Cyberpunk 2077: A Candle in Sunshine [OPEN SPOILERS]

Yes, this many months later, we’re still talking about Cyberpunk. Or at least, I still have some thoughts on it. I completely understand if anyone doesn’t want to read another hot take on the matter—I’m exhausted too—but I’m hoping that with this sober distance, a slightly more productive conversation around this game can take place. That, and I can’t stop myself from writing something longer about Cyberpunk. This isn’t enthusiastic inspiration from the Muse, mind you – more like one of those nagging errands that just keeps picking at the back of your head, week after week, month after month, until you finally clean your damn shed and find rats living there.

I beat Cyberpunk 2077 a month ago. After months of having to react to the controversy of the day—and there was always a new one for a while there—there’s a chance to construct and articulate my own thoughts, rather than react to the newest thing. So as much as I’d prefer not to, because I’m already so tired of this game, I feel the need to write this up, and hopefully I never have to think about it again.

A Disclaimer

I'm not going to jump into the trans discussion in this piece—I've already done that plenty in the forums, and I want to discuss the game as a whole. The critiques thrown CDPR's way are valid, and I don't think it's very controversial to say that those of us unfamiliar with why someone could be uncomfortable should listen to the trans people this affects? Rather than reflexively say, "well I didn't see anything wrong with it." Between Cyberpunk,Last of Us Part 2, and Hogwarts Legacy, a cynical part of me wonders if 2020 was the year "gamers" learned that trans people exist—any sort of phobia or misinformation is nothing more than studied ignorance, after all. Sure, they were aware that transgender folks existed, but they never really had to confront those transgender folks actually being in "their" games and speaking openly about wanting better representation. The "discourse" around this issue occurring in gaming communities is less a conversation and more one side speaking while the other holds their hands over their ears yelling "lalalalalalala I can't hear you!" That's not to say there aren't productive conversations to have about transgender representation in games, it's just that... those tend to happen between people who give a shit. And there's a small, yet vocal subset of game fans who clearly don't, which made my time attempting to explain the issue in these forums straight up exhausting. (Ironically, it's often those who say, "I really just want someone to explain what the actual problem is," who are looking for no such thing.)

To that subset: don't worry, I'm not going to talk about it at all for the rest of this piece. If you genuinely want to talk about this, feel free to DM me.

With that out of the way...

Where Do We Even Start

Someone must have made this comparison already, but Cyberpunk has so much going on, and yet so little, that it can act like a Rorschach test for whoever’s talking about it. Post-release, there are so many tire fires surrounding and within the game that which one you want to talk about is, in itself an important decision that frames the entire discussion. To paraphrase a few I’ve seen: is Cyberpunk the beginning of better consumer protections and refund policies in video games? The end of day one patches? A watershed moment to rethink how we over-hype games in our marketing (like this great piece from Gamer_152 focuses on)? A tipping point in the deep ugliness of some video game fandoms, willing to trigger epilepsies in folks who dare point out issues in the game they’re tilting at windmills for? Is it the death of modern CDPR’s reputation? Or, just focusing on the game outside of its cultural context, is it just an okay game that was over-hyped? Or a masterpiece flawed by its rushed production schedule and botched console release?

I want to talk about that last bit, particularly, because in the second wave of Cyberpunk critiques online, I’ve seen this sentiment pop up more and more often—that this is an incredible game marred by technical issues. Implying, or outright saying, if you have a modern PC this is going to be a great experience.

That is absolutely not the case.

A Seemingly Random but Actually Crucial Tangent on In N Out

Like a lot of y’all, I live in California. Around here we have a chain of burger places called In N Out. It’s alright! I enjoy the Double Double, I think the fries are kinda thin papery garbage that turn to ash in your mouth, and drinking their milkshake is a near-masochistic experience as you punish your throat with some of the densest ice cream and dairy you’ve ever tried to suck through a straw. Seriously, you need the suction force of say, an airplane’s cabin decompressing to get the last of the milkshake out through a straw. So, not the best burger place here, but an alright option, and I admit that it is synonymous with the West Coast.

However, when I went to college on the East Coast, where no In N Out locations exist, the franchise took on an almost messianic unattainable quality. New York kids who had never been to one wished they had been, and the Cali kids who went to school there claimed that it was the best burger place ever, egging on this disproportionate, platonic ideal of fast food burgers. Heck, when an In N Out wrapper was found in Queens and photographed for Twitter, a full-on amateur Twitter investigation was commenced (the perp was found—they had brought In N Out on their flight from San Diego) It was fascinating to watch a fast food chain become some kind of symbol or totem to these guys, and when it came time for me to weigh in on these conversations, I’d just say that I liked it to not rain on their parade. Inaccessibility, paired with some overenthusiastic evangelists, created unrealistic expectation for In N Out, when Five Guys was sitting right there! (Five Guys is the best fast food burger, don’t @ me)

A similar phenomenon is brewing around Cyberpunk on the PC. The luxurious trailer footage of Cyberpunk, paired with the kitchen sink of PC graphics features and technologies, (DLSS! SharpeningFX! RTX! THE GAME OF THE FUTURE IS NOW!) has created this impression that the game is some kind of technical marvel or juggernaut, that those with PCs capable of running it are lucky to have. Again: inaccessibility + overenthusiastic evangelists = bloated expectations.

Because I can convince myself it helps me with work, but really because I’m wasteful with my money, I have one of the fastest consumer PCs one can build right now. I have an RTX 3090 paired with a Ryzen 5950x (the extra cores do genuinely help with compile times), with 64 GB of RAM. In other words, I have burned disgusting amounts of money for the privilege of playing Cyberpunk in its utmost glory, and I can tell you what that’s like in one sentence.

It’s a mess.

Sorry guys, Cyberpunk is rough on every platform. In order to run the game smoothly at 60 frames a second, you have to crank DLSS waaaaaay up. DLSS is not a “feature” here, but a necessity. At upscaled 4k, with everything on, and raytracing set to medium, you’re looking at a wildly uneven 60. At DLSS set to “Performance” or “Ultra-Performance” you get a semblance of the framerate you’d want from a PC game, minus frequent CPU spikes from driving around the open world taking you down to 40 FPS, but the image is genuinely really grainy. Cyberpunk uses a lot of resolution-dependent effects, so a lot of the smoke, lights, and distant environments can look fuzzy and blurred when you have DLSS leaning all the way into performance. On the other end of the scale, DLSS Quality and Balanced modes look far sharper, but the game’s performance tanks into 30ish territory again. Even turning down the resolution target from 4k to say, 1440p or 1080p doesn’t get you the performance you’d want. (It gets to like, 70-80, but still uneven.) Because of these headaches, I spent my entire playthrough ping-ponging between “Balanced, Performance, Ultra-Performance” and “RTX Off, RTX Medium, RTX Psycho”, and was never satisfied with any of them, either due to the framerate or the muddiness of the image.

Once you look past all of that, and turn off the chromatic aberration, motion blur, and film grain, (or like me, turn everything up to native 4k and highest settings for a 12 FPS slideshow and “science”,) the game as a whole is still… ugly. Some of that could be the art style, one that embraces brown, gray, and orange industrial wastelands when it’s not using every nit of brightness on your monitor for the neon urban areas, but it’s probably more likely a “death by a thousand cuts” kind of deal. There are areas that stand out (the opening hotel heist, the parade, downtown, Afterlife, WOW,) but the primarily color I remember is brown, and a constant over-bloom lighting effect. And say what you will about Crysis, a game that also brought hardware to its knees in its day, but it also looked damn good in exchange. This, though? Feels less worth the tradeoff.

Even from an artistic, rather than technical standpoint, Cyberpunk disappoints. A common sentiment is that this is partly the fault of the source material—that by attempting to be the ur-Cyberpunk game based on one of its oldest pen and paper incarnations, what used to be transgressive now just appears generic. That may be part of it, but when I read Neuromancer or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I’m not just enjoying them because they “did it first” in some bizarre dibs-calling on the entire genre. I’m enjoying them even today because they have something to say, and the world backs up their messages. In Cyberpunk, the most prominent visual landmark at any time is the architecture of Night City itself, but this architecture, while there’s a lot of it, misses the mark. I highly recommend reading this architect’s critique of Cyberpunk’s spaces—but in short, Night City has the aesthetic of raw functionality, but isn’t actually serving any function, turning the architecture into a glamour. Mind you, a “glamour” in the older sense of the word: an illusion, a spell. Now, there’s nothing wrong with that. All games are smoke and mirrors. It’s just that with stuff like this (see below) all over the place, likely the result of crunch, this spell breaks all the time. For a game that relies so heavily on the verisimilitude of Night City holding, this is crippling.

Also, there were still several game breaking bugs while I played it in February, so buyer beware.

The Game Part (In A Nutshell)

Past the technical concerns, which are present on every platform, Cyberpunk is an empty, empty game that is constantly shouting at you, waving at you to look at it, distracting you from that emptiness. If you play through the critical path, ignoring all the sidequests, or even some of the story missions, you can probably beat the game in 10-15 hours? All you really need to do is go through the opening 3-4 missions leading up to Johnny Silverhand’s introduction, then mainline Takemura’s quests, take Arasaka’s offer, and then you’re set. And the game is aware of this thin critical path, to the point it’ll yell “hey, don’t walk past this point unless you want to finish the story!” Now, Witcher 3 did this, but that came after so much more story it felt more like a fair warning than a “hey, don’t dive here, the water in this pool is actually 1 foot deep!”

Characters will constantly call you with urgent matters in the middle of other urgent missions, or, most hysterically, during important dialogue moments. Now, you can say “yes, I’ll be right over,” knowing damn well that you won’t be over for at least 30 minutes, or you can say the sane human thing of “I’m busy, can I come by later?” Except sometimes that actually lets you do the mission later, and other times it cuts the mission off entirely (this is what cut off any chance for my female V to romance Judy, by the way). These missions constantly stepping on each other’s toes gives the impression that a lot is happening and Night City has so much to do, but really, it’s just poorly paced to create that illusion. Because between those cacophonous moments (at the end of one mission only to get 5 other text messages or calls) is a great emptiness. Not a contemplative, intentionally sparse emptiness like No Man’s Sky or Death Stranding, but a laundry list of boilerplate sidequests and groups of Bad Men to kill, one that is deeply boring, but compulsively playable. “Ah, just one more map icon. Just one more. Then maybe I can upgrade my Cool to one more point out of 20!” Whether or not the missions are fun (they aren’t) isn’t their point – the appearance of the missions and the utility of the missions is their point. The appearance, because you can’t be a modern AAA game without icon vomit on the map, and those sure are a lot of icons that give players a lot to do (on paper, even if it’s just the same activity x100). The utility, because their only purpose is to make the numbers go higher.

How are those numbers? They’re alright. Mapping out a specialization for my V was some of the most fun I had with Cyberpunk, as I got to make a pretty synergistic “Cold Blood + Mantis Blades” build that gave me a lot of health and extra damage every time I killed a guy or went into slow-mo, which was… a lot. So that was okay, and seeing my dumb build (HEAVY ATTACK LUNGE. HEAVY ATTACK LUNGE. HEAVY ATTACK LUNGE. SWIPE SWIPE SWIPE SWIPE SWIPE) in practice was fun for the first few hours it took off.

The problem is that there was 30 hours left.

In Doctor Faustus, (the novel by Thomas Mann, not the original Christopher Marlowe play,) a fictional Devil explains Hell as people running between unbearable fire and unbearable cold, with nothing in the middle. The damned souls run back and forth forever, swapping from an intolerable state to another, crucially, always seeing the other as a potential refuge. Cyberpunk put me in a pretty similar spot, jumping back and forth between the combat and my character’s skill tree as my primary motivators, but neither being quite compelling enough for me to be satisfied by. The core combat and stealth isn’t interesting enough on its own without the game’s RPG abilities, so I played it primarily to level up my character. But the character levelling only really comes into play in the combat, and the skill trees aren’t that interesting, so... it’s only a matter of time until the core loop comes tumbling down.

On Power Fantasies

When the original Deus Ex came out, some reviewers pointed out that, while having such a wide range of options was exciting, each individual gameplay style, by necessity, couldn’t match that of its immediate peers. The shooting in Deus Ex was awful, and the stealth was much better but still not up to Thief, or Metal Gear Solid. The magic was in how it all came together, the exploration of different options.

Similarly, every option in Cyberpunk 2077 is… underwhelming. If one of the core conceits is to fulfill your fantasy of being a badass deck-punching netrunner, or a ninja warrior, or a hard-boiled merc – Cyberpunk meets none of these. The combat tends to have a bell curve of enjoyment—near the beginning, you don’t have enough tools to play with to do more than “shoot man” or “walk behind man, strangle man,” but near the end, you are so powerful you don’t have to engage with any gameplay loops at all.

Take three completely separate paths. I went for a stabby stabby blade build with zero thoughts given to stealth. It started with me actually having to be pretty careful about my engagements, since I had a pretty glass cannon (read: 0 points in Body) build. That was interesting, even if the melee v melee combat felt awful, and versus gun combatants it was just “mash the attack button over and over.” Near the middle, I got some Mantis Blades, some nice mods on those, and the slow-motion cyber implant, so I felt like I had a lot more control over the fight, which again, was interesting. Then, near the end, I was so overpowered that I didn’t need to worry about any abilities at all, and just mashed attack + sprint with my brain turned off. Again, that was fun at first, but there was 30 hours left. And there’s something kind of strange about the ultimate reward of a combat-driven game being… not having to engage with the combat as deeply?

Another example. What if you want to be a stealthy infiltrator? A cool character who’s in and out before anyone ever noticed they were there? I’ve certainly had a lot of fun playing like that in other games, but here, there’s not a lot going on in the stealth. The layouts are the classic “well you can go in the vent here or jump up the side of the building there” tropes from Deus Ex, but moment to moment, you are just walking behind guys, strangling them, and hiding their bodies. But wait, it gets less interesting! Because, even if you play a non-lethal character, you unlock a mod for your weapons that can make them all non-lethal, so you can take your incredibly overpowered silenced revolver, and just headshot every guard with 0 consequences. Great.

“But Giraffe!” you say. “The cyberpunk genre is all about hacking and augmentation! What about the cool hacking?” The hacking route in this game is equally dull in its power fantasy, as I watched my friend stream and play the game that way. Your most valuable tools from the beginning are distracting enemies with nearby objects hacked, and blinding their optics. Near the end, however, you unlock Contagion, which lets your hacking damage spread from one target to another to another until the whole room is dead, and from one button press. Once again, in a disturbing trend in this game, the reward for playing it and levelling up is having to play it less.

The Mantis Blades, Gorilla Arms, and Monowire are all neat, but they are all just cooler looking versions of existing weapon archetypes. They are not radically new augmentations that unlock entirely new ways of playing, ala a Deus Ex, but just one more upgrade in the same stale combat loop.

So, in short, throughout the entire game’s run-time, I didn’t enjoy most of the story missions (because they dealt in the same indulgent “follow this character as they talk and check out how well their face animates while you’re still not playing the game” pattern as a lot of recent releases), I didn’t enjoy the copy-paste compounds of enemies, I didn’t enjoy the combat or stealth or hacking, and in the end, the skill and customizations you could give your character were disappointing. So why did I even play this? I kept playing on the thinnest, most fragile promise of the late game skills and abilities: “Maybe, if I play enough. Maybe, if I grind enough, I’ll unlock an ability that makes this game fun.” But no, those systems and those abilities were just distractions for what I was actually doing the whole time: grinding. And it frickin’ worked.

