Cyberpunk 2077 after 1.2 update.We are returning to Night City on PS5

It’s hard to find another game from recent years that is just as polarizing as the community Cyberpunk 2077. Players are clearly divided into two camps: either praising the CD Project Red product, turning a blind eye to mistakes or going one step further and saying they have not encountered anything (which is unlikely to give their size) and another, which is constantly criticizing Polish studios and complaining about everything. I’ll be somewhere in the middle of this scale because the beginning was my favorite, but then it started to get worse.

Prolog Cyberpunk 2077 I have fantastic memories. When I started this game in mid-December, I immediately went without. The story fascinated me from the first minutes it was written, which was aided by well-written characters and the atmosphere of Night City. I don’t mind that even the most short and shallow months of V and Jackie’s life were presented in the form of a short, music video montage. Not only that, but in those few hours I didn’t make any big mistakes: oh, sometimes the enemies jumped to the ground after death, no big deal. I felt lucky and I was one of those people who could get this whole adventure without much difficulty. Oh how did I go wrong …

By the time the preface was over, all the hell out of you, and you know what hit the fan. Errors actually appeared at every step. Sometimes they were fun, like NPCs frozen in their signature T-pose, other times they were so frustrating. The worst thing was that I quickly noticed a very serious problem with the PS5 version, at least for me. Of course, we are talking about crashes, i.e. throwing from the game to the main console menu, which often loses several or several dozen minutes of progress. These kinds of breakdowns happened to me almost every hour, and after a while, I decided it was time to rest for a while. Not only this, I naively decided that such a significant bug that would be reported by many internet users on Reddit or on social media would be treated with priority and fixed in a few days.

That did not happen. There are some minor hotfixes out there, and it promises to get some solid updates in January and February. January also did not bring the expected progress, February … changed to “the second half of March”, which actually became the end of this month. Patch 1.2, with its changelock very long and surprisingly fun reading (because, among other things, adjusting the NPCs’ urine flow and repairing cars that start engines after placing the body in the trunk), crashed, but. .. There is not much left to the ideal, and I do not know if in 2021 CD Project Red will be able to eliminate all the disadvantages of their mission.

Let’s start with the positives. Cyberpunk 2077 After update 1.20 it actually stopped crashing into the PS5 menu. Very easy to verify, because as I mentioned, this happened earlier on a regular basis. After installing the patch, I had several long sessions at Night City, which lasted about 2-4 hours, which I could not do yet. I also did a little research and looked at forums, social media and Reddit. Other players report that this is great, but from time to time you may find posts from users struggling with crashes and similar frequency. It’s hard to say how many of them actually have issues like this and how many are trying to catch developers this way. They can not hide the fact that the Polish studio has fallen on the players, they often show it in a very malicious way.

The driving model has been improved, and it can be adjusted “for us” thanks to the sliders. The system that allows you to reset the locked vehicle status that occurred to me twice before installing the update would also be very helpful. Now obstacles, stairs and other stumbling blocks will no longer drive cold sweat behind, because in the worst case, we will get the car or motorcycle back on the road quickly or without pain.

The police were also “fixed” … the officers would no longer appear before our eyes or behind V’s back (yes, they operated in a place previously inaccessible by “regular” methods), but it was essentially nothing more than smoke and glasses. The cops are still getting up from the ground, this time a little further away and out of sight of the player. Conflicts with law enforcement also leave much to be desired, and we can forget about exciting chases or shootings. The problem here is primarily artificial intelligence, which can only handle the average response to the protagonist’s actions, but it can be time consuming and complicated to fix.

1.2 It’s hard for me to check everything in the changelog, but I think it’s really hard to find small flaws that look more fun than annoying. Unnatural, comic animations or NPC behaviors all made no impact on the game, but certainly managed to break the sink. It is noteworthy that most of them are completely inconsistent in nature, making it difficult to say to what extent this was actually removed. This “randomness” is one of the main reasons for such a split in ratings, and even the status of the game for the Premier, because it is difficult to test the behavior of absolutely all possible players in such a complex and ambitious production.

Of course, it is not like that Cyberpunk 2077 After the merger, he was magically freed from all imperfections and I found myself very quickly. About 5 minutes after starting this product, I ran into a stall and it only appeared … when I smashed my motorcycle against it. This may be because some objects are actually read in front of the player, which is even more visible after 1.2. I suspect that this is one of the ways to “offload” the game on previous generation consoles, and that the full version for the next generation will only appear in the fall, and now PS5 and Xbox Series S / X owners must live with it …

Does this apply to traffic on the streets of Night City, or … its lack. Previously on the PlayStation 5 (there was no other way between performance and quality modes) it had issues, and after the upgrade it could be even worse (a phenomenon that is difficult to analyze in detail due to inconsistencies in this case). Standing at the intersections for about a minute, I did not see a single figure or car, which I allowed to capture on video.

Vacancies will not be an issue for themselves, and I agree that they have charm. Driving around such a desolate cyberbank city is very atmospheric, but … not necessary in this game and such announcements. The creators’ guarantee that Night City is a vibrant city that will never sleep is immediately remembered. Meanwhile, on PS5, as soon as the first epidemic controls are introduced, you can get the impression that we arrived in Poland in March 2020.

My theory of “slimming” the game for previous generation consoles has been somewhat confirmed by analysis carried out by digital foundry experts. They mention in their video content that the smoothness of the PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X has been significantly improved. Unfortunately, the older and less efficient consoles that CD Project Red works with still perform poorly and players often have to fight the game at about 20- 25 frames per second.

There is no denying that the developers have been working on Titanic for the past few months, which is a testament to the size of the update and the length of the description of the changes introduced in it. Both resulted in the thrill of the game, because finally, after four months, I could enjoy the fun without any major setbacks. However, I fear that it will take at least a few more months of serious work to bring the game closer to its ideal. Who knows: maybe it will be the fall of 2021, thanks to the promised update for the next gen consoles, Cyberpunk 2077 Will it become a completely “new” game?