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.
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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