Video Gamers Podcast - [Flashback Friday] Cyberpunk 2077 Revisted - Video Games Podcast

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

We’re going back to the future with this video game flashback episode. In honor of Phantom Liberty coming out soon, we’re diving into the video game vault and revisiting our second episode of Cyberpunk 2077. This time around, Cyberpunk 2077 is fixed and working well. Did it make a difference and what are our thoughts now? Check out this awesome flashback episode to find out! Thanks to our LEGENDARY Supporters: Redletter and Gaius214 Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/videogamerspod Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com//videogamerspod Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/videogamerspod Subscribe to us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q   Visit us on the web: https://videogamerspod.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. Everyone from the Video Gamers Podcast, listen to me. Skynet has sent a new machine. The only way we will defeat it is to go back in time and listen to our old favorite episodes. The future calls them Flashback Friday. Some may have different hosts, but it's okay. It'll still work to beat the T-1000. Come with me if you want to live.

Good morning, Night City! Yesterday's body count lottery rounded out to a solid and sturdy 30 10 out of haywood thanks to unabated gang wars one officer down so i guess you're all screwed because the ncpd will hello chooms and welcome to the multiplayer gaming podcast please rate our show five stars leave a written review and check out our preem Patreon page, where you can help support the show and get bonus episodes. Just visit MultiplayerSquad.com. I am your host, Paul. Joining us, he is our resident Ripper doc, installing cybernetic upgrades to chrome us out.

It's Josh. I don't know that anybody would trust me to do any kind of procedure. I thought you were going Michael on that one. Yeah, I don't know that I trust you getting in there and making changes to my operating system. I mean, there are some shady Ripper docs out there, too. Oh, I would trust you more than fingers. Yeah. Fingers, man. Oh, my goodness. Oh oh what a character this game all right and joining us he's our brain dance techie from clouds he's currently

scrolling through virtues preparing those bds and xbds to sell on the streets it's michael i am also a smoke show and i have a haircut that's kind of like a long over-the-side thing with my buzz cut on the side. This is not starting off well. Those who played this game might understand what I'm talking about. But I look great in a scuba suit. Yeah, it's Michael Alvarez, right? That's what we're going to call you this episode. All right, so guys, we are going to be deep diving Cyberpunk 2077. The game's now been out for almost two years. And just to let you guys know here right at kind of learn what the overall quest is of the

game. So we will be talking about all of that. And then later in the show, we'll give you guys a major spoiler warning where we're going to get into all the end game content, ends of side quests, things like that, that we loved. But before we jump into our deep dive, we do have a little bit of housekeeping to do. So guys, we do need to give a shout out for Patreon support. We do want to give a thank you to Blackstar DQ. That name might sound familiar. He is one of our legendary supporters and he has signed up now again with rare status.

So we do want to give a very special thank you to Blackstar DQ. And then Josh, I think you've got a couple of reviews. People have left the show. I do have some reviews. It's been a, I think you've got a couple of reviews people have left the show. I do have some reviews. It's been a little while since we've read some of these, and boy, I saved two really good ones. They're a little bit longer, but if somebody's just tuning into the show, they'll appreciate these. All right, this first one comes in from MoreGal77, and it's titled, A Must for all gamers and it says not only the best gaming

podcast that i found but also my favorite overall podcast to listen to the enthusiasm that paul josh and michael have for gaming shows in every episode the humor and playfulness of the podcast makes me feel like i'm listening to my close friends the show features weekly industry news video game deep dives and reviews the extremely fun bonus round episodes help me get through any rough days five stars oh i like that one that was a good one i know they're really people out there really up in their review game man makes my heart tickle to all those nice things being said about us uh we might need to check on michael he's getting to the age where a heart tickle to all those nice things being said about us uh we might need to

check on michael he's getting to the age where a heart tickles concerning so is it right right it's uh hold on no fingers are tingly all right you're good michael good all right pain in the chest we're good check okay keep going show here we go review number two comes in from donnie d six two one eight nine and it's titled Love Your Guys' Show and the review says, such an amazing group and show. You guys have literally become such a vital part of my daily routine on Tuesdays and Fridays. I listen

to your show religiously on my way into work. I love your Twig episodes. Honestly, they are probably my favorite part of your show. I never use Google anymore because without fail, I know that you guys will give me the latest news and updates. I found out about Halo Infinite, Overwatch 2, the new Harry Potter games because you guys talked about it on the show. I love listening to your deep dive episodes, especially

when it's a game that I've played before. It's cool to hear other people's viewpoints on it. Keep up the great work. You guys are doing a phenomenal job. I know it's a few weeks late, but welcome to the show, Michael. I love multiplayer gaming podcasts before with the two hosts, but having three is so much better. Your tournaments with three hosts are so much fun to listen to. One last thing before I go. A few months ago, you guys did a random episode

where there was zero gaming involved. You guys talked about different pranks that you've all done in the past. You should do more episodes like that. Not a lot. Still, continue keeping the channel gaming related, but just every now and then, make random episodes like that a little more frequent because that episode was hilarious.

That prank that Paul talked about with all the stickers, hilarious. A plus tier level prank. Sorry for the long review, but i felt it was worth describing how great of a show this is for new listeners hashtag team waffle i've actually used i've used paul's shower curtain prank on like three of my friends no joke oh yeah i love how i love how um donnie d 062189 which i'm assuming means he was born on June 21st, 1989. Happy birthday when that comes around. It says I'm a few weeks late on Michael

coming on the show. That's like saying a 40-year-old man is like 1,200 months old. Yeah. A few weeks late. 8 months. Yeah, that's my 1,200-month-old baby. Oh, that's so great. What a nice review. Thank you, Donnie. And Josh, you weren't kidding. Those are

two fantastic reviews. Yeah, so all you people out there that have not left us a review, be aware the review game is strong now. Yeah, you're going to have to start writing some chapter divides in there. You know, give a little bit of structure. We're going to need some peer editing. All right, well, guys, as much as I love these reviews and everything, we've got so much to cover with cyberpunk. I think it's just time to jack in and deep dive cyberpunk 2077. Okay.

Here's steam's description of the game. Cyberpunk 2077 is an open world action adventure RPG set in the dark future of Night City, a dangerous megalopolis obsessed with power, glamour, and ceaseless body modification. Alright, now Josh, we did do a deep dive of Cyberpunk two years ago. The game came out December of 2020. You, me, and Todd played as much as we could. We basically tried to clear the calendar, knocked out as much as we could we basically tried to clear the calendar knocked out as much as we could and we did a deep dive so why the return trip to night city all right so

when cyberpunk released it released to some major issues and anybody that's been listening to the show for a while knows that i was probably more hyped for Cyberpunk 2077 than I have ever been for any video game ever. The hype was literally out of control. I don't know that any game could have lived up to that level of hype, but man, was I disappointed. I hated Cyberpunk back in the day for what it did to me, you know, and did to a lot of people. It was one of the biggest letdowns in gaming ever. When you have Sony and Xbox pulling your game from their online stores because it doesn't run enough for them to warrant selling it, you know, you've got a serious issue. And so we played through the game in all of its bugginess. We did a deep dive on it, but in all of its bugginess we did a deep dive on it but in all honesty you know we did not

you know we all three of us weren't able to completely finish the game and with the bugs and the issues that it had it just was not a complete game at that point and so what we did is we said hey i wonder if cyberpunk is good now now. It's been two years. I can't believe it. We talked about that on a recent episode where it kind of surprised all of us. And we said, man, I can't believe it's been two years since its release.

But then we went, you know what? They announced the expansion, the DLC, the Phantom Liberty, if I think I got that right. I believe so. And people started kind of getting excited. Edge Runners came out on Netflix, which kind of brought a lot of limelight back onto Cyberpunk 2077. And it's kind of been back in the news.

And so we said, hey, you know what? It's been a really long time. Have they been able to redeem this game? Let's do a full deep dive with Michael, who I don't think ever played it before. Did you, Michael? No. Kind of.

Okay. Just like a couple hours yeah i was gonna say i'm sure you bought it but you just probably never played it right short answer not really i i made it probably about three hours in and uh essentially it was so buggy i was like can't can't no right and i bought a special edition too like i was super excited been following for a while cd project red's my jam did a good job with your three very excited saw all the videos keanu reeves baby and then i was like oh no oh dear goodness no yeah so i think the goal now is to say hey let's review cyberpunk 2077 for the game that it was supposed to be because at this point i think

the devs cd project red is that you that they've done what they're going to do to make this game as good as it is at this point. They're starting to move on to DLCs and sequels and things like that. I know selfishly, Paul is curious whether I like the game now or not, because I was pretty peeved back in the day, I'm not going to lie. And so you'll just have to listen to find out. Yeah, in preparation for this episode i went back i listened to our old deep dive fun fact it's the one and only episode that josh hosted

so josh actually did host one episode insane and i also scrolled through some of our twigs because i was trying to find when did josh finally quit cyber? Because when we did the deep dive, I told you and Todd that the last third in particular just gets so good and so much momentum and the story that to me that overshined all the glitches and all the problems with the game. And you ended up fizzling out one of the Twig episodes. You said it was when you completed the float mission. And anyone who's played Cyberpunk knows what we're talking about. You said, guys, I don't like this game. Which was so sad for me to hear because you had such high expectations.

There was a lot of good in Cyberpunk. But the glitches and the gameplay issues just really brought the whole experience down. Big time. Yeah. So now that we're covering the game, if you're listening to this in the future, this is now just after patch 1.6. So that's what we're now covering. The game has come a long way, I think.

Spoiler alert, I love this game. I listed it in my top 10 games of all time. I went back to double check. I had it clocking in at number six. So you guys already know later when we do the make love, marry or murder segment, you already know I'm going to marry this game. But I really don't know anything about what Michael's going to say. I'm curious to know if Josh feels the same or if it's different. And usually at this point early in the episode, I just toss it to one of you to lay out the story of Cyberpunk. But that's too much of a job for one

person because this game has such a long, detailed story. So I think we're going to just kind of have to divvy stuff up and kind of tackle it as a team michael why don't we start with you so when you first you you get the uh rated r character creation screen we don't need to go into the details very very rated r it might even be worse than rated r it could be could be my almost adults only yeah and you get to choose either an origin story of being a nomad a street kid or a corpo so michael why don't you tell us which one you picked and kind of just tell us like the opening origin story basically up to when you get the time jump montage just let us know a little bit about your origin story for your v yeah i'll take the little baby steps in our journey

uh walking through the giant story of cyberpunk today so i chose the corpo as like the corporate beginning of the three different origin stories and essentially you quickly realize this corporate life is you know i've ascended pretty reasonably high i'm on a really nice floor um and you know i'm working for a director who apparently is working with the European Space Agency. But you very quickly understand that there's a lot of dog-eat-dog backstabbing happening in this organization. So I go and I go to this late night club after hours, after life. No, it's not after life.

Is it after life I go to? I think it's after life I go to. Go meet up my good buddy, Jackie. And I'm like, hey, listen, I got this stuff I got to do. here's the story jackie's like yeah i'm gonna help you out i'm your i'm your boy i'm your awesome i'm your helper let's go hack let's go do stuff let's cyberpunk and then all of a sudden some gentlemen come walking into the club and they're like hey there we know what you're gonna do and i'm like i know you don't know what i'm gonna do me no not me and they're like no we know and then all of a sudden they're like scanning me with devices, grabbing my arm, jacking me into this machine.

