CYBERPUNK 2077 - ENG
- Shauntsy
- Jul 5, 2022
- 11 min read
O Cyberpunk, wherefore art thou cyberpunk?
Compared to the real crazy CDPR fans, I boarded the HYPE train relatively late, but I was still in front of the crowds. This was the HYPE train, which later became the hottest and fastest blazing craze in the (gamer) world. I felt like I was in a religious community that predicted the arrival of the digital savior from a single logo graphic, a distant CGI trailer, and the success of The Witcher trilogy. At that time, the HYPE train was still windy. There was seating and legroom, air conditioning, and a working buffet. The toilet was clean, there were no smashed drink cans and smeared cigarette butts everywhere. It was a HYPE train, but calm and cultured. Then came E3 2018. I watched live as they blew our eyes out with cool styling and vibrant cityscapes. A buzz started, the first big stop of the HYPE train brought many new passengers.
Another year passed, another E3, another Cyberpunk 2077 presentation, but wait! Who is that guy staring me in the face at the end of the trailer, and why is he so familiar? But it's, WHOA, it's Keanu Reeves! Even with this realization, I screamed without articulation, but my mind completely melted only when the cyberpunk legend himself, in the flesh, stepped onto the stage! The Keanu Reeves who brought us Johnny Mnemonic, The Matrix trilogy and A Scanner Darkly. There probably is no star with a more serious cyberpunk past. I pre-ordered the steelcase PS4 copy of the game at the first opportunity and patiently waited for the miracle. In the meantime, the HYPE train was more reminiscent of a festival-bound train, without room to drop a single pin, and everyone was teasing each other in a daze, waiting for the long-desired terminus.
There were early signs of the mass catastrophe caused by the collision of the HYPE train into the big gamer-shitwall. In the midst of the pandemic, anonymous developer complaints surfaced and reported dire conditions. Nextgen caught up with the developers who kept pushing the release date in front of them again and again. The PS5 and Series X "released" and (although we couldn't get them,) the already existing enormous pressure almost doubled both in terms of expectations and impatience. In the meantime, suspicions were allayed with increasingly expensive development diaries and marketing/PR moves. We were even lied to by CDPR citing Red Dead Redemption 2's excellent release state for Cyberpunk 2077 as an example to follow. Finally, the appearance came, we saw it, and we couldn't process what happened. I was between two consoles at the time, waiting for something to run the disc on and because of that I was left out of the initial storm, but by the time the PS5 came, I had already decided that I wouldn't start until a nextgen version was scraped together.
What kind of game did Cyberpunk 2077 become? A scandalous, incomplete, unfinished pile of bugs? Yes. A huge disappointment for millions of players? Yes. One of the best sci-fi RPGs of all time, with deep and provocative themes? Well, yes. The kind of game Cyberpunk 2077 turned out to be depends a lot on who is sitting in front of it and with what expectations. The developers were clearly reaching for the skies, which I think may have been caused by the delusion in the management that Cyberpunk 2077 must somehow overshadow even the success of The Witcher 3. I understand the kind of anxiety that creators feel when the peak performance of their lives should somehow be followed up, and because of this they begin to overdo it. But this has serious requirements for a video game. It should have lined up new technologies at a master level (for which, by the way, CDPR received a large non-refundable loan from the Polish government after President Obama praised The Witcher games), and put the tools for success in the hands of enthusiastic talent. That didn't happen. The game could thus be nothing more than a first person The Witcher 3 with a cyber world, admittedly with a much shorter runtime. A lot of money went into expensive marketing, the constant employment and public appearances of movie and pop stars. It is still a question of who was responsible for what in the whole phenomenon, and I am afraid that we will only learn after a very long time from quietly published memoirs. If that day ever comes.
