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About this mod
Forces the hacking minigame to adhere to the pre-2.0 rules, rather than being entirely dictated by the player's level. A companion mod to Pre-2.0 Skill Checks.
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Pre-2.0 Access Point Scaling
With the advent of version 2.0 of Cyberpunk 2077, every aspect of the hacking minigame was reconfigured to depend on the player's level. Here are the important points to understand about this change:
- If you left an Access Point and came back to it later, say when you had a better Cyberdeck that could handle the Daemon Sequences better, unfortunately the difficulty of the Daemon Sequences you have to input will have increased with your level. Maybe those sequences were 2 to 3 numbers long originally, but now they're 3 to 4. Prior to 2.0, the lengths of Daemon Sequences at a given Access Point were, on the whole, reliable, no matter what level you were.
- The rewards for beating hacking minigames also scale solely to the player's level. What this ultimately means is that your optimal game plan in the post-2.0 world is to ignore every Access Point you find until you're past level 50, at which point you will get the maximum rewards from every single one, no matter where in the world you found them. Apart from being catastrophic from an immersion standpoint, this utterly kills the utility of hacking Access Points organically—i.e. taking care of them the moment you see them, so you can take immediate advantage of whatever rewards they offer. You'd be a fool to waste those future resources. If you like to play optimally, Access Points are completely verboten until the very late game. Which is absolutely stupid, because it's not the in-world, logic-based rules you'd be cleverly taking advantage of, but rather the arbitrary, immersion-killing scaling system CDPR forced onto the game.
- It also means that any concept of "balance" when it comes to the supply of Quickhack components is completely destroyed, because that balance is entirely dependent on the level the player happens to be when they decide it's time to start hacking Access Points. The balance prior to 2.0 was very good and ensured that the highest tier parts were in relatively short supply and had to be legitimately earned. That's gone now.
- Hacking is generally much easier in the post-2.0 game, to the point that one is far less pressured to upgrade their Cyberware to deal with long Daemon Sequences. No doubt this was one of the many concessions CDPR hastily made to a complaining minority—a concession which unfortunately steals away from the utility of upgrading one's gear.
- Lastly, classic go-to Access Points that were high-demand, high-reward, where Legendary Quickhacks were known to be potentially available, such as the Access Points at the Psychiatric Ward or in City Center, are no longer a thing. They're now all just generic Access Points fully dictated by the player's level. Just like every other Access Point in the game. Which is boring as hell.
Hopefully that makes it easy to grasp why the pre-2.0 system was overwhelmingly superior to what we now have. Anyway, this mod brings things back to the pre-2.0 norm.
What this mod DOESN'T do:
This mod does not fiddle with the post-2.0 reward pool. The rewards you get for hacking Access Points have been changed around in 2.0, and the 2.0 game has been balanced against those changes. As a quick example, there is no longer a Perk which increases the odds of getting Quickhacks from Access Points. With this mod installed, the rewards are still categorized by the "difficulty level," but that difficulty level will no longer use the player's level and will instead use the location factors the game relied upon prior to 2.0. It's essentially the same system used by all skill checks in the pre-2.0 game: The further along in the game you are, the tougher such challenges tend to get.
Another thing this mod leaves alone is Iconic Quickhacks. These were introduced with 2.0, and can be acquired throughout the game from NPCs and vendors, but only once the player hits level 51. Think of them as CDPR's reward for buying their DLC. There is no good, non-arbitrary way of integrating these into the pre-2.0 rules, chiefly because there is not a single Access Point in the entire game that was ever flagged for a difficulty of 51+, so this mod won't make a change to the post-2.0 behavior—once you're level 51 or higher, any Access Point you hack has a small chance of rewarding you with an Iconic Quickhack schematic. The good news is that it fundamentally doesn't matter that this system breaks immersion; the Iconic Quickhack schematics are, by design, very easy to fully assemble, so the only aspect of them that's truly important to maintain is that they remain strictly endgame content.
