Game Difficulty - will Cyberpunk ever be made remotely challenging?

[Oublivae]

How come no one has pointed out that stats do not actually function properly? This has been invisible to virtually everyone playing this game, maybe bar a select few posts that have vanished into obscurity. Stats from armor mods do not work properly.

Stack movement speed mods upon all of your items. You never move faster. Unequip your full critical damage set. You do not do less damage. I am assuming out of a lack of better knowledge that they are snapshotting your highest stat you have acquired up until an internal hard cap is set into place to keep you from breaking the game, as in running faster than you can even bunnyhop. Reddit posts have contemplated on whether it might just be that you have more than one mod equipped, which deactivates all mods. With a lack of information even in-game and what appears to be total ignorance on this issue, I see no immediate fix in the future.

If you are reading this, developers or players, spread the word that armor mods do not work properly just like many perks in the game. Deeper developer interest needs to be placed here because this is a critical flaw in gameplay and I have no idea how this survived playtesting.

 

[CS554]

I specificaly said I wasn't using any build. Just put all points I had (and there is lots of them) into crafting and my weapon of choice - rifles/machineguns plus used mods and cyberware for crits. Thats it. Game "balance" breaks at this point. It takes like 15-20h?

You just described build. Only way not to have a build is not to use any attribute points, mods etc.

What I have tried to do is to find a way to enable more challenges without breaking game for other players. I also provided link to where I have deconstructed an example how CDPR has done exactly that, so that can be used to ketch up something that could actually be implemented and could be lot's of fun.

 

[PsychoNutsPT]

in my opinion , skill that gives you DMG boost on fire weapons shouldn't exist, should be replaced by: Faster reloading / less weapon recoil / weapon sway / weapons swap time, ADS time etc..
Because 1st it doesnt make sense, 2nd dmg (on fire weapons) should be related to the itens (weapons) only not skills.
They have so much stuff that could give you the edge on battle (in the cyberpunk universe), and they just sit and select the easiest stuff do configure and create. Just like dificulties. "wanna chellange?" sure debuff the player stats and buff up the enemies stats. there you go, a chellange. easy way out like i said.
Working on AI and patterns and objects, now that is more hard work, but it makes a waaayyy better game.

 

[XDarkknightx09]

I think a new game + would help alleviate the problem, along with a balance pass across the board. At the same time you can't just make everything a bullet sponge, or you'll get the problem fallout 4 had. Snipers are useless after you hit mid levels.

In Fallout 4 you basically couldn't play a sniping character, because you would need to hit like 40 + shots with a bolt action to to kill any threating creature past early game. A solution to this would be to tie your games stealth and stealth damage together with it's character survivability stats. The more you invest in one, the lower the other one will be. That way if you invest into high damage stealth one shots, any small mistake you make is certain death. Letting a camera see you, letting any enemy see someone get shot, failing a hack, hacking and not neutralizing all effected targets before the hack wares off, seeing dead bodys etc. Once alerted all enemys will know where you are and aggressively seek after you, only the epic rarity memory wipe hack or leaving the area will get you out of certain death.(goons respawn if you leave the area to prevent cheese)Higher threat target should require a little more then one shot, requiring some extra resources to finish them off after the first big hit from stealth.

Here's an example scenario from fallout 4
All human non elite targets can be oneshotted from stealth with a headshot and heavy stealth investment.
Higher threat targets would require investing into traps and mines while also still utilizing your heavy investment into stealth.
So you encounter a deathclaw, you use your stealth to sneak around to place cc traps and damage mines without being detected. You retreat to a safe distance, get you stealth shot in taking him down to 50%, then you let the the mines deal some damage and cc him while you take a couple unstealthed/unbuffed pot shots to finish him off. If you let yourself get detected while setting up traps your dead, you didn't optimize you trap placement/ didn't craft enough traps and he gets around them your dead. In this way you allow higher threat targets to still be very threating without invalidating a build.

This kind of balance using cyberpunks mechanics and resources would be a good way to go for higher threat targets such as cyberpschyos, drones, etc

Edit:
For general goon area clearing this is how the gameplay would go.

Against 2 enemies close together you would need to reboot optics against one, shoot the other, and before the reboot optics wares off pull the bolt back retarget the other quickly and kill him. Then you have to worry about if any other enemys will gain a line of sight on a dead body before you can move them both. So then you might have use the breach protocall reboot optics daemon in dense enemy areas to prevent that(I would lower the duration for this daemon as well so it isn't broken, maybe a cooldown nerf as well) . But then you have to worry about killing all the enemys in the network before the hack wares off. Note basic goons will not get alerted by silenced shots, but any higher threat enemys will unless an apropriate hack is used on them beforehand.(some enemys could resist hacks as well such as cyberpschyos) This would be a really fun and engaging combat loop for high damage stealth builds imo. Requiring that much investment into cool, int,reflex,crafting would also prevent any large investment into body as well, forcing that glass cannon playstyle.

