Start working on Game Balance, because that's the biggest thing ruining this game when everything else works.

+
If you imagine a Cyberpunk 2077 where all the technical aspects work perfectly you quickly realize that the game has other very fundamental flaws that currently get little attention, but that would get blasted if there weren't so many showstopper issues that prevent people from even getting so deep into the game that they realize how broken a lot of the systems are.

Game Balance is fundamentally broken in Cyberpunk 2077. There is a bevy of mechanics that are completely overpowered and take all the challenge out of the game because the enemies simply have no defense against them. Even if you avoid using any of those you're liable to break the game simply by trying to optimize your character, because so many of the bonuses you can gain from items are out of control powerful compared to the bonuses you gain from skills and perks. Other mechanics in the game are much too weak to ever be useful and need a significant boost before they could ever be the basis of a build. Avoiding all the broken aspects of the game leaves you with only half the options still available to you, and even there not all guns are created equal, and you'll quickly find yourself pushed toward a small subset of the options.

Mechanics that are plain overpowered:

- Tech weapons are overpowered. There is no two ways about it. The combination of pinging enemies and firing through walls to take them out is simply broken because the enemies in the game have effectively no defense against this. It sounds like a cool mechanic early on, but you very quickly realize that playing a tech sniper destroys the fun of the game to an extreme degree. Every single encounter becomes nothing more than shooting red paper targets that float around in an otherwise irrelevant space, and then looting an empty building. Enemies need to be able to respond to railgun fire in some way. They can't simply stand around and wait until they are all dead. They need to fan out and sweep the facility.

- Quickhacking also becomes extremely overpowered once you can do it through walls. Once you get the legendary version of the Ping Quickhack and you can use hacks through walls it breaks the game in the same way as tech weapons do. The enemies simply have no counter to what you're doing. You can simply sit in a corner somewhere and take them all out without them ever conducting a sweep or going dark or doing anything else that would protect them from getting obliterated.

Basically both of these problems exist because enemies do not have a way to react to being attacked through walls. Enemies need to have a procedure for when their network is compromised and being used against them. They should be able to recognize that this is happening to them when they get attacked or see a friend get taken out through a wall, and go dark in response. They drop off the network so they can no longer be pinged or hacked without a direct visual, but the downside to them would be that they can no longer communicate unless they can see each other. This would make attacking through a wall a powerful way to open an encounter, and if you're very careful allow you to peel the onion by taking out enemies that are alone. However just like all enemies get alerted when they actually see you there should be a point where the enemy group goes "We're being hacked, go dark" and their network disappears. If the enemies have a netrunner they could also have the ability to reset a network or back-trace intrusions once they realize someone is killing them through their network.

Another relatively easy way to fix this issue would be to change ping so that in order to highlight all enemies in a network you need to ping an enemy, not a device. Pinging a device would only highlight other devices. That way you need at least one enemy to actually have a line of sight to you in order to attack enemies you can't see.


- Camera Control is extremely overpowered because again, enemies simply let themselves be killed off. They never realize that they are being hacked through the camera and neutralize it. This isn't quite as overpowered as attacking enemies through walls because you can only do it when you have a camera to use, but it still takes all the challenge out of any given encounter when enemies are visible through cameras. This can be exploited from level 1 in the game. It feels very clever the first time you do it, but then quickly becomes a complete joke.

If an enemy is repeatedly attacked or witnesses an attack on a friend that was targeted through a camera they should shoot the camera. Using camera control to take out a few enemies and have them destroy all their own cameras would still be a powerful move, and it would create more emphasis on trying to cleverly take out enemies that are alone.

- The crafting mechanics are also overpowered. There are too many ways in the game to create a positive feedback loop where crafting and recycling or buying and recycling create more materials or money than you put in. This simply breaks the game. Once you set up your character to do these things several of the major reward and resource systems in the game break down and simply don't apply anymore. It also really sucks the fun out of making a tech character because you want a character who has cool toys, but what you get is simply a character who has infinite resources.

