and working my way through the story and questing. There are so many small quality-of-life changes coming with this patch. The New World channel on the AggroChat podcast slack has been flooded with random observations that I have made while running around. Some examples are… you now get bonus experience the first time you craft a new item, making it more valuable to just craft a bunch of different things. There is a visual indicator now to denote “named” items that drop with static stat packages so that you can easily differentiate them from random rolled loot. All of the factions have bases now, and they are themed based on the faction. Harvest breakpoints have been lowered a bit so that you can get to higher tiers of materials a bit faster and now those “rare” drop items can be created out of base materials so if you really need Fae Iron to craft something, you can just pour Iron ore into making some.

My biggest takeaway is that I am in love with the Greatsword. If this weapon had existed at launch I would have been a Greatsword main. I believe whoever designed this weapon damage-dealing kit, was absolutely used to playing a Greatsword Warrior in Guild Wars 2. So many of the abilities feel like they were lifted straight from that game. I have a multi-slash attack that feels very much the same and a spinning charge attack that can be used to either get into battle or get out of battle quickly. The only thing that doesn’t really fit is that there is a big jumping hit that starts as an uppercut but has a follow-up downward slash. I need to respec at some point and play around with the tanking abilities to see if I like those as well. I am looking forward to when this game has loadouts, which are apparently coming… because I could absolutely see having a greatsword damage build-out and a greatsword tank build-out.

I finished up my night with a little bit of Cyberpunk. This game is absolutely “comfort gaming” for me and really other than ARPGs… the whole Open World RPG genre is my comfy place. There was a time when I would boot up Skyrim or Fallout New Vegas, but now I tend to gravitate towards Cyberpunk and Witcher 3. I am not terribly far into the game on this playthrough and when I decided to go to bed last night, I was about halfway through the initial braindance sequence. I hope there was a reasonable checkpoint because the game would not let me save… so I ultimately just bailed out. I don’t think I am necessarily done with Path of Exile, and am most definitely not done with Diablo III Season 27… but I needed a break from that style of gameplay for a bit.

Testing Assumptions

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday I made a post, and after reading through the comments… specifically that of Bhagpuss I realized I did make quite a few assumptions. After playing so many MMORPGs with so many different people over the years, I assumed that most people had a stacked list of acquaintances after spending decades playing these titles. I long ago ran out of space in my Battle.net friends list and am consistently having to delete people to find space to add new ones, but that is in part the side effect of leading a raid for a few expansions. As a result, I decided to test these assumptions to see how true my point of view happened to be. So the easiest means of doing this was to cobble together a Twitter poll and then ask folks to retweet it around a bit to try and get a more diverse smattering of eyeballs on it.

So first off I realize that my methodology is a bit flawed. There are only 144 votes at the time of taking this screenshot, and it is limited to those who are active on twitter and the range that 29 retweets will get you… which according to Twitter analytics is a little over 800 impressions. Folks who are active on social media are probably already self-selected into a group of those who are either more socially active or at least more interested in being socially active. However, if you accept those flaws, the numbers more or less shake out like I thought they would. Some 86.1% of users view starting on the same server as friends as a positive thing, 4.2% considered it neutral, and 9.7% prefer to go it alone. Part of what makes me think these numbers are pretty stable is for the most part yesterday after the first hour of the poll, the percentages stayed mostly unchanged within a margin of error. If you want to chime in or just watch the process of the poll, I believe I have it up for another day.

I played a bit more of New World on the PTR server yesterday, and if I thought the redone Monarch’s Bluff was cool… Everfall is even cooler. It has a whole gaslit industrial revolution era vibe to it, with considerably more modern housing. This makes me wonder what exactly the rework of the other towns will bring. I am hoping that they keep this going forward with doing each town as though it had been built during a different era on the island. I think I have followed the main story quest as far as I can for right now because it bugged out when I tried to do the latest version of the Soul Warden trial. The leveling is so much faster than when this game went live initially. I’ve only really poked at this game for two days and am already level twenty, and most of that was just from following the story quests. So I do believe then when they say that you will no longer need to do the town boards to gain levels.

In my travels, I came across someone with the name “Dr Demone Kim” so I am not sure if this is actually THE Youtuber or just a fan trying to look like him. I do know that he was recording some videos in Monarch’s Bluff but I have no clue what his new character name is. He got his original character stuck in Brimstone Sands, where anytime he logs in he pretty much instantly dies. It is super cool thought to bump into a name I at least recognize, even if it is not his account. We are still trying to sort out how we are going to approach this game when the patch drops. Right now I am leaning towards picking whatever normal server happens to be the lowest population and rolling there, in the hope that everyone else that is planning on doing the same can as well. This would leave open the option for folks who don’t want to re-roll to just move their characters with one of the free tokens, whereas the fresh start servers will be locked for transfers.

