But Witcher 3 doesn't force me to play through a boring ass, tedious ass, unskipable Braindance scene every run.
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2026
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Cyberpunk 2077
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FWIW, since Patch 1.5 from 4 years ago, you can skip the braindance tutorial.
However, the "His own choomba shot him" line has already been burned into my brain before the patch.
Witcher 3 forces me to play as Geralt that moves with the finesse of as 1974 Cadillac Fleetwood and somehow riding Roach is even worse. The inconsistencies in the combat make it a chore to play through. The writing, acting, music and visuals are doing the vast majority of the heavy lifting.
I like Cyberpunk better, but the unskippable cut scenes are a major problem, you've got to admit. Especially in the early game
I really hope their next games figure out how to make the game more open while minimizing all the front loaded cutscenes.
I really wish I could love the game, but the story kind of ruins the feel. The whole pretext is you wanting to become a legendary mercenary, but that whole journey is skipped with a montage of V and Jackie. It's not immersive to be running around in an open world game doing open world stuff (read: whatever the hell you want) when you know that your life is being threatened by a bio chip. You'd give dealing with the bio chip the highest priority. I wish there was a remake or prequel or whatever in which you have access to the whole map before the bio chip fucks you up.
Except for that one story/gameplay detail, I'm all for it. Modded the shit out of it during my last playthrough. 🥵🍈🍈
It’s not immersive to be running around in an open world game doing open world stuff (read: whatever the hell you want) when you know that your life is being threatened by a bio chip. You’d give dealing with the bio chip the highest priority.
Finally someone complaining about the same problem with game I always complain about.
What I struggle with with the game is that it's meant to be punk. It's easy to die. A dude with a gun can kill no matter who you are.
Instead, you're an invincible death/hacking machine. You can mow through mooks in a way that should completely and utterly reshape the whole criminal underworld, but instead, is treated as if it's just any other day.
The power levels are wrong for the aesthetics of the setting
You're not wrong, but that's kind of a plot hole intrinsic to virtually all video games with combat.
In real life, if you go around getting in life-and-death conflicts with people, you are very likely to be killed before long.
Problem is that most games with combat want to let the player kill more than a handful of people, or there wouldn't be much gameplay involving combat.
The ways around stuff like that, if you want to avoid unrealistic survival, requires some pretty elaborate gymnastics or constraints, like "the game can't follow a single character", "the game involves a lot of reloading", or "the main character has some sort of magic ability to reconstitute themselves".
Essentially all video games with combat also don't treat wounds realistically either. You get hit by a bullet or two from a rifle, you probably aren't going to be running around in more-or-less okay shape continuing to fight as normal.
But, I mean...there are the constraints placed on the developers of what's fun to play. Realistic simulations don't necessarily make for good gameplay.
Heheh, you have not played many milsims or tactical shooters, I guess?
I'm always modding Cyberpunk ... as close to being one of those as it can be.
I agree that the vast majority of shooters play by 'arcady' damage rules and mechanics... but there is a solid nichr of people who really do just love the suck.
You're not wrong, but that's kind of a plot hole intrinsic to virtually all video games with combat.
Not if they're turn based :P
They can still definitely be fun, but they also tend to be hard af. Sifu is a good example, get clobbered by a bottle, lose 3/4 of your health.
Sifu is notably very clever though, in that... the game expects you to fail, and that's woven into the core game itself.
Failure comes with benefits and drawbacks, the playstyle of the game itself changes.
Most people who make video games that are just brutally difficult... are not this clever.
If you don't want a power fantasy:
Play on a harder difficulty level, turn off aim assist, change the recoil to affect 'on camera' not 'on weapon'.
And/or turn off every element of the HUD, or maybe just leave a few parts for yourself. No more threat indicator noises/sounds, no more minimap, no more hit confirmation, no more knowing how much damage you're doing.
Not a panacea, there are still, imo, flaws with how the power scaling works, but those would take mods to address.
But yeah, try playing through on Very Hard, might feel a bit less like you're a overpowered super merc.
That causes different issues.
It's cyberpunk. You're meant to have aim assist, hit confirmation, damage estimators etc. You're cybered, you're half machine, and losing your humanity to the machine to get those advantages is a core part of the setting aesthetic. Or alternatively, you don't get cyber, and you don't lose yourself to the machine, but then you struggle to survive when dealing with those who have. You see this play out in extremes in the cyberpsycho story arcs.