This is pretty straight forward, the system should never create more resources than it consumes. Ex Nihilo needs to be removed entirely, the literal title of the ability should explain why it's broken. You should be able to commission an NPC to do things like upgrade an iconic item to legendary level. What technical skill should let you do is craft and use unique gadgets that you can't get any other way, the same way Quickhacking lets you craft powerful hacks. Don't simply take "having good items" away from all characters that aren't techies to make the stat relevant. Give it some unique techno wizardry, in the style of The Division gadgets.

- Instakill / Tranquilizer hacks and attacks. There are some things in the game that simply cause any enemy affected by them to instantly be defeated. Some of them are quick hacks, another I know of is the tranquilizer missile, but whatever form this kind of mechanic takes, it's overpowered and sucks the fun out of the game. Especially the tranquilizer missile is a hot mess, because it simply makes all other weapons and build considerations moot by being a literal win button. At least with the quick hacks you need to have enough ram to use them, but once you do there is simply no stopping you.

If you can't perform a takedown on an enemy you shouldn't be able to tranquilize or suicide them. Simple as.

Mechanics that are simply underpowered:

- Ricochet is basically a useless mechanic. For one, it doesn't make any sense that the weakest out of the special abilities on weapons has the highest barrier to entry. You need both a ballistics co-processor and a trajectory generator working in tandem to even see where the bullets are going to bounce to, as opposed to nothing at all to use tech weapons, and only a smart-link to use smart weapons. The trajectory generator should just be removed from the game, you shouldn't need it. Secondly ricochets are insanely difficult to use compared to the other weapon effects. While it's theoretically possible to probe around until you find the perfect spot on the wall to bounce a bullet around an enemy's cover, it would be much easier to just fire through it with a tech weapon, toss a grenade, maneuver, or just wait until the enemy sticks their head out. At the end of the day Ricochet is a neat idea but it doesn't work.

This ability works backwards right now. It shows you where your bullets will bounce and leaves it up to you to figure out if that trajectory will intersect with an enemy anywhere. It would be much more playable if instead of calculating trajectories from your gun to anywhere it calculated trajectories from the head of marked enemies to your gun, and then projected an aim marker on the wall where you have to shoot to make it happen. So basically you'd move through a space and see the red arrows come out of enemies and point toward a spot on the wall. Quickly snapping some shots at those spots will cause hits on enemies. That's actually useful and fast paced, as opposed to the complete mess of trying to line up a ricochet with a target you can barely see.

General balance problems:

- The bonuses you get from different sources are completely disproportional for most stats. For example, 15% additive crit on an armor mod is just plain out of control. It's trivially easy to stack 100% crit chance in the game, and then start stacking triple-digit crit damage increases on top of that. You wind up with obscenely huge damage numbers, and all because these bonus items give absurdly huge bonuses. This ruins the game even if you don't use it, because if you want to play a challenging game you're effectively locked out of hunting for awesome gear. Another example is armor. If you install legendary subdermal weave in your character you get +200 armor. An epic level armor bonus clothing mod adds more than that, and so does a high level pair of sunglasses.

I'm not going to make a list of every single bonus in the game that is way too high, because I know that the design team must have a spreadsheet for that kind of thing. What I am going to say is that perks/skills should be the largest bonuses you get to any given stat. Cyberware should be the next category down. Mods should only add very minor bonuses, akin to runestones in Witcher 3. Crit chance should not be additive. Every percentage increase to crit chance should only get you that percentage of the remaining difference to 100%, so that there are diminishing returns on stacking crit chance and you never actually get to 100%. You don't need me to tell you what appropriate numbers for crit chance are, you got it right in Witcher 3, I'm just baffled by why you didn't use the same level of awareness in this game.

- Weapons need to be balanced in general. Even when you're past all of the things that are genuinely game breaking and you're in the realm of items that leave you with a decently challenging gameplay experience you quickly realize that some items are simply way better than others. For example trying to make a character based on LMGs is pretty frustrating compared to making a character based on pistols or rifles. Even within the realm of pistols there are some that are clearly a lot more powerful than others. The mere fact that no weapon seems to require more than 6 body to wield invalidates the idea that very strong characters have access to larger ordnance to make up for their lack of finesse. Essentially even when you're dealing with only the aspects of the game that are generally fun and challenging to use there needs to be more emphasis on character building and meaningful choices over simply having some things be better than others.