And they take every bit of cyberware that I've got away from me. And they basically ruin my life and make it so that like in this environment, you depend on having your cyber gear. It's not like these are upgrades like your bodies. Humans are almost like Borg from Star Trek. You almost depend on this cyberware at this point. And so my character is essentially... Part of her life is ripped away from her at this point, and she starts over. And that's when the montage comes through of just me essentially starting my life over. Decent overview, right? That was good. That was okay. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like if you imagine someone today working in Apple,

and then all of a sudden going down to the street level, and you decide you're going to start being like a street thug and build your way up from the streets. Josh, what opening origin story did you pick? So this time around, I went with the street kid, which basically means you grew up on the streets of Night City. You've had a rough life. You've learned how to kind of scrap your way through the city and just surviving. You're doing odd jobs for different gangs and stuff like that. You know, you're just a savvy street kid.

That's basically what the origin story is. And all these origin stories, they're fun, but they don't really affect the outcome of the game. Now, there are some special dialogue options that you get depending on the origin story that you picked throughout the game, which is kind of neat. Ultimately, I get a job from a fixer that says, hey, we want you to go steal this Preem car. It's a very high-end car. You're like, there's no way that I can steal this car. There's security all over this thing. They're like, no, we've got that taken care of. Here's some hacking software that'll let you get into the car. So like any good street kid, I go to boost this car. And then sure enough,

there's a guy there that comes up to me. His name's Jackie. He's like, what are you doing here? I'm like, what are you doing here? Then the police show up. There's police brutality all over the place. They wind up beating us up. This whole heist fails. And then lo and behold, me and Jackie start hanging out a little bit

since we're both in the same boat. The cops let us go because we're not worth busting. And that's kind of how you wind up meeting Jackie, who you meet in all of these. He plays a major part in the game. But yeah, Street Kid, that's kind of basic. You're just life on the streets, man. You're struggling to survive.

Start on the streets and stay on the streets, right? Yep. Yeah. So I have played through all three origin stories. The very first time I played, I chose Nomad. I don't really know why. I just kind of looked at it and clicked it. And with that intro story, basically you start out living out in the desert outside of Night City, but you're kind of like scraping to stay alive. You're not really thriving, and you decide that you want to go to Night City and start to work toward becoming a legend. So you end up accepting a job to smuggle some stuff into the city. You meet Jackie. He goes with you.

He's like the guy inside the city. You're the guy on the outside. He meets with you. Together, you try to cross the border. You end up getting chased by some Arasaka agents, and you find out that the illegal contraband that you were transporting is an iguana. And so the game kind of like hits you with that humor in the beginning. Like in Night City, there's just not really any animals. And so the idea of having an iguana is actually like a really

big deal. So yeah, in all three origin stories, you meet Jackie and then you hit what has got to be the greatest montage ever in video game history. It really is, man. They did such a good job on this. Dude, the first time I played it, you start hearing this beat. This beat clicks in. You get voiceover work about the city of Night City and about how there's 30 murders every night. And so you're kind of getting the idea of like, oh, this is not a city for your common man. This is a bad place, and you got to be ready to fight to survive in Night City.

And to me, this was when the game immediately grabbed my attention. I don't know if you guys want to talk about some of the stuff inside the montage. I absolutely love how you kind of see very quickly how they rise in prominence in street gangs. It's one of the best ways that a game has transitioned from an intro into the, let's get into the meat and potatoes of the story itself. Famously, we talk about The Witcher 3, where it takes eight hours before that game really starts to hit its stride.

Now, it's phenomenal. I mean, phenomenal after that but cyberpunk takes like two hours to hit its stride because of this montage that basically just skips a ton of time from whatever origin story you picked and says this is why you're at where you're at in this game why you're doing the things that you're doing why you're good friends with jackie it is one of the best pieces of storytelling in a cut scene type thing that i've seen to be honest yeah and i love how you see in the beginning that they're trying to you know get money from like low-level street thugs. So they'll get into a fistfight in a club,

and all of a sudden you see it'll cut to V in the bathroom, and one of their teeth has fallen out, and they just kind of smile at the mirror, and then they go back into the club and start brawling with the guys again. And the next thing you know, they're kicking down doors of nicer apartments, and they're chasing people down the street. They start chucking away their pistols and grab giant assault rifles. So you can see how they're getting this success in

Night City. And it's a really neat shortcut into where the real game begins. I think you hit the title card after about two to three hours of playing. Which is really neat, to be honest. The other thing about the montage that it does is it's not just all the jobs that you're doing, but they show you going to dinner with Jackie's family. They actually really tie together the bonds that you start to form with Jackie throughout this montage. Yes, you guys are rising up the ranks of people in the city. You're doing more and more jobs. You're getting better and better at what you do. But you're also getting closer and closer and kind of building that bond that you and jackie have as well and that's a really important part of the montage also yeah i think it's it's so

impressive the way the storytelling is in such a short montage you know you've seen it done in bad games in bad film where time passes and you just don't you don't believe the feeling of it you really do feel like jackie's family by the end of this montage, just because of exactly what Paul and Josh were saying, the way that you see yourselves raise rising up through, you know, and then becoming like the family part. And then like, I love the part,

like when they're throwing the pistols away, grabbing the assault rifles, it's like, Oh, we're making it somewhere. We're like, we're like the Kings of the street now. And you believe it and you buy it.

And so later on, as the story goes, like right from the first mission with Jackie, you're like, I trust trust this guy so when you have questions for him and things like that you're like no i want to see what his input i want to see what he's got to say because i believe in him and he believes in me and and to have that happen so quickly without hours and hours of gameplay having happened is is really a testament to great storytelling and to great voice acting work by jackie you immediately are like i want to hang out with that guy you immediately trust him you love him he's cool he's pretty awesome so uh i'll

go ahead i'll play a little bit of the song i was talking about i really want to give a shout out to them it's a song called no safe point by run the jewels they specifically wrote the song for cyberpunk and i think it's one of the best beats I've ever heard. Okay, so now we're all best friends with Jackie. Everything's on the up and up. We end up being hired for a job where basically we're breaking into Arasaka Tower and we're going to steal this item that is called the Relic. And without going into the details because we don't want to spoil everything, basically, long story short, is that the chip that you steal is damaged. You fall a certain period of distance and the chip is damaged. And so to prevent it from being hurt more, you grab the chip and you pop it into a card reader that goes directly into your brain. Because here in the world of cyberpunk, everyone's all about those cybernetic upgrades.

And so you plug in the chip, it starts interacting with your brain, and you're not too sure what this chip is or what's going on. The whole job was very hush-hush. And V's health is starting to be impacted. And during a period where your character is now unconscious, all of a sudden, you start playing as a different character. And you'll notice all the dialogue is like a different color. So it's kind of cluing you in that you're playing someone else. Your left hand is all metal you're carrying a guitar and you realize that you are playing as of course

johnny silverhand you're playing through one of his memories and you very quickly learned that johnny actually died 50 years before but you're now living one of his memories what a freaking entrance for johnny silverhand first of many um i was not expecting that moments like because you know you see everyone knows kiana reeves is in this game everyone knows he's johnny silverhands you have to live under a rock to not have missed that you know the whole all the marketing campaigns and so on so forth but to find out like dude's been dead for 50 years and like now i'm playing as him super cool and then i didn't know he's a rock star and i felt like a rock star i don't know about you guys but i got some goosebumps it was really cool the i gotta back you up just a second

too paul for me that heist where you go to get the relic is one of the best heists in a video game ever dude like grand theft auto V had some good heists. Cyberpunk 2077, the heists that you have to do, the missions that you have to do, number one, to prepare for it, and then the heist itself is one of the best heists that I've ever, ever experienced in a video game. You get that.

That's right. You get that kind of in the tower. The flathead mission is before that where you have to get the flathead. You've got to do a bunch of stuff before the brain dance investigation game that's oh that we'll talk about that mission later but i've got some things to say about the mission where you get the flathead because that some really wow moments in that we'll talk about that later oh sure yeah the maelstrom mission even the people who that's what it's called even the people

who hate cyberpunk they will all say the setup to the heist is what cyberpunk promised in years past yeah there's a hundred different ways to resolve that quest line it really is pretty remarkable i think most people agree that's probably the best part of the game um but yeah so now as as johnny here you know playing through one of his memories, you finish a rock show, you say goodbye to the audience, and then you learn that you're on your way to drop a nuclear bomb in Arasaka Tower because you're essentially a terrorist and you are against all these mega corporations. You see them as killing the American spirit. This is not who we want to be. We got to rebel against the corpos.

And he's going to do it by setting off this nuke. And so you ride directly after this show. You get on a helicopter. You land on Arasaka Tower's roof. And your team asks you, hey, do you remember how we're going to do the mission? And then Johnny hits you with this line get the payload on the elevator arm it let gravity do its thing explosion rocks the foundation tower crumbles chaos screaming yeah yeah like johnny's the coolest guy in the world yeah yeah and it's

so funny too because so many like you think of like the punk bands of the early and mid-90s, so many rock stars have wanted to take down the establishment. No, Johnny Silverhands is doing it. Oh, yeah, he really is. And so basically, you finish up that little memory of what happened with Johnny. It's kind of like how they teach you about Johnny's origin story in a way. And all of a sudden now you go back to V, but you're now talking to Johnny. Johnny is there. You see him. No one else can see him. And you're having ongoing health issues. Now, does anyone in the group feel like they understand the story well enough that they can kind of explain overall without getting into spoilers, like what the whole point of this game is from this point on uh i i give it a

try i give it a try and then so much for volunteering thank you so much i was like so the i'm gonna go very top level down because we'll get into spoilers later. But basically, and I have to avoid spoilers? Oh, boy. Yeah. You can talk about what we learned from Hellman. You finally talk to a guy who knows about the relic. I think all that stuff's okay. Okay.

So basically, this relic that you've put into your cybernetic brain slot thing to try to hide as you're getting out of this heist gone wrong, gets damaged. It's got what they call the Ingram of Johnny Silverhand on it. So Arasaka is the big bad corporation in this game. They had this program called Soul Killer that would basically take somebody's personality and everything that they are and store it on a chip. This was meant to be for very rich people so that they could preserve their life. And now Johnny Silverhand's construct, is what they call it in the game, is starting to slowly take over your brain. And that's why you are seeing Johnny Silverhand. It's why you're able to communicate with him and nobody else can because he is infesting your brain, so to speak.

Now, he doesn't get to control this. This is all like a natural process because of this relic that you slotted in. So it's not Johnny's fault. It's not really your fault. But this Ingram is taking over. Like, that's the baseline story of Cyberpunk 2077 is you play as V and Johnny Silverhand is inadvertently taking over your mind. And so your quest to try to figure out how to stop that and to survive begins. And that's the foundation for Cyberpunk 2077. Now you start to go out there and you say, well, hey,

I got to talk to this guy because he's in trouble. He was at the heist and now he's in trouble. I won't spoil things that happen. So you have an unlikely ally that's kind of a higher up guy. You have your Ripperdoc friends that know technology and stuff like that. And you're really just trying to go around and find out what the heck is happening to me. And that's the basis of the game. Now that leads you in so many insane directions. Yeah. And, and honestly, appropriate word. Yeah, it really does. And you know, that's the, the really like the heart of the game is everybody that you meet and all the missions that you do and the people that you talk to and the desperation that you have to try to get this

thing out. You want to get Johnny out of your mind because it's going to kill you and you're going to be gone. It's overriding you. Yeah, yeah. I mean, V knows I'm going to die. I am going to cease to exist. And Johnny Silverhand is going to wind up being me,

you know, alive in my body if I don't do something about it. Well, and one of the brilliant parts about that is, again again one of those one of those wow moments this game for me when i was like wasn't expecting that is johnny's talking to you in almost every mission not just the main story missions the side missions he's talking to you in the game and he's telling you what he thinks you should do the guy is not shy but you're always like do i want to believe this guy because i don't know if I trust him. We trust Jackie right away, but very early on,

you know that if Johnny takes over your brain, he gets your body. So he's got a selfish reason to leave you down the wrong path is to make it so that your brain goes kaput and he takes over. And so it really adds a dynamic in the gameplay that is just so interesting. And when Josh said it's insane, some of the things and the choices you have to make in this game are absolutely bonkers well yeah you even have a relationship score with johnny so if you hit like i for inventory you can mouse over the top and it'll tell you how friendly or how antagonistic are you with johnny because that's a choice in the game

are you gonna trust him are you gonna go along with what he says? Or are you going to be more antagonistic with him and push back and maybe call him out on some of his BS? And so that really plays into the game as well. And that's also going to affect some of your endgame choices. Some things are cut off if you have an antagonistic relationship with Johnny, or you might cut yourself off from certain dialogue and different options if you're too friendly with him. And so that's a really interesting part of cyberpunk is that what that was i did not know what that was the three when you hit inventory oh yeah yeah yeah i was like is this is this telling me how far i am in this story i never knew what that was and now i'm like okay so i was 90 with johnny i was i was his pal oh that's really good to know i'll just

play through. I'm going to have to pay attention to that. Yeah, one of them tells you how friendly you are. One of them tells you how close you are to Johnny taking over your body. It's like how close to death you are. Because if Johnny overrides your brain too much, you're going to lose all control. And now you'll be the person talking to Johnny where Johnny sees you but nobody else and eventually you're going to get wiped out. So yeah, it's really interesting.

