Cyberpunk 2077

[BillButNotBen]

You guessed it: correct.

Are we… replicants?

the little-known Streets of Fire. As a teenager, this genuinely made me angry. I had see Streets of Fire because I was a connoisseur of weird action movies, and I knew it was a strange movie set in an alternate past, that could be 1950 or 1980, and which was really annoying because it was so stylized and silly,

I can see that. It has the same kinda vibe. I also saw Streets of Fire as a teenager and thought it was awesome. I haven’t had the guts to watch it again recently as I worried it wouldn’t hold up.
Even that poster looks pretty cyberpunk.

Like a true Blockbuster should, Blade Runner 2049 makes you ask yourself the big questions like

Why is nothing happening
How much longer will this be
How come nothing happened

Were you expecting an action movie, because it has a pretty similar pacing, plot structure and amount of action to the original movie.
Actually, I hadn’t realised it was especially long as it didn’t feel that way when watching it. It’s like the way I can watch the 4hr extended LotR movies and they don’t feel long at all, and yet some 90 minute movies can feel like they drag on forever.

[Steph]

Hello.

First run before office this morning - got lost in character creation of course. Crashed 4 times in the intro area (first 5 mins), sounds are not loading properly, killing the immersion.

If there is a way of disabling the bloody mission indicators on the HUD can somebody tell me?

[sonson]

The content in something like the LOTR films is undeniable though, a lot of stuff happens and that requires time to portray. It’s still a bit sluggish with it but everything that happens drives the plot, establishes depth and is fairly necessary to tell the story.

A film maker who requires 3 hours to utilise all the simultaneous artistic aspects of film to communicate that the future is empty, dystopian and lonely badly needs a better editor. It’s not bad or anything but its spectacularly indulgent. From a narrative perspective 3 hours to tell a really basic story is a poor example of craft. From a musical and artistic spectacle requiring 3 hours to communicate your vision and themes is likewise pretty unimpressive.

Cinema is the medium of Hitchcock, it is the apotheosis of being able to tell a story powerfully and economically and utilise multiple aspects to allow them all to be greater than the sum of their parts. I recently finished reading Rebecca by Daphne Maurier, I watched the Hitchcock film and they were entirely different experiences, two different ways of telling the same story and examining the same issues differently.

2049’s 3 hours communicate the same or less than sitting at home with a 2049 Artbook, listening to Philip Glass then reading a Philip K Dick short story for 3 hours would though.

[BillButNotBen]

I’m not sure you can measure the worth of a movie or the skill of a director based on the length of the movie. It’s what they do with it that counts.

The Good the Bad and the Ugly is 177 minutes long, longer than Blade Runner 2049, and comparatively little happens in that time. It’d be quite possible to tell that story in 90 minutes. But it wouldn’t be the same movie and it probably wouldn’t be a masterpiece.

On the other hand, there have been a couple of episodes of The Mandalorian recently that would have been improved by cutting them down from 45 minutes to under 30 minutes.

BR2049 isn’t really even all that long by modern standards. It’s 2 hrs 40 minutes. Lots of movies these days are about 2 and a half hours.
It’s basically the same length as Avatar, Django, The Wolf of Wall Street, Les Miserables, Zero Dark Thirty, Gone Girl, The Last Jedi, Interstellar, Saving Private Ryan, The Dark Knight Rises, etc… It is 20 minutes shorter than Avengers Endgame.

As for ‘nothing happening’, that seems an odd claim. It follows a similar Noir-ish plot structure to the first movie, with K following up clues, uncovering conspiracies, a fair number of red-herrings, misdirections and plot twists.

It doesn’t have a lot of action… but then it’s not supposed to.

Hitchcock had a great style that worked well for his movies, but cinema is also the medium of Kurosawa, Leone, Coppola, etc… who all regularly made movies over 3 hours long.

[Godwhacker]

Just gave it a fifteen minute run (thanks working from home) and it’s been fine for me so far- no crashes, runs at a decent frame rate, etc.

Doubtless the bugs are waiting. Can’t imagine December is going to be much more fun at CDPR than the previous months have been.

[SephKing]

I’m running it on a 10600k, 32gb DDR4 (3600) and a 3080 (MSI Ventus) and performance is ok ish.

I’m running on pretty much all maxed with RT on ultra, DLSS on performance and getting about 60 to 80fps on average. When things are chaotic though it feels like it drops quite severely at times (40’s/50’s).

