100% the game is designed to be a power-trip. If you reach max level, you’re pretty over-powered no matter the way you built your character. Even on higher difficulties–I played on hard, read that it’s still largely the same on the hardest difficulty.
Not sure if anyone watched the companion anime Edgerunners (The anime’s the reason I picked up the game), but there’s a certain boss you face in the game that’s also in the anime. In the anime, said boss is an absolute monster. Just demolishes everything. In the game, V beats them, which means in the world of Cyberpunk, V is incredibly badass.
I played around both with stealth and also running around and shooting people in the face with my rocket pistol during my playthrough. If you don’t build for body firefights are dangerous–especially on the harder difficulties. It doesn’t take much to knock you down. Stealth + Quickhacks are definitely the safer way to proceed through the game.
I also lean more towards @Marx’s way of thinking, the incentives to playing stealthy are that it’s fun if you enjoy that kind of game play. And there are gigs that do specifically reward you extra for completing them w/o being noticed. Maybe it’s not as big a reward for just running up and shooting everyone in the face, but you also don’t need to maximize your rewards. If you do the side missions it’s super easy to hit max level before doing almost any of the story missions, and you’re just swimming in eddies and gear by that point.
My biggest gripe with Cyberpunk is the story. The urgency of Johnny is at odds with the open-world nature of the game. I really enjoyed most of the characters, though, even if I wish we got to spend more time with most of them. I really wish we got to actually play through most of that cut scene after the prologue. I think putting a lot of the open-world stuff there before meeting Johnny would have helped the dissonance between the story and the gameplay.
Also, I tried this too, got bored halfway through then reloaded. Haha.
I suppose any discussion of getting it right vs. getting it wrong is going to go nowhere if enough people don’t agree there was anything wrong in the first place.
Perhaps I should have framed it differently. Perhaps I can reframe it now?
So: the key gameplay things I like that are done differently in Death Stranding.
obstacles are not limited to merely a thing with a weapon trying to kill you. No matter how many approaches there are to getting past a thing with a weapon trying to kill you, if they all work, it doesn’t really matter which you use. A variety of obstacles can be used, that require a variety of approaches to overcome. Terrain, environment, people trying to steal from you, people trying to kill you, all the way up to “BTs”, which I think are a great bit of design, and also come in various flavours (can’t go into real detail while avoiding spoilers).
shift of focus from you to your cargo means that partial failure states work. Instead of “you are dead, reload”, you can try and recover the cargo, because you aren’t dead. I greatly prefer onwards failure states to fail and reload. Sure, there are some instances of irreplaceable cargo, and some other fail states, but making those the exception rather than the norm is great.
most such games have ways to make progress easier at some point. Some do it by allowing “levelling up” to make old challenges trivial (aka, progress by grinding). Some do it by training your muscle memory and timing. Death Stranding doesn’t really let you skip a challenge entirely, but after you get from A to B once or twice, you are allowed to feel smart by building ways to bypass the challenge. This mostly means zip-lines in the end-game, but the freeform way you can approach these, preparing lines of sight, mapping best routes, and optimising bandwidth, feels good. This is very different from letting players over-level, or forcing players to “git gud”.
Re-reading this it looks like I’m mostly just rehashing my first post. Oh well. I hope I did it a bit better this time.
I think you did fine re-framing it, and it makes more sense the point you’re making.
I think there are legitimate complaints with Cyberpunk, but I wouldn’t say it does getting from point A to B wrong. I think it does give the player a lot of freedom in it’s more limited scope of success and failure. It just puts a lot of the incentive for not always doing in the players hands. And in trying to make it valid for every approach to work, instead of forcing players down paths they don’t like as much, it inevitability leads to a path of least resistance. That’s not necessarily a “wrong” thing, it just also leads to a sense of sameness in encounters.
Based on your description of Death Stranding–I haven’t played, so don’t know for sure–it sounds like there’s maybe less freedom in the mechanics but a wider scope of success and failure states that allows for more interesting encounters, with the gameplay itself incentivizing a variety approaches. It’s not necessarily a “right” thing, though, because there’s a greater risk of someone bouncing off because they have to engage with something they don’t enjoy.
I think and interesting part of the discussion isn’t if one did it right or wrong, but in the ways the games are successful at what they set out to do, but also where they’re less successful.
I’ve only played Cyberpunk but I think it’s pretty successful at letting people have the freedom to approach a task in a variety of ways. It’s less successful in that variety is basically just giving you a choice of different hammers with which to smash something. Even going the stealthiest/non-lethal of plays, you’re probably leaving a trail of bodies behind you going from point A to B, even if they’re not “technically” dead.
I do think, in general, it would be nice if games had more partial “success” and “failure” states that were mechanically and narratively rewarding. Sounds like Death Stranding is pretty good at that. Cyberpunk has issues there, at least mechanically. Narratively I think it does OK there, even if the mechanics don’t always back it up.
This happens in too many open world games, the only effective work around I’ve seen is where narratively your taking time to build up your strength / team.
I’m playing the new god of war at the moment it took a while to warm to me but I’m getting back into it and the combat and story are satisfying. It does deal with the “why do you keep running away from the objective to smash pots and search for loot” really well By owning it in the dialogue (even if it is mainly humorous dialogue).
Yup, also happens in a lot of RPGs too. I know it’s a hard thing to balance, some people don’t like how Breath of the Wild or Elden Ring are relatively story light which lends itself well to just running around wasting time. Using it to build up your strength/team is probably the easiest way to make it work.
I think Cyberpunk could have handled it better by shunting at least some of the open-world exploring stuff before Dexter DeShawn contacts you for the mission. That’s when V starts building their reputation. Then the Johnny stuff can be more focused. Though, I know people also dislike when a game is open-world for part of it, but the end is a tunnel. Can’t please everyone.
Overall, though, can’t complain much about Cyberpunk. I can see where they had to cut stuff, and I think it could definitely be improved. But they made a setting and a game I enjoyed spending 200+ hours in, and really hope I can return there in the future.
After this discussion, though, I think I’m going to have to give Death Stranding a try. Not really a big Kojima fan-- except for Zone of the Enders, loved the first one still need to play the second–but I did just get it for free on Epic and @Benkyo’s made me interested.
Awesome. I cannot recommend enough that you change some of the default game settings:
Change the difficulty to hard. The effects are subtle, but significant.
Change “hide signs containing spoilers” to “show my signs only”. Otherwise the game is littered with crap, and spoilers too.
Change shared content to “don’t share structures, signs, or vehicles”. Otherwise bridges spring up everywhere, and it only gets worse from there. You still share highway building and maintenance later on, which is the best part of cooperative building, and your stuff is still shared for others to benefit from.
(also change BT encounter warning to “first time only”, but you’ll know when you want to do this)