A note about what this mod means for the availability of Quickhack components:
In the post-2.0 game, Quickhack rewards are multiplied in scope as you gain levels. In the pre-2.0 game, which this mod replicates, Quickhack rewards are tied to a static system that results in more or less the same total accumulation on every playthrough. But the important thing to understand is that there is a limited supply of high-level Access Points in the game, and they're mostly concentrated in areas around Santo Domingo and City Center. Limited numbers of high-level Access Points means a limited total accumulation of high-level rewards.
In a normal post-2.0 game, a player is likely to begin acquiring Legendary Quickhack components before they've hacked even half of the Access Points in the game, which means they'll soon be positively swimming in Legendary components. That will not happen under the pre-2.0 rules; Legendary Quickhack components will be in short supply and one will need to actually take advantage of options like crafting higher tier components from lower tier ones.
That is why this mod provides a lot of configurability over whether the various aspects of the hacking minigame, including the rewards, follow pre-2.0 rules or post-2.0 rules.
The menu options in detail:
- Enable/Disable: You can disable the mod at any time and return to the post-2.0 system where the player's level controls everything from how challenging the Daemon Sequences are to how much loot one gets from a successful hack. That said, be aware that this mod holds no control over the Intelligence requirement for tapping into an Access Point in the first place. In practice, this means that the first time you look directly at an Access Point and discover its Intelligence requirement, the game will store that value and it will never change again. Enabling/disabling this mod won't have any effect on that. If you want the Intelligence requirements of Access Points to follow the static pre-2.0 rules, you will need to install the mod: Pre-2.0 Skill Checks.
- Use Pre-2.0 Reward Scaling: This tells the mod whether or not to follow the pre-2.0 rules specifically when generating the rewards for successfully completing Daemon Sequences during the hacking minigame. The pre-2.0 rules will generate rewards based on the difficulty of the Access Point itself, while the post-2.0 rules will generate rewards based on the player's level. As mentioned previously, this is the most important decision you will make with this mod. The default is to use the pre-2.0 rules, since reverting things to their pre-2.0 state is the entire point of this mod, but doing so will significantly reduce your overall gains, especially for top-tier rewards, because Access Points of a high difficulty are in short supply. That said, you might explore solving this problem with the Phantom Liberty DLC, as discussed below.
- Use Pre-2.0 Sequencer: This tells the mod whether or not to follow the pre-2.0 rules specifically when generating the Daemon Sequences the player must enter in order to claim rewards from the Access Point. When enabled, the lengths of the Sequences will be primarily dictated by the pre-2.0 game's static rules. When disabled, the lengths will be dictated by the player's level, and will tend to be shorter overall. If one is too used to the post-2.0 rules, where every hacking attempt is so easy that one practically never has to upgrade their Cyberware, then this can be disabled.
- Pre-2.0 Sequence Length Randomizer: Pre-2.0 sequence generation included a small random factor, potentially adding an extra number to a given Daemon Sequence. This means that when you're hacking a given Access Point, the sequences may be 2, 3, and 4 numbers long, but then if you exit and go back in, they may now be 3, 3 and 3 numbers long. Because this feature generally lengthens Daemon Sequences, this is the main aspect of the hacking minigame which results in pre-2.0 hacking being more challenging than post-2.0 hacking. In practice, each of the three Daemon Sequences ends up being an average of half a number longer than without this added random component, so if you want to win all three rewards, you may need a Cyberdeck with a buffer 1 or 2 slots larger. This is actually fine with the pre-2.0 rules, because, as was noted earlier, access points with a genuinely high difficulty level are uncommon, and it doesn't hurt to give a high-tier Cyberdeck some purpose. That said, there is merit in CDPR's decision to eliminate a random factor of such high variability, because gimmicks like that tend to promote save scumming, which is to be avoided. That is why I have provided an option to keep the extra Sequence lengthening this random factor would normally provide, while eliminating the random factor itself. Set this setting to "Static" if you want to use it. Sequences will be longer, but won't randomly change lengths if you exit an Access Point and re-enter it. In other words, if the Sequences are 3, 3 and 4 numbers long once, they will be 3, 3 and 4 numbers long every time you look. This is a good compromise between the challenge of pre-2.0 hacking and the relative polish of the post-2.0 game.
