I finally did it! I finished Cyberpunk 2077 (and the Phantom Liberty DLC). I have slain the beast! And now, years and years after the game has been released, patched into playability, memed, dissected, discussed, and modded, I can present my review!
For the one person who, via some miracle of fate, is having their first introduction to Cyberpunk 2077 on my blog, here’s some plot/background. It’s the year 2077, and the world is a heck. Night City is a fairly new independent city in California. It’s right on the border between two warring US successor states. A lot of people come to Night City to make it big, to get their post-American American dream. Statistically, none of them succeed.
V is one of these guys, freshly minted mercenary who dreams big. Via a series of unfortunate accidents, he ends up with an engram of Johnny Silverhand, a long-dead rock star/terrorist stuck in his head. This is also slowly killing him. The two of them have to find a way out of this situation by shooting, slicing, dicing and sometimes even talking their way through Night City.
Phantom Liberty is the DLC that invites V into Dogtown, a city within a city, a slum and enclave run by a military unit turned militia. It’s an adventure that presents questions of loyalty, patriotism, and whether the web security mechanism established to maintain safety from rogue AI isn’t just dumb magic.
What we mean when we say Cyberpunk 2077
But the story presented in the game has a brother of no less import: the story of Cyberpunk 2077 the video game. Set in Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk TTRPG universe, it was adapted into a video game by CD Projekt RED, a studio flush with money and renown from the Witcher game series. The initial reveal was glossy and mysterious. What followed was a hugely troubled development, starting with a long radio silence after the first trailer, leading to troublesome social media posting, and ending with delays, lies about not forcing crunch, and a barely functional game getting released.
For me, I ended up playing version 2.12 of the game, which means that it has been patched into playability and near stability. One of the biggest recent changes has been completely replacing the original skill system and approach to armor. The previous implementations were really bad: penny-packed stat increases for the former and having to judge t-shirts for their negligible differences in fire resistance for the latter. The first time I tried the game about a year ago, I quit playing in disgust.
So while many gamers these days are somewhat entitled when claiming that a game has been “abandoned” after launch just because the devs aren’t releasing endless free content. Cyberpunk 2077 wasn’t – it needed those endless patches no less than the previous “AAA To Have The Least Promised Features At Launch” title holder No Man Sky did. After all, it would be nice to deliver launch promises some day.
We’re not talking about something really deep here. With 2.12, Cyberpunk 2077 finally made the AI traffic work. In that sense, the game finally caught up with the basic functionality present in the original Grand Theft Auto.
On the other hand, the field of FPS RPGs isn’t that big, especially when it comes to AAA open world titles. In that hallowed field, Cyberpunk 2077 compares favorably to Starfield – the game I dropped (without finishing) so hard that I wrote 7K words about how bad it is. Previously, I had played and completed Outer Worlds, the most Also-Ran of first-person RPGs I know.
Plus, those are both sci-fi games, and Cyberpunk 2077 is, well, Cyberpunk 2077. No matter what you think about the political-ideological direction that genre has taken, it’s a very visually compelling source material. For all the razzle dazzle of technological dystopia we get to read about in the genre classics, we certainly lack in first person games that would beam it straight into our retinas.
Night City glitz
There is one specific praise I will shamelessly give to Cyberpunk 2077: it’s a beautiful game. Even before I bought a €2000 PC, it already looked great. And while I don’t care – or have the expert knowledge – to talk about the tech making it possible, I feel confident to say that a lot of it is due to the work from the army of designers and artists involved.
Night City is a fairly flat city. This means that whenever you reach any sort of elevation, you can see huge swathes of it. And you’re immediately treated to a tableau of low-rise poor neighbourhoods that give way to skyscrapers as the eye steers closer to downtown. But even the lesser neighborhoods are dotted by megabuildings, the massive apartment complexes that may be cities unto themselves. You can also see the brutal marks of industrial parks and the colossal automated greenhouse covering the Biotechnica Flats.
If you go downtown, you will find yourself walking between sleek and faceless corporate skyscrapers, trying to wrap your head around the multilayered streets. Unity Plaza, surrounded by the HQs of Arasaka, MiliTech and other hypercorps, is built to crush you with their cyclopian edifices. It is centered on a multi-storied roundabout, a park divided into four quarters and other human-hostile architecture.
And if you drive away to Heywood, you are much more likely to get lost in endless narrow streets and side alleys. The buildings are very human, in both scale and appearance. Businesses have identifiable fronts. You’ll find cafes and restaurants bustling with activity.
The sidewalks are the domain of colorful pedestrians, panhandlers and food stalls. Any lucky larger space can become a market while anything the public abandons can host the shanties for the large homeless population. And there are signs – neon, holographic and regular – everywhere, advertising drinks, drugs, guns and sex.