By the time I emerged from my sidequest binge-leveling, my character was level 50 with most of her abilities (Blades, Cold Blood, Stealth) around 17 out of 20 proficiency, and most of the game’s story content was still in front of me. But playing all that side stuff first, and engaging with the story and only the story, only brought its problems into sharper relief.

The Setup

The emptiness of Cyberpunk’s systems, open world design, and gameplay extend into the story as well. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot going on—there is. It’s just that when you sit down afterward and ask, “what is Cyberpunk about?” a lot of potential answers come up, but none that are fully satisfying or make a through-line in the entire work.

In the beginning, it’s one of the most traditional crime game stories of all time: the price of infamy and power as a young merc makes their way into criminal stardom. Early on, the game seems intent on asking V and her starry-eyed partner Jackie, “what would you do to become a legend in Night City? Would you willingly walk into an early, likely violent death for a shot at fame?” This can be seen with your first conversation with Dexter Deshawn, the moment at the bar with Claire where she tells you how each drink is named after a dead Night City merc. This theme is then further hammered in when your big-time heist goes wrong and Jackie dies in your arms (easily one of the best moments in the game). When you die and come back to life, it’s almost like a second chance, isn’t it? “You’ve seen how high the price for fame in Night City is – knowing that now, do you still want to pay it?” Near death experiences are a powerful moment, in stories and life alike, to reconsider, reset your positions. Will V, with this new clarity, still pursue the top of the merc pyramid, or is there something more worth holding onto in life now? That’s a good setup for a story. However, this is all promptly forgotten and discarded when Johnny Silverhand appears, though he does bring in much more interesting questions and conflicts.

Johnny Silverhand

On paper, Johnny Silverhand is the best part of this game.

Let’s start with his relationship to V. For those reading a way-too-long Cyberpunk post despite having not learned who Johnny Silverhand is…? (highly unlikely,) Silverhand is a rockstar from 50 years before V’s time. He nuked Arasaka Tower, and was captured for his trouble. Arasaka removed his soul and placed it in their captivity, until V unwittingly plugged the same biochip into her head. When she got shot, the chip started replacing her personality with Johnny’s to save the body. This means that, like a lot of great character conflicts, these two are inherently at odds. V and Johnny cannot live at the same time for long – one has to go.

However, the cards aren’t in V’s favor. The chip is all that’s keeping her alive, so removing it would kill her. If she keeps it in, her personality will be entirely replaced by Silverhand in months. And she’s seeing him, talking to him, in her head. It seems like a normal conversation, and V pushes back hard, but a scientist familiar with the project (Hellman) points out that if Johnny starts to influence her thinking, she won’t be able to tell what is her thought and what is Johnny’s.

Honestly, this whole set up is fantastic. The conversation after you capture Hellman is one of my favorites, as you’re interested to hear what Johnny has to say, but you’re worried the longer you let him talk, the more he espouses his world view, the more that’ll become V’s world view. You don’t trust your dialogue options, you genuinely don’t trust yourself. It’s good stuff.

Understandably, the game’s narrative shifts from the theme of “Night City legends, wOOOOOO!” (though I think Johnny is an interesting foil for that, since he is a legend, at once an aspirational yet warning figure for V) to questions of identity. What makes you you? Is it ethical for companies to have the capability to own a person’s very personhood ala the Soulkiller, or the dolls in Clouds? Every sidequest starts to tie into this, in a way that’s understandable but a little too on the nose for my taste. Every mission seems to end with Johnny saying something like, “WOW, THIS FAMILY IS BEING BRAINWASHED INTO BECOMING DIFFERENT PEOPLE. REMIND YOU OF ANYONE!?”

Again, all on paper, that’s all good. The problem?

Johnny Silverhand suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucks.

That’s a really dismissive, harsh claim, so don’t worry, I’m backing it up!

First, on the more logic-y side of things, Johnny Silverhand’s relationship to the world makes little sense, or what’s there makes the world seem incredibly shallow. This guy is 50 years old, remember, and everything in Night City is apparently similar enough 50 years later for him to still comment perfectly fluently on! For instance, when working with the Tyger Claws for some side missions, Johnny’ll give you lip (he does that, a lot,) about how “oh, the Tyger Claws are super dangerous, don’t fuck with ‘em.” To demonstrate how absurd this is, imagine if 50 years from now in a major metropolitan city we still had the exact same gangs and no new ones at all. Or conversely, think 50 years back. “Man, watch out for the Warriors, they’re the roughest toughest kids around!” It makes it feel like literally nothing has happened since Johnny left. In his flashbacks, the city looks exactly the same, with the exception of one (admittedly awesome looking) city vista from a club.

On a similar note, almost all the NPCs around you can’t stop talking about Silverhand. He’ll lament being the last of the “real rebels, maaaaan,” but then everyone and their mother still remembers and fawns over Silverhand. So, the emotional reality of him feeling left behind, like the resistance he gave Arasaka made no difference and he was just paved over and forgotten anyway? Makes no sense. Much like my Tenet piece, I feel inclined to note this isn’t a “plot hole,” this is the baseline emotional state not tracking. And if we can’t intuitively track the character’s feelings… that’s a problem.

Later NPCs, like Rogue and Kerry Eurodyne revolve their entire character arcs around Johnny Silverhand. You spend a lot of time giving Johnny Silverhand temporary control of your body so he can, at the most pressing, gain some intel, and at the least pressing, go on a date with his ex. Between these late game moments, and the sheer number of times you’re just treated to the Johnny Silverhand show, it starts to feel like he’s the main character of the story, and not you. And that’s… alright, I guess. It’s not ideal in a game where you create your own custom character and therefore have an attachment to how they act and roleplay, only to be shoved to the sideline as Keanu Reeves is given center stage.

I swear, no one ever said “no” at any point in the production of this game. “Should we do a licensing deal with Microsoft even though we’re not going to release in time for this generation likely? Sure!” “Kojima wants a cameo, should we give it to him? Heck yes!” “Grimes? Yeah!” “GLaDOS? Uh-huh!” “What about this random YouTuber who could star in the ‘my cyber dick is on fire’ mission?” “No…” “Oh thank God.” “…way am I turning that golden opportunity down!” And Keanu Reeves is the cyberpunk guy so we’re going to cast him as the most important character in the game. We got Keanu Reeves in the game, and that’s huge, so we’re going to let him promote his motorcycle company and have stocks in the company and show up on stage at E3 and be in every trailer because V isn’t important! Keanu Reeves is! V is the boring guy/gal on the cover with a gun – Silverhand is the guy who this story is really about.

And that’s a problem, isn’t it? If the player isn’t the main character in an RPG? There’s a real chain of passivity going on here. I’ve complained about passive main characters before, but here it’s a whole new level. V is a passenger in Johhny’s story, who in turn is a passenger to the plans of Rogue and Alt (or Panam or Arasaka if you choose those routes). This whole game is other, cooler people telling you what to do. It can work in a linear action game, but when V is the one making decisions, that gets dicey, right? But to make it seem like you still have agency, Johnny will just present you important decisions in dialogue. Before the last mission, nothing changes (depending on the order of missions you’ve done, you may have known where Mikoshi was for a while) except another character (Vik) shaking V and telling her to make a decision! Except even then, V doesn’t make a decision, she’s taken to the roof where Johnny tells her the options she’s got. And the best one is him and V going in alone, or him taking over your body to go to Arasaka tower with Rogue. They should have just made him the player character, honestly, since it’s his story they’re the most interested in telling.

I can’t with this guy. My brain wants me to write in two entirely separate directions. One, I could point out how wrong it is to sideline the main character’s story in a damn narrative-based role playing game, and point out that if you look at their development, Johnny is actually the one that changes the most and receives the most setups and payoffs (Alt, Rogue, Samurai, the full circle of Adam Smasher) and V gets nada. Two, I want to just move on and point out that, this could still all potentially work if Johnny Silverhand’s character worked at all, but he’s actually a vapid, obnoxious prick, past the Keanu Reeves of it all.

Yeah, let’s talk about that second one.

The Emanuel Swedenborg of Cyberpunk

It’s always a little annoying encountering pet characters in video game writing. You know the ones – Kai Leng in Mass Effect 3, Tiny Tina in Borderlands 2. Characters that the writer clearly loves, and will drop anything else the narrative is doing, or make intentionally turn the player character into a temporary idiot to give their pet character snappier comebacks. What makes these characters grating, rather than story-shattering, however, is that they aren’t the main characters of these games.

Silverhand, unfortunately, is the core of Cyberpunk, narratively, and thematically.

He is, in many ways, the mouthpiece for many of the game’s themes. He’s the angel on your shoulder, who tells you what to do and when, he’s one of the only characters who openly opposes the corporations in Night City, whereas everyone else exists in their own individual rat race, more or less accepting the dystopian status quo. If you want your character to have a revolutionary streak, Silverhand’s the only place to turn. Because of all this, the words he has to say have a lot of weight. Is there a poet beneath that leathery exterior? Is Silverhand an effective anti-hero?

No, not at all. Silverhand has about as much depth as your stoner classmate in high school. He has a sense of romanticism (more on this soon,) but always in the vaguest sense. He’ll wax lyrical about how a street musician is playing the guitar with roughshod technique, but “feeling.” He’ll be vaguely nostalgic or melancholy about his exes, even when his flashbacks show he had little to no respect for anything other than their sexuality at the moment. He alludes to deeply held reasons he hates Arasaka, when in the end it boils down to “they kidnapped my no-strings ladyfriend and she became an AI.” He will yell at you (and you have no choice but to listen,) over and over, how he’s looking out for the little guy, how he wishes he wasn’t taking over your body because it’s like how the corporations rob people of their peoplehood. But in reality, he stands for nothing.

There’s a side mission where you’re following the data trail of a digital philosopher type called Swedenborg-Riviera. He writes vaguely revolutionary gibberish, much like a certain Rocker Boy. As you progress, Johnny starts to make fun of you. He calls you an idiot for following this trail of clues, and it’s implied that he may be jealous that people listen to this “revolutionary” and not him. When you reach the end of the trail, however, you learn that Swedenborg-Riviera is actually just a hacked fortune telling machine that spews out gibberish on the net for people to follow, as a prank.

Now, players familiar with 18th century theologians may have seen this one coming: Emanuel Swedenborg was a well-known writer who wrote a book called Heaven and Hell in 1758. He had some valid critiques of the church, but he was also, mmm, how do we put this, a bit of a nutjob cult leader? William Blake, a creator of his own Christian mythology, was reportedly a fan of Swedenborg’s writing right up until he actually attended one of his sermons. Afterward, well, as he writes in the "Marriage of Heaven and Hell:"

“I have always found that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise; this they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.

“Thus Swedenborg boasts that what he writes is new; though it is only the contents or index of already published books.

“A man carried a monkey about for a show, and because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conceived himself as much wiser than seven men. It is so with Swedenborg; he shows the folly of churches, and exposes hypocrites, till he imagines that all are religious, and himself the single one on earth that ever broke a net.

“Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth. Now hear another: he has written all the old falsehoods.

“And now hear the reason: he conversed with Angels who are all religious, and conversed not with Devils who all hate religion, for he was incapable through his conceited notions.

“Thus Swedenborg’s writings are a recapitulation of all superficial opinions, and an analysis of the more sublime, but no further.

“Have now another plain fact: any man of mechanical talents may from the writings of Paracelsus or Jacob Behmen produce ten thousand volumes of equal value with Swedenborg’s, and from those of Dante or Shakespeare an infinite number.

“But when he has done this, let him not say that he knows better than his master, for he only holds a candle in sunshine.” (40)

Being an insufferable English lit type, I was expecting this “twist” from a fair bit away. What I wasn’t expecting was for Silverhand to turn around and say, (paraphrasing) “Man, that’s really funny! A perfect prophet for Night City, the philosopher it deserves! Please don’t take it down, V!” And so, you get the choice to leave the hacked machine spewing nonsense to the unsuspecting masses or to take it down. And the revolutionary wants you to leave the nonsense up. Out of, what? Nihilism? Isn’t fake philosophy that misinforms the public (who would otherwise be receptive to hearing concrete steps on how they can affect change) pretty fucking counter-revolutionary?

And in that moment, I got it. Up to that point I was struggling with Silverhand, struggling with summing up this empty husk of a game that was doing so much I’d have to address, but leaving me with literally no feelings, excitement, or ideas every time I put it down. But when he smugly asserted that this trash was what Night City deserved, I got it. This game depends, in all its variations, all its endings, all its moments, on at least some emotional attachment to Silverhand, but…

Silverhand is the Emanuel Swedenborg of Cyberpunk 2077.

Seriously, re-read that Blake quote, replace “Swedenborg” with “Silverhand,” and tell me this doesn’t track. Johnny Silverhand, the guy who will shout at his bandmates and loved ones about how he’s the only one willing to fight Arasaka.

“A man carried a monkey about for a show, and because he was a little wiser than the monkey, grew vain, and conceived himself as much wiser than seven men. It is so with Swedenborg; he shows the folly of churches, and exposes hypocrites, till he imagines that all are religious, and himself the single one on earth that ever broke a net.”

So it is with the church of Johnny Silverhand. Johnny Silverhand, the guy who talks all the time about revolution, but only in vague aesthetic terms of feeling or solidarity of the rights of the individual, never meaningful concrete change. (See here Lindsay Ellis’ video about Rent, which discusses how “fight the power” Broadway shows appeal to vague feelings of liberty and romanticism, because discussing concrete injustice would make it unpalatable to a bourgeois audience, AKA the people who can afford theater tickets.) He says he cares about freeing this city, but he will happily keep Swedenborg-Riviera around because it validates his negative opinion of the world. A guy who opts for the most shocking or badass action at any point, whatever makes the biggest scene or him the most sympathetic, regardless of internal worldview. One second bragging about the size of his cock, the next being soulful about music and grief, the next a firebrand. His most drastic action, nuking Arasaka—literally accomplished nothing other than created the aesthetic of resistance. The tower was rebuilt. He’d be more useful as an organizer alive. But no, he had to cement his legend forever.

This feeling continues to deepen the more you go down the “Silverhand and Rogue” ending route. After 80 hours of running around, the game is in full “look how far we’ve come” mode. Earlier, Silverhand sits V down near where his body was dumped, and reminisces about how much they’ve grown together, how much of a better person he is now. Yet it falls flat, because when I look back on the journey we’ve undertaken together, I remember dozens of hours of copy-paste sidequests with occasional jeering from Silverhand. I can count the number of meaningful moments with him on one hand, let alone moments of his character shifting. (Outside the motel after interrogating Hellman, outside the Voodoo Boys club, the Pacifica hotel after he takes you on another bender and reminisces about his war buddy.) And when you let Silverhand take your body over one last time, Rogue can’t stop telling him how mature he’s become. So, with this new maturity, this new respect for life (which I genuinely can’t track other than, concern for V’s life? That’s the only thing I see change with Silverhand.) what do they do?

They literally do what got Johnny killed in the first place and go back to Arasaka Tower to blow it up again.

WHAT’S THE DEFINITION OF INSANITY AGAIN?

I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.

Johnny and Rogue have grown so much… that they’re making the exact same mistakes. Nothing has changed at all. And oh, whoops, Rogue died this time! Go figure! She was living a safer life, Silverhand wanders back into her life to guilt her for surviving, and she falls for it hook line and sinker and puts herself in a situation where she’s killed. Unbelievable.

