Is this game an rpg?

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Depends what you define as "RPG".

A lot of people here seem to define it as pnp where you play your character doing whatever you want. By that definion the only virtual RPG is Dwarf Fortress adventure mode.(If you have not tried, try it. It's by far the best "rpg" out there)

Elders scrolls, fallout, baldurs gate, Ultima, none of these are RPG by that standard.(You still play the guy destined to do X)

Now if you include these games as RPG this game is a RPG for sure. Because then RPG is not playing a character with a destiny, but how you reach your destiny. And in this game you have plenty of ways to do so: Stealthing , hacking, meleeing, shooting, etc.

With that said this is not a RPG game. Is a Open world RPG. Meaning the focus is not in your story, is in the world and how you interact with it.(Otherwise the world is just a hub for mission, and Mario 64 with the castle is a open world game)

Now... that's something we can discuss. The game managed to make an interesting world. A shame you don't have ways to interact with it aside from missions.
 
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You ever fought Trauma Team at level 15? You clearly haven't. Also you're literally lying about slaughtering your way through every zone. High level enemies are located at City Center and Heywood. There is no way you'd easily slaughter them with low leveled gear, and then find and equip gear from those zones because they have level requirements. Character stats ARE important. Oh wait you must've been playing Easy or Normal, in which case your opinion is disregarded.
Yes, I've attacked trauma teams and cops right from the start.
And I've done missions in City Center and Heywood and done just fine with weapons that I've collected along the way. Headshot with a pistol murders stuff easy. Especially if it's from stealth. As long as you keep picking up new gear, you'll be fine. Of course you can also rely on quickhacks which just makes the game a joke.
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Yup, now you tell it, this is blatant. Maybe Johnny doesn't show himself enough in side stories ?
Well, it's also part of the "OMG I've got no time left, must rush" from the main story to the "tra la la I've just sitting back and enjoying life" from the side stories. One makes you feel like everything is a race against time, the other makes it seem like you're just enjoying the merc life.

Honestly, I'm finding the non-story stuff to be more entertaining.
 
I can't think of an easy way to solve this problem. It's a ludonarrative dissonance created by the freedom to intermingle side quests with main quests. They could throttle down on the urgency to solve the chip problem? Add more Johnny Silverhand to more gigs and side activities? No idea. The side stories give me the freedom to act the way I want to act as V. The main story does not have that luxury and can't really reflect on the choices that I make throughout the game. How is the main quest supposed to know, if I'm a Pacifist Hacker with a mean streak, or a horny blood-thirsty Solo with a heart of gold?
The ln dissonance you see is because side quest & main quest are not linked (if I understand well, you refers to rpg/videogame gamedesign theory, which I know a little, as I listened to hundreds of podcasts about that). So they doesn't seems to be in the same world.

Main problem with Johnny is :
a- Keanu Reeves's time is not cheap
b- It's the main cure to that (in my opinion).

He should at least SMS the player at some point :/
(or hack stuff in the player's environnement)
 
Honestly, I cannot understand people who say that it is not an RPG because they cannot interact with all the inhabitants of night city. Was this possible in Gothic 2, Final Fantasy and so on? No. And here, we have lots of NPCs which create an amazing atmosphere as long as you do not expect a jackie-like character behind everyone.
A big thing is that you're generally referring to JRPG's, which are honestly their own thing (and often not even considering real RPG's by many people because they're just a linear storyline that you follow with no choices).

A game like Gothic is an RPG because your character's stats make ALL the difference. Your skill as a player didn't matter if your combat skill was low, you wouldn't hurt enemies at all. So character skill was key.
Plus you had TONS of choice and consequence. You had lots of options that greatly affected the story and the path you took.

Final Fantasy is a JRPG. So while there's stats, and they matter as you have to grind up to fight bigger enemies, you also had no choices or impact on the story. You were basically just following a set story and doing fights along the way. Stopping to grind as needed.

Cyberpunk has player skill trump character skill. Your character is irrelevant for the most part. It's all based on YOUR skill as a player, your FPS twitch reflexes. That's what determines success. Your character's skills can boost your playstyle, giving you some more damage or easier stealth or whatever... but it's still wholly dependent on you as a player.
And Cyberpunk doesn't really have any choice or consequence for the most part. Oh, you can make some minor choices, which are most often just down to "do the quest or not do the quest". But you don't really change the story at all. Everything comes down to the same ending choices regardless.
So overall Cyberpunk is an open world (very bad open world) shooter with some RPG elements. I wouldn't even call it an Action RPG like Fallout or Elder Scrolls because there's just not enough RPG elements or choices in the game to call it such.
It's more like a shooter such as Far Cry, where you've got your story you're following, and it's basically choosing what order to wipe out bandit camps in.
 