Not much to say here, game just needs to acknowledge that the more ways to play the game are a valid the more people are going to find that perfect, magical build that is pure fun for them. That means let people use their favorite weapons instead of having to chase the numerically most powerful weapon.

An appeal:

Please take these issues seriously, because poor balance is one of the biggest things that's screwing up the enjoyment of this game when it actually runs. You don't want to come out of fixing all the technical issues to find that people are now groaning and moaning about how broken the game's general system design is. These are issues that are genuinely ruining the fun in the game, because if you want a real challenge you basically can't use half the stuff in the game. You can't use hacking, you can't use tech weapons, you can't use crafting, you can't hunt for the best gear - all of these things make you so overpowered that the game becomes boring no matter the difficulty.

Enemies seem very competent in a direct confrontation, but are utterly defenseless when you tackle them with stealth and subterfuge because they simply do not know how to defend themselves against it. Even when they are finding their dead friends strewn about they just wait until they get taken out too. They should be sweeping the building, going dark on their network, call for backup, anything that gives them a chance to actually put you in a tight spot instead of being able to murder an entire gang by repeatedly hacking the vending machine behind their hideout.

The potential of a standalone multiplayer title in two years is also something that a lot of people have high hopes for, and bad balance in multiplayer games is even more crippling than in single player games. There you not only face the dilemma of having the game be boring or having items taken away from you if you refuse to use them so it doesn't become boring, but other people can actively impact your experience if their choices are different. Figuring out solid game balance now is going to go a long way toward not having the multiplayer aspect of this game choke with these kinds of problems later, because something like ballistics co-processor vs smart link is going to have to be resolved if we want a game where character building is fun and all choices are valid.
 
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If you imagine a Cyberpunk 2077 where all the technical aspects work perfectly you quickly realize that the game has other very fundamental flaws that currently get little attention, but that would get blasted if there weren't so many showstopper issues that prevent people from even getting so deep into the game that they realize how broken a lot of the systems are.

Game Balance is fundamentally broken in Cyberpunk 2077. There is a bevy of mechanics that are completely overpowered and take all the challenge out of the game because the enemies simply have no defense against them.

I am more concerned with how enemies can instantly annihilate you on Hard mode just by looking in your direction, because the armor, evasion and resistance stats are all bugged to much lower values than they should have.

Even if you avoid using any of those you're liable to break the game simply by trying to optimize your character, because so many of the bonuses you can gain from items are out of control powerful compared to the bonuses you gain from skills and perks. Other mechanics in the game are much too weak to ever be useful and need a significant boost before they could ever be the basis of a build. Avoiding all the broken aspects of the game leaves you with only half the options still available to you, and even there not all guns are created equal, and you'll quickly find yourself pushed toward a small subset of the options.

Mechanics that are plain overpowered:

- Tech weapons are overpowered. There is no two ways about it. The combination of pinging enemies and firing through walls to take them out is simply broken because the enemies in the game have effectively no defense against this. It sounds like a cool mechanic early on, but you very quickly realize that playing a tech sniper destroys the fun of the game to an extreme degree. Every single encounter becomes nothing more than shooting red paper targets that float around in an otherwise irrelevant space, and then looting an empty building. Enemies need to be able to respond to railgun fire in some way. They can't simply stand around and wait until they are all dead. They need to fan out and sweep the facility.

Are you familiar with the concept of the Artorias Great Shield from Dark Souls? It requires no real skill to use and lets you beat almost anything in the game with ease. The thing is, the playstyle trades speed and efficiency for defense. In game design there is this concept known as "trade-offs". As in, if you choose to suck at one thing you can become great at others. Tech weapons + wall hiding are slower than just run-and-gunning, and so they are safer to use. This seems like a fairly straightforward trade-off. Also, enemies *do* try to fan out and surround you. They also have grenades.


- Quickhacking also becomes extremely overpowered once you can do it through walls. Once you get the legendary version of the Ping Quickhack and you can use hacks through walls it breaks the game in the same way as tech weapons do. The enemies simply have no counter to what you're doing. You can simply sit in a corner somewhere and take them all out without them ever conducting a sweep or going dark or doing anything else that would protect them from getting obliterated.