This last mission was where I started to really lose it, in case you can’t tell. Armed with my new reading on Silverhand’s character, his self-congratulatory dialogue with Rogue hits my ears especially harshly: “Fuck plans, back in the day, you’d just do some lines, pick up your iron, and do what needed to be done!” Again, he is actively endorsing the idea that if you want to change things, don’t think about it too hard! Just feel it, man. And again, this thinking gets the love of his life killed. Not that anyone calls him out on that. No, they just get mad at Adam Smasher for doing exactly what you’d expect him to do.

As their AV (flying ship thing) shows up, this badass music kicks in, Rogue is sauntering with a big gun, and they both board the ship. With a view of the city at night, Rogue and Johnny spend a good minute just circle jerking each other as the ship flies toward Arasaka Tower—“WE’RE ABOUT TO GIVE THIS CITY A WAKE-UP CALL!””ONE SECOND YOU’RE IN THE GUTTER AND THE NEXT YOU’VE GOT THE WORLD AT YOUR FEET.” Ugh. You two deserve each other.

The Good, The True, and the Beautiful

Charitably, there’s a line that at least clarifies Silverhand (though it doesn’t come close to redeeming him in my eyes.) At some point with Rogue, Silverhand says, “fuck the true and the good, we only cared about the beautiful!” And this makes sense. He’s of course referring to the Platonic ideals of the good, the true, and the beautiful, (justice, truth, art,) and a guy whose character class is all about changing the world through rock and roll would obviously believe in the beautiful above all else. The art. The aesthetic. He wants to look cool, and say cool shit, and make cool things, and he wants to act out of pure feeling, unrestrained. Now, I’m no Platonist, but I think there are, just philosophically speaking, outside of the game even, significant drawbacks to that approach.

I’m reminded of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by Keats, which, because I’m not the most attentive student, I remember mostly as a critique of aesthetic. During 19th century, there was a lot of cultural and intellectual attention being paid to the relationship of art to aesthetic, and Keats, in writing about this beautiful Grecian Urn, critiques this high taste when it is separated from bodily feeling (Keats looooooved the body). In short, he sounds like he’s praising it, but really he’s calling it cold and joyless. The most famous lines are at the end,

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

In short, to put aesthetic and beauty above all else is stifling. Cold. Shallow. And in a way, isn’t that this whole game? The NPCs in the world are as lifeless as the figures drawn on the urn. It’s about a lot of things, if by about you mean throwing in half-assed references and not following up on them in the main narrative. It’s about sex work, it’s about capitalism, it’s about AI, it’s about what it means to be human, it’s about nostalgia, it’s about the importance of individuality in a world meant to crush this individuality down. It’s about these things because there are references and moments where these are all discussed, even as it never comes to a cohesive whole or world view. It’s not the story that’s important, it’s the aesthetic of having importance that’s important. Cyberpunk, much like its posterchild, Johnny Silverhand postures like it has a lot to say, but in reality says nothing that you haven’t heard before, and articulated better.

Cyberpunk’s accomplishments hold, as Blake said, “a candle in sunshine.”

The End

Hey, if you read through the whole thing, thanks a lot! ~6800 words is no joke, time is valuable, and I appreciate it. As always, I also post these to my blog, Lapses in Taste.

A couple of things:

Yes, I have watched all the endings. I like the “bad” ending with Arasaka, easily the most thought provoking and appropriately dark ending. The rest didn’t particularly resonate with me. This game leaves a lot of loose threads, and the ones they choose to resolve, or perhaps how they choose to resolve it left me pretty unhappy.

Parts of this read like one of the more negative things I’ve ever written, which on the one hand I feel bad about, but on the other it’s how I honestly feel about the game? I’m not going to give anyone crap about liking Cyberpunk, though.

With that massive endnote aside, months later, with the hype and backlash settled, how do you find Cyberpunk? Did you push through the issues on release? Like the story? Hate it? Waiting for some of these promised updates to make a noticeable difference?

I ultimately came away very positive on Cyberpunk, and I think I'll gladly play it all again in the potential cyberpunk future in which I'm able to finally get a god damned Playstation 5.

I think Johnny being a massive trash fire is why the character actually works for me. Maybe it woud not if it were anyone but Keanu, maybe.

But every time there was a heart to heart with this idiot in my head giving me atrocious advice about everything going on it was some of my favorite bits of the game.

And whether or not it helps I always felt like the game knows that he's a fuckin' loser underneath it all. None of the "Wow this guy is coool" moments feel genuine.

I read this whole piece and I agree with most of it. However, what's interesting is that as someone who really liked Cyberpunk none of this really changed my views on it. I think that the big differences between how we experienced the game are our expectations and how much time we put into it.

I never expected Cyberpunk to live up to the hype because no game could. A lot of the criticism you levy against it, like the fact that the city emphasizes form over function and that the mechanics get stale after a while, are just kind of inherent to the medium. It's so hard to build a city as big and complex and sophisticated as Night City that there's no way a team could worry about function for the vast majority of buildings. The pedestrian stripe thing is a dumb oversight from a rushed team, and it will probably be fixed in a patch some day. Some other games have done this better, but every game has these flaws.

Likewise every game that tries to give you an open ended way to approach enemies and lets you level up skills has power curve issues at some point or another. Cyberpunk has a lot of gameplay issues that are worse than those of most games (the AI is terrible) but not at all unique.

One area where I kind of disagree with you is in how self-aware the game is about the fact that Johnny Silverhand sucks and is a shallow twerp. Games are made by a lot of people so there's always internal conflict to the storytelling, but I think Cyberpunk knows that Johnny sucks. I think you can see it in the way that he keeps messing up and being a jerk to V. and lying to you and the fact that all his endings are messed up in some way or another. You suggest that there's an issue with the fact that in one of the endings Johnny tries to do the same thing he did 50 years ago and that failed, but I think it's an intentional nod to the fact that he sucks. He's supposed to be seductive and appealing in certain ways, but ultimately he's just as selfish as everyone else in Night City, where you either suck as a human being or you end up like Jackie, or usually both.

I think it's interesting that you entirely skip over Panam and the nomads here, and the way that the areas outside Night City are presented. I actually think that in some ways they are the key to understanding how the game sees its world. They are far from perfect, and Panam is impulsive and immature and helps get her friends killed, but they sharply contrast with the Night City people, who are almost all irredeemable pricks. Judy is another exception, but she's from outside Night City and she leaves by the end of the game if you follow her storyline. Cyberpunk is about Night City and Night City eats everyone's soul.

I think that Cyberpunk has a lot of problems as a game. The mission design was clearly truncated in order to get the thing shipped (compare the first and last missions with...every other mission in the game.) The braindead AI means that combat stops being interesting pretty early on and never goes back. Driving cars is mostly horrible, though you can get around that by using bikes. There are a lot of compromises. But I also note that you don't discuss the music and don't really touch on the overall feel of Night City. I think that these are the areas where Cyberpunk excels, along with certain good missions and characters. At times Cyberpunk's Night City is a really seductive video game world. When you're driving one of those bikes through the city listening to the music at night and letting the neon wash over you it's an amazing experience. Panam and Judy and River are all well-realized characters who are more interesting to interact with than Johnny.

I also think that the game's short critical path is a strength. Unlike V. you can leave Night City whenever you want. I put in like 40 hours and I could feel the magic wearing off so I left, with a lot of side stuff undone and the whole third act basically unexplored. You stayed for twice as long and it seems like you came out a little regretful of your time. It's like being at a party where the lights are flashing, the music is blaring, and everyone's beautiful and euphoric but also kind of insufferable. Spend a few hours there and you can have some flashy fun and then leave with a smile. Stick around until morning and have to talk to those people under the sun's harsh glow and you're going to feel empty and kind of bad. I'm not blaming you for your experience or denying it, but I do think that you've glossed over a lot of the good stuff that's in the game because of the stuff that's not. And I think you are misreading how the game views Johnny Silverhand. Yes he's played by Keanu Reeves and in some ways he's awesome (the game clearly ran into the Apocalypse issue where the designers knew people would want to play as Keanu, and it lets them) but overall I think the game knows he's bad. I think it's a very nihilistic game, for better and worse, but there's a lot of fun to be had in it if you're not expecting it to be anything truly special.

@bigsocrates: I think we're more in agreement than our differing final impressions give off, yeah.

For instance, I totally acknowledge that have open ended approaches often result in power curve issues. There's a reason I brought up Deus Ex, because even the best examples of this gameplay have problems. What I'd say, though, is that the late game abilities Cyberpunk give you don't fundamentally alter the gameplay in exciting ways in the same way a, say, Dishonored or even Mankind Divided does. You unlock Possession or the time stopping ability in Dishonored, and the way you play fundamentally changes, opening up playstyles that you didn't have at the beginning. In Cyberpunk? The late game stuff is just +25% (crit chance, damage w/ weapon of choice, damage with hack of choice, etc.) to what you could have started the game with, so it's pretty underwhelming.

The essay was already running long, but I did not find myself as enamored with the music as a lot of others did, I think. There are a couple of bangers (PonPon Shit rips), but most of it, as someone who has been listening to synthwave or similar electronica since, around Hotline Miami, is pretty lackluster. I feel the same way about the music that I feel about most of the game -- it fits an overall vibe, but that vibe is pretty generic or outright unpleasant. There were about one or two songs I was happy to hear on the radio, and the rest of the time I rolled my eyes.

As for the experience of being in Night City itself... I did mention that parts of Downtown look great, it's just that to experience a world, it helps to have a reason to be there? And others have pointed this out, but because there are just a few sparse vendors and cars to buy, and nothing else to help roleplay being in Night City, you have to force yourself to go out of your way to let it wash over you. And sometimes, yeah, if a song I liked was on (rare), I'd drive around the freeway on the motorcycle for a bit and have an alright time. I don't mention the experience of being in Night City, though, because it's rarely nearly as pleasant for me as it appeared to be for you. I can walk down the street and hear the same few canned AI lines that run out quickly. Hear a radio in the distance yell "OOOOOOOOORGASM!" Stand in a park as people walk in a circle? This is part of why I brought up Death Stranding and No Man's Sky -- those are games that people bring up similar points of "I just liked existing in that space," but the difference is their designs facilitated that. In Cyberpunk, the game yells at you to "GO! GO! GO!" with its constant phone calls and text messages, the sparsity of in-world activities encourage a single-minded pursuit of missions and murder.

The fact that no dev could possibly fit function into all of Night City's forms (which I may agree with) is just evidence to me this should have been scaled down drastically. And there are games like Red Dead 2 or Fallout: New Vegas where I can see the function there, and the world feels so much more lived in as a result. When devs care about world design, it pays dividends. Instead, in Cyberpunk, it's one more thing I have to hand-wave, "well, it's really big, plenty of games don't get this right." And there's only so much I can hand-wave before having to just stop excusing and outright say, "this is a deeply compromised game." And it is. Cyberpunk is a masterclass in all the things people don't think about in game design until they're executed improperly -- what makes a game world fun, what makes mechanics be compelling for the run-time of a game, what incentivizes the player to do side content and engage with the core gameplay loop? And the fact that they missed the mark so wide on the world stuff, to me, is not an indication that this is just a side effect of most games, but a failure on the game's part.

I'm hearing shades of something here, an implication that I came in with too high an expectation, so I want to clear this up real quick: I did not come into this game thinking it would be the best game ever, like a lot of folks seemed to. I came in wanting a decent open world game with Deus Ex gameplay, and hopefully, an alright story, given that this is the studio that made The Witcher 3, one of the best examples of open world RPG storytelling. On all those fronts: the world, both in what the player can do and how it exists; the gameplay; and the story; it fell well below those modest expectations, for me.

As for Silverhand, that's a charitable read, and I wish I could share it. However, the scenes near the end of the game play Silverhand and V parting ways (either way, Silverhand taking V's body or V only living for six months) as some kind of heartfelt goodbye. If you do the Arasaka ending, the worst ending in the game, Johnny chastises you. The "secret" best ending where no one else dies can only happen if you agree with Johnny enough or make him happy enough. That reads as incredibly sympathetic to him.

Also, even if this were supposed to be a "man, the Johnny lifestyle is so seductive but it turns out it's a bunch of crap" approach, kind of like the Scorsese tactic with Goodfellas or Wolf of Wall Street (show a morally bankrupt life at its most appealing, therefore revealing how empty it is without ever having to outright say it), for that, Silverhand has to be genuinely appealing. And he never is. He starts hostile, murderous to you, constantly snarky and negging, he treats everyone in his flashbacks like garbage, so there was never a moment where you "buy in" to his mythos to then be rudely awakened. It may have worked if you just heard about Johnny Silverhand and came to admire him from a distance, or if he started as genuinely charming, but no, he starts like a dick.

Now, Silverhand starting as an asshole makes a lot more sense if the game is trying to paint him in a redemptive arc, which I will argue 1000% it does. His reunions with his friends from the past, his changes in demeanor toward V, the way other characters treat him -- this is totally a "Johnny becomes a good guy" story, made even more apparent in the (imo saccharine) ending where he gets to live in V's body. So, no, I don't think the game knows Silverhand is as awful as he truly is, or if they do, they don't do a good enough job communicating their intention either way.

@efesell: Those early conversations with Johnny were some of my favorite bits, too. It's just, as the game progressed, and the story missions pushed you further and further toward having an amiable relationship with Johnny, the less I could trust the writer (in a theoretical sense, I know several writers work on this stuff) knew how bad Johnny was.

For example, if the writer knows Johnny is insufferable, why have not one, not two, not three, but four (to potentially five!) moments where you play as him and get to see him "let loose?" Why give the heartfelt ending or reunions with his former crew? The closest I felt to the writer 'getting' Silverhand was that bit where he throws up in a toilet and then gets knocked out by the boyfriend of the lady he was hitting on -- that felt nice and aware. I don't think there were quite enough moments like that, especially since the person pushing back on him most is the only person who sees him -- V. And V is such a wet noodle that is ordered around by literally everyone she comes into contact with, it's hard to take her criticisms seriously. Maybe it's an issue I have with the writing, where you can choose dialogue options to criticize Johnny, but you never get the criticisms you'd actually want to say to him. V, essentially, just whines, instead of pointing out his hypocrisy.

I'm pretty sure that secret ending requires you to maintain a balance with how you treat Johnny I know that I was locked out of it entirely because I did happen to say things he wanted to hear too many times.

I know that the specific final trigger for it is the last dialogue at his grave where you have to tell him that he needs to stop being such a fuck up.

Interesting. That's pretty neat, more nuanced than the writing seems to indicate.

Now if there were a second secret ending you can only unlock by just berating Johnny the whole time, I'd have done that in a heartbeat.

It's an interesting idea but it was incredibly frustrating at the time because if I recall you have to be at like.. 60% or so on his relationship tracker thing and ALSO make sure you treat him like shit in the final conversation.

I THINK I had the former but fucked up the latter and did not have any saves to roll back to.

@lapsariangiraff: Cyberpunk was definitely rushed and it's obvious that a lot of what was in the original spec was cut. Part of that is clear in the paring back of the missions (again you just have to look at the first mission and the last mission to get an idea of what they wanted to do, and then compare that to the fact that most of the game is spent just fighting dudes to see how much got cut.) That's not really a defense, but it's a common element in a lot of games. And neither Dishonored nor Deus Ex are really massive open world games. Their smaller scope makes it easier to have game changing powers without making them game breaking. Most big open world RPGs don't really have that kind of end to their power curve. That being said, I acknowledge that Cyberpunk's skill tree kind of sucks. So do the cybernetics. There are a few things like the super jump legs or gorilla arms or mantis blades that make a big difference, but most of them are just small upgrades that don't make up for the lack of magic.

