Cyberpunk 2077 is game hard to write about, as it’s easy to mix our ideals of what the game should have been after many years of an incredible hype wave, what we believed the game would be with the preview information we had (an interesting topic, but that would be a review more of the marketing campaign more than the game itself) and finally the real game we can start on our entertainment devices.
The first question that I find easy to answer is: Is it as good as their last RPG, The Witcher 3? And the answer is a simple no. It seems that was a lightning in a bottle situation. Then again I think I also would put CP2077 behind The Witcher 2 (I loved TW2 though!), so maybe finally the high dev turnover rate at CDPR finally bit them in the ass, or maybe CP77 development was especially troubled. Or both, there is no need to choose.
With respect of differentiating what people hoped it would be, vs the reality, I’m seeing on Internet lots of people complaining of ridiculous things like not being able to romance random npcs (some people ARE really thirsty!) or how you can’t buy new houses, or how simple is the pedestrian AI, etc. This was never going to be a ‘ultimate city life simulator’. This game is about mainly, being told a predetermined story written by their writers, at least until they let you choose between a few endings.
And while the cop system could be better, this isn’t a cop vs robbers focused game unlike GTA so improving that have very little priority over other areas in my opinion.
Instead, I was disappointed in other parts, where I believed the game would improve over The Witcher 3, the c&c. That was supposed to be the big differentiator factor for the new game, it was going to be more a RPG. For people not in the know, it means choice & consequence, when talking of RPGs. This starts with the lifepath/origin system. With only three options, I expected them to have more importance, with longer exclusive prologues and even a series of sidequests for each lifepath. Maybe with Nomads you solve the issues that made you run away to Night City, with Corpo you would take vengance on the people who betrayed you and make sure you eventually would reach a position of power… as you surely already know at this point, the lifepaths gives you a few dialog options, that sometimes are just flavor and from what I could find each has a single exclusive quest… a 2 minute mission.
And this is just the start, the poor c&c extends to the rest of the game. The first real main quest (the Maelstrom mission, showcased on 2018 E3) has important variations, however that’s almost the only one that is a highlight until reaching the end, where you can choose 4-5 possibilities. CDPR also insisted in an innovative system where making some side quests would affect the main quest itself, but apart from the ending itself (it opens up the mentioned endings), and a few mentions here and there of things you did that didn’t seem to have far reaching consequences, so I also think that aspect end up being overrated.
I almost would call CDPR on misleading marketing because of it, but I suspect it isn’t something that simple. I think (maybe naively) they really intended to make more of a RPG at first, but the development had to be an incredible clusterfuck and they ended up leaving lots of half done stuff on the cutting floor, going finally for a more safe and simple linear structure. I actually noticed these cuts in a few quests, that are suspiciously barely developed or feel rushed. I even detected some clunky dialog where I suspect they reused lines in unplanned places, which gives the feeling of an unfinished game. I’m reminded of the troubled development of Stalker, that had to be cut down by THQ after several years of development, making it more scripted and linear, and only when they released Call of Prypiat they approached their original vision.
The funny thing is, I always considered The Witcher series a mix of action/adventure/rpg games because they never have been, you know, something like an Fallout game with more player agency, c&c, character creation, etc, but I liked them for what they were*. I think the mix of disappointment of unrealized expectations together the blander protagonist here makes the same lack of c&c more a real flaw, in a way I didn’t consider it in The Witcher series.
*: that said, The Witcher games has always had few but important decisions to take, like the famous Act 2 in The Witcher 2. Nothing that ambitious here.
Because yeah, V the merc whose entire starting motivation is wanting to be ‘a Night City legend’ (what a generic, impersonal motivation) and later is just ‘to not die pls’ results in a notably blander main character than Geralt. If they wanted to make someone a good as him but give the player more agency of who V was, well, they failed. The decision to make the game entirely in first person? I like that for the gameplay, but in hindsight, I think it also was a reason it makes V less of a character that mattered.
And as I commented some days ago, if their mission was to let play you V’s story they kind of failed too, because they also fall back into telling their own story of their own characters, instead of YOUR own character, every time the plot goes on about Johnny and his pals Kerry, Rogue, and Alt, etc. I almost think they should have done a story about them in 2020’s times if that’s what they wanted to tell, and not the weird hybrid thing they ended up with. Johnny in particular is… let’s say he is indeed very cyberpunk character, a too cool for school nihilist anti-system hardass that plays the douchebag with anyone who knows him, but he is ‘charismatic’ so everyone seems to somehow not kick him away on sight. In the game, he is amusing sometimes, other times he is tiring.