Basically both of these problems exist because enemies do not have a way to react to being attacked through walls. Enemies need to have a procedure for when their network is compromised and being used against them. They should be able to recognize that this is happening to them when they get attacked or see a friend get taken out through a wall, and go dark in response. They drop off the network so they can no longer be pinged or hacked without a direct visual, but the downside to them would be that they can no longer communicate unless they can see each other. This would make attacking through a wall a powerful way to open an encounter, and if you're very careful allow you to peel the onion by taking out enemies that are alone. However just like all enemies get alerted when they actually see you there should be a point where the enemy group goes "We're being hacked, go dark" and their network disappears. If the enemies have a netrunner they could also have the ability to reset a network or back-trace intrusions once they realize someone is killing them through their network.

This actually defeats the balance of the playstyle. The whole stealth+ hacking + tech weapon playstyle is about being slower for the sake of being safer. If quickhacks+tech weapons was no safer than run-and-gun playstyles, it would be objectively inferior, because run-and-gun is much, much faster.

- Camera Control is extremely overpowered because again, enemies simply let themselves be killed off. They never realize that they are being hacked through the camera and neutralize it. This isn't quite as overpowered as attacking enemies through walls because you can only do it when you have a camera to use, but it still takes all the challenge out of any given encounter when enemies are visible through cameras. This can be exploited from level 1 in the game. It feels very clever the first time you do it, but then quickly becomes a complete joke.

If an enemy is repeatedly attacked or witnesses an attack on a friend that was targeted through a camera they should shoot the camera. Using camera control to take out a few enemies and have them destroy all their own cameras would still be a powerful move, and it would create more emphasis on trying to cleverly take out enemies that are alone.

See above.



Mechanics that are simply underpowered:
- Ricochet is basically a useless mechanic. For one, it doesn't make any sense that the weakest out of the special abilities on weapons has the highest barrier to entry. You need both a ballistics co-processor and a trajectory generator working in tandem to even see where the bullets are going to bounce to, as opposed to nothing at all to use tech weapons, and only a smart-link to use smart weapons. The trajectory generator should just be removed from the game, you shouldn't need it. Secondly ricochets are insanely difficult to use compared to the other weapon effects. While it's theoretically possible to probe around until you find the perfect spot on the wall to bounce a bullet around an enemy's cover, it would be much easier to just fire through it with a tech weapon, toss a grenade, maneuver, or just wait until the enemy sticks their head out. At the end of the day Ricochet is a neat idea but it doesn't work.

This ability works backwards right now. It shows you where your bullets will bounce and leaves it up to you to figure out if that trajectory will intersect with an enemy anywhere. It would be much more playable if instead of calculating trajectories from your gun to anywhere it calculated trajectories from the head of marked enemies to your gun, and then projected an aim marker on the wall where you have to shoot to make it happen. So basically you'd move through a space and see the red arrows come out of enemies and point toward a spot on the wall. Quickly snapping some shots at those spots will cause hits on enemies. That's actually useful and fast paced, as opposed to the complete mess of trying to line up a ricochet with a target you can barely see.

This is actually a good idea, I agree that Ricochet is underpowered.

General balance problems:
- Weapons need to be balanced in general. Even when you're past all of the things that are genuinely game breaking and you're in the realm of items that leave you with a decently challenging gameplay experience you quickly realize that some items are simply way better than others. For example trying to make a character based on LMGs is pretty frustrating compared to making a character based on pistols or rifles.

This goes back to the concept of balance. Investing in Body gives you a durability tree (Athletics), whereas reflexes doesn't. This produces a trade-off: players who invest in Body have better defenses, while players who invest in reflexes have more ranged combat options. I would love to have two extra lives on a short cooldown on my pistols character, but I don't.


An appeal:

Please take these issues seriously, because poor balance is one of the biggest things that's screwing up the enjoyment of this game when it actually runs.

I agree. I just think the lack of evasion/armor/resistance due to bugs is a much bigger issue. I hate getting 2-shotted all the damn time because my evasion stat is only 1/45th of what it should be.