So let's finally get into a little bit of the gameplay here. We're going to talk about the guns and all that here in just a moment, but let's talk about the open world nature of the game. You're in Night City. You can bring up your map. You can bring up your journal, which keeps track of all your quests and side quests. and there's a lot that you can do in this game what are some of the things you can do in night city uh what do you want to do because you can do most of it that's basically you know yeah like what do you want to do um i'll highlight a couple and then pass it over to josh on this i think i think it's very cool that the open world seems very alive there's a lot of things happening some of which are called out on your map,

some of which are not. A couple of really nice things that are called out on the map early on is that it's just simple ways that you can earn things called street cred. Should we cover that now, or should I cover that later? Sure.

Should I cover that later? Yeah, go for it. Essentially, there's two different ways to level in this game. There's your actual level, which is what you use to put in abilities and stuff. I know we're covering that later on. There's something called street cred,

which is essentially like your street cred. It's exactly as it sounds. It's like how well known are you? That's your notoriety and so forth. And any of these open world things kind of get you that. But one of the coolest things that I found to do that's called out on your map is that if you want to help out the cops,

you can help out the cops. Like there's little, every time you're driving by or going by something, it'll be like, hey, there's something going on over here and uh the cops have reported this crime going on and you can almost go vigilante mode and take care of it for them most of the time means you're gonna go in there and wax everyone and just shoot them a whole bunch and so murder's okay if there's an assault in progress and the cops give you carte blanche go take care of this situation it is very good to go and it's like how do you want to murder these people well i'm going to practice using this gun that's how i figured out by the way

how i wanted to play the game is practicing on these little street gangs that were committing crimes and so forth um you know and there's also things that go on also like the the cyber terrorists uh cyber psychosis yeah why don't you explain that one too if you want to i'll pass this off to you to explain that part because i didn't do as many of these um the so i mean it should be said too that there is no shortage of side missions you could probably spend a good 60 to 80 hours doing side missions in this game if you wanted to there are multiple different districts in the city and every district has its own fixer and a fixer is basically like a boss that gives you quests and gets things done.

So somebody hires a fixer to do a job. The fixer reaches out to you, you know, or whoever the other people are doing these, these things and you can choose to do them or not. And so as you're driving around, if you go into new territory, a fixer will call you and say,

Hey V, I've heard of you, you know, reach out to me. You can come by and talk to me in person if you want, but let's work together. And then you can, you can literally just say, well, all right, I want to do a bunch of stuff for you, man. Um, the cyber psychosis one, uh, a lady named Regina reaches out to you and she says, Hey, I'm trying to track down why these people go crazy. There's something about the cybernetic implants that causes this. We're not really sure. It's a super dangerous thing. Everybody in the city is afraid of cyberpsychosis and stuff like that.

So every now and then, you'll get a notification that says, hey, we've located one. And you can go show up there. And sure enough, there's the person going crazy, gunning down the cops or being attacked by the cops. You can go in, do business, try to find out what's happening. I mean, that's a whole quest line. Like you said, you can help the police. You can, I mean, there's just absolutely no shortage. When they talk about open world nature,

it's truly open world. Like you can drive to any part of the city that you want at any given time. You could spend almost an eternity doing side missions and never touch the main story if that's your thing and this is one of those two where you know a lot of games rely on the story guiding you two different side missions and cyberpunk does this very well there are side missions and side characters you meet that will give you little tree branches of whole entire story segments and arcs that you can go through but i found a few stories just by literally wandering around. There's one that I really want to finish. I was looking for a gun store because

I'm like, I need more pistol ammo because I found a really cool gun named Skippy. We'll talk about that sometime later, I'm sure. And I was like, man, I'm using a lot of pistol rounds. And I was in this one part of town. I couldn't find this gun store, but I found a garage door that I could open. And there's a disassembled motorcycle in there. And the motorcycle starts telling me its story through my cyber look, whatever it's called, essentially my spider senses or whatever. You use your cybernetic implants to scan devices. And it starts a whole mission. And I'm like, was I supposed to be led here at some point? Because I finished almost the whole story when I got to that. And so there's so much out there that I guarantee I haven't even found,

and I was all over town. You can steal cars if you want to, Grand Theft Auto style. You can't keep them, but you can steal them and drive them around until basically the next story point, and then your car kind of disappears, and you've got to hail your own car again. But there's so many things you can do in this game. And one of the best things about this open world is that it truly feels alive like other open worlds do not everything that interacts with

you is it feels very very well fleshed out yeah i would not put it quite on the same scale as red dead redemption 2 or gta 5 those you're going to get a little more character to character interactions where maybe you witness like a bar fight or something like that you're not going to get that in cyberpunk but the city feels very lived in which i think is is really good uh in addition to what you guys have mentioned there's vehicles you can buy that you do get to keep permanently there's apartments you can rent there's ripper docks you can visit i think we should talk about that next here for a little bit so the ripper docs have essentially replaced normal doctors in night city people are at this point as much machine as they are human sometimes even more so and so you can visit your local ripper doc they can give you upgrades if you want to chrome out and they can also scan you for viruses so if you're not feeling well in this world, it's normally due to a software issue

instead of illness. So you can visit Ripper Docs, and basically you have a whole bunch of different slots available on your body. Basically, you can upgrade your frontal cortex, part of your brain, your ocular system, your circulatory system, your immune system, nervous system, integumentary system, which I've never heard of, your operating system, your immune system, nervous system, integumentary system, which I've never heard of, your operating system, skeleton, hands, arms, and legs. I did not make it up. It is in the game. And some of those even have multiple slots. You can add like 30 different upgrades to your body in this game. Are there any specific upgrades that you really enjoyed or any that stand out?

First of all, I have to correct you, Paul. It's integumentary and it's your skin. Integumentary. Yeah, it's your skin, basically. Oh. You Googled that.

You Googled that. Dude, I'm a biology major. What? You knew that? Yes. Oh, man. Here I am trying to just make it so that katana is more than two words.

Yeah. You're like integumentary say it one more time yeah that means skin yeah yeah integrity gloom and terry right there you go nailed it um the ripper docs i think are one of the coolest parts of this game to be honest with you there is a very cool scene in the beginning where you visit vick who's your like kind of personal ripper doc or the guy that you've been seeing. He's been helping you out a lot. Really, really neat sequence

where he upgrades your ocular implant and some other stuff. But this is where you start to feel the cyberpunk aspect. I mean, yes, the city's full of neon lights and there's people walking around in weird costumes and outfits and things like that. But this is where you start going like, oh, I live in the

future. And you get to craft your character in any way you want. If you want to go guns a-blazing, there's augmentations for that. If you want to go stealthy, there's augmentations for that. If you want to be like a net hacker guy, you can get upgrades that let you do things like that too. So this is where you actually craft the game based on the way that you want to play. And the game does a very good job of number one, you, it eases you into it because some of this stuff is very expensive and has level requirements so that you always kind of feel like you're progressing. Um, and then the really cool part is that as you go to different Ripper docs, they have different things.

So that's a fun thing to kind of go treasure hunting and say, let me discover. Yeah. Let me find this Ripper doc that's down some dark alley somewhere and some no man's part of town. But he's got some really good stuff that I want to have installed. Whereas Vic may not have that stuff and so on and so forth. So they're just really neat sequences. To me, I loved the Ripper doc part of the game, whether it was Vic, who you feel very kindred to, or Fingers, who is one of the worst characters I've ever seen in a video game.

No, don't even talk about it. Yeah. I mean, some other Ripper docs that are in the game and stuff like that too. But really neat implementation of a way to say, hey, this is how you get to play the game the way that you want. Yeah. Before the Ripper docs, before you understand this part of it, Night City is basically just Blade Runner. And then this is when, like Josh was saying, you really get into the cyberpunk part of it.

Mods that I really, really liked, anything that kept me alive a little bit longer was really really helpful because i was not good at stealth let me let me just say that so uh anything circulatory system i had a lot of regen mods um there's a mod called like second heart where if you die you basically come back to life that's very useful um because i died a lot and i was really tired of the extensive loading screens because the loading into this game is a little bit longer than a lot of games, probably because it's so in-depth.

My favorite mod of all mods, though, is as your hands. You can add weapons to your hands, almost like Wolverine, where you can have blades come out if you want. My favorite thing in the world was the monowire. Once I discovered the monowire, I never went back to anything else. I was going around. Like, the range on that thing, it's kind of like, oh, my goodness, I think it was Johnny Mnemonic, where the guy had, like, the thumb, and he would pull out, like, this cord, and

it would, like, take people's heads off, like a laser cord. It's like that, except it had some range to it, too. I loved the monowire. Once I figured that out, I was like, can I kill everything in this game with the monowire? By the way, the answer is no. You will have to use guns at some point, but you can do almost anything with a monowire. And that's just the coolest thing, is that you can literally take your body and change it to whatever, like however you want your play style to be. And I love that it gives you so many options.

I'm going to stop saying I love this game before the make love marry murder part. I don't I don't love this game. Very benign on this game, guys. It's very benign so far. Yeah. One of my favorite upgrades is to the legs you can get a double jump and so that'll let you reach you know higher ledges and stuff that you normally can't reach that really helps when you're going stealth it lets you kind of work your way around the map in

really clever ways if you have watched the cyberpunk edge runners series on netflix there's a whole plot line about the sand devast, and you can get that as one of your upgrades in Cyberpunk. It slows down time, and so you can kind of run around and shoot a bunch of people and kill them while they don't know what's going on. I also had a really cool augmentation where my whole body would go completely invisible for 15 seconds. And so, I always play this game Stealth, and we'll kind of all talk about our different methods in a bit, but that was very handy where once a minute, I think, I could go invisible for 15 seconds. And that makes Stealth a lot easier, just for the record.

So let's talk a little bit about actual combat. We've talked about how you can go Stealth, where you can do takedowns you can go guns blazing you can use melee weapons you can use quick hacking which we've not really talked about yet where you're basically attacking other people's cybernetic implants that's one of the problems if everyone's hooked up with uh computers you can hack them and sabotage them they're all connected so michael let's start with you. It sounds like you liked the Monowire the most. Were you all about that melee life?