Thi is also compounded by the slightly derivative, not totally believable setting. I mean, they have made a decent job on making the world realized as well as possible, when translating it to the screen, but ultimately, this world of mercs, fixers, corrupt cops and evil corpos seems more than anything tailored to play a scifi version of a D&D session mixed with Neuromancer… which is exactly what it is, given the origins of Cyberpunk. IMO, it was alway telling how Cyberpunk 2020 was called… that, Cyberpunk. They didn’t bother making up a new title, they just used the term of the subgenre directly.
In a way I have to take my hat off to CDPR for being bold enough to use an obscure and kind of forgotten tabletop RPG as their setting for their next AAA game, even with elements like the whole 80’s sheen that may seem just weird to newer, younger players that expected a more normal type of scifi.
I guess the summary could be that the canon source of inspiration here isn’t as good as it was in the Witcher series, and that’s why the characters and settings aren’t as good here. However, I think that’s only partially true, as in the Witcher games they took lots of liberties and told their own stories and they were very good, it isn’t like The Witcher game series were good because they copied and pasted from the books. It had more original stuff that copied stuff, and even the copied stuff were concepts that developed on their own.
Oh, before I forget, I wanted to make note of the (relative) lack of humor for most of the game in comparison with TW2 or TW3, which end up hurting it. It’s something that I loved in TW3, as it served to have a bigger palette of possible tones, from serious, tragic quests to funny ones, something I consider very valuable in a 100 hour monster of a game. CP2077 only have very few moments and comedic quests, and even fewer that can be called ‘laugh out loud funny’. It can be argued that this is a dystopic, dark future but… The Witcher world is also pretty grimdark, and they didn’t care then!
And it’s even more curious here, because Cyberpunk has a wild side, from Sailor Moon or clown gangs to all manner of 80s reference they could have. I don’t know how there isn’t a quest of attending a concert of some super new and innovative musician who ends up being a cheesy hair metal band with big shoulder pads and the like. It writes itself!
About the story, without spoiling it, I already commented I thought some parts of the first Act and start of Act 2 seemed rushed to me. I will add that the final arc just before the point of no return seemed rushed too I’m talking of the Voodo Boys part, it was literally a single mission of finding a van, you talk to Alt later, bam point of no return. They didn’t joke about the main quest being shorter here. I thought the idea of the Voodoo Boys, a very reclusive and secretive netrunner group based on Haitains who were behind everything as they were the ones who hired Evelyn was a promising concept, and I would have a few more missions around them. I liked how the main story was going at the start of Act 2 with Takemura, planning how to get Hellman with Panam, the Clouds mission, planning how to convince Hanako… It took me by surprise the Voodoo boys were wasted like that, together the fact the choices there were lackluster (of course deciding between NetWatch and Vooodoo Boys barely matter) and how the game jumped to the end from that plot point, it made for a disappointment.
I have played two endings, the shortest one, the suicide, and the one where Johnny survives and leaves the city. Both were very well done, and it’s almost jarring to see the careful tone they are constructed with, in comparison with other parts of the game. The juxtaposition between the heartfelt and emotional messages left by your pals if you kill yourself vs the dialog I was having 90 minutes before of “choom this, bro that, mega cool this, bitch blah blah” is too much. And Johnny moments leaving the city while educating a young musician were so delicately bittersweet, nothing to do with the Johnny of the previous 70 hours. Which I get it, character growth, he is reborn again, but I needed more of that in the proper game, not only in the epilogue. So the endings are good, but in a sense that serves to point how other parts were not up to par!
You may wonder where bugs enter in all this, as in a way it’s what the game is being more known for at release. Well, I had 0 crashes, so there’s that. Game is super stable for me. For several dozens of hours I was lucky and barely had any problem beyond some cosmetic bugs, only in two occasions I had to reload to solve being stuck in a sidequest. So you can imagine how confused I was, in comparison with all the complaining that there is in Internet. However, once I intended in finishing the game and started to complete the remaining missions, I started to have more and more issues. It’s like they had a list of all the bugs detected in Q&A, and they only had time to fix the first 2/3 of that list. From dialog skipping, to face animation not occurring in important characters, to broken boss fights, to getting stuck in the scanner mode, to music disappearing when it shouldn’t, at some point I was having a different issue for each quest, for 4 or 5 quests in a row.
