2.0 made sweeping changes to the items in the game which have a varying degree of impact on the gameplay loop depending on whether you prioritize iconics or standard weapons, and standard vs rare stats on your cyberware.
If you are focused on an iconic weapon, and your cyberware stats are fairly normal, you might just be happy to not be wearing armored bras on your male V for example. Everything that drops is either money or components after a bit of inventory management, you get your intended weapons and keep them upgraded after which point nothing else matters in the game. Same as it ever was. You only need to visit the ripper every 5 levels or so to check out some new cyberware and upgrade a bit.
If however, you are building around a weapon without an iconic version and or are looking for very specific stat combinations on your cyberware it's very different. Every few levels your weapons will start to tickle enemies meaning it's time for an upgrade, but you cannot simply upgrade your weapon anymore. You also need to visit the ripper very often to buy extra cyberware at low tier, since when you've leveled up the process gets prohibitively time consuming and expensive.
In 1.6 everything was upgradeable. If you liked that nekomata with 50% faster charge time on it, then congrats you could use it all game albeit with some steeper upgrade costs. Armor with relevant stats could be upgraded on the go every time you leveled up, and every few levels you'd say to yourself "Oh that piece isn't a permanent fixture of my build, and it's getting a bit too steep to keep upgraded so I need to be on the lookout for a replacement."
The timesinks in the old system were:
- Disassembling / Selling a barrage of items from every encounter.
- Shopping for components to keep up with upgrade costs.
- Figuring out who sells which cyberware or crafting spec.
- Rerolling special drops via save-loading.
This meant after every other encounter or so, once you understood the system you'd likely open the menu, disassemble everything below a certain price point, spam some upgrades on your gear, and then spam click the dropbox until your inventory was nice and clean again. When you got low on components and heavy in the wallet you'd either fast travel some shops, skip time to reroll a shop, or take the opportunity to drive around for a while buying up components.
The timesinks in the new system are:
- Disassembling every item until they are 2 or 3 tiers below your current level, in which case you can sell them to afford more cyberware.
- Save-loading every guaranteed drop of your weapon to try and get the correct tier for your level with mods that don't suck.
- Constantly visiting the ripper to buy loads of cyberware and reroll your stats.
You are doing double duty compared to before, though you do not have as much stuff to sift through it's almost guaranteed to be worthless to you, which makes it feel like all work and no reward. You are also spending long sessions at the ripperdoc staring at menus to try and replicate stat builds that previously did not require that level of busy work. Instead of rerolling special rare versions of items a couple times per playthrough, you now get to do that every time your weapon drops from a container or a world placement in order to stay relevant. Otherwise you must accept enemies being extra spongey, and mods turning off your stamina regen while aiming etc.
So how might you fix it? Here are my suggestions.
- Greatly expand the weapon mod pool adding some meaningful variety to non iconic weapons. No more 1 good mod vs 4 other bad mods per weapon type.
- Allow upgrading of non-iconic weapons at the very least to + and ++ versions if not entire tiers like iconics.
- Allow replacement/removal of weapon mods for a scaling component cost.
- Replace random stats on cyberware with mod slots and add cyberware mods with random stats to the loot tables/shops/crafting.
As a final aside, the economy of 2.0 makes gig and scanner rewards feel trivial now. Since so much money comes from selling weapons I'm no longer looking forward to, nor motivated by the cash rewards they offer. Just a drop in the bucket now. It's technically more optimal to avoid getting the bonus rewards if it means you don't have to go to a dropbox just to get a couple weapons worth of eddies.
TL;DR the changes suck for non iconic weapons and picky stat builds.
If you are focused on an iconic weapon, and your cyberware stats are fairly normal, you might just be happy to not be wearing armored bras on your male V for example. Everything that drops is either money or components after a bit of inventory management, you get your intended weapons and keep them upgraded after which point nothing else matters in the game. Same as it ever was. You only need to visit the ripper every 5 levels or so to check out some new cyberware and upgrade a bit.
If however, you are building around a weapon without an iconic version and or are looking for very specific stat combinations on your cyberware it's very different. Every few levels your weapons will start to tickle enemies meaning it's time for an upgrade, but you cannot simply upgrade your weapon anymore. You also need to visit the ripper very often to buy extra cyberware at low tier, since when you've leveled up the process gets prohibitively time consuming and expensive.
In 1.6 everything was upgradeable. If you liked that nekomata with 50% faster charge time on it, then congrats you could use it all game albeit with some steeper upgrade costs. Armor with relevant stats could be upgraded on the go every time you leveled up, and every few levels you'd say to yourself "Oh that piece isn't a permanent fixture of my build, and it's getting a bit too steep to keep upgraded so I need to be on the lookout for a replacement."
The timesinks in the old system were:
- Disassembling / Selling a barrage of items from every encounter.
- Shopping for components to keep up with upgrade costs.
- Figuring out who sells which cyberware or crafting spec.
- Rerolling special drops via save-loading.
This meant after every other encounter or so, once you understood the system you'd likely open the menu, disassemble everything below a certain price point, spam some upgrades on your gear, and then spam click the dropbox until your inventory was nice and clean again. When you got low on components and heavy in the wallet you'd either fast travel some shops, skip time to reroll a shop, or take the opportunity to drive around for a while buying up components.
The timesinks in the new system are:
- Disassembling every item until they are 2 or 3 tiers below your current level, in which case you can sell them to afford more cyberware.
- Save-loading every guaranteed drop of your weapon to try and get the correct tier for your level with mods that don't suck.
- Constantly visiting the ripper to buy loads of cyberware and reroll your stats.
You are doing double duty compared to before, though you do not have as much stuff to sift through it's almost guaranteed to be worthless to you, which makes it feel like all work and no reward. You are also spending long sessions at the ripperdoc staring at menus to try and replicate stat builds that previously did not require that level of busy work. Instead of rerolling special rare versions of items a couple times per playthrough, you now get to do that every time your weapon drops from a container or a world placement in order to stay relevant. Otherwise you must accept enemies being extra spongey, and mods turning off your stamina regen while aiming etc.
So how might you fix it? Here are my suggestions.
- Greatly expand the weapon mod pool adding some meaningful variety to non iconic weapons. No more 1 good mod vs 4 other bad mods per weapon type.
- Allow upgrading of non-iconic weapons at the very least to + and ++ versions if not entire tiers like iconics.
- Allow replacement/removal of weapon mods for a scaling component cost.
- Replace random stats on cyberware with mod slots and add cyberware mods with random stats to the loot tables/shops/crafting.
As a final aside, the economy of 2.0 makes gig and scanner rewards feel trivial now. Since so much money comes from selling weapons I'm no longer looking forward to, nor motivated by the cash rewards they offer. Just a drop in the bucket now. It's technically more optimal to avoid getting the bonus rewards if it means you don't have to go to a dropbox just to get a couple weapons worth of eddies.
TL;DR the changes suck for non iconic weapons and picky stat builds.
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