Yup. It’s why they’re so pissed, too, because Metacritic renders Tom’s star score as a % (so 40% in this case) and we all know that 4 isn’t even a number that exists on a 7 - 10 scale so clearly this Tom Chick character is some kind of number-inventing lunatic.
I doubt this review will get a lot of negative attention from Metacritic readers. If you don’t read the text, it looks like part of the mainstream backlash, so a lot of people will nod in agreement. The true believers are spread too thin to focus their attention here defending the game.
I get the impression that his score would have been the same had the game shipped with zero bugs. I like to imagine that alternate reality, and all the fanboys swarming into this thread. It would be a fitting spiritual successor to the Deus Ex review.
But hacking in cyberpunk — the genre, not the game — is an expression of the two-way connection between the human and the virtual. Meatspace and cyberspace. Moving between the limits of meatspace into the unlimited potential of virtual space. In Tron, the lightcycles can turn at 90-degree angles without losing speed. In The Matrix, Neo can leap over skyscrapers and dodge bullets. In cyberspace, you can access a bank server in Shanghai from a favela in Rio. Cyberspace is an expression of how everything is connected through an alternate world unfettered by the laws of physics and free from the limits of geography. People can interact virtually regardless of where they are. Cyberspace is an alternate level of reality, like the astral plane in a fantasy game, simultaneously underneath and between everything. And hacking is a way to control and subvert this reality in ways that feed back into the real world.
So then why is hacking in Cyberspace 2077 always a localized phenomenon with such a limited range of options? Why does hacking consist only of turrets, cameras, and damage effects, all requiring direct line of sight? Way back in 1988, in Interplay’s Neuromancer videogame, cyberspace was a whole other level of gameplay. Hacking was like entering another plane. It understood how technology had split reality into two levels, one virtual, the other incarnate. Cyberspace and meatspace. But there’s no gameplay at that level in Cyberpunk 2077.
I have no idea if the new version of the tabletop game influenced the videogame or not, but Cyberpunk RED (which just got published in November) changed the way hacking works from VR-style adventuring to just localized magic spells.
In the old 1980’s Cyberpunk 2020 game your Netrunner could basically stay home and hack systems while the Solos and everyone else went to the encounter are and physically interacted with enemies. They’d get into the firefight, while the person hacking would have a VR-style combat encounter with black ICE programs that looked like digital dragons or ogres. The danger to the Netrunner was that they could get their brains fried by losing to the ICE.
After decades of people playing this way, Mike Pondsmith changed it because it split the group making it hard for the GM and players. The GM would have to run a combat encounter with 3-4 people, then stop every now and then to run a different session taking the Netrunner player through their experience. Plus, the systems were different enough to cause rules confusion.
In Cyberpunk RED, Netrunning now has to be done in the encounter area. The lore excuse is that after Johnny Silverhand bombed Arasaka, everyone panicked about security and made their building systems more self-contained. Hacking now plasters an AR overlay on the physical world, so the Netrunner has to move around to interact with stuff. From a game mechanics perspective, this simplifies the job for the GM and for players it brings hacking rules in-line with the rest of the systems and exposes the Netrunner to the same combat as the rest of the group.
It’s a good change for the tabletop game, but I do believe it loses a lot of the original “cyberpunk” flavor.
I find this idea of a “mainstream backlash” rather perplexing, outside of the last gen consoles where it’s entirely driven by bugs/performance, given that I’m seeing a PC Metacritic of 88, including scores of 90 from IGN, Game Informer and PCGamesN, and a Recommended from Eurogamer, and the lowest score is 60. There’s definitely disappointment from some outlets, but if anything the critics have been more positive than gamers at large.
Pour one out for T-Bug.
Whoa whoa, Fifth Element is great. I think Michael Bay is what you are looking for.
Other than things like Uplink or Hacknet that are purely about hacking, are there any games that treat hacking/cyberspace as more than a localized minigame?
In Deus Ex and the recent Shadowrun RPG’s you hack terminals to gain control over nearby security systems. Invisible Inc. wants you to discover devices in the physical part of the level before you can interact with them in the cyberspace layer. And the less said about Watch Dogs and it’s IoT enabled hand grenades, the better.
An open world RPG seems like it could be an opportunity to present a networked world where sneaking into a dungeon and fighting the orcs inside isn’t the only way to reach the treasure at the end.
System shock treats it more like Shadowrun, and Cyperpunk from what I gather from Telefrogs description, does. You jack in, and are in a construct world you see and can interact with through an avatar.
In that case, I’m not sure that that person was supposed to be doing anyway. They were mostly just narrating shit from audio while you did your thing with Jackie.
Quadrilateral Cowboy was localised, other than in the framing device, but it was definitely more than minigames.
The role of the Netrunner exists in the game, but you cannot play one.
Same with Tom’s complaint here -
Cyberpunk 2077 does try to address these issues. Clearly, Tom is arguing that they failed. But like the Netrunner it’s in there somewhere.
I feel like all of you missed the first step of all video games and didn’t buy three special edition Rockstar Energy Drinks and then use the codes printed on the tabs to unlock the three part Cyberpunk 2077 comic book series “Where’s Johnny” on Amazon’s Comixology site.
No wonder you don’t understand the lore.
Does it? I hope so. I’m not very far in, but so far the only attempt it has made to reach for some larger meaning has been around fame/glory, and it’s been pretty perfunctory.
I don’t think it does. The majority of missions are:
- Go to place
- Kill or evade all the bad guys.
- Touch or retrieve thing.
In the main missions you can get dialogue but there’s not a lot of “what does it mean to be human?” in there.
You get a little bit of that in shards and logs, but if you stuff that kind of discussion into things 90% of people won’t read, I think it’s fair to assume that it’s not the focus of the game.
Video…games…dot text?
The whole game is about losing your consciousness to Johnny’s engram. Arasaka has a way to transfer human consciousness to software. Johnny’s girlfriend Alt has become an AI behind the Blackwall. In the Arasaka ending, daddy Arasaka takes over his son’s body.
Does Cyberpunk 2077 sit back and take a deep philosophical look at these things? No. But they’re in the game.
They’re in the game, but I’d argue that what Tom is talking about is actually doing stuff as a player mechanically in the game that covers that. Take the Braindance stuff. As goofy as it is, it’s trying to make you play through recorded memories and investigate them for evidence by contrasting what the person experienced versus what you, the detached floating investigator, can glean from the scene.
Imagine a mission in Cyberpunk that had you actually grappling with Johnny physically or mentally to overcome his desires. Or imagine an actual penalty for loading up with cyberware.
Watchdog Legion sucks, but it has a quest line that covers transhumanism, using recorded personalities in evil ways, and virtual fantasy spaces better than anything in Cyberpunk.
Very few of my favorites ‘say’ a damn thing, much less in a way that couldn’t more efficiently be done in an op-ed or something. Ultima IV says something. Civilization II shows something. But mostly I’m interested in mechanics+setting/atmosphere. However, when a game devotes an inordinate amount of time showing you its writing, the writing ought to be worth reading/viewing, of course.