For those of you who wanted a straight review of Cyberpunk 2077, I'm sorry to say it is going to be buried in here somewhere, but not easily isolated from the event that was this game's release. It is no exaggeration to say that Cyberpunk 2077 was possibly the most anticipated game of all time. Announced eight years ago, three years before the release of CD Projekt Red's opus The Witcher III: Wild Hunt, Cyberpunk 2077 promised to be the future of RPGs. It took place in the oft coveted genre of cyberpunk, a genre that has seen its fair share of representation, but generally relegated to the sidelines of mainstream media. CD Projekt Red went full tilt in marketing this thing, adding video after video, pic after pic, promise after promise as to what was in store for us when this game was released - if it ever would. It wasn't until 2019 that we even got a release date, one that would be pushed back three times before its eventual release on December 10th 2020. Release date shenanigans only amplified the hype for the game. People began joking that it would 2077 before we ever got our hands on the thing, but it is important to note that, outside some preliminary outlining and conceptualizing, the game really wasn't in production until roughly 2016, after Blood and Wine for The Witcher III was released.
At this point, the release of Cyberpunk 2077 is the most controversial and infamous release in video game history, somehow sidelining the likes of Mass Effect: Andromeda, No Man's Sky, and Fallout 76. The reasons have been recounted and extrapolated over the last month (Edit: make that plural, now, as this was written in January) nearly to death, to the point where now I reckon few really want to hear about it anymore unless it is about added content. Cyberpunk 2077 was supposed to be the future of RPGs, but instead it became the awful totem of all the industry has become.
Of all the promises that disappointed fans, the one that seemed to cut deepest wasn't exactly a promise at all. Cyberpunk 2077 promised in depth roleplaying, with decisions that would matter, a life path that would change the way your character interacted with the world and the general campaign itself, and customization that the world would react to. These teases dripped to the masses over the years strongly implied that Cyberpunk was going for an immersive sim type game, a near perfect combination with CD Projekt Red's skill for story telling, character, and repercussions. Someone from the company would say directly that the game was, indeed, not an immersive sim, but those words paled to the promises the marketing team seemed to continue to commit. An immersive sim, by a general definition (and actual definition is up for debate, even among the genre's most devout acolytes) plays by a set of rules and contains a vast array of consequences. The idea is that so long as you play by the rules, you can do whatever you want. If you can combine certain hacking abilities that allow you to bypass a third of the game, then that was fair and the game would adjust accordingly. Likewise, decisions, including in game conversations, approaches to quest fulfillment, and aspects of your character build would all have consequences seen throughout the game. Prominent in the genre are classics like Deus Ex, Prey, System Shock 2, and to small degree Bioshock, although I have qualms with that one. It was the type of RPG that the hardcore loved to lament its lack of representation, the serious RPG for serious RPG lovers, like Krautrock can often be to those into the progressive rock scene. CD Projekt Red had shown a propensity towards consequences, with its extreme differences through choice in The Witcher 2, and its standout quest with the Red Baron in The Witcher III. The idea that these systems, so fundamental to the cyberpunk genre, could be used creatively to change your experience was an exciting proposition.
There were other elements, too. Promises ranged away from RPG styles, venturing into open world sandbox type gameplay. Much like Grand Theft Auto, there would be a wanted system and cops, ready to fight you tooth and nail if you ever stepped out of line. Following genre tropes, however, you were to have the option to bribe the cops out of pursuing you, and likewise corporations you displeased could pay the cops off to make a reason to hunt you down. Night City, Cyberpunk's home-of-squalor and corporate greed overrun, was to be a veritable playground, full of crime to commit, gangs to align with, and a reputation to amass as you climbed the ranks.
The promises were obviously too big to be true, but where the line was going to be drawn was the real question. Delays and stories of extended crunch time made a worrying prospect, especially from a company that had decried crunch, saying they would never partake again. The delays were concerning, sure, but nowadays it was virtually unheard of for most major releases to not have at least one (or not need one). The masses were getting restless, but so long as Night City lay before them, developing and getting ready for their arrival, they would have managed. This was, after all, CD Projekt Red.