Yeah, I was all about do things the stupidest way you can possibly do things. I legitimately changed my play style like six times, all by accident, because this is my first playthrough on this game. And there's so many different ways that you can play the game that i every time i saw something cool i was like a kid at the candy store i'm like that i want i want to do that instead i want to do that so i started out with this cool katana and i was like i'm a katana person that's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna do all melee so i started putting points into melee and then i got a cooler gun and i was like no i want to use this gun i'm gonna be a sniper i'm gonna be a sniper in this game so i started putting points into crit and headshots and stuff like that. And then I discovered

the monowire and loved it all while realizing that really stealth is pretty. It's at least necessary that you have some stealth in this game. I would say it's one thing that you really should do unless you're playing a super easy mode. If you want to bulldoze through this game, go ahead, set on easy mode, go bulldoze through it. But I don't think you're going to enjoy it as much as if you really experienced some stealth. So cyber mods are a really fun way to go about it. That being said, when you've already made your fifth choice on how to style your character, you're not going to be good at any one thing.

You're going to be a jack of all trades, which means you're going to be okay at all of them. So I was pretty okay at cyber mods. I think the best thing that I got was the ability to make someone kill themselves, which was nice, but I wasn't good at mass crowd control. So I pretty much stuck to limited cyber mods, lots of melee and some crit chance with the guns was my playthrough.

I'm really excited to, if I ever have time again, try a different build. If I ever get to come back to this game, because I really did not specialize in anything. That being said, I had a blast doing those different things, but it was definitely smart to kind of specialize somewhere like you guys probably did. What about you, Josh? I know you tend to not go stealth. I'm guessing you were a lot of guns, a lot of quick hacking.

So the first time I played Cyberpunk, I went melee. i was all about that katana life and just getting up in people's faces this time around i wanted to play a little bit differently so i went full like hacker mode oh that's my favorite i focused i focused entirely on quick hack abilities and things like that that would let me really just jack people up from afar explain how they work so the way that quick hacking works in this game is it's kind of twofold. You can do this neat little thing called a breach protocol, which you can choose to do beforehand, which is like this neat little code mini game that you play. And if you do that, it reduces the cost of your quick hacks and does other stuff too.

Like maybe it will make cameras more vulnerable or turrets like shut down longer and things like that. But the quick hack system, you basically are uploading like a virus into the other person's cybernetics. And so you have a vast variety of things that you can do. Something as simple as just pinging them so that you can see everything, like you can see all the enemies in an area because everything's connected via the internet. So if you ping them, you get to just kind of see where all the outlines of the bad guys are. You can do things like blind them.

So you can shut down their ocular implants and then they're blind. You can jam their weapons because most people have like an implant in their hands that kind of interacts with their weapon and you can jam that. You can overload them. So you do fight a lot of actual like robots and things like that in this game. plan in their hands that kind of interacts with their weapon and you can jam that um you can overload them so you do fight a lot of actual like robots and things like that in this game so you can get like an overload ability um michael touched on one you can actually later on in the game get cyber psychosis you can make people suffer from cyber psychosis to where they'll turn on their allies maybe you if they see you or if there's nobody around they'll turn on their allies, maybe you if they see you, or if there's nobody around, they'll just go crazy and kill themselves too.

So I found that with the quick hack system, I did that coupled with stealth this time. I rarely ever used a gun or a sword. If I did get into a fight, I wanted to at least use guns this time because I was all about katanas and stuff, my first playthrough. Made the game feel completely different. So if there's anybody

out there that's like, yeah, but how does it feel if you play one way or the other? I can tell you, it feels completely different. So how you approach combat in this game and how you build out your character does vastly change the way that you play this game and how the game feels. So I got a question for you because

I did not go that route at all and that's kind of the route that now that i've played through i'd like to i'd like to see that is there like is there a way to play this game where you're eliminating an entire group of enemies without even touching them or doing anything you're literally just using the quick hacks and taking them out you you can the quick hacks are not necessarily like damage dealing for the most part they're more like debilitating. Like, yes, some of them do damage. You do get like an overheat ability.

And like I said, you get the, like the discharge ability and stuff like that. And as you level them up, they can get fairly strong. But this is not like I quick hack you and your head explodes. You know what I mean? Like they're more like I, there's like, so to give you an example, there's a trio of three guys. They're all looking outward. I can't sneak up on them.

There's no way I can do that, right? Like, they're going to see me, but I'm trying to play stealthy. So I'll blind one of them. Or maybe if I've upgraded my cyber deck, I can blind two of them. So now they can't see me. So then I go up, I walk up, I stealth take down the third guy, dump his body real quick before the blindness wears off. And then now I've only got two guys I have to deal with.

So it is much more strategy-oriented, I feel like. But then again, you can just induce cyber psychosis on a guy, watch him start fighting all of his buddies. His buddies kill him, he kills a few of them, and you just kind of thrive through the chaos too. Yeah, that's kind of the only stealth that i really use is exactly what you just said there's a group of two never got good enough to do three because i didn't know what to do but i'd blind one of them kill the other guy stealthily dump his body and then sneak up on the guy who's left and kill him that was my stealth mode the problem was if i tried to like initiate an attack with someone like using the suicide method for some reason and maybe this is something i need to put more points into for some reason if i did that all of

a sudden all the bad guys are like i know you're out there i know you're there and i'm like how do i do like pure stealth with that and so it's probably just something i had to put more points you can do distraction techniques so you can hack like a soda machine and have it start spitting out soda cans and then so a guy will walk over and he'll leave his buddies so this game definitely is play how you want to play and and you can do you can approach any situation a dozen ways that's awesome thanks for doing learning time for michael just treat me like a listener there's also totally different quick hacks so for example michael like you're talking about the suicide quick hack. Everybody will immediately be aware that you're out there because that's a hostile quick hack. There are also covert ones you can use that do not put you in combat. So for example,

there's one called System Reset, where basically you just hijack every part of their cybernetics and shut it down and they fall unconscious. unconscious well if you've upgraded your cyber deck and you put a couple points where now it'll spread to additional targets you can actually knock out a group of three or four guys silently if they're all close to one another now of course an enemy might still see a dead body and then you know hit the alarms but there's a lot you can do in this game i highly recommend playing exactly as josh did i think you go a combination of quick hacks and stealth and i think that's how this game works best now that being said there's a lot of options with guns all right this game does have a pretty novel take on firearms that i think is actually really cool. You've got power weapons, which ricochet off surfaces.

So you can actually, almost like Moira orbs in Overwatch, you can aim and hit people around corners, which is pretty cool. There are tech weapons, which basically work like railguns. You can charge them up and they'll shoot through cover. You also have smart weapons, where your aim reticle is about 60 of your screen maybe even bigger you just point it anywhere relatively close to an enemy and every bullet will home in directly

and you know you might have all headshots on that this is my forte and my bread and butter because i'm a terrible first person shooter game and i enjoyed the gunplay in this game because i had guns like that all All smart weapons. And this is one of the awesome things about cyberpunk is there's all the different gangs in the city. The tiger claws are like one of them. Well, the tiger claws,

all of them are outfitted with anti measures to smart weapons. So they will actually override your, they jam your smart weapon technology. So if you're fighting tiger claws your smart weapons don't work as well and i think stuff like that is very very cool now all that being said i always am a little bit partial to where you get gifted a silenced sniper i can't help myself i'll bust it out and use it every once in a while. But I don't love the guns in this game. I do think that they're neat, but I prefer stealth and quick hacks.

I think you hit on a good point, though, Paul, with the way that you like the way that Josh did it is the way you play the game, because this is what really sets it apart from other games. If you're just going to go and stealth or gun, like if you're going to stealth, Assassin's Creed is great for that. If you're going to do a bunch of gunplay, Call of Duty, Halo, things like that. Whereas, a combination of all, which is the route that I went, was really fun.

But if you really want to do something that completely makes this game stand out as a different game, I don't think any other game really does it like the way the playstyle Josh did was. So it stands apart. The beauty of that is it just gives you options. Now, there are multiple times in this game where one of my favorite weapons was a smart shotgun and so basically it was just it was just you know line up half your

screen on somebody click the click the mouse metal and they're eating a full shotgun blast like around a crate you know and and and so that was a lot of fun. The gunplay in this game, it's not Doom Eternal or something like that. No. But it is fine. The guns are very neat. They look cool. They act cool. You can play it kind of how you want in that regard.

They're fully upgradable and customizable as well. So there's a whole crafting system and an upgrade system and all that as well. I didn't really get into that either time because you just find weapons so fast that there wasn't really a need. And I was hacking people more often than just shotgun blasting them. But you can play however you want. That's really the takeaway. Yeah, I think that's what the game really lets you do well is just hybrid any method or go all in on one. And the game totally lets you play the whole game that way even if you go full stealth the final boss in the game you can defeat him with all stealth you have to basically uh blind the boss and then go behind them and you'll rip off part of their cybernetic

implants and you have to do it multiple times but even the bosses you can defeat through stealth which is neat um i don't want to spend too too much time on it because i know we're already almost an hour into this episode we all knew this one's gonna go long i said early on it's gonna go two hours so you do have your attributes and your perks michael did mention these before these also affect your combat so you have all these different skill trees where you get to put points uh cyberpunk we talked about in the last deep dive it's very rpg light it's not a hardcore rpg at all but you do have these different stealth trees your attributes boil down to body reflexes technical ability intelligence and cool and there are things in the open world that are impacted by that. So if you have a door that's jammed,

if you have high enough body, you can just rip it open. If there's a door that's locked and you have high technical ability, you can probably open it because you can hack your way in. And cool, we'll give you new dialogue options, all kinds of stuff like that in the game. And then inside each of those attributes, there's multiple trees that affect combat. So I didn't know if there were any in particular perks that you guys liked, but just to give you an example, I love that under the body tree, there are two perks you can unlock that work really well together.

One of them is called divided attention, and it lets you reload while sprinting, sliding, and vaulting. And there's another one called Multitasker that lets you shoot while sprinting, sliding, and vaulting. And when you combine those two together, you're dodging, you're sliding, and the whole time you're shooting. And it really makes the gunplay feel so much better. And that's just an example where if you don't go into that tree the guns are pretty lame but if you decide to go all in on the guns you can actually make it a really fun experience you become like neo and trinity from the matrix 100 yeah so any any perks you guys remember or any of that stuck out to you i just because i went full hacking i just took everything that upgraded quick hacks um you know like ram regeneration yeah ram regeneration so that i could quick hack more often it lasted twice as long the spreading

the contagion was kind of neat to where if there were other enemies around like quick like if i blinded somebody it would transfer to people that were around them and stuff like that as well um you know this is just another layer on top of that RPG layer. And I'll keep saying it, but it's you play this game the way that you want to play. If you want to be stealthy, there is an entire skill tree devoted to stealth options. You know, if you want to go guns a blazing, you can turn yourself into a walking tank. You know, like legitimately, you know, you can you up your strength and stuff and you can have these monstrous, just, like, Gatling-type guns, and you're walking around with armor for skin for your cybernetic upgrades,

and you're just blasting everything to smithereens, you know? If you want to go a speedy katana wielder, you know, like, Paul, like you said, these speed options and melee options and stuff like that, there's just something, they've kind of thought of something for every build, even grenades. Like I accidentally went into, I think engineering is one of them. I feel like that's one. And I was like, oh, I'm going to be like a hacker engineer guy. And then I started putting points into engineering and it's all like your grenades blast radius is 20% larger.