Yes, I've attacked trauma teams and cops right from the start.
And I've done missions in City Center and Heywood and done just fine with weapons that I've collected along the way. Headshot with a pistol murders stuff easy. Especially if it's from stealth. As long as you keep picking up new gear, you'll be fine. Of course you can also rely on quickhacks which just makes the game a joke.
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You haven't fought them in higher level areas, because it's impossible with a 30-40 level gap. You cannot 1 shot an enemy that's 30 levels higher no matter what kind of stealth build you have. Armor scaling is too high.
 
Well CDPR removed the title from its promotional blitz so.....

Its a bare bones RPG at best. The problem is that its barebones a lot of things. Bare boned RPG. Bare boned open world. AI so bad its a bare boned shooter. yada yada yada.

Its so pretty though, and has a good story. I feel bad for the developers, programmers and all. Management and share holders really screwed them over.
 
A big thing is that you're generally referring to JRPG's, which are honestly their own thing (and often not even considering real RPG's by many people because they're just a linear storyline that you follow with no choices).

A game like Gothic is an RPG because your character's stats make ALL the difference. Your skill as a player didn't matter if your combat skill was low, you wouldn't hurt enemies at all. So character skill was key.
Plus you had TONS of choice and consequence. You had lots of options that greatly affected the story and the path you took.

Final Fantasy is a JRPG. So while there's stats, and they matter as you have to grind up to fight bigger enemies, you also had no choices or impact on the story. You were basically just following a set story and doing fights along the way. Stopping to grind as needed.

Cyberpunk has player skill trump character skill. Your character is irrelevant for the most part. It's all based on YOUR skill as a player, your FPS twitch reflexes. That's what determines success. Your character's skills can boost your playstyle, giving you some more damage or easier stealth or whatever... but it's still wholly dependent on you as a player.
And Cyberpunk doesn't really have any choice or consequence for the most part. Oh, you can make some minor choices, which are most often just down to "do the quest or not do the quest". But you don't really change the story at all. Everything comes down to the same ending choices regardless.
So overall Cyberpunk is an open world (very bad open world) shooter with some RPG elements. I wouldn't even call it an Action RPG like Fallout or Elder Scrolls because there's just not enough RPG elements or choices in the game to call it such.
It's more like a shooter such as Far Cry, where you've got your story you're following, and it's basically choosing what order to wipe out bandit camps in.

This is not true. After the First story Act in CP, there are a lot of enemies you cannot beat with a low level. Or at least it is difficult. On the contrary, I remember beating high level npcs in gothic by practacing the combat system.

What were the big story choices in gothic? Not that you get me wrong, I love gothic but i remember the Ending to be linear. Well, of course, you could choose a fraction.
 
Yes. It's very simple. You're playing a role and have deep level up mechanics (tons of perks tied to attributes, hit points, a "magic" meter represented by your RAM, etc). Enemies are leveled too, to the point where you have to cheese them (run over them with a car or something) if they are at a significant higher level than you. Otherwise, you don't have much of a chance. Shooters and action games never have enemies that are that much stronger than you. If they are, they have special glowy spots you shoot at to weaken them.

It's not an action game. It's not a shooter. It's not a strategy game. Action and shooting mechanics are definitely secondary to the rpg elements (which include everything I said about the level up mechanics, and a very extensive script full of dialogue choices). The dialogue options in action/shooter games are usually very scant, or your character's lines are all scripted with no choice in what you say.

It's not on the level of a tabletop rpg, but no video game ever made is.

It's still an rpg video game. These kind of arguments are really nitpicky. It reminds me of people who put music into all different kinds of sub-categories, and get their panties in a wad if you dare call it something other than what they, being God, have designated it.

"It's not metal. It's grindcore." Yeah, whatever dude.
 
This is not true. After the First story Act in CP, there are a lot of enemies you cannot beat with a low level. Or at least it is difficult. On the contrary, I remember beating high level npcs in gothic by practacing the combat system.
Yes you can, you just need to keep picking up better weapons. I watched my wife do, and she's TERRIBLE at gaming. lol
Enemies do start taking longer to kill unless you find weapons that do lots of single shot damage. Because it's not that enemies are getting a lot more health, but rather that they're getting too much armor. So every shot is being greatly weakened, the key is getting a weapon that can trump their armor. Switch from a pistol to a revolver, and you'll see a massive difference in damage.

What were the big story choices in gothic? Not that you get me wrong, I love gothic but i remember the Ending to be linear. Well, of course, you could choose a fraction.
You got to side with different factions, each having their own huge storyline and quest arcs, which also led to different special abilities you could get.
While all the pathways came to the same ending, how you got there was VASTLY different.

Meanwhile in Cyberpunk, the choices make no difference. With the flathead, you're fighting Malestrom or Militech (or possibly both if you really try)... which is basically the exact same thing, fight a bunch of enemies getting out of the enemy base. Most things are like this, your choices either make no difference at all, or they just put a different skin on the enemies you're fighting anyway. You don't get branching story paths or anything. You get a linear set of missions you have no control over.