DLSS off though and the game is uplayable with these settings. It looks great but DLSS does make it look quite blurry. Looks like it’s running at around 1080p, if not a bit lower and upscaled. Playing on my 55 inch TV so quite noticeable. Might not be so much on a gaming monitor.

[LexW]

Bill, we’re mostly pulling your leg mate.

But you’re not doing stuff any favours my pointing out that bunches of movies by “auteur”-type directors run pretty long, because many of those movies are “watch-checkers”. Les Mis is a bloody channel flipper thanks to the casting of Javert, and I say that liking Les Mis the musical. The only one I unreservedly enjoyed was TLJ and that was because for some reason that movie was on the precise “vibrational frequency” my wife and I operate on (she was like “That might be the best Star Wars movie! Well after the first!” and I was like, yeah, I kind of feel that, though I thought it was more equal to TESB - I accept this is entirely personal opinion). All the rest are a bit “yeah is this movie still going? Okay yeah it’s still going”.

For me when I know a movie is by Nolan or Villeneuve or whatever there’s definitely a bit of dread. Interstellar could have stood to be 40 minutes shorter and better for it for sure.

Re: following a similar structure to the first movie, that’s not really an argument against “nothing happening”. Blade Runner 1 is an incredible vibe movie which was quite taut and has fairly regular spaced action/scary sequences. It’s very easy to make the same sort of then and fail to achieve that tension.

[LexW]

I’m running it on a 10600k, 32gb DDR4 (3600) and a 3080 (MSI Ventus) and performance is ok ish.

Christ that’s terrifying for “Okay” performance.

[sonson]

As above, mainly just playing Devil’s Advocate.

But I never said you should judge a film on the basis of its length. But if you show me a film that takes 3 hours to say very little or just the sane thing repeatedly, I’m going to say its either indulgent or confused. There is merit in the stillness and the quiet of Kurosawa (though it is deliberate, intentional punctual silence, most of his stuff is very much a riff on or direct transposition of Shakespeare, stories like that require obsessive awareness of length, structure and rhythm ). Hes pretty much the archetype of how to use everything at hand to tell a story well, to make every moment count, be that a battle or just two people in a hut making tea or something. For me this kind of thing is especially apparent in 2020 when films have to contend with the corrupted cerebral existence of constant distraction. The best films hold you minute by minute, they make otherwise all consuming passive watching habits impossible.

2049 is a 3 hour vision/mood piece you could evoke in either a much shorter time or without even using the medium of film at all. It’s a director examining their inspirations and failing to communicate anything besides what they look or sound like to him, for 3 hours. That’s fine in the abstract, but in a medium almost entirely about economy and craft, a 3 hour art installation is not what I think films are for. It’s very much the equivalent of the 80 hour AAA game which is photo realistic and lovely to look at but which has very little core besides “immersing” you.

Mediums have purpose, convention and structure which require basic execution. If you dont use them I dont know why you would use that medium. This is a universal argument from me mind, I apply it to books, comics, videogames etc. Most auteurs favour their vision and experimentation over respecting the basic craft of the medium.

Compare 2049 with something like Zodiac. Fincher is an auteur but hes an exceptional director first obsessed with using the tools and tricks of the media he is communicating with. Zodiac is a film that knows how long it is, and why. 2049 is a formless esoteric waft of ideas.

[BillButNotBen]

Bill, we’re mostly pulling your leg mate.

Well, now I feel foolish.

I haven’t even seen half those movies, but I don’t remember most of them being considered especially long. My point was that it’s not a particularly long movie anyway.

2049 is a 3 hour vision/mood piece you could evoke in either a much shorter time or without even using the medium of film at all.

I would totally disagree.

Also, it’s not close to 3 hours.

I’ll stop talking about it now, since the game is actually out and so there is finally something to actually talk about.

[Steph]

Turns out I needed to upgrade card drivers (AMD RX5700) - will let you know if things improve

[sonson]

On a 55 inch TV on the highest settings “only” running at 60-80 FPS is probably not going to be the bar for more than 5% of gamers I shouldn’t have thought mind.

[Skalpadda]

A film maker who requires 3 hours to utilise all the simultaneous artistic aspects of film to communicate that the future is empty, dystopian and lonely badly needs a better editor. It’s not bad or anything but its spectacularly indulgent. From a narrative perspective 3 hours to tell a really basic story is a poor example of craft. From a musical and artistic spectacle requiring 3 hours to communicate your vision and themes is likewise pretty unimpressive.

