I wrote a thing on Reddit about the smasher fight. Regardless of the general point re sniper rifles (which I think are correct as stated because the loading time compensates), Smasher needs to level with the player or at least have several slices of life rather than being one shottable at high levels, if only because he's supposedly close to 100% cyberware and the final fight, AND that a lot of thought seemingly went into that fight (which I've never seen as I played it at level 50).Even when they start one-shotting your level mobs at 1/3 of char progression (lvl20-25) and exceeding that dmg by five orders of magnitude at max level?
Exactly. And unless it's the easiest difficulty you really shouldn't have. You still killed the final boss with some stats at entry level (200 armor is pretty much negligible as armor is a percentage dmg reduction scaling linearly - another example of amateurish design - and 200 translates to about 3% dmg redux). It just supports my own argument. Balancing in CP is a hot mess. I'm not sure how scaling works on Smasher (afaik bosses have a different scaling mechanic than mobs), but it is obviously very very wrong.
By the way, I'm not criticizing here, I am genuinely interested as I study games academically and I wrote my master thesis on popular culture in games and how people receive it across different cultures. if you love the game so much (and you surely do for you wouldn't be defending it if there were no emotions involved) why in the world would you rush through it without doing any side content or attempting at developing your character?
Again, this is very arguable from the point of view of gameplay development. Every game must be balanced. Not just video games. It is in the definition of "game." All games must be balanced to provide entertainment. Being single player has nothing to do with it.
It is hard to arrive at any conclusion without doing any proper research, but taking these forums as a sample, it is stunning how many people find it entertaining - the total uninhibited god mode, player noninteractivity, and general - imo - painfully trivial gameplay given as default on the hardest difficulty in CP77.
By slices of life I mean the classic videogame conceit that you can only hit a boss for a certain amount of life at a time, after which he switches into his next phase.