The more I read of what you wrote the more I think that our varying degrees of enjoyment relate to how deeply we engaged with the game, which is part of what I was talking about when I mentioned expectations. I never walked around Night City if I could avoid it because it was very clear how empty it was to me early on. Instead I drove everywhere, and as backdrop to a motorcycle ride the city works pretty well. Likewise you mentioned in your essay that you were disappointed with V.'s character. I'd point again to the fact that there are zero games that are as open ended as Cyberpunk that do character development in any meaningful way. I never thought V. would be an actual character so it didn't bother me so much that he wasn't.

You act like there are no benefits to the Cyberpunk school of game design, but there are. Night City definitely does not feel lived in, aside from maybe a few locations, but it's massive and complex. I live in a big city, and for someone like me just the ability to drive around in a city, rather than the small, dense, areas that often pass for cities in video games, has its own charms. It's not something to handwave, it's just a choice with benefits and downsides. Red Dead Redemption 2 is mostly nature, which is easier to simulate more convincingly than a dense urban environment because we don't really notice that there's no pollen in the air and the plants aren't growing in ways that really make sense for those species and the animal behavior is wildly inaccurate. We're much more familiar and attuned to that stuff with humans and human spaces.

Cyberpunk's big shallow playground approach definitely has its downsides but it has its upsides too. You never really get to know Night City because it's so big, so you have that city-like experience of going down some random alley and finding something totally new. Or going to a part of town you rarely visit and finding stuff there. As a city dweller I really appreciated that stuff, and since I was mostly driving past on a bike I didn't care that you can't visit the shops or whatever. The Yakuza games have dense city areas that make sense and have a lot to do and see in them, but to me they don't feel like cities because they aren't vast with unfamiliar places. They feel like city-themed amusement park. Night City felt like a city. So long as you didn't look too closely.

I think that a lot of your issues with Johnny have to do with the Apocalypse problem I cited earlier. Maybe you're not familiar with that game, but when Activision was making it they hired Bruce Willis to be the sidekick character to the main character. Then when they were doing market research they discovered that, surprise surprise, everyone wanted to play AS Bruce Willis. This forced them to remake the game with Bruce Willis as the main character, and repurpose his VO, and made for a disjointed and pretty bad game.

After they hired Keanu Reeves they knew that at some point you HAD to play as him or people would complain. So you do, at certain points. And they couldn't make him a total scumbag asshole because everyone loves Keanu Reeves and that's not really the Keanu Reeves energy. So he does have a semi-redemptive arc at points though, again, his endings are pretty messed up and the things he does have bad consequences. As I said it's somewhat muddled by there being a lot of cooks in the kitchen. I definitely don't think it's a 1000% redemptive arc, though. Johnny doesn't change or learn that much during the course of the game (as demonstrated by his desire to repeat the same damn mistake that literally killed him over again) and he's pretty much a prick throughout. Whenever he takes over your body he does fucked up stupid things, just like he does in the flashbacks. I want to point back to people like Panam and River and Judy, because those are examples of the game showing you what actual decent folk are like in Night CIty. They are in contrast to Johnny, just like the Nomads are in contrast to Night City in general. The game does provide these moral contrasts that I think make its somewhat muddled message clearer.

I don't want to just say "it's just a game, bro, why so serious" because that's a bullshit attitude, but I do want to say that I think Cyberpunk is a game that's more enjoyable if you meet it on the shallow level where it operates. The more you dive in the worse it gets and the clearer the seams show. If you're cruising on your bike through the neon feeling all cool and badass it's a good time. If you try to walk around and look for story and meaning you're going to mostly have a bad time, though there are some hidden gems buried in all the dross.

But that's also on theme for the source material. I don't think it's intentional, but Cyberpunk is actually a very Cyberpunk game. It's just that it provides the world's experience from the shallow corporate side rather than the actual punk rebellious side. It's a Cyberpunk game brought to you by the games division of Arasaka. But that's still entertaining on some level, even if it's deeply empty.

@efesell My final number was 60% too! Hmmmm.

Hmmmmmm.

Related, the fact you had to wait a few minutes at the conversation for the secret ending to pop up made it way more time-intensive to check if you had gotten it. I understand why they did it (the game already reeks of "you change the entire ending from one set of dialogue options"), but that made me take way longer to realize this wasn't going to happen.

@bigsocrates: Super jump was easily my favorite upgrade. It was one of the few that changed how I could approach some things, and it was pretty amusing to use super jump to light-parkour your way from one end of the map to the other in denser sections. (Even if that exposed parts of the world that were clearly never meant to be looked at closely.)

I'm not sure I'd agree about Cyberpunk's open-endedness with regards to V: they go to pretty great lengths to tamp down on the possibilities for V's character, especially with each life path turning into "I'm working my way up as a merc now", even when it doesn't make much sense. (I picked the Corpo background, and boy, the more I read, the more I realize I got to see the story at its worst by doing so. Such a whiplash from that opening to "starry-eyed merc at the bottom of the chain.") To be clear, I'm not asking for feature creep or for there to be that openness, just that CDPR made a choice (the right one for their schedule probably) to have V's character act in a very limited set of ways. The most intense branching occurs at the very end, but for the majority of the run-time, V acts in pretty similar ways. This game has a lot of Mass Effect Andromeda syndrome in the dialogue where you only get to choose whether you agree politely or snarkily. Or even if you call a guy an asshole, the quest proceeds the same. That's totally fine, that's how these RPGs keep their narrative scope in check, but it does mean, if there's only this one V -- I wish they were more interesting.

Having lived in New York, I love that feeling of finding a corner or bit of the city I've never been to before. The issue is, what makes that feeling for me, besides the initial novelty of finding a new place, is that there's something new to see or do there. With Cyberpunk, if I find a random alley, the best case scenario is I find a legendary weapon or component with the same graffiti. I think my favorite moment of exploration was when I went to a random rooftop between buildings and there were people to shoot there that I'd happened to not mark on my map. I felt like, "man, there was a thing here!" But that could have been easily deflated if I had seen it or marked it as a waypoint on my map earlier.

I think there are benefits to the scenic approach of world design -- for example, I'm going to praise Mafia II and LA Noire for executing this very well. They're entirely story-driven games, and the world's just a great backdrop for it, or a place to relax in. This focus serves them well, as there's never an expectation that there's more to do, and you can just enjoy it for what it is. However, Cyberpunk doesn't have nearly the same benefit of focus, due to the littering of side activities, NCPD crime dispatches, and car icons on the map. So it has the crowdedness of a Grand Theft Auto with none of the depth in that world, but it doesn't have the same clarity as a Mafia II, either. It begs you to look at its world, and then has little to show for it.

I know some folks who worked with Neversoft around Apocalypse's timeactually! I totally agree that they had an issue of having to use Reeves more once he was on the project. Regardless of whatever happened behind the scenes though, the result is... sloppy. Which I think we're in agreement on.

Panam is one of the best parts of the game, in that she's one of the few romantic interests that appears to have substantial character flaws that she overcomes. That first Badlands section is one of my favorite moments in the game, as for once it just slows down and lets you talk to and bond with someone. Though even that doesn't escape the Cyberpunk chopping factory as the number of times the game will skip forward a few hours to stich a Badlands mission together started to get distracting for me. Judy is a lovely person, but as someone trying to play a lesbian V, I found her to suffer from "I'm the most perfect human because the player has to be attracted to me"-itis. Her greatest flaw is, what... caring for Evelyn too much?

I'm glad you bring up the "outside of Night City" moments, because in an earlier draft of this essay, I talked about how often Cyberpunk uses the "a quiet, beautiful spot outside of the city" moment -- this happens with Takemura, River, and Panam, and probably some others I forget (oh yeah, Johnny mentions this when you climb the billboard for that Swedenborg sidequest). They are some of the better character moments in the game, and I get the sense that the game is trying to impart a message of "from a distance, there's beauty in what is ugly up close", or just a message about finding beauty in ugly times in general. The issue I take with that, is that by only having these beautiful moments from a distance from the city, the game is taking a pretty binary approach to the worldbuilding. Night City sucks, but it looks pretty from a distance! Some of the "best" endings being leaving Night City with your partner, and being chastised for not leaving it also backs this up. And that rubs me the wrong way, that feels like the approach of a developer who doesn't live in a city. Because in a crowded place like New York, the beauty isn't just in the skyline or the city limits view -- it can be in the city itself. In the noise, the clamor, there's just teeming humanity there, and it's messy but also beautiful. And Cyberpunk never reaches that. The clamor is always unpleasant, the people terrible, the city soul-crushing. There is very little beauty within the bustling areas of the city, just dildos and Idiocracy ads and NPCs spouting the same lines over and over. Danger supposedly around every corner and the citizens supposedly hardened, but if I brush up against a guy or start running down the street too fast, someone yells "CYBER PSYCHO!"

I'm reminded of that great Austin Walker piece where he talks about Gotham in Batman: in the comics, it's not just a hellhole, it's a center of culture, it's the place to be. But in the Arkham games, it's just a nightmare. I have a similar problem with Cyberpunk's worldbuilding.

Anyway, I've clearly engaged with this game too much, but still, it's a shame that that caveat has to be there.

Thanks for taking the time to read and respond so thoroughly! My ire at Cyberpunk aside, I'm enjoying talking about it with y'all.

I mean Judy does get all of the people she wants to help killed because her plans are well meaning but short sighted and bad. So I dunno about perfect human being over here.

I may have less of a good read on this, because Judy was one of those folks who called me while I was in literally the worst moment and I said, "hey, maybe not right now!" to which she took as "I'm never going to talk to you again."

I did a few of her side missions, but the later Mox side stuff was cut off from me, sadly. Which is a real shame because the only benefit to playing as much as you can of Cyberpunk is being able to say "My takes are grounded in having seen all of Cyberpunk!" Which I now cannot.

Thanks, game!

On the subject of romances though the most incredible one is River if you turn him down because then you have to go to a family cookout with him and all of the interactions with his family when you are Very Clearly Not Dating are beautiful.

YES! It was sooooo awkward. I just sat there as his sister and niece/nephew gave me the constant soft pitch on him, and at every point in the dialogue I could I said, "nope, nope, not interested in River like that" and it just kept going. Economic for having to only write the dialogue one way, and that one way technically "works" for both romantic and not romantic playthroughs? Yeah. But maaan was it awkward.

If the intent was to simulate the feeling of a guy leading up to asking you out and you see it coming from a mile away and you can't stop the trainwreck no matter how hard you try? Bravo.

@lapsariangiraff: There are two approaches to character development in RPGs, more or less. The first is a written character who mostly does what they are pre-determined to do by the writers, with maybe a few choices here or there, like a JRPG protagonist or Geralt. The second is a cipher who is meant to represent the player and his or her choices, like in Fallout or Elder Scrolls. V. is the second type of character, more or less. Yes the dialog choices don't actually matter much, but you get to choose V.'s background and where she goes and what she does for the most part, and it's clear that the game WANTED to give you more input into what happens, it just ran out of time. I point yet again to that first mission. There are a ton of approaches as to how to tackle it, whether you talk to the Militech lady, whether you hack the credits chip, etc... That's clearly the game they wanted to make, and they weren't able to, so they drastically cut back on the choices. But Johnny Silverhand gets all the character development because V. is supposed to be an Elder Scrolls character, who ends up stuck in a more linear game. It's like Mass Effect if they had to strip out all the choices. In Mass Effect you don't really develop as Shepherd, the character development is offloaded to your companions and you get to play Shepherd however you like, as inconsistently as you want. Here the character development is mostly offloaded to Johnny and you are supposed to play V. as whatever type of character you want, except that they didn't actually get to implement that stuff.

Not really an excuse but it makes some of the decisions that seem odd in a vacuum make more sense.

I don't think it's quite fair to say that you can't experience any of that city discovery in Cyberpunk. Different areas of the city look very different. You're right that if you actually explore these places on foot there's nothing there but maybe a slightly different Ripperdoc clinic or yet another copy and paste gang fight or whatever, but if you're just doing sightseeing on a bike there are neighborhoods and areas to ride through and enjoy. Just like when you're riding through Red Dead on your horse and see some cool stuff. Though yes, Red Dead has a lot more actually interesting or fun activities and encounters to discover, but it's also a much better game by a company that makes those kinds of games and had a massive budget (not that Cyberpunk was low budget, but it was way lower than something like that.)

The activity cruft of Cyberpunk is a real problem in modern open world games. Almost all of them would benefit from fewer more interesting things to do. I ignored most of the random stuff in the game because, yeah, if follow a random NCPD dispatch you're inevitably going to be disappointed (And probably see some weird bugs.) Even something like the Cyberpsycho capture quest chain I peaced out from after a few psychos because CDPR didn't put enough time into those quests to make them interesting. Pretty much the only good content in the game was the main storyline and the side quests from major characters, and some of that wasn't even well made. So I really played the game kind of like a Mafia II or an L.A. Noire type game, with a lot of scenery mixed in between story focused missions.

This game has a particular view of Night City, and it's very nihilistic. Basically Night City is an irredeemable place where bad things happen. That is represented by the fact that it eats V. up and kills them no matter what you do. It's not possible to survive. It's a Cyberpunkian "we're in the apocalypse we just don't know it" ethos, and it has a bit of an edgelord aspect to it, but it's a theme that runs through the game. That's why Night City is only beautiful from a distance. The game doesn't want to explore the lives of the people actually living there, and whenever it tries to do that (like with Judy's quest chain at The Clouds) it ends up punishing those people just for existing. There are no happy endings in Night City, it is a beast that consumes everyone who comes into contact with it. It never changes. It's a very stylized approach and while I don't think it represents real cities, I think it works in the context of the source material.

I think this is reflected in what I thought was the best Cyberpunk sidequest outside of the main character stuff. The Peralez sidequest. Since you played most of what was on offer I assume that you did it, but in case you didn't to summarize you agree to help a mayoral candidate who seems to have good intentions and you uncover a shadowy conspiracy that has been controlling him without his knowledge, and at the end have to decide whether to tell him about it or not, with his wife wanting to keep him in the dark. There are no good choices at the end of this quest, and whatever you do ends up feeling slimy and bad. This is a quest about the literal government of Night City, and it shows how the game views Night City (with the caveat that any game made by a lot of people will have multiple perspectives overlapping.) There's no way to tame it or clean it up because it's very nature is debasement. It will eat you alive, and the only choice you get is how you're cooked and what kind of sauce gets used.

And in that context Judy actually has a very serious flaw. She's naive. I played a male V. so she shut down my romance attempt (I actually liked her more than Panam, who I found immature and overly enthusiastic) but I still spent a lot of time with her and came to appreciate her as a person. Once you swim with her in the lake, in a sequence that would have been magical in a better made game, you get an understanding for her background and who she is. She puts up the tough exterior but inside she's just a nice kid from the suburbs, raised by loving grandparents. She doesn't belong in Night City. Every attempt she makes to apply her understanding of the world to Night City backfires in a spectacular way. She gets people killed, she blunders into situations she doesn't understand, she's overly ambitious in the same way that Peralez is, just at a lower scale, and she, and others, are punished for it very severely.

Ultimately she leaves Night City. Because if she'd stayed it would have eaten her too.