The movie is to a huge extent about the cinematography and letting you soak in the atmosphere, and in that it absolutely succeeds. The telling of a fast-paced story and respecting your time isn’t the point and it’s not a poor example of craft - that’s a mad thing to say. And still it has a story with a clear purpose that holds together and builds on the themes and ideas of the first movie in a meaningful way. It’s kind of astonishing in this era of reboots and reshoots, where properties are dug up and shocked back into shambling existence in the name of brand recognition, to get a movie that respects and builds on the source material so well.

It’s fair enough if you didn’t like what it set out to do, but it certainly didn’t fail at it.

First run before office this morning - got lost in character creation of course. Crashed 4 times in the intro area (first 5 mins), sounds are not loading properly, killing the immersion.

I’m running it on a 10600k, 32gb DDR4 (3600) and a 3080 (MSI Ventus) and performance is ok ish.

Sometimes I feel like I should make an effort to play more new games as they’re released but then the games industry keeps giving me absolutely iron-clad reasons not to.

[Steph]

After disabling GOG Overlay (thanks RPS!) it runs very smooth on ultra settings.

[AlexClockwork]

Welp, I’m still undecided on whether to buy it, but this Polygon piece has reminded me pretty well of the reasons why I don’t want to.

It sucks that Cyberpunk 2077’s edgelord marketing worked so well

It’s specially annoying to think that I desperately want to give then my money and play their damned game but can’t just go ahead and do it because of their dedication to being troublesome edgelords.

[ColdSpiral]

It’s specially annoying to think that I desperately want to give then my money and play their damned game but can’t just go ahead and do it because of their dedication to being troublesome edgelords.

You’ve summed up how I feel more succinctly than I could.
It’s not really even the initial offences that bug me - though they’re certainly insensitive at best, if not actively hostile, I’d be willing to forgive a Polish developer a bit of cultural friction - it’s their response to valid criticism of same.
Instead of a generic “thanks for pointing that out; though it wasn’t our intent to cause offence, we understand how it can be interpreted and will be replacing this content with something more appropriate before release” they double down and use it as marketing spin, galvanising their fanbase and increasing the amount of harm the content has the potential to cause.

It sucks because this could’ve been a game I could really get into, and although I never buy AAA games at full price anymore, I’ve been getting enough Christmas hours at work that I could reasonably afford it, even with beach tax. As is I’ve got the prospect of having to justify to my co-workers why I’m not snapping up and wearing one of the promotional shirts when I get in tomorrow.
Going to have that damn shade of yellow burned into my retinas both online and in meatspace; now that’s cyberpunk.

[Skalpadda]

It would’ve been easy to defend and keep in without being complete dicks about it even. You’re allowed to depict problematic things in your art. A shitty marketing poster in a game where human shittiness is a major theme is easily defensible as a clumsy but ultimately well-meaning critique.

That’s how I took it at first and I didn’t see the big problem with the image in isolation. Instead they doubled down and chose to be ignorant and hurtful in their response to criticism. Their marketing has always been bafflingly stupid but their edgelording response in this case is hard not to take as actively malevolent.

[Steph]

Ok. A little caveat: I’m a big fan of CDPR and bought this on pre-order (pre-installed on 7 December).
At its current state, the game is unplayable and I cannot recommend it to anyone.

I haven’t been able to play for more than 10 minutes without it crashing to desktop or encountering a game-breaking glitch.

I am playing (ha) on a Ryzen 5, SSD Samsung T7, AMD RX5700, 16 GB Ram. If anyone is aware of any known issues with this hardware, please do let me know.

As much as I would love to play it, I think I’ll go back to Dishonored 2.

[Godwhacker]

I gave it another whirl over lunch for an hour or so. Zero problems so far, though I turned down a couple of settings and have kept DLSS on. I’ve got the latest NVidia drivers, 32GB of RAM, a 2080 Super, and an Intel i7-9700k.

I suspect everyone’s mileage will vary.

Dishonored 2 is a great alternative though.

[Jp1138]

Started playing with the default settings the game gave me in a fairly old computer, GTX 970, 12GB RAM. Crash to desktop when sitting in Jenkin´s office chair. After a reload, crashed again in the exact same spot…

Edit: well, it seems to be a problem with AVX instructions and old CPUs…