And if your PC can handle crowd density, these streets are crowded by folks of all walks, dressed in aggressive cyberpunk couture. There’s an infrequent police foot patrol and armed gangers openly congregate wherever they can park a car. You’re as likely to see a criminal raid as a block party. It’s all happening in the background of corporate glitz and urban squalor, ripperdoc clinics and vending machines.
The closed district of Dogtown turns the contrast to 11. It was meant to be a showpiece neighborhood, celebrating every sexy and marketable aspect of Night City – technological achievement, innovation, the riches. But then the war happened, investors fled, a military unit went rogue and took the place over, ruling it as the Barghest militia. Now, you have museums and showrooms infested by gangs that are using those places for more prosaic purposes.
The residential part of it is literally made of stacked shipping containers. Others try to eke out a living in unfinished luxury hotels. Gangs have taken over any named structure Barghest didn’t want. Meanwhile, the militia doesn’t care about the criminals as long as it gets their cut. Their own HQ is the Black Sapphire hotel, but their presence is everywhere – you can’t even get into the neighborhood without going through their fortified checkpoints.
There’s one, black pyramid-shaped night club for the rich and the armed while all the small people head to the former stadium. The latter is now the largest market in Dogtown, powered by the nuclear reactor aboard the aeroblimp that crashed in the middle of it, selling everything and anything you’d want.
For players, that means any legendary weapons they didn’t pick up, among other things. Put a pin in that.
More things to look at than the architecture
Drivin’ around this bad-ass-citeee are a bunch of retro-futuristic cars. Rather than smooth eggs of today, they’d be rather boxy if most of them weren’t so low. Horizontal lines rule the day with greebles a-plenty. About the only feature the cars of Night City have with the Cybertruck is their narrow road lights, which is yet another condemnation of Tesla’s low-poly turd. There are also variations: Nomads roaming between the cities are very likely to take production models and tune them for their needs, producing fun twists on known silhouettes. And they all come with interior views!
You can also be flashy without a car. Clothes, now mostly bereft of stat bonuses, come in a range of styles from “my soul is legally bound to Arasaka” to “my favorite music style is a slur unpronounceable without cybernetics”. You can mix and match to your heart’s content. Even if you’ll rarely ever see the results during regular gameplay (it is, after all, an FPS), your full body is the first thing you see in the inventory and thus I cycled through a lot of questionable sartorial choices.
Cyberpunk 2077 is also fairly good with writing. You’ll hear TV news and read hundreds of emails and notes, browse the store, the piles of weapon and vehicle descriptions. Every bit of that writing adds to the tapestry of the world while also being well-written on their own.
The grace of writing extends to the dialogue as well. I don’t remember ever feeling like it ever came off as clunky or inorganic. I’m not entirely sure whether Keanu Reeves’ delivery really sticks the landing – Johnny Silverhand really does sound the same no matter what the emotional aspect of the scene is – but everyone else really does their best to depict Night City’s worst.
Probably the only real downside is how often I ran into repetitive street banter. Maybe it’s a function of playing for so long, the last few plot missions are done with a maxed out character. But still, there’s only so many times a man can listen to “Choom, this BD is hella weak” before growing irritated.
On the other hand – and unexpectedly for everyone involved – Cyberpunk 2077 is kinda good on romances? For people still reeling from classic BioWare stuff (which I used in the meaning of “pre-DAI”), it will be a welcome surprise that player romances don’t just culminate with sex and the ultimate end-goal. The characters are still there to impact your life and story. Meanwhile, even if you choose not to romance some of them, you can still have a fairly touching and fulfilling relationship with them. Wild, huh?
Mad about gaem
Now, let’s get back to that legendary-weapon pin. That’s because we’re getting to the ugly part of Cyberpunk 2077’s gameplay. And sometime before the 2.0 update, that gameplay made me quit in disgust after playing for merely three hours. It’s that aforementioned update that made me try revisiting the title, reworking some of the worst systems in the game.
But I can’t say that I would have finished Cyberpunk 2077 without paying for a Nexus subscription to have the Vortex mod manager handle all the mods for me.
Cyberpunk is a TTRPG, so Cyberpunk 2077 had to be an RPG. I’ve never heard good things said about the original (any edition), so it’s fitting that the transition to a single-player FPS would also be bad. Pre-2.0, the perks were increasing things in single-digit percentages. 3% to slide speed? Where do I sign up?!
2.0 shows that the devs understood that the skills and perks systems they shipped with the game three years before were garbage. Quote CD Projekt, the perk trees “now contain fewer perks, but impact gameplay in a more meaningful way.” Gone are single-digit increases nobody could get excited for. As you invest in unlocking perks when leveling up, you’re now picking such must-have shit like hacking through cameras, health regen, more cyberware slots and so on. Bonus percentages are now in tens. At the top of the tree, you have powerful ultimate abilities.
Skills were condensed into five groups, advancing based on how you act in the game. They’re a mixture of small percentage bonuses, free perk points, and upgrades to certain perk abilities. Less exciting than perks, but hey, you don’t have to choose which of them to upgrade – if you’re playing like a Solo, using a lot of Body (attribute) abilities and weapons, the Solo track will increase. Simple!