Now is this reflective of how cities really are? Of course not. They're complex places teeming with humanity, good and bad, light and dark, all the rest of it. I love cities. But it's a choice, damn it, and it's the only one Cyberpunk really sticks to, and I think it makes the game interesting and fun for me to engage with at a shallow level. It may have the world view of a nihilistic 15 year old, but there's a nihilistic 15 year old within me that enjoys that thing from time to time.

Need more evidence? I talked about the music earlier. What's the game's de facto theme song?

Like it or hate it (I really like it despite the cheeeeeese) it tells you the game's themes pretty clearly.

@bigsocrates: Yep, there are two approaches. And V ends up working as neither, likely due to, as you say, budget, but I'm genuinely not interested in letting those factors affect how it's evaluated. Every game dev cycle has its ups and downs, every game runs into crises and limitations and reductions of scope, but all that matters is how it ends up in the product folks play.

Now, I think wee disagree, in that I believe Cyberpunk clearly wanted to have a Witcher 3 style of dialogue and playable character, rather than Fallout, where Geralt is fully voiced but can commit a wider range of actions than you'd be used to in a modern Bioware game, but still has his own character regardless of what you choose. It's what CDPR knows, and what I think they were trying to build on. But this is The Witcher 3 if they didn't have time to actually give Geralt choices. That first mission has a ton of outcomes, and I agree they'd make the whole game like that if they could. But, they didn't, so that's what I'm going to talk about.

As for the nihilism aspect... I can get down with some pretty nihilistic entertainment, but Cyberpunk didn't work me in that respect either. Mostly because if you are going as dark as possible, showing humanity at its absolute worst, then it at least better do so in a way that still says something interesting. Cyberpunk, however, works with the same palette we've seen a lot of, to say things we've heard before, and the real world has gotten way more nihilistic than Cyberpunk ever could. Most of the sidequests, including the Peralez one, end in the same way no matter what, in a way that could be called "nihilistic," but feels more like wasted potential. For example, hanging out with the pop star, getting an interesting premise where her manager wants to override her personality, only to drop that whole premise to say, "yep, she's psycho, she killed him!" is deeply disappointing. Instead of exploring the real world culture of exploitative male managers handling the very identities of female pop stars, we just get a cheap "he was right all along!" punch line. In short, I'm okay with nihilism, but not if it stops you from exploring the potential of your story. And Cyberpunk does this over and over.

So the theme of nihilism helps tie together a lot of the game's decisions, but it ultimately doesn't matter much, to me at least, because if the question is "was this an interesting story? did I care about the characters? was the outcome satisfying?" my answer is still no.

That being said, I said this in the piece as well near the end, but there's an exception: my favorite ending is the Arasaka one, which is rather hopeless. It plays the most strongly into the core fatalism of Johnny invading your head: you got him out, but you're still going to die, you are an Arasaka lab rat, the technology was used to propagate this regime for even longer with Saburo Arasaka at the head, and now you're faced with another impossible choice -- to die or have your soul become Arasaka property. That was great.

@lapsariangiraff: I think there's some pretty strong evidence that they weren't trying to make a Geralt. The first piece is that they let you choose your background, which doesn't really work that well with a Geralt type. Geralt is in part defined by his past and relationships, as all characters are. V. has no past in the game, really, beyond her friendship with Jackie. Of course the "select your background" stuff, like everything else in the game, is super compromised and doesn't end up meaning basically anything, but it's the sort of thing you'd do if you wanted to build a cipher rather than a Geralt.

The second piece of evidence is the marketing. The game was very much "carve your own path through Night City with Johnny Silverhand at your side" rather than "experience V.'s story." This was a game that was pitched as a way for players to live an alternate life, just like Skyrim, not as telling the story of a specific character, like The Witcher does. Even the name V. supports this. They could have chosen another gender neutral name like Sam or Danni or, heck, even Jackie, but they went with an initial to give the character even less premade identity. There even is a canonical name for the character (Valerie or Vincent depending on gender) but they don't use it.

For most of the missions I think that the lack of influence on the outcome is a deficit. For the Peralez mission I think it's a strength, because it ties directly into the theme of that mission. It doesn't matter what you do, what you know, what you discover, because the forces arrayed against you are too powerful. It's the lesson that Johnny can't learn because of his narcissism, and in a game where the other stuff you did seemed to matter it would hit home pretty hard. It's undercut by the fact that nothing that you do matters in the game, but the game undercuts itself in a lot of ways.

I think that our different experiences with Cyberpunk really do come down to expectations to a large degree. Pauline Kael had a quote about movies, which is that they are so rarely great art that if you can't appreciate great trash there's no point in going. I think that the vast majority of games are kind of a mess in one way or another, and usually in multiple ways. I think the issues you have with Cyberpunk can be applied to some degree or another to almost every RPG, or even game, out there. Take Skyrim. Admittedly that game is a decade old at this point, but it has even worse issues with layouts and buildings not making sense and player choice not mattering. Mass Effect was raked over the coals because it turned out in 3 that your choices didn't really lead to wildly different outcomes, and I'm still not sure what people were expecting, exactly. Rockstar's open worlds are better, but even Los Santos, which has the advantage of being based on a real city, doesn't really work as a lived in place, and I'm sure to a biologist who studies the ecosystems of the American West Red Dead Redemption 2 is beyond a mess of contradictions.

Cyberpunk's deficits in these areas are worse than most, but it is also wildly ambitious in a way that I dig. It makes a real effort at putting together an actual full future city and while it comes apart at the seams if you start pulling threads, from a motorcycle at high speeds it kind of works as one. It has a lot of interesting and daring choices mixed in with a lot of bad or easy ones, and it pushes the genre forward in a number of ways. The alternative is something like The Outer Worlds, which succeeds much better in the kinds of things it is trying to do (though I'd say that the skill tree there is just as boring as Cyberpunk's, but doesn't get nearly as much flack because nobody expected anything more than Fallout in space. And I'd say that Outer Worlds' locations make even less sense than Cyberpunk's. Outer Worlds got near universal acclaim, and part of that just comes down to better execution (fewer bugs, better writing, a few choices that actually did matter) but a lot of it comes down to expectation. I got much more out of Cyberpunk than I did out of Outer Worlds, and I liked Outer Worlds fine.

Tying it back to the essay, I think some of the criticism of Cyberpunk is just about things that games can't do well at this point, like make believable cities (though obviously some of Cyberpunk's issues go beyond that, like the pedestrian stripe that goes under a building etc...) I think some of it comes down to what I believe is a different reading of authorial intent (like the idea that you're supposed to think of Johnny Silverhand as this amazing hero, which, if true, hoo boy did they miss the mark with that one.) And of course some of it is completely valid and correct. As I initially said, I mostly agree with the individual critiques, even if I think that some of the stuff is actually intentional and more nuanced. But the reason I like Cyberpunk comes back to the Pauline Kael quote. It's not that I think Cyberpunk is great trash. It's kind of a dumpster fire in a lot of ways, some obvious (the technical issues) some less obvious (even if fully executed there's a hollowness to the vision.) But with games I think that you often need to just take the good parts and try to look past the bad, because every game, even the great ones, has so many terrible parts. Cyberpunk's greatest sin, in my view, is that it vastly overpromised what it delivered on almost every level, and people went into it expecting to feel like they did when Skyrim launched a decade earlier, but came away with a game that failed to solve Skyrim's problems or even live up to a lot of what that decade old game did. But no game has solved Skyrim's problems, and few have lived up to it, even a decade later. So I appreciate Cyberpunk for the shallow thrills it offers, the few places where it actually pushes things forward, and the fact that it actually took a swing at things that most games have utterly given up on at this point.

Skyrim remains relevant because almost nobody has stepped up to the plate and tried to make a game like it. A single player world you can sort of live in for a time. Cyberpunk took a shot, and got some of it right, and I found that very cool.

I actually really like V as a protagonist, probably more than I ever did Geralt to be honest.

@efesell: Did you play male or female V.? I played male and while I would say I didn't hate him, I found him kind of inconsistent and at times overly abrasive. A lot of people have said the female voice is better, and I think that some of the stuff that V. says would sound less prickish coming from a woman. I've toyed with the idea of doing another playthrough with a different background (not that that makes a huge difference) and a female V., but I'm waiting for them to fix the game and add whatever content they're going to add because as @lapsariangiraff says the game is extremely linear in terms of the main quest and a lot of those missions are dull (and playstyle doesn't really change much) so I don't think it's worth it at this point.

If they expand it like they did The Witcher and fix a lot of the problems and maybe add in some more worthwhile side missions and variety then I'd revisit.

I'm actually really curious as to what the post launch support for this game will be. They're going to do 9th gen versions at some point, they still have patches incoming to fix some of the biggest issues, but after that do they work on DLC and expansions or do they move on?

I feel like the game has left the conversation much quicker than The Witcher III ever did and I don't know what the market for expansions would even be two years after the fact or whatever, so maybe they're better off making a sequel or The Witcher 4: Witching Ain't Easy.

On the other hand a Blood and Wine level expansion to Cyberpunk that actually makes good on some of the ambition could be franchise saving. And some substantial free DLC to make up for the state of the game at launch might redeem some of CDPR's squandered reputation. The game did very well commercially so it might be worth it for them to just invest in a big free DLC expansion and earn back some good will.

The change list for patch 1.2 just dropped and legit I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a bigger set of patch notes in my life.

I wanted to just pop in and say, that as someone who hasnt played cyberpunk that this is a great read... and i read every word. I wish i could contribute more, but i probably wont get around to playing this game for another 5 years.

Anywho, great write up, great discussions here (lots of back and forth and very few angry yelling).. keep up the good work

@bigsocrates I love Pauline Kael. Not to pump my own "trash cred," but one of my favorite games is Alpha Protocol, and I will go to bat for Sylvester Stallone's oeuvre of films any day. Not in a ironic sense, but because I genuinely enjoy them.

I think where you and I disagree on the "enjoyable trash" angle was, I didn't find Cyberpunk enjoyable. When Pauline Kael called films trash, she was referring to how quickly they are made and disposably they are consumed -- even the very best film is, in a sense, trash to her. If we follow this trash analogy all the way down... then Cyberpunk is, even in the world of trash that is video games, pretty gnarly trash.

Now, in this essay, I've gone pretty in-depth because I wanted to figure out the core of why it all fell so flat for me. But the reason I had to go so deep was because the moment to moment gameplay bored me for most of the game's runtime. So this wasn't a "man, this game isn't deep enough for my sophisticated palette!" situation. I just completed Assassin's Creed: Syndicate's entire map, ha. It's that it wasn't engaging at all, for me, so it gave me a lot more space to think about stuff I'd otherwise never have to in a standard Ubi game. You're totally correct about the "completionist playthrough" thing, by the way, I played for 78 hours and did every icon on the map.

We can go back and forth for a long time over this part too, but I think saying that the things I critique Cyberpunk for are things that all games have problems with is giving games short shrift, and we may just have to agree to disagree on that, I've made an attempt to cite specific games that do pull off everything I've criticized in Cyberpunk, from the open world design, to the gameplayer, to the player verbs in the world, because what I'm asking from Cyberpunk is not some unattainable goal, just CDPR flubbing it. (Obviously, due to overambition in the time they had, but again, their potential isn't on store shelves, their reality is.)

There's a great rant from Frank Lantz at GDC called "The Immersive Fallacy." I recommend that! It's only 6 minutes. In short, he's critiquing the impulse in games to let you "do anything and everything" in a game world. The important part of a GTA or a sprawling game like Cyberpunk isn't a breadth of options, ironically -- it's a focused set of player interactions that are all fun and all contribute to the core gameplay loop or fantasy of living in that world. We've been talking around it, but at the end of the day, we wouldn't even be having this conversation about "scenic world design" (which you have to voluntarily opt into against the game's momentum) or immersive sims, if they had just taken the few interactions they clearly had the scope for and nothing more, and made them all tie together in a more cohesive way. I can look at a game with say, 5 side activities copy-pasted, 4 vendor types copy-pasted around the map, and a couple of food shops and vending machines in a game where the food consumables are pretty useless since you pick up so much in the world, and say, "wow, there's all this empty space where the cool stuff could have gone -- such ambition," or I can say (and this is where I'm at, I think) "if you only had the room for this little stuff, make sure it works cohesively together, at least." Which, if we play inside baseball or armchair game dev, they obviously couldn't because they overreached and by the time their cert date was coming up, they only had time for cuts, stitches, and staples, resulting in this messy game. EDIT: People don't give The Outer Worlds more credit because their expectations were lower, they give The Outer Worlds more credit because their systems, while totally unoriginal (it's Obsidian doing a modern Fallout), still all work together cohesively. Outer Worlds is actually a fantastic example of a team knowing what scope they can work in and making that smaller space more interesting, rather than stretching themselves too thin.

Now, again, I love Alpha Protocol, (and KOTOR 2, another game cut to hell) so I love me some messy RPGs. The problem, isn't the mess. The problem is, you mention the game's ambition, how that makes it more enjoyable -- and I don't see any of that ambition. Or at least, that ambition does not affect the way I'm playing it moment to moment. The ambition is certainly not present in the combat, or the dialogue, or the quest design. I can't think of a single system that has been pushed forward in the industry by Cyberpunk's existence. Not a single dev I know of has mentioned in passing, "hey, Cyberpunk did this neat trick, that's cool." When I rack my brain, the only ambition I see is, "MORE." MORE world scale, MORE density of environment -- but that's the same (misguided) ambition that games have always gone for, and as Frank Lantz says in his GDC talk I linked -- MORE doesn't make a game inherently fun. And the systems in Cyberpunk and the way they interact with the open world are inherently unfun because they don't work together.

For a specific example, the vending machines. This is a game with dozens of vendors and vending machines that give you weapons, food, and drink, when you don't need any of those things since you scrounge better ones in the environment or craft them yourself no problem. That, and unlike the Witcher 3's potions, the boosts in Cyberpunk aren't really a necessity because the combat never challenges you. Now, Witcher 3 had plenty of taverns that had food on sale in their inventory you wouldn't need to buy, but they at least gave them a couple more useful items like the crafting materials or even Gwent cards (if you were into that kinda thing). This ventures into armchair game dev territory, because the basic critique is "Cyberpunk's systemsdon't give the players enough incentive to interact with the world outside of its checklists," so offering a solution to that is inherently prescriptive. But what if there was actually, valuable stuff in the shops? Late game items that cost a lot more but benefited you greatly? The closest to that is the Ripper Docs, but you can outscale their costs very early in the game.

Cyberpunk may have been envisioned by the design team as being on the bleeding edge of innovation and ambition in the gaming industry, but my point is, the final game is most certainly not. And saying, "well, video games!" gives short shrift to the dozens of other games that do what Cyberpunk tried to but better.

You mention that in every video game you have to look past the bad and enjoy the good, because there's so much bad in every one. And I disagree, in one way. In the very best games, I will agree, there are still flaws, but those flaws are usually informed by the design goals and I can see what they were going for -- take Mirror's Edge, one of my favorite games ever (and another very imperfect game that I love, so I'm genuinely not just being a perfectionist here). The game's short, the pacing has lots of issues on a first playthrough, and the world isn't explored at all -- but that's okay, because this is a game about running through the environment as quickly as possible, and that brevity lets me play it again easily, and eventually, with the paths in that game down, I get that power fantasy the devs were aiming for, feeling like a parkour prodigy. The flow is unlike any other game I've played. Cyberpunk, on the other hand, is a Cuisinart of good and bad, all jumbled all over the place with no coherent goals, or contradictory design goals. Each department was clearly making a different game. The good and the bad don't create any compelling player narrative other than, "this game came out too early."

