What Kind Of Game Did Cyberpunk 2077 Turn Out To Be, Anyway? [SPOILERS]

[Music] [Applause] [Music] in the 1984 novel neuromancer william gibson wrote quote night city was like a deranged experiment in social darwinism designed by a board researcher who permanently kept one thumb on the fast forward button stop hustling and you sank without a trace but move a little too swiftly and you'd break the fragile surface tension of the black market either way you were gone with nothing left of you but some vague memory in the mind of a night city fixture like rats the bartender though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with new yen for the clinic tanks biz here was a constant subliminal hum and death the accepted punishment for laziness carelessness lack of grace the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol end quote now that night city and the one in cyberpunk 2077 are two different night cities technically but in practice there's very little difference at all although cyberpunk 2077 is supposedly an original work and not an adaptation of a series of novels like the witcher trilogy that cd projekt red had previously been famous for in the end the difference is simply that the adaptations being made are broader more composite a range of novels and movies and animes released over decades distilled and reduced then bottled under the new brand name cyberpunk 2077 was 2020's most anticipated game and its most remarkable flop an almost universally regarded sure thing that was released unfinished and partially broken running on older systems like the ps4 with such glaring inadequacy that even in early 2021 it has not been allowed to return to the playstation store after it was removed for quality control reasons obviously there was a major gulf between expectations and reality but whose expectations cyberpunk 2077 seemed like it was going to be a lot of things to a lot of people i met someone in person who said to me straight faced that it would be the greatest game of all time when it came out that it would do everything an rpg was always supposed to do but more and better he expected something extremely simulational like star citizen i myself was expecting it to lean toward the role-playing parts of being an rpg that character and dialogue would be king others expected it to have deep combat a massive map all sorts of things and this is how the hype came to be so great because various promotional materials flirted with all of these preconceptions suggesting everything clarifying nothing there are strands of all of those things in the game as it released they didn't technically lie about that anyway what i don't think anyone realized or anticipated is that the corporate ring of cd projekt red would demand the game's release before any of those features or ambitions came together in a coherent way cyberpunk 2077 feels like it was almost a dozen distinctly different games to facilitate being all those different things at once it settled on a flexible and familiar organizing format the grand theft auto style open world city crime simulator if you're curious about how the game compares to the witcher titles it's barely even relevant to how hyperpunk 2077 actually turned out instead let's ask a question better tied to its actual genre did cyberpunk 2077 do as good a job trying to elevate the gta format as red dead redemption 2 did both games are pastiche adapting across generations of previous works little pieces here and there of what makes the foundational genre enjoyable memorable and worthwhile however cyberpunk 2077 struggles quite a bit in areas where red dead 2 creatively soared certainly a lot of this has to do with different development practices but i think quite a bit of the difference comes down to the characteristics of the genres being adapted adapting a western into the video game format gave it new room to breathe to take the sense of vast space the weight of historical change and the affectations of the culture then let them all play out at once in a simulational environment felt exciting fresh especially with the game's commitment to quiet moments long animations and casual immersion it told a traditional western story but at a pace and in a style that was unique from the media that inspired it it would be diminished as a novel or a show or a movie cyberpunk 2077 on the other hand is dealing with a genre that at its heart is fast paced dedicated to colorful novelty and leans heavily on style over narrative substance this is well suited for a video game to portray but extremely difficult for a video game to improve upon even when narrative comes second to mood and stylistic flourish cyberpunk movies and novels are able to keep a sharp focus and arrange their elements in a way where linear storytelling helps keep them unique from one another tons of movies since blade runner have had the blade runner look to them but it's easy to separate one from another because of their own take on the aesthetic red dead redemption 2 didn't necessarily need an angle to be unique it simply had to faithfully adapt and the adaptation itself was creatively notable cyberpunk 2077 suffers tremendously from its lack of interest in having a particular angle on the cyberpunk genre it faithfully adapts to the point that a quote from 37 years ago accurately describes the entire city's vibe but that's what holds it back it no longer feels much like the future and that nostalgic fidelity muffles the punk part of it in the introduction to neuromancer's more recent additions gibson talks about how the iconic opening line might not even mean much of anything to future readers when he wrote quote the sky above the port was the color of a television tuned to a dead channel this is an image that requires a memory of broadcast tv before it went digital where you could tune into static instead of just a black screen with a small box of white letters saying signal not found he imagines a young reader today wondering why there are no cell phones in this original version of night city gibson further offers the idea that it's ignorance of the future that lets his work carry over across generations it's full of enthusiastic guesses cyberpunk 2077's problem is that it never guesses it takes the foundational works at their word reproduces their questions reproduces their conclusions their descriptions their exposition their set designs it's like going to a high school reunion of all your favorite characters moments and images from across the entirety of the cyberpunk genre look over here by the punch bowl where snowcrash is chatting with johnny mnemonic out on the dance floor you've got a conga line with both blade runners paycheck and minority report while ghost in the shell does a kiloshooter with altered carbon that's the thing about high school reunions though it's not that you ever gave a damn about the school it's the old faces you've missed the event itself means nothing at all we can illustrate this by taking a look at johnny silverhand the omnipresent companion character played by keanu reeves reeves is himself a cyberpunk staple even if it wasn't for the matrix trilogy he'd still have the extremely entertaining johnny mnemonic under his belt or his turn in the lightly animated version of a scanner darkly he is as much a face for the cyberpunk genre as jason statham is for carchase movies having him here gives the game a certain credibility the question is how much actual difference there is between his johnny from 1995 and his johnny from 2020. there's not much some volks have said that reeves performance in the game is lackluster but i disagree it's almost exactly the same quality of performance he gave in 1995 which is to say scenery chewing camp when he grabbed his co-star by the shoulders and emphatically demanded i need to go online i need a computer in 1995 it sounds pretty much like the same damn thing silverhand would say whining at your player character for smokes and liquor in 2020's big budget game the retro-futuristic elements rush to embrace the 1995 johnny as much as the 2021 to present technology clunky and chunky enough to recall the gibson-led creative movement that spawned the genre but fancy enough that it won't seem genuinely backwards to a smartphone-era audience this is difficult to do one decade's dystopia does not necessarily translate into another let's briefly consider then 1973's soylent green and overpopulation dystopia it is not considered cyberpunk because it's pre-digital not a computer to be found throughout the entire movie yet it has almost all the other hallmarks of cyberpunk a cramped and dying downtown of colossal increasing wealth gaps a noir-inspired narrative and characters a focus on how technological progress creates moral vacuums in it the police are mostly independent contractors and many of them employ a book a research assistant who has special access to old libraries and written archives because the climate crisis has destroyed all the forests no forests no wood pulp no wood pulp no paper no paper no new culture for 20 years or more just more people more poverty until the snake eats its own tail and the dead are processed into tasty tablets by the soylent corporation the movie itself is extremely sexist on re-watch but its dystopia is fascinating and how closely tied it is to its era it's this specificity capturing a piece of the zeitgeist in amber and preserving that anxiety in perpetuity that's creatively meaningful about it it's why neuromancer is meaningful as sci-fi still even without cell phones instead cyberpunk 2077's vision of the future is a lot like johnny silverhand he used to really be something back in his day and there's evidence of him all around you still but he's lost his place in the world and it's not clear if he'll ever fit back into it the right way again by the time the hundred or so hours i dumped into a completionist playthrough of the game were over i had made up my mind that i would rather cyberpunk 2077 not have tried to be a role-playing game at all and that it had been much more upfront about how genuinely limited the opportunities for role playing would be i strongly feel that the capstone that holds the entire red dead redemption 2 experience together is the charisma and vividness of its main character arthur morgan you can do things to change and differently characterize his behavior but at no time is he presented as being the player's creation you can steer him to redemption or away from it either way his motivations and reasoning are his own cyberpunk 2077's v is meant to be more flexible closer in spirit to commander shepard able to branch things differently and accumulate meaningful differences from other players choices the only meaningful choices in cyberpunk 2077 are at the end and that's only a choice of ending scenario based on yes or no quest completion not any particular choice within those quests similar to how it was with arthur morgan actually problem is arthur was given agency and personality separate from the player input from the very beginning even more strongly as the game continues while v is forced to develop a personality from the rags and scraps of dialogue choice you're given of the hundred hours i put in only about 40 of them involve dialogue driven quests the rest is just number grinding map check listing tertiary objective fluff the majority of that fluff is contract murder for the police department and sure that's an ironic dystopian note to hit the first few dozen times but in aggregate you do so much work for the ncpd if you're neighborhood clearing that it does injury to the idea that you're somehow not upholding the status quo it does injury to the part of cyberpunk that is remotely punk at all even in your lawlessness your goal to be a night city legend is predicated on trying to come up through the same hyper capitalist channels as everyone else doing whatever it takes to get money is the social more in night city v especially with a corporate background and often with a street kid background too is basically a model citizen of their dystopia let's actually talk about money in the game real quick it is mostly useless if you only ever do a few of those ncpd jobs and a few of the only slightly more complicated gigs you'll get all the money you need for some good upgrades inventory is something you'll rarely if ever pay for in shops there's only one thing in the game where you actually need a large amount of money for it and that's buying cars i tried going for the achievement of getting all of them and even though i didn't spend much at all on anything else besides cybernetics i still ended up half a million short of that achievement after completing every quest on the map there just wasn't enough money it takes like an hour of grinding to even save up for one mid-price car and there's only a few that any given player will find appealing and worth tooling around in this sounds then like a purposeless exercise except that unsold cars are listed on the world map and in your quest log as if they're