Hello everyone. I recently platinummed Cyberpunk 2077 PS5 and its Phantom Liberty DLC and wanted to talk about it.
Overall, this was an easy (On PS5 at least) if rather confusing game to Platinum. There a lot of missable story related trophies as well as later missions taking several in-game days to unlock. So I imagine for a first time player, it would likely require a second playthrough in order to know where key items and missions are. Fortunately for me, I played the Stadia version (RIP in Peace) back when the game first came out and did a good chunk of the game so I was prepared for this run.
So here was my game plan:
1. Grab a Katana or Knife and kill enemies as I play through the game. When I get 300 kills, switch over to an SMG and get 300 more kills. Then keep alternating between them to level up my Shinobi Skill. Make sure I collect and sell everything I find in order to make money.
2. Prioritize doing Fixer gigs and CyberPsycho attacks (Special side missions that pay a good chunk of money. Save as much money as possible as I will need ~E$2,000,000 for "Autojock - Buy all vehicles available for purchase").
3. Once those are done or more aren't available, start doing main missions. Watching out for any of the following since they contain a key item for a trophy: "Search and Destroy", "Nocturne OP55N1", "Riders on the Storm", "The Hunt", "Rebel! Rebel!", "Pisces", "Chippin In", "Psychofan". Everything else doesn't matter how you play it.
4. Once I max out my Street Cred reputation, and have enough money, make a manual save and buy every car. Reload my save and then use the money to buy whatever I need for the following trophies especially:
"Daemon In The Shell - Kill or incapacitate 3 enemies with one "Detonate Grenade" quickhack."
"Rough Landing - While Berserk cyberware is active, perform a Superhero Landing to kill or incapacitate 2 enemies"
"Two Heads, One Bullet -Kill or incapacitate 2 enemies with the same sniper rifle shot."
"V for Vendetta -After reviving with Second Heart, kill or incapacitate the enemy who killed you within 5 seconds."
These require a good amount of money and specialized equipment. "Rough Landing" for example, required me to use a respec, shopping around for specialized Ripperdoc implants, weapons and mods and 15+ tries to do as the groups I did it on would always have one guy survive at 1 HP for some reason.
5. Once I unlock the Phantom Liberty DLC, put the main story on hold and 100% that. This DLC' missable trophies are only related to its endings which you can all get if you make a manual save before the mission "Fire Starter".
6. Return back to the main story, finish all main missions and side quests, then do all 100 NCPD gigs (which was really tedious) and find all 159 fast travel points.
That last one was annoying because while you only need to drive close to Fast Travel points to activate, there were around 20 I had left despite 100%-ing everything else because they were on parts of the map where there were literally no missions, gigs or content. Though, it wasn't too bad to do. I simply gave my grandparents a photo of a completed map on my iPad and asked them to "find all the blue icons that weren't on my game" and they came through for me.
An important thing to note is that 2.0 update for Cyberpunk 2077 reworked a lot about how the game worked. Including mechanics like levelling up, crafting and progression. This makes the PS5 version easier to platinum than the PS4 version as many trophies aren't missable now.
For example, "Master Crafter - Craft 3 Legendary items" on PS4 required you to specifically invest in 4 major skills in the technical skill tree to be able to even craft items. On PS5 however, you can craft whatever right out of the gate as long as you have the items for it. No skills required. So this ends up being one of the easier trophies now.
The only downside I found is that some of the guides I consulted were a bit of out date now. One cool feature the PS5 has is that some games' trophies lists come with a built in optional guide for how to get them. Which I find is great as it means you can help on the game without needing to leave the game. And there was a really helpful section for "Christmas Tree Attack - Complete a Breach Protocol with a minimum of 3 daemons uploaded". The built in PS5 guide told me to search for skills like "Big Sleep" and "Mass Vulnerability" which I couldn't find no matter where they were. Turns out, those were from the pre-2.0 version. The real PS5 version also doesn't require any upgrades (although they do help).
Overall, this whole experience took me around 70-ish hours in real time and around 65-ish hours on my final save file. The trophies generally were pretty fun. Many being related to the story often just meant doing certain questlines in their entirety which is how I play anyway. However, the game has a habit of "timegating" certain quests which I felt really hurt the pacing.
So lets say you complete 2/4 of Judy's quests. It could be quite a while before you receive the phone call for mission 3. It got to a point where I had the final main quest "Nocturne OP55N1" ready to complete by like hour 35 but I still hadn't received calls from River, Judy or Kerry for their quests despite doing literally every side quest (minus NCPD gigs) I came across first in the meantime. The game seemed to roll for Panem and Rogue's quests early this time.