 

[Agent-94]

Wrong game then. It's a looter shooter not a battlefield simulator. Ofc you need unrealistic dmg mechanics.

Unrealistic damage mechanics don't fit in a hard sci-fi setting.

 

[oomwoc]

How much total armor you got by the end? I had 4650 armor on lvl 50 and even basic gonk could kill me with 2 shots, and teleporting police could 1 shot me 100% of the time.

At level 50, I have approximately 6800 armor while standing around doing nothing. With a blade out and running around it jumps up higher, and as soon as I start killing it keeps climbing due to Cold Blood.

To negate enemy damage at level 50, you need around 7000+ armor from what I've read, and it seems to be the case from my experience.

 

[ya1]

Unrealistic damage mechanics don't fit in a hard sci-fi setting.

Heard of Mass Effect? How would it play if everything died in one shot, and you could end every encounter in a few seconds (literally)? Or avoid battles altogether (courtesy of Contagion)? And Mass Effect wasn't even a looter shooter with emphasis on character development and getting stronger to meet increasingly hard challenges. In CP77, there are no challenges beyond about 1/3 of max level. Egro CP77 mechanics are garbage.

Of course you need unrealistic mechanics where enemies tank damage in games of this particular genre, and sometimes you need bosses to tank headshots and rocket launchers. Otherwise the game turns trivial. Especially a game that emphasizes character development.

You know what realistically happens when you get shot? You topple and can't move paralised with pain. Doesn't sound like fun for a video game. Anyway, this is not what happens in CP77 anyway. In CP77 you shoot a armored mech in its toe with a low caliber handgun and it goes flying 50 feet in the sky. So the argument that it's good you can one-shot everything in CP77 because it's REALISTIC... well... nvm.

 

[Johny_Mnemonic69]

You just described build. Only way not to have a build is not to use any attribute points, mods etc.

What I have tried to do is to find a way to enable more challenges without breaking game for other players. I also provided link to where I have deconstructed an example how CDPR has done exactly that, so that can be used to ketch up something that could actually be implemented and could be lot's of fun.

If putting points without a care in the world is making a build I guess you never played any real RPG ever. Enemies should be owning me due to my rly bad life choices.

I will say it differently. Just started killing enemies with mele weapons. I have Blades at lvl 4, no skills put on that, only 4 body. Katana crafted legendary. I kill everyone with 1 normal hit anyway.

Post automatically merged: Jan 29, 2021

At level 50, I have approximately 6800 armor while standing around doing nothing. With a blade out and running around it jumps up higher, and as soon as I start killing it keeps climbing due to Cold Blood.

To negate enemy damage at level 50, you need around 7000+ armor from what I've read, and it seems to be the case from my experience.

in my opinion , skill that gives you DMG boost on fire weapons shouldn't exist, should be replaced by: Faster reloading / less weapon recoil / weapon sway / weapons swap time, ADS time etc..
Because 1st it doesnt make sense, 2nd dmg (on fire weapons) should be related to the itens (weapons) only not skills.
They have so much stuff that could give you the edge on battle (in the cyberpunk universe), and they just sit and select the easiest stuff do configure and create. Just like dificulties. "wanna chellange?" sure debuff the player stats and buff up the enemies stats. there you go, a chellange. easy way out like i said.
Working on AI and patterns and objects, now that is more hard work, but it makes a waaayyy better game.

Yeah, overwhelming amount of skills is just dmg increase. No new game mechanics to keep game fresh through all these hours. Also they could implement dmg boosts through weapon modifications instead of skills.

Sometimes I can't believe they put so much work into characters, narrations, music, graphics etc. and one of the most important things aka skills/perks/progression is dumbed down and broken. No wonder they changed the game genre to action adventure. Even they new they fked up royally.

 

[CS554]

I will say it differently. Just started killing enemies with mele weapons. I have Blades at lvl 4, no skills put on that, only 4 body. Katana crafted legendary. I kill everyone with 1 normal hit anyway.

This sounds broken. I used baseball bat and bare fists a lot (didn't had any cyberware in arms slot) and I sure as heck couldn't one hit kill all tougher enemies with that, not even with char 49, body 20, brawling 14-15 and most of the related perks unlocked. Lower level enemies were different matter and there was critical bleed or something that caused enemies to die instead of getting knocked out.

 

[GerhardA]

So at around lvl 20-25 I'm doing like ridiculous amount of dmg. I can one shot every enemy with sniper/Buria or 2-3 shot with machinegun.
At lvl 50 the games is easier than journalist mode. There is absolutely no balance anywhere.
Enemies have like 12k life and this is how much I do with one shot to the head without min/max skills (didn't touch Cool skill tree).