actual quests i cover the cursor over an area that i thought that i had cleared finding something still left and then realizing that something was simply that i forgot to buy an ugly ass pickup truck that costs more money than the most expensive cybernetic augmentation in the game it's maddening the only thing i can reckon is that lacking an actual player economy with things like advantages disadvantages rewards they just inflated the vehicle prices to function as a cash dump using the quest icon to assign it a false urgency something after all has to drain the player's account might as well take huge bytes out of it for arbitrary reasons none of the ncpd scanner jobs and very few of the side gigs offer any opportunity for characterization barely any of them branch from one v to another besides weapon choice the content is largely the same across all players and all characters if grinding out money was mechanically good for something that would make it worthwhile at least decide content but with minimal reasons to even engage with buying and selling at all the time spent on it is equally meaningless as a narrative and gameplay experience consider grand theft auto 5 its high-end player economy it's about buying cars too sure but also businesses and property it adds an extra mini-game of traditional capitalism on top of all the gamified crime even generating business related quests both los santos and night city are over-exaggerated ultra-violent sex-obsessed parodies of american capitalism but only one of these games bothered to functionally include the capitalism and it isn't night city it's odd to say that grand theft auto 5 is a superior game in some ways to cyberpunk 2077 but there are many areas where gta 5 puts more thought and effort into its systems and spends more effort tying those systems into its satirical themes if cyberpunk 2077 had committed fully to being a city crime sim it might have improved on what gta 5 was doing the script is certainly superior to gta 5 much less obnoxious even when it's being shallow and brash but cyberpunk 2077 is under the impression that it's an rpg instead it needs loot and levels and branching dialogue so it reaches towards these things awkwardly instead of just committing to what it experientially is it reaches towards them so half-heartedly and sporadically that i really wish it didn't try most of the time the only truly defining characteristic about v is that they're an aspiring young criminal looking to climb to the top of a glittering city of violence and lies like i don't know vito scaletta or nico bellic or tommy vercetti or any number of open world protagonists who i remember better for their linear player independent characterization veto scaletta is a good parallel to draw frankly because of how mafia 2 is comparatively structured as a game cyberpunk 2077 is best in its big moments the main quests the high effort side quests especially for the four core friend characters it could be completely condensed into a tight dialogue driven 40 hours and nothing of meaningful weight would be lost chuck the inventory system streamline what you're paying for and why dedicate the open world to serving as an elaborate set for the stage play of the narrative people [ __ ] hated it when mafia 2 did exactly that people complained until they were blue in the face about what a waste it was of a digital city how it scarcely qualified as a game without filling itself with icons mafia2 even attempted to correct for this with its own dlc as the years go by i think of mafia too often and it stayed at the absolute top of my list for this mechanical subgenre for exactly that singular narrative focus that everyone hated so much at the time if any game could have pulled off the same formatting it would have been cyberpunk 2077 it has exactly the same blend of cinematic grandeur and simulational pacing that mafia2 did when it's moving through what's clearly the primary content in these moments cyberpunk 2077 is an amazing game if you can find it in yourself to ignore large parts of the map you might even get the game to stay focused on that wavelength for long periods of time but for a completionist playthrough it is self-diluting to an outrageous degree it's difficult to tell which quests are going to be worthwhile and which quests are just coloring in the in the map until you're done and in practice i felt like i was role playing v maybe twenty percent of the time the other eighty percent is driving shooting picking up loot selling loot and then occasionally adding another car to the collection to do more driving in red dead redemption two this transit time and these repetitive moments are used for both narrative and simulational purposes arthur comments on all sorts of things you come across he reacts instead of just you v however is meant to be your creation and so they don't speak out hardly at all just hanging around johnny silverhand later prompts these conversations and provides structure for them but so much of what you do is a lonely and bereft of story red dead 2 uses long animations in a focused economy to make money useful to make engaging in loot loops deliberate it leverages its mechanical repetition into furthering the mood and deepening immersion for cyberpunk 2077 it is worth talking about how bad and artificial the inventory system is it is a lot like mass effect 1. you have a deceivingly limited number of actual base weapons then these weapons scale and level and numeric value as you gain player levels this is what makes buying weapons useless anything you have will be improved upon by whatever you find lying around in another three hours of play you can upgrade guns you like to keep them current but since the base weapon types repeat over and over it's just as easy and much less expensive to just do some more police-sanctioned massacres and hoover up the randomly generated loot to see if you'll get a better one you always will eventually so the only reason you need to keep looting everything is for money which you only need for cars which you don't actually need at all because you can just gta style steal them from anyone anywhere yes cops will pursue you for an entire block until no one gives a [ __ ] the cops are barely even a mechanic almost just there as a gesture and not a functioning feature in red dead 2 i always knew why i was doing something i wanted a new gun so i went hunting for pelts until i got one i was tired of the plot so i wanted to explore and bond with my horse there was a purpose and memorability to just having a campfire and a can of beans in contrast a lot of the content i was experiencing in cyberpunk 2077 was just as content doing the same things over and over because they're there to do and i was tired of icon clutter on the world map plus the elusive hope i'd find a good quest in there somewhere what's frustrating is that they are buried here and there among the multicolored bouquets of assault rifles pistols and shotguns littering the ground after a battle in a study of pigeons scientists found that they would feudally keep pressing a button for treats tens of thousands of times if there was no pattern to treat distribution the thought maybe this time persisting for hours after the treats dried up if there's never a treat they give up if there's a consistent pattern to the treats and the pattern breaks they give up if they can't tell then the glimmer of hope draws everything out to excruciating lengths cyberpunk 2077 is sometimes sometimes on par with the media it's imitating and influenced by sometimes more often this night city has as much to do with gibson's night city as the new york and new york has to do with a new york new york casino in vegas i hit every button in the game trying to get the treats to fall out and i really don't feel much smarter than a pigeon for having done so personally i blame jackie wells for being such a good character no matter which background you choose jackie appears and that first introductory gig is an acquaintance or a brief rival then circumstances throw the two of you together and months pass in a montage as the two of you become in the world's lingo toombs which is like a combination of best friend and business associate jackie is great because he's not a bad person at all he's got a purity of intention to him where even if he's doing violent shady things he's not going about them in the shadiest possible way he's not much of a liar and he's a very faithful pal we and him have big dreams about being night city legends of rising to the top of the social and economic circles as easily as if they'd taken the express elevator it is a little juvenile sure but they're both young and kind of naive despite past traumas plus the cyberpunk genre has always very much embraced a juvenile and sophomoric perspective there's a kind of understimulated mallrat vibe to huge chunks of the great cyberpunk canon neil stevens in the snow crash stands out as being an especially notable book where both its best and worst parts are born of a kind of manic teenage energy at its best snow crash leaps from idea to idea with an intensity i remember from reading sci-fi as a teenager breathless enthusiasm for high concepts and drawing unexpected connections layered with a deep and reflexive cynicism for the corporate morass of pop culture around me the way snow crash can move at breakneck speed through so many complex images pet ideas snarky asides and speculative world building is what made it one of time magazine's hundred best books that teenage energy also leads to his protagonist being the world's best hacker the world's best swordsman and the world's best pizza delivery man all at once we'd call this a mary sue these days but stevenson chose to just call him hero protagonist which feels a little general to make stick as a trope all on its own this manic teenage energy also led to the author feeling somehow comfortable writing his 14 year old secondary protagonist into a three-page sex scene with his much older toweringly large villain which begins more or less with the villain yanking her out of her work shift to say we go on date now to be honest i put snow crash down at least 10 times in the last 200 pages because it was falling apart so badly towards the end even finding time with the last 20 pages for the wait i knew your father cliche again this is a time magazine 100 best novel i think what keeps it on that list is its unself-conscious brash manic imagination reading it made me feel like a teenager again i was when i was a teenager a pizza delivery driver myself driving my dad's 1993 toyota camry using a thomas guide in my own mania for stacking up the tip money to navigate on the tri-con food corporation's behalf in america 18-25's are hustling years where you sink or swim and probably do a lot of goddamn drugs trying to keep awake enough or sane enough not to sink 30 is regarded as the hard cut off for success it's common wisdom that by then you're either already driving a bugatti or you'll be associate supervisor at the pottery barn for the rest of your miserable existence life of course is more complicated but that's the pressure and those are the implications of being that age where cyberpunk 2077 starts out with jackie and vee's best tunes with her whole criminal careers ahead of them it's relatable to anyone who's ever gotten a five cents an hour raise after a year of employment [ __ ] that noise [ __ ] that life i want more for me which i guess is capitalism's real hat trick that disillusionment with it more often than not goes right past collective or cooperative action to fix it to loop around as a personal revenge quest about getting it any way you can where the outcome is to cheat the system and still win by its own definitions just the same as if you'd been straightforwardly successful and paid for your fleet of cars with dealership financing instead of with contract murder these friendship with jackie wells reminded me a lot of some of the friendships i made when i was working as a line cook the kind of friends where a lot of the time you initially spend together is trying to make the best of something that inherently sucks then later on you find you actually like to spend time together by your own choice and that's an exciting discovery there's nothing either of you can do about the system that's got you in its grips no structural change even remotely within your agency but it is more bearable having built something human within that structure wells does such a good job in that role that the friendship is crystal clear even when v is vague and lacking as a protagonist v doesn't have to articulate why they want to hang out with jackie he's my friend too the first 6 to 12 hours of play before the opening title screen practically glitter with promise though they also foreshadow the problems with vacuous repetitiveness that do begin to stack up alarmingly later on part of this i think may have to do with development attention paid to watson versus the other neighborhoods the corporate upper