I had one of those weird nights where nothing really felt right gaming-wise, so toward the end of the evening, I wound up back in Cyberpunk 2077. I thought I would check out some of the patch changes, and so far I am on board with the wardrobe system. It was always one of the things that bugged me that I could not really control my appearance if I was trying to optimize my gearing. I would try and latch onto the first decent-looking legendary item I could find and then just keep upgrading it, so I could maintain a specific look and feel. I started another femme V as I have yet to play through the game completely on anything other than my original masculine V. I went for the nomad story start, in part because I actually want to see the questline that involves Alanah Pearce. I have no clue if I will stick with this play-through or bounce back into more multiplayer nonsense.

It is a bit of a scattered post this morning, but those sometimes happen.

Big Cyberpunk 2077 Update

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On Tuesday we got the big “Next Generation” patch for Cyberpunk 2077, and last night I finally got around to popping my head in to play with a few new features. Cyberpunk was easily my favorite game of 2020… but that was largely because I was playing on the PC with a pretty beefy system. If you had the bare minimum of specs or were on one of the consoles… your experience with this game was significantly different. Essentially I had the privilege of a great experience, but I know that for most people… that was not the case. With this patch however I am hoping the rest of the world can start to get the experience that I had.

To be honest it isn’t like CD Project Red had been slacking on updates because the game was already significantly different from the one that released a year and some roughly fourteen months ago. This is essentially the thirteenth patch that we have gotten from the release of the game. Not all of them added significant features, but in truth quite a few of them were rather lengthy. This one however seems to add more new systems and features and places the game on what seems to be extremely sturdy footing. If you want to check out the full list of changes the patch notes can be found here.

One of the most significant changes is to the way that driving works in the game. Suffice to say that driving… especially with WASD on a keyboard felt awful. There were a number of tweaks that you could make to your configuration to make it manageable, but it always felt like you were riding a thin line between being in control and sideswiping an entire district full of people. I managed to win all of the racing mini-games with a keyboard… but it was a constant challenge. Now things are just easier and the turning radius of your vehicle feels way more sticky and less likely to side out of control. This also means that I am going to have to essentially unlearn the behaviors that I have been using to account for the awful system, but it is very much a welcome change. Your vehicle feels like it has more weight to it and acceleration curves have been adjusted to account for this, and braking feels more significant.

Something that players have been begging for since the release of this game, is a way to legitimately change your the appearance of your V. Sure modders have sprung forth to fix this problem, but now it is super simple to change your appearance at pretty much any time. When you look in the mirror in your apartment you will now see an option to dive into the appearance modification interface, with unfortunately fem/masc body/voice/genitalia options being locked. I am guessing there are too many quest decisions locked to the gender options that it would be challenging to shift that mid save. However this should solve some of the issues of folks who created a V, thought they looked cool… then had one or two features that ended up bugging the hell out of them while playing the actual game. My first Masc V absolutely had this problem, where the lighting in character creation was wildly different than that of the game and I did not love my chosen appearance.

What I spent most of my time playing with however was the housing options. I am a sucker for housing in games and I am so glad to see Cyberpunk 2077 actually fleshing this out a bit. Firstly you can take your original apartment and give it a makeover by choosing one of a handful of preset styles. I would have rather had something where we could actually decorate the apartment ourselves… but this is at least something. I chose the Neon Sands theme for my original apartment which gives it a sort of neon yellow and mauve appearance with new textures being applied to the carpet and accent wall panels. I dig it quite a bit and fits my Nomad Fem V that I was last playing.

There are four new apartments added to the game. The cheapest of these is Northside in Watson and it has an Arcade cabinet and feels very small and cozy. The next would be Japantown/Westbrook and it has more of an Asian themed vibe and weirdly feels sorta like a hotel room. The next one would be Corpo Plaza in the City Center, and it feels a bit like the room you send the spider bot through in Konpeki Plaza. The most expensive and the one I went for is the Loft apartment which is located in The Glens just down the street from the Coyote bar in Heywood. One of the things I dig about the Glens apartment is that you have this really cool entrance with someone watching the door and a vending machine.

The apartment itself is this gorgeous loft with three levels. The main floor has the kitchen, pool table, and entertainment area. There is a small loft area that has a library and from what I can tell there are no intractables there. Then the big loft includes the bedroom and bathroom.

Here is another shot of the loft from the bedroom level and the views out of the city are phenomenal. One of the nice things about apartments is that all of our stashes are linked which means you will always have access to all of your gear regardless of which one you duck into. You can of course purchase ALL of the apartments but that would be pretty cost prohibitive until late game. I ultimately plan on doing this with my current play-through of the game, because why the hell not.

One of the cool things I noticed is that a bunch of the objects are have unique interactions. For example you can attempt to play pool… fail to hit the ball into the pocket and then flip off the table. You can turn on the television and instead of just having to play random things… you can actually flip between what appears to be three unique channels. A number of things give you buffs for example if you take a shower you get a refreshed buff that regenerates health during combat up to 60% for an hour. If you make a pot of coffee you get the Energized buff that gives you +25% max Stamina and +30% stamina regeneration for an hour. If you sleep in your apartment you get the rested buff which increases skill experience by 20% for an hour and regenerates any missing health.