You can carry more than three grenades. And I was like, oh, this is stupid stupid i don't want to grenade people man i want to i want to quick hack and detonate their grenades while they're on right right but if you wanted to you could straight up make it so you craft tons of grenades all the time have these grenades be all you do is just like clear just throw these grenades yeah you could i just didn't want to play that way kobe no the idea yeah one of the things that was interesting though too is that you know if you want to go guns a blazing there's also different options you can do here like and they're in several different skill trees like for instance if you want to be a pistolier or someone who just that's not a real word i don't think

um but someone who like basically is really good with pistols i think that was in like the was it the perception or whatever one of those trees and then there's like one where you are really good with shotguns or really good with sniper rifles or really good with automatic weapons but they're all in separate trees they're not like just under a gunslinger tree and so you have to say if i want to be guns a blazing and i want to be really good i can say that i want to be really good with pistols and then it makes pistols actually much more relevant because one thing we know about most shooter games pistols aren't that relevant typically most of the time you don't really want a pistol because there's things that will do more damage that are better and pistols

especially if it's revolver you're reloading all the time but you can make it so like you you reload a revolver like instantly like you know some of those those guys you see on youtube which is kind of cool my choice again i was stupid here and i won't spend much time on it i went all over the place but the one thing i did was say that i'm really good at dying in these games so i put a lot of points in just body and staying alive and you know points into like for instance uh you know if i'm not actively getting shot my health regenerates 15 faster things like that so jack of all trades whatever you want to do yeah so i don't know what other thoughts you guys have about combat i will say that i think one of the really revolutionary things that cyberpunk did that i don't remember seeing in any other game and to give todd credit he talked about this on

our last deep dive if you go anywhere near a ledge whether it's a doorway or a crate in the middle of the street, if you go near it, your character automatically goes in to take cover where you're at. You don't press a button. It just pops you in cover automatically. And if you go ADS, it lets you peek. And if you decide that you just want to start walking around, you don't have to press a button. You're not glued to wherever you took cover. You're free to walk around. And it makes the experience so much more immersive it's not like gears of war or mass effect we have to press a button to go into cover press a button to leave

cover it makes the game feel much more organic as you're going through the combat it also made it so that i actually used cover because i won't use the cover in other games because it cumbersome and awful. It's very natural in this game. Super natural. So yeah, any other thoughts about combat? Anything good or bad that you want to mention? I think it adds a good bit to the game and it's not a combat focused game by any means, but it does add a good amount to the game. It shows you how hostile Night City can be. You are not playing this game to be a shooter. So if you've ever seen a video of Cyberpunk and seen Guns Ablazing, that's not what this game is. It is just a part of the larger game. Yeah. I would also very highly recommend playing this

game on hard, even for your very first playthrough. And if you've already played it once, then you can either play as hard or very hard. do think that this game is far too easy on normal combat wise no no no shade to you michael maybe it was just your build out but i will say especially if you go into quick hacking it just seems so op you gotta bump up the difficulty a little bit otherwise you might just feel like you're Rambo. It might feel more like Broforce than Cyberpunk. I can agree with that completely, too, because I played the game on normal. And the first third of the game, sure, it was difficult.

By the end, I realized that there's this fight at the end where you're fighting 20 guys at a time. And I was on normal mode. I was literally running through with the cord thing. What's that thing called again? The monowire. I was running through with the monowire and just taking cover, taking a quick breath off my asthma inhaler,

which heals me, and then running in more monowires. So I completely agree with Paul. I think you're going to get a lot more out of it if you up the difficulty. Yeah, for sure. All right. So Cyberpunk initially released two years ago.

Famously, it had all the glitches, all the issues. In particular, last-gen consoles got hit the hardest. IGN famously gave the PS4 and Xbox One version a 4 out of 10. I don't know if you guys know, the frame rate would drop into the teens on playstation 4 the game was unplayable people said it was making them feel nauseous because of how bad the frame rate was so even on high-end gaming pcs at the time when we played it josh you had a brand new 3080 i had my 2080 ti i had bugs galore you had less than, but we both saw plenty of glitches. Now, from a technical perspective, playing post 1.6, how did the game play technically for you guys? I'll say this.

It played pretty darn flawlessly for me. I was very surprised at how much they had accomplished. Now, it's been two years so this you know two years of bug fixes made the game you know almost bug free the only bug that i encountered in all of this game was that i would get a bug where i couldn't sprint um the game thought i was crouched even though i wasn't crouched and so it would generally happen if i like mantled over something, like if I climbed a wall or something like that, and then I just would be stuck and I could not sprint after that. So I'd have to just reload a save,

you know, a quick load or something. It'd be fine after that. But that's the only bug that I encountered in my entire play through this time. Yeah. I would say not having a frame of reference as having played much before this play through.

I remember the first time i played there was that effect that paul and i talked about where you get blood on your hands and it looks like it was hovering like eight inches above your knuckles um things like that they just didn't happen this time around it just didn't happen and i had two bugs one of them was the sprint bug like i figured out a way around it because it was such a reliable bug like this happened all the time where like i'm, I'm not encumbered. I'm not out of stamina. Why can't I sprint?

And why am I going so slow? And I would literally just pull out the katana, push sprint once, put the katana away, and it fixed all of it. For some reason, it just knocked me out of that mode. The only other bug that I had actually happened at the very end. I was moving a vehicle in the final act, and it got stuck halfway in the ground, halfway out of the ground. Oh, no. It would not get out of the ground that I had to exit the game and come back. And thank goodness,

during that final act, it does autosave quite often because that was after a very frustrating moment, and it was good. But that being said, for a game that has been known to be horribly buggy, I know it's been two years, but a lot that has been known to be horribly buggy, I know it's been two years, but a lot of devs would just be like, hey, we already sold X million copies. Let's just roll with it. And I think that's why we're seeing such a good resurgence right now is that people are playing it because of Ed Redner on Netflix, but also the devs fixed it. And it's good.

It runs well. Shockingly, for the fact that I was running into glitches probably every 20 to 30 seconds when i played this the first go around there was something about my 2080 that this game did not like i have the exact same 2080 i have not upgraded in the last two years same graphics card i played this entire game my playthrough was 43 hours i encountered one glitch and it was not even anything major it's when you talk to takamura like up on that little bridge and he was bending over acting like he was leaning on a counter that one too but he wasn't i didn't have that one i forgot about that i was like is he constipated like what's going on here he was like bent over and i realized it was

him like he's supposed to be leaning on a rail and he's not so yeah literally that was the one glitch in the entire game i couldn't believe how well it played compared to back then they've really come a long way yeah all right well we're gonna go ahead and take a short break and we'll be back soon with more multiplayer gaming podcasts get groceries delivered across the gta from real canadian superstore with pc express shop online for super prices and super savings try it today and get up to 75 in pc optimum points visit superstore.ca to get started okay guys it's time let's get into spoiler territory we're going to talk about anything else in the game that we want to do so if you want to keep all these things hidden go ahead and skip forward to the one hour 32 minute 47 second mark

and at this point guys let's just jump into whatever we want to talk about romance options items that you find or are gifted end game decisions what do you guys want to talk about um pan am pan am we can start there i'd be very happy what about pan am josh so how smart she is uh yeah she's very handy um you know she she's she's kind of a rebel no honesty integrity. Um, you know, dude, I'm just going to start off by saying CD project red makes the best side quests in video games. I absolutely hands down. I'm saying it right now. I cannot think of another company that creates, you don't play cyberpunk for the main story. Like the main story is great. Don't get me wrong, but it is the side quests in this game that flesh out everything, man.

And if you are just playing the main campaign, you are missing out on so many incredible quests and characters and things like that. So if you haven't played Cyberpunk and you're going to play it, play it with the knowledge that you are going to explore. You're going to pick up all the side quests. You're going to talk to characters. You're going to help them out, and you're going to do all that because it is infinitely better than if you just play the campaign and that's it.

Some of the side quests, there's the one where you're helping the – oh, man, I'm having a brain fart – the cop. Oh, River. River, that was it. River Ward. Yeah, River. You start helping this cop doing this investigation, helping the oh man i'm having a brain fart the cop the uh river river river ward yeah river you start helping this cop doing this investigation and all of us you know i talked about the heist right and how great the heist was this was one of the best detective quests that i've been on yeah like he's been kidnapped yeah like the dude's nephew's been kidnapped and he's asking for your

help and you're like okay but you're going and you're looking through trailers and houses for clues and and you're slowly like piecing things together and then you know he leaves he's like hey thanks for the help but then he calls you a couple days later he's like hey man like this is getting bigger than i thought and before you know it you're at some crazy dude silence of the lambs farm freeing dudes that have been trapped and gassed in like in this it's like a horror movie almost you know and it's just like what is this quest but that's what cyberpunk or that's what cd project red does and they do it just as good in cyberpunk as they did in the witcher a hundred percent and there's so much feeling behind it like we talk about in the witcher the baron quest line or

whatever i think that was part of the main story wasn't it that wasn't a side yeah no it's part of the main story it's kind of what gets the story going but it essentially is essentially it's kind of the same thing where the river ward line for instance like you started out as like you don't even you might not ever even go and discover this character the first first time you see him, you're in a brain dance as part of something from kind of the main story. And then it just slowly, like you kind of slowly, he gets introduced in your life and you don't have to follow any of these leads or anything. But all of a sudden you're like, holy cow, I'm solving huge crimes with this person that I just saw walking around in a brain dance, wearing this fur coat, thought it looked kind of cool. Like, and it goes so deep into the characters characters and that's one of the biggest things is yeah when it comes to the characters like you

you can romance the characters certain characters and by the way spoiler big spoiler here really wish i would have played a male character because i could have given some beautiful hugs to pan am and instead she was like i want to be your your friend. And beautiful hugs, just read the context. But it's really interesting because you go through these storylines and each one of these side quests with essentially three of the main characters that are side quests.

So you've got Judy, you've got Pan Am, and you've got River. They're kind of your three big side quest storylines. And each one of these is almost... You can throw Carrie in there too. If you would have met carrie which i didn't oh really i did i i'm looking through the quest and i'm like i don't even know what carrie is what's funny is we talk about river in this quest with him i met in my first playthrough and i

played i did a lot of side quests the first playthrough never met river once so i actually asked you i was like is this dlc like how where is all this like this big quest line there's this river dude and you're like yeah you were like dude he was there and i'm like wait what like how did i miss this i've got to go meet this carry person because that's but but kind of my point though is like that that's the point for earlier there's so much to do but like each one of these these three let's say four if you add carry in there it's almost like a whole video game on their own. It's like a whole six to eight hour video game of just this side quest big storyline.

And there's little side quests here and there. There was one that was really bonkers where I'm sent to go take this guy out and I'm supposed to assassinate him. And I end up riding along with him in the back of a cop car while he's talking about being this crazy murderer but then he found jesus and he partnered up with a a news company essentially to tell his brain dance studio to tell his story and at the end of it like and that's the short that's a really short one but it was really bonkers like there's so many bonkers things it's great wait how did you finish that quest did you actively crucify him and take the hammer and nails and do it yourself? Because you can do that in that quest. He just kind of said goodbye at one point.

And I was like, that was it. Oh, and you never saw him again? He never called you or anything? No, he's like, yeah, because we went. No, he never called me. We went. We wrote around and stuff. He's like, hey, spend the day with me.

I went and talked to like two or three people, I think, that were like, hey, I'm sorry I killed your family member, this and that. And then we go and we talk in this restaurant. And I must have made some different choices on it because I was like, hey, I kind of believe in this and that. And there was that female cop that just kept getting really mad at me. And I'm like, get out of here. I don't want to talk to you anymore. And I think I just kind of, he was like, all right, see you later.

So basically... They're like, you'll still get paid. Yeah. They end up calling you. So his whole mission is, I want people to experience what Jesus experienced on the cross. And in this game, they can record your life experience as a brain dance. They can sell it to others. You can download it into your brain and you will feel the same pains, the same sensations,

the same emotions. And so you can actually go and watch it be filmed. It's one of the darker quests for sure. And he even asks you, will you be there with me? And you can say yes or no. You can try to talk him out of it, or you can encourage him to do it. And since I've played through this game three times, I've tried to make every decision possible. And there's some ones that'll definitely tie your stomach in a little bit of a knot as you're going through quests like that one.

So what about romance options for you, Josh? Did you romance Pan Am? I sure did. Spoiler warning, this game is rated M for Mature. M plus. Yeah, I mean, it is very graphic. It is not intended for children at all. And that goes to the romance options as well.

