In 'Cyberpunk 2077,' the Only Truly Punk Move Is Not to Play
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I don’t play games much anymore, but I did pick Cyberpunk 2077 up (via Stadia) and I’ve found it to be a blast. Certainly not perfect, but absolutely a world worth exploring. My favorite part are the details; there are tons of little stories and narratives in the items you pick up during each mission. The constant barrage of negativity surrounding it make no sense to me.
The game’s vitriolic reaction only really came about as a direct followup to possibly one of the most hyped up games this year.
My experience is that it’s a fun game with some minor problems. If you like cyberpunk books or media, you’ll love it. The writing team put a lot of effort into crafting a backstory of the world.
Overall it reminds me of the original Neuromancer novel; moments of sheer brilliance mixed with moments of tacky, embarrassingly bad writing. That specific quality is part of the genre’s history, to me, and I think a lot of the criticism toward 2077 is from people who haven’t read much of the previous books.
"Control was another game with "severe frame rate issues" on base PS4 and Xbox One consoles. While it started out well enough, it began dropping hard on combat sequences, even going as low as 10fps"
checks notes, never delisted despite shipping game playing at 10fps ....
The other big difference is the amplification by social media that's present for every pop-culture phenomenon makes the kerfuffle seem larger than it is. What passes for news media these days is mostly a large twitter echo-chamber.
I would bet 90% of gamers are like me. Disappointed in the launch, but definitely going to try the game once the main bugs are ironed out a few patches down the road.
I can tell you why I'm annoyed: I was a big CDPR fan, I loved all three of the (core) Witcher games, so I was hoping something to a similar level of quality. The fact that it wasn't isn't the problem though (especially bugs, which can be fixed), the problem is the CEO's lied, not just to us the customers, but also to their shareholders. They said a year ago that the game could be played from start to finish, but its now come out that devs are saying that was a downright lie. Shortly before release, they said that the game "performs better than expected" on base PS4/Xbox, which was also an outright lie.
I'm angry at the lies.
The game itself has problems: the AI is nonexistent (GTA 3 from 2001 had better car driving AI!), its buggy with regular crashes, physics glitches, audio glitches, quest-breaking bugs. The shooting is not terrible, but its nothing special. The hacking is just a menu with zero depth. Many missions are just "go kill the people" mundane affairs (sad compared to how great The Witcher 3's side quests were). There are characters that get built up and then you never hear from them again. Some characters quest lines feel very short. Few decisions have a lasting impact and the endings are almost all chosen through a selection in the last mission segment (very few prior decisions have any impact on it).
But with that said, the game isn't bad (bugs aside). The music is amazing, the voice acting is great, I found the characters likable, the attention to detail in some areas is fantastic (visiting peoples graves for example) and overall the main quests, especially the ones that were more talking to people than shooting, were really good. I legit felt heart broken at certain phone messages towards the end, they hit me right in the feels.
So its a flawed game with some great ideas and some good content. I feel that if they'd had another year of development time, it would have been an amazing game, but management rushed it out instead.
If I ignore the technical issues and judge the game purely on story, content, gameplay, then I'd give it a 7 to 7.5/10 (with technical problems I'd give it 3/10)
I've played it through once (and reloaded right before the end to see a second ending) and I don't regret buying it, I got my moneys worth. However, its nowhere near the hype their marketing promised and its nowhere near the quality that The Witcher 3 was.
More surprisingly to me is that people still give modern media any credibility whatsoever. I turned on NPR the other day and had to turn it off after 15 minutes. I can't imagine why anyone would listen anymore.
There's enough space on the Internet for "is this game fun?" reviews and "is this game epistemologically sound?" reviews.
I don't really understand the plot complaints other then they just didn't like it that more or that it didn't fit their idea of what the game should be.
That said, you should understand that what you've shared here is your opinion and isn't a ground truth for videogames. Humans play games for many, many reasons and for some they'd much rather have a smaller experience with excellent writing.
You can also make fairly pragmatic decisions to do what makes the most sense in context. I wouldn't call it 'optimistic' sci-fi since the world is pretty gritty, but the techno-futurism, ability for people to upgrade themselves is pretty interesting, and achieving immortality for everyone is pretty optimistic even in that gritty backdrop.
It's worth playing to check it out, I'd ignore most of this over-intellectualized writing about it and just play it for yourself if you want to.
I liked the story and world ultimately, I think people just like to have 'contrarian' takes on something popular as a way to signal how smart they are.
Probably too harshly worded, but it's a recurring thing I've noticed.
I didn't think I'd like Silverhand at all, I haven't really seen any Keanu movies since The Matrix so had zero buy in with him being in the game, and at the start he was such a dry character. However, as it went on and as V and he interacted more, he grew on me and I guess V did too, so the V/Silverhand blend at the end became something I actually cared about.