And yet it still blows. Maybe because I reached the top character level long before finishing the main quest, but damn it, not a lot of those perks were interesting or meaningfully impacted my game. The Painkiller perk gives health regen, which is great. Army of One, giving 10% to health regeneration per enemy up close? Less so.
Quite a few perks (and skills, and cyberware) are, for lack of better term, magical. To this category, I assign stuff like Glutton for War, recharging Health items and grenades after killing an enemy. What’s more, they have little immediate impact to your gameplay – and is barely noticeable in action. Compare this to immediately impactful stuff like the ability to still aim while running, or parkouring more, or hacking through cameras (magic!).
But this is what happens when you’re wedded to the unexamined application of cRPG skills. Stuff like damage and crit chances have a spot in TTRPGs and cRPGs derived from them because the player is not in immediate, direct control of their character’s attacks – they can only tell the character to attack. Thus increases in damage and crit chance are an abstract way of showing that your character has become better with the blade, able to overcome the enemy’s defenses to successfully stab them in the spleen. But there’s no need for that in an FPS, I can aim the damn gun.
I don’t need damage increases as I can myself get better at shooting dumb Maelstrom gangers in the face. I can’t, however, get better at parkouring without the game featuring a fully-fledged parkouring system that would put QWOP to shame. But if my character can suddenly climb higher and pull up to higher ledges, I immediately experience a quality of life increase.
In a similar vein, guns. While we have already established that I can move the crosshairs onto some gangoon’s head and click the pain away, I can hardly get better at reloading the gun faster. My actual physical hands are my hands are nowhere near the magazine release, the mag itself or the stashed spare, and there are no peripherals to facilitate that. However, faster reloads are immediately impactful and can come not only with faster animation speed, but maybe even with cooler animations altogether. I’ve been on YouTube, I’ve seen what the gun nuts get up to. You get the idea.
No punk, all cyber
Now, this is a cyberpunk title, so you can also gain abilities through bionic enhancements. But why, for example, is the platform gaming-favorite double jump a cybernetic implant/limb replacement while equally cartoony air-dashing is a perk? Why are crits from quickhacks enabled via an implant and not a hacking skill? Why is decreasing quickhack cooldowns by taking enemies the providence of bionics and not Perks like Glutton of War?
Much like with Perks, Cyberpunk 2077 is filled with cyberware that’s only of interest for freaks writing build articles for the benefit of SEO. They’re either giving you fringe stat benefits and very situational boost. They’re things you only buy because you haven’t seen anything more interesting. Seriously: if you’re a virgin stat-bonus boosting leg implant, you’re not gonna win against the chad super jump bionic. It’s like foregoing teleportation in Dishonored: you could do it, but why would you?
Speaking of missable iconics: the Sandevistan. When the Edgerunners anime released to drive up hype for Cyberpunk 2077, it was played up as top-tier bullet-time bullshit, something you definitely want to get your hands on. In Cyberpunk 2077 the game, it’s just another source of bullet time in a game where you have a hard time not tripping over time-slowing Perks. You even have the Karenzikov and Defenzikov implant duo giving you bullet time while sliding and aiming.
You’ll still see the Sandevistan at work, though. It will still be used by random gangers, from very early levels, to get close to melee range. Oh, how the mighty have mainstreamed.
Plus, you know what else is jockeying for the same implant spot as the Sandevistan? Fucking cyberdecks.
Just like martial weapon users get immediately clowned upon by magic users in Dungeons and Dragons, the Max Payne implant gets immediately owned by the cyber spell book that lets you remotely shut down cameras (and eyes), jam enemy weapons, immobilize NPCs, blow up cars, send dudes berserk, and more. Pathetic!
“Hey, wait, did you say ‘blow up cars?’? Isn’t that quite powerful?” Why yes, it is. It’s the Trivialize Races Button. Once you get that quickhack, the other car hacks – slamming the brakes or forcing RAMMING SPEED – become irrelevant. It’s kind of similar to hacks that erase enemy memory (trivializing sneaking) or make the enemy kill themselves (one hack delivers it via a gun, another – by grenade).
Now, there’s a thing in the setting, called cyberphyschosis, where a heavily augmented person (a cyberpsycho) will flip out and start killing stuff. There’s an extended quest dealing with it, challenging you to take cyberpsyhos down, alive if you can. What causes cyberphychosis? Simple augmentation overload? Psychological stress related to occupations that necessitate it? Shady drunks flooding the city? Capitalism???
Actually, it’s a quickhack called Cyberphychosis. It makes an enemy flip out and start killing everyone around them. Case closed!
While there are some clever quickhack designs – especially with the ones that have dual use depending on whether you’re stealthy or loud – they’re overshadowed by a multitude of “I win” options you can get nearly from the start of the game. The best I could muster in terms of bionic self-censorship is not using quick hacks which are essentially elemental damage spells, fluffed as “making enemy implants leak toxic materials” and other eye-roll worthy garbage.