And well, once you get deeper into the game, you notice there are few more bugs. Weapons that don’t admit the mods as the should, mods whose effect doesn’t really apply, etc.
This, together other issues explained below, makes me say the game launched… around 6 weeks too early. And I’m talking of the pc version, from what I’ve heard, the console versions needed some extra months of polish, bug fixing and optimization.
Something I still haven’t commented is perhaps the thing people notice when they start up the game for the first time: it’s cough cough visually stunning. Both in tech and in the art assets and it how it ties all together in a cohesive whole it’s brilliant. There is a price to pay in hardware requirements, it doesn’t reach Crysis 1 levels where they were over ambitious and most people couldn’t run well the game until two years after the initial release, but it’s the first game in years that it supposes a hardware requirement jump in comparison with games released six months ago.
As I wrote before, the city is incredible, in both scope, density, details and variety, and the tech accompanies well with super short loading times (when you load up a game or fast travel, otherwise there is none). The games almost deserves to be experienced just to do virtual tourism.
The game structure is another point of contention. If TW3 was divided in main quest, side quests and PoI filler shit (you know, the bandit camps, the chests, etc), then CP2077 introduces a new level of granularity, with main quest, side quests, gigs and PoI filler shit (crime spots, ncpd jobs). The gigs are really a middle point between a side quest and filler content, and it’s perhaps one of the biggest change between the two games. Because not only the main quest in CP2077 is shorter than TW3, there are also less side quests. And that was The Witcher 3 heart, the amount, variety and quality of side quests. To compensate they introduce the gigs, that way they have close to the same amount of content, but it isn’t the same. Yeah, some gigs offers some interesting context like a guy who is stealing medicine because he needs it, and you can affect how it ends by talking with him, or some other gig has a funny dialog; this “filler” content is better than your average Ubi game, but that’s approximately 1 in 4 gigs I’d say, lots of them are or repetitive and/or lack that spark of uniqueness, and it’s just kill another gang guy or rescue another bloke you don’t care about.
The way it tries to give context to these gigs, with notes and irc logs is particularly bad. They are really, really, really not interesting to read. As much as CDPR can have good writing, I suspect they gave all these notes to junior devs, and it shows. Same as the formulaic briefing/debriefing system, with each one having a fixer call, a text message and another end fixer call. In a way it serves to highlight how samey they are.
In the side quest department, maybe I’m hallucinating a bit here, but I could swear there was more variety in TW3 too, sometimes I feel the game restricts himself too much to what it’s typical of the genre. Of course, even with this said, there are still several very good quests, as it’s trademark by CDPR, some will leave you thinking or will touch your heart. I’m focusing more on the downsides or disappointments of this game but that doesn’t mean good quests doesn’t exist. It’s also that I won’t to spoil them of course that I focus on the other side, and also because in a way, this move by CDPR feels a novelty.
A novelty? I’m talking of the game being a bit more gameplay centric than the narrative-centric nature of the Witcher series. With these gigs being so numerous and lots of them not having a nuanced story, they play more like a gameplay-first approach for the game. More accurately, they are small (a few big) Deus Ex missions. You can approach the place from different angles, and use a mix of stealth, action and hacking to complete them.
I guess this is a good moment of talking about the gameplay, which is the other big thing change from TW3, obviously. And I liked it very much, despite the obvious shortages in some areas, it’s why I actually completed all the gigs. This ‘Deus Ex-lite’ gameplay together a solid sense of progression, improving attributes, skills, getting perks,loot around, maybe find some unique weapon, investing money in new equipment, getting new cyberware, mods for your clothes, weapons and more… it gets addicting, you know.
Again, despite the obvious flaws. To enumerate:
-the gunplay ends up being excellent, the best example of it in a fist person RPG. However, that doesn’t mean the entire combat is superb, while fun, the combat AI could have been better. They are too passive, in particular. To not count they are not prepared to counter some types of attacks, like rifles that headshot people through walls, enemies doesn’t know what to do against it. They also aren’t able to climb to higher heights, which is something they should have stolen from the AC series. If you make the player able to mantle and climb to roofs arbitrarily, your AI also needs to be able to do it, otherwise you easy cheese situations.