And I could have accepted that if the RPG elements were key to gameplay, but they're not. So unless you have choice and consequence OR strong RPG elements that define how the game functions (rather than just player reflexes)... you can't call it an RPG. Generally you want BOTH. I might have called it an Action RPG if there were at least choices, but it's just a shooter like Far Cry or Rage 2.
 
things I'd do first are:

Take away the 6 months forward. let me seamlessy enter Night City and experience the characters that are a but cut cinematic for real now.
I liked that flash forward, in terms of naratolgy.
But I also understand what you tell here, this is character building. The problem is with what happens next to some of your buddies, you can't make the player too emotionnaly connected.
That would make a fine DLC I think, because that sort of stuff would be neat, after the game is finished.

Don't give me all the map discovered immediatly in the form of activities and contacts, Let them come out little by little, to also promote exploration.
I agree with this. The phone is spaming the hell of the player by the moment she/he gets a car.
1 call / 10 minutes max, imo or even better :
40% - 0 call
40% - 1 call of the current neighbouhood, if remaining calls of the list of calls in that territory
16% - 2 calls of the current neighbouhood, if remaining calls of the list of calls in that territory
4% - 3 calls of the current neighbouhood, if remaining calls of the list of calls in that territory
Roll each 10 minutes.

Mission shouldn't highligth the whole map at once like that.
In GTA:VC (which I played maybe 500 hours when I was young), the max number of activities you could have at once was something like 10 missions + 10 activities, and this felt rigth. I don't know what R* made for last gen GTAs.

I'd mod the phone imo.

Also, this would need a planning that is not that hard to design (withthe game designer star they have).

Make exploration and travel time meaningful by having random events or even quests that trigger or appear as an opportunity without even showing them to me on the map from MILES AWAY. This killed totally interest and killed the only functioning part this game has (the Structure of the City from a 3d model perspective).
I'm not sure that's very much different to TW3 there. CP77 is like TW3, with a lot less "useless" activities to do (and also : less animations, less life, almost no fauna - before the 1st ripperdoc, I saw 1 cat -scripted?- 50h in the game no other one, no dynamic meteo, etc).

Don't threat V as the next big thing from hour 0, let us get there little by little.
This is flash forward related.

And actually make use of the fact that you wasted AN ENTIRE NCW episode flexing about how you put names in the streets of NC, like we would even care in this game since it has no reason for us to remember them.
You can rememebr them ifyou tae the time to pause and read stuff, actually.

Even with these just few tweaks, the game would have been a MUCH better experience.

After that you start touching and refining systems like AI, traffic , enemies and so on that currently aren't even implemented at an APHA stage. (yes the UI as well).
imo, most urgent gamedesign stuff to fix (befor this) is AI and driving. Because these makes the "present" of V.
What you tell about is super urgent too, but #2, for me. It is urgent too because it talks about the goals the player has or makes as V.

Let's hope the game will be as, or more, open than TW3, because late mods were awesome :)
 
Sort of, depending on how you define it. Are you playing a role with dialogue choices? Yes. Are there levels and stats? Not very involved ones, but yes. So in those respects it is an RPG. Do the action mechanics outweigh the RPG elements though? Probably yes.

To be honest, action adventure games with progression mechanics and RPGs have been moving closer to one another for years. AAA ones, anyway. A good example of this is to play Daggerfall (Elder Scrolls II) and then play Skyrim (Elder Scrolls V). Despite the massive advancement in graphics and presentation, Skyrim feels dumbed down in virtually every way in terms of RPG mechanics. The levelling system especially is super simple. You can even trace how that series dumbed down through each successive game as the series grew in popularity.

Western AAA RPGs and action adventures with RPG mechanics are blending into one.
 
No it's not. As with TW3 you play a character not yourself.
even if it might be hard to play exactly like a PnP RPG (because it's 90% dialogues and yes, in that case the story actually changes and GMs have to imrpovise all the time and very often trash everything they planned) I still feel other games captured the essence of RPG in a much better way, much closer to PnP.
I actually feel that CP77 has nothing to do with PnP RPGs at all. If it wasn't called Cyberpunk we might not even have this conversation.
RPG isn't as simple as having to create your own character - that is optional, you can still play a defined character and influence the narrative (that's the focus of an RPG), there is generally character progression along the way, this on simple terms can just be DnD on paper, but it can still be implemented in shooters to make it more fun and realtime.
 
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Hello, I had many discussions about it with many people and I wanted to know your opinion. I understand that the industry today tends more towards hybrids than pure genre games.
Personally, I consider that it has rpg characteristics but is more focused on an action / looter sandbox.
No. It's a shooter, with "rpg elements".
 
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