EDIT: This reminds me a little bit of older novels, and how much more sprawling and tangential they can be. Take Frankenstein, which is very much not a straightforward work, and has lots of elements that are in tension with each other or outright contradicting each other. What makes a great novel, (or some games) effective messes compared to say, Cyberpunk, is that those contradictions and tensions lead to interesting discussions and actually get the intent of the work across still. The mess of Cyberpunk doesn't create any interesting conundrums, each bit of its "Frankenstein's monster" construction is actively detracting from itself. END EDIT.

To sum up this massive discussion, because I have work to get to, when I mention successful open world games, you say that Cyberpunk couldn't possibly live up to that because they didn't have the time or budget. When I mention successful smaller games that nonetheless have what Cyberpunk is striving for, you say that those are too small and Cyberpunk is too big to accommodate that clarity in gameplay or level design. But what I'm trying to say is, regardless of the size of the game, there is always a way to make the design cohesive and keep the player engaged. You just have to pick your verbs carefully, and know what kind of game you're making. Cyberpunk wanted to be Deus Ex and Grand Theft Auto at the same time, but didn't take the time to create a world structure or player progression that supported that decision. So instead, we have helpings of a *bad* GTA or Ubisoft open world game, slammed right next to uninspired Deus Ex levels and skills. In the design they came up with, each aspect takes away from the other.

I did not come in expecting Skyrim. I came in expecting an at least okay game. I knew from the beginning it wouldn't be as ambitious as the fans were overhyping it to be, but I thought that the systems would at least fit together? That I'd leave the story at least somewhat satisfied. And it didn't reach that.

So in that massive void we have to have complex discussions on theories of open world design, when really, the simple reality is: the game's world isn't designed well. And that's not perfectionism, or hyped expectations, that's just basic open world design that Ubisoft manages to get right even on their worst entries. And yes, even basic open world design is really hard, but that is the game CDPR chose to try to make, so that's the context in which we gotta discuss it.

In terms of where I come at in criticism, I think the goal of any good critique is to try to articulate a game/movie/painting/poem/whatever's essence, to engage with the material the way it wants to be, and ask how well it meets its goals. It's less a checklist thing, and more "how does the whole work?" thing. It's why we have phrases like "more than the sum of its parts." But, on the whole, for me, Cyberpunk was less than the sum of its parts. And in a narrative-based open world RPG, I'm going to talk about the role playing, and the open world, and the narrative. :P

@imunbeatable80 Thanks! I was worried what these massive posts would look like to an outsider that A) isn't in it and B) hasn't played Cyberpunk, so I'm glad you're enjoying it! :D

@lapsariangiraff: I think it's interesting that in one part of your response you question where Cyberpunk's ambition is, but in another you say that it wanted to be Deus Ex crossed with GTA. That's actually extremely ambitious! Deus Ex only works as Deus Ex because the constrained and controlled environments allow the designers to create the density that makes those games good. GTA sprawls but limits what you can do within the sprawl in order to make it a consistent experience. Trying to do both at once is extremely ambitious....and Cyberpunk fell flat on its face in the attempt, despite coming from a studio with a strong pedigree and lots of resources (not GTA resources, but lots of resources.)

I said there were a few places that Cyberpunk pushed gaming forward and you disputed that so I'm going to name them specifically. I'm not surprised that game designers aren't looking to Cyberpunk for inspiration because Cyberpunk is a famous dumpster fire.

What I think Cyberpunk does well:

1) I think this is the best future/fantasy city of this size we've seen in games. It is deeply flawed, but it's still a fascinating vision of what a city could look like. I'm far from the only person who thinks that, and prior threads on the game on these forums have had people talking about how their favorite part of the game was just wandering around looking at the city. Most games with big cities just base them on cities that already exist (and most of those are bad anyway) which is obviously much easier. The last game I can think of that tried for a massive futuristic city was Agents of Mayhem, and...that game is on my worst games I ever finished list, and had a city that REALLY made no sense, though I still thought it looked cool*.

2) It does some really interesting things with visual design in a number of places.

3) It lays the blueprint for a much better game that someone (maybe CDPR) will eventually make. That first mission, where you're trying to get the Flathead is truly epic. There are a ton of decisions to make and lots of ramifications for those decisions. Whoever can find a way to make a bunch of those types of missions in an open world Skyrim type game is going to push things forward in a big way. It's not the first game to have missions where a bunch of choices matter internally, of course, but in this context it's something really special, and it is more realistic that it can be implemented than what people thought they wanted from Mass Effect where the whole game world changes radically based on a bunch of small choices. Having each mission be its own little puzzle box that can go a lot of ways internally and then has a few different meaningful outcomes that are woven into the world in one way or another (even just the way that Meredith Stout will call you up for some 'fun' if you go full Militech, which is a very Mass Effect thing) is something that a developer with the right resources and tools could actually implement. I think Cyberpunk's big problem was trying to do that in the first game, and finding that you can't learn how to build a first person RPG AND put in Deus Ex style mission choice variables simultaneously.

4) It finally lets gamers have virtual sex with Keanu Reeves. This requires a mod, of course, but still. If that's not innovation then nothing is!

I think it's interesting that you chose Mirror's Edge as your example of a game where you don't have to look past the bad parts. Even the people who love it think the combat sucks, and that's a significant element of the game, which you didn't even mention because presumably you can look past it.

I thought you were going to pick a harder game like Tetris. Or Picross. Or even something like Mario Galaxy, which is polished to a sheen. Tetris and picross are honestly not that easy to find meaningful flaws in, but they're also not super relevant here.

I also highly disagree with your claim that Ubisoft gets open worlds right. I played Watch Dogs: Legion and I said at the time that the best way to experience Virtual London was to fly over it on a drone because that city sucks. ** Watch Dogs 2's San Francisco was better, but there they just stole all the good parts and the basic layout from real life. I think a lot of Ubisoft open worlds are pretty bad as open worlds and especially as cities. Watch Dogs 1's Chicago had real life to draw on and it was still bad.

Tangents now over, I've never said that Cyberpunk couldn't live up to massive open world games because of time and budget constraints. I've said that those games were doing different things, and that some of the ways their worlds seem to work are just because we don't really understand what those worlds are really like. I'm not really a defender of Cyberpunk except insofar as I think that rather than being empty and hollow, as you have said it is, I think it's wildly uneven. I think it's a mix of really good and interesting ideas, with bad ideas and terrible execution. You mentioned the vending machines. I don't really think that adding useful items to vending machines would do much for the game, and I think the vending machines are just there as scenery, the same way that the flushable toilets were in Duke Nukem 3D. I will agree with you that having some kind of economy that wasn't completely busted would be good (in a prior thread I mentioned that the car prices are completely out of whack with the rest of the game, since you earn a tiny fraction of car money from random gigs, and cars all suck to drive, and you could invest that cash into cyberwear that actually impacts the game. The cars are just one example of how this game clearly needed at least 6-12 months more polish even at its already reduced scope) I want to point to another vending machine related thing, which is the mission where the sentient vending machine asks you to help it out. It's cute, and funny, and tragic, and there are a couple other cute funny tragic interactions like that in the game. The guy whose cybercock is malfunctioning and asks you to drive him to the hospital. Nobody attacks you, nothing happens, he just calls you later and sends you some money. Those are your "Red Dead" moments, and there are a few of them mixed in with all the incredibly boring "go to this installation and kill everyone" missions the fixers are always giving you.

The Delamain mission is another example. You're tasked with dealing with all these AI cars and they each are malfunctioning in a different way and then the factory breaks down and you have to go deal with it and there are several different approaches depending on your skills and it doesn't really work because the car missions are all broken in some way, and the factory is a mess of design, but the idea is fantastic and the writing is strong.

I already mentioned the Peralez mission.

There are a lot of missions that were either flat out good, like that, or came close. I remember that mission where you break into that members only club with River and it's set up like a Deus Ex location and I spent the whole time thinking "Damn, if the stealth was a little better in this game, or if hacking was a little more interesting, this would be amazing." I never thought that during Watch Dogs Legion because the mechanics just weren't that deep or complex. It would have been a whole different game. Cyberpunk was almost that game, but couldn't quite get there. Again. Ambition.

If I were designing this game I would say "screw the vending machines just leave them, whatever" and focus on building and polishing more of those types of encounters. We don't need gang fights on every corner, or a billion cut and paste missions where you go into a building to kill someone or steal something or whatever. More of those missions with interesting mechanics and meaningful interactions and less random crap would have made this a much better game. And yes those types of missions take longer to make, but they're also kind of the studio's calling card with Witcher III. Turn a corner and there's something interesting and new there. Here, too often, it's turn a corner and it's yet another of the same goddamn mission you've done 10 times before. That's why I stopped turning corners and critical pathed it through the game.

Speaking of which, you never really got into why you completed the whole game if it bored you. I think I would have a very different view of the game if I'd spent 78 hours with it, and it might be more like yours. Was it a professional obligation? We know that Rorie wasn't holding your dog at gun point because Rorie would never threaten a dog, and you've said nice things about Alpha Protocol. Why do everything in a boring game you don't like?

Anyway, at a certain point we are just arguing over whether the sprawling mess "works" and there's no way to say who's right or wrong at that point. It's just a matter of taste and whether you can pick the good bits out of the mess or are too put off by the problems.

But I'm not going to pretend those problems didn't exist. I haven't even mentioned how during the final boss fight with Adam Smasher he got stuck in mid air and froze at about the halfway point through the fight and I just walked on to the ledge he was on and bopped him in the nose until he died. But despite that I think the game is trying to do way more than almost any of its contemporaries, and succeeds in quite a bit of it, even if it fails at even more. YMWV.

*We should talk about Agents of Mayhem some day. It spends much of its game time having you fight through repetitive randomly generated villain "lairs" for some reason. They're all ugly and gray, even though it has this big bright open world city above ground. You want to talk about conflicting design decisions...

**Watch Dogs: Legion actually has a lot of parallels to Cyberpunk. I liked both games (Cyberpunk more.) Both of them had bad gimmicks that didn't really work. Both had gameplay systems with combat and hacking that should have offered more variety and tactical choices than they actually did. Cyberpunk's writing, for all its faults, is way, way better, as are a lot of elements of depth. If you want to know why I consider Cyberpunk ambitious all you have to do is compare it to Legion.

@bigsocrates:I specifically brought up Mirror's Edge because that's an example of a very imperfect game. I didn't want to bring up a "perfect" game because I'm, again, not advocating for perfectionism. In Mirror's Edge, the combat is clunky, yes, but the game is focused on keeping you moving, and Faith is a runner, not a trained fighter, so the idea that she would have a tougher time fighting armored goons with guns makes total sense. And the difficulty in these combat encounters encourage you to parkour past them, which is one of the most ideal ways to play that game. So while it's a fault, it at least an interesting one, and it serves the game as a whole. It's not about looking past the faults, it's about the faults stemming from an overall vision in a way that makes sense. Another good example is Far Cry 2 -- the enemies respawning at every checkpoint as soon as you turned a corner sucked, but it fit the intention of giving the player a constantly hostile world they could never tame, as opposed to Far Cry 3, which lets you constantly alleviate tension by giving you safe zones after you clear bandit camps.

I wouldn't say Ubisoft gets open worlds "right" so much as their open worlds are built to a single purpose, and execute on that purpose competently. It's boring, yup, because we've seen it a lot, but there is at least none of the bewilderment present in Cyberpunk which is, "how the heck does any of this fit together?" For example, different type of environment, for sure, but I didn't care for any of the story missions in Assassin's Creed Origins, but still completed the entire map (without ever leaving Alexandria in the story) because that world was just so much fun to explore.

Legion is interesting to bring up, because I think that game's core design gimmick of being able to play as anyone is rather novel, and it also falls flat on its face, but the answers as to why it's falling flat on its face are a lot more interesting than Cyberpunk, and create new ground for future developers to build upon should they so desire. The Errant Signal video on Watch Dogs Legion did a pretty great job at summing up that game's design issues. (In short, missions want to include every type of player character, so the level design can't fully take advantage of any one character's unique skills.) With Cyberpunk, I see that there's an ambition of scale, and I'll grant you, it was unfair of me to say that combining Deus Ex and GTA isn't ambitious -- that is. It's just that none of that ambition translated to making the game any more interesting to play. In the missions or buildings, I'm playing an uninspired Deus Ex, and in the open world, I'm experiencing an uninspired GTA. The two never truly mesh. To each their own, but for my tastes, Legion actually feels more ambitious to me. It's funny pitting them against each other, because I honestly don't care for either very much, but I would personally call Legion a more interesting failure.

Real quick, even though this is going long, to the ways Cyberpunk may be pushing the envelope:

1. The world is pushing the envelope, but I'm not sure I'm as enthused by it as you. It's large, there's lots of geometry, and the interconnected streets are pretty dense, but we've seen big cities in games before. If you want to call out the fact that it's a futuristic city specifically, or that it's larger than any city in a game before... maybe. The sheer size of it is an accomplishment, but that doesn't really push gaming forward, that's the same ambition we've been pushing at (to lesser and lesser success, imo) since Grand Theft Auto III. Despite playing a lot of open world games, I genuinely worry that chasing this scale at the AAA level all the time is detracting from games. The larger the scale of a game's world, the harder it gets to design a world that's engaging to be in, as I think Cyberpunk demonstrates fantastically. So it is pushing the envelope, but in a way we've seen before, and at the expense of other aspects of the game, so I'm less inclined to sing its praises. Of course, YMMV.

2. Parts of the visual design are cool! There are lots of talented artists in game dev, and to me the designs of Cyberpunk didn't really jump above that bar for me. I'm just constantly humbled by how good artists are at their jobs across the entire industry.

3. Again, you even bring it up, we've seen this kind of mission structure before. Cyberpunk's selling point is, "this thing you've seen before, but at MEGA SCALE!" These branching missions, but throughout the entire game, essentially. And yeah, that first mission is a cool one of those. But it sits alone in Cyberpunk. Implementing it across an entire game isn't a matter of cracking the design code, it's a matter of raw time and cost. And Cyberpunk did it in a similar way Disco Elysium did, so I don't see that as "pushing the envelope." I see that as implementing existing branching storytelling techniques for a fraction of a game's runtime.

4. Put it on the back of the box! :D

I think on the whole, in discussing the open world, we're discussing two different things, which might be why we're talking past each other while still agreeing on quite a bit. You keep bringing up individual story sidequests, and I keep coming back to how Cyberpunk's open world mechanics interlock (or fail to). So yes, the payoff to the Delamain sidequest was great, and I was happy to get text messages from all the individual cars after I set them free. The vending machine quest was a good bit. But the longer I played the game, the more I realized this would have been far stronger as a linear story game, because that's clearly where the effort in the production values went. You have these gorgeous set piece moments like the first mission, and the parade infiltration in the middle, and that's clearly where the production values and time went in the missions. But the few good bits in the quests are buried by the overall construction of the game.

So if the exit criteria of this discussion is for me to admit there are good things in Cyberpunk, yeah, there are! They're just so overwhelmingly outnumbered by the rest of it, that my overall take veers from "uneven" to "bad." Kind of like how if a movie with a few great moments or scenes still doesn't leave a great impression if the ending is bad, Cyberpunk has these great bits, but the overall game falls short. If the game ended well, or the story was worth seeing, or if the core combat was more enjoyable, I'd feel way better saying, "you know, the open world is paper thin, but there's some neat stuff here to see, just make sure to mainline it." As it stands, though, I wouldn't recommend Cyberpunk to even someone just critical-pathing it.