A cybered up merc is meant to be a small shark in an ocean of piranhas. An ocean where there are larger sharks, but also killer whales. A cybered up merc is meant to be a threat to most people on the street. But a gang of partly and non cybered folk should be a threat to the merc too. Maybe a merc could get lucky and tear up a gang by themself, but it would leave a power vacuum, and disturb a lot of people who had deals with that gang. It would be a story in and of itself. And any merc that kept killing wiping out entire gangs would eventually take a wrong step, and end up dead, or if they were good enough to not get killed by the gangs, they'd find themselves with a bullet in the back of the head, being put down by the corps who rely on the status quo in the streets to make their money.
The point being, the cyberpunk setting itself is not designed to be home to mass slice and dice combat. The slicers and dicers are the people who have lost themselves to the machine completely, the psychos that need to be put down.
tl;dr - Changing the difficulty wouldn't resolve my main issue with the game
It is a roleplaying game, with a very diverse set of possible builds and playstyles. Thats a major point of the OP article, that there are a wide array of possible Vs.
You absolutely can play through the game without getting any other cyberware beyond what the intro forces, you absolutely can play through the game as a maniac melee hack and slasher, and you can even do both those at the same time.
The last option there is more difficult, especially in the higher difficulties, but it can be done.
If your main problem is that... you can mow through factions and they don't really hunt you down, in response to you being an existential threat to them...
Well, if you want more depth there, there are mods that do rework and make more extensive both the police and gangs, how they interact with each other, and you.
I think the gang one is named 'They Will Remember', and pretty much does everything you're asking for.
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/19747
There are also mods that expand on the idea of the player being able to fully go into cyberpsychosis.
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/5646
There are other mods that rework how the Cops work... tons of different kinds of mods that rework many aspects of the game and gameplay, to make it into a much more dynamic and reactive experience, or that just fundamentally rework the entire way combat/cyberware/hacking/armor work, to be much more unforgiving.
Much like joytoys... the game can be whatever you want it to be.
Mods are great and all, but they're mods. The default setting, despite being called Cyberpunk, doesn't respond as a Cyberpunk setting should in response to many possible variations of V.
I stopped bothering with mods a long time ago, because I've found they're often too frustrating for me to be worth it. They break with updates, they don't play nice with each other, they often clash with the core storyline in unexpected ways, and they can annoying to install, and all of this has become more true since I moved to linux.
I think I'd love something like that first mod you mentioned if it were part of the base game, both because it sounds more fun and because it's truer to the genre the game is named after, but it's not enough to get me to install it and do another run through.
Those solutions just make it more challenging to have fun instead of more challenging.
Elden Ring is a game where the enemy power levels are through the roof and its still fun as hell to lose over and over. That's because the gameplay itself is great and it feels great to play.
My definition of 'fun' includes what you call 'challenging'.
Different people find fun in different things.
Personally, I don't care so much for minmaxxing stats and items, as much as I care for the actual complexity of the potential gameplay situation I am facing.
I don't find the idea of having to retrace my steps from a fixed save point to be very fun... I prefer being able to save basically anywhere at any time.
Like I'm just loading into another virtu.
But, some games mix and match different kinds of 'being able to save' with other kinds of gameplay, and achieve different balances that appeal to different people.
I mean, if you're playing with a controller, yeah, that's why auto aim exists, why it was invented, because joycons are inferior to a mouse at making precise and delicate movements.
I get that you'd then just view auto aim off and more punishing recoil as ... too much.
But for all the rest of the HUD stuff... your cyberware is broken, or its been hacked, or you couldn't afford the fancy pants version.
Those could fairly easily just be worked in as elements of gameplay itself, and it even makes sense in the setting.
I agree. I always use mods that balance the difficulty for this very reason.
The biochip sounds like a final act problem and not the ending of a prologue.
I believe that was the original plan, or at least a 2nd half of the game thing, but they felt it threw off the pacing? I remember something in an interview about being worried players would feel no direction or motivation without the relic plot, and be confused as to what they were really supposed to be doing and why. Ironically, considering the release, I think they really wanted to hook players from the start on this one and felt players would need more than "go be the best"
Tbf I wish they had let that beginning chapter breathe more. At least a few main story gigs with Jackie before getting the gig from Dex would have been good.
