I’ve been thinking about the PS1 game ‘Driver’ a lot recently. It’s a game I spent a lot of time on during my youth, and whilst I’m sure it doesn’t hold up some 20 years later, it was still a highlight from my ‘gaming youth’.
As much as I know I enjoyed it however, I don’t remember all that much about it. Aside from pulling the perfect reverse hand-break-turn in order to leave the garage/lockup area and begin the game proper. I didn’t need to pull this manoeuvre of course, I could just, you know…drive out, but something felt so incredibly satisfying about it that I couldn’t stop myself.
Which brings me to this point of this thread. What’s something you do in a game for no reason other than it feels damn good?
Cyberpunk 2077 is purely an escapist game for me. The game itself sort of sucks, the side missions are mostly “go and kill this dude” or “go and steal this thing”, nothing you do has an effect on anything and it’s generally pretty uninspired and blah, but I bought it because I got it for under 20€ so I figured why the hell not.
It looks damn purdy though, and Night City is intricately built and has lots of small fun details. I love just wandering around the city, stopping at hole-in-the-wall noodle places (even though they might just be “window dressing”, and even if they’re not the restaurants in the game are totally pointless), or browsing the stuff at some market, etc. etc. etc. So even though I don’t like it as a game, I like the environment it provides (although honestly the constant in-your-face sexism gets pretty old…)
I personally really like cyberpunk, I wish the launch went better. Adding more features would have made it truly great.
I’m an achievement hunter. Normally once beating a game I uninstall and move on to the next game. But cyberpunk, I did three full playthroughs on very hard with different builds.
The story is really great the first playthrough, but for my second and third playthrough, I rush to level 14, grab the double jump, and just go exploring. I hit level 50 before talking to Takemura at the diner.
My favorite character is my third one, my corpo netrunner. Pre-patched contagion was just bonkers. You could walk into an enemy stronghold, look at someone, and command the whole building to die.
The game becomes a whole lot less fun when you’re that OP, but it felt like a reward, since the early stages of a netrunner build is the weakest build in the game.
It’s absolutely got a lot of good things about it. While I don’t necessarily like it as such, I don’t dislike it either 😁 mainly the things that bug me are that the mechanics are a pretty generic sneak’n’hack clone and it’s very linear: nothing you do actually influences anything very big in the world except for some fairly inconsequential things, and you have no real choice in the larger picture of how things turn out.
I’m hoping the DLC, whatchamacallit, delivers on its promises of remaking some of the game to deliver more of what they originally promised.
Have you tried Cloudpunk?
I have not! I was actually just eyeballing it in Steam the other day thinking about whether I’d want to buy it, so I think I’ll take this as a recommendation
Cloudpunk has really nice atmosphere but is highly linear, almost to the point of belonging to the “walking simulator” genre. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it, but just don’t go in expecting much in terms of gameplay.
Oddly enough I like walking simulators, even though Cyberpunk’s linearity irked me. I think it’s because I like my RPGs more nonlinear and with more freedom to decide how things go, but I’m fine with linear stories in games that don’t try to sell themselves as something else
That’s probably why I recommended it. I spent more time with it going around aimlessly, hamging out in places than actually following the story.
I just want a Blade Runner sim so badly…
Right‽ I just started playing Cloudpunk and I’ve really liked it so far, and I had this exact thought. Cloudpunk is close and it’s great fun, but I would commit light treason if it meant getting a (good…) 1st person Blade Runner game on the market
edit: oh and thank you for the tip, it’s exactly what I was looking for
Absolutely a recommendation. It’s extremely atmospheric. If you’ve ever wanted “drive” around in Blade Runner’s world, Cloudpunk is about as close as you’re going to get in terms of feel.