The potential of a standalone multiplayer title in two years is also something that a lot of people have high hopes for, and bad balance in multiplayer games is even more crippling than in single player games.

Multiplayer has forced down the throat of countless games. Diablo 3. F.E.A.R. 3. Dead Space 3. Many potentially great single-player games have already been sacrificed on the grotesque heathen altar of multiplayer. Don't make us bring the Inquisition down on your ass.
 

Ziffa

Forum regular
I am more concerned with how enemies can instantly annihilate you on Hard mode just by looking in your direction, because the armor, evasion and resistance stats are all bugged to much lower values than they should have.



Are you familiar with the concept of the Artorias Great Shield from Dark Souls? It requires no real skill to use and lets you beat almost anything in the game with ease. The thing is, the playstyle trades speed and efficiency for defense. In game design there is this concept known as "trade-offs". As in, if you choose to suck at one thing you can become great at others. Tech weapons + wall hiding are slower than just run-and-gunning, and so they are safer to use. This seems like a fairly straightforward trade-off. Also, enemies *do* try to fan out and surround you. They also have grenades.




This actually defeats the balance of the playstyle. The whole stealth+ hacking + tech weapon playstyle is about being slower for the sake of being safer. If quickhacks+tech weapons was no safer than run-and-gun playstyles, it would be objectively inferior, because run-and-gun is much, much faster.



See above.





This is actually a good idea, I agree that Ricochet is underpowered.



This goes back to the concept of balance. Investing in Body gives you a durability tree (Athletics), whereas reflexes doesn't. This produces a trade-off: players who invest in Body have better defenses, while players who invest in reflexes have more ranged combat options. I would love to have two extra lives on a short cooldown on my pistols character, but I don't.




I agree. I just think the lack of evasion/armor/resistance due to bugs is a much bigger issue. I hate getting 2-shotted all the damn time because my evasion stat is only 1/45th of what it should be.



Multiplayer has forced down the throat of countless games. Diablo 3. F.E.A.R. 3. Dead Space 3. Many potentially great single-player games have already been sacrificed on the grotesque heathen altar of multiplayer. Don't make us bring the Inquisition on your ass.
Dead Space 3 was rushed, developers took the action route to sell more,rather than horror aspect and slow paced gameplay.
Diablo 3 had very bad day one launch, where no one where able to play and, the auction house, after those where fixed, it was a solid game, it maraly lost players because the gameplay loop was boring and missed diverse built choices that other game had, like POE or Grim Dawn.
I didn't play fear 3 can't talk about it.

Neither Diablo 3 or Deadspace suffered from multiplayer choices, rather the opposite.


MP on Cyberpunk is like a whisper in the desert.
 
Dead Space 3 was rushed, developers took the action route to sell more,rather than horror aspect and slow paced gameplay.
Diablo 3 had very bad day one launch, where no one where able to play and, the auction house, after those where fixed, it was a solid game, it maraly lost players because the gameplay loop was boring and missed diverse built choices that other game had, like POE or Grim Dawn.
I didn't play fear 3 can't talk about it.

Neither Diablo 3 or Deadspace suffered from multiplayer choices, rather the opposite.


MP on Cyberpunk is like a whisper in the desert.

Dead space 3 went the action route precisely because the developers didn't think horror could work well when you are sharing conversations with friends. They are right, horror works best alone. The thing is, corporate executives didn't care, they just wanted to force multiplayer in anyways, so it went from horror to action, ruining the franchise.

Diablo 3 didn't just have a bad launch. It forced the entire game to require an always-on connection and married the core gameplay loop to the auction house in an awkward way. Both of which were connected to the multiplayer decision.

If you played F.E.A.R. 3 after playing 1 and 2, you would understand why it was the worst offender on the list.
 
Looks like you put a lot of thought and hard work into your post which is very well done .

However I have to disagree with the whole thing

I don't see anything you posted as a problem .
I think fixing anything gameplay ( shooting stuff) should NOT be priority
I hope they don't make multiplayer games as I prefer single player titles.

This is my personal priority list

New story , new romances , adding more content to existing romance, more story cut scenes , conversations, FIX CLOTHES so we can wear what we want! > - combat , multiplayer , optimizations , combat balancing etc
 

Ziffa

Forum regular
Looks like you put a lot of thought and hard work into your post which is very well done .