Of course, you can hack items as well as people, and thus you get into silly shit like hacking radios and microwaves to explode with the force of a landmine. With gas canisters, you can somewhat imagine an Internet-of-Shit future where gas canisters are both Wi-Fi equipped and have enough garbage inside that you could make it blow up by tampering with pressures, but it’s ridiculous. Honorable mention goes to ever-present stacks of boxes that are tied down with remote-controlled straps, just waiting to burst.
However, this sort of disappointing approach to quickhacks is nothing compared to hacking. Half the game, I was wondering what the perk descriptions talking about uploading daemons in hacks refer to. Will I find, at some point, a hacking game that isn’t based on timed sudoku? No. The timed sudoku is all there is to hacking.
“Uploading daemons” is a pathetic attempt at making it all sound cool. Most you can do is “upload daemons” of longer, harder sudoku combinations to get more resources out of hacking.
When I previously talked about the flaws of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I mentioned hacking every alarm panel that I see: nothing to do with preventing guards from calling in friends – it’s just farming XP. In Cyberpunk 2077, it’s much worse. As far as I’m aware, most data access points don’t give you anything outside of experience, money (inexplicably) and quickhack components (even more inexplicably). I think hacking specific Wi-Fi antenna points makes the local enemies easier to quickhack, but I’m not sure.
But in most other aspects, hacking in Cyberpunk 2077 is like having locked crates in Skyrim that you already know don’t contain anything but a trivial amount of gold and common potion components. If you’re hacking anything other than a computer (which may contain lore and security controls), don’t bother.
Oh shit, it’s crafting
Hacking is a fairly self-contained disappointing system. Crafting, however, is almost never good in gaming – Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t clear that hurdle either. The devs had the brainpower to understand that the original system, which demanded you collect five duct tape, eight crushed plastic and 1 thingamajig to make a pistol, was bad. They axed it. Now, you just have generic Components (except for quickhacks, which use quickhack components) and crafting an item just requires components of appropriate level.
Want a level 3 pistol? If you have the blueprint, you just need to pay X amount of level 3 components. No skill checks, no specialist tools or benches, no time required, just an instant access to a pistol.
Are you happy to see me, or did you just rub some copper wire together in your pocket to make an HMG?
The system is kind of pointless since you can often find stuff of equal quality in the world or, you know, buy shit. Money isn’t an issue after the first third of the game, and consumables don’t exist outside of ammo. There are some unique weapon recipes, but most of the time, it’s guns that don’t offer anything over those found in the world.
CD Projekt has some understanding that their loot game is wack, so most of the guns you find in the world are immediately converted into components so as not to force you to sell 20 shitty pistols after every firefight. However, as there are plenty of unique weapons in the game, you soon lose interest in anything generic, as any nameless weapon is inherently inferior in function – and since we’re unfortunately tied to a horrible quality tier system, unique weapons are the only ones that can be upgraded in tier.
Is it possible to make an interesting weapon tier system in a game? Theoretically, yes. A weapon of worse make can have worse ergonomics, making their handling (drawing, switching to iron sights, turning, regaining accuracy after moving, etc.) worse. They can be less reliable, with jamming, stopages, and whatever stupid issues may arise with magazines. You could even have exotic issues like being too light to control recoil, lacking rails for furniture, and so on.
After all, there are more AR-15 manufacturers than stars in the sky, and people keep finding reasons not to buy the cheapest version every time.
But if you’re not interested in any of those systems, you do what Cyberpunk 2077 did and make tiers essentially related to damage and range, and it becomes extremely boring really fast. The only really impactful difference is that generics of different levels can have fewer mod slots (and weapons can’t take mods of a level higher than they are).
Oh, weapon mods. The real gun fantasy is putting enough furniture on your assault rifle that onlookers will start commenting that overfeeding isn’t cute, actually. It’s about using enough aftermarket parts to invent a new type of “Ship of Theseus” dilemma. However, you won’t have those fantasies fulfilled in Cyberpunk 2077.
Attachments are the visible mods. At best, you’re choosing between a muzzle brake or silencer, and between red-dots and full-on optics. Fifty years into the fucked future, and we’ve driven taclights, laser pointers, UGLs, etc. into extinction. Modifications, on the other hand, are invisible and magical. “Better Half” gives you +10-20% crit chance with the second half of your magazine. “Slice ‘Em Up” makes enemies 20% more susceptible to finishers after you execute a dude. How does that work? What exactly did I put in my weapon to make it work better when it’s halfway out of ammo? Did I miss the point where V installed the Horadric Cube at his workshop?
Lethally boring guns
But nothing is more ridiculous, bad-game-design garbage than the Pax Modification. Pax makes any weapon at all non-lethal. I trace this obsession with giving a non-lethal option back to the praise heaped on Deus Ex 1. The difference is that Deus Ex was the only one[1] to do this right, too.
