cyberpunk 2077 has no ideas
Just from playing Cyberpunk 2077, I can see the powerpoint presentations from nearly a decade ago when it was still high-level executives planning the game: it would have the open city of Grand Theft Auto. The gun progression of Borderlands. The RPG elements, scope, and crafting of Fallout. The stealth, augmentation system, moral choices, and well, pretty much every good aspect of Deus Ex. Then, a ton of people were overworked for many years to make some sort of hybrid of those games without any of the soul, humor, fun, or original ideas of any of them.
Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t a brand new game any more, and hopefully, that means we can all move past discussing it purely in terms of the console-breaking bugginess of its original release. The fixation on its bugs might imply that, when those are fixed, what’s left is a good game. It’s not.
For a game so obviously GTA-inspired, the game has a much different idea of Crime and being a Criminal in a big, open city than I do. Opening the map is overwhelming: the game shows us that seemingly in every corner of terrain, there’s a quest, a side mission, a few guys to go and kill. But a huge number of it are interchangable, straightforward enemy encounters that are just plopping a few guys in a location, marking them “assault in progress” or “organized crime,” and telling us to go kill them. Who’s telling us to do that? The cops. Essentially, in CP77, no matter what the game pretends about Choices, you’re playing as a mercenary acting on behalf of cops. Anyone tagged as a member of a gang has an XP value (“street cred”) and a bounty paid by police. Somehow, doing things the cops want me to do gets me street cred, but cops themselves (while certainly killable, though very difficult) don’t give any sort of reward. Weird!
For a setting that should be focused on rebelling against authority, breaking new ground, and unexpected events, the baked-into-the-design supplication to police is an example of how lacking in ideas the game is. You’re not even tasked to go kill random gang members by some shady crooked cop, like you would be in GTA, or some private military contractor who’s taken over the job of policing for profit, like in Robocop. It’s just “hey, the police want you to do this.” Everywhere that they could have added a cool, unique twist to remind you that you’re in a future that’s progressed in an eerie satire of today’s trends, the game shrugs and doesn’t bother. Somehow, a game like GTA, set in the present day (or near-past) can come up with far weirder, more memorable characters than CP77. Everyone just seems so… normal.
Before I paint with broad strokes, I’ll note the exceptions: there’s a quest where you wrangle lost cars with rogue fragments of an AI, one where you play detective in the apartment of a politician, and one where you help a religious fanatic. In these, there are some ideas present; they’re willing to make characters weird enough to be memorable. But even in those, the writing is inconsistent at best; one of the cars makes an actual “the cake is a lie” reference like a shitty late-2000s webcomic.
Pretty much every other quest just tells you that there are some bad people, so it’s okay to kill them, and there’s an object to go and get. None of the gangs have any coherent beliefs, like the groups in Fallout: New Vegas, nor do the sidequests point at any sort of larger conspiracy, like pretty much everything in a Deus Ex game. (The politician one does, which is what makes it a happy exception, but even that just ends in a kind of vague, juvenile “it’s THEM and they do EVERYTHING” kind of way, rather than seeming like scratching the surface of a conspiracy, seeing something you weren’t supposed to see. The game seems to be filibustering around not having actually thought of what these conspiracies are.)
Being a Deus Ex-inspired game, it has to have a “no kill” option available. So when you go up behind someone for a stealth takedown, you can either press one button for lethal and one for non-lethal. You can add a mod to your gun that somehow makes all the bullets… rubber, I guess? It’s not really explained, but they somehow deal more damage. There’s never any actual disadvantage to the non-lethal option; guys don’t wake up like they do in Metal Gear Solid, so except when the game gives you a specific optional objective of “KILL this person,” non-lethal is exactly the same as lethal. So why include both at all? It’s a distinction without a difference, just so the game can say in its marketing that you can go through the game without killing anyone.
The part of the game that’s genuinely great is the city itself. I love cities, both in games and in real life; I feel that in any RPG, the tutorial ends and the game begins when you get to the first real city in the game. The creation of a city that’s big enough that it feels like a city while also being full enough of life (and things for the player to do) to not feel hollow, for it to feel like one city while also being able to differentiate its neighborhoods, is one of the most difficult things for even the best RPGs to do. Its difficulty shows in how BioWare, despite making great RPGs like Dragon Age, can’t make a city that doesn’t feel like an inn, two merchant stalls, and some backdrop to walk past. The cities are what make Bethesda RPGs so fun to exist in: the difference between adventuring far out into the wilderness, then coming back to civilization and relaxing with conversation. Cyberpunk 2077’s city is beautiful, diverse in its areas without seeming like a quilt of unrelated zones, huge but not empty (like GTA cities, especially San Andreas). The team that made the city did great. Sucks that a bad game inhabits it.
The city might be full of quests, but those quests don’t feel like they connect to anything or anyone like they do in a more traditional RPG like Fallout. In those games, you go to a person, dialogue happens, they give you a quest, you go back to them to complete it. CP77 shortcuts this: the quest is a blip on your map, and you initiate the quest by going to the location, you get a call from someone about it, and you do it right there. The lack of seeing your sidequest-givers face-to-face makes it feel like the map, or your pause menu, is the one giving you quests instead of a character in the game. It makes it impossible to have favorite questgivers, because they’re not really people in the game, just talking heads that pop up and give you an excuse to go into the building you’re right next to.