That was the killer of it all. CD Projekt Red had spent over a decade amassing a reputation within the games industry as the company "for gamers", the same company that released one of the greatest RPGs of all time, updated it incessantly for years and released massive, full-priced-game-sized DLCs for $15. The same company that created Steam's greatest competitor, GOG.com, a games store that let you download games without DRM, and that worked hard to get classic games running on modern machines. They were the last bastion for gamers who still valued a company-gamer relationship after the fall of other such companies like Blizzard and Bioware. It was obviously a bit creepy to be invested so much in a company that sells you media, but they had earned at least some faith and respect up to this point. They had a committed vision, a general ethos that felt like they weren't out for money, but for quality content.
The ending is obvious, even if you didn't somehow hear about it by now. Cyberpunk 2077 fulfilled very few of its promises, it released late, and it was so buggy that anyone playing on previous gen consoles - the platform, other than PC, it was built to run on - could hardly get through the early quests without running into a gamebreaking bug or hideous graphical mishaps. Cyberpunk 2077 was plainly unfinished, rushed out the door with more cut content than content left in the game, and suddenly the greatest game company around became one of the most hated over night, their stock tanking nearly 50% and preparing a defense against a law suit from their investors. The lies are too numerous to list out, the response to affected gamers even worse. CD Projekt Red announced gamers could get refunds for the game, but they didn't talk this over with the respective stores people bought it from. Steam has a policy where you cannot return a game if you have played more than 2 hours, and PS4 won't let you return it if it has ever been downloaded to your harddrive. This caused a massive influx of return requests to online stores everywhere, with everyone having to unprecedentedly flag the game as being fully available to return, no strings attached. PS4, particularly pissed off about this fiasco, went a further step by removing the game entirely from the digital storefront, another first. CD Projekt Red, without a doubt, fucked up beyond what I imagine can be repaired. There are a few out there - and, admittedly, I am sort of on the fence of this group - that want to see them pull a No Man's Sky, to update and patch this game to a closer image to what was promised. But there is so much that needs fixing, so much content that simply isn't here, it won't register as a possibility in my head, much as I want it to happen.
All possible immersive sim elements - or the mechanically adjacent - are virtually stripped from the game. At the beginning, you get to choose one of three life paths. You can be the street kid, raised on the street and comfortable with the crime in Night City; a Corpo, essentially a corporate mercenary; or a nomad, a Mad Max type on the outskirts, living the family life with your comrades out in the badlands. Choosing one of these three life paths was supposed to change the game, supposed to morph the game around your version of V., the main character you play as, but instead they give you a separate first 20 min of gameplay and after that some colorful, alternate dialogue that amounts to the same as the neutral option. For all intents and purposes, the life paths are just dressing on a game that is no different than any other choice. Choice throughout, however, is more complicated. Contrary to popular, frustrated belief at the moment, there are choices throughout Cyberpunk, just not nearly as much as even the first The Witcher. But for the most part, choices take a back seat to the main gameplay loop and the story that CD Projekt Red want to tell.
Likewise to the lack of RPG mechanics and choice, the Grand Theft Auto elements were stripped down where they weren't outright broken. Cops do, in fact, chase you if you commit a crime (or simply look at them), but they cannot pursue. The AI in this game is laughably bad, hardly an AI as a small batch of rules associated with very immediate geometry. What I mean by this is best explained through example. Cars don't really drive around Night City, they simply follow the road as though on rails. This means that if you were to park a car even remotely in the way of traffic, a traffic jam would inevitably occur since the AI only knows to follow the road, and stop for anything in the way. What is somewhat tragically hilarious about this is that the AI itself will sometimes get into car wrecks, having followed the path without consideration for what any other car is doing. These wrecks can be stumbled upon with a mile of cars lining up behind the wreck, no one able to move because the AI doesn't know to go around. The programmers came up with a simple solution, but it breaks all immersion. So long as the line of cars and the crash is out of view of the player, it will despawn everything and respawn new ones. The same goes for pedestrians. Gang members and police will shoot and duck under cover, but general citizens of Night City will duck into a canned "cowering" response, each a perfect mirror of the other. When in this state, just like the cars, they will despawn when out of the player's view. Even those gang members and police aren't sure exactly how to engage in combat. More often than I would like to count, enemies would walk right next to me without shooting me, unable to properly parse the area and where I was. The AI also didn't know how to take cover all that well besides "hide behind nearest box", which was easily exploited by simply running around and shooting them. Challenge is still sort of there, but it is due mostly to bullet sponge enemies on occasion.