Most games like this fumble by moralizing shallowly about the evils of killing Nazis, by giving you more XP for the non-lethal route, or by presenting you with a cornucopia of weapons and mods you can’t use cos they’re lethal.
But since you’re but a single mod away from turning your anti-materiel rifle into a long-range warm glass of milk, you can both live your street samurai lifestyle and still adhere to Batman’s stupid moral code. The only downside to Pax is that the modified weapon does a little less damage, but I’ve never really noticed the difference.
Maybe I’m just that good.
In any case, Pax the Non-Lethal mod removes another bit of friction or preparation that the player would have to make. It strips No Russian of controversy without changing the gameplay the slightest bit. It saves the developer from having to come up with interesting cyberpunk gadgets for capturing targets alive.
But that design ethos already worked for skills, bionics, and hacks, so why not guns?
Yet there’s a deeper layer to this game-design-for-cowards approach. Do you remember how in Dishonored, you had the option of taking out your assassination targets non-lethally, and then dropping them off for imprisonment or a lifetime of sex slavery? You can do that in Cyberpunk 2077! In every Gig – one off side-mission – in which you have to shwack a guy, you can also deliver them alive to a drop off. The fixer will take care of them from that point.
So, you know, your target is still getting shot in the head, but not by you! Congrats on completing your non-lethal run by blasting the guy in the face with your Ba-Ba Sleepy Sheep ZZZ shotgun, and then leaving him to be killed by some other guy. 10/10 morality.
And that’s aside from all sorts of frictionless tools from stealth that come from your magical hacking powers as well as magical traits. And you can get even better at it with your magical consumables.
In what way are those items magical? Well, your grenades and medkits are rechargeable. Naturally, they also have tiers. There are a few types of healing items and a dozen varieties of grenades, but the important part is that you don’t have to worry about running out of supplies. And traits allow you to regrow health kits faster! No, there is no in universe reason for that being the thing.
The only good thing to be said about the inventory systems is that CDPR eventually stripped armor values and stat boosts from clothing, leaving them as mostly cosmetic options. On one hand, that’s very good: seeing starting t-shirts with miniscule cooldown reduction and equally ignorable damage resistance was what made me give up on the game in the first place.
On the other hand, the game provides no incentive to dress for the occasion – no disguise bonuses for wearing a corporate-office appropriate clothing for infiltration, no sympathy for dressing in a gang’s colors, nothing. Collecting cool corporate battle armor is nearly pointless – it just adds a negligible amount of armor instead of, I don’t know, giving you better health regen, night vision, enemy radio and whatnot in exchange for having no chance of blending in.
And this is just the final part forming my larger thesis about Cyberpunk 2077: it’s not a game for perverts.
Cyberpunk 2077 is not a game for perverts
I believe that small-“c” cyberpunk features a large amount of gear porn. Manufacturers and models matter – it’s a belief shared by both edgerruners and shadowrunners. The fetishistic fantasy of a borged-up mercenary involves carefully selecting your gear for the mission as well preparing for it by, at the very least, scouting the location. And since Cyberpunk 2077 is a game all about making it big as Night City’s coolest violence subcontractor, you’d expect all those things to be a major component of the game. You want to immerse yourself into gear porn and be the pervert that has strong opinions on intermediate cartridges.
After all, if Kiroshi optics are that good, there must be inferior optics it can be compared to, right?
You’re about 3,000 words into this review. You already know the answer. Let’s explore the game’s hostility to perverts in more detail.
- Gun porn? Buddy, this isn’t even gun erotica
You don’t need to pick specific weapons for the job – your inventory can easily hold around 20 and your stash can be accessed from the trunk of any car you own (and can effortlessly call to your location on any street). You don’t need to buy ammo, either – you get elemental effects from mods and magical legendary weapons, there are no calibers to think about, and I don’t think that smart guns (with guided bullets) or tech guns (that pierce through basically any cover, no matter how stupid that is) need special feed either.
So all the great writing the gals and guys put into fluff on manufacturers and gun modelsremains just that, without any reflection in the world. There are no online discussions (in game or IRL) whether Arasaka or Militech makes a better rifle or whether 9.11 mm or .45 ACyberPunk is a better pistol caliber. You can’t make price-quality comparisons for gun mods since there are so few of them. No playing dress-up with your favorite piece – outside of barrel attachments and optics, it’s all magical mods.
Probably the peak of No Perverts Allowed gameplay comes with cars. While 2.0 finally introduced functioning traffic and cop chases (definitely not something that was already possible back when GTA releases still were MS-DOS compatible), you still can’t modify vehicles at all. You can buy quite a lot of them, but even the color is out of your control.
I could, however, see the argument that adding cosmetics to a vehicle is not exactly vital to the edgerunner experience. After all, the most famous cyberpunk games always have a separate class for vehicle handling, which means that most players won’t. And, once again, the pervert fantasy is focused on functional upgrades rather than neons.
