Alert readers will recall that I've been an ardent defender of the computer game Cyberpunk 2077 despite all the media reports about it being so riddled with bugs that it is literally unplayable. In addition to several posts here in these pages, I've argued my case in other on-line forums too, like Facebook and Reddit.
I'm not saying there aren't any bugs, I'm saying they're more amusing that annoying and certainly don't render the game unplayable. But the longer I play (I'm now some 238 hours in), the buggier it's getting. Some of that could just be the cumulative effect of so many hours - if you play for 10 hours, you might see 1 bug, but at that rate if you play for 100 hours, you will encounter 10 bugs, and so on).
But although I haven't been keeping track, it seems that the bugs are becoming more frequent and more severe. Rather than just having objects hover in space, the most frequent bug I've encountered (like the dead soldier above), bugs are now interfering with gameplay and story progression.
The biggest and worst occurred this weekend. There is one quest, an integral, main story-line quest, that starts by having a Non-Playing Character call you on your in-game cell phone. It's been well over 40 in-game hours by now, and I'm just now realizing, "Girl, he's not going to call you" (I'm playing my second play-through as a female character).
He's not calling, and therefore there is no way I can start that integral, main story-line quest. I've tried calling him but he doesn't pick up. I've tried causing random mayhem in his neighborhood to get his attention - he's a "fixer," sort of a like your friendly neighborhood crime lord/contract procurer. Need someone killed? You contact a fixer and he or she will set you up with a suitable assassin. Need something stolen? Your fixer will procure a thief suitable for the gig. But I can't get this particular fixer to call no matter what I do - for all I know, he could be dead.
The particular story line I'm stuck on has a fixer, Mr. Hands, who's supposed to call my character and ask me to break into a gang-infested former shopping mall for one of his clients and put a tracking chip on a high-end automobile. Easy stealth job - I know this because I did it successfully in my first play- through. I'm playing through a second time now so that I can make some different choices and experience a different ending - near the end of the game, you choose one of three different strategies to complete your ultimate mission, and all three end differently. I've put in well over 100 hours investing in skill sets and developing my current character specifically for one of those alternative endings (I'm trying not to drop any spoilers here), but now, since Mr. Hands won't call, I can't complete that quest. And since I can't complete that integral, main story-line quest, I can't get to the quest after that and so on to the final quest. In other words, I can't complete the game. And since the game auto-deletes old save files, I have no saved games from back before all this started.
I've gone online and "Mr. Hands Won't Call" is definitely a thing, a bug, and no one has a working solution to it. The "fixes" that were suggested all assume that you still have some other unfinished quests with Mr. Hands left to complete, but in those 40-plus in-game hours I've completed each and every last Mr. Hands quest. Not only that, I've done every single thing possible in Mr. Hands' neighborhood, even things that don't remotely involve him, including random drive-by shootings of innocent civilians to try and get his - or anybody's - attention. FYI, killing civilians only results in your character being killed by a police SWAT team - don't try this at home.
So now I have to decide whether to start the whole game over again and build a new character and progress all over again to try and get to the Mr. Hands storyline, hoping that once finally there my experience will be like my successful first run and not this unsuccessful second.
Or I can just delete the game and join the crowd of nay-sayers claiming the game is one big, buggy, unplayable mess.
Great, another binary choice to make.
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