So, Cyberpunk 2077 is only partially an RPG, and only partially an open world sandbox. The question becomes: what the hell is Cyberpunk 2077? The answer is both simple and complicated. Cyberpunk is a hybrid of sorts, and it cannot figure out how to properly mix its styles effectively. The general loop has to do with combat, leveling up, quests, gigs, and exploration. Combat is reminiscent of looter-shooters such as Borderlands and Destiny. It does this side of things adequately, but suffers in number of places. Looting guns and equipment can be quite a chore. Most loot all looks the same, and is primarily used as sellable fodder or scrap for the crafting system. You will generally find weapons that incrementally increase your DPS, or armor that incrementally increases your defense, but it is always by a minor set of points. You could hold onto certain guns for awhile if you want, but you always run the risk of potentially running into something quite a bit higher level than you, several iterations of loot up. This does a couple of things to the rest of the game. Firstly, it makes shops (of what few there are) virtually useless. Secondly, crafting becomes more or less flavor over a system that can take care of itself. Crafting certainly has its advantages - I was able to upgrade my quickhacks, this game's equivalent to spells, painlessly and free with all the crafting parts I had looted - but more often than not it does little for the rest of the game. The looting may be a bit of a bust, but the general shooting is good. Aiming down sights and pulling triggers definitely feels as though it was made by a company that hadn't made a shooter before, but it is refined enough that, so long as you aren't hot off Counter-Strike or Doom, you are likely to only partially notice it.
What becomes most annoying about the combat, however, is in what great potential there was here. If you did something like I did, investing heavily in hacking, you'd know that there is a lot of fun to be had mixing and matching gunplay and your little cybernetic spells. Quickhacks let you do a few things, such as Ping, which shows every enemy in the area for a short amount of time, or Contagion, which hurts enemies and can jump from host to host, upgradable through the tech trees. You can hack electronics around the combat arena to distract enemies and help you stealth around, or you can jam an enemy's gun or temporarily blind them. Hacking becomes incredibly fun the more you invest in different ways to approach large groups of people, but can make you pretty overpowered rather quickly. The main problem is that the game isn't particularly well balanced, in just about any of its RPG roles.
You will level up in Cyberpunk, but there is more than one XP gauge to keep track of. Each of your core five abilities can level up the more you use them - so hacking can level up your technical ability, and beating someone to a pulp will upgrade your beating to a pulp ability - which gives you nice perks and extra talent points as you gain a level. Likewise, you will have a Street Cred level, which does little outside of gate you from doing certain gigs and buying certain stuff from stores. Street Cred is so insanely easy to amass, however, it hardly gates anything outside of trickling certain side missions to you as you play rather than dumping them all into your lap immediately. All of this is essentially dressing around your primary level and the skill trees. The skill trees, however, are a bit of a mess. They are initially hard to read and misleading. What is worse, several of the abilities therein are completely or basically useless, as are whole trees. This thing was obviously still in the testing and planning stages when they decided to lock what they got and move into polish mode.
Cyberpunk 2077 reeks all over of a game that was just into its testing and balancing phase when it got pushed into the final stretch. The technical work of this game is generally impressive, with some of the best graphics of the generation (and if you can run it with raytracing without the thing chugging too badly, it can be truly jaw-dropping). There is so much detail to admire throughout Night City, a place obviously built with love from the developers, but with no chance to truly fill it out with anything to do. Side activities, a la Red Dead Redemption or Grand Theft Auto are virtually nil outside of racing. Getting a haircut isn't even included, again bucking what was said before release about customization (and don't even get me started on how you look consistently like a clown since so many stats are tied to gear). What you get instead is an Ubisoft map. Once the prologue is behind you, Cyberpunk spills its guts worth of "gigs" (and what amounts to the same thing under different names). Gigs are separate from your quests, being essentially "go here, kill this, take this". It is basically a hundred Far Cry miniquests. To be fair, I've always had a soft spot for the Far Cry series, being a good blend of popcorn fun as far as shooters and open world games go, never too demanding but usually never totally a waste of time. As such, I enjoyed doing gigs throughout Cyberpunk 2077, but they are hardly what I am here for, and they take up a majority of the content in the game. There are some special gigs here and there, such as minibosses called Cyberpsychos, and even once where I ended up investigating what happened to a missing person, but they are all generally the same.