As such, the worst offenders are the combat cars. They come with machine guns, missile launchers, or both. Those are the two weapon classes, they all have a single entry each, and you can’t add them to regular cars. Both classes are auto-targeting and have infinite ammo. Immediately, you have no friction and no need to prepare (and, once you get the CAR EXPLODE.exe hack, no need to shoot). Just whistle, and your armageddon steed will be there.
I feel like it would be very Nomad and on point to be able to tune up your ride and form deranged opinions on what weapons it should mount like you were playing a lavish Interstate ‘76 remake, but I’ll also agree that this may be asking too much of a game that isn’t a car game.
Incidentally, one mod adds performance-focused car tuning, but all of the upgrade tiers are simply better than lower tiers, so it was only a question of having enough money at a point in the game where I was nothing but money.
But performance enhancements don’t matter much in a game where they couldn’t make the speed feel right. I’m driving at 300km/h and I feel like the speedometer is lying to me, an insane thing to feel in a game.
And while we’re on a roll bitching about cars: no matter how much they did to improve cars in the game, there’s still a long way to go. A big example of this is in the NPC driving in the cutscenes. Cyberpunk 2077 loves drivers who dump exposition. They come in two forms: NPCs driving using the AI logic or full on-rails cutscene mode. Neither of them really work.
In the middle of a mission about dealing with your sins and contrition, we leave the house of a grieving victim. We get back into the car and the NPC driver drives over the curb, bursts through a fence, and maybe even runs a guy over. Nobody bats an eye, solemn dialogue continues. At the end of the same driving segment, we stop at a diner. Cutscene mode takes over and the car starts making rapid pivots around its center like you were reading about a UFO sighting. Wild.
This, I remind you, is after the update that made traffic finally functional as well as enabling cop chases.
Going back to the more reasonable expectation of gun mod porn, I rather have the ridiculous detail of Escape from Tarkov. Instead of giving me a Named Pistol that will obviate the need to ever use a generic one, let me go nuts comparing triggers, grips and Soviet-forged lowers. Have all sorts of janky greebles I could screw on to compensate for not having night vision in my eyes (or even a Deus Ex flashlight). Maybe it would make visiting weapon stores cool rather than a roundabout way of spinning the RNG wheel to refresh what’s on sale.
- Bat-Panacea. Never leave home without it.
But it ain’t just guns that lack pervy charms. There’s no titillation in gear, either. Grenades and health packs can be hot swapped at any moment. Outside of cooldowns, they never run out. The most you can do is buy meals and meds that give you long lasting (thank you, whichever Witcher 1 dev made the generational breakthrough by introducing boosts that last half an hour) benefits, but they’re marginal.
The guards are your standard game guards, by the way. Big love for staring at the walls, little situational awareness, no connection to a larger battle management grid that would raise alarm if one of them dropped dead, and industry-standard amnesia that makes them forget finding their buddy’s corpse within five minutes.
As for the tools for dealing with unimaginative human guards… There’s your UbiSoft standard guard-tagging, but it doesn’t even bother recording their patrol routes on the map. The smartest thing you can do is use a quickhack that calls a guard to your location so that you could help them with their sleep debt. If the enemies don’t have a hacker nearby, you won’t even be traced via your script kiddie exploit use.
No spoofing, no jamming, no lock picking or panel splicing. Not even something as simple and silly as Deus Ex: Invisible Wall’s gun mod that silently vibrates windows into dust. You don’t even get drones without modder support. The entire technical side of edgerunning in Cyberpunk 2077 is either hacking or quick-hacking.
At most, you may need to swap out bionics and hacks at a ripperdoc, but why would you do that? The bionics that provide stat boosts rather than enabling new ways of interacting with the world (like jumping real high) are boring, and you probably have your favorite set of hacks anyway. And there’s no human enemy that doesn’t have a grenade or a pistol to self-harm with.
Personally, I’d love a cyberpunk game where the NPC reactions would factor in whether my clothing fits the scene, where I’d have to grease palms and subvert physical infrastructure before going in, where I’d pick my guns for the occasion, and where I’d really have to put in work to disable alarms and tripwires without using expensive armor and copious explosives.
I don’t want room service, I want a UGL that fires canisters of quick-hardening foam to build an impromptu cover.
- Fighting the most dangerous enemy: boredom
It’s not just the player who doesn’t have to think about their equipment. The NPC enemies don’t do that either. So what works fighting one of them roughly works fighting any of them. The most you’re getting in specific factions being maybe a little more susceptible or resistant to some damage types. I really don’t remember any outstanding differences. In my mind, the awfully-named Tyger Claws had more Sandevistan mooks and were more prone to use smart guns, but that’s it.
God made borged-up men. Electric UMP made them equal.
