What's free and what's paid?

Super hot take: I'm playing Starfield right now and it just pales in comparison to Cyberpunk. Though they are clearly different types of games, the artistry, environmental detail, dialogue writing, and voice acting are all a clear step down.

Can't wait til the expansion comes out.

Cyberpunk has one of the best cities I've ever seen in a game. If you hang out with the Aldecaldos and River's family, driving back into the city feels like driving back into a city. It isn't just going to a location with a lot of NPCs.
Yeah, really a hot take to post in a Cyberpunk community 🙃
- Is it? Do you not remember how the official subreddit went mega apeshit bananas for over a year?
  
  Also, have you ever looked at the official Steam forum for this game?
that's nice
That's good to hear. I've been curious about sf but cp is maybe my favorite game so far. Similar experience with me with Spiderman Remastered. Been playing it, and NYC is so beautiful in it, and the web swinging is really fun, and I like the combat mechanics, buuuut.. I find myself missing everything else about cp.
I thought about this too. Especially with how often Starfield breaks immersion Cyberpunk never does unless you switch to 3rd person.

I do try to maintain expectations because it is on Bethesdas engine but I often wonder why they didn't try a different engine for Starfield.

Gaming these days is weird. Buy a game but still be locked out of content because of what, you are too poor to pay for the meaty bits.

Well, this is expansion, we had paid expansions in the early 2000s, probably earlier.
- Knuckles was an expansion on the fucking Genesis.
- Yeah gaming these days, paying for star craft brood wars just to get extra units.
  
  To not even mention recent examples like Total Annihilation: The Core Contingency or Diablo: Hellfire, Warcraft 3: The Frozen Throne, Baldur's Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal, the list of offenders goes on.
- Blizzard was making expansions in the late 90s and they were amazing. Back when blizzard was the best of the best not the worst of the worst.
- We had expansions in tabletop games.
- We did and they were awesome. I guess I'm just saying there are two versions here and one of them is better than the other and I find it weird thats all. At least the expansion was all inclusive and not a form of baiting you into missing out on paid features. Things have changed obviously since 2000 but, take the level 60 upgrade. Paid and free are at an obvious disadvantage. The ranking system shouldn't be something you pay for to be uncapped.
I've been a console gamer for a while now, last pc games I played were the red alert/ Warcraft TFT (with a splash of wings of liberty) so I don't really get to mess around with mods

DLC that comes out years after original release is fine for me, if I'm getting hours of additional content. That stuff doesn't happen for free.

Obviously if they hide all the game-breaking fixes behind a DLC paywall it's ridiculous, but cyberpunk seems to have been pretty dedicated to fixing their game that was fairly broken at launch.

I've never played it yet, but it's been creeping up my list. Didn't really have much interest until watching edgerunners on Netflix (which I've become lowkey really into, how many times can you rewatch something before it's weird?). While I know they're not the same, the atmosphere and universe seem awesome, and the Devs seem committed to salvaging their reputation

I'm generally a patient gamer, but I caved for RE4make and am super hyped for Armored core 6. Don't have a PS5 yet so I'll have to wait for Deadspace, but once I beat RE4make at least a second time I'll probably try Cyberpunk

At this point I'm not sure if it's PS5 time, or worth waiting until Christmas 2024 for a ps5 pro for Deadspace and a smoother gaming experience on the dual system games I have

Daaammn I need to get a move on with BG3 so I'm ready for this. Really looking forward to it!

I'm still bitter about the lack of monorail but ... I'll get over it one day

I heard those things are awfully loud.
- It glides as softly as a cloud!

I bought this game a long time ago, but never played it because it would consistently crash right after the montage scene. With this update, seems maybe a good time to give it a try again. Is there anything the expansion adds to a first playthrough?

As an IT guy, what CPU were you trying to play the game with?

I'm aware of a few early bugs with 2077 that would crash the game on specific CPUs.... Just wondering if that was your problem.
- Huh weird. It's an i9-9900K.
the left column skill tree, AI, etc stuff should change the experience
- Yeah, but it seems that all comes with the free update? My question is would it affect anything to buy the expansion, or would it make more sense to play through the game first, then only buy the expansion if I want more content?

Thank you!