However I have to disagree with the whole thing

I don't see anything you posted as a problem .
I think fixing anything gameplay ( shooting stuff) should NOT be priority
I hope they don't make multiplayer games as I prefer single player titles.

This is my personal priority list

New story , new romances , adding more content to existing romance, more story cut scenes , conversations, FIX CLOTHES so we can wear what we want! > - combat , multiplayer , optimizations , combat balancing etc
Don't forget that this is an FPS story driven game.
Lacking any proper balanced to the FPS mechanic will ruin everything else the game has to offer.

If i wanted to focus on a story driven only, i would have bought a visual novel.

Fixing bug that broke progression and performance on console, is no doubt the main focus of Devs.
After that, will came everything else, at LAST, we could use some content, but before getting to that, they must assure the barebone mechanic works as intended.
What i'm sayng is, there is a lot to do before going into adding more content or DLC.
 
Yes, I absolutely agree.

Balance is atrocious - and I refuse to believe anyone actually tested combat with a maxed out character.

I can't enjoy the game at all, because I can't even find a way to reasonably gimp myself. When you struggle to find a challenge on the hardest difficulty in the game, you know something is very seriously wrong with it.

I can't use ranged silent weapons. I can't use hacking on enemies after level 5-6. I can't use Tech weapons. I can't use stealth. About the only way to get even the remotest of challenge on Very Hard is to go in guns blazing and staying close to the enemy, because they can't effectively seek you out when you're at a distance.

I know a lot of people don't have any real interest in game balance, and they just want to breeze through combat without ever considering the finer mechanics - and they might not even realise there's much of a problem, because they have no interest or motivation to make informed progression choices. Some people play this as a straight-up story shooter - and that's cool. There should be room for them as well.

Obviously, if you don't invest in your character development, combat might seem harder - because you're doing a tenth of the damage you could be doing. That's a separate issue.

However, this is not developed as a shooter and it's not meant to be a game where your choices aren't important.

If you read the description of "Very Hard" - it's clear as day that CDPR wanted that difficulty to mean you HAVE to be careful in how you develop your character, and you HAVE to make informed progression choices.

I do expect modders to do the most work here, because CDPR don't have a history of understanding or even caring much about game balance. But the fundamentals are tied into the engine itself - and there's no way modders can implement proper AI responses - or, at least, it will take many months for them to even attempt such a thing.

That's why I hope CDPR will at the very least try to implement a more aggressive and efficient AI - and tweak reactions to stealth and non-visible player offensives so they respond MUCH faster - and they move around with a lot more speed.

Being shot through a wall by the player should result in the NPC aggressively moving away and trying to find the player. Sitting down and waiting to get shot some more is about the dumbest response imaginable.

For stealth hacking - or any ranged attack from the player really - the AI should immediately start searching aggressively for the player - and it makes no sense that they have to wait until an actual body is found, when their buddies are being attacked 5 feet away from them.

Inhalers need to have cooldowns - because you can easily spam your way out of almost all damage, unless it's instant one-shotting.

I could go on. This is perhaps the worst case of imbalance in any AAA RPG I've ever seen - and I was there for Daggerfall.
 
I agree with your assessment of the crafting, skills/perks and hacking in terms of enemy reaction (especially being hacked via camera) but Im mixed on gun balance and insta-kill hacks. I remember playing the pen and paper when I was young with my friends and our characters had some insane stuff with the rule additions. My guy had a actual railgun you mount on your shoulder that could destroy a tank in a single shot and it had tracking assistance. I think having overpowered weapons is part of Cyberpunk and some things being objectively better is part of it too.

The legendary clothing mods that boost weapons should be weapon mods though because they are far too overpowered being in clothes. I don't mind if a gun can get >100% crit if you mod it :) But giving all guns >100% crit is game breaking
 
Dead space 3 went the action route precisely because the developers didn't think horror could work well when you are sharing conversations with friends. They are right, horror works best alone. The thing is, corporate executives didn't care, they just wanted to force multiplayer in anyways, so it went from horror to action, ruining the franchise.

