Cyberpunk 2077 — 2.0nd Chances

Review

People wanted different things for Cyberpunk 2077. Many wanted Grand Theft Auto in a generic future. What I wanted was more of a combination of System Shock, Deus Ex, and Fallout: New Vegas. What we all got instead was unfinished and more like Deus Ex meets Borderlands with Bethesda-tier bugs. The very brokenness of the game had everyone talking about it as the pandemic raged on in December 2020.

A launch fiasco is now expected for all major releases; it’s not news in this awful industry. From the “hacking” reveal in 2018 to withholding the console versions from reviewers, CD Projekt’s marketing manipulation was carefully calculated. They knew what they were doing, and their star developers took their corpo roles seriously. They knew the limitations of the hardware in consoles and opted to release the game anyway—and it didn’t matter. But to withhold the console versions from being reviewed properly is something they must take accountability for.

2020 was the year the tabletop game was set in for the most part, which was obviously part of the decision to release it the way they did. Yes, you could complete the main storyline and have some wacky fun, but so many elements were out of joint. After some patches, it became slightly less unfinished, and some disjointed elements came together. Night City felt lived-in and somewhat unpredictable. The questlines had more resonance, and it was engaging to text with companions and NPCs. However, several features and systems were still missing or underdeveloped.

The 2.0 patch, released in tandem with Phantom Liberty, is the ‘redemption arc’ we have all been waiting for. This review has been cooking in my head since December 2020. I gave this game a lot of time and had a lot of patience with it. This is my final word on what I love and hate about Cyberpunk 2077.

Corporate Illusions

The “fluid dialogue system” advertised from the first major gameplay trailer is only there sometimes. You often have to follow a character to continue dialogue, which feels worse than locking the player out of the controls. The dialogue options have a bit of complexity, with CDPR’s branching storylines depending on whether you kill a character or not, and the choices between two evils. An example (spoiler): when you tell Delamain to take Jackie’s body to Viktor Vektor, instead of Jackie’s family, that triggers a different questline and set of dialogue options.

Quests like “Sinnerman” are heavily railroaded and don’t allow any player freedom. We get it, their writers have cool stories they want to tell, but there should be more player agency involved in how they tell these stories. Don’t lock us out of our skills, whether hacking or killing. Trust our capacity to engage with the story on multiple levels. Don’t make us follow the little dotted line, again and again.

Seeing REDengine

The dotted line is not where its resemblance with The Witcher 3 ends, either. The car races and the “Beat on the Brat” quests are paint-by-numbers. The underlying gameplay loot cycle structure is virtually the same. The developers bet on this structure as if it was a tried-and-true model, when it was in fact the weakest part of The Witcher 3. Even now, Cyberpunk 2077 still feels structurally like the REDengine blueprint is all over the quest design, the looting mechanics, and so on.

Whereas the crafting mechanics are an afterthought, undercooked and barely cohesive. This is where the resemblance with Borderlands is at its worst, with a plethora of guns and paraphernalia that you have to disassemble one by one. This is a waste of the player’s time. Crafting as a whole feels like a time and money sink, but the rewards don’t feel worth the investment. The thing about the game living up to the reality of cyberpunk tropes is that the only way to get what you want is modding.

Cyberpunk 2077 is at its worst when it tries to be Grand Theft Auto in the future. Driving missions are a bit of a nuisance with scripted mishaps, even in the 2.0 version. The Delamain quests, “Night Moves” and “Sinnerman” are all missions where something has to get in the way of your driving to an objective. “Riders on the Storm” has a railroaded stealth route that you can’t diverge from. The game suffers from the same problems NakeyJakey pointed out in a notorious video about Rockstar’s game design, even though The Witcher 3 avoided some of these problems.

Yes, and I gotta find Ciri. Eventually.

Gonks and Gigs

What they continue to do better than most studios are quests like “Second Conflict,” where the Maelstrom characters you met in the first job with Jackie Welles either resurface or get replaced by new leaders, depending on your choices. It makes the characters have an actual impact on the storyline, rather than just being cardboard cutout NPCs that can be replaced by similarly inconsequential placeholders.

An unusual quest like “Coin Operated Boy” feels almost like a metaphor for single-player gaming and the empathy we feel for fictional characters in these games. These details and minor stories, which can be missed by players who focus on the main storyline and action, are what CDPR has always done best. Finding these minor stories and paying attention to them is rewarding in a game of this scope.