To sum up generally what Cyberpunk 2077 is, it is essentially a streamlined Witcher game in plot and dialogue, a looter shooter meets Far Cry in general gameplay, with the backdrop of a Grand Theft Auto game. It's a weird, hodgepodge of different styles that each can be fun on occasion, but rarely seem to come together as a whole. There are moments here where a side quest you went on can be heard referred to by a gang you are about to smoke out of existence, or sometimes you will be roaming around the city, looking for what there is to offer, and stumble across a small, more unique quest such as talking to a vending machine. But these sorts of things are well hidden beneath what is essentially a lot of fodder to keep you playing this game, without all that much payout except, you know, money for mods. And there is at least a partial worth there. True to the genre, you can modify your body with cyber-enhancements, and these cost a lot. Grinding money to get the double jump or those wicked blades that come out of your arms was actually really rewarding, since neither are remotely necessary to play the game, and both made playing much more fun. Keeping a high price ceiling on them made them easily coveted, but they were never so high I gave up even trying. Modifications more than once changed the entire way I played the game, and I can see replaying later - preferably after some content updates - and trying things differently.
Cyberpunk 2077 is technically chock full of stuff to do, it just doesn't have a lot of depth to it. It is mindless fun to get money, up your street cred, and generally fuck about when you are between main or side story beats, and generally that is fine, if it is a bit disappointing. But, much like The Witcher, the main draw is in its plot. In Cyberpunk 2077 you play as V., a person whose one goal in life is to go out in a blaze of glory and be remembered forever in this horrible city. Not too long into the game you get a gig to pull off a nearly impossible heist, one that doesn't go quite as planned. You steal a biochip called a relic, essentially a chip that holds an entire person digitally on it. When things go awry, that chip has to be slipped into the slot in your head, but unfortunately that doesn't quite match the warranty with the device. The chip, it turns out, has legendary rocker and terrorist Johnny Silverhand on it, played by Keanu Reeves. That chip, as well, was never meant to be put inside another person, as it will slowly overwrite the person with the personality on the chip. V.'s mission - inexplicably another ticking clock like The Witcher III, despite the obvious problems with doing that in an open world game meant for you to lose hours in - is to somehow get the chip out of his head before the construct takes over, and without dying in the process. The plot set up here is pretty simple, toying around with themes of personality, identity, and extreme situations requiring extreme measures and alliances. Johnny Silverhand, who first comes off as the world's biggest asshole, ends up being a fully compelling character as you progress, whether you choose to fight with him, discuss things, or agree with him like the fanboy you can play V. as. This problem, after all, is both of your problems, as Johnny isn't too keen on having your body any more than you are to give it to him.
Surprisingly, Cyberpunk 2077's plot hardly touches upon the genre and its strengths. There are elements here and there about identity, modifications, and the horror of corporations essentially running the show (and, as a side note, let me recommend SOMA, an excellent game that follows some of the same themes much better than Cyberpunk), but primarily what Cyberpunk wants to talk about is the gung-ho lifestyle V. wants in the beginning. Johnny is everything V. wants to be, and being forced to confront the man himself creates a new understanding of what these types of people are. The core conflict of the game is whether you still want to become Johnny or not, and how you deal with either of those options. Through Johnny, V. climbs the underground social ladder, meeting the old greats as well as some new and powerful entities within Night City, essentially fulfilling V.'s want right under your nose without you noticing. It is a neat narrative trick, where the circumstances of this fulfillment take away the accomplishment you would expect, again requiring you to go inward to consider the elements at play. After all, no one is happy in Night City, especially not the old vanguard regarded as legends. Praising the rebels at the top who did something means a lot less when those they fought against are still tyrannically in power, it turns out.