I suppose I could have just manually slept for several in-game days to pass the time requirements for these quests to trigger. But still, I am not a fond of this design from both a casual and trophy hunter perspective. For one, the main story critical path for Cyberpunk (just getting to "Nocturne OP55N1") is relatively short. A player focusing on just main content could easily get to it in around 20-ish hours.
However, some of these extra storylines, some of which do open up extra endings, don't have any indication there is more to them until they happen to pop up. Kerry's for example, could technically "end" after any of the missions and it wouldn't seem out of place. Later missions often open with Kerry even going "Hey V, remember how everything seemed hunky dory and resolved after the last mission we did? Turns out, the situation turned sour. Come and help me". River's last mission comes after the main threat is resolved and he invites you for dinner. It's a similar situation for Judy.
So if you are a casual player that doesn't know how many quests there are and aren't going after trophies, it's not unreasonable to see someone completing the game without even knowing Kerry, Judy, River or Claire's storylines are technically incomplete. And if you do know and are trying to complete them, you have bounce around between unrelated missions or just keep sleeping to trigger them which gets annoying.
I believe the intention is to get players to bounce around different quests and for the setting to feel more "realistic". After all, when a character says they will get back to you, it might actually take some time for them to get back to you. They're not going to instantly have the information you need. But, still, like I said, I dislike this approach. In addition to the reasons from earlier, I also feel it "punishes" the player for not doing their side questing during designated times. Lets say you do some Fixer Gigs as a break from the main story, then do a main story quest you find interesting only for the game to say "Hey, go take a break and do some side quests first". The main mission doesn't take into account what you were doing earlier. I feel it's better for open world games to operate like GTA or Assassin's Creed in this regard where the next mission is available as soon as you complete the previous mission. No mandatory timegating. That way, you can do whatever proportion of main and side quests you want.
The game actually has a solution for this in its Phantom Liberty DLC gigs. Here, the game gives you a general map marker for the next stage in a quest as long as it's "ready" and if the player doesn't interact with it for a specified amount of time, then they get a call revealing what the first stage of the new mission is. This solves the issue for the casual player missing potentially interesting quests just because they don't get a phone call by looking at their maps for new quests. And for experienced hunters as they can directly go to the quests they want. All while keeping the "timegating via phone calls" in some form.
The only other significant issue I had with platinumming this game were the NCPD gigs. About 100 "radiant quest"-style activities where you go to an area, kill all enemies and/or retrieve an item and the mission is over. These work fine as activities you can do along the way to more important activities (similar to crimes or Random Events in games like Spider-Man) as they are quick bursts of combat, money, loot and XP. They don't have much story (aside from a data log or journal from the scene of the crime). But having to grind out 100 of them got really tedious. I soon just ran in and grabbed the item and left to start getting them over as fast as possible as I had done everything else. Just making these optional for the trophy would have significantly improved the experience because otherwise the game was quite fun.
As for the game itself, separate from the trophies, I really enjoyed my time. I liked it when I played it back in 2020 on Stadia on version 1.5 and experiencing all the wacky bugs. It was a fun "Far Cry-Like" with how I'd bounce between quests and combat areas, alternating between gunplay, stealth and platforming, and collecting loot to improve my V. And the story and writing were so engrossing and human. Night City, despite being rather static to interact with, is absolutely detailed in terms of world building and houses plenty of interesting quests.
Version 2.0 on PS5 Seems to push further on this "Far Cry-Like" design by downplaying more restrictive builds that lock you into a playstyle and decoupling gear from stats. And in some ways, I feel that was for the better. One big issue I had with version 1.0 and its marketing is that it felt like it was trying to "do everything". It wanted to be GTA or Watch Dogs despite lacking that specific style of sandbox (even missing car chases). It wanted to be a Witcher or Bethesda style RPG despite lacking the character building stuff of those games. It tried to be like Borderlands or Diablo with its loot system despite it feeling incongruous with the world (though I still enjoyed its attempt here and am a bit disappointed this got removed entirely).
So version 2.0 focuses the game more towards what was its strongest points: its story, and flexible "Far Cry-like" gameplay and its worldbuilding/design. And those elements come together to make an engrossing and fun game despite other games still doing individual elements better. Like, Far Cry, I feel, still has more fun outpost clearing with how other elements of the sandbox can make the experience more wild. Watch Dogs makes the hacking more interesting by giving you more ways to use the environment such as jumping between cameras to complete missions or bypass certain obstacles in a more puzzle like way (as well as having more interesting car chases). But Cyberpunk 2077's world and mixture of powers and quests manage to the experience more novel.
Thank you so much for reading. My next post will probably be a casual review of Dark Souls 3. See you then.
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