But let's finally talk about the game! The world and its features are from the tabletop "pen&paper" role-playing game called Cyberpunk 2020, it was all licensed for the game and reworked in close cooperation with the original creator. There is a future turned inside out, in which giant companies rule over everything and everyone. The individual and human dignity are commodities set at a unit price, and the gap between the rich and the poor is so wide that you can't even see through to the other side. All the advantages of the world can be bought for money: cyber implants operated into the body offer an endless array of new abilities and talents. This market is driven by an intense arms race, a delicate and fragile balance which hangs like a sword over the head of the ordinary man. The planet is in ruins: all landscapes are deserts, the weather is acidic-radioactive, the mass destruction of animals and plants has already taken place on a significant and irreversible scale. Food, drink and everything necessary for life is synthetic. And all this is available in excellent quality, immediately and happily given to us by a huge corporate monopoly, as soon as we flash a pretty coin for it. The only question is, do you have that juicy dosh?
In this enviable world, in the middle of the state of California, the game's location is an independent city-state turning all this to eleven: Night City. There are even fewer laws here than elsewhere, and they are mostly there to benefit the companies. Man is a wolf to man, and because of this, whoever wants to prosper must play dirty. From here, we create a character for ourselves, and I recommend that everyone only move on when they are completely satisfied with how the character looks. We can even choose the beginning of the story, but in the end all threads lead to the same place: we are hanging around the city as penniless mercenaries, but with lifelong friends, when the big day c: an army of bugs and cut conten line up in front of us almost constantly. The game is so buggy that it can crash anytime on
There are soft SPOLIERs in some places beyond this, without concrete details, but with my own emotional tones.
Of course, the Job does not go well, complications arise and a story begins, which promises to be very exciting. And at the same time, they also inflict one of the most annoying role-playing dissonances on us: here is a huge, interesting world, discover it for yourself at your own pace and have fun. But there is also this fucking urgent story, come on, there's no time to waste! The game fires a rocket up our ass, but at least this time it doesn't try to derail the main story as much as other similar games (e.g. any Elder Scrolls). Unfortunately, this is not intentional, the game is only an outline of what we were led to believe for years, and even this faint outline is a little annoying: an army of bugs and shortcomings line up in front of us almost constantly. The game is so buggy that it can crash anytime on PS5. Main missions have to be reloaded due to missing story items or unpressable buttons. You can fall under the map without trying, but if that doesn't happen, you can still see how the game loads the traffic and the world in and out before your eyes. Our character, or someone who is not even there with us, will randomly make a comment with no context. Sometimes you can do the same thing in the menu this way, sometimes that way.
And what's that menu like? I swear that I can come up with a more usable solution by myself in 1 hour. Once, one of my saves had a thought and took me back to a part of the game I hadn't even been to. You see, into a later mission. WTF??? Whatever. The animation, physics and behavior of people and vehicles wandering around the city are disappointing. Some sounds and HUD effects get stuck, which only disappear with a reload. Anything that isn't part of the main quest looks blatantly puritanical, a large part of the world just isn't finished. The combat and transportation aren't very strong either, but they work after all, so at least it's not painful to play.
It is difficult to even list what is missing from the game that we have seen in trailers. There is no subway transportation, a lot of locations and missions are missing, almost everywhere you feel that a lot of things have been cut out of the game in order to make the release. What I missed the most was the organic feel. That here all game elements complement each other to create an experience that takes you forward hand in hand. Instead, the game is piecemeal, you can feel where its different parts are put together. Sometimes it also happens that e.g. in a corridor, I can clearly see how long one guy worked on it and where the next guy took over.
But if everything is so bad, then what is good about it? Did CDPR do anything at all? The locations, plot and characters are mind-blowingly detailed and good. Every beat and step is precisely calculated. There were scenes where I held my breath with a tightly squeezed controller, lied about the zbreathtaking scope of the game (technically they didn't lie, but they did imply it). However, many people have forgotten that there are things in which CDPR has no room for improvement, because they are already the best of. The atmosphere is unsurpassed, the visual design is fantastic, the music is impeccable (which also stands proudly on its own feet) and the characters are very strong. Keanu Reeves' character is The Main Feature of the game. His name is Johnny Silverhand, the famous rock star and terrorist who, although he died 50 years before the plot, he now somehow lives in our heads as a kind of digital ghost. He is with us all the way and leaves nothing unsaid, no matter what happens. Johnny immediately grew close to my heart and there was no question that I wanted to experience the time I spent with him. We may never know how much money was taken from the development to employ such a star, but he himself is the face of the cyberpunk genre in one person, and that was enough for me to not think about the money spent on the pre-order. He simply carries the whole thing on his back and without him this would be a much poorer game.
