A Chromed Poser: Impressions of Cyberpunk 2077

 

("Cyber Dreams" - created by StarryAI and named by ChatGPT. How cyberpunk is that!)

Sci-fi novelist Jack Womack referred to the term 'cyberpunk' as "a facile adjective for the working vocabulary of lazy journalists and unimaginative blurb-writers" and I couldn't agree more.  I love cyberpunk not because it is some sub-genre of sci-fi, but simply because it is just another face of the "hard-boiled" or "noir" genre of literature and film.  Don't believe me?  Okay, here's proof: go watch the classic noir, "The Asphalt Jungle." The plot of that classic 1950 film noir has everything that most cyberpunk stories have, specifically, a cadre of criminals hired by a shady "fixer" to pull off a heist that, inevitably, goes wrong.  Heck, I just described Act I of CD Projekt RED's Cyberpunk 2077!  Sure, hacking and transhumanism are missing from that movie due to the, er, limited nature of that decade's technical possibility, but the rest is there. What? Did you think cyberpunk was something new?  So sayeth Qoheleth: what has been will be again, and what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the neon sun.

Be that as it may, I am not here to enter into a discussion of the origin of cyberpunk as a genre, but rather to offer my thoughts on the prevailing champ of that genre in gaming, Cyberpunk 2077.  Because I am what I like to call a "gray pixel," which is to say a gamer who began his gaming avocation back in the 1970s with the original home gaming console, the Atari 2600, I was not suckered into pre-ordering this title that had so much pre-launch corpo hype surrounding it, that any experienced gamer could see a smash and grab barreling down the track towards him like a runaway train.  Because of this intuition, I avoided the inevitable disastrous trainwreck of a launch that Cyberpunk 2077 so thoroughly earned.  Now, that is not to say that I missed out on what fun was to be had during those early days because I did get to revel in the schadenfreude of watching a dumpster fire burn while an angry mob, blind from months of staring at the neutron-star radiance of their own feverish Cyberpunk 2077 hopes and dreams, raged at the crackling flames.  Good times, chummer!

But that was then, and this is the sarcastic now, some two years and change post-launch.  With a soon-to-be-released expansion - "Phantom Liberty" - about to be unveiled, I thought the time was right to take a look at the game after the developers have had ample time to patch their mess of a title.  It should be ICE-free, right?  

Surprisingly, even with the game entering its third year of desperate patching, I still found myself less than enthused about jumping into the game.  As with any other title, and especially with one that has become the mug shot for shady corpo game developers (art can and often does imitate life or, if you prefer, you can't separate the creation from the creator), I watched more than a few gameplay videos, and what I saw did not entice me in the least.  While the game certainly did seem to now function at a competent technical level, the gameplay I saw remained less than compelling.  

But, with the game 50% off and with no other games demanding my immediate attention, I figured I might as well roll those dice, despite my gut telling me they were weighted for snake eyes. So I jacked in and this is where the dive took me.

I have to admit, I was quickly gripped by the narrative that Act I and the subsequent Interlude set up.  As mentioned at the start of this post, the player is very quickly immersed in a typically noirish plot involving an audacious heist masterminded by shadowy individuals and orchestrated by shady middlemen.  The player takes on the role of one Vincent, aka "V", who along with his buddy Jackie Welles, is determined to make a name for themselves on the mean streets of Night City. As is ever the case, the heist proves to be fool's gold, with V and pals forced to go on the run, lay low, and later try to figure out how it all went so wrong.  

This narrative, while hardly original, did hook me in a powerful way. Granted, as a noir junkie, anything with that sort of gunmetal plating is going grab me hard, and this did precisely that.  It helped that the voice acting for the cast in this early part of the game was top-notch.  I found V's actor, Gavin Drea, to be particularly superb as he brought V to life as a tough but sensitive guy who slings his cyberpunk patois with just a hint of a Brooklyn wiseguy accent.  But the rest of the cast was often just as good, from Jason Hightower's Jackie Welles to Michael-Leon Wooley's Dexter Deshawn.  Needless to say, the bona fide star of the lot, Keanu Reeves, arrives as "Johnny Silverhand" during the Interlude, and he quickly comes to resemble Cyberpunk 2077's terrorist equivalent of Buckaroo Bonzai.

