Before the release of Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt RED was the favorite studio of almost all gamers. The release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt showed that the Poles can make real AAA games. The adventures of Geralt went down so well with the audience that the company earned a huge amount of trust and loyalty. Now the ossified old men and the newcomers were waiting for another masterpiece from the studio. And the developers stirred up the audience’s interest by promising something new in the RPG genre. BUT as a result, as you already know, the game turned out to be quite controversial. Today I will try to figure out how CD Projekt RED came to this and is it worth playing Cyberpunk 2077 six months after its release. Pull on your dirty gear, punks, and keep your guns ready, let’s rush to Night City!
What is Cyberpunk 2077? This is a first-person action/RPG where we have to get into the shoes of the mercenary hacker V (aka Vincent if you play as a man, or Valerie if you choose a female). In fact, Cyberpunk 2077 is just a first-person joker, but not an RPG (although the game in every possible way disguises itself as this genre. They even brought in a character editor). At the beginning of the game, there are three character legends to choose from, which, in theory, should form a unique passage and experience for each chosen path. And indeed, when you start playing, the feeling that something unique is forming in you remains exactly until the moment you go through the prologue and find yourself in the open world, where small lines of dialogue remain from your legend and a couple of tasks from friends from the past GG. And as you understand, this does not change subsequent events from the word at all. And the choice of replicas also makes little difference on repeated playthroughs; you will find yourself watching almost the same movie, only with slightly changed dialogues. They sold us about interactivity, which doesn’t exist.
Although the main plot does not have crazy interactivity, its structure turned out to be more than challenging and interesting. Your character, as I wrote above, is a mercenary, and like any mercenary, he wants to find a bigger business so that the proceeds literally fill all possible holes. Therefore, GG, together with his accomplice Jackie, takes an order to steal a certain item from the mega corporation Arasaka. It seems like nothing complicated: take it and bring it, but everything goes, as always, not according to plan, and the thing we communized is a biochip, which later ends up in the head of our would-be mercenary. And then GG goes into such a steep dive that he cannot get out of it alive: he is killed. But since death is not an affordable luxury, we are resurrected (no, not Jesus) by that same biochip, which turns out to be not simple, but with the personality construct of Johnny Silverhand (rocker and terrorist played by the notorious Keanu Reeves).
This is where the fun begins! Now everything that happens to V directly changes Johnny, and Johnny, in turn, affects V. This exchange of experience, if you can call it that, makes any task more interesting. Your dialogues with Johnny are full of humor and caustic comments that he makes after almost every action you take. But not everything is so smooth: our brain and body, in particular, are not happy about living like this, it physically hurts them. Our hero dies due to the fact that the chip began to replace our consciousness with Johnny’s consciousness. And how you will climb out of this hole depends only on you.
Secondary quests also have something to show for it. Take, for example, the quest “Passion”, where the prisoner Joshua, sentenced to death, decides to film a braindance (a technology that transmits into your brain other people’s memories with all the sensations that the operator experienced during the recording) about his crucifixion and distribute this recording to the masses in order to “make a sacrifice for the sins of people” through his torment. The victim of Joshua is recorded only to make a profit from this recording of the crucifixion, in other words, from such a frank act, which requires a lot of courage and fortitude, corporate companies make a show and PR as much as possible. Cyberpunk 2077 demonstrates well what humanity can come to if it continues to have the same greedy and consumerist attitude toward everything that exists. Or you can also mention the quest with the Perales family, where the head of the family strives to become the mayor of Night City. But something strange is happening in the couple’s apartment, and they hire GG to act as an independent expert and find out what’s going on, since the couple don’t even trust their security. During the investigation, we learn that the spouses are being influenced from the outside, by changing their memory and neural connections, making our employers completely different personalities who will carry out the will of the unknown puppeteer. This quest even sent a chill down my spine when I got to the truth, I was so imbued with the stalemate of the situation. There will also be quests with a detective component, where you must save Detective River’s nephew; showdowns with cyber psychopaths and other equally interesting secondary tasks. In some quests you will even be given some choice. Or you might fail a couple of missions if you don’t move your cyber pistons. With these examples I wanted to show that there are, albeit small, glimpses of good in the game.