There is a filter you can turn on that makes it so they're not completely fully nude. But, you know, Pan Am. They're too close. They're too close to you. I'm uncomfortable. I don't like it. The kissing is weird yeah and you can't cut you can't skip some of these cut scenes if you happen to go down that route

i i told the joke that i'm at my office is downstairs it's got like double doors to it i was romancing pan am and then it happened where all of my romancing paid off, let's just say. And I'm playing through my TV speakers. The doors open. Things start happening on the screen. People start making noises. So I'm trying to mute everything. I'm looking at the door behind me going,

please don't let my wife or kids walk in the room right now. I'm trying to skip. I'm like, skip, skip. and it's just pausing it like how do i and when paul said the voice actors earlier are very good the voice acting is very good it was thankfully uh nobody asked what was going on in right here um but and not even just your romance option as johnny you get hit out of nowhere with an unskippable four minute scene with Alt. Yeah. You get hit with that out of nowhere. There's lots of romance in this game, all of the

Witcher. Some of it catches you off guard and never caught me off guard in the Witcher. So maybe that's a little bit different. Yeah. Turn a corner. Yeah. Pan Am does have a famous intro scene. The first time you meet her is another thing. There's YouTube for that, I guess.

But yeah. Pan Am plays a very major role in the game. You can just be friends with her if you want, or you can try to romance her. And she is your love interest if you play a male V at that point. She's got that honky-tonk. Yeah, she's... Ba-donk-a-donk.

Yeah, that's basically it. That's a song on the radio, by the way, so this is for the family audience. Nice. Let's jump ahead to some Endgame stuff. So, Josh, what was your very very first playthrough what's your canonical ending that you see here in your experience as v okay so the first time i played this game uh there's a point where you can just uh v is kind of the world is collapsing johnny has almost taken over his entire psyche and all that stuff and you're you're kind of reminiscing on this rooftop and one of the options is like i just want it to end and and then sure enough like he just ends it and he commits

suicide and that's game over and so my first playthrough that was actually the ending that i i went with and then i was like wait a minute but then i that's right after that is when i fizzled out too and i kind of went i don't think i like cyberpunk guys. Like this game's not doing it for me. This time around, I did finish the game. I wanted to, and I knew going in because the first time I was very adversarial with Johnny because I was like, Hey, this guy shouldn't be in my head. I don't want him taking me over. It's my life.

It's not his. He lived 50 years ago. This time I approached the game as in I'm going to embrace Johnny. I'm going to do everything I can to try to be his friend and sympathize with him. When it came to the end game, you get the option of do you want to let Johnny kind of take over? Or do you want to try to remain V and things like that? I went fully just, hey, you know what? Johnny got a second chance at life.

Somehow it's my body that got a second chance at life somehow he it's my body that he got this chance at and so i did i let johnny take over as as far as like my ending for the game was that you choosing to uh go into arasaka tower and fight your way into makoshi so you took rogue with you i did i took rogue with me um the first time well for rogue no it doesn't and the first time i i let the aldecaldos the aldecaldos um with pan am help me yeah um this time i went with rogue because i and that's a whole nother quest line that i'd never experienced in the first game um and so yeah it doesn't end well for rogue but it did end well for johnny it i felt like it was a happy ending you know with the approach that I took to the game, saying

hey, I'm going to embrace Johnny and I'm going to give him the second chance at life. So it kind of felt like a good ending for me. Well, especially for anyone who hasn't played Cyberpunk or if it's been a while, you find out that the whole game you've been trying to find a way to have Johnny removed

from your brain. And what you find out at the end is that your body's DNA has been altered so much by Johnny's construct that even if they remove Johnny from your brain, you will still die within six months. Or give your body to Johnny and he'll live a full normal life. And so it's almost like if you look at those odds and those numbers, it does kind of make sense to let Johnny take over. And Johnny is not the same person in the beginning.

You see in the old memories, he's a D-bag. He does not treat people well. He only cares about himself. And you as V and Johnny definitely impact each other, where by the end of the game, Johnny really does care about Rogue and Alt, and he is a new person in life. And there's something really poetic about letting Johnny take over your body.

Yeah, it is. Yeah, Johnny's definitely a lot more like Fred Durst, except with talent at the very beginning of the game. Don't you compare him to Limp Bizkit, Michael? I said, except if he had talent, because he has talent. What ending did you compare him to limp biscuit michael i said except if he had talent yeah because he has talent what ending did you pick michael what'd you do so i could not get me enough of pan am so i had her and the i want to say alan magordos that's not right that's a city in new mexico alda caldos um they went with me and we used some cool tech

we used um obviously that uh that panzer tank thing that was really fun to pilot. The Basilisk. The Basilisk until it got stuck sideways in the ground, which was one of my only two bugs. And so in my playthrough, it was really interesting because we had to basically drill in from underneath the construction site, get into Arasaka Tower, fight our way in. At least I had to fight my way in because I failed the check on sneaking real early in that one. And you go with Saul. Saul and Pan Am go

with you. And you go with Saul. It does not end well for Saul. The Smasher definitely gets his name. If anyone watched Game of Thrones, Obermartel, the Red Viper's death is the same death essentially that Saul gets, except he gets smashed by a giant metal foot uh and it's graphic his head explodes everywhere but um but yeah it's that's it was a fun ending i did the same thing that josh did uh and that was just my lawful good

coming out i'm like i can't selfishly i can't selfishly say that i'm gonna take this body and we're both kind of screwed i'm like i want to make it so if one of us can walk away and be okay and so i'm like hey johnny take the body and it's kind of cool too because johnny's kind of talking you out of it he's kind of like hey i didn't do this so that you could die i want you because we forged that relationship i wonder if there's different dialogue if you don't forge that good relationship because he's like no no we've been doing this so you live i'll become this construct ai thing for the rest of my existence and live with um what's her name again alt alt cunningham yeah live with yeah live with alt cunningham and he's trying to talk me out of

that i'm like no i'm not going to do it i'm going to go ahead and just give you the body the epilogue is beautiful though because he truly seems to respect v and he has this new outlook on life as he's kind of taking this young musician under his wing that lives in his complex. So it was a great ending. I really appreciated it. I'm really interested in seeing the other endings as well. One of the funny things is that you both chose to let Johnny take the body, which gives you the same epilogue. However, since Rogue is dead, if you storm Arasaka Tower with Rogue, when he goes to the cemetery, he visits V's grave and Rogue's. Whereas with you, Michael, he would have only visited V's.

Just V. Yeah. Really interesting. I can't believe you both gave Johnny your body. I think that's crazy. Because the whole game is you trying to survive as V. It's a redemption story, Paul. Yep.

But Johnny already died. He had his life. Yeah, but he had a bad life and then this is your he's redeemed by like your kindness and you're working with him and the friendship that you build and then like johnny actually becomes like a decent human at that point i feel like v already closed out so much of her story like pan am is now the leader of the not alamogordos the aldecaldos. Aldecaldos.

Very good word. Thank you. It means skin, by the way, if anyone's listening. Sure. But also, that joke landed real flat. Sorry about that. I thought we were just talking about Pan Am again, so I went somewhere else. That's right.

And then with Judy, you've kind of resolved a lot of her issues issues she's kind of at peace with some of the things she does she's finding a way to get back into her art and appreciating her life and you've helped so many people out and you know like with river like he you solved the issues with his family with the disgusting things that that that guy was doing in that shack or whatever but i feel like ultimately like she had been redeemed and it was johnny's turn to be redeemed you know it was his turn to go out and have that new life and i just felt like that was the way and plus if i would have chosen to live it's for nothing i'm going to die quickly why not just pull the plug now and let someone else have the life that's just kind of how i thought well who's to say alt's right? Maybe she's not. Well, maybe she's not. Yeah. So my canonical ending that I always think of is my very first playthrough.

I played as a nomad, and then I went into Night City. I lived it up. I became a legend. And then I decided to call Pan Am because I had my nomad roots. It just seemed right. So I called the Aldecaldos, had the same thing as Michael, where you drill underneath the ground to work your way into Arasaka Tower. You fight your way, or stealth in my case, to Makoshi. And then I made the other decision where I said, no,

I'm going to keep my body. I'm going to jump in the well and keep it. Andny says never stop fighting and then you wake up as v and your whole epilogue is where you have now joined the aldecaldos full-time you are planning to leave you guys have found a secret way past the uh the mountains and the border patrol so that way you can get your way into tucson arizona and pan am says i promise you we're gonna find a way to fix you and to keep you alive Border Patrol, so that way you can get your way into Tucson, Arizona. And Pan Am says, I promise you we're going to find a way to fix you and to keep you alive. And then you have a really sweet moment where you're with Pan Am, and you take off your bullet necklace, and you let it go in the wind, and you make your way to go live as a nomad at the end of the story. So My V was kind of like, started as a nomad. they kind of lusted after the power and the glory of the city and realized it wasn't for them and then went back to living as a nomad and i thought i really liked that ending for me but it still has a little bit of that sour note because

is v gonna live or not you don't really know at that point although now there's hope though now we're getting an expansion so i'm pretty sure're going to kind of go further into that storyline. Is V going to find a way to survive for sure? Because clearly it's not a canonical ending for CD Projekt Red where you give Johnny the body. Because in the trailers, you're still V. So it'll be kind of interesting to see. Unless it's some kind of flashback. Maybe it takes place before.

I don't know. I guess we'll have to wait and see well i noticed that only 9.8 percent of players according to steam select that ending or at least go through that ending so it seems like the other ending where v is still v is is more popular so because i was curious about that when i finished the game i'm sitting here thinking like how does an expansion happen am i doing it as johnny do they make it so you could do is either make it ambiguous or is it just that you're V, you know?

Yeah, I think you're probably just V, but we don't know for sure. Uh, all right. So the last thing I will say is I love the end game credits where you have all the voicemails from all the main characters, even including some secondary ones like Mama Wells,

will call and they all have completely different lines depending on choices you made over the course of the game. The worst part about letting Johnny take over your body is that Johnny won't pick up the phone and talk to anybody because he's not V. And you get some heartbreaking calls where half of those people are like, will you just tell me if you're alive? Like, why won't you call me back?

What's going on? I'm freaking out. And it's really sad. Vic is like, are you too much of a big shot? Like, are you ever going to come back? Like, it's kind of sad if you let Johnny take over. Yeah, that was really hard. But he's starting his life now.

And his life is not the life with those people. It is sad. I'm just but like i get it at the same time yeah it's sad for those that you're leaving behind i like it more when you stay as v and you kind of get to wrap up those phone calls where vick will tell you oh well now that you're out in the desert be really careful don't get any dust in in your ocular implant or if you do here's what you do so there's like some sweet moments like that i feel like that stuff wraps up maybe a little bit better um but it's really fascinating to play through different ways make different choices

and see what they do takamura hates your guts if you do not go with the hanako arasaka ending he tells you to rot in hell um which i think is very funny because he's like a pretty chill dude the whole time and he turns hard on you at the end that is if he's still alive you know i was gonna say is there yeah i was gonna say is there a universe where he's alive because he died in my story so if you remember there's the mission where all the agents find you and takamura and start fighting you and the game tells you to escape the game doesn't make it clear but you can actually go save Takamura and he actually has multiple lines of dialogue he still shows up in the game from that point forward which is pretty

interesting stupid game is making me play like four more times now what's stupid what's stupid game murder this I think for Michael being lawful good, the fact that he didn't go and see if he could rescue Takamura... It's going to bother him. I fell through a floor. Yeah, I did too, but I went back to go get Takamura, or at least look. I didn't even know.

Michael, Michael, Michael. Because the game doesn't tell you. It does not. No, I know. My heart. My heart is sad. I love that old man. He talked about cats on buildings. He's all happy. He's got weird cybernetic things in his neck. I just want to give him a hug.