View attachment 11158370

On a side note I have 4650 defense and it does absolutely nothing. Still 1-3 shots and I'm dead to low threat enemies.

I mean in every single game similar to Cyberpunk, the same issue happens too. In Fallout, once you hit a certain level and get certain gears, you basically become a one-shotting-unkillable-god too. Same thing happens in Skyrim. I played Fallout 4 most recently and it's even worse since there is no level cap. I think it's just inevitable in games like these. At some point the player will just heavily outlevel and outclass the content and everything becomes so easy. Even worse if you minmax.

 

[ReptilePZ]

I do not think that introducing bullet sponges is a good solution to any difficulty concerns - yes, you'd have a more challenging game but the challenge would be cheap. Making enemies deadlier with better AI as well as more enemy variety with a larger skill pool that you need to consider and adapt to would be the way to go, in my opinion. Easier said than done, of course, but it's what it is.

 

[WillyDio]

So at around lvl 20-25 I'm doing like ridiculous amount of dmg. I can one shot every enemy with sniper/Buria or 2-3 shot with machinegun.
At lvl 50 the games is easier than journalist mode. There is absolutely no balance anywhere.
Enemies have like 12k life and this is how much I do with one shot to the head without min/max skills (didn't touch Cool skill tree).

View attachment 11158370

On a side note I have 4650 defense and it does absolutely nothing. Still 1-3 shots and I'm dead to low threat enemies.

I used to joke that there would be an entire generation of kids that would grow up playing CoD games thinking you need to empty 30 rounds of 7.62x39 into one guy to kill him or shoot him 2-3 times in the head for same effect and get totally stunned when 1 shot would be lethal regardless.

FPS utterly destroy any semblance of reality to appease people that try and juggernaut and are 1st to go down every round then scream at the last man standing. So games like CoD and the like, introduced bullet spongology to keep people from quitting and crying as they can run away from a "lethal shot" and shrug it off. Same people that'll now buy aim bot software and try and take "how good they are" seriously when they are literally doing nothing but running around while software does everything.

Ignore the damage dumbers. 1-3 shots should kill anything remotely human. If you like shooting the same enemy 50 times before it dies x 7,976 enemies, go play the current CoD garbage and rage when you go down.

 

[oomwoc]

In the descriptions for at least one gun in the game (in the journal) it describes how with cyberware, shots that would once kill a human instantly no longer did the trick. So they had to make more powerful guns. So theoretically, they could make enemies bullet sponges and explain it with cyberware. Metal skeletons, metal infused skin, full body replacements, etc.

 

[ya1]

I do not think that introducing bullet sponges is a good solution to any difficulty concerns

It is SOME solution. Not a perfect one. An easy one, though. Just raise the health on very hard. Around lvl 20 - raise it about threefold. Lvl 30-40 - raise it 5-10 times. Max level - raise it 10-20 times. And just like that with minimum effort you got a much better game. Also, include an option of enemy level scaling up. These two very simple things would certainly achieve something.

But this won't go far because the difficulty of the game is dumbed down by another bunch of factors:

- Archaic AI. Afaik they used FSM behavior model which is archaic for this kinda games. It just cannot handle complex tasks. Things like team work or strategy - forget about it. I also noticed that registering input is terribly slow. Many a time, I have already flanked an enemy with my melee build, was standing to their side or behind them, but they still opted to initiate the get-to-cover animation.

- Dumb stealth mechanics. It affects non-stealth playstyle, too. You can walk up to four guys in a hostile area from 10 meters away and take them out with a melee weapon one by one, and they don't have time to react becuse of the detection delay (but also the next point contributs to this). Easy solution, though, the detection mechanics should only kick in when you're sneaking, otherwise an instant detection.

- Terribly slow animations. Even without Sandevistan the enemies move terribly slow. It sometimes takes more than two seconds for enemy to finish the unholstering and aiming animation before they actually start to shoot. Taking cover or vault cover animations also look like in slow mo.

- Time dilation and quickhacking. Basically, it boils down to uninteractive and risk-free gameplay. This will always suck balance-wise. These two things are just bad ideas. Nothing you can do about it, really, they'd have to scrap it completely. Zero-cost 10+ second slowmo - where the player is not slowed except the guns - is always gonna be god mode in an open world games focused on short encounters. And quickhacks... just a terrible idea.

 

[Agent-94]

In the descriptions for at least one gun in the game (in the journal) it describes how with cyberware, shots that would once kill a human instantly no longer did the trick. So they had to make more powerful guns. So theoretically, they could make enemies bullet sponges and explain it with cyberware. Metal skeletons, metal infused skin, full body replacements, etc.

Those guns were meant specifically to kill "borgs" by penetrating the metal, which means they only become bullet sponges to the non-tech, non-explosive, and non-sniper weapons. Even without those more powerful weapons, their organic parts are still going to be killable by regular weapons.