I'm not sure which case is more unforgivable here. Geralt, the Witcher protagonist, in the books at least, makes it a personal point not to meddle in human affairs as much as possible, and to keep it strictly business for the most part - e.g. killing horrible monsters for coin.
In the game, our actions couldn't stray further from this principle.
From what I've seen in Cyberpunk's gameplay, we are no less than a mass-murderer as well. And despite most of our kills being gang members and thugs, I'm still not sure it's entirely justifiable. I've seen people indiscriminately kill civilians and cops by running them over with cars, and suffer no real consequences in further gameplay.
Hence it's quite hilarious to me when people compare Cyberpunk to Deus Ex or another stealth shooter. They must be out of their mind. The games are nothing alike. The shallowness and one-dimensionality of Cyberpunk makes it much closer to GTA/Borderlands than a revolutionary stealth/rpg game.
People were expecting a revolutionary game in the way Witcher 3 was when it came out. And that, Cyberpunk certainly isn't.
It's just very run and gun. And uniteresting. I'm sure I'm in the minority, but I'd love it to be a mix of syndicate (if you know that game), Detroit, and something like a point and click game. Something with a ton of interaction and only a bit of fighting.
Of course, I occasionally screw up and end up lobbing grenades until I stop getting shot at, but so it goes.
> I'm sure I'm in the minority
Nah, that sounds pretty cool. I'd play something like that. Especially since as I said above, the interaction-heavy quests were the best ones.
I played through the whole game and got probably lucky when it came to bugs because I did not experience that many game breaking ones (though DID encounter them which taught me to save very very frequently) and I am lucky to have a high end PC so while performance was really terrible I still managed to get ~60fps on highest settings, most of the time.
It is not, it is not amazing even without the bugs. I have a strong suspicion that the people who praise or defend it so tenaciously played only the longer prologue, which lasts a few hours depending on your speed, maybe a few hours further. The quality of that part is way better than the rest and from that point on the quality will continue to drop the closer one gets to the finale.
The game has massive problems that are just not related to bugs, it just tries so many things and does all of them mediocre. Many redundant and useless game mechanics. UI navigation is terrible, there are game design problems. The open world is hollow and lifeless and the behaviour of random NPCs does not even reach GTA 3 level in some ways, to put that into perspective. There is nothing to discover or explore in the open world part (except pretty screenshots sometimes) and every interaction in it (that is: outside of story missions) with characters works through audio calls and text messages.
I am not saying that it is absolutely terrible without the bugs, there is some fun to be had when everything works, but removing the bugs would lift it up to "pretty ok" at best, and I do regret the time investment and purchase. Seeing the opinions split into these two extreme opinions "amazing" and "absolutely terrible" just feels weird.
I'd love to see a setting where technology has made the world a practical utopia, and people generally don't have to be wary of each other. It would be tricky to introduce interesting conflict and challenges into such a setting, yes.
There are some anime/manga like that, for example Aria [0], which is basically Venice on Mars and the main characters are aspiring gondoliers, with the story centered on their training or daily life etc.
But you could have a utopian human society and have the conflict come from an alien species or some kind of cosmic cataclysm.
I'd bet you know about Psycho Pass, it also shakily satisfies your description.
Yes, these ideas are played out, and there's tons of bad examples of media that just replays these ideas without bringing anything novel to the table. But I still find the idea of a 'realistic' dystopian sci-fi more potentially compelling than a sugarcoated 'impossible' utopia because I fundamentally believe it can't exist. I cannot conceive of a real utopia in practice, and what someone else may call a utopia I would surely call some sort of nightmare.
Refer to Brave New World as a good example of exactly this dynamic.
The very definition of a utopia (colloquially, regardless of where the word actually came from) is a state where nobody feels like its a nightmare.
Where everybody has basic comforts and the freedom to do what they want (as long as it doesn't harm anyone) and decide their future and has safety nets against misfortune.
You can still have plenty of interesting trials and tribulations in such a setting (competing in sports, getting good at art, exploring the cosmos) and I'm sure that if done right it will be a refreshing change from the usual tired old trope of "Everything's fucked! And will always be fucked!"
I believe in nurture > nature, and I see it in the differences between different human settlements (cultures, nations) and in attitudes over time.
In some places you're more likely to get robbed, in others you're more likely to get help. In some cities you're more likely to see casual litter, in other places more people cleaning up after themselves.
For every decade you go back in time there will be more and more classes of people who had a much harder time of fitting into society, along with the lack of many other freedoms that we take for granted now.
Once nobody has to constantly struggle for basic comforts, I think humanity will be able to chill the fuck out.