management of cd projekt red demanded the game's release despite developers insisting that it needed years more work a bloomberg report further detailing the primary development on the game didn't much begin until 2016 and even by 2018 the trailer shown at e3 was almost completely smoke and mirrors in watson a lot of the side gigs have story and world building value that becomes much more scarce and intermittent later on was all the content of the game meant to be simulational and immersive instead of mostly behavioristic we'll never know all we have is what watson suggests might have been possible being isolated in it for so long makes grinding even the content with no narrative value feel worthwhile because you're setting yourself up to be extra beefy when the larger map does open up and the main story missions have an excellent sense of pacing to them all building with precision to a huge and intricate robbery that to no one surprised goes off the rail and introduces the real plot which the rest of the game follows to come off with a sense of weight however this first major turn of the plot needs a lot of investment on the player's part watson is well designed to provoke that investment between jackie wells getting a handle on the size and scale of night city and testing the pace of mechanical progress through the side content the heist of the climax is the introduction comes only after the players genuinely lived in the world and become comfortable with their place in it by the time the heist arrives both of you and the player are basically feeling the same emotion about it hungry anticipation for something more or something grander the desperate curiosity to throw open all the doors of power in the city not that you've been taught how to work the longs where you're going however jackie cannot follow the way the two of you are the friendship you have is too distracting for the choices you'll have to later make about staying in the world or leaving it about supporting the status quo we're chucking a spear at it my wife has a habit of popping in on me at inopportune gaming moments so she comes home right after the heist asking me are you okay you seem sad and i have to tell her well it's because all of all jackie ever wanted was to be somebody man but jackie died he died right there in the back of the cab where we swore we was gonna make it together and she sweetheart she is just nodded and backed slowly out of the room like the last thing v says to jackie the last thing is see in the major leagues pal which is such a goddamn stupid thing to say but that's exactly their friendship they're both basically idiots for ambition which makes it kind of a pure and true thing to say as well none of the rest of the game was especially emotional for me but the whole introduction struck me as basically pitch perfect and how it was arranged and presented because the thing about jackie is that he died while climbing to the top of the city was just a beautiful dream he never lived to see how mechanically boring and narratively frustrating achieving that dream would be narratively the heist gone wrong is kind of sort of supposed to be anyway the end of these fixation on being the best mercenary and night city of chasing legendary status as an achievable end goal the chip you were trying to steal held a copy of the dead rock star johnny silverhand preserved as an act of spite for a ceo to torture novelty or not his mind is now overriding yours and eventually you'll just become johnny there's no point in building a name and an image for yourself if you've just got to hand it over to esteemed hollywood actor kiana reeves the main plot is rather tightly focused on the process of trying to separate the two of you on your relationship with each other and whether johnny and v care if the other lives or dies it is slickly and luxuriantly produced the dialogue is often quite good and it well balances character development with action-driven missions the only prominent shortcoming is that a lot of the payoffs it sets up are adjacent to it in the deeper side content of the characters you meet during those missions cd projekt red has indicated in interviews that it considered the completion rate for the main story in the witcher 3 to be low that many people were overwhelmed or tired of the game before they ever saw any kind of narrative resolution so cyberpunk 2077's story is meant to be much more compact more approachable so that if you want to just wrap it up at some point that's not too hard this leads to some odd energy in the pacing it's eager to show you as much of night city as it can in as spectacular a way as possible but as a teaser to try to nudge you into the other content too much momentum in the main plot two immediate of stakes and the player doesn't feel excused to leave it takes deliberate and frequent breaks in its own storytelling to just shoo you out into the other content which isn't bad in itself except that the further away from the primary missions and characters you radiate outwards the lower the quality of the content where watson was absolutely packed with side content that served world rolling purposes even when there was no player choice or characterization involved even fascinating neighborhoods in the broader night city are devoid of content that evokes anything truly special about them take pacifica a casino and mall-centred vacation paradise neighborhood except that it died from mismanagement and corruption before it even began now it's just a complete waste of urban space decaying for years at on the fringe of the city connected by freeways no one uses lit weakly by a faded neon and the few high-rises still connected to the power grid i was hugely excited to dive deep into pacifica and indeed the main story makes great use of it as a backdrop centering a lot of the activity of its plot around the grand imperial mall a giant dead mall that is just exquisite in its wasteful decay however there's only like three gigs that aren't police contract murders just three chances for an extra scrap of world building and instead it's all just the same steal this kill that don't get caught for some bonus credit [ __ ] that can be found in a hundred other games pacifica doesn't matter as a backdrop to the content it's barely interactive with it the content is simply there out of an obligation to the size and splendor of pacifica the sense that game world without icons all over it isn't a game world at all if all i knew of pacifica was the main story missions i would still have the same sense of it thematically it's those missions that build out the themes and frame its vistas the rest of the available content might have gotten me to see more of the neighborhood on foot but it caused me to appreciate it less by dilution with just the main story i could imagine a world behind it i could imaginatively project i could fold my projection into my understanding and own a piece of the city instead i know for certain that the set is cardboard i've peeked behind it to see the unpainted side held up by cheap pine stilts more even the things that make pacifica special are helpless against the monotony of its own content its lack of difference from other neighborhoods or even other games in any way beyond thematic framing corporal plaza is another great example the game's leveling system makes it numerically difficult if not outright impossible to go questing there until late in the game giving it kind of a thematic allure it's the seat of power and money in the city closed to the likes of you until you put in your dues as a mercenary so when you finally get there shouldn't the stakes of the quests be as tall as the skyscrapers well i didn't find the side content in the city center to be recognizably different in any way from the other neighborhoods it's mechanically separate from the other content in a way that suggests it might be but it's the fastest neighborhood to 100 after pacifica you can wrap up the entire place in two or three hours of hustling and grinding the homogeneity of it made me question why i the player was bothering to go through the effort but after all the other neighborhoods i wasn't going to simply abandon the pursuit of 100 in it the bigger better question is why would v do it he's dying he doesn't have a lot of time left it was moreover viscerally demonstrated to him that if you try to hold on to the dream of being the best and climbing to the top that dream is eventually going to drain out with the rest of your blood onto the floor of a taxi cab in some nameless alleyway my sole motivations were to make my numbers go up better character numbers to branch what there was to branch better inventory numbers to kill things faster and more easily accomplish the chore of combat bigger numbers in my account so i could make the quest icons for the car purchases go away v doesn't have any such motivations they're motivated to save their own ass surgically remove keanu reeves and then return to this lifestyle later on if that's important to them even in your conversations with others you're continually advised to just drop it all move on live a better life somewhere else you can even nudge v in that direction in the dialogue especially with the nomad background dialogue options continuing with the mercenary hustle is backwards for v's character development couldn't that be mitigated by a sense of escalation in the encounter design of the side content absolutely which is why i wish they'd bothered to do so as it stands the difference between encounter design in watson and encounter design in corporal plaza is that the watson quests feel more relevant and more hand tailored again there are dozens of hours of the total playthrough that i'm talking about here massive chunks of the game that are not only narratively backwards or flat but mechanically backwards or flat as well the only thing that made it feel like time was moving forward at all in my gameplay were the close friendships specifically designed to be lenses into night city culture in the half-finished way of so many things about cyberpunk 2077 those four primary friendships are parallel purposed into romantic subplots for various v types it's quite an economy of writing actually each friendship progresses basically exactly the same across all these but you only end up smooching one of them there's judy the tech expert and suffering idealist who you try to help take over ownership of kind of cyber brothel from a criminal syndicate and put ownership in the hands of the employees it doesn't work out well she's a romantic interest for lesbian vs only there's river a grizzle detective with a touching family life and a thirst for justice against the serial killer on the loose he's the straight female love interest straight male v's get pan am palmer a nomad troublemaker who's got the most effort and money thrown behind her subplot even making the cut as a key character to one of the game's alternate endings gay malevs have to contend themselves with carrie eurodyne a washed-up rock star who used to play in johnny silverhand's band and who's been trying to stay relevant ever since carrie has got some good moments but he's deeply selfish and often straightforwardly annoying making him a bad romantic pick for anyone let alone every single male protagonist who isn't into pan am on the other hand this is kind of cool because these characters won't make solipsistic exceptions for you judy is a lesbian always you aren't supernaturally cute to her just because you have agency as the player character on the other hand because nothing really changes in the basic setup plot and voice acting you end up on the receiving end of irresolvable and hilariously misdirected flirtation a lot of the time especially with river there's a long scene of him bringing you to meet his family having you stir his paella showing a romantic drink up on the water tower much of the scene implies that this dude kind of likes you and wants to pull you close it even offers you the chance to try and kiss him if you think that's where it's headed but river isn't actually that way and if you've mistaken the past 20 minutes of romantic subtext for the actual text that's apparently on you i want to be absolutely clear that my objection isn't being flirted with or having a homoerotic undertone it's that there's only an undertone there at all because they recorded one set of lines and left the whole quest intact from a completely unrelated straight romance it's a function of the developer condensing the character arcs a noticeable and preventable moment of comic cheapness it's still positive and enjoyable to bond with all of these characters and experience the slice of life context these scenes add to the narrative it's just one of the flat out oddest instances i've ever seen of narrative thriftiness even the romance i was actually invested in was a little rough to deal with because i made my character thinking i'd never have to look at him again and i felt terrible for pan am that she had chosen to like