Diablo 3 didn't just have a bad launch. It forced the entire game to require an always-on connection and married the core gameplay loop to the auction house in an awkward way. Both of which were connected to the multiplayer decision.

If you played F.E.A.R. 3 after playing 1 and 2, you would understand why it was the worst offender on the list.
yup i can confirm horror works best when you are alone , be it games or movies. If you are in group its fake scare and trollfest laughing matter, you just talk about burger prices and whats the latest meme you saw herpity derpity, but if you play alone or watch movie alone its way scarier, and if it's VR it can double and triple the experience.
Horror legit scares are solo experience because its human instinct. Humans feel safer in groups
 
I agree with your assessment of the crafting, skills/perks and hacking in terms of enemy reaction (especially being hacked via camera) but Im mixed on gun balance and insta-kill hacks. I remember playing the pen and paper when I was young with my friends and our characters had some insane stuff with the rule additions. My guy had a actual railgun you mount on your shoulder that could destroy a tank in a single shot and it had tracking assistance. I think having overpowered weapons is part of Cyberpunk and some things being objectively better is part of it too.

The legendary clothing mods that boost weapons should be weapon mods though because they are far too overpowered being in clothes. I don't mind if a gun can get >100% crit if you mod it :) But giving all guns >100% crit is game breaking

Hey Templar.

Do me a favor and find the "Tethering" bug in CP2077, pretty please! :)
 
Are you familiar with the concept of the Artorias Great Shield from Dark Souls? It requires no real skill to use and lets you beat almost anything in the game with ease. The thing is, the playstyle trades speed and efficiency for defense. In game design there is this concept known as "trade-offs". As in, if you choose to suck at one thing you can become great at others. Tech weapons + wall hiding are slower than just run-and-gunning, and so they are safer to use. This seems like a fairly straightforward trade-off. Also, enemies *do* try to fan out and surround you. They also have grenades.

The difference is that with the Greatshield of Artorias keeping the shield raised and waiting to get cheap shots in isn't the most efficient way to play even while you have the shield equipped. You're tempted into lowering your guard to get more hits in on a moment to moment basis. The shield can be considered a training tool, giving players the confidence to approach unknown enemies, and start learning their attack patterns. This is substnatially different from how Tech Weapons and 20 int Quickhacks behave, because with those the game doesn't tempt you into taking greater risks, it simply rewards the most boring risk adverse playstyle possible.

Tradeoffs are great, but no system should ever pigeonhole you into a playstyle that has neither challenge nor temptation. Even if I wanted to take greater risks on a tech sniper or 20 int netrunner I would have to abandon the capabilities of my character. The game doesn't reward me for doing so, on the contrary, in forcing me to ignore capabilities I paid stat and perk points for I get punished for wanting to take greater risks. The game just doesn't give you an option to make a high end netrunner who's less cheesy but more devastating.
 
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Don't forget that this is an FPS story driven game.
Lacking any proper balanced to the FPS mechanic will ruin everything else the game has to offer.

If i wanted to focus on a story driven only, i would have bought a visual novel.

Fixing bug that broke progression and performance on console, is no doubt the main focus of Devs.
After that, will came everything else, at LAST, we could use some content, but before getting to that, they must assure the barebone mechanic works as intended.
What i'm sayng is, there is a lot to do before going into adding more content or DLC.

Don't forget that this is an FPS story driven game.[/B]

I disagree in your interpretation and there is a quote form the dev out there some where that disagree as well.

Lacking any proper balanced to the FPS mechanic will ruin everything else the game has to offer

I disagree making the changes you propose would ruin the game for me .

If i wanted to focus on a story driven only, i would have bought a visual novel.
maybe you bought the wrong game
I think you have mistaken this for The Division , Destiny, GTA etc


Fixing bug that broke progression and performance on console, is no doubt the main focus of Devs

I completely disagree with them wasting dev time on last gen condoles to being with.

After that, will came everything else, at LAST, we could use some content, but before getting to that, they must assure the barebone mechanic works as intended.

we seem to disagree on what that is.


What i'm sayng is, there is a lot to do before going into adding more content or DLC.

I agree with that in principled but not for reason you stated above,.
 
