I was genuinely enjoying this for the most part but I've put it aside while I finish Ghost of Tsushima and Death Stranding. When I'm done with those there'll doubtless be a few more updates and fixes.

I'll also start again from scratch - I hate how my character looks anyway (seriously, you can't change your appearance in this game?!).

I played through the first 4 or 5 hours in a post-Covid haze, so a revisit may be more enjoyable.

So. After around 110 hours of chipping away at it, that’s the credits rolled on Cyberpunk 2077.
How do you even begin to review this game? A game that represents both the absolute best and worst of the medium. I guess we’ll just have to jack in and see what happens.
There may be some very mild spoilers here, but they’ll be thematic rather than direct.

So, Cyberpunk 2077 then. This is easily the most broken game I’ve ever played. But it’s not the myriad bugs and technical issues that are the main problem. No, there’s a cancer at the heart of this game that I doubt can ever be cured.
With Hollywood movies, occasionally you’ll see a film, and at the end of it be left thinking, what the fuck was that mess? Generally a bit of research will reveal the term development hell. You’ll nod sagely in agreement, knowing what that means, and get on with your life, perhaps annoyed at losing a couple of hours that you’ll never get back.

Cyberpunk 2077 is the gaming equivalent of that.
Only rather than a couple of wasted hours, this was 110 hours. Was it a waste of time? Am I angry? Well actually no, because despite the fuckery, it still contains some of the finest moments in gaming I’ve experienced in 45 years of dabbling with the medium.

This is a game with an identity crisis. It clearly started off as one thing, and by the time it was released it was a completely different experience to what was originally intended. The parallels with the perils of modification and tinkering with the body and mind throughout the narrative are striking.

It’s an open world game, that doesn’t need to be an open world game. It could have been a tight linear action game without all the open world shenanigans, and it would probably be all the better for it, but hey, we’ve built this city, so by God we’re going to use it.

And what a city it is. It’s breathtaking and bewildering. Beautiful and believable. A triumph of world building. Sadly it’s also completely at odds with the game it contains.

Let’s talk about Rockstar for a minute. Now they get a lot of stick, and rightly so, for their GTA games, but the one thing they do incredibly well, is lead the player through the world. Everything connects. Everything points to the next place, and if you follow the trail of crumbs, then by the time the credits roll, you will have seen virtually everything the game had to offer, and have a good understanding of the layout of the world. That’s the benchmark for how to do these games. The illusion of freedom while you’re actually following the developers meticulously drawn path.

Cyberpunk 2077 has none of this. They’ve clearly played all the Rockstar games, but they’ve completely overlooked what makes them tick, and after 110 hours, I have no better understanding of the geography and contents of Night City, than I did after 110 minutes. That is not a good thing.

At it’s heart, there is a relatively brief narrative, torn up into scraps, and scattered on the wind around the city they’ve built.

The core of the main quest is a race against time, yet you are constantly ignoring this ticking clock and just fucking it off to go and do other things. It doesn’t gel.
And what of these other things? Well, that could best be described kindly as a mixed bag. Some of the side quests are genuinely brilliant, but they are in the minority, and are hidden in a stew of tedious fetch-quests, robberies and takedowns. There is no way to find a lot of the best content other than trial and error, because a lot of the time, until you get to the start of a sidequest, you just don’t know if it’s going to be premium content, or the worst sort of filler. This is also not a good thing.

I’m not going to dwell on the technical clusterfuck that rolled out with this title. It’s well documented everywhere you look, and maybe they can fix a lot of these issues with patches, but they will never be able to fix the real problems here. That it’s a game that is completely at odds with the world it exists in.

So it’s rubbish then?
Well actually no. I really enjoyed it.
The atmosphere is incredible. The city is consistently breathtaking on SeriesX, and the music complements the visuals perfectly. If like me, you grew up in Mega City One, and the world of Bladerunner, then this is it, beautifully realised in high definition. It’s an absolute triumph.

The characters you meet along the way are also a fantastic bunch, and while their motivations and backstories can veer between non-existant and puerile, they are a genuinely well drawn bunch. It’s a game of conversations, and CDPR has done a simply amazing job here. You will care about these people, and their interactions with you can be incredibly well written. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll hurl. You know the deal.

Keanu might have got all the press, and I’d argue he’s mis-cast in the roll, but he’s genuinely good company. He’s maybe not the character he should have been though, because the story cries out for a young Johnny Rotten, but instead gives us a generic leather-clad rocker boy, but like I say, he remains an interesting character, and is consistently good company. Makes the best of a bad lot really.