Gameplay has several playstyles https://casinostuen.co.uk/bonus/ that the player can switch between at any time. Cyberpunk 2077 can be played like a regular joker, aggressively breaking through crowds of opponents. You can cleverly crawl through ventilation and doorways using stealth, finding lonely enemies and strangling them all one by one. Well, or, being a skilled hacker, instill fear and terror in enemies by hacking enemy equipment, cameras and implants. I love freedom in the style of play, and Cyberpunk is a fairly flexible game in this regard, despite the shooter bias. It’s a pleasure to shoot here: both ordinary firearms and futuristic barrels arouse genuine interest, and you pick up new types of weapons in anticipation of exploring them as soon as possible. The same can be said about implants and other body augmentations. The weapon’s recoil is pleasant, it sounds natural and looks impressive. In general, the arsenal is huge in size, this applies to both conventional guns and futuristic weapons, as well as grenades with melee weapons. Here, I think, every gamer will find something of his own. In such a large open world, of course, there is also transport: we have access to cars, motorcycles, trucks, one infantry fighting vehicle and… Everything! They don’t give you any lethal transport, a taxi or a bus, or, at worst, they don’t even give you control of a broken-down boat (to plow the local waters at least a little). However, driving local transport is still fun (even despite the fact that a patch has been released that allows you to adjust the sensitivity of turning). You almost always skid when turning. Or, on the contrary, you don’t push. This creates inconvenience. Yes, and at high speed he also drives cars and motorcycles, trying to fly off the road. By the middle of the game it becomes so tiring that you spit and use fast travel terminals. By the way, you “summon” your transport, like the Roach, by pressing one key.
Graphically the game has something to brag about. The heart of the game is REDengine4, a new version of the engine that pleased us with its visuals in the third Witcher. If you look at the list of improvements compared to the previous version, this almost drove the next generation. In fact, this is true, but only partly. For example, you won’t find such advanced reflections from Nvidia RTX anywhere at the moment, and even in the open world. Overall, the static picture looks like the real next generation. But all the visual feast ends when you start moving. It’s difficult to explain what exactly the problem is here, but the picture immediately becomes unreal, less clear and artificial. This is especially noticeable in cutscenes, where no less “plastic” movements of the models are added to the plastic picture. The environment also lacks interactivity; there is little you can twist and turn, although the engine provides such an opportunity. Drawing the range of objects leaves much to be desired. During the day the city looks so-so, it’s better not to go out into nature to save your eyes. At night the situation is already better, but it lasts surprisingly very long in the night city of the New United States of America. The dark time of day flies past you in a local sports car and shows two faces from the window, driving off into the distance along with the surroundings of the neon city at night to go on a spree to the local bar. And such a state from: “Wow!" – before: "Well, cool" – accompanies you throughout the game.
Stylistics Cyberpunk 2077 comes from its name. This is cyberpunk in its best traditions. High tech, low life, as they say. The only difference between 2077 and many of its peers in the genre is in the visualization. The cyber prosthetics here resemble something bulky, sloppy, completely covered with chrome or other alloys, deliberately shouting: “Hey, look at me.”!». Ubiquitous advertising that permeates almost the entire infrastructure of the city and ridicules certain stereotypes of society. And the world around you, in general, looks provocative, which captivates your attention even more. The crime rate is off the charts, gang warfare in poor areas borders on business districts, where there is some kind of peaceful life. You can calmly take a walk, have a snack, sell and buy unnecessary things, install new augmentations for yourself and buy cartridges with new types of weapons. There haven’t been such open worlds in the cyberpunk genre for a long time. It was made so painstakingly and tastefully by artists. Sources of inspiration for fans of the genre are immediately visible; off the top of my head I can name “Blade Runner” from director Ridley Scott and “Ghost in the Shell” by Mamoru Oshii. Some locations look so colorful and original that they take your breath away. Take the same level with Voodooists: I haven’t seen such a cool visual of the digital world for a long time, I would like to better study this world of netrunners and find out what is hidden behind the screen, in addition to Alt Cunningham. But, unfortunately, we are allowed to surf the Internet a limited number of times, which is a pity. The game, of course, has an incredibly rich visual diversity, but behind all this beauty there is a ringing emptiness of the open world. Even though there are crowds walking along the street, and vehicles driving here and there along the roads, exploring the local world is, in fact, boring. There are activities in the form of additional tasks, but they won’t show you anything new here. You have already seen similar tasks in a thousand and one games, you approach the zone and it begins: go-help, beat-kill, find-steal, come-steal, save-save. These tasks cover almost the entire map, and when you look at them from a bird’s eye view, assessing the upcoming front of work, your eyes widen, and the thought of an unprecedented variety of tasks populates your head. However, dreams are shattered on the cast-iron ass of reality when it comes to the understanding that these side effects are for the most part of the same type and only have the function of extending the time spent in the game. Of course, not all of them are done perfectly, but only a small part is something interesting and original. So it turns out that in such a beautiful hefty city as Night City, in fact, the player from the main entertainment can only go through the main and secondary tasks, the rest of the content does not deserve time. NPS also do not give out anything interesting and unique, they behave stupidly and sometimes illogically, this applies to both civilians and enemies. BUT, I would like to note that the NPS models themselves are very diverse in terms of visual display. In the crowd there are people: large build, thin, freaks with varying degrees of augmentation, children, people with a normal build, jocks, old and young.
