Cyberpunk - REVIEW | Futurestic Games | Open World Games | Rack Nerve

One of the most eagerly anticipated films of 2020 was Cyberpunk 2077.

It was billed as a watershed moment in video games, combining the rich history of R. Talsorian Games' enormous cyberpunk Night City with the storytelling abilities that made Geralt of Rivia's travels so engaging for so many of us in The Witcher. Everything was done in first-person perspective to sell us on our protagonist V's embodied interaction with the world.

But, as is characteristic of the cyberpunk genre, there was a significant gap between the hype and the final product. The game fell with a dull thud, the stark truth of which might be attributed to a variety of problems cited by critics and players: slow cyberpunk gameplay, the world's general emptiness, and a lack of compelling narrative. A series of technical issues loomed over all of this, quickly turning Cyberpunk 2077 into a generator of glitchy memes and exposing a rushed game made under terrifying crunch conditions. It was removed from Sony's PlayStation Store due to significant performance issues, and the months thereafter have been a long crawl of CD Projekt patching, adding, and tuning the game in incremental updates - a concerted effort to align it with its marketing promises

Now, 16 months later, the most often requested question is, "Is Cyberpunk 2077 'good' now?"

CD Projekt issued a significant patch for Cyberpunk 2077, version 1.5, in February 2022. It includes a slew of bug fixes and tweaks, as well as new content and native PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X support. Although reading the patch notes takes a long time, the main sense is that CD Projekt has redesigned practically every game component in Cyberpunk 2077, from battle AI to player stat functions, the economy, and the way vehicles work.

The company has done comparable system and world overhauls with the second and third Witcher games, so these large post-release swings are nothing new to it. This is the first time, though, that a single patch has carried the burden of "fixing" an entire game. It's a hefty burden, and I'd be lying if I claimed that having to assess how "fixed" the game is didn't weigh heavily on my mind when I re-launched the game on Playstation 5 in February.

In the weeks since, I've been enjoying my first playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077. Since I skipped the first game to wait for the inevitable second swing, my eyes are as fresh as they can be. If you're searching for a soundbite, here's my verdict: Cyberpunk 2077 is now a fairly solid game.

It's effective. It takes place in a world that appears to be the one that everyone was looking forward to when the game first came out. People live their lives in the huge Night City, and the player character V is simply another individual caught up in the process of striving to climb the social ladder. You may easily move from filthy streets to immaculate skyline suites in megatowers, and the many missions thread V like a needle through these political realities transformed into spatial forms, much like any other piece of cyberpunk media (thanks, Fredric Jameson).

Based on evaluations of the original Cyberpunk 2077 and my experience completing the new Cyberpunk 2077 over the past few days, it appears that one major difference between pre-1.5 and post-1.5 is intensity. CD Projekt seemed to nail size at launch, with a vast and properly futuristic environment. What it lacked was a sense of depth, a sense that this enormous world included functioning individuals going about their thing except the player character. The gaming world lacked heft, as if everything was there only to provide the impression of a city rather than genuine evocation of a real metropolis, complete with stores and booths, cyberpunk criminals, and their own economic network.

It's an odd marker of present video game culture that this is the thing we want the most, given that the entire video game environment is, by definition, a technical illusion designed to make a player feel significant. In any given game, the folks on the sidewalk are not there to be full. They're there to provide context and an aesthetic sensation to a player rushing by in a futuristic vehicle. If there's one thing that patch 1.5 does right, it's that these aspirations appear to be realised. NPCs have little interaction with their surroundings, and they become panicked when gunfire begins nearby. 

The combat also appears to be significantly changed from the original version. While stalking around the combat zone, I played as a very technical boy, infecting enemies with powered-up hacks into their essential organs. It was evident to me how my method differed from the others on offer, giving me the impression of being a razor blade cutting through groups of enemies tactically. I could always use a baseball bat to attack my robotic foes if my more sophisticated talents weren't up to the challenge.

The gunplay, which at times feels inescapable, has the flavour of a warmed-up Far Cry with some weapon concepts, like as assault rifles with tracking shots, that felt pulled straight from 2012's Syndicate. The game's content is timed in such a way that another, stronger weapon is always dropping off an opponent corpse, trivialising the entire system. I view this as a fantastic method to experience a variety of weapon types as a scavenger lord who enjoyed playing that way. I can see how this would irritate a more tactical gamer.

One of my and many others' biggest aspirations for Cyberpunk 2077 was to see how it will tackle storytelling in its science-fictional environment. The Witcher games succeed in developing their main cast of characters and placing them in situations that allow us to see them as three-dimensional beings with thoughts, feelings, and complexities that are rarely seen in video games. The decision to design this cyberpunk game under the Cyberpunk brand identification meant that it could draw on the rich history of this world created by Mike Pondsmith in the R. Talsorian Games Cyberpunk setting for over 30 years.

