Starting to move along now.
Just playing as stock lady V. I'm not too interested in putting time into the customization. It's so tedious, and yet so limited. I think with mods you can actually get better functionality and usability out of it, as well as being able to change any aspect of your appearance at any point. I kinda like this whole setup though. Got that serious merc 'tude about 'er with the Kill Bill biker suit and the hornet-pallet tech camo Gundam boots. Of course the pro tech sniper needs a GitS visor for that cold, predator vibe - triplet pair for frontal eyes, like many aggressive hunting spiders. You know she rides a Yaiba
I actually do like a lot of the clothing options available at this point. It's pretty easy to access viable options. Lots of different legendary stuff that cycles in shops, that category always has the most unique items they sell. You can re-roll an apparel shop by cycling the day outside of the shop. Each shop has sets of stock they can show you that are unique to them, with other items mixed in that are shared and more randomized. You can hit the shops and routinely buy better specced stuff, switch looks. It's kinda more interesting to swap looks occasionally - there is a lot to combine that looks cool and is actually well done. If you accept that the game encourages that both through drops and buys (and arguably the INSANE cost/boring time investment of keeping up with upgrading clothing,) you can make that a little opportunistic game. You can also find more variety now, and its better stuff. Yeah, you don't get to slap armadillos on everything, but it doesn't always matter that much, because even lower level/rarity stuff has better defense on average and still seems to scale in terms of what you find/buy. A rare item might have better stats than a legendary at certain points in the level curve. Earlier legendaries buyable before you would reasonably find or make them tend not to be as much of a departure from the rest of the gear.
The only real limiting thing is still that you can't put any higher-rarity mods on lower-rarity clothing. That's still dumb to me - an annoying and redundant limitation, as they already reduced the slots to fixed amounts by tier and type of item. Putting a legendary armadillo on a rare jacket with just one slot when you are at a level to be crafting legendary armadillos pretty much just makes that specific item viable as armor at that point in the game - as in, it's not going to be more powerful than a legendary one with four slots because high-level armadillos add a lot more defense each. This also undermines the value of investing in crafting to begin with. Crafting is still worthwhile if you want to use the many iconic weapons out there (and with clothing specs you can routinely craft better versions of pieces you really like,) but it has many contemptible idiosyncrasies.
You cover the cost by doing what I consider to be essential cash farming. It's good for investing in crafting if you go that way too. You can do it fairly early. You need a couple of points in tech, enough to get the rare crafting perk. After doing a little of the early game (not even post-Jackie,) you can go to a ripperdoc who I believe is in the central-northern region of Westbrook. When Dex first drops you off after meeting him for that car-ride interview, outside that big pagoda/shrine surrounded by a giant multi-lane circle. There is a ripperdoc down a lower-level market alley on the outer edge of the circle. But north of there is another one who should show up on the map once you get close. You'll know because he's a young white dude who wears a white rubber surgeon's cap and acts sussy. I think that's the spot. He's at least among the few you can get to before the heist. He sells a cheap rare optics mod spec for like 1780 ennies. You buy that, make a little more money, buy the materials needed to make them from any merchant that sells them all - like, buy them out. Immediately craft until you run out. Sell the optics back to that merchant. Each time you do that, you'll net a nice chunk of ennies because the materials to make one of those mods is significantly less than the mod itself. You may deplete the merchant's cash before you run out of optics you made with what they sold you.l I don't feel this devalues the game, but rather adds more to what you can do at any given time and makes building a character more fun and rewarding. Their systems are pretty unbalanced and certain things just beg for a bypass. There are other ways of cheesing things that I don't mess with. The money gives you enough to work with. You can even sacrifice a chunk of your profits to accumulate all of the crafting materials if you run the loop at the right junk merchants... another otherwise more tedious matter. That's the thing, if you think this trivializes something, know that the real way is so much less fun and more time consuming... if you can believe that. Getting/keeping the right ones can royally suck the natural way. It's just so slow relative to how the things around it progress.
I swear to god, there was a point in the patching where there just were no cash exploits, and then they came back and the game became more fun again because I could through that appreciate it more for what it can offer as a sandbox.
It's honestly kind of essential, there is just so much you can buy. I buy lots of vehicles to swap around, different clothing. I experiment with cyberware. I have no hacking skill at all, but right now I have a decent cyberdeck with good hacks and it surprises me how many uses it has just with the cyberdeck upgrade. There's quite a range of hacks, with access being more about cyberdeck quality than perk investment, though that adds a lot to how much total use you get out of it. No stealth skills either, but I can do it with the help of my deck, stealth camo cyberware, and my silenced Dying Night. Weapon shops, like clothing shops each have their own especially good legendary weapons, legendary specs, better attachments/scopes. So I play around with those. Even in the lower tiers, there are things you can buy that with mods, will generally be better than what is dropping when you're buying them. They're usually your level or one behind. It's worth considering the odd ones that sometimes show up over your level by a few. They often wind up being gems.
This character still feels like a fledgeling. Right now I'm investing in tech for the sake of longer range tech weapons I want to use going into some of the Panam stuff. I will stick with pistols and shotguns, where I'll still use tech and maybe take the perk points out of the rifle stuff to invest more in melee for a fast, strong and versatile melee/ballistic build with a side of tech. It's all about body, reflex, and tech. Honestly, if I could give up pistols, I might've just not invested in reflex so much and gone for cool to add flavor or intelligence to mix in some more hacking.
. Anything that might fit the bill from the last few years? I'm running an RTX 3070 btw.