So really, there’s not difference between fighting the best Arasaka can muster, cybered-out Maelstrom goons, or just cops. While the basic combat system is fine, you’re still just shooting guys, – killing them in environments filled with explosive gas tanks and no-less-volatile microwaves. The fans are aware of this – I’ve seen mods that try to give gangs more flavor, like Maelstrom being more resistant to headshots due to replacing so much of their head with crude bionics.
Too bad ideas such like this are only viable when you have zero budget, no profit incentive and no crunch.
Cyberpunk 2077 also repeats an early boss-fight at least several times. Yes, I’m sure that walking welder exosuit is the only such system around. Nobody has either thought to replace its sweeping laser with an HMG or just produce their own model fit for a different purpose. Have fun with the repeat fight.
I’m also particularly irritated with one boss who, by all rights, should be available to sneakily take down. She’s doing nothing but pacing in a large room. But if you start getting close, she starts getting real fond of pivoting on the spot so as to never turn her back to you. Weird how that happens, huh.
The epitome of shit enemy design is MaxTac. Enemies have tiers of difficulty and MaxTac is a tier of its own. How do they operate? You may remember the opening of Edgerunners, where they take out the berserk Sandevistan operator by… facetanking his fire and then shooting him point-blank in the head.
They are no more tactically adroit in the game. If you ever go up against them – I had to deliberately start shit to see them at least once – you’ll be confronted with something akin to an overleveled Dungeons & Dragons party. Each MaxTac trooper has a different class, but in the end, they’re bullet sponges that shoot you good. In fact, they’re minimum-tactical: all guns and HP, no cooperation or subtlety.
Personally, I’d love it if elite security forces were harder to hack due to hardened communication channels or the shitty implants that Maelstrom have was more susceptible to eye-hacking. What if the inexplicably Russian implant thieves had more non-lethal tools? What if a non-insensitively themed hacker gang had about as many combat hackers as a corporate security force had guys with LMGs?
I’m not even talking about the enemy AI acting smartly, I’m just talking about enemy force composition and stats here.
Though the AI being at least a little intelligent wouldn’t hurt.
- Intelligence is for wieners
Well, neither you, nor the enemy is prepared for anything. But that’s OK, since none of that professional preparation exists outside of what plot missions make you do. One early plot mission requires you to steal a special infiltration drone. But you’ll never get to do prep that’s not plot-mandated. No hacking building plans, no bribing people to leave you access cards. No imaginative gadgets to overcome imaginative cyberpunk security – as long as you stay out of the eye of the camera, you’re good.
Most side missions – both jobs and gigs – lead you to the door of a building and let you go at it whichever way you want, no forethought required. Everything you need to subvert security, take down guards, and steal stuff you have on your person at all times. There will be carelessly abandoned passwords and passcards to steal, turrets to take control of and guards to put to sleep with a gentle caress of the neck. The only place where lack of preparation ever impeded me was bringing enough ammunition, and only in the early game.
The stakes are generally so low, some modders added the Stealthrunner achievement and skill system for completing your gigs silently and non-lethally. Previously, I had not felt any real need not to see everything like a nail-type problem that I have an electric UMP-shaped hammer for.
In the end, the real solution to any gig is to have the weapons and implants of highest rarity you possess and then put all the guards to sleep via a mixture of shotgun salvos to the face and hacks that nullify the need for stealth.
Eventually, I had to manually constrain myself from using naptime hacks and remote car explosions to overcome any challenge.
Could it have been more than that? Yes! A long time ago, there was a cyberpunk FPS with a similar approach to Internet of Things. It was called Syndicate, and it was a somewhat confused reimagining of a tactical game of the same name. It also had effortless hacking of enemy guns and grenades (in flight, too), courtesy of your onboard AI.
What Syndicate also featured was a level where you were fighting the lowtech poors. Lowtech poors who, notably, do not jam a lot of susceptible electronics into their bodies and guns. Suddenly, you had to adapt, at least little – but it was a sign that the developers are thinking about the logical extrapolation of their world.
You could say that making some missions hard to beat through hacks would impede hacking-based characters… But it would also mean that players would have to adapt to the requirements. Maybe their hacking skills would become useful for shaping the terrain beforehand, like diverting forces from the location or creating a sewage disaster to make the guards scatter.
For gun-play, having mission goals (“we really don’t want you to shoot the guards”) or the location itself dictate what weapons you need would also be fun. Suddenly, you have to care about SMGs being easier to wield in close quarters or pistols being inconspicuous (or even a thing you could get smuggled inside).
And, you know, gear. You could mess around with different cameras, sensors, locks, and so on. Maybe vents could now be drone sized rather than mandating that a full person should fit inside. Some doors could be picked, others could be hacked, while a third variety would require some electrical engineering skills.
And imagine a game where guards would be wired into a network, transmitting their life signs and sometimes calling in over the radio. Sure, it would require the game to take place in some sci-fi future, where technology was prevalent and security was parano- wait.