Finally, as to why I played the whole damn thing? Great question! As you can tell by the litany of open-world games I've brought up having played to completion, my brain is absolutely broken when it comes to RPGs or open world games. If there's a maximum level, if there are sidequests, I'm going to do literally everything I can before progressing further in the story. This was a habit I picked up in Fallout 3, because let's face it, the main story is *not* the draw of that thing. So, with Cyberpunk I did the exact same thing. After rescuing Evelyn with Judy, I went to do every sidequest. I went through Panam's entire story, I went through River's entire story, I did every narrative sidequest that was appearing on my map. Then I went down to clearing "Gigs" neighborhood by neighborhood.

As I said in the essay, what kept me going at first was the setup of the story with Silverhand, which is great. What kept me going in the middle was this false carrot on a stick dangling in front of me saying, "hey, maybe the game will be fun after you level up some more?" There's a reason I called it "compulsively playable" -- none of it is great, but it was inoffensive enough for a while that I could keep trucking.

It was at that point, about 50 hours in the game, I hit my wall. I realized I was just "making the numbers go up," and stopped playing for a while. I put it down for a couple months, then I saw that people were talking about Cyberpunk again in a way that absolutely did not match my experience. So I picked it up again with the intent of finishing it completely so I could have the best grounding to discuss this game with y'all. And who knew, maybe the story would pay off well at the end? Or so my thought process went.

There wasn't much sidequest stuff left, so I just polished off the NCPD scanner activities and completed the story. I will say, it was a rude awakening going from the sidequests to the story, because as uninspired as the open world stuff was, I was at least in control at all times, if that makes sense? I could run to my next objective as soon as I was done with an area, and there was always forward momentum (except for having to stop to loot guys after each fight, which I sometimes prevented myself from doing, but I couldn't turn down the potential money / crafting XP for long). Going from that to the story really exacerbated how many missions involve walking and talking, or standing while people talk without any player input. This lackluster mission design isn't unique to Cyberpunk, again, it's the reason I did the side-stuff in AC Origins and as little of the story as it'd let me.

To be clear, if I had stopped playing for good at 50 hours, my feelings on the game would be very similar, sans my specific ire with the story's conclusion. I had the same distaste for how empty the game's world and progression were -- and because we've gotten hung up on that word, when I say empty, I don't mean "literally nothing there," I mean what's there is incredibly shallow, which dovetails with the game's nihilistic streak in a really unpleasant way. Like how the streets feel empty, even though technically there are a couple dozen pedestrians there and some cars? It's the same with the missions. There's stuff there, but the quality moments are so few and far between the experience left me feeling empty.

So yeah, I played the whole thing because I thought there'd at least be something interesting to talk about at the end of it, and I wanted to understand it as fully as I could, even if only as a cautionary tale.

@lapsariangiraff: Saying that Mirror's Edge's bad combat plays to that game's strengths is just another way of saying you were able to look past it. In that case it's true that the flaw isn't part of the core strength of the game, but it's a significant flaw nonetheless. Assassin's Creed Origins is a game you were able to enjoy even though you don't like the story or the story missions, which are not bad elements that play to that game's strengths. My point is just that all games have good and bad and while we can argue about how those things fit together in Cyberpunk it's just sort of a matter of what you can tolerate. One interesting thing to come out of this discussion to me is that we mostly agree about what's good and what's bad in the game. Even on the city, our biggest point of disagreement, we agree on what specific elements are good and bad for the most part, we just value those elements differently.

I don't think the city in Watch Dogs Legion was built to a specific purpose. I think it feels really aimless and they were going for verisimilitude more or less. Assassin's Creed cities are different, since they are often built as actual video game levels with intended paths and playability emphasized, but the quality varies wildly across the franchise. A lot of them can be kind of a pain to navigate.

I think that Legion and Cyberpunk are pretty natural to compare. They're both story driven open world games with combat, stealth, and hacking. I agree that Legion will be the more influential game because its gimmick is closer to working (Cyberpunk doesn't really have a gimmick per se), and it won't be hard for developers to tweak it in a few ways to make it work*

I actually think that our different reactions to Cyberpunk come down a lot to how we engage with and play games. I am very much not a completion guy when it comes to open world games. I think I've completed all the objectives in precisely 2 open world icon vomit games. The first was Ghost of Tsushima, and that was because most of those objectives were unique little story nuggets, and the others were easy to find and get done with. The second was Spider-Man PS4, and that was because I just decided I wanted to platinum it, and I did, and I regret it. I kind of liked that game when I played it in 2018 but when I went back to platinum it last year I ended up burned out and sick of it, to the point where I had to force myself to get through the DLC when I got the Miles Morales ultimate edition that came with the PS5 remaster, and I still haven't played Miles Morales because the thought of more Spider-Man just makes me wrinkle my nose. And that was a game I liked for just a story playthrough with some side stuff when I felt like it.

I'm "done" with almost every game before it actually wraps up. I commonly spend the last 10-20% of games audibly saying "why won't you end?" to the screen. I

I'm not going to tell you that you played Cyberpunk "wrong" because that doesn't make any sense, but I do think that you played it in a way that emphasized it's flaws. My pattern was to do some story stuff, go do some random stuff in the world (sometimes forced because the game makes you take breaks between some story missions...how did that even work when you'd done literally everything in the world?), go back to the story, go back to doing the world stuff etc... until I got close to the end and could feel myself getting bored with the mechanics and too powerful for the difficulty curve and just critical pathed it to the credits.

Playing this way meant that I never got too bored by the story stuff that takes control away from the player (though that is definitely an issue) and never got too annoyed with the lack of meaningful content in the world because there was generally enough to fill the pockets between story missions, and I interwove learning the combat and improving my weapons and skills with all that story stuff etc...

Cyberpunk is like a Taco Bell taco. It kind of works when it's all piled together but if you take the ingredients apart and examine them separately you're going to have a bad time.

Seriously, though, a lot of the emptiness you note doesn't really show itself until you've put some time into exploring the systems. You yourself say you were fooled by the carrot on the stick for awhile and then became angry and embittered (okay, maybe not that) after you found out that it was a plastic carrot all along. By just engaging more shallowly I managed to get out before the Taco Bell meal really made me sick.

Of course then there are some people who just don't like Taco Bell.

Here is what I wrote in my GOTY write up that I never published because I couldn't be bothered to pull together all the screenshots. It placed third behind Final Fantasy VII Remake and Hades (which is clearly the best game I played last year):

Hoo boy. This game. I played it on Xbox Series X and I had a lot of small bugs, and some substantial ones including one that wrecked the final boss fight of the game, but despite those issues, and despite the other flaws in the game including terrible enemy AI, shallow and boring side content, and a story that totally lacks player agency, I really enjoyed my time with this title. Part of it is my love of the Cyberpunk source material, part of it is the way the game is drenched with atmosphere and has one of the best video game cities ever made, and part of it is the good mission design for the main missions and the strong performances of much of the cast. It is a deeply flawed game in so many ways, and not one I’d recommend anyone pick up or play until it’s patched, but it stuck with me in a way few games do and I am considering doing another playthrough once it’s patched and the 9^th gen console versions are out, even though it’s extremely linear. If you think this game is too offensive to enjoy then I completely understand where you’re coming from. If you think its side activities are too shallow I’m right there with you. If you think that it should never have been released in such a broken and buggy state you are 100% correct. I have written a lot about my issues with this game, and whatever complaints you have I can probably see the merit in them, but I really really liked it and Resist and Disorder is my favorite video game song of the year.

The only change I'd make to that is to qualify the "good mission design for the main missions" claim because it only applies to some of those missions. As you can see I already agreed with a lot of what you had to say here.

And I don't even have the right hardware for the Keanu Reeves sex mod.

*Protip: it was a bad idea to have EVERY playable character in the game be randomly generated. It was ambitious and cool in theory, but it absolutely wrecked the writing and offloaded all of the actual story stuff to a snotty AI sidekick and the villains, while Marcus Holloway was arguably the best thing about Watch Dogs 2. You don't need to have every character be random, and while having a Marcus type character would also compromise permadeath, just put in a game over restart from checkpoint if s/he dies. Permadeath for everyone else, game over if the main character(s) die(s). Then you can have an actual decent story.

@bigsocrates: Yeah, it was really funny playing through the story at the end with those "wait 24 hours" bits thrown in, but nothing to do in the world to pass the time. Thankfully, there's a "Wait" button in the menu that came in clutch, since I could just skip right to the next part of the questline by skipping 24 hours. Though the wait function did result in some bugs whenever a location was involved. For instance, when I waited for evening outside a night club for a mission, the quest didn't trigger until I left the area and came back.

Spider-Man was great. I didn't platinum it, but I did every side activity. While it was starting to wear a bit on me by the end, I think their method for gating types of collectibles and sidequests depending on how much story has happened really helped me not binge on it. I could get every icon on the map, and then play a chunk of story, then come back to the world with new mission types. It's a good thing that system is in place, because when the map is fully filled in by the end of the game, hoooooly shit is it icon barf.

It's super interesting you bring up being done with games before they wrap up, because depending on the type of game, that's often me as well. Most roguelikes, like Dead Cells, I beat once and then consider myself set. The only exceptions were Hades (because I wanted to see the ending after 10 wins, but I know friends who went way deeper down that rabbit hole getting the couple hundred hour + "true" ending with the social meters maxed out) and FTL because that game is fun as heck. But yeah, most games absolutely overstay their welcome. Even totally linear singleplayer games like Uncharted 4, there's so often this lull where the story is absolutely resolved, (in Uncharted's case, Nathan and Elena have reconnected and opened up about their marriage) but then you have 2 more hours of shooting because "BiG cLiMaX!"

My playstyle definitely affected my take on the game. For example, I don't think any human should be cursed with the knowledge that there is literally not enough money in the game's economy to buy every single car after doing every activity in the world. Or that, even once I'd played the whole thing, I didn't have enough proficiency in Blades or Cold Blood or Stealth to hit rank 20 in one of those skills, despite only playing with those three the whole time (perhaps the game was expecting me to just mainline literally one thing, which I hope isn't true, because that'd feel bad).

There was a concept I thought of a lot while playing Cyberpunk, and I think it applies to the idea of "right" and "wrong" ways to play a game. Most players, given a choice between an inefficient playstyle that's fun, and a more materially/mechanically rewarding yet tedious playstyle, will choose the latter. We're kind of stupid like that. So it's up to the developer to create natural incentives for playing the game the "optimal" way, kind of like Doom 2016 and Sekiro. And this came up in my head constantly while playing Cyberpunk because the leveling mechanics constantly encouraged me to play in the most tedious way. Did you know that the game still gives you Stealth points for hiding bodies when everyone in the area is dead? I did! So the modus operandi in each area was, and I kid you not, "shoot everyone in the head/stealth kill everyone/stab everyone" (depending on what mood I was in or which skill had a +1 perk point reward in the nearest future), then loot each body, then drag each body to a dumpster, then dismantle every item that wasn't better than what I had in my inventory. Rinse repeat for every compound.

Even more ludicrously, though thankfully this only came up twice, there are two areas in the game that are just comically littered with mines. We're talking like, a whole hillside. Buuuuuuuut if you have Technical Ability or Intelligence (the three attributes I min-maxed in were Technical Ability, Cool, and Reflexes), each mine can be disabled for a sizable XP reward, around 100-300. So what did I do? I disabled each -- individual -- mine -- in the entire zone. (The first was in this Badlands Gig where you have to get a car out from a minefield, the second was that killer farmhouse you go to with River to catch the predator.) I'd say about 30 minutes of my 78 hour playthrough of Cyberpunk was dedicated to farming mines for XP. In the Badlands gig, I even joked with my friend "you know, I'm going to pick up this car, and then enemies are going to spawn, and I'm going to wish that I had left some mines on," and sure enough, exactly that happened. XD Meanwhile, the entire urgency of catching this guy before he killed someone again was completely undercut with River, but hey.... had to get that XP! At one point River decided that my thoroughness meant I was leaving the area, so he teleported away with some snippy "this is important, come back soon" dialogue, then came back a couple seconds later. Good times.

Last story about how silly the grind in this game can get. There's a series of boxing sidequests, I dunno if you played all of them, but you at least saw one, likely. As I mentioned before, my build had 0 body upgrades, so I was the worst equipped to take these missions on. Luckily (or unluckily), one of the hardest fights with the Animal boxer glitched out and counted as me winning a fair fist fight, when in reality I had just murdered her and her entire crew as part of an Assassination Gig that happened to be in the exact same location. Imagine my surprise when I was in the middle of stealthily shooting everyone, and then one person just talks to me amongst all her friend's bodies to say, "HEY, YOU GONNA FIGHT?" Then, two hours later, the coach texted me "HEY GREAT JOB WINNING THIS FIGHT!" Sigh. Anyway, I still haven't gotten to the real grind in this story. Now foolishly committed to seeing everything Cyberpunk had to offer, I took on the toughest fist fight in the game, with a character who had no punching skills or upgrades whatsoever, and the HP of a twig.

Cue the big boxer guy glitching out and constantly sidestepping in a corner of the ring, and me just punching him, over, and over, and over, for about 45 minutes, as his health slowly whittled down. And this music played on loop.

I will never hear this song the same way ever again.

Also if anyone comes for Taco Bell in this thread I will end them. :P

As someone who often feels less than inspired to create Wisecrack-esque in-depth analyses on art and entertainment, I appreciate it when they're made for the sake of providing some talking points to reflect on after the escapism effect wears off, so props for the time and effort spent since I get bored with my own writing past 1,000 words.

Anyway. Like with Efesell, the 170 hours I spent with the game were pretty positive as well; considering that I've been keeping an eye on the game since the initial trailers, but keeping my expectations pretty tempered; excited enough to pre-order on Steam, but not enough to expect the highest caliber of video game that Witcher 3 fans have propped that up game to be. Between playing the game for myself and looking though the various discussions about the game, though I'm generally pretty easy to please in that I can spend over 100 hours, or even over 1,000 hours in a game that most people would say is "niche", "deeply flawed" or "boring" if I'm enjoying the gameplay loop, I can't disagree with the more rational/reasonable criticisms about this game, mainly in regards to story and characters where CDPR seemed very meticulous in crafting those two aspects with the Witcher trilogy (give or take their own respective flaws, oversights, questionable elements, and changes from the books), so I can completely understand the disappointment of expecting the quality of writing only to basically get something that's on par with Fallout 4. That said, Fallout 4 is my most played game on Steam at over 1,100 hours where playing it as a survival game (not to be confused with survival mode) and experimenting with mods was pretty enjoyable for me over the years whenever I've had the time to kill, but a game that's a more complete and compelling package is still appreciated.

So, with the big talking points about the game being common knowledge among an informed audience at this point, other than the foreseeable patches to bring the game out of early access, I guess the big question to ask is "Where do we go from here?" Though, to ask some smaller questions: Would it be worth going back in when the game is at least as technically sound as The Witcher 3? Is there a certain point where the people that were the most disappointed with the game can eventually get some enjoyment out of it? And from the development side: What's CDPR's next move after the bug fixes? Multiplayer as they've advertised? Story expansions to try to smooth out the rough edges? Add in features that were left on the cutting room floor? Or just say "screw it" and go back to how they've traditionally done story and choices with Cyberpunk 2078? Or a differnet "screw it" and try a new IP or stick to Witcher? Personally, I'm willing to go back into Cyberpunk after a few more major updates (hopefully being able to change at least some of V's facial and body features and hair after the initial creation screen), but again, I can completely understand why people have washed their hands of this game and CDPR at this point.