this guy this guy who i specifically designed thinking okay now what would a spokane area meth dealer look like in 50 years when the camera shifted to third person to show the two of them taken the downtown express i cracked up laughing i mean if this is who pan am is falling in love with then frankly no wonder people are hesitant to let her lead the nomad tribe it does not suggest a history of good choices on her part it's not helped by the fact that v's male voice actor sounds authentically californian to the point that i low-key hated the guy a lot of the time v is even attempting to choose kinder more polite dialogue options a tremendously self-centered person with an honor and flippancy and a defensive swagger that makes him seem like a child in his dad's cyber warfare suite it is easy to blame this on poor development that an annoying protagonist is something you catch early on but i think these fundamental dislike stems more from cyberpunk 2077's fidelity to genre tropes more than anything personal to v i don't often listen to audio books but i had on the version of neuromancer narrated by robertson dean in the car a while ago and i was struck by how similarly false a note case hid when he was going through his own tough guy dialogue it's robertson dean's skill as a narrator that brings this out dean has a wonderfully deep declarative voice that works amazingly well as an author's stand-in for any paragraph of description or action he brings gravitas to the storytelling through the act of telling it that same gravitas and gravel in dean's voice makes case sound petulant much of the time it flavors his tough guy dialogue with a kind of artificial cheese because robinson dean can sell a lot of things but he can't seem to sell cases being credibly intimidating he sounds instead kind of teenagery kind of juvenile and sophomoric case ends up coming in on the same wavelength as stevenson's best ever hacker swordsman pizza delivery guy is a nerdy author's speculation on what it would be like to be kind of a [ __ ] bag without ever having sunk low enough to know for certain case is a better protagonist than hiro and neuromancer is a more consistent book than snow crash but cyberpunk 2077 is a game with a completely uncritical devotion to both v is a character who is more trope than human something both books were of dangerously close to but managed to avoid with the unique imaginative leaps of their respective authors the differences in these authors enthusiasms and perspectives in trying to create a composite referential work cyberpunk 2077 undoes this near-miss mashing one hard-boiled mark with too much skill and luck into another in a sickening collision that leaves both of them unidentifiable streaks on the pavement it's the pavement that matters more than v anyway night city will stay with me for a long time in a way that v absolutely will not despite my frustrations with quality and arrangement of content within it night city is one of the most photogenic lush cityscapes yet created in gaming which is part of what makes the greedy [ __ ] surrounding the game's release so frustrating there's a lot of competition for the prize of shadiest ploy by cd projekt red to sell the game but my bet is on how they only allowed reviewers to play pc copies as seen here running with its rtx reflections and shadows its subtle fog its radiant lights on a pc night city is an achievement of visual art on last generation consoles night city is kind of an insult for the past two years right up until last october i myself was primarily using a ps4 to play games and collect footage as my gaming laptop aged and i faced it out of service i didn't expect perfect performance from pc-centric titles but i did expect a rough equivalency of experience control is a good example it chugs pretty bad on ps4 but it is perfectly playable and it still looks beautiful sure it's fuzzy around the edges and loses much of the intricacy of the rtx versions of the game but it was a fair compromise being made between software and hardware night city is what makes cyberpunk 2077 what it is the fabric from which its best parts are woven the style that replaces the substance across so much content it's a staggeringly gorgeous video game environment over and over again through rain drenched nights of neon shining off the wet pavement to bright baking sunshine washing the colors out of the concrete sprawl it pretty much never happens that a high-profile aaa game like this is removed by sony for quality control reasons it was a staggering professional judgment on sony's part and i largely agree with it the offense is in pretending that cyberpunk 2077 could offer an equivalent experience on older hardware and actively hiding the fact that it could not they conned money out of people's pockets just as crassly as the stupidly dressed hustler selling bootleg brain dances down at the game's night market it's impossible for me to talk about how amazing night city was for me without pointing out that i was lucky that way it's equally impossible to just write off night city as entirely a grift when on my end it lived up to the promises it made and more at least visually what's especially remarkable is the depth of detail and the verticality of it all some of it can be a little awkward like how distant headlight effects don't actually correspond much at all to corresponding on the road but there's an attempt in the dense inner city to show movement at all levels streets and neighborhoods coiled below freeways snaking above hovering vehicles streaking by far above it seems like a marketing thing to say oh rtx this rtx that but rtx is a technology specifically related to light shadow reflections and fog it's the rtx details that make everything pop in night city they add a layer of high-tech gloss that sells the cyberpunk vibe by simply being part of it rather naturally every flourish they add is a flourish appropriate to the blade runner ask aesthetic rtx is more prominently used here than in watchdog's legion and much more impressively so night city also successfully nails the california feel it's distinct from los angeles or san francisco but its outer freeway areas in the badlands are incredible doppelgangers for places like pomona and those sun-bleached trash strewn secondary freeways out towards riverside and san bernardino it's a genius mix for casual believability the recognizable realistic part of the city are the oldest parts of the city the poorest parts on the outskirts and the closer you get to the money and the power the crazier the architecture itself becomes there were a lot of times i kind of wanted the game to shut up a few times i would have preferred it to speak up instead but never once did i want to look away well from the billboards maybe a tricky thing about translating an 80s or 90s dystopia is that in terms of the media landscape we're in kind of a postmodern hell of anything ghost advertisements plastered all over everything already and trying to find a satirical angle on that requires either being very clever or being excessively graphic in a way modern ads still haven't quite devolved into remember the kisnos ad from 2004 with the sponge monkeys trying to capitalize on the very earliest kind of viral videos the we got a pepper bar one we barely made it out of the 90s before snow crash style pop culture was a demonstrable fact of our collective lives now 17 years down the line it's gotten infinitely more annoying and insidious night city's advertising landscape was frankly a major disappointment to me because i didn't feel like it was imaginative at all if anything the advertisements and culture of marketing in the game is kind of backwards and inept compared to the infinite layers of self-aware meta-textual jokes and competitively surrealist imagery you see on the actual television in those increasingly limited windows where you're even watching broadcast television with commercials anyway instead the ads are all horny or gross or grossly horny with hardly any deviation towards making an item actually appealing this also puts it in line with gta 5 and los santos but in a way that benefits nobody for gta part of why it goes in that direction is just a reflexive holdover from back when gaming was trying to self-style itself as extreme in a petty kind of fart noise way back when gta 3 came out surfing the wave of its own carefully cultivated controversy for gta however cultivating a sense of petty on reality is a major part of why it works it's obviously a raunchy parody from every angle around each corner and on each billboard and because of this it's okay to go nuts and do crimes by drawing attention to its artificiality acting with naturalism or assigning moral weight to things in the world seems foolish it's philosophically meaningful for grand theft auto to create enough baseline nihilism that you don't mind pulling a rocket launcher out during a traffic jam and you might even have fun doing it cyberpunk 2077's own design fights against that nihilistic engagement with all of its high-gloss story moments at its best cyberpunk 2077 has a simulational pacing it wants to be immersive it wants you to feel part of its awful beautiful city and believe in it it pulls strongly towards the notion that you should feel as v and not as player one the breadth of meaningless side content and the aggressively cartoonish pop culture create an equally powerful back current of it's just a game who gives a [ __ ] again gta has incorporated that who gives a [ __ ] mentality into its core identity it's the game's most credible and powerful defense against all the accusations of it being culturally toxic this fundamental self-acceptance of itself as being too petty to matter that way role-playing games can't do that they can't they need to suspend disbelief it is unworkable for them to just let it crash to the ground and then play with the rubble it's interesting to consider cyberpunk 2077 and reddit redemption 2 together in one more context the ways that they alternately conform to the sci-fi criticisms of the hbo series westworld in its first couple seasons you know before the show completely fell off the rails the idea is that a corporation has created a faux wild west where all the locals are robots npcs effectively and the human patrons can do what they please and operate on the video game logic that none of their actions affect real people so they can be as mean and as sleazy as they find it in themselves to be and the second season's revealed that the real profitability of the park is not that the patrons are unobserved it's that they are every awful thing they do is catalog tracked and leveraged against them later the core cynicism here is that given total freedom and the opportunity to create a paradise of personal agency most people will use that agency to steal rape murder do any number of terrible animalistic things which consequences might prevent them from doing in real life now red dead redemption 2 is absolutely a kind of westworld in practice a grand but imaginary place where there are no consequences and only you have agency except we again encounter the rock and the stream that is arthur morgan we aren't a nameless stranger we're a particular person with a particular set of proclivities and struggles arthurs are lens into the world and conversely the filter by which our actions make sense or not the player is naturally steered towards goodness by the goodness lying follow within arthur at the beginning the world exists mostly to provide context and structure for his internal journey the arc of his redemption it does not solely exist for the player experientially even if you can make the argument that it's formally solipsistic which sidesteps the westworld hypothesis cyberpunk 2077 however is a west world in exactly every nasty little way that the show was trying to throw shade at it's not simply that the world's advertisements are childishly rude it's that they only exist to give you the player a passing chuckle it's not that the npcs serve the players swims too obviously it's that there's no sense at all that these people exist when you're not looking at them there isn't even the illusion of personhood in most cases the city itself is a monument to self-serving vice and finality itself done in satire but how powerful a barrier is the satire between you and v when all v truly wants is to climb to the tippy top of murder-sex mountain when most of what you're doing is whoopin and hollerin as you come along for the ride one particular advertisement was singled out before the game's release as being transphobically exploitative which it certainly is by using a beverage can size erection to sell a can of beverage so cd project red uses the defense that it was intentionally dystopian a part of the satire this seems like a minor issue to fixate on but the fixation comes from how this example hinges the question of how applicable the westworld critique is to cyberpunk 2077 when the entire world is designed top to bottom for a player's