Some Scattered Thoughts About Cyberpunk 2077
Visit the most horrible of all futures and set folks on fire using the Internet.
(Contains spoilers for Cyberpunk 2077 and The Last of Us.)
Polish studio CD Projekt Red made The Witcher 3, one of my favorite video games ever. So when they announced Cyberpunk 2077, I was really excited.
Then they released it, and it was a non-functional disaster. I was sad, but also a little relieved. Not playing it saved me 50 hours, which was nice.
Then I spent those 50 hours under Covid house arrest. I probably used that precious time saving up for a Golden Toilet in Animal Crossing.
Anyhoo, I finally played Cyberpunk 2077 and its enormous DLC, Phantom Liberty. The game was good. The DLC was very good. A bunch of scattered thoughts ...
Quantity Has A Quality All Its Own
Man, but I love playing a gigantic, big-budget AAA game sometimes. A huge fantasy world that positively drips money.
But it has to feel BIG. I didn't get that feeling from the new God of War game. My memories from those are mostly wandering down narrow tunnels. I want something I can get lost in, like Baldur's Gate 3.
(This desire, to me, explains a lot about why the Oblivion remaster did so well. It's aging and has its flaws, sure, but it's BIG.)
Cyberpunk 2077 had a big budget, and it's all on the screen. There are tons of nice little details. A huge world to explore full of surprises. More optional quests than anyone would want, with a lot of neat settings and writing. I'm walking away from the game knowing I left cool stuff behind.
The DLC is even more lavish. If you play this game, be sure to do all of Phantom Liberty.
There was a lot of fun little design tweaks. For example, you are constantly looting little upgrades to make your grenades and healing better, and enable your character to have more cyborg mods. It provided a constant flow of progress and pleasant dopamine hits. The shop to mod your person was also fun to hang out in.
Twice in the early game, you get to do this really cool thing where you investigate something by wandering around inside a 3D recording of an event, looking for clues. It was complex and expensive, so I knew it wouldn’t appear outside the early game (it didn’t), but I enjoyed it while it lasted.
Anyway, it was good. All that said, now I shall do my shop talk and picking of nits.
Writers, Please Give Your Characters Charm
So CD Projekt Red shelled out the big bucks to put Keanu Reeves in their game. As in, the guy stuck in your head, Johnny Silverhand, looked exactly like Keanu. You see and hear him a lot.
I found this insanely distracting. Like, every time Johnny came onscreen, a tiny voice in my head said ("Look! It's Keanu!")
I have been a fan of Keanu's since well back into a prior century. He has a natural chill likability onscreen that is always good fun.
Which is why I will never understand that they made Johnny-Keanu the most relentlessly obnoxious, unlikeable character I've ever encountered in a video game. True fingernails-on-chalkboard territory. He's smug and mean and insulting and abrasive. And then he has a loooong sex scene. (Ew.)
I complained about this on Twitter, and multiple people assured me he gets better near the end and in the DLC. He does not.
This really sticks out to me because I'm playing Split Fiction with my wife. It's fun and pretty, but its two female protagonists are, again, laughably unpleasant. And sure, my wife and I are having a great time making fun of them and intentionally causing them to die, but wouldn't likable characters be better?
Designer, I beg you, play Baldur's Gate 3 again. It had a huge variety of characters, good and evil, friendly and hostile, but they were full of charm. If you're gonna expect me to spend 50 hours (or far more) with these assholes, make them enjoyable to watch. (Bonus assigned viewing: The Sopranos, which is loaded with charming evil.)
It's Fun, But Easy
I had fun playing Cyberpunk 2077. Not an ecstatic amount of fun. It's a shooty game, but I found the fights pretty repetitive. I liked them, but all the non-boss fights felt kind of the same.
However, this may be my fault. I played on Normal difficulty, and found it to be wildly easy. Serious power fantasy territory. This means that the normal difficulty is correctly tuned. I should have played on a higher difficulty.
(Side note: It’s impossible to balance a large open-world RPG. Players who do all the side stuff find the game too easy. Players who rush through the main story find everything too hard. Yet, though the game was too easy for me, I still had fun. I found that very reassuring while I work on my own large open-world RPG.)
The hacking system was the magic in this RPG. This was neat, kind of. Basically, when you hack an enemy, you hold down a button that slows time. You pick a target and press a button. The target eventually dies. It felt powerful, which was nice, but it was uncompelling gameplay. So many of the fights for me went Select. Click. Select. Click. Repeat until alone.
