I just finished the new ending of Phantom libery, man is it rough. I
need a moment to decompress after it. I'll leave discussion for
spoiler space and talk more about the game as it is now.

First Cyberpunk 2077 2.0
It feels almost like playing a sequel compared to the state of 2077 previously, except the quests being pretty much the same. The combat
feels a lot better now.

I played several characters through the beginning about 16-20 levels,
to try to figure out what I'd like to play, which was a mistake as at
those levels it's nearly all the same, you don't have the perks,
skills, or cyberware to really differentiate, and playing the same
missions over and over isn't fun.

The combat is harder, but I was playing on the hardest difficulty. For
those of you with less need for difficulty, there is normal and even
easy to play on. There are a couple missions that are really
difficult, the Nomad start and the end of the prologue mission. Those
are skippable if you have Phantom Liberty though. Also any mission
where you're not playing yourself or can't use all your weapons and/or cyberware, of which there's several in Phantom Liberty.

The one thing I was most worried about - the enemy level scaling didn't
really matter. Your increase in ability scores, perks, skills, and
cyberware mostly more than makes up for it and fights become easier and
easier for the most part.

It seems like netrunning (cyber-mage) might be best at level 30 though,
don't get the good quickhacks (spells) before 30 and starts dropping
off against high health enemies later. It's also a lot slower as ram
regen is very slow and before you have the cyberware you can only take
out a couple guys with it before waiting a long time for it to regen.
Before 30 you can't even do it without alerting other enemies. It
seems like it's better as more hybrid, the varous crippling, blinding,
and weapon affecting quickhacks first then shoot them with guns or
melee.

Going for guns first starts off a bit slower and you can't even do it
proper before 20 when you can replace your netrunning cyberware but
takes off after 40. I found melee even worse as you don't have the
movement to get up close an personal.

Overall I feel like it's a pretty good improvment for combat.

They're still patching it pretty quick and the patches are breaking mods they're on 2.02 now, and while I only had one mod installed, and the
support mods required for it, when that dropped the game wouldn't load.
I wouldn't say the game requires mods, but there's a lot of QoL I'd like
that there were mods for. The one I was using was just for showing
where loot was, as it's difficult to find dropped broken guns, which at
least at the start of the game is important to ge the crafting materials
from. There's a lot more I see that I'd like to use like one that
gives an augmented reality drive path instead of having to look at the
minimap to see a route.

There are still a lot of bugs, not all perks and skills are working.
In fact none of the skills were working in 2.01. There's one that's
supposed to double your dash movement toward enemies which would come
in real handy for shotgun (which is my preffered weapon) and melee that doesn't work, it's just a wasted perk point now. At least you can
change your perks any time out of combat. But I wasn't aware it wasn't
working and had that perk until I'd read it wasn't working and tried it,
and it indeed didn't work.

It's not so bad it really impacts my play, but there's a few that did a little. There's a semi frequent bug where a particular body isn't
lootable. You can save and then immediately reload and the body will
then be lootable, or you can just ignore the one bit of loot that you
can't get. There were a couple times in missions where an enemy would
be hiding out of range/bounds and you couldn't get to or kill them and
the mission had a requirement of clearing all the enemies, so reload
from before combat started.

I'd say it's still worth playing now, but if bugs or mods breaking
would annoy you wait a bit more, maybe another 5 months :( *Sigh* this
year has been the year that's been repetedly pounding in my head not to
buy anything until it's been out at least 6 months.


Phantom Liberty:

I like the small area it adds of Dogtown, it's really war torn and
dense. The new infinite car stealing and air drop fights are a good
change of pace from the missions, both with decent rewards.

It adds an ability on a new character to auto-complete all missions
needed to get to the first mission to get into Phantom Liberty, and
sets you to level 18 with 20k eddies (money.) This is what I should've
done instead of repeating those missions. I'm not sure what this does
for a couple things that have consequences in later missions in the
base game, though you can pretty much just go to Dogtown and do all the missions there and ignore all the previous missions.

It also adds all the iconics your missed at a weapon dealer, though
only those you failed to get in the mission - except for one set of
guns. You otherwise have to do the mission an iconic is in to be able
to buy it.

The missions there are a whole new story, it's pretty good, I'm not
sure how you'd do at low level though as I didn't go until around 55
and they're definately harder than all but some of the hard story
missions. Though you can always lower difficulty.

The one thing I don't really like with the missions is a lot of them
require you to betray your employer to get the new iconic weapons, and
those aren't available at the merchants, ony the ones from the base
game. I suppose that makes it so there's real consequences to how you
play though.

There's also a good number of main missions and at least one side
mission where you don't exactly play yourself, I always hate those in
games, none of your weapons, gear, or skills. They're way harder than
normal.

As far a I can tell there's only one new ending, and boy is it rough.
The game really affected me again, I'm deeply impressed by the ending,
but it's not one I'd ever choose again. I had planned to play to the
new ending as a netrunner as I finished it as a tanky shotgunner, but
it left me really down, and I need a break, perhaps perminent from this
game, after all I've done all the endings.

Here's the spoilers on it:
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You get to live, but you have to betray both Johnny, and another, It's
o.k. though she betrays you first, and Johnny is just an electronic
eccho of the real guy, right?

It gets even rougher, as you have to have all your combat cyberware
removed, which leaves you weak as a kitten, and a common unaffiliated
street thug is beyond your ability to fight. Your friends have all
changed and left you behind. The worst is the male love interest Panam,
she was too hurt by your long disappearance during your recovery, she
never wants to even talk to you again.

It feels like you betrayed your ideals too. What matters to the
character is making an impact, and the game leaves you as just another
face in the crowd, litterally.

- Justisaur

ø-ø
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