@nexivselecaf: I think there's enough people who have said something to the effect of "I'm going to wait for this game to be fixed" / "I'm going to wait for the proper next-gen version" that this game will continue to have a life, so updates will still be appreciated. I doubt people who had a bad first impression are likely to come back, but who knows, it's a slow year for games, so by the time it's in ship shape people may have time on their hands.

Witcher 3 had a rough launch, but this tech debt feels like such a deeper hole, I'm not sure if they'll ever get to the point of making Blood and Wine-sized expansions. CDPR has made more than enough money at this point to start work on a different project, my guess is they'll either continue on their promise of multiplayer Cyberpunk or cut and run to a safer project after the technical stuff is a bit less embarrassing. Because while folks are divided on the game itself, everyone seems unanimously affronted by the technical state of the game, so that's likely priority one over there.

Incidentally there's a 28gb PC update out just now so I guess this thread has primed me to just kinda play some more of this..

@lapsariangiraff: Wow. The game you describe sounds really boring. And empty. And bad. I'm sorry you had to experience that. Genuinely. I also completely see why, if you spent the kind of granular time it takes to disassemble all those mines the illogic in the game's spaces and construction stood out to you. There's a lot of time to think about things when you're painstakingly disarming dozens of mines from a weird farm on the outskirts of town during the very silly ending to an otherwise decent chain of sidequests.

I'm not a min-maxer at all. I'll grind if I have to, and I've definitely played games I wasn't enjoying out of stubbornness, but if there's a fun way to do something in a game then that's the way I'm going to do it, and if I'm really not enjoying side content I'll abandon it. I definitely encountered the mines and I disarmed some of them and noted the XP bonus, but it never occurred to me to disarm them all because that sounds boring. I long ago came to the conclusion that because nothing I do in a game world is going to matter when I move on from that game there's no point in grinding out these little things. If I'm going to spend time doing boring repetitive things it's going to be in the real world in a way that benefits me or others. Why spend half an hour disarming mines in a virtual field when I could use that time to search the web for PC parts to help me build a rig powerful enough to run the Keanu Reeves sex mod? You know, things that really matter.

For Cyberpunk that meant that I just blew past large amounts of content, including basically everything in the final act because I was starting to turn on the game. I dropped a bunch of quest lines and just beat it for the exit. I also abandoned a lot of other parts of the game. Heck, as soon as I found out that the bikes were more fun to drive than the cars I barely got in a car again. I did try out the barehanded fight quest line but I got to the guy who puts up his rifle and there was something about that fight, either he did damage even on a successful parry or it was sucking up too much stamina, and it didn't seem like it would be fun to grind past him so I just dropped the quest line and moved on. I would not have spent 45 minutes bopping him in the nose even if he got glitched.

This is why we played largely different games. My memories of the game, outside important story moments and cool little side events, mostly consist of blasting over the freeway on my bike, or occasionally wandering around on foot and poking my nose into some side content. The game has a bunch of little side quests where you kill random thugs for the cops and then you'll find a note telling you about some stash house they have with items or something, but they're never worth getting, so I dropped those quickly. I just picked and chose what I was going to do, and even then I had a lot of boring experiences and stuff that didn't pay off. Trying to do everything would have made me bored and angry.

I do understand that some people are natural min-maxers, and to some degree game developers are responsible for pushing people towards the good parts of their game and away from the bad parts. Cyberpunk does the opposite. I honestly think the one woman anti-landmine campaign stuff is kind of on you and your personal quirks (it's clearly not what you're intended to do), and to some degree so is the hiding of bodies post-mortem (though it's dumb that it gives you XP) but the fact that the fixers are constantly calling you and pushing you towards extremely bad side content is 100% on the game itself. Cyberpunk is designed to funnel you into the worst parts of its world and the least engaging parts of its gameplay. It's not just the game's outside of game marketing, but a lot of its internal systems, that are constantly nagging you to engage with bad stuff. The fact that you don't just buy cars at random dealerships (which would still make the car economy bad) but you're constantly getting people texting you and advertising their grossly overpriced and unfun to drive automobiles is just one example. I legitimately want to talk to the person who thought that was a good and fun idea. Just like I want to talk to whoever it was that thought that creating dozens of short boring missions and having people call you up and tell you to do them was a fun plan. Was the whole fixer system in place before they actually designed the missions themselves and then they had to rush out something to do in the places the fixers were telling you to go, so it just ended up pointing you towards essentially nothing? It kind of seems like it, but signposting content before you even have that content seems like a textbook definition of hubris in game design.

I think all this has a lot of implications for games criticism. A movie is a movie and a book is a book. There's one intended experience for them, and yeah there are some movies that come alive on Imax or whatever, but everyone's going to have a similar experience. Someone who criticized a book for being boring if you skip ahead to the end and read the last chapter first so you spoil everything is going to get a lot of blowback for "doing it wrong."

Games are different. I do think that it's unfair to penalize a game because it's not fun to do things that the designers never intended (like disassemble a whole mine field) but I also don't think you did that in your essay. It is very fair to criticize a game for having bad content that the game is constantly pointing you to. You can't just say "well you can skip that content" because it's part of the game. But I also think that it's a valid design decision to put in a bunch of content that the player is only supposed to do some of. Like the Korok seeds in Breath of the Wild. You're clearly not supposed to collect all of them and there are so many because the game wants you to run into a bunch naturally no matter what direction you go off in. You're not supposed to have to hunt them down, you're supposed to stumble upon them. This is clearly a valid design choice, and I think criticizing BOTW for having too many Korok seeds is unfair.

There's a Youtuber called The Completionist who 'completes' every game he reviews, and I often watch his reviews for games I've played because his experiences will be so different from mine. He'll frequently say things like "this game is fun if you just play it once or twice, but in order to complete it and do absolutely everything you have to turn it into a hellish and unfun time sucking experience" and on the one hand I'll be like "so...don't play it that way? It's a game, dude, not a job" but on the other hand that's the way he engages with games and also sometimes the designers will create bonuses and incentives to play that way, at which point it's on them. Don't tell your players to play games in ways that are bad!

Bringing it back to the original essay, obviously if you'd played the game more selectively it wouldn't change everything about how you viewed it. It wouldn't have fixed the technical issues, it wouldn't have changed Johnny Silverhand's character, and it wouldn't have resolved the problems with the mechanics (though spending less time with them would make them less boring.) On the other hand I do think you would have come away with a different view on Night City and some of the other elements of the game, because the shallow illusion does work for a while if you don't look at it that closely. We both went to a magic show, but you say in the front row where you could see how sloppily the tricks were actually performed and the strings and trap doors were obvious. I sat in the back and was able to just enjoy what the magician was doing without examining it too closely. Does that make either person's experience less valid? I don't think so. Both are objectively fair ways to evaluate the show.

@bigsocrates: For sure, the mine farming and compulsive body hiding was absolutely a me thing, not a game thing. Personally, I think it's silly that hiding bodies counts towards stealth when there's no stealth involved because everyone's dead, but the behavior is definitely on me. Which is why I didn't bring it up in the piece because, as you said, totally not the game's fault for those things.

The fact that fixers call you and you never have to meet them, but they are physical people on the map is very telling. They clearly wanted to do more with fixers, or have introductions in person at least (plenty of games introduce a main character in a cutscene or in-person scene and then have them call you,) but instead, we just get calls as introductions, likely due to reduced scope. The first time Regina (the cop, if that was her name) called me in Watson I was just so taken aback, like, "who are you?" And it never gets less jarring as more and more fixers call you saying "HEY. I HEARD YOU'RE GOOD AT CLEARING SIDEQUESTS."

I will say, the brilliant thing about Breath of the Wild, is that it would have been very easy to make the Korok seeds or shrines just as tedious as Cyberpunk, with one simple change: if they had marked all the Korok seeds on the map the way Cyberpunk marks all its activities. It would change the feeling of the map from wonderment and discovery, "Wow, can't believe a shrine/Korok was there! That's cool, I found that!" to, "well, 4 more seeds in the bottom right corner of the map to go... ugh, it's up a hill, this'll take a while." By not having any of those on the map from the get go, (and that is a conscious design decision) every quest found is a player discovery, the player feels in control, and the likely dozens if not hundreds of seeds they never find won't bother them, because they don't even know they were there. That's worked wonders for me, at least. Now, would keeping all the sidequests and NCPD activities off the map until discovered have made Cyberpunk's side content better? No, but it would have given players a better reason to explore the city, and made it easier to say "enough is enough" when you were tired of it. Plus, I love that feeling in open world games when you have a plan or route in mind and the game suddenly diverts it -- so if I were driving to the 5th "Steal this item stealthily" gig of the night, and I suddenly came across another person who needed my help? That'd be great! (Unsurprisingly, Red Dead Redemption was my favorite Rockstar game when that came out.)

Buuuuuut CDPR chose not to do that, because quests are tied to XP which are tied to player levels and abilities, which already have a pretty high ceiling, and not showing every XP opportunity on the map likely felt too withholding, and would hamstring folks who just want to "make the numbers go up." But I would have loved that, or at least as a toggleable option in the menu? I was one of those guys who turned the map off in Witcher 3 because I found it too distracting and used the waypoints too much.

I will say, like Hbomberguy does in his Bloodborne video, there is absolutely a wrong way to play some games. Like Jeff in the Outer Wilds GOTY discussion -- if he went out there and didn't know he could read text, he is missing a huge chunk of the game and a source of info. So it's up to the developer to create intuitive flows so every player "stumbles" into the right way to play (when really they're being cajoled at every turn by the level layout, mission structure, weapons, XP rewards, etc). I'm reminded of Brad playing Doom Eternal -- every time I see him play it, he walks back into a corner he can't get out of, and every time, he goes "that's my fault!" Because a lot of design quirks, players will feel as "their own fault," when in reality, like Brad, they're just getting hung up on sticky/not as great parts of the level layout.

I know I'm a bit more die-hard about this than a lot of folks. For instance, I'm the guy who will say over and over that "free instant takedowns from stealth from behind that take no resources in your game encourage players to just go around takedown-ing instead of engaging with your fun abilities."

Dueling essays in this thread and I’m here feeling “I just think it’s neat!”.

@lapsariangiraff: If you want a roleplaying reason why hiding bodies would still get you experience...you're still getting the experience of hiding the bodies. If XP represents learning then how is learning to hide a body quietly when nobody is around that different than doing it with people there? It's just practice, so you gain experience.

If you want the actual reason...they clearly didn't think that deeply about their mechanics, plus the whole game was on fire when it launched and I don't even know if the game is capable of detecting whether there are any live enemies in the area reliably so I'm sure this was pretty low on the tweak list, significantly below "game hard crashes constantly on multiple platforms."

The whole Fixer system was clearly a nod to the source material, so I appreciated it on that level, but yeah, it's obvious that it was not implemented as intended and it's just a complete mess. You sort of develop a relationship with Wakako because she has a place in the main story and you go visit her, but I believe she's the only one (other than Dexter and Rogue, of course, but they don't count.) The others do exist in the world but in weird places. I think I ran into one (not literally) just like standing on a patch of grass near a highway? I shrugged my shoulders at a lot of that stuff in the game because there's just so much jank. It really was like playing a beta. And not a "beta" that's ready for public testing to drum up publicity. A real-ass beta.

I think that map vomit in games is almost always bad and I'm somewhat baffled that BOTW's brilliant map system hasn't been more influential, except that developers are afraid to trust players and also it's hard to implement (and probably doesn't work if your map is crammed full of garbo content.) Going from one place on the map to another marked location isn't playing a video game it's a virtual commute, unless your traversal is really fun, and most games have bad traversal. I much prefer verbal directions (you can put them in a log so people don't forget them) or an approximate search area (like Cyberpunk uses for the Delamain quests) to just "run to this icon and do the thing." I stopped looking at the map for much of the game and did just stumble into things (though sometimes I did look at the map and just go to the nearest "thing" to where I was when there wasn't much stumbling going on.) It definitely made the city feel more alive, but too often the thing would be a random fixer calling me up and telling me to murder some people in a nearby building.

I don't actually think that those are examples of people playing a game wrong. I think they're examples of a developer failing to properly teach players how to play. That happens a lot. I especially get irritated when I play a game and bosses are totally different from the standard gameplay, and like your skills that you've been relying on totally don't work on them anymore (especially if those bosses are difficult.) It's like you spent the whole level doing math homework and then you get to the final test and it's a history exam on the French Revolution. Well why were you teaching me all that math then?

But if the game properly communicates its systems and such and a player chooses to only use some of them or try to get around them they're not "playing wrong." They're making a choice that they feel is right for them. And that's valid. People should engage with games however they want.

I'm totally the guy who will stop doing stealth kills after a time because I get bored with them, if there's another viable path. I just don't care about efficiency in games. It's one of the reasons that I tend to prefer easier games over hard ones. I'd rather have more flexibility than have to learn how to play and stick rigidly to that style.

@efesell: NO! You can't just enjoy a game and think it's fun. You have to analyze it to death, and then start analyzing other games to death, and then start talking about abstract theory. You can't just say "This is cool, I had a fun time with it." That's not allowed!

Besides these aren't even really dueling essays. They're mostly in agreement.

@efesell: Imagine how long these posts would be if we disagreed on the entire game? :P

@bigsocrates Yup, I think I saw Dino just by the road. Like, a placeholder fixer spot that was never revisited. Super weird.

Maybe the phrasing isn't a "wrong" way or "right" way to play a game, but there are clearly fun and less fun ways of playing a game, to a certain margin of difference depending on personal taste or how much variety the game accounts for. For most games though, the developers are intending most people to have a pretty similar experience, and sometimes players aren't taught how to play the game in a way that's fun. Either way you put it, "not taught" or "wrong," we're in agreement that it's the developer's fault for most cases.

@lapsariangiraff: On the one hand it's kind of a cool idea to have a fixer who is just out there among the people rubbing shoulders and getting a sense of the city instead of sitting in a secluded office or table at a bar like Wakako or Rogue. On the other hand...the side of the highway is just such an odd choice. They couldn't put him on a park bench? The game has a lot of parks. Or outside a convenience store. Or...whatever, I shouldn't put more thought into these things than the developers did.

The reason I don't like the term "playing it wrong" is that it's often used to blame players for developers' mistakes, especially by fans. Fans will be like "of course you didn't enjoy the game, you played the wrong class, idiot." Or "everyone knows you're not supposed to do everything on the map, so it's your fault you didn't enjoy yourself." And, no, that's not how gaming should work.

Obviously if you decided to review a game by doing something weird like playing Dark Souls with Donkey Kong bongos then that review not be widely applicable, but it doesn't mean that you wouldn't have valid things to say.

What I was trying to get at by "no wrong way to play a game" is that I think Cyberpunk is most rewarding if you engage with it at a shallow level and don't dig too deep into the mess that underlies it, but I'm not hating the player here, (even if I also don't hate the game.)

@bigsocrates: People who say "you're playing it wrong!" are indeed the worst.

I'm only a few paragraphs in, but this is already such an awesome piece on this whole mess... Just wanted to give a shoutout before I grab a tablet and continue reading from there.

@lapsariangiraff@bigsocrates: Why don't you two get hyped up for nekid Keanu Reeves instead?

But seriously, I read the whole thread and always appreciate good faith long form discussions (even ones that are 30'000 word long).