Well, he would have hated your guts since you went with the Aldecado Pan Am route. Yeah, I think we all agree. He would have told me that if he hadn't died. Yeah. The worst decision is if you trust Arasaka. Because you're going gonna have to plug yourself into makoshi and now your arasaka property i don't i don't trust them at all that's a terrible ending and then right the other arasaka ending is where you know you're gonna die and you launch

out into space to rob a casino but you know you're going to get shot and killed so it's like your last blaze of glory um one thing i will mention before we move on from spoilers because i know this is a long episode when jackie died what did you do with his body i sent it back to his family what'd you do michael do you remember i had i had him sent to vix first okay so you chose the ripper doc i had never chosen the ripper doc option i always sent him to his family where you have the funeral at the coyote and you go and you see jackie's garage and you pick something and you choose like the the tequila or whatever and you pour it out

and you have this whole memorial service if you send jackie to a ripper doc and then choose the arisaka ending you find out that arisaka intercepted his body and put jackie into makoshi you can talk to jackie at the end of the game where he is in makoshi and talks to you see in my ending i didn't go with the arisaka ending but i talked to him at the end. And I don't know if it's different in yours because I talked to him, but he was very confused. He was like, we made it V. And he's like, he's talking to a mirror. Yeah.

And he's like repeating old lines that you've heard from him and stuff like that. And so like, is that different from if you pick the actual Arasaka ending and save him? Or is that the only thing you get? I think you probably saw the same thing. Yeah. But even in this go around, I was still seeing things even though i've i've 100 cleared this game i have every trophy in steam third playthrough i was still discovering brand new storylines i had never seen before uh i've said it a million times but cyberpunk for all its failings it really did shoot for the stars like this game i think it's the most ambitious game ever made.

It's either this or Red Dead 2. These games just tackle so much. The other thing I'll say about that, and I know we've got to start wrapping things up here, is that this entire game is first-person perspective from start to finish. Oh, yeah. And they do some truly incredible things with the first-person perspective.

I can't think of another game that has done everything that Cyberpunk does from that perspective in so many different ways. The immersion that that gives you in this game as you're playing through this story as V and all this other stuff is second to none, to be honest, man. I remember the first time, I don't know, was it Battlefield or some game the guy like got knocked down on the ground and you see him put his hands down and it does like first person yeah while they stand up i remember having that like blow my mind to be like whoa all of cyberpunk is like this you you ride elevators up to your apartment and you're looking down and you see this like the city falling away you know i mean driving around the city

you know all kinds of things it's super just even like sometimes the fixers are the people that you meet you get in the cars with them and you have to go on a ride with them while they talk to you and you can look over at them and they'll look back at you right like you are living this game because of the way that they approached it. It's very hard to convey to somebody. You just have to play it to understand that aspect. And like I said, they have done it better than anybody has done that portion of making you feel immersed in a game by that first person perspective. Well, and they do it so naturally too. Some games would try to point out how good they are. Look at all these cool things you can do.

You feel like you're there. You really do. And also, holy cow, some of the detail when you bring up the inside of the vehicles. Oh, yeah. You look over. And you know how when you have a piece of glass in a car, like the window, it's got that little tiny barcode in the Ford Motor Company? That's on every car. It's insane.

The detail they put into this. The back of the seats where the lint is placed and collects in certain spots i swear i was looking for places where they reused like textures and i didn't see a lot of it like it was very crazily detailed designed yeah it's tough to find any reused content and all the people are all procedurally generated you'll find people wearing wild outfits it's right pretty funny some of them are like children and some of them are like dwarves it's pretty interesting everything that they programmed here okay so i think we're all done with spoilers so back to spoiler free content here open call anything else about cyberpunk to talk about before we jump into community reviews and the rest of our normal segments?

I think the biggest thing really is just the one thing that I didn't mention is just how incredibly well all these characters are fleshed out from design to voice acting to their stories. Early on in the game, this really isn't a spoiler, but you talk to a group called the Maelstromers and they are like as far into cybernetic implants as you can get like the boss of them his whole face has been replaced with like one giant red eye and so it actually is very it's almost like from a horror film but you're talking to them like they're humans and it just goes to show you how deep cd project red went into their character design of like, this world is really built around these characters, and it doesn't let you down. It's one of the best things about this game. It's just the design overall from every aspect and facet of it. Yeah, totally agree. I think the story in this game and the choices you make, all the characters are all completely brilliant. The gameplay can kind of vary depending on what

route you go. But man, this game is really standalone. There's nothing quite like it on the market, that's for sure. All right, so we've talked a little bit about what we think about Cyberpunk. I'm very curious to hear what we're going to get here, Josh, and when these reviews are left. If it's 1.0 Cyberpunk, they're all going to be bad. If it's anything that's new, I think it's going to tend to be better. But just hit us with it what are some community reviews okay so i did pull reviews like we always do i will say i wanted people's thoughts on how cyberpunk was now so i actually excluded anything that was from the beginning um so all of these reviews are from the last six months

nice okay that way it's, you know, how is the game itself as the game was intended to be? How do people like it? That's what I filtered and focused on. So if it's a negative view, which you will hear, it's not, oh, well, this game was super buggy and I couldn't play it on my PlayStation four type stuff because everybody knows how that went in the past. So, all right, this first one is recommended 88 hours on record i have played through this game two times once when it first released just going through the main story i laughed i cried i'd enjoy it i enjoyed it like a movie my second playthrough

was much more fulfilling though i was v i made decisions like i would i got the exact build i wanted i completed all the quests from the maximum interesting characters i achievement hunted the poo out of this game and enjoyed every second of it gunplay is amazing quick hacking is perfect for stealth awesome crafting system with fun weapons i enjoy the adult theme of this game and the conundrums it places you in my only complaint so far is that there just isn't enough money to purchase all the vehicles so i'll probably just glitch or mod the money to get that because i truly feel i've mastered and beaten the game already on very hard difficulty.

The only thing that remains is to finish the rest of the endings, including the secret one. I recommend this game, especially for older gamers who want a great first-person shooter experience, but with a meaningful story and a wonderful sense of accomplishment for fleshing out the game. There are some minor bugs, but they don't break the game or ruin the immersion that badly.

The complaints are overhyped, especially at this update stage. Agreed. The only thing I'll say on this review is that I disagree with him labeling this as a great first-person shooter experience because I touched on that earlier. While there is shooting in the game,

I don't qualify this game as a first-person shooter. It's not Borderlands. Right. It's not. I mean, it does have some action sequences, but that is not the focus of Cyberpunk. I think if you were to call this a first-person shooter, you would also call, like, GTA 5 a first-person shooter.

It's not. You know what I mean? There are parts of it, but it's not the focus, for sure. By the way, I know we gotta move on, so we don't have to discuss this but did either one of you guys buy any cars or apartments in the game yeah i do i do i always i always buy the fancy motorcycle oh nice i got it from wacako and then you can zip around really see i just got a motorcycle i just got uh the one that you get from the funeral yeah you get that one too but yeah but michael which we covered in the spoiler section shows a different route oh no but you still you still get access yeah you still get plays different that motorcycle

okay yeah yeah so yeah i also silver hands his porsche the best though that thing's hard to drive though man the handling's not not if you do it right. All right, all right. I'm moving on here. Okay, so this next one is not recommended. 107 hours on record. Nearly two years and lots of promises later, this game is still a mess. Pedestrians spawning on highways. Every second NPC on the street is the same model

despite high graphics settings. Hollow calls often overlap and cut off quest dialogue or the other way around. Thankfully, nothing game-breaking, but can you really be thankful for that? Is it really okay for a title of this level to barely function the way it is meant to? Okay, I will say, I did not have any of the issues with pedestrians that he had, but you can sometimes have really bad luck where you get a phone call in the middle of a mission, and sometimes the game is smart enough where V says, Hey, really busy judy can i call you back and that's great and sometimes

they just keep talking and you can't understand either yes you have characters talking to you in person while they're talking to you on the phone and they they can sometimes overlap i did get that yeah i forgot when we mentioned the bugs i had that actually a couple times i don't think that's a bug that's just bad luck yeah maybe it's just bad luck so um i i will say you know i don't know what people expect with the character models yes there's some character models that stand out a little bit more and so you do see them a few times throughout the city but like the diversity of the npcs is good enough that it is fine. Like, if you're the kind of person where you're like, look at that! I've passed 4,000 people and those two guys look the same! Like, come on, man. Like, it's still an accomplishment that they had so many NPCs that look

differently. You know what I mean? And how they act as well. It's kind of like, I feel like that's nitpicking. Yeah, and back in 1.0, if you remember, if you did a 360 degree turn it'd be all different pedestrians like the game would render them after you would turn around the game doesn't do crap like that anymore that was the stuff that really did drive me wild where there's no one behind you you commit a crime you turn around and there's a cop point blank sticking a gun in your face right that stuff is banana stupid. Which it comes from. You weren't there. Yeah, but where the game's at, 1.6. You don't get that stuff.

Yeah. All right, this next one's not recommended. 40 hours on record. I have tried to like this game, but it is like a beautifully plated meal that is absolutely tasteless when you bite into it. I find the main story hard to get into, although I really liked the Jackie character.

And the numerous NCPD and Cyber Psycho missions are like playing the same mission over and over again. Rinse and repeat, grind until you have a nosebleed. The Taro and Delamain missions are basic fetch quests. I hate to say the game is bland and boring, but for me it is. I've pushed as far as I can go with it. I did like the Breach Protocol hacking. For me, that was a fun little little mini game, but not enough to recommend a game with this much wasted potential. Beautiful to look at, but not a playground you want to play in. Dude,

if you don't like the cyber psycho missions, they're a hundred percent option. I will say they're not every mission hits a hundred percent. There are some missions where you kind of go like, all right, maybe I wasted my time on that mission. Oh, tell me,

you know? Yeah. I mean, some of them, you know, it's like, they're not all bangers, but there are a lot of bangers out there too. So it's kind of worth slogging through some of the other stuff

to get to the really good stuff. Play the way you want, right? Same with the guns versus stealth. Pick and choose the quests you want to do. Do the side gigs. The side gigs are great. Skip Cyber Psychos, skip Delamain. You don't need to do those.

That's fine. All right. And then this last one is recommended 91 hours on record. It's difficult to quantify just how good Cyberpunk 2077 is. It's like trying to tell someone you've discovered the world's best cheeseburger. We all know what a cheeseburger tastes like. And for the most part, they're all fairly similar. But sometimes sometimes a special magical combination of ingredients comes together in a way that has to be experienced to be believed and understood cyberpunk 2077 is like that it's an open world first person rpg with hacking but it's also so much more it's a sublime experience from the moment it begins to the month to the end of the 35 plus minute credits

no matter what kind of gamer you are or how you like to play, Cyberpunk 2077 caters to you. I think that's fair. I think it's very fair. You play this game. We've said it probably a dozen times now. One of the best things about Cyberpunk

is you play the game the way that you want to play it. Legitimately, you can't break it nowadays. You could break it back then yeah you know but now you just you play how you want to play it plain and simple very nice so that's what the community thinks um now it is time for us to guess the overall score for cyberpunk now i will also quantify this that steam does not break it down into recent reviews so for whatever reason steam for cyberpunk i don't know why only has all-time reviews so i'm going to give you guys a hint and that these reviews are going to also incorporate the

initial release of the game which was very very bad so that's the only hint I'm going to give you. Okay. But we guessed what we think the overall Steam score. I think I won the last one, didn't I? Am I back to champion now? Or was it Paul again? No, no, it was Josh. It was Josh. Was it me? I've only won once and I'm not going to win today. I couldn't

remember. Okay, so I guessed 92%. I thought there's been a ton of hype thought there's been a ton of hype there's been a ton of hype this just shows that i don't cheat either by the way guys you know what i mean that i write down what i think before i go to steam that's gonna be the most wrong answer we've had yet yeah so you wrote it down and then you went yes and found out that they don't have believe it or not i play this game honestly. Oh, I believe it.