benefit and amusement is it possible for the creator to wash their hands of the cruelties placed within it westworld the park was about wish fulfillment the frightening and disappointing depths of those wishes and cyberpunk 2077 is essentially about wish fulfillment as well at its simulational best it wants you to feel as if you're leading a double life one is you the other is v as easy as if you were just another voice in v's head like johnny silverhand at its childishly gross worst it wants you to bury your face in the excess and breathe deep like you were railing a massive lion out of the city's ass crack these are not compatible creative choices there's three options for resolving them either you lean into immersion and these things stick out as idiotic and unpleasant or you lean the opposite way into nihilistic frivolity and these things are just little jokes on the way to the big joke of your very existence in the game world or else option three you throw up your hands and accept that westworld was right and our fantasy selves are just the worst possible expressions of our chosen selves one of the more tragic elements in how the npc's westworld are treated is that they can by design never really grow or change like actual people they're bound to loops of behavior and characterization that repeat endlessly without them even being aware ed harris's man in black orients his worst cruelties around this fundamental feature that he can casually say hello to someone on the street he had earlier ripped the skin off while they were still conscious and screaming for a villainous mindset this nihilism is freeing if you play these games more for the fantasy of being a hero however this nihilism is exhausting the pervasive sense that none of this mattered and none of these people were anything other than textures sound clips and carefully staggered behavioral scripts wore me down worse in this game than many others i've played i think in retrospect because i wanted so badly for that not to be the case a game that is obviously consistently bad i can mentally adapt to and accept much easier than a game with such peaks and valleys of quality take a late game quest with cyber augmented pop star lizzy wizzy voiced by real world pop star grimes the setup for the quest is this moody techno noir chat where she hires you as a kind of pi to investigate her manager and lover who she suspects of some kind of infidelity as you look into it it turns out that the guy wants to make a copy of her and then modify the copy to be more placid and well manageable it pulls on a ton of interesting themes the way women are treated as commodities in pop music sometimes whether we can ever own ourselves again once we give up enough to a career plus it's a meaningful twist on the initial setup then it simply goes nowhere either you hide it from her or you tell her if you tell her she murders the guy and then asks you to cover it up which takes maybe 30 seconds the twist here is that it seemed like the guy was being manipulative and hyperbolic when he had explained why he wanted lizzy mentally neutered but it turns out she's actually just legitimately unhinged she likes killing she'll probably do it again just for fun all you can do is v is send a frowny face text to her about it and wag your finger across the digital divide the initial setup conversation is like half the quest the rest happened so quickly and on such a surface level that i had to check online to see if that was really the whole thing over and over cyberpunk 2077 will present an idea or an image that truly is beautiful or fascinating or cool and then instead of developing resolving the thing it seems satisfied just having put the thing in front of you the lizzy wizzy quest made me feel frustrated because it felt pointless my involvement as player wasn't truly necessary and nothing changed because i stuck my nose in it was it cool sure i guess i just thought based on the books and the movies and the shows that the game was inspired by that it would try to reach beyond affectation towards genuine meaning a lot of the disappointment i felt with cyberpunk 2077 as a piece of cyberpunk media i'd already experienced in more or less the exact same way watching netflix's altered carbon series it's good in that it's dripping with money in the production budget and there's too many eyes in the editing room to let a single scene come off in a way that seems technically inept it's also maddening in that every time it gestures towards answering a question it raises it'll attempt to distract you with a cool sword fight or photogenic nudity or a sudden shift into a new b plot and then it'll act like it doesn't have time to talk now that so much is going on when it finally does begrudgingly resolve a plot line it'll do it in a derivative way that feels almost obligatory to the genre of course it has to be this guy because of the class critique naturally such-and-such knows whoever it is to set up this extremely obvious conflict in the climax there is so much energy in the setting of mood and moment that there doesn't seem to be any passion left over at all for the fundamentals of character and conclusion i want to use a compellingly bizarre example for cyberpunk 2077 the time that you have the option to consensually crucify a man for money you're initially hired by a guy to murder this fellow who wronged him now that the wrongdoer is getting some kind of weird early release from prison the cops shoot the guy who hired you right away but the wrongdoer wants to talk to you i had been waiting for dozens of hours for something surprising to happen and here it was so this dude while in prison for all sorts of depraved and violent crimes had a major religious conversion he's a true believer now a feature of the game world is something called a brain dance which is a full recording of a person's emotions and experience there are fictional brain dances where the actors have to truly actually internalize their characters and not just portray the emotions but feel them totally they are exploitative black market brain dances where people do horrible things to each other for real and then capture the candid result in between the two fits this man a convicted murderer a disposable human a media corporation has gotten him to agree to restage christ's crucifixion for real he will ask god for forgiveness for his sins and then he will die for them while his every remorseful tear is recorded and sold as a pure and true religious experience to a jaded world hungry for any kind of sincerity at all it takes place over several parts all the early parts being just lengthy conversations on the subject there's the question of whether it's even right to allow him to agree if he's at this point of self zealotry isn't he arguably having a break with reality shouldn't this be treated as a mental health concern a suicide attempt or what of the fact that in talking with the guy it becomes pretty clear that he's genuinely enjoying all the attention and he might just not understand that he really has to die at the end that this is no grift even if it might feel like one to him or how about his corporate handlers who are at all times steering him towards maintaining his commitment no matter the moral complications i went through with it i came to that conclusion by degrees however first is that he convincingly argued that it wasn't my place to choose for him that he was remorseful and this was how he chooses to express it second is the argument that the media woman made a good braindance performance is delusion his delusions are what will be meaningful to others he truly believes in a world devoid of both sincerity and meaning is that not darkly cynically inspirational the mood of the whole thing is shockingly subdued for a game like this everyone treats the moment with somber respect they treat it as the execution it is he asked me to be the one to kill him so i was even for the media woman it was kind of overwhelming and gross she calls you later feeling better with your check in hand but at the time the sense is that you've done something genuinely sacrilegious something sad and craven and bizarre and somehow extremely plausible if you accept the speculative technology at the heart of it it was the game's only moment that really made me think truly made me feel uncomfortable with my own choices that felt like it offered the kind of bleeding edge cynicism that the cyberpunk genre is so famous for if i was v it would have changed me it would have changed how i relate to the city narratively speaking the whole thing is such a baseball bat to the face that going back to the old i'm going to be a night city legend v seems totally untenable but you do it's not a main quest so it's never mentioned again at all you might be familiar with what's generally regarded as one of the worst movies of all time tommy wiseau's the room either through the movie itself or through its retelling in the disaster artist its legendary incompetence stems largely from a spectacular failure at tone control veering wildly from one mood to another sometimes intentionally often not in a famous moment the main character stumbles onto the apartment rooftop declaring i did not hit her i did not oh hi mark no recognition of the whiplash this quest and this crucifixion remarkable as they are end the moment it's over and leave no legacy in the narrative the player is left with nothing to say but i did not encourage a man's malignantly narcissistic delusions to disgusting extremes for personal profit i did not aha johnny in a book or movie or even a different sort of game with linear plotting something like this could be sequenced and arranged for not only immediate impact but lasting impact as well instead as an open world side quest it can be played in any order or not at all in a way that kind of necessarily excludes any kind of continuing legacy its content precision engineered to provoke a moment of reflection in the player which v is mostly excluded from sharing with you even the way you choose to end the game is roughly predicated on choices you made in the very beginning each of the three endings map onto one of the three original backgrounds you chose when you first made your character if you match one for one they come together perfectly coherently if you mix them around they become decreasingly satisfying i chose by accident what i think is probably the most detailed dynamic character arc for v which is nomad background paired with nomad ending seasoned with a straight male romance with pan am palmer the nomad leader it all lined up and came together so so well the very beginning of the game started miles outside night city meeting jackie wells in the deep badlands across the militarized checkpoint between southern and northern california you see the city from a distance shimmering in the heat and sparkling with wealth and the unknown the two of you dive in head first jackie dies and everything you build for yourself is slowly taken away as you're overridden by johnny silverhand panem's a bright spot in all that she's loyal and true the way jackie was and pulls v away from the city towards a family where they can belong as opposed to a seething flux to try and dominate your friendship with judy was much the same way her time in night city breaks a part of her for judy to ever feel like judy again she has to leave following the nomad dialogue option over others a nomad v yearns to reject all this [ __ ] that they would just cut and run if it wasn't for the fact that breaking into arasaka tower and using their soul prison to split themselves from johnny is the only way not to die working with nomads across their arc is often more fun than a lot of characters in the city because the nomads are generally straight shooters with you and with each other it's a welcome break from being lied to all the time by becoming close to pan am you follow her trajectory from the outside of the group to the inner circle her friends become your friends her home becomes your home when the nomads fight and die on your behalf it's not necessarily an act of excess you've done the same for them in the past and this kind of grand anti-corporate display is something they all feel positively about as a way to go down fighting in the epilogue pan am and v leave the city together with a whole nomad band sneaking around the checkpoints in search of a better life down arizona way it forms a very pleasing loop with the intro chapter from promise to disillusionment to the creation of a new dream from tearing off the patch of one tribe to being formally inducted into a new one all of night city is like a nightmare for v to pass through a harrowing of the self i've talked plenty already about how the small things in cyberpunk 2077 don't cohere so it was surprising to me how beautifully the nomad to nomad arc came together and tied up its own themes in the big picture storytelling it cemented my feeling about how much better the game could be as a more limited linear experience it took