In the end, it was fine. I had a good 50 hours, but I would have done a lot more of the optional content if the fighting had more zazz. (Note that Grand Theft Auto games have this exact same problem, and you don't even get magic. If you want a real focus on fun combat, play one of the new Doom games.)
The Story Was Good, But With A Familiar Flaw
The story has a great hook: You get an alien personality copied into your brain, and it's taking you over. You have to get rid of it before it kills you.
(Baldur's Gate 3 had something very similar. This plot device can be retired for a bit. Maybe we can go back to a main character with amnesia for a while.)
In a long game, a clear story hook like this is vital. Cyberpunk 2077 has a billion distractions. When you return to the main story, you must be able to remember what it is about!
I still had a lot of trouble with the story. With everything pulling me in so many directions, I couldn't keep all of the characters, missions, factions, corporations, and general lore straight. It didn't help that I had to remember all this stuff for two people in my head, instead of the usual one.
You Have To Be Careful About Telling Players How They Should Feel
Video games have no excuse for ignoring the general writing advice of "Show, Don't Tell". After all, games can easily show you things. They're VIDEO games, after all.
So I start the game with some guy named Jackie. Apparently, we're friends or partners or siblings or clones or something. In the prologue, Jackie and I murder a whole bunch of people. Then he dies. Oh well. Goodbye, guy I just met.
And then I spend hours and hours being told how this guy I killed people with for 5 minutes is the kindest, gentlest, wisest fellow you could ever hope to meet. I didn't feel any of it, because I never got the chance to know the guy.
If you want to mourn a character in your game, that's great. It can be solid storytelling. I can be sad about the death of a character in a video game, but you have to earn it.
Remember, everyone was super sad in The Last Of Us 2 when Joel died, but to make that happen we had to spend a full 1.3 games with him.
I Don't Get The Morals Of This Game
Cyberpunk 2077 takes place in Night City, the worst place in all of history. It's a nonstop ferment of corruption, hopelessness, murder, and more than a little rape.
The game tells me I am supposed to hate the corpos (Cyberpunk 2077er punk-talk for "corporations"). Yet, as far as I can tell, the corpos are the only thing in this miserable hellcity that works. Without the corpos, the whole mess would collapse in on itself in five minutes.
My first introduction to the corpos was that I was breaking into one of them, killing a ton of people on the way, to steal stuff. Are we 100% sure in this situation the corpo is the bad guy?
The only reason I would hate the corpos is that Cyberpunk 2077 told me I had to. No other reason. It's ok for a game to tell me what my role in a world is, but it's another thing entirely, in an open-ended game like this, to tell me what my morality is.
Anyway, in the end, I sided with the United States. 'MURICA!!!
It's A Good Game
When I write these drive-by reviews, I always feel bad. It makes me seem far more negative than I am. CD Projekt Red took a real risk putting in the work and money to fixing Cyberpunk 2077, and they succeeded. It's a really cool game. I had a lot of fun with it, and it totally justified the money and time I expended.
I am totally onboard for Witcher 4. I already know that it will be full of difficult but charming people, and my magic will involve lots of fire, the way the game gods intended.
Spiderweb Software creates turn-based, indie, old-school fantasy role-playing games. They are low-budget, but they’re full of good story and fun. You can still late-back the Kickstarter for our next game, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory.
Some of the bits about cyberpunk that I found noteworthy were the cinematography, just vastly more budget on conversation animation, those scenes felt like the true star. Also, how well it 'feels' like an rpg besides almost every quest having zero choice - often they'll be clever about choice by explaining "consequences" in a followup conclusion text message to avoid branching animations.
As you say the gameplay is trite and the difficulty is reliably trivial. I think of it more like an immersive visual novel, that's where the value is.
I'm no game dev (barely competent at tying my shoelaces), which means a part of Cyberpunk confused me. You call it out in your piece - how Johnny Silverhand is a douche in the game. BUT WAIT, there's more! I played it at launch, bugs and all, then fired up a new toon when Phantom Liberty dropped, and played both the full campaign and DLC together.
During this exciting time (and it was great both times!), I found during the second playthrough that Johnny had aged better for me. He sounded nicer; the nuance in his tone and how his lines land meant something different after my first playthrough. And it made me wonder if a) I have a brain parasite, or b) if they wrote him to be a certain way but he only comes across more favourably after you've marinated in him for longer.
Dunno, but it was a super-weird realisation to have the second time; resistance to replaying it was, "Not this asshat again," but it wasn't like that at all.
That aside, your core premise that the people you spend time with should be charming is 100% the recipe. I've lost count of the number of TV shows I've stopped watching (latest being Prime Target) because the characters are all hyper-hostile assholes.