All right, so 92% was my guess. Michael? 78. It's just a number that stuck in my head. No idea why. All right, I jotted down 74, so I won't change it. I'll stick with 74. 74. All right, Michael, you win.

You win. The actual was 77%. Holy cow. Not only I won, I was within a dollar. You win. What was it? The actual was 77%. Holy cow. Not only I won, I was within a dollar. You were within a dollar. You did bust, so technically you don't win anything. But we'll get into our rating here in just a minute. Michael's going to get to bring us in here.

But I think that the overall score, there was 419,000 reviews on Steam, by the way, and some change on Cyberpunk. So obviously this is a very popular game. It's a very well-known game. But Michael, you get to take us into this next segment, buddy. Just close your eyes and envision Panam. Get us ready. Hey, Panam. Get us ready.

Hey, Panam. I really wish I would roll the male character so that I could ride off into the sunset as we head to Alamogordo together and spend the rest of our lives. But alas, it just wasn't meant to be. Sorry, Michael. It was not. In Alamogordo, I got to throw that in there again.

If anyone's listening from Alamogordo, by the way, congratulations on having a town name that I know in New Mexico. Nice. All right, Paul, do you want to explain this segment? Sure. So this is Make, Love, Marry, or Murder. This is where all three of us give this game our individual rating. Is this game marriage material?

You highly recommend it. People out there should buy it. It's worth the price. You'll get plenty of entertainment out of it. Is it murder where you do not recommend it? Don't buy this game. Or is it make love where maybe in the right circumstance, it makes sense or maybe play it for a bit and drop it.

But, you know, obviously everyone already knows my rating. It's absolutely a Mary for me. The very first thing I thought when we did our hot takes bonus round, I said, I don't care. I'm going to say it. I like Cyberpunk more than The Witcher 3. I have both of those games in my top 10. I've got Cyberpunk at six, Witcher 3 at seven. I think Cyberpunk gives you so much to do. It's one of the few games that I've done 100% of the trophies in Steam. Played it through three times.

I'll absolutely play through it again. I can't say very much wrong about this game. Other than my very first playthrough. I did think it started slow. But once you get past that. And you kind of learn the world. I think the game totally takes off. It's in that regard a little bit like Witcher 3.

Once you get into the groove. It takes off it's in that regard a little bit like witcher 3 once you get into the groove it takes off and i highly recommend it to everybody all right michael this is an easy mary for me i love this game absolutely am enthralled by this game there's so much to do one of the things i like the most about this game is is truly that you can play it as who you want to be if you want to play it as a shooter game can play it as who you want to be. If you want to play it as a shooter game, you can do that. If you want to make it a sneak around Assassin's Creed type game, you can do that. And I think one of the greatest things about this as well is just how many different ways you can play the game makes it so great. I have 53 hours on my playthrough,

and I think I could still play 100 more hours. It absolutely is incredible to me. I had another really good point that I wanted to make on here, but I forgot what it was. But just know that I'm marrying this game because it's really, really, really, really good.

Everyone needs to play it. I'm curious to see because Josh's first playthrough, he finally said, I realized I don't like this game now without the expectations, without hype, with a couple of patches, where are we at, Josh? So here's the thing. I think that this time around, I was able to actually really appreciate some of the finer points of Cyberpunk. I think my initial playthrough, I was so jaded and upset by what we were promised and kind of what we got. Some of that was my fault for buying into all of the hype at the time.

But I famously have said this game disappointed me more than just about any other game out there. And while all the bugs are fixed and it runs smoothly and all that stuff, taking everything into consideration, this time around, I was able to play this game without the hype, without the expectation, and just say, hey, what kind of game is Cyberpunk 2077? It's a freaking masterpiece, guys. It is, right? It really is.

Everybody that knows how I felt about it initially, I can 100% assure you that this game is one of the best RPG games that I have played. The perspective, the characters, the attention to detail. You live Night City, man. You know what I mean? The story gets a little convoluted sometimes. I don't think it's a flawless story.

You know what I mean? It's still very good, but sometimes it just gets a little weird, man. Constructs and AIs and the, the, the net watch and the, what the heck. And there's so many things you don't understand while you're playing and you

kind of just scratch your head and go, huh? But if you just don't worry about that stuff, just play the game, play it how you want to play it. It's incredible, man. I loved every freaking second

of this game i will also say this it's one of the best looking games i have ever laid eyes on gorgeous it's unbelievably good looking we didn't even talk about the graphics the audio in this game is freaking superb every way that this game is presented is absolutely top notch so if you were like me and you were burned in the beginning and you say i'm never gonna forgive cd project red i understand that like i i get that yeah i'm still a little hesitant but after playing what they made they just released it too early man this game needed maybe another year but two years is proving that that was enough time to put out a masterpiece of a video game yeah for those that say i'm never forgiving cd project red it's time to forget forgive and go back and you weren't

missing out on one of the best video games that has been made in probably the last 10 years. If you're holding a grudge at that point, honestly, like, you know what I mean? It's, it's one of the, so this,

I'm officially, this is a massive Mary for me at this point, which makes me really happy. I wanted to love this game from the very beginning. And I, I hated it in the beginning and now I love it. And so I feel like the circle's complete. Bigger turnaround. this game from the very beginning and i i hated it in the beginning and now i love it and so i feel like the circle's complete bigger turnaround this or no man's sky which game made the bigger

turnaround i'm gonna give that no man's sky started lower i'm gonna give that to no man's sky still because they're still working on it um i think in this case they just released cyberpunk too soon yes what i just got done and what you got done playing you know is is the way that i think they intended this game to be and you know what there's still people that are bitter they're still saying they still over promise what it is today is a lot better but it still wasn't what they promised us and it's like i get it they promised the most revolutionary thing ever. But man, this is pretty close. Dude, the number of people crying that Mantis Claws don't let you climb walls like Hanzo or Genji is so stupid.

Like people are so bitter about it. It's like, let it go. It's not a big deal. Go buy a double jump upgrade and you're fine. It's still a phenomenal game, man. Yeah. Wow. I'm so happy, Josh.

I could cry yeah i was really hoping that you'd really be into it now even i i when i went back and listened to the episode even i was kind of like yeah the hate that this game is getting is deserved it even though i loved it it deserves all this hate and now it's just so nice to see this game in a better place we didn't even talk about mods uh by the way you can do third person v you can do vr mode you can do doom mode where the game is 8-bit and it looks like old doom you can turn the whole game hard cell shaded borderlands mode there's a mod for that flying cars even if you don't really love the way this game looks, which would make no sense because the game is beautiful.

You have a million options to mod it out as well. So, wow, Cyberpunk, what a comeback. Let's go into our last segment, guys. Let's go to the leaderboard and see where this game stacks up. All right, we got just a couple minutes before we hit the two-hour mark. Let's see if we can knock this one out in time. Looking at our leaderboard, we have a total of 80 games that you can see at multiplayerpodcast.com. We have to come to a consensus rating of where do we put this game when we stack it up against others we currently have a top five of red dead 2 god of war overwatch disco elysium and rust we've got some other stuff down in the

middle like around 40 we've got far cry 5 raft killing floor 2 and vermin tide 2 all the way at the bottom we've got some stuff like uh human fall flat Escape from Tarkov, Minecraft Dungeons, The Forest, some stuff like that. I think you could have stopped at the top five. You could have been like, hey, let me tell you the top five and then not go farther than that because I'm going to put it in the top five. Yeah, I was going to say, we all married it. We know it's going to be near the top. Josh, do you see it as a top five oh i think it's funny because i was looking there i legitimately i'm looking at our top 10 i'm going well it's above outriders

it's above satisfactory it's that's above valheim i love rocket league but i get that's a kind of a niche game um so it's above rocket league it's above apex it's above apex League. It's above Apex. It's above Apex. And I kind of hit that, is it above Rust to me or not? And then I started going, well, now our top five is going to be nothing but massive role-playing games. So I started to hesitate. You still had Overwatch in there. I started to hesitate at the five mark. I am easily happy to put it at six. If you guys both want it in the top five five i'm willing to not fight that either so my thing is

based on my individual top 10 it would it would plug in at number two now i know josh likes god of war more than red dead 2 i think those two are very worthy of top two spots i would have no problem putting cyberpunk as high as two. I also have no problem putting it as low as five. I do think it should go above rust. I would say that personally. Now, if CD project red was able to add multiplayer the way they had promised

originally, this game might be like a, no doubt. Number one. And we'll have to wait and see the cyberpunk sequel. I think we'll see that multiplayer i think they envision it being like gta online and if they're able to put out that kind of product it's gonna be every single thing you could ever ask for and i hope that's

what we get so josh is kind of thinking maybe six i was thinking two through five where where are you at michael see the leaderboardboard here is just way out of order for how I would rate them anyways, so I'm not sure where to put it. Because I would probably put, if I were to reorder this, Disco Elysium number one, Cyberpunk number two, Red Dead number three, God of War I haven't played, Rust I haven't played, Overwatch number four or five.

So it's like I wanted above Red Dead, but does it deserve number one? Probably not. You know what I mean? It's a little goofy. So it's a weird order for me, so I don't know where to put it. And then again, Disco Elysium,

I don't know, it's so hard because I think they're both very equal to me. Disco being just the greatest pure RPG I've ever played as far as just like that. It's such a good RPG game. The story is so incredible. It's so polished. but this game adds so much more you know so where do you guys want to put it number three above overwatch that's fine that works for me i i i i would say maybe three or four i would put it above disco disco has perfect execution cyberpunk just does

so much more i feel like i personally really want to give them credit. I feel like I need to be the voice of reason here for you two. You know what I mean? Number one. It's a great... I love it. I love Cyberpunk now. But I don't know...

Oh, man. Disco Elysium is so good. But Cyberpunk is such a bigger... I could... All right. Four is as high as I'll go before I start crying and whining, guys. Just put it number four

so nobody gets mad at what you're doing wrong. If you want to put it at four, that's fine. I won't fuss too much, but if you guys try to go higher than that, I'm going to start fussing. I want to put it at one,

but let's put it at four. All right. I'm totally cool with that. I think we can start to think of these as tiers and not so much three versus four. I think anything in the top five is extraordinarily good. And I think that this and Disco deserve that over Rust. So I agree with that.

Rust is going to be very niche again. It's like Rocket League. You're either going to absolutely love that game you're gonna hate that game cyber cyberpunk i don't see people like being like oh i hate this game you know what i mean like i can't imagine somebody saying that so i think that's totally fair all right lock it in cyberpunk will go in at number four wow i did not see that coming but i'm so glad to see it and then our next deep dive is going to be a game called devour and that will release on halloween and so that was a decision that was made by dr catatonic one of our legendary supporters if you want to check it out it's only five dollars

super cheap game fits along perfectly well in the month of october so if you want check that out and also if you want to be a Patreon supporter like Dr. Catatonic who selected a game, you can see the options for support at MultiplayerSquad.com. You can pledge as low as five bucks a month or as high as a hundred. And even if you do the legendary 100 for just one month, you can pick any game and we will deep dive it. And come follow us on socials at multiplayer pod. And I think we're good to go guys. I think it's time to,

uh, get on out of here. Our longest episode ever. Yeah. Two for the price of one. Yep. Yep. No part one,

part two. We're just releasing the whole thing. Also probably the longest game we've played on this list too. So it's up there longest game this or red dead well unless you count like overwatch which is unlimited yeah it's different yeah all right well thanks so much to everyone out there who stuck around we will see you all on thursday for this week in gaming happy gaming everybody we'll see you next time cheers all right see everybody