all the way until the climax for v to demonstrate growth and change but my little guy pulled through in the end and behaved in a way that i agreed with and respected although i think his fashion sense will never fully recover from his time in night city this is also basically the closest thing to a happy ending in the game which is why other backgrounds can choose it street kid and corporal backgrounds can gel with it but as a pivot from who they were before only no man to nomad narratively loops in such a considered and satisfying way the ending better suited to the street kid background is just less satisfying overall because it's essentially the ending where nobody learns anything it's the ending that johnny silverhand pushes you towards so you could guess 50 years ago on the night johnny died he and his old flame rogue reduced arisaka tower to radioactive rubble it didn't change anything it just made johnny into a terrorist it's why his psyche was preserved all this time because old man arisaka took great offense to what johnny did and conspired to punish him beyond what was physically possible rogue's still around in 2077 and johnny eventually asks v if he can take their body for a spin and try to romantically reconnect to her johnny's pattern with women is that he gets dangerous beautiful talented people to love him by drawing out those qualities and then tries to get away with being a colossal [ __ ] by acting like any attempt to hold him to a standard of accountability or respect is a betrayal of the women's own revolutionary fire he's a manipulative and selfish son of a [ __ ] either 50 years ago or now rogue has changed she runs afterlife the most famous mercenary bar in the city she's basically queen of the underworld then along comes johnny he convinces her that she's made herself part of the system that who she is now is a betrayal of who she was then this is all classic johnny silver hand [ __ ] he's used that line before for much pettier things but rogue deep down has wondered the same about herself and lets that seed of doubt bloom so they suit up and they do it again the same damn thing go to the bottom of arasaka tower and strike a blow against the corpus calm because it worked so well against arasaka last time when all those folks who died is collateral as a mission it's the most satisfying of the endings coming in guns blazing from the top is more visually dynamic and better paced than coming in from below with the mining drill in the nomad ending during the fight with adam smasher the guy who killed johnny the first time smasher kills rogue instead history essentially repeated itself just like anyone could have told johnny but if there's any one single defining quality to silverhand it's that he never [ __ ] listens johnny's big idea is the same idea as last time but once more with feeling smasher doesn't kill rogue johnny does this can be prevented by going through some extra steps and waiting a long time to get a secret ending where johnny and v just go to loan the two of them but it requires having a high numerical friendship score with johnny and i called a guy an [ __ ] once too often to be offered such a thing it is a secret ending for a reason though narratively johnny killing rogue is the intended tragedy sure smasher does the damage but her death happens the moment johnny walks in wearing v's face and asks her what what happened to the old rogue it's a deliberate and actually rather deft blend of nostalgia and tragic melancholy it's a loop for johnny like the nomad end was a loop for v with rogue dead johnny can just disappear into the unknown digital spaces beyond the black wall with no ties a ghost finally going into the light it's the best ending for silver hand or the one most true to him in any case it leaves v in an awkward narratively backwards place in the epilogue however you finally get to be king [ __ ] of night city you run after life you're a legend everything you dreamed up with jackie wells back in the day you've now achieved it only thing is is that it sucks you hate it you're still dying and it's still not enough for your v even after all you've been through pan am is still around but she broke up with me on the patio overlooking my helipad during this ending she wanted to leave staying was foolish you tell her imploringly that you just need to do one more job and everything will come up aces in the end johnny handled the consequences for you you yourself as v learned nothing you aggressed into the childish fantasies that ate jackie alive except now you live by the recreational drug principle of diminishing returns nothing in this city is exciting enough rich enough a target night city legend is a box you've checked galactic legend is next now is the time for space crimes i felt the same way about my v in this ending as pan am did if this was how he was going to be i'm packing my toothbrush thematically not bad loops well ties it together well enough but narratively it's more of a circle than a satisfying arc if you don't bother to help johnny at all and don't cultivate a relationship with the aldecaldo nomads the only two options available to you at the end of the game are suicide and trusting hanukko arosaka to use her corporation to bail you out in the corporal background you start off falling out of arasaka's good graces it's only with this background that there's really any narrative sense to coming crawling back for the finale to any other character it's just setting yourself up for obvious betrayal what makes the ending meaningful instead is in how it explores the side character of takamura as the disgraced bodyguard of the head of the entire corporation it was compelling to walk with him as he tried to hold on to his sense of personal integrity and his trust in the corporation he committed his life to after his disgrace in one long rooftop conversation he spoke about how he felt honored to be plucked from poverty chosen to be what he is crafted into it from a child he regrets nothing he pities v instead for having never felt such purpose without a player's intervention arasaka will just kill him close towards the climax if you save him the next time you see him he's back to his old self a level of class and luxury that you've hardly ever seen on him before no wonder he was such a zealot for arasaka he had been rather low-key about all he'd been rewarded by them takamura's narrative purpose is to show that champions of the status quo are often neither fools nor monsters they have a logic to their actions a purpose to their beliefs and underneath all that purpose lies a terrible fear of losing what they have takamura is extremely personable it's quite easy to root for him and want for him to recover his sense of honor his place in the world because friends are equals you and takamara aren't really friends and you were never equals in this ending you inadvertently helped the dead patriarch sabura arasaka whose murder put you in this mess return from the grave using the soul ingram technology to take over his son's body like johnny was taking over yours you prototyped the whole process for him and then you gunned down those who stand in his way weeks later in your epilogue you see him on the news saying why change what is perfect his world his soul his corporation he has the power to inflict his definition of perfection on everyone else eternally meanwhile you're trapped in a hospital in space no escape from an endless battery of tests it's a successfully miserable and claustrophobic sequence as it went on i felt very vividly like clawing up the walls in search of a way out takamura comes to offer you a slim sad sliver of hope a place in the soul prison as arasaka property or else you can just die of your neurological trauma takamura says you're basically beneath notice now garbage to be tossed out he is here only because you saved him and he knows it takamura was right in a way the corporation does offer purpose it does offer belonging v belongs as property labeled and placed on a shelf where he can never interfere again i like this ending better than the last because of how successful it is in portraying a bleak hollow ending for v's character arc it's just that it works poorly as a punishment ending for not doing enough content it's thematically opposed to v's entire personality and demeanor the sole exception being that corporate corporal arc where you beg for forgiveness and are coldly denied saving takamura is an unmarked semi-secret story branch yet without him the ending loses most of its vibrancy and meaning and it pretty much omits johnny from the whole equation accepting any guilt you might feel for having surgically removed and shredded after seeing johnny silverhand's own personal ending though the shredding seemed preferable the worst writing in the entire game and i mean the absolute most head-scratchingly bad ideas and inept executions of those ideas is preserved somehow for the ending where you allow keanu reeves to just keep your stupid body if he likes it so much i was more excited for this ending than most of the others because on lancv johnny silverhand's character is relatively concrete and if you've arrived at an ending where you hand him the keys to your body then chances are you've gotten to a place of friendship with the guy i wanted to know how the great johnny silverhand would be humbled by this experience and sure enough it did change him into the most cliche sunday school ass polo shirt wearing [ __ ] you could possibly dream up welcome to the johnny golden heart ending god help us both the epilogue plays out over johnny's last day in night city he's been living in a shitty building over in pacifica and he's friends with this teenage kid who wants to be a musician his dad beats him and he thinks he's going nowhere so johnny's taking the kid under his wing he'd the kid drives you on one last errand to a music shop johnny used to love while there johnny buys a guitar worth many thousands of euro dollars you know exactly where this is going exactly it doesn't deviate it doesn't apply irony or skill or passion we're genuinely actually just gonna end with the mr you forgot your guitar keep it kid trope as the bus drives away far away from this ugly city let's ignore for the moment that johnny's wearing collared shirts now let's ignore that there's a lot of range of motion between rocker boy terrorist and ned flanders that the game could have stopped anywhere between those two extremes for the johnny golden heart ending let's pivot instead to a moment from knights of the old republic 2 where your mentor crea teaches the player character a fun lesson about philanthropy there's a beggar and if you like you can be quite generous to him cray uses the forest to show you how it plays out don't help and she shows that nothing will change apathy begets apathy help however and she shows you that the man's wealth makes him a target and leaves him beaten broken and much worse off than even before what precisely does johnny think is gonna happen when this kid goes back home to his abusive father with a 6000 eddy guitar you don't have to be a [ __ ] jedi space wizard to scry that one out what's more is that johnny should know this better than anyone he is the most consistently cynical and nihilistic person in the whole game and now he's acting like this is going to earn him paragon points for being such a cool dude consider everything you know about night city is this kid even gonna make it all the way back to pacifica without getting jacked then johnny looks out the window with what i assume is a contemplative expression as the bus rolls away and he begins his new life free of the city and apparently everything he ever learned within it in the past hundred odd years might as well have had sarah mclaughlin's i will remember you playing as the boss rolls on by every other ending fell in one way or another cyberpunk somehow each of the other endings loops some aspect about the game tying up like with like for thematic and narrative closure this ending can't even be bothered to try it's a shockingly abrupt creatively confusing disappointment that puts it at odds with the story but well in line with how cyberpunk 2077 was received on release there's been a number of articles released already about whether cyberpunk 2077 can do what no man's sky did and turn around public opinion through sweeping post-release revisions with patches and expansion content i think the johnny golden heart ending demonstrates why it can't no man's sky was a procedural exploration game driven by survival mechanics crafting mechanics and algorithmically assembled visual art cyberpunk 2077 insisted despite all evidence to the contrary that it was a role-playing game it insisted that it wanted rpg mechanics and then it did nothing with them the skill point screen is a junkyard of half-implemented ideas with little or no relation to the main verbs and rhythms of the game money means nothing leveling means nothing inventory is disposable and replaceable in order to fix