But not all gigs in the base game are as engaging as the Phantom Liberty gigs, which are much more interactive and feature unique characters and dialogue. I suppose the gig that stood out most to me in the base game was “Bring Me the Head of Gustavo Orta,” but most felt copy-and-paste: you either infiltrate or bum-rush, then complete the quest and get paid. Fetch quests are the most artificial way of engaging players.

Nomad Lifepath Jackie is the best Jackie.

Between the Lines

The role Keanu Reeves plays in Cyberpunk 2077 makes sense when you remember Johnny Mnemonic (1995). This was a terrible cyberpunk movie, based on a short story and screenplay written by William Gibson, about a courier carrying a data package encrypted into his brain. The difference is that Johnny Silverhand is the data in your head, rather than a courier, and ‘data courier’ fits V’s job description most of the time. It’s this inversion of roles that the writers thought would be in keeping with the lore.

The shards found everywhere in Night City are not always engaging, but I was drawn to the shards with passages from poems by William Blake, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, and Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. There was some use of literary allusion in The Witcher 3, but there is something more substantial in the use of direct references to real poets, historians, and philosophers.

Depending on your decisions in the final act, whether you remain V or embrace becoming Johnny, Alt Cunningham quotes two passages from famous poems.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question ...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

W.B. Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”

The secret ending took some doing.

Feature Wishlist

The Lifepaths are still somewhat undercooked in the 2.0 update, and the whole first act is as railroaded as the first act of Phantom Liberty. Yes, there are numerous improvements to gameplay mechanics, to progression and skill trees, and to the crime systems. While I don’t much care about going rogue, I know this is expected in urban open world games, but there are other features that I would like instead.

For instance, I wish the computers were more realistic and open to interaction. The wrist-cable hacking animation gets old fast, and the access point logic puzzle minigame gets too easy way too soon. It would be much cooler to have something closer to The Occupation, where you copy files to shards, making sure the data is encrypted, then sneak it out of the complex. As it is, the game still leans more towards Borderlands than Deux Ex and System Shock in that sense.

Gigs should have more scenes with the fluid dialogue system, instead of NPCs simply attacking you on sight right away. This was the appeal of Phantom Liberty, making gigs more complex and engaging by letting us react to the NPCs rather than go in, kill, and sneak out. Of course, most gigs are supposed to be quick and dirty contracts, not fully branched quests, but there is still room for improvement in how they work.

The real GOTY.

Nostalgia Mirrorshades

There are other cyberpunk games that pushed the genre beyond the original tropes. The 1989 adventure-RPG Neuromancer was influential for its time, but there are also other more experimental or indie games, such as E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy, Observer, Ghost Runner, Ruiner, Citizen Sleeper, and others. Personally, I would love to see a game adaptation of Transmetropolitan, or something with that particular style.

Why do we look back on the 80s cyberpunk aesthetic with nostalgia? This specific niche privileges the gaudy, flashy, and lacking in substance. If we take off our nostalgia mirrorshades, can we still enjoy Cyberpunk 2077? Or is that retro aesthetic required to enjoy it? As I wrote in my Phantom Liberty review, the future of Cyberpunk as a series will likely be tied up with this period for a while.

Even through all its technical issues and shortcomings, Cyberpunk 2077 kept me engaged through many hours. I found myself often just driving around Night City and not really engaging in crime or missions; just taking in the sights and sounds, the songs on the radio, the NPCs chattering, the life of the city. It feels like a real place, as horrible as it may be, and it keeps me coming back, despite some glaring neon flaws.

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Disclosure: Cyberpunk 2077 was reviewed on PC with a GOG copy purchased by the reviewer over the course of hundreds of hours of play time. All screenshots attached were captured during the review process.

Rating: 8.5 / Recommended.

The Good

• Immersive all the way through;

• Outstanding soundtrack and voice acting;

• Engaging, fleshed out characters;

• Compelling side quests and details;

• Plethora of gameplay options;

• Endless potential for sequels.

The Bad

• Railroaded first act;

• Some uninspired fetch quests;

• Still glitchy here and there;

• A few underdeveloped features.

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Cyberpunk 2077 is available on GOG, Steam, Epic Games Store, Xbox, and PlayStation. More information is available on the official website.