As Hbomberguy notes in his comprehensive look back at Fallout: New Vegas, one way that game was so brilliant was that it made cool areas, then gave you quests to make you go there. In CP77, with things just popping up on the map, you’re rarely sent anywhere (other than by the main quest): you just do the things that are nearby. You’re not going out and exploring new territory, you’re doing cleanup on a certain area of the map until it’s a bit less cluttered by all the quest markers. (I first went to the Badlands area of CP77 by just deciding “ehh let’s go over here,” rather than being sent there for any reason. It’s good that the game supports that, but none of the sidequests ever would have asked me to go out there.)
And while the city itself is beautiful, in a realistic way, the same normalcy that plagues the NPCs is all over the city. I’m in a future dystopia, where are my weird tech cults? Why can’t I stumble on some neo-Luddites by accident and find out what their deal is? Every quest in the game that sends me into some garage, warehouse, whatever, should have been an excuse to make a surprising, unique area, and the game simply chooses not to every single time.
It’s not just the writing and the quests that are lacking in ideas, the basic gameplay is monotonous and poorly thought-out, too. The game attempts to combine Deus Ex’s stealth with the stat-check gun system of Borderlands. This, fundamentally, does not work. The whole idea of stealth is that you either walk by people completely undetected, or you sneak up on them and do some sort of one-hit kill: either melee takedown, or a silenced gun headshot. Because CP77 decided to have a traditional RPG level system, it needs to have a way to have stealth also scale with it. So, should higher-level areas have more enemies? Should they be larger? Should they have different door systems, more security cameras, require keycards, that sort of thing, so that they’re actually more complex? No! The game just says, “oh, that guy is too high level,” and prohibits you from doing a melee takedown. If you shoot one in the head with your best silent sniper rifle, they only lose half their health, then the whole group of enemies is alerted. It’s complete bullshit, just a huge stop sign saying “by the rules of the game, you are Not Allowed to do this quest yet. Come back later.” (This is also how it conveniently makes the cops just wandering around the city too tough to kill.)
The game wants you to choose to be either stealth-oriented or gun-oriented (among other things), but there’s very little way to reward a player for being stealthy. If you care about guns, it can give you better guns, that’s easy, but if you’re sneaking by everyone instead, what can it give you? Money, which is mostly used to… buy guns and armor? I just kept collecting more and more guns that I was rarely, if ever, going to use.
The guns are, as I mentioned, most directly influenced by Borderlands. They have different rarities, and you can equip better ones as you level up. There’s a few categories: “power,” which has bullets that can ricochet (I never did this, and don’t see how it could have been useful), “tech,” which can charge up for more powerful shots, and “smart,” which are homing weapons. Within each of those categories, especially within one kind of gun (pistol, assault rifle, etc), all the guns pretty much feel the same, even the legendary rarity ones. This is such a letdown compared to Borderlands, a series where it’s consistently delightful to get a new legendary gun for the first time: to be legendary, they have to do something unique, or else it’s just a normal gun. Why even bother having “legendary” guns if there’s nothing memorable about using them?
I said the game has a traditional leveling system, which isn’t quite true. It has two. There’s traditional XP, then there’s “street cred,” which unlocks different shop items, and opens new quests. But completing quests and killing people gives street cred also, so… why are there two? There’s nothing I can do that would meaningfully increase one and not the other, so why not just have one XP system? Why not, if this is a hyper-capitalist future where everyone is dependent on the mods in their body, the skills in their head, and their equipment, ditch the XP systems altogether and just rely on each skill tree unlocking as you use it more? Actually, the game kinda does this already, with each of the stats having its own unique XP, so maybe there’s eight different XP systems happening at once. I don’t know. It sucks in the same way that the car Homer Simpson designed sucks.
That describes a lot of CP77, though. By trying to do too much, it does everything poorly. It’s like that video game idea that I and every other 10 year-old had, where it was the best space flying game and then you landed on a planet and it’s the best shooter game and then you got in a car and it’s the best driving game. No game can be that big and do everything well, and attempting it is just going to cost $317 million and occupy a studio for eight years, driving everyone working on it into either an early grave or, hopefully, the office of a union organizer.
One radio snippet in the game was a satirical ad, saying that if anyone approached you from a union, report them to either corporate security or the police. It was funny, but also made me sad at what the game could have been: why couldn’t the game focused on how the police are working with corporations in the future to stomp out the power of the working class? Did that writer have a say in the prominence of the police into the structure of the game, with hardly any indications that the game thought the police might be sometimes bad? (I did, at one point, pass by a scene where the game was making a point of showing blatant police brutality, but of course as the player I couldn’t do anything about it.)
If games like Hades and Stardew Valley are wonderful because they’re clear labors of love, narrow, seemingly-repetitive games that are overstuffed with a shocking amount of hidden content, dialogue, and story, surprising the player with things it’s amazing the developers had time to include, Cyberpunk 2077 is the exact opposite. It is a labor of labor. Clock in, do what your boss tells you, clock out, labor. Guns shoot, they deal damage, enemies take damage and die. Creativity is restricted by a tightly-allotted Creativity Budget that ran out a third of the way into development. What’s left is a soulless amalgamation of better games, elements picked from each of them with no understanding of the larger whole that they came from.