 

[ya1]

FPS utterly destroy any semblance of reality

Okay... and?

 

[Agent-94]

I used to joke that there would be an entire generation of kids that would grow up playing CoD games thinking you need to empty 30 rounds of 7.62x39 into one guy to kill him or shoot him 2-3 times in the head for same effect and get totally stunned when 1 shot would be lethal regardless.

FPS utterly destroy any semblance of reality to appease people that try and juggernaut and are 1st to go down every round then scream at the last man standing. So games like CoD and the like, introduced bullet spongology to keep people from quitting and crying as they can run away from a "lethal shot" and shrug it off. Same people that'll now buy aim bot software and try and take "how good they are" seriously when they are literally doing nothing but running around while software does everything.

Ignore the damage dumbers. 1-3 shots should kill anything remotely human. If you like shooting the same enemy 50 times before it dies x 7,976 enemies, go play the current CoD garbage and rage when you go down.

Even with cyberware, most human enemies are not going to need that much ammunition to kill. They still need their organic parts to survive, and weapons meant to pierce armor will go through their metal parts. Even if not penetrated, the blunt force trauma will still get to the organic parts. Only those with bulky bodies (acting effectively as spaced armor) such as Adam Smasher really stand a chance against gunfire, but only to a certain degree (his chest plate can still be pierced with tech weapons and his head is still vulnerable).

 

[CS554]

Only those with bulky bodies (acting effectively as spaced armor) such as Adam Smasher really stand a chance against gunfire, but only to a certain degree.

And that guy really hasn't much organics left but brain.

Been thinking enemy netrunners and there was other topic but I continue here.

Weapon Glitch quickhack could work like in Mass Effect enemy could use overheat to block player (and team) from firing. Solution was to switch to other weapon or use powers. It was all very well prompted to player what was happening and I think something like that could work in this game too.

Cyberware Malfuction could work too.

Sonic Shock wouldn't cause but dramatic effect, perhaps on last mission it might be a bit different.

Cripple Movement might be just something frustrating, don't know about that.

Player Self-Ice would nullifies these, but then that's a player choice.


Enemy Second Heart cyberware could create some interesting scenarios, especially if player doesn't scan or check the scan results to know that enemy has it. I just can't figure out how that could work for stealth players. Same problem with Micro Generator.

Enemy Detoxifier would cause some gray hairs to stealth players too.

 

[Agent-94]

And that guy really hasn't much organics left but brain.

Been thinking enemy netrunners and there was other topic but I continue here.

Weapon Glitch quickhack could work like in Mass Effect enemy could use overheat to block player (and team) from firing. Solution was to switch to other weapon or use powers. It was all very well prompted to player what was happening and I think something like that could work in this game too.

Cyberware Malfuction could work too.

Sonic Shock wouldn't cause but dramatic effect, perhaps on last mission it might be a bit different.

Cripple Movement might be just something frustrating, don't know about that.

Player Self-Ice would nullifies these, but then that's a player choice.


Enemy Second Heart cyberware could create some interesting scenarios, especially if player doesn't scan or check the scan results to know that enemy has it. I just can't figure out how that could work for stealth players. Same problem with Micro Generator.

Enemy Detoxifier would cause some gray hairs to stealth players too.

Those are all much better solutions than bullet sponges and would make enemy netrunners terrifying.

Weapon glitch should only affect electronic weapons such as smart guns and tech weapons (railguns), allowing the player to fall back on purely mechanical weapons (this should work both ways).

Enemy Second Heart should be rare enough that it surprises the player who forgets to scan enemies.

Player ICE should locate the netrunner applying the quickhacks (which would be fair because your position is revealed if you use too many quickhacks in too short of time) in addition to doubling the time it takes for enemy quickhacks to activate.

I still think there should be a separate extreme difficulty mode or challenge mode so the Division/Borderlands/COD/Dark Souls players could have their spongey enemies without the entire game being changed to cater to them.

 

[CS554]

Those are all much better solutions than bullet sponges and would make enemy netrunners terrifying.

Weapon glitch should only affect electronic weapons such as smart guns and tech weapons (railguns), allowing the player to fall back on purely mechanical weapons (this should work both ways).

Enemy Second Heart should be rare enough that it surprises the player who forgets to scan enemies.

Player ICE should locate the netrunner applying the quickhacks (which would be fair because your position is revealed if you use too many quickhacks in too short of time) in addition to doubling the time it takes for enemy quickhacks to activate.

I still think there should be a separate extreme difficulty mode or challenge mode so the Division/Borderlands/COD/Dark Souls players could have their spongey enemies without the entire game being changed to cater to them.

Yep, optional Cybered Up difficulty challenges and like that.