- Pre-2.0 Sequence Length Static Mod: If you choose "Static" in the above setting, you can further manipulate the resulting Daemon Sequence lengths here. This defaults to 50%, which is about how often the pre-2.0 random factor would add an extra number to a Daemon Sequence and would be the best match for the vanilla pre-2.0 experience, but you can dictate whatever percentage you want here.
- Enable for Phantom Liberty: Just as with the mod Pre-2.0 Skill Checks, Phantom Liberty was not set up with its own difficulty rating, so this mod will default to the game's post-2.0 rules, letting the difficulty of Access Points be controlled by the player's level. Enabling this option will force the mod to treat Access Points within Phantom Liberty as though they do in fact have a static difficulty rating. That having been said, there could be some genuine merit in leaving this disabled: Assuming the player enters Phantom Liberty after level 32 or so, leaving this option off would mean the player would receive the best possible rewards, including Legendary Quickhack components and recipes, from every Access Point in the DLC, and that could be a good, non-immersion-breaking way of countering how the pre-2.0 Access Point rules tend to result in fewer top-tier rewards in general. (Or you could enable this option and simply tweak the value below to define Phantom Liberty's hacking difficulty as being above 31, or above 50 if you're after Iconic Quickhack schematics.)
- Difficulty level for Phantom Liberty: Assuming the above option is enabled, this is where you tell the game what difficulty rating to use for Phantom Liberty's hacking minigames. The default is arbitrarily assigned as 20, as this is slightly higher than the average difficulty in Pacifica, and there's an argument to be made for the player moving directly to Dogtown after the events in Pacifica. Be assured that establishing a static difficulty rating for Phantom Liberty's Access Points will not result in those Access Points providing the same exact challenge across all of them, because the game actually uses two different scales when gauging the difficulty of any challenge, and this setting only plugs in one of those two values; the other doesn't need to be set.
A short list of suggestions after all of that explaining:
- If you want a pure pre-2.0 experience, leave everything at their defaults. Enable the mod for Phantom Liberty if you want the DLC to follow pre-2.0 rules as well. For immersion purists.
- I personally recommend changing the Pre-2.0 Sequence Length Randomizer to "Static." While this is not the true pre-2.0 behavior, I agree with the end result that the lengths of Daemon Sequences will not change every time you exit and re-enter a given Access Point. It's a post-2.0 behavior that I can be on board with.
- A good, immersion-aware compromise that may sidestep the problem of limited high-tier rewards would be to enable the mod for Phantom Liberty and then set Phantom Liberty's "difficulty level" to 32 or higher, so that the Access Points in the DLC will always give you top rewards. Since CDPR never established genuine difficulty values for Phantom Liberty's Access Points, one can reasonably rationalize that the DLC is endgame content that deserves endgame challenges and rewards. Also remember that if you set the "difficulty level" to above 50, the Access Points will have a small chance of rewarding you with Iconic Quickhack schematics.
- Or, if you want to solve the rewards problem concretely, simply disable the "Use Pre-2.0 Reward Scaling" option, which will force rewards to be based on the player's level. A little immersion-breaking but at least the actual challenge of individual Access Points will still retain the purely static nature of the pre-2.0 game.
- My own plans: I intend to keep most settings in their default, pre-2.0 configuration, but I will change the Pre-2.0 Sequence Length Randomizer to "Static" to kill the random factor in Daemon Sequence lengths, enable the mod for Phantom Liberty, and change the "difficulty level" for Phantom Liberty's Access Points to 32, as that will ensure I'll get a good supply of top tier Quickhack materials from the DLC. (See the example screenshot for what my settings look like.)
If you are keen to do away with more of the immersion-killing post-2.0 level-based scaling, try Pre-2.0 Skill Checks. It will force all the game's doors, Access Points, barricades, cameras, dialogue and other skill checks to use the actual pre-2.0 numbers, just like this mod does for the hacking minigame. Be aware that both mods use the same resource, and it is safe to overwrite the file.