There a ton of other changes including item cost balancing and an increase in credit gains… as well as a number of new weapons added into the game. My focus however was on the housing systems and trying to determine if driving actually worked well. I am sure I will explore some of the other changes over time. Essentially if you had been sitting on the fence about Cyberpunk 2077… this might be a time for you to check it out. If you have a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox Series X/S you can also check out the game for free right now as they are running a trial. It seems like you download the full game and then are put on a 5 hour timer to get as far as you can within that time. If you like it, you can purchase the game and carry the save over, if not you can uninstall it and move on with your life but I believe the save will stick around in case you ever change your mind.

The Waiting Begins

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Well folks I am about as ready as I am going to be for Endwalker, and now the waiting starts. Sure there are a lot of things that I could have done to get prepared for expansion, but being completely honest… the whole grind everything to 80 sapped the will out of me. Yesterday over lunch I spent about thirty minutes turning in belts to the Maelstrom vendors for Grand Company Seals… and having to dump them periodically into ventures. So at least I should be set on running retainers through ventures for quite some time. For those who are curious the only things currently in my inventory are:

  • Two Stacks of Potions gained through copious amounts of Palace of the Dead and Heaven on High
  • A Phoenix Down – because of course you have to keep one of these around
  • A stack of really cheap food that I am just going to use for getting that +3% xp boost
  • Gysahl Greens to keep my battle buddy summoned to fight by my side
  • Way too many clear prisims but I refuse to get rid of them because at some point I will level a tradeskill high enough to make them into glamour prisms
  • Glamour Prisms and Removers because they never leave my inventory
  • Some Versatile Lures because I might decide I need to fish as part of a quest

I’ve had people comment about how clean my inventory is… and I beg you to please pay no attention to the bulging vaults of my retainers. I have a bad habit of just cramming things in their inventory until I absolutely cannot ignore it any longer. That said… I am ignoring it a bit longer because supposedly there are gacha boxes going in on the Grand Company vendors and turning in all of this gear should earn me a lot of them. Basically I’ve ratholed so much gear into my retainers for the purpose of leveling the jobs all the way to the maximum level. However when it came to actually doing that… I just bought a set of poetics gear every 10 levels and never touched any of the accumulated dross from my bank. So very little of it do I care about for glamour purposes, so I fully expect to convert all of it into gacha boxes.

As is often the case… I pre-ordered Endwalker so long ago that I had to log into the MogStation to verify that I had in fact set up everything to be able to participate in the head start tomorrow. Thankfully they give us this very useful screen to alleviate our fears. What I do not love however is that they make us wait so freaking long to get the actual key to register it. The MogStation being awful is a meme, but god is it true. In theory buying a game FROM Square should automate all of these steps, but nope I had to manually register the head start code, and will have to manually register the final key as well. Anyways if you are like me… and concerned about making sure you can log in as expected… maybe check your own MogStation.

Since New World is a shit show, I have been branching out and finding other things to keep me entertained until I can officially walk on the moon. Lately I have been playing a lot of Cyberpunk 2077, and really this game does not deserve the stigma hanging over it. Mass Effect Andromeda and Cyberpunk 2077 are both games that were killed by the bad press that came from launching way too early. Within the first week or so enough patches had been released at least on the PC that the games themselves were extremely enjoyable to play through. Granted I am not the sort of player who goes out of his way to purposefully break games, and I largely completed missions as intended. However since launch a whole slew of patches have gone into the game and the most important of these… is your cat can now move around your apartment.

This time around I opted to start a Femme V with the Nomad Backstory. While I feel like Corpo is probably the strongest because of the quest dialog options it gives you… Nomad is pretty great as well. Truth be told that in this world… I would more than likely live the nomad life or at least it seems way better than living in the slums of the city. The Nomad vehicles are my jam because they go really fast and handle extremely well… which honestly is all I want from a game. They also have this whole road warrior vibe to them which I dig greatly. There are a lot of things that seem to have improved… and a few things that were removed. For example you can no longer get legendary quality mantis blades for free without actually fighting anything. These appear to only be available for purchase at ripper docs, but supposedly they added other legendary cybernetics items to make up for the loss of the free blades and the monowire.

My only real regret is the fact that I have started this play through… and am starting to really get into the story again… and know that come tomorrow I will not care about it at all. As a result the last few nights I have not really been moving the plot forward and instead doing a bunch of the side missions which hopefully means I can pick up at some point in the future and sink back into the life of V after the shiny has worn off Endwalker a bit. Similarly I fully expect to check back into New World, though the current trajectory of that game does not give me much hope. I found out this morning that there were apparently stealth nerfs to the crafting of dungeon keys, so that they now require quadruple t he amount of stone than they did prior to 1.1.1. So it seems that not only did they wreck open world grinds… but they are now trying to slow down the dungeon grind as well.

Tomorrow I will likely be pretty late doing a blog post. I expect to get up tomorrow morning and play for a bit before writing some of my initial impressions. I will keep things spoiler free of course and just talk about the general shape of my feelings. However hopefully none of you will actually be reading my post and will instead be enjoying Endwalker yourself.