these things the entire game structure would have to be fundamentally altered you know how mass effect 1 fixed its inventory problems by releasing mass effect 2. it was too late by the time everybody hated it fallout 76 is also often described as a success story because it's maintained a solid user base in the face of tremendous criticism unlike anthem but fallout 76 never much apologized for or changed its basic structure it's mostly just drip fed quality of life changes over such a long time that the game is just easier and smoother to experience now it's not like it's feasible for cyberpunk 2077 to patch in dialogue and lore to make the police scanner jobs and side gigs more meaningful and connected adding new content just makes the problem with narrative dilution worse more simulational mechanics will clash with the gta style arcade mechanics more gta style shenanigans further saps the credibility of night city as an imaginary place cyberpunk 2077's pre-release marketing made it seem like it was going to be all things to all people and its development team did try quite hard to live up to that promise in that attempt the end result came out more muddled and confused than just about any open world game i've ever seen plus it was rushed out the door with such poorer versions on xbox one and ps4 that there were major lawsuits plus how it triggered actual epileptic seizures in some reviewers and players with a braindance animation plus its shallow and lurid approach to trans representation plus the range of technical bugs that rivaled mass effect andromeda in terms of mummified virality some of those things can be patched out like the bugs and the seizure-inducing animation which is already gone to truly become better however cyberpunk 2077 would have to choose which game it actually wanted to be the slow-paced dialogue and character-driven simulational drama of the main plot the nico bellic-esque just gets me my monies drive shoot and loot loops of the side gigs the endless grind to make numbers go up of the scanner hustles you push it in one direction more than the others somebody gets mad push them all at once and the proportions stay the same the status quo remains in place the problems just play out across additional hours of content corporate choices at the upper and middle levels of cd projekt red have essentially permanently sabotaged their anti-corporate video game could it have ever been different considering the dynamic could it have ever been honest was it necessarily always going to be pre-tense as a corporate anti-corporate game i don't think so i think it could have been something amazing bits and pieces of it still are the problem is that the game is exactly what it says in the title a broad composite genre piece that's trying so hard to represent include everything that very little of it feels coherently individual it would be like playing western 1888 or detective story 1957 or ensemble comedy 1983 it sets expectations about images and mood that it largely meets but it's almost contractually obligated not to have its own identity to flit from reference to reference and image to image relegating narrative structure to a few strategic points like the towers of his suspension bridge the obvious artificial solipsism of it all makes it hard to feel truly invested even when the story is performing exactly as intended more than most games it's absolutely eviscerated by the westworld hypothesis the idea that what we really want is a thematic framework in which to behave badly imagine weakening to night city as a player character would you run jobs would you find a date would you race cars or would you just attend back to back showings of the sasha devon three mouths one desire experience the promise cyberpunk 2077 was marketed on is that it would be so immersive we'd feel that way about it that it would be a westworld to alternately inhabit as a cooler wealthier sexier deadlier version of ourselves instead we got a futuristic luxury grand theft auto with too many systems and not enough imagination to have succeeded in that original intention of immersion would have made it an ethically complicated media object worthy of the cyberpunk stories that inspired it it also would have positioned it as a subject of their criticism in failing cyberpunk 2077 becomes a more mundane thing an artifact of our current dystopia not any creatively speculative one a high-profile reminder that corporate capitalism doesn't care if you hate it in fact it can take that hate package it neon and chrome and sell it right back to you for 60 dollars you can detonate a nuke in arasaka tower and 50 years later the tower is still there and selling your t-shirts a lot of johnny silverhand's anger is in helplessness he can scream into a microphone he can drink until he nearly dies he can commit egregious acts of terrorism nothing [ __ ] works night city remains and as much as i feel that it's also what doesn't work for me about night city's retro future things have changed as futures become present to become past not for the better just for the different there are fresher hells yet to come and i turn to the cyberpunk genre to warn me of them in advance as an act of tribute of recreation and reference cyberpunk 2077 is often superb compared to something like trans metropolitan well imagination isn't something you can patch in later thanks for watching i'd like to take a few moments to thank my name some of the people who are currently donating ten dollars a month or more through the crowdfunding website patreon if it wasn't for the crowdfunding i wouldn't be able to do these videos at all people like jim mcgee owen turtle alex hansen leo o'neal connor mclaude eli bergmas john paul kweller james sullivan erin williams zach millington soybes sheik eddie burton carol henderson kelly buffalo jason mcamer caleb brennan marcelo ferrara bk carol hogue daniel phillips sella tyler robinson corey beaufil jack dawson dennis clark stephen garrett day jake mays you're my favorite youtuber james birklane simon murray mr mush kumaran vision nobody world war ii freak alexander lyster igor babiuk argus morgan mole brian hill julian renault again t kelly jared meyer hannah parker ariane adair jeremy kirby snuffalophagus blue bishop shane dave s nolan pete blaze j craig farrell pascal moser jake mick williams david s michael tilney anaphylaxis l.l ross dexter claire gillian brendan buchanan dylan kevo scott dick lockheed aaron hendricks marius labonita marius labonshu lavonshu there we are angus monroe the roadie 451 alec barcelos simon wilburn lucas grislick timothy cole james stevenson alex chris harink stuart jackson jeremy hillier eric strickling nick coracette magnus k aura tavares kirk fury joe joyce rich to the rdo jack holmes frogfoot gabriel bernsen hunter rasmussen yarrow 12 skye swanson jonathan harrison ethan david stapley c soldier hawk jimbo michael hasani sean hansen willard nekirk dr crime evan garvind joseph smith alastair stroke beth lewenberger daniel cerusi smite me now alexi erin olivier andrew adc400 mj dorian sanchez eamon mcneely julius janice kevicus saab also known as duca rocco giacomo david sherman l-i-y-w-j-l austin aliosio recommission dylan scott isguard blind fighting evil bread spot ted lattice jacob sindolar melody redacted theras atala martin peterson stephen thompson angus cunningham louis loretti lucas stantonland preston mcclesio oshi ken olandov james hull brandon martin cincus philip wooley sam zeitlin timothy lee peterson commissar colin mcrae noops matt donahue raven rises christopher clark morton enzyme david cassan joe freund peyton helix harrison pruis aiden henzo every thorpe andy gershone texas dan jack ronin snow hole jay mackery brett brothers jonathan flaherty adventure top merrick james cato bailey dijko sean murphy tech daniel mccarthy james brendan i'm sorry about that matthew dominic hickman augustine castro kyle parliament adam findlay matt lefler willem klein jack esther aldo curtis stickman grit finley m jeremy harris haitian 95 gethin ris bins benjamin glover ryan francom samuel murphy [ __ ] daria steve beligaard evan barnett armuta chris dobbs gaspard fleury hertobise kate stock nikolai vladimirov liam pearce justin michael darius rudominer the drunken manatee thomas watkins jack shahan matthew allen kelsey jared k mathis vandenbosch michael dimichel genocion stimson sneed icr7 thomas culligan brian barrow roberticus 1995 greg chris tekkenton evan vodka blitz kirk battle riley bozarth jeff zhang stephen plovan levi thomas stephen haste guy sean suey doomed sheridan sophia naylor alexander smith epitome 22 jed davonna opperock costume constantine ivanov logan hickman danston tyler cox jrg123 liam white april mahan zachary leonard roper wolf in white van sergeant qq trinant matthew burns symmetry master aaron dempsky bowden matthews campbell rogue thrax keone warby thomas fielding eli youngs space wizard 63 arnie hd maxwell baume thomas vavasour jay calder tyler r smith patrick morrison alex mcdonald kevin morris allison sugar brianna manassa dave alexander clattworthy ron gervais vadim flax kazihira kyle zymes colin stoltz nicholas pie face ottavio albanissi ethan hayes howard knutson peter h rhys kittelson drogon eric jensen phil harding elijah king imran mamuri max barros patrick galmond tyler lambert patrick mills miazco zaha calum tm brynne gelbart dralax 789 deeb the rambling bard highland fox well-tempered clavier william poverd quenan matthew shrirak vivek ragaron ragan cobalt asbjorn volk valvin cold beans bob mitchum tyler king stephen love dance charlotte m3 ivan akavaria cobra adam n h lode galax alex williams william j gorman leighton cardin james hembers henderson zachary ziemba jujubeens john ceclovsky matthew richard twybner austin matheson scott mook sg response tiernan garcis james gray kell perrion vitor tumuli jared a hicks garrett johnson han xiping jacob wanish max cohen shield wall leo pero marcolath tyler f william tong conceded axis bryn davies james mosca victor felton s engball jeffrey mcintyre marcin zarat levi whitney dickin dellamast nikolai elijah nelson sam bellmeyer byron allen eric amundsen noah kantrowitz tinfoil pancakes maurice desuro manu wiedna greg rucker low beyonder hiloson vance jordan falls ralph rainwater alexander romanov kazra padowsord patrick mcgranahan robot ghost jeremy saunders stephen heim ryan snyder april jacob mcmillan eric joyne edward clayton andrews angelo sukaris in ian glasgow c.e king shiny wolf el weasel vernal herzo daniel orn christensen thomas lee me nemo vandenbring dinika forums ben willard js greg mirlis jordan klein sky jameson daniel floyd mark phillips andrew tapp kevin shao with matthew sutton tysar vicarion david carlson kissa avery holmes david harpstreit matthew mason simon sean josh obelisk art history matthew cassidy bill dobbins clay harrington tom rowardy kwitch devin vernon kyle zane n.k jemisin john fry gustav lindstedt michael atwell evan hill andrew opliner i cannot fly nicole hamilton oscar stangenberg colin adam howard dewey comfy hat orillian andrew boisseno pascal murray alexander soonden zac b lacillus toad heart thomas whitting nefertam 93 the soul james fergus foley dijon wong kh maker d argus swift ranger ridiculous cybot d kim winston andreas larson anthony bardell sean phillip a coffee brian plockelman jesse wilkinson devin fitzpatrick tim marsh colin bassnet jeanette carl gleason izan barghouti dios ricardo gamda rich stewart adrian kamalai nate tenzar tom painter jared oszewski eric jackson qrax alex zolato the bloke sasha lucas marcondes de moray peter flink andy bennet brimgy schlepps anonymous yarn boy kefi dusty kess cole wardell daniel a russ juan sonar patricio garcia demiano hayes levi schumalock chase baker logan sabors max angel ortiz christopher bolson kirby monger patty christian prata emily snow michael guerin alex baker andrew battenberg john cooper aiden seidman the spade sergio proxy savannah jones aragorn quicken reber g miami david cryer hannah henry malek warren d connor dwigan jonathan gill rob diehl josh waters dirt person smith 745 riley peter sean thompson mihai nilu oksana lisa aaron goldbeck jason lee edward d heap tacentes13 christian plank emily drillstrom noah baldwin tyler collins daniel drexler tor highlander dan t dxp curtis cook jake tracy jerry lorenzo lf adam legislative matthew flowers robert conley mr b pig i compute them megabyte zero one trevor shack needs zero promises stephen t and chetta olaf person caleb blythewight jl thomas o'connor jonas hansen rachel reeves joe dude it george tarnsov joey steve whittle tac g null zero six jason miller edmund horner j element stuffed wombat leafy stucco briat stuka gliad brad wallace pat healy daryl schaefer sudan david jacobson adam spizac page peter ciccolo samuel baron berlin i'm sorry declan hairtail mauricio madrigal avena charleston wall retta and discourse dude along with everyone else who donates a lesser a month lesser amount of money i'm sorry thank you very much for donating and keeping these videos going