He’s not the highlight though. The highlight is the supporting cast of oddballs and misfits you interact with along the way. All of them do a stellar job, and if Alyx Vance was the benchmark for this sort of thing, then Cyberpunk soundly smacks her in the face and steals her crown. There’s a lot of interaction in this game that finally takes this sort of thing to a new level of realism, and maybe, just maybe, that makes it all worthwhile.

So where does CDPR go from here?
Well, obviously they’ve got a raft of technical issues to fix, but really the problems at the heart of the game are what they should be addressing.
The credits have rolled. Time to let V ride off into the sunset (depending on which of the myriad endings you rolled with), and draft in a new protagonist for the DLC.
A clean slate is desperately needed. They’ve built a compelling world, and now they have to work out how the hell they get the best out of it.
That’s not going to be easy, and I’m not convinced they’re up to the task, but they’ve clearly built a world they intend to exploit for as many years as possible, so I guess time will tell.
Until then, I guess I’ll be watching tv in my scuzzy megablock apartment, and petting Mr Nibbles the cat I adopted.


In fact, he probably deserves the last word…

Aye, that's a good piece you've written there Jon. Your thoughts post-game pretty much mirror my own.
It's a half baked pie containing some standout ingredients, cooked by an amateur chef with good intentions, but lacking the vision to get the best out of the recipe.

Yup. The stashes on vehicles don't sync with your main stash. It's just another broken feature, and yes, the other "apartments" you get in the course of the game are utterly pointless.

In a game where the world around you “gets better” having a static stash seems redundant.

It looked from the wall you could place your coolest stuff there but of course anything that was optional didn’t get used.

It breaks my brain that this is still the game I think about most in 2021.
There is so much goodwill across the board, and those notable moments, and with particular characters are still incredibly memorable.
There is a real power to the game.
And then it is hamstrung around 2 game systems that don't ever mesh, and with the RPG mechanics never quite finding their way, meaning there is no real agency over player character. At the same time there is a kind of fun FPS mechanic at play because the boom shots feel good like.
I don't want Cyberpunk to get "fixed" because the mess it is is one of the most fascinating things that gaming has ever wrought. I will still maintain it is not a good game, because the payoff to the whole saga is insane and not deserved, but I will never let it not be fascinating.

Probably one of the most wasted open worlds ever.

Aye, enjoying these words. Not played the game yet so think I'll miss out on the current state, butt sounds like there's a load of potential there.

RamSteelwood wrote:

great article JonB, and nice write up G.

Enjoyed reading them both. Though not my kinda game the world seems captivating.

I haven’t touched the game since I finished it.

I can never do it with most games.

g.man wrote:

We need to talk about Judy.

Minor story spoiler incoming. 

Spoiler:

At the end of her side-story, she leaves Night City and gifts you her apartment.
But, if you then visit this apartment, she will always still be there, standing by the window...and you can talk to her too.
She always has the same dialogue tree from this point onwards, and it's the same dialogue tree that occurs if you phone her after she's left Night City. 
In the context of a phone call, it works. It's stuff you would chat about on the phone.
But if you talk to her in the apartment when she shouldn't fucking be there, then she's saying stuff like, Yeah it's a good time to talk, because I'm driving right now.
No you're fucking not! You're standing right next to me.
She'll then go on to explain how she doesn't miss Night City.
Probably just as well the apartment she gifted you when she left is completely useless.
Now that's just one example, but virtually every major side story falls apart in a similar way.
It is almost as if nobody at CDPR has genuinely ever played the game. We've had the best part of half a dozen major patches, and stuff like this is still in there...everywhere you look.
And that's the real problem. They're going to be soooo busy trying to patch out the technical woes the game launched with, that the stuff like this that's the real problem just gets left in.

The only game breaking bug I had was interesting. Towards the point of no return, I was waiting for a phone call from Nancy (Samurai member) that never came. Googling it revealed it to be a known thing, but every solution I tried to rectify it failed and I was left absolutely stuck.
Eventually I was about to give up when suddenly the game crashed (pretty much the only time this occurred for me) to the dashboard. I rebooted the game, and low and behold, the first thing that happened in game was Nancy phoned me. It was almost like the game knew it had fucked up and took pity on me.

Yeah seems like they are supposed to spawn somewhere off map, this game has a fair few spawning issues from what I have seen out there, this is a particularly noticeable one though I guess.

Yeah, it's a real headfuck of a game, but for all the wrong reasons.
Get in a lift, and it opens up a whole can of philosophical worms. Often in games, things like elevator rides are used to disguise loading periods, but in Cyberpunk it would appear that if you get in a lift and go up 20 floors, then yes, you have actually got in a lift and gone up twenty floors. It's like Simulation Theory gone mad.

I've seen things, you people wouldn't believe...