Before players even got their hands on the game, CD Projekt's promotional material went to great lengths to inform you about Night City and all of its history, placing V within this web of connections. The open world and its numerous zones and factions are contextualised by this world history and the players who inhabit it. It's crucial to understand that Night City is divided into a dozen factions, each with their own goals for the future and traditions to uphold. As a result, their organisations serve as a backdrop against which we can understand the game's main protagonists, such as Johnny Silverhand, Panam Palmer, and the Arasaka corporate family. Cyberpunk as a genre is frequently concerned with the question of who is constrained by what, and novels like Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net and William Gibson's Neuromancer are fueled in part by the thrill of watching their protagonists break through the social, economic, and technological barriers that have entrapped them.

The created-character aspect of V, as well as the different backgrounds from which V can come (such as a Nomad or a Corporate stooge), give Cyberpunk 2077 a Mass Effect feel. The other characters are well-developed, each with their own storylines, and when V enters their orbit, everything alters in a noticeable way.

In a broad sense, this worked in the Mass Effect mode where my grasp of V allowed me to make judgments from their point of view, but the "player-created" nature of V leaves something to be desired. While Night City has a large cast of individuals, each with their own history with the city, the inability to immerse V securely into it means that everything happens to me as a player. When Geralt met a new character or went to a new place in The Witcher 3, he always had a basic understanding of the situation, and my job as a player was to help him navigate it and learn as much as I could. V, who has a solid background, jumps from mission to task and place to place with little connection, just understanding what a questgiver tells them. So many of the things I did in the game ended up feeling generic for such a unique place and period. To be honest, this astounds me.

Even the design features used by CD Projekt to counteract this disjointed sense work in odd ways. I went with the Corporate background, which meant the game started with my firing from Arasaka Corp. and gave me some extra dialogue options if corporate politics came up. However, this only unlocked caustic or manipulative dialogue responses early in the game, allowing me to delve deeper into a conversation with my corporate-speak; towards the end of the game, those same Corpo dialogue choices had become almost completely about obedience and pro-corporate attitudes. This mid-game swap results in a position where I am unable to make assumptions or assertions about V in order to provide them with a role-playing foundation on my own terms. Many late-game situations lost their impact as a result of this.

If this story style has any strength, it is in its characters and the problems you assist them overcome, such as Johnny Silverhand, a construct locked in V's head. Because the chip that locked Johnny there is slowly killing V, the entire premise of the game revolves around attempting to extract him. While there are some truly compelling gameplay moments in this jumbled biopsyche, such as segments where Silverhand takes control of V's body and engages in rock and roll shenanigans, Silverhand (and Keanu Reeves' performance) is overshadowed by minor characters such as idealist detective River and ageing fixer Rogue. If this story style has any strength, it is in its characters and the problems you assist them overcome, such as Johnny Silverhand, a construct locked in V's head. Because the chip that locked Johnny there is slowly killing V, the entire premise of the game revolves around attempting to extract him. While there are some truly compelling gameplay moments in this jumbled biopsyche, such as segments where Silverhand takes control of V's body and engages in rock and roll shenanigans, Silverhand (and Keanu Reeves' performance) is overshadowed by minor characters such as idealist detective River and ageing fixer Rogue. 

It's worth considering the considerations behind a large patch like this, which is nearly solely focused on the game's technical and gameplay aspects. There's no attempt to soften or examine the cyberpunk genre's use of techno-orientalism in its depiction of Asian culture and characters, which is a significant missed opportunity in a game that spends so much time thinking about previous mistakes and how to fix them. A transphobic advertisement is still plastered across practically every surface in the game, monopolising vision in a way that contradicts real-world advertising guidelines. . With this game's long tail of updates, there are almost endless opportunities to delve deeper, question some assumptions, and engage with the genre as thoroughly as the genre's founding texts did. None of these, however, were deemed worthy of a patch. It appears that making ensuring there are new apartments, cars, and firearms is more important.

While patch 1.5 is functional and puts Cyberpunk 2077 up to whatever minimum standard people thought it should have been at launch, it is not without flaws. Playing the game for the first time now, it's evident that the high watermark is only serviceable, and that Cyberpunk 2077's core ideas are excellent enough to pass the time, but not great enough to be truly amazing, or even a substantial look at the genre to which it clings. It's a cyberpunk story for sure, from pre-release anticipation through awful release to quite good a year later.

But it's impossible for me to play the game after this patch without thinking about how many other games, with far more interesting concepts and approaches to the genre, aren't going to get the second wind that Cyberpunk 2077 will get in the coming year. Years of development time went into creating a typical and familiar 1980s dystopia in a decent frame. In Night City, it's just another day.