-the stealth is pretty decent, hiding corpses, avoiding patrols, turning off cameras, searching alternative routes with your skills, etc. As in most games, the AI doesn’t have a particularly wide field of vision but if you don’t abuse quicksaving it gets pretty tense, because once alerted they get much more awareness of their environment, and their alert level won’t ever return to a safer level.
So pretty decent… as long as you don’t try hard to break it, which you can with specific quickhacks powerful enough or once you obtain really good weapons with high damage per bullet (which admits a silencer), then stealth gets much more trivial.
-The difficulty progression is, at least, better than in TW3, where it was totally broken. For the majority of my playthrough (first on Hard, after in Very Hard), the game maintained a minimum of difficulty, with the player being squishy and the enemies not being super bullet sponges. They didn’t do this magically, I think the game uses a soft auto-level system. Notice I said ‘majority’, eventually the difficulty got broken in my game too, the assault to Arasaka was pretty easy, indeed.
I have to make a note here, this was the impression of my playthrough. I didn’t get any attribute or skill above 15 on it, and I reached level 45. I just did a bit of everything, because fuck playing a 100 hour game only using one thing. I guess the game ‘breaks’ earlier if you do a specialized build.
-And this is not counting with hacking, which is fully OP broken. I already made a few posts about it so I won’t fully it explain, but you can be a god who look at mortals making them die in horrific ways, at no cost, and not even needing a focused build on netrunning. I will add that while a full rebalance would help, it isn’t even is the ideal solution. Making a complete playstyle for the game to be just ‘point & click in the distance’ was just a bad idea. Any play style should be more engaging than that, and in the case of netrunning, you should be avoiding ices and daemons and all that.
-The economy worked better than TW3 and other rpgs, money was valuable through most of the game, but also I had enough to get what I needed. There are some exceptions, some stuff that was clearly too expensive and out of line, it seems the game autocalculates the price of the items, and weapons of the highest tier have ridiculous price tags, even if they really are just incrementally a bit better than the epic version of the same weapon. +15dps and a extra slot shouldn’t cost 220K more!
Again, some notes: getting the perk that gives extra money when hacking access point should be obligatory to all characters, not only netrunners, I’m a scrounger at heart and most of the time I collected and sold most enemy weapons, and I only bought a bike and a car, there is no enough money to buy all the cars. Hell let’s be honest, I bought the car because I felt it was a money sink you are supposed to use at least once, to represent your newfound wealth, but there is really no reason to buy an expensive one, much less several. The game in fact gave me a pair of Quadras in quests, and in the only quest where you need a car (the races), they also give you the option to use a npc’s car.
-The mentioned player progression is… a bit uneven? Not sure what to say here, how I feel of the attributes with points vs skills that need to be used to level up. I wil say it needs more work, of course, with skills like Athletics that needs a ungodly amount of time to level up, to useless perks like ‘undetected in water’ or ‘receive 5% less damage when falling to the ground’. It’s funny because I usually defend the balance of other games (there is a difference between something situational and something underpowered) but yeah, I won’t defend some perks here. And we are still not mentioning the other issue with the perks, how 40% of them at least are pretty damn boring. 3% more damage, yay! 10% faster reload time yahoo! etc
-Crafting also needs a good rebalance, both spec prices, gains obtained in armor upgrades and many more elements. To not say anything about a really needed UI rework.
-Some Cyberware is disappointing. Remember the monowhip was supposed to be used for hacking too? Remember when the Mantis Blade was supposed to be used to stay on walls? Remember the gorilla arms was going to help open doors? All that was removed, they are simple damage dealers now, they just change what type of damage they deal.
Talking of UI, it’s interesting how it regressed in comparison with their last game. From the minimap zoom not being affected by your speed, to not having distance indicator in the quest log, to the inventory not sorting sometimes by the type you choose, to the info panel not appearing in some weapons if the text is too long, or the stupid ass vehicles to be bought cluttering your map, the list of issues is big.
There are still more features to talk about. The sound and music are good, although I won’t be listening to the OST in my free time. Driving is kind of ‘ehh’, and with keyboard it’s even worse, but then again, it isn’t like the game have a big focus at all in the vehicle side. You just to move from point A to B with them, and the quick travel points do the same too. The voice acting I experienced (Spanish) was particularly good, although a bit too latino for my tastes.
And… uhh… I feel as I should do a final words part to end this, summarizing my thoughts on the game, but I’m still not sure what to say. Perhaps I will play another pair of endings tomorrow and then write my final thoughts.