Channel: Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Views: 358,622

Rating: 4.8626757 out of 5

Keywords: Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt RED, Review, Critique, Analysis, Retrospective, Explained

Id: lWEkeqJ2djM

Length: 90min 6sec (5406 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 06 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/EatsPancakes]

I’m kind of shocked how fast this game fell off for me. I was reasonably hyped for it, granted each delay slowly degraded that hype. Then, I played it on higher end PC with very little issues, and while I didn’t dislike what I played, I just stopped playing. Like the game just completely dropped off my radar for me and I honestly don’t know if I’ll go back.

[u/SoloSassafrass]

As someone who actually did enjoy my time with 2077 I fully understand and agree with most of its criticisms. One thing that's touched on in this but isn't gone into (was Noah aware 2077 is based on a tabletop game? It doesn't come up anywhere so I'm guessing not?) was that despite being a game set nearly 60 years later the characters, lore, and world is obsessed with still being 2020. It works for Johnny's character because for him it really was yesterday, but despite what has changed I started to feel kind of weird about the way so many parts of the game seemed to be desperately clawing back towards that.

Like, I get it, it's the most popular setting for the tabletop game, at least until that's eventually superseded by Cyberpunk RED (if that succeeds in happening) but the fact that we get characters like Rogue and Kerry who have to both be in their 80s if not their 90s by now, Adam Smasher still wandering around being an asshole, even Saburo Arasaka still running Arasaka corp as a man a century and a half old. Early in the game Jackie mentions that this is a city where legends are born, and presents to mention characters like Adam Smasher, Morgan Blackhand... people who made it big 60 years ago. And since then there just don't seem to have been many, if any legends rising in Night City.

One of the thing that disappoints me the most about 2077 is that it's tremendously at odds with actually being set in 2077. Like, sure, nothing has really changed in all that time and that's a plot point, but somehow most of the notable faces are even still the same people to a bizarre degree. Bes Isis is a 90 year old ex-rocker turned reporter who hasn't retired yet. Kerry Eurodyne has somehow managed to maintain celebrity status and continued to release albums for 60 fucking years and has spent that entire time wondering if he still lives in Johnny's shadow. Silverhand has an excellent reason to be the same person he was over half a century ago, and his character loves to rail against how things are the same, but also how in small specific ways they're different too. Is it though, when one of his main quests involves getting his old band back together and despite it being so long after the fact everyone except Johnny is not only alive and kicking, but also available, up for it, and still living in Night City?

'Futureshock' is a big part of Cyberpunk's lore. That tech and society has progressed so rapidly that people no longer recognise themselves or the world around them, and at times will lash out, disassociate, or otherwise start to have trouble reconciling with the speed at which reality is changing around them. Johnny would have been a perfect opportunity to explore some of that futureshock through the lens of a character who initially jumped in with both feet and welcomed it. Beyond that it was just more of an opportunity for CDPR themselves to create a Cyberpunk that was built on Pondsmith's foundations but was a new vision for a new age, with their own spin on things and a new cast of people at the apex of Night City. New legends to hear about and topple. Hell, Cyberpunk RED, the tabletop setting that was released to bridge the gap between 2020 and 2077's world states features more growth and change for the sitting in the two-ish decades since the Arasaka tower bombing.

I still enjoyed 2077. Many of the characters are fantastic, with shout outs to the four romanceable characters and their arcs, which although they have their ups and downs are still largely well-written and enjoyable characters. Even Johnny, who I know many people didn't like, is a good character to me, going on the assumption that his teenage-level attitude and straw nihilism is because the guy never matured and is refusing to do so now on some kind of principle. Some of his later moments actually do put paid to that for me well enough to accept it as a whole arc where he starts as an unlikable character and eventually, painfully, reaches some level of self-awareness and maturation through his personal quests.

But damn, man, if it doesn't feel like it wears 2020 around its neck like an anchor for a lot of its runtime.

[u/yognautilus]

So I played through Cyberpunk when it was released and finished it in about 3 weeks. I actually liked the story and loved how the relationship between Keanu and the main character developed.

But damn, every time I had to do something non-story related, it kept reminding me that it was just a game. A buggy, messy game. I'll be watching a cutscene where Keanu finally starts to approve of the protag, and the 5 seconds later, someone will be running in the sky. The consistently shit FPS, the ghost town of a city, and things randomly appearing and disappearing, all took me out of the game. It's also far behind RPGs from the previous gen, despite coming out as a cross-gen game for the PS4/PS5. In Cyberpunk, I could walk into someone's house and just steal everything. In Fallout 3, if I snuck into someone's house and started stealing shit, not only would they have opened fire on me, my companion probably would have disapproved, too, depending on who it was. You could also feel all the effects of your choices in Fallout 3 almost immediately. Cyberpunk is about as basic of an RPG as you can get, and even then, it's a disgrace to RPGs to call it that.

I really enjoyed Cyberpunk, but damn was it a dumpster fire.

[u/Tincruures]

CD Projekt where punching way above their weight. Comparing Cyberpunk to RDR 2 and present themself like Rockstar 2.0 just makes the game look way more worse than it was.

[u/Key-Contract-9672]

Honestly the only reason I was hyped for this game is because I wanted to run around in a futuristic vertical mega city that was extremely dense and detailed. While the architecture and buildings are really cool the city is lifeless.

It’s a shame because I love big cities and no other game has large dense cities with lots of verticality. Even though GTA/RDR are certainly detailed, the cities aren’t dense or vertical.

[u/[deleted]]

[removed]

[u/mirracz]

The most disappointing thing about this game is actually how CDPR handled all this situation.

Since I wasn't blown away by Witcher 3, I never fell in love with CDPR. In fact, I hated their constant use of crunch in game development. But I also acknowledged the quality of Witcher 3. With Cyberpunk CDPR sank much lower than I ever expected them to be.

Not only did they release an unfinished game, they doubled down on it with review manipulations. Instead of geniuine refunds offer they used this to shift the attention to Sony/MS refund system. Instead of acknowledging the misleading marketing they are "proud on the game on PC". Instead of fully taking the blame, they throw QA under the bus.

And most of all - instead of pumping out patches, they release a few small patches and their 1.1 "major" patch is another tiny patch. To add insult to the injury, these patches introduce new bugs and even decrease of overall performance for some.

C'mon, CDPR. You have 1100 employees. This is the best you can do? Even Fallout 76 patch cycle was faster and more effective.

[u/Enfosyo]

A more focused linear game would have been much better. I don´t know what the open world added. You can´t do shit in it. Just mission after mission style like No one lives forever and others.

Also the graphics are praised a lot, and on a technical level I guess it is impressive but I never stood and stare in awe like in games like Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon Zero Dawn or RDR2. Maybe concrete apartment complexes aren't that impressive as a vista.

[u/sonicboom9000]

The most disappointing thing about cyberpunk isn't that its a broken mess but that even if it wasn't broken it'd still be bland and uninspired....the game feels very shallow and outdated