But these connections aren't nothing. Some of the best content in the game are the side quests, as is common in CD Projekt Red games. Side quests this time around are a lot more strange to receive this time around, and I am not surprised to find a lot of people seem to have missed a lot of them. As is fitting the narrative and setting, you get side quests from contacts you meet either in the main story, or in a location that the main story generally takes you to, such as the Afterlife bar. There was a particular instance that seems emblematic of how side quests generally find you. After a certain amount of time, someone named Elizabeth will contact you out of the blue, saying they have a job for you. The quest, called I Fought the Law, is somewhat interesting. You figure out what happened to the recently deceased mayor of Night City, working for a wealthy couple currently campaigning for the position, and working with a detective that cannot let the case go, though he knows it is closed. The quest opens up two quest lines, one with the detective (which is surprisingly dark and a rather fun detective side quest) and one with the wealthy family. Both come to you organically over the course of the next few days in game, neither of which is totally connected to the initial quest you took (one is in part, but veers in a rather interesting direction). Virtually all of your side quests end up coming to you by accident, usually with someone from a main quest contacting you later, or from a message out of the blue when your street cred reaches the required level. Pursuing these quests usually but doesn't always lead you to meeting other side quest givers, letting the stories overlap and connect tangentially through association of the characters. It feels incredibly organic, but the execution makes going out of your way to trigger these quests a bit of a chore. This wouldn't be so bad, except it feels, again, like things are a bit unfinished. There are far fewer side quests, by my count, than previous games by the company, and it feels like a lost opportunity. I liked learning who different people were in the city, some of which would connect to other quests in interesting ways, such as one quest investigating a cult ending up associating with an old friend of Johnny's, met through a side quest he gives you. The overlap and interconnection feels somehow lived in, but it is so sparse it is hard to appreciate at times. Likewise, you getting quests through incessant calls and texts gives Grand Theft Auto IV flashbacks. You will get so many at such a rapid pace (and often while doing other missions, hardly able to tear your attention away from the task you were already set on) that it is easy to forget how certain quests in your journal got there in the first place. It feels extremely messy and not well thought out, like a tacked on way to connect all of these disparate parts that had no way of organically coming together. It is impossible to know if this was due to the game being rushed out the door, but it certainly feels like it.
One has to wonder what Cyberpunk 2077 looked like over the summer when the game was originally set to be released, but looking at footage from years ago, I'm wondering what things looked like before Johnny Silverhand became a core component. There is a lot off about the development of this game. Nothing quite makes sense. The release was a downright travesty for the industry, a shocking, brutal knife twist in an industry that has been struggling for a while to keep up with consumer demand. Buggy, unfinished games are the norm now, and it really shouldn't be any sort of surprise. Gamers want games as quick as they can get them, as graphically impressive as possible, and with more content than anyone with a full time job could ever hope to complete, but that simply isn't viable. Games are extremely difficult to make, and the current demand for them and what is in them requires an insane amount of work, a lot of time, and a lot of money - all of which is being pressured and improperly managed. There is something toxic at the core of the industry, and it is showing just about everywhere, and there isn't a single obvious answer to it all. Gamers want the impossible, and the competitive market of the AAA space simply won't relent long enough for the industry titans to take a good hard look at how to better go about development. Cyberpunk 2077 has the unfortunate designation of being a watershed game, but not the kind they wanted. Instead, it represented the toxicity of the industry and its crippling internal problems, and that sucks for everyone. But as much as Cyberpunk should be made the example, it also pains me that very few people are actually talking about what is in the game rather than what isn't. Cyberpunk 2077 is a malformed chimera of styles, inconsistent but definitely fun. The world built here is interesting, one that I wish there was more to see and play around in. I don't know if CD Projekt Red could possibly fix this game, but I sincerely hope they at least try again with a sequel. There is so much potential here, and it would be a shame for it to go to waste.
7.0