Instead, Cyberpunk 2077 was stuck in development hell for years, lying to fans and crushing their own development crew to put out an OK title. For the perverts among us, we have to look around and hope that some lower-budget game can deliver the high-speed, hyper-professional, ultra-violent dystopian mercenary action that it couldn’t.
We love our cops, our law enforcement
Now, for a last bit of semi-coherent rambling: the cops. Everyone has written about the cops in Cyberpunk, talked about Pondsmith proudly having five-oh buddies, the works. But Cyberpunk 2077 wants to hit up the ripperdoc to get a bionic ass cheek to sit on three chairs at once.
So on one hand, we have copaganda: NCPD has bad apples, but they have plenty of officers who want to do a good job and are just constrained by corrupt leadership, underfunding, and, of course, the law. It’s a very end-of-century belief, together with the larger idea that the leading cause of crime is not enough policing, and not poverty, dehumanization, and so on. You and I both know that it’s bullshit – cops aren’t great at preventing crime from happening and aren’t great at solving (FBI stats from 2018 showed 61% clearing rate for murders and only 13% for burglaries). But the 90s were a silly time, so some of that can be expected from a product of the era.
However, the rules of cyberpunk dictate that The World Is a Fuck, so NCPD is underfunded and understaffed. Their job is hard and you have police officials striking deals with criminals. You can hear cop radio requesting reinforcements and getting none. There’s a whole section of NYPD bounties where you show up and shoot up some criminal activity. You get to do a few missions where you have to deal with named cops and you have about as many (if not more) bad cops as good ones.
And here’s that third, awkward chair. The world is a fuck and NCPD has been privatized. What remains uncommented on is that the NCPD is the only corporation with a shitty product. Kiroshi eyes are good, Militech is a great weapon manufacturer, and so on. But NCPD sucks as a police force despite its main product being the police force. What’s more, it’s the only corporate military that sucks. The game constantly reminds you that they get outdated gear that sucks while literally any other corp, no matter how uninvolved in military affairs, can easily source some tacticool goons.
It’s one hell of a cocktail the player is supposed to swallow without thinking, especially when any glance away from the game will land on a news report about an American cop shooting up a school after being spooked by his own shadow. When American cops are very noticeably overfunded (NYPD is getting above $5 billion a year, like the Chilean and Romanian militaries), extremely corrupt (from deputy gangs to selling off the weapons they get from the government) and absolutely pathetic (getting spooked by a pine cone, shooting a family of five, getting away scot free), you can’t take this game at face value.
And to add some flavor, it’s very interesting for a Polish studio to crank out something that pro-cop. Anyone who lived under the spectre of the USSR reflexively thinks cops to be corrupt and useless. But they will also publicly defend cops as the thin blue line between us (good) and crime (ontologically bad, could never be us). So it’s interesting to see it on display here.
An addendum to cops and politics: Johnny Silverhand is a rebel without a cause. He rages, 90s-ishly, against modern life and the corporations without having a single political idea. He actually mocks people with any sort of motivation and the game even includes a quest where a mysterious yet popular online political poster turns out to be a bot. South Park would be proud.
What’s even more out of tune with the times is his disdain for sex workers. For someone who fucks and drinks a lot while proclaiming to be a rebel against the society, Johnny has a cop’s opinion on “another dead whore.” But I guess this is what you get when you try to make a political character while having entirely unexamined ambient politics that didn’t even upgrade the baseline from exposure to contemporary western (read: west of the Polish-German border) values.
Or maybe they just hired the guy who wrote the cop-slobbering story of Call of Juarez: The Cartel that portrayed torture of a sex worker as just something hard men have to do when making hard police choices.
Now, a brief note on the Phantom Liberty DLC content: Dogtown is a great addition to the city, and it’s a fun place to palaround and get into shootouts. However, it suffers from two somewhat related problems: Cyberpunk 2077 having no coherent idea for what the Blackwall (the defensive line shielding internet from rogue AIs) is, and the last combat segment. It is absolutely not fun to be defending a zone from wave after wave of supposedly elite troops just feeding themselves into your grinder. There’s not even an annoying objective that you can randomly fail, it’s just very anticlimactic to be in an arena and gunning down goons en-masse. It gets even worse when you’re gifted Blackwall magic powers to just effortlessly make them explode. Dog shit!
Game not good
Yet I completed both Cyberpunk 2077, doing any mission I could find (and thus having reached max level long before the end of the game), and Phantom Liberty. With mods, it’s an OK game. With mods. But I can’t help but feel like all the work of the writers, artists, voice actors, and level designers is constantly betrayed by gameplay seriously lacking in ambition, uninterested in exploring the implications of the techno future, and absolutely unwilling to make the player exert effort.
By the way, the player character’s briefs stay on during sex scenes; a wonderful fuckup in a segment where the developer has full control of the camera – in the game where you choose genital size in chargen.
[1] Ok, I lie, there was also Alpha Protocol.