This is not to say that the narrative was perfect.  For example, I found it odd how V was constantly referred to as a "kid" desperate to prove himself yet he was somehow chosen from a city full of criminals to lead one of the most brazen corporate heists in Night City history.  This aspect of the plot displayed the sort of dissonance you get in an after-school cartoon where it is inevitably some kid that is asked to save the day because of some special ability that his more experienced elders just can't match - sorry, didn't mean to digress into Cyberpunk: Edgerunners territory. The point is, the after-school schlock struck me as pulling against the hardboiled tone of the story. A minor annoyance, to be sure.

Be that as it may, the story was nonetheless engaging, and I found the gameplay to match. Sure, the bulk of the early gameplay was very similar to a Call of Duty campaign, which is to say a tightly controlled, very hand-holding experience where the player is told to do this, kill that, take this, move there, etc. As with the CoD team, Cyberpunk's developers used this tightly orchestrated experience to show off the best parts of the game, from the neon-trimmed cityscape of Night City to the rogue's gallery of characters and the mega-mall worth of cyberpunk accouterments that wraps up the entire experience like a stainless steel tortilla.  

Unfortunately, upon reaching Act II,  the point where the hard-charging narrative takes a backseat to more freeform gameplay broken into bite-sized chunks of isolated missions, that unremarkable gameplay I witnessed in many gameplay videos showed itself.  First, we have the Potemkin village which is Night City.   For all its Simon Stalenhag techno-dystopian glitz, I found it about as lively as "New Detroit" from Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Eidos-Montreal's cyberpunk game from all the way back in 2011.  Sure, the player gets to see an expansive city, one where its denizens can be seen walking about, talking on the phone, and "driving" their cars (this game has some of the worst NPC drivers I have ever experienced!), but he soon realizes that it is just a facade, an illusion of activity as scripted as the many holographic adverts seen around the city.  Sure, you might get the randomly spawning reported crime from time to time, but the rest is just mindless bots moving about without purpose.  Where is the dynamic city promised so long ago by the developers? The NPCs with their own schedules, jobs, sleeping hours, etc?  Nowhere, frankly. The city is as dead as Radio Shack. 

This empty feeling is compounded by the fact that the player soon discovers that there is very little to do in Night City when not mission running.  With the exception of a single arcade game you can play to pass the time (if you can find it), there are no amusing side activities such as GTA offers. Likewise, despite the city teaming with food carts, crowded open-air markets, and knickknack stands, none of them are interactive! They are just more cheap plywood set props.  Boredom City might have been a more accurate name in the final analysis.

[As an aside, I also take issue with the artistic presentation of Night City.  Frankly, there is not a lot of "night" about it.  Now, I want to be fair here.  Night City's namesake is the criminal zone in Japan that is featured early on in William Gibson's seminal Neuromancer.  As Gibson describes it, the city is perpetually bathed in artificial lighting, so much so that even the night sky "was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" - never has light pollution been so artistically expressed! And while I get that Cyberpunk 2077's devs were going for a similar look, and were also trying to be faithful to the southern California local of the Night City of the Cyberpunk roleplaying game, I find the resultant game's Night City to miss the mark atmospherically. I much rather would have had, say, the future Los Angeles from Ridley Scott's equally seminal Blade Runner, or ION Land's superlative dark and rain-drenched Nivalis from their Cloudpunk cyberpunk thriller game.]

I also quickly found that there doesn't seem to be much of a point in buying anything. As with most games of this type, there is a lot of loot to be gotten just by doing missions, much of it better than what you will find in the shops. That is par for the course with these types of games. But what especially annoyed me is that even the food vendors are ultimately pointless.  Unlike games that have more of a life-sim element to them, Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't track hunger or thirst, so why even worry about eating? Outside of food and beverages providing shortlived buffs or debuffs (in the case of alcohol) that mostly affect post-combat recovery, there isn't any purpose, so why buy it when you collect tons of this stuff off of the stiffs you loot? There isn't even a respite value to eating at a restaurant as the player will soon discover that the devs never coded in the ability to take a seat while you eat your meal!  Likewise, while the player can sleep and shower, there is no point to them either besides just wasting time.  It all adds up to another Potemkin village, this time made up of gameplay functions without real purpose.

