Okay! Sleep didn't work out so well. Brain workin' hard, thinking about PAX Aus. Ryan sent me a few pictures of the food he ate, and they were quite welcome, because Melbourne must be one of the best cities to eat things in the entire world. To prove this, I went to an online site - a "web page" - listing twelve or so of the best restaurants in town, and even after going to said town once a year every year for ten years, I'd never heard of any of them. But I could make my own list of twelve that I'd put up against anywhere I've ever gone. Roster's deep out there.
Morak is having the time of his life in Phantom Liberty, and he bounced completely off the original game when it came out. He was playing it on the Playstation 5, and I can't speak to any of the particulars because the only time I have a Playstation controller in my hand is when it's hooked up to my computer. I don't have the new good one and my 4 no worky. But apparently, for enough of the Playstation audience, it was fucked enough that Sony removed it from their store as you'll recall.
No longer. He was going to start fresh, something that's broadly recommended because they, um, basically re-did character progression altogether, but he had the choice to start right at the expansion and he did so. He's spent a lot of time in there already, playing via remote play because his eldest got him super sick, and he might actually be obsessed. Have there been negative cognitive externalities? I mean, yeah.
I played it when it first came out, basically sprinted to the end, and at least for me - on a decent computer with last year's hardware -- I didn't experience the technical issues I'd read about. That wasn't the issue. The issue for me is that I grew up playing it with my friends as a table, thought about what it would be like to live in Night City all my life essentially. If you aren't familiar with my heroic origin story, we were the type of Christians who use terms like "The World" and "Secular" to denote the battlefield upon which we waged perpetual spiritual war. D&D was right out, as Satan in his immortal ingenuity was using the game to teach children real spells. So where many gamers of my vintage place Dungeons and/or Dragons in their identity scaffold, I place Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk 2020.
I spent a lot of time thinking about the imaginary musical genre Chromatic Rock and what it might sound like. I didn't hear it in there. Music is… sorry to be this person, usually I'm not sorry but I'm just gonna feel it this time, but music is really important in the RPG. And CD Projekt Red understands this at some level, because they named their quests after songs. Right? Somebody knew. And then they forgot.
Judging from the response to Phantom Liberty, it seems like it's probably time to add Cyberpunk 2077 to the list of "profound redemptions," currently occupied by the likes of No Man's Sky, Diablo 3, and Final Fantasy XIV - this last one literally entitled "A realm reborn." I thought the gameplay was fine, even initially - it was the story and the worldbuilding I always maintained was unpatchable. But technically this is DLC, right? I'd love to continue being right retroactively.
(CW)TB out.