Exactly. Is this what the movies call "pacing"? It's bad, anyway xD
Wait. Hol'up. You "modded the shit out of it" and then somehow had life left over enough to actually play it! What kind of time lord are you?! I'm still grinding away, deep in the mod mines, thinking that's the actual game. 😅
I actually finished 2077, while giving up on W3 after a couple hours. So yeah, I guess I agree.
I was very nearly in the same boat. The initial NPC dialogue was written by and for angry 14-year-old boys. It gets massively better; the characterisation is broad and engaging, and the central-european fairy-rail feel is really quite strong. The two pieces of DLC have great stories themselves.
Having played Witcher 3 after Cyberpunk, I definitely noticed that CDPR has a certain formula, even though the games are wildly different in genres, gameplay styles and player integration. I’m not sure if I would call either better than the other, but CP77 was absolutely a more refined iteration of that formula.
As someone with over 1k hours in CP2077 and about 40-50 in Witcher 3 (currently playing), this is a hard genre thing for me. My first thoughts in playing Witcher 3 was that it felt like a call-back to a lot of RPG tropes and mechanics from older games. I feel like there was enough of a gap between Witchers 2 and 3 that they could have easily overhauled a lot of the systems to be more in line with a standard action adventure game similar to GoW2018, but deliberately chose not to. It feels kind of like a slicked, modern RPG with the soul of one made in the early 2000's. CP2077 felt like CDPR wanted to flex their modern game dev muscles and show us that they could do that as well. They're made by the same people, but to scratch two very different itches in my opinion.
That said, I think my playtime makes it clear which I like more, but I've always leaned more towards the sci-fi side of fantasy. Both The Continent and Night City feel very organic and immersive, but I think Night City wins that fight. It might be the geography or maybe just the classic structure of it, but I've noticed The Continent feels much more... segmented. Compartmentalized. It feels very game-ified, with how distinct the various zones like villages, etc. work. The genres are very different, but it feels almost like Pokémon with how static and predictable the environment feels. The pack of wild dogs is always just outside the east village gate. The peasant in the blue shit and leather coif is always standing by the bulletin board. The lady in the white dress is always pulling carrots in her yard and complaining about her bowels. Meanwhile, Night City has random scenes thrown into locations sometimes like firefights, crime scenes, police investigations, corpo deals, car bombs, and the like. It makes the city feel alive, constantly changing in its minutae but largely the same overall.
Two very different games, almost tailored to opposite ends of the target demographic. Witcher feels like it wanted to please older gamers, with some hopes of pulling in some new ones as well. Cyberpunk felt reversed.
Well, yes, but a better story? I dunno. I enjoyed the hell out of both, though my reading and enjoying of The Witcher books and playing the previous games in the series might've tainted my objectivity.
The Witcher 3 story is 1 billion times more compelling and the world is 1 billion times better even with older tech. If the game had better gameplay it would be almost perfect (for me). Hence I have high hopes for the Witcher 4.
Just stop calling them RPGs. The term has been rendered meaningless by the inclusion of character customization and inconsequential choices in pretty much every type of game.
The Witcher 3 is a story-driven action-aventure game.
Cyberpunk 2077 is an immersive sim with significant focus on the story and many RPG mechanics.
Neither is really about playing a role of your own making, making significant choices, or having the world react to your actions. Sure they have a lot of aspects borrowed from RPGs... But that's not the core of either of them. Arguably, the Witcher games actually incarnate a lot more of the storytelling language of RPGs, but you are still playing a set role that has been written and performed ahead of time.
.. . quite literally, cyberpunk has multiple endings that are chosen by the actions of the main character…
…final fantasy games are RPG’s where there is one ending, and every character is set not only in their roles, but also their personalities.
not disagreeing that the term RPG is vague and mostly unhelpful, but arguing cyber punk is not an RPG because player choice didn’t matter is kinda nuts
Immersive sims often have multiple endings based on the choices you make, but that doesn't make them RPGs. I do agree that Cyberpunk is more of an RPG, but it feels compromised in the same way as Bethesda RPGs.