I left the most delicious tidbit for last: the main mission of the game is exemplary! The locations, plot and characters are mind-blowingly detailed and good. Every beat and step is precisely calculated. There were scenes where I held my breath with a tightly squeeyed controller, with my ass on guard, and I felt my pulse beating. It's a short and concentrated journey, the pace of which is crazy and always surprises me with something. Even a good movie or book could do this so far, but here is what makes CDPR unbeaten: we can decide how to proceed with almost everything. This in itself does not make a multiple-choice role-playing game good, but here the Poles have done it again! There are decisions in the story where I had to go outside for fresh air because I couldn't stand the stress. The stakes are so high and the emotions so intense that even now I shake thinking back on them. And the endings are simply brilliant. I don't know if it's possible to finish the game better than those 2-3 versions I got, but it was a real kick in the stomach for me. The game deals with provoking topics and at the end throws in twists and turns that I could have seen well in advance, but somehow they always hid it from my attention, only to slap me in the face with them at the end like with a kind of cartoon cake. The cake was always there in the background, but it didn't even occur to me that someone would end up getting smashed in the face with it. We are presented with gut-wrenching choices at the end of the story, and we are mocked afterwards when our naive hopes collide with the cold, hard reality.
Well, is Cyberpunk 2077 a good or bad game then? It's not what we expected, and for many, not what they can find value in. It has become a game development nightmare. A textbook on what not to do. They tricked us, led the world on and released a much worse game than they let us know. In some places, it was broken even a year after its release, and no major changes are expected anymore (but I hope I'm wrong). It was made with the world's money, for many years, and fantastic talents worked on it, but we were disappointed by the perennial favorite studio, CD Projekt Red, which was believed to be infallible. However, it wouldn't be fair if we didn't also look at the negative circumstances that add context to the picture: Cyberpunk 2077 was an unknown genre for the creators, who felt that they had to surpass the success of The Witcher 3 (which is considered one of the greatest games of all time). A generation has passed, which increased the complexity of development, since the same game had to be made for many very different machines.
During the finish run of the development, a pandemic struck, while the company was hit by continuous external and internal attacks. In the meantime, fans have HYPED the game to the high heavens while they were waiting, and this was contrasted by the general gamer sentiment that has peaked in 2020: that every company is a prick and every new game is empty and crap, except for the last true game that brings the cyber redemption. From here you can already see that it was easy to make a big flop even with a relatively small stumble (and the stumble was not a small one). Poor Cyberpunk 2077 partially took the fall in the eyes of gamers who had this as their last hope after becoming fed up with all the failures like No Mans Sky, Anthem and Ubisoft games.
Despite all this, there is one thing that was real about this development: this team put their heart and soul into the game. There are bugs around every corner, but next to them is the hard work and vision of the developers. They seriously wanted to show us this world, tell us this story and make us fall in love with these characters. No one can take that away from them. Because after 70 hours of playing, after the credits rolled up, I don't remember the bugs. I don't remember having a broken save, crashing to the dashboard, falling under the map, or reloading from a dead end. I don't remember the missing subway, the clunky controls, the waiter's body moving separately from his face floating next to him (well, I remember that). I remember that in a completely hopeless and oppressive world, I stood by the side of my friends against power, companies, the evil and indifferent world, my fate, death itself! I went from being an ordinary nobody to an urban legend. I finished what I started and although I paid the price and nothing turned out the way I wanted, I was never alone. Then, when I stood up from the game, I felt that it had become part of me. I learned something about life, I learned something about myself, and I continue my own path as a better person. This is what makes Cyberpunk 2077 more than just a video game. It's a bad video game, but also more than that. And for that something more in it, the journey is totally worth it.
Never Fade Away
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