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Enemies seem very competent in a direct confrontation, but are utterly defenseless when you tackle them with stealth and subterfuge because they simply do not know how to defend themselves against it. Even when they are finding their dead friends strewn about they just wait until they get taken out too. They should be sweeping the building, going dark on their network, call for backup, anything that gives them a chance to actually put you in a tight spot instead of being able to murder an entire gang by repeatedly hacking the vending machine behind their hideout.

Concur. You've made some really good points about AI in this post OP.
I've been having fun killing stuff, but at the same time I don't think the AI takes an active enough role in self preservation (either offensive or defensive).
 

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i agree with mostly everything.
game runs fine for me, but balance and abusable combat ai hurt it a lot.
for stacking boni with armor or weapon mods, i think a stacking penality could be a good idea.
like, first bonus 100% effective, second bonus (of the same type) 50% effective, third bonus of the same type does not do anything. doing it this way would allow for powerful mods while at the same time prevent stacking the boni so high it breaks the game.
 
This whole system is fundamentally broken on so many levels that it's hard to figure out what they were even going for. There's SO many perks that are just completely pointless simply because fights don't last long enough for them to matter. It's like they originally had a bullet-sponge combat but then realized it's dumb af but never bothered to rework the perks and now everything apart from like SMGs oneshot everything.
 
If it was just a few things that were overpowered I would avoid using them and then just use the weaker stuff for a challenge. Unfortunately your post doesn't seem to cover the simple fact that every weapon and build is OP in this game for one simple fact. The way enemies scale in this game is just simply getting more damage & armor. You fight the same enemies (albeit they look differently but their behavior/mechanics/weapons are the same) as you did at level 5, at level 20.

Meaning if you were able to kill enemies at level 5 just fine with barely any perks, then every time you get a new perk, or a more optimized weapon/armor,the gap between you and the enemies gets wider and wider, cause you're essentially fighting the same types of enemies who do the same thing as they always did, but you're more equipped to handle it.

Your post doesn't address the fact that everything in this game is overpowered.
It's important that people understand this, because that means the solution to fixing the game has to do with the enemy variety & adaptability.
Cyberpunk takes RPG mechanics without understanding that RPGs don't just have a progressive system for the player, but the enemies you face evolve and become more complicating to kill. They gain things such as immunities and their own sets of abilities that get more dangerous the further you get into the game.

In Cyberpunk the only one that grows is you. CDPR is taking RPG mechanics from other games without understanding why they're there. Fixing the games balance requires more than nerfing weapons.
 
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I kind of cover it in the part about bonus stacking getting totally out of control. But yea, this thread is more concerned with specific mechanics that are overpowered even when you don't have any gear backing it up.

The damage scaling out of control is definitely an issue with this game, but this game should be high lethality. There is nothing inherently wrong with enemies going down quick, but they need to be equally lethal to you.

There is definitely a sense in this game that the enemies got shot in the leg at the start of the arms race.
 
The game needs enemy variety if it is ever going to be challenging than just having damage scaling fixed. Because even if you scaled down the damage it doesn't prevent the players from using cheese tactics to overcome the AI. Even if they improved the AI it's a singleplayer game, meaning players will find a strategy to beat the AI.. and because the game lacks enemy variety, that winning formula strategy will work on all enemies.. thus the game becomes easy again.

Let's say they tone down the damage dramatically. But you find you can still shoot them through walls. So the problem is still there. Let's say they improve AI to where they can find you and you can't shoot through walls anymore. Players will just change to the next cheese tactic.

But if the game had lots of different enemies that require different approaches it means even if you found a way to exploit an enemy, it may not work on the other enemies. Then this opens up to many possibilities such as combinations of different types of enemies. So your cheese tactic might work on enemy type A> but if they're together with Enemy type B & C it becomes hard/impossible to do the tactic.

You come up with a tactic for enemy A, B & C together, but then you go against a group of enemies B, D, and G... and it's different each time meaning each fight you go into you're dealing with different types of AI that require different strategies.

When players can't find a way to cheese the AI, that makes them lethal in itself. No matter how much they nerf the perks, tone down damage or fix the AI.. this game will still struggle to have satisfying combat when every enemy is identical from each other.
 
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