I am also very perplexed by the lack of a third-person camera angle.  Part of the fun of playing character-creation games is that as the character levels up and begins to collect fancy gear and threads, the player gets to see this reflected in the game by watching his 'toon do his thing via the third-person camera. No such luck in this game either. Granted, there is a fancy photo mode - I always enjoy using those - but that is not a substitute for a proper third-person camera. Perhaps the devs should have spent more time working on this bedrock gameplay element and less time on, say, in-game penis options?  (Everything wrong with this game can be summarized by that observation on where dev time was spent!)

Did I mention that you can't even steal cars in this game? Or, to be more precise, you can steal them...but not keep 'em. As soon as you leave them somewhere they are gone.  This forces the player to buy the handful of cars that are offered to him by in-game characters. Oh, get this: those cars you can buy? There are no customization options. None!  It is worth remembering that 2008's GTA IV allowed both stealing and customizing of vehicles.  

This, and other elements that I haven't even touched upon (the worst UI since Skyrim comes quickly to mind), are what make Cyberpunk 2077 feel not just disappointing but amateurishly executed. As I referenced above, open-city games from 2011 had features that this title still lacks after years of post-release support.  In many ways, Cyberpunk 2077 is more representative of a game studio's first attempt at making a modern RPG than it is the product of a studio that has already produced the fantastically immersive and deep roleplaying franchise that is The Witcher series. 

I don't want to damn this game. For all its many, many gameplay shortcomings, CD Projekt RED has nonetheless created one of the most solid cyberpunk settings since Deus Ex: Human Revolution.  Even though there is precious little to do outside of taking scripted missions, those missions do play to the setting's techno-dazzling strengths, something I find continually pulls me back into the game for just "one more mission."  So, there is that. I suppose.  But this one aspect of the game is also its only saving grace.  Unfortunately, I suspect that over the long term, it will ultimately prove deficient.  Without a true sandbox where city life is as immersive and as unpredictable as, well, real life!, Cyberpunk 2077 is as limited as one of those TellTale games that are little more than a "choose your own adventure" type of experience. Nice to visit? Sure! Would you want to live there? Nope.  Night City is just too dull and shallow, offering the player no way to make the city feel like his own. No way to go off-script and, say, meet friends for drinks (as in GTA) or go exploring in search of adventure (as with Skyrim), or even start his own edge runner empire by chasing out rival gangs and claiming territory as his own (Saints Row: The Third).  All those other games found a way to implement such freeform gameplay years and years ago. How CD Projekt RED failed to even get close is a remarkable testament to how things went so wrong for this former champion studio. 

We currently have little information on Cyberpunk 2077's ambitious expansion, Phantom Liberty, but I am hoping that it brings more than additional narrative. Seeing the limited gameplay, those new stories are important to the game as it has nothing else going on, but what this title desperately needs is actual gameplay besides mission-running; a way for the player to make Night City his own, with his own experiences, his own goals, and his own wacky adventures.  Without that, Cyberpunk 2077 will never be anything more than an exercise in mediocrity. And that would leave CD Projekt RED as a dirty gonk.

Here are the final deets: I paid thirty eddies for my copy of Cyberpunk 2077and I believe that is what it is worth.  Anything more would be overpaying for a product that is merely average for the bulk of the ride. That is not to say that the game doesn't shine at times, but the truth is that more often than not it just shambles along like a punk with a bad case of cyber-psychosis. It is no exaggeration to say that ION Land's Cloudpunk offers the same experience of mission-running in a cyberpunk city but unlike Cyberpunk 2077's $60, Cloudpunk only costs $20 and offers not only the ability to drive your own hovercar (despite their existence in Cyberpunk 2077, the player doesn't get access to them himself) but also offers a city with a heck of a lot more atmosphere than what is found in Cyberpunk 2077:

Like a scene out of Blade Runner...

Come to think of it, I need to play Cloudpunk now.  And not Cyberpunk 2077.

What more is there to say?

Addendum: 

As an aside, I also need to tip my hat to the devs for including a tune from Miles Davis's soundtrack for Louis Malle's French film noir,  Elevator to the Gallows:

Remember how I said cyberpunk is just noir in the near future? Well, in addition to The Asphalt Jungle, I encourage fans of the game to watch this movie. To put the plot in cyberpunk lingo, a corpo plots to break into his corporation HQ with the intention of killing his boss and stealing his wife and maybe the whole company. But as with any heist, things soon spin out of control...

*: All screenshots and video captured via Geforce Now