>"Once nobody has to constantly struggle for basic comforts,"
It's definitely possible. Humans have an immense amount of potential for good. But I don't believe the people in power, with the influence to enact meaningful change, will ever let this fly. Simply because of the reason that they greatly benefit from the current state of the world. People in this class have most of the capital and generate money from their existing wealth while doing basically nothing of value. They need us commoners to consume, consume, and consume. They need us to work and labor away, as cogs in the machine that makes them profit, so that they will not have to work like us. Yes, automation will come. But who will own the factories and machines? Exactly. But even then, there will still be many things that they require laborers for. And in the future, the common people will be fighting each other over the privilege of serving this owner class at the continued threat of destitution. Just like how it's always been...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91w4GkdGfVA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u3IB3Jygus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnDxHTaeNX0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUcTGx-pfvI
You can browse more on your own, just search for random travelogues.
Why hasn't every place devolved into chaos? Why are some places better off than others? Why can't that success be replicated?
Even if dethroning the current power structure does not happen, the ordinary people can still live increasingly comfortable lives as to make the differences practically irrelevant.
Look at the comforts we have access to now. Unprecedented in the history of humankind. Sure, not everyone has a private jet, but everyone can fly. Not everyone can eavesdrop on any conversation in the world, but everyone can have conversations all over the world. We may not have access to military satellites that can peer through buildings, but we do have Google Earth.
You speak of factories and production lines. What if they're all run by robots? Or better, everyone has a 3D printer in their kitchen that can just build an iPhone 42 right there?
How about matter replicators? Cloning pods? Medical immortality? Terraforming and colonizing multiple planets? With everything powered by an endless supply of fusion energy.
Nevermind if all that will be possible any time soon. Cyberpunk gets carried away with pessimistic predictions. I just think there's room for a genre of fiction that runs with optimistic prediction.
- After Life, Simon Funk: https://sifter.org/~simon/AfterLife/
- Most of Ted Chiang, but particularly Liking What You See: A Documentary: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vSPLnv...
- Also Ted Chiang: The Lifecycle of Software Objects (not really pessimistic or optimistic, just thoughtful)
- Her (Movie), melancholy but ultimately hopeful
- HPMOR (Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality): http://www.hpmor.com
- True Names, Vernor Vinge: http://www.scotswolf.com/TRUENAMES.pdf
- Permutation City, Greg Egan (accurately predicts AWS 20yrs early along with a host of other super interesting ideas)
- Star Trek TNG is the classic example of optimistic Sci-Fi, but the more recent Enterprise is also good.
- The San Junipero Black Mirror episode
- I wouldn't call The Expanse optimistic, but it's probably the best sci-fi show on today.
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For some contrarian anti-recommendations which can be just as useful:
- I thought the culture series was bad, in plot/characters/writing - I found it tedious and kind of dumb.
- I disliked the three body problem for similar reasons.
The Neil Gaiman run of Miracleman is about the Utopia constructed by Miracleman during the Alan Moore run of Utopia. Presumably the next series is about how that goes tragically wrong, but it has never been published. But the Golden Age (Gaiman run) is pretty interesting. People living in a Utopia are still people.
s/Utopia/Miracleman/
I think if the game was more like Alan Wake it would have been better as far story telling goes. Alan Wake is awesome by the way.
Without any expectations, when playing I thought the narrative choices were a bit shallow. Maybe they get better as the game progresses.
Hatred, negativity, and piling on is easy to do. If we enjoy something then we just enjoy it. Stopping and making a point to share that enjoyment doesn’t probably happen as often.
Also, remember there were many articles about a year or so ago about the toxic world game developers have to live in. Tons of expectations and tons of viscous attacks. Why would anyone expect anything different in this situation.
About the article, it's well written. I'm still likely to play the game, but will wait until I get a PS5 and once they've polished some of the bugs.
Unfortunately, lack of character depth doesn't sound like a thing they're gonna patch...
I likely wont finish the story, but will continue to futz around in game for a while when I'm bored.
The irony of the save file corruption issue being tied to "too much crafting" given the DIY ethos of punk is palpable.
It's so true honestly. The game has the intellectual depth of a Che-shirt or that Kendall Jenner Pepsi commercial.
What the game reminds me of is Mark Fisher's point about how we've lost the ability to imagine new futures, because Cyberpunk is the opposite of a futuristic game. Cyberpunk's notion of sexuality in the future is basically bolting a penis or vagina onto the opposite sex, everyone's driving around in retro-looking cars or motorcycles, nothing about it is actually novel other than the surface level aesthetic they've put on it, which has been virtually unchanged for four decades. The author is right that the most actual cyberpunk aspect of the game is in fact the development and sale of the game itself, like some sort of unwitting piece of performance art.
It’s a GAME ...