And here I want to move on to the main disadvantages of the game. Numerous bugs and dampness of the game. These two points kill everything that is good about Cyberpunk. Then the facial textures will disappear in the cutscene with Johnny Silverhand, sometimes the animations glitch and the sound disappears, in story missions the transport moves jerkily and unnaturally, as if I were seeing a sketch of an almost finished scene, the crowd disappears when the camera turns sharply. And in some places the game can systematically crash for no particular reason (then an acute shortage of 9 gigabytes is discovered in its distribution, which led to an emergency stop). The crudeness of the project is visible both in the technical part and in the implementation of the promised ideas from the developers, which were cut in the roughest form.
Let’s say we take V’s apartment, in terms of functionality it is the most desirable place for the GG, but as soon as we are pushed into the open world we forget about our so desired home, it is simply not needed here. They don’t talk about it or mention it, and there’s no desire to go there. Guess how many times we will visit the shelter during the game? Three or four times, and then twice according to the plot of the game. You may ask: “What is this strange quibble??" – but, believe me, these miscalculations are smeared thickly throughout the game. You may also ask: “How to solve this problem?“Here are a couple of ideas: make crafting things not in the hero’s inventory, but in the workshop on a workbench at home; make sure that while you sleep in your bed, additional boosts in parameters appear for a while; order any upgrades or improvements for your gadgets and weapons through your home computer. You could organize parties at home, with your friends, or spend dates with your passions in a cozy place, and not in the middle of nowhere.
The main character’s phone is also crookedly implemented, which has four functions: call, receive a call, receive SMS, send SMS. ALL! Let’s be honest, the phone is more similar to the model not of 2077, but to mobile phones of the 2007 model, when push-button phones were still in use (and even then they had much wider functionality in the form of a camera, browser and other multimedia).
Or the Night City metro: at the time of release it was cut out and only tourist fast travel terminals were left. Ideally, I would like to see something like the subway from GTA 4. Well, or at least make fast movement video inserts, like in “Deus Ex: Mankind Devided” and “Spider-Man” from Insomniac Games. Well, if video inserts are not suitable, you can follow the path of “The Darkness” from Starbreeze Studios, making the subway a kind of location where the subway arrived, we sat down, loading screen, arrived at the desired station, got off. Eh… And these solutions are on the surface, but I came up with them, and I’m an idiot. And my ideas certainly should not be better than the developers from CD Projekt, who are paid for this. I just want to show that it was possible to find a bunch of solutions to solve the above problems. The question, of course, remains open as to what prevented us from fixing the problems: lack of time, unwillingness to pay employees more, or lack of hands?
But what CD Project Red invested in was creating musical compositions for the game. In Night City, a very large number of smart performers in various musical styles were driven to radio stations. We pushed them into different thematic waves, and the magic did its job. Of course, all this is a matter of taste, but, as for me, it turned out quite colorful. As for the musical accompaniment, it is also not inferior in quality. The OST was written by Marcin Przybyłowicz (familiar to us from the soundtrack from The Witcher 3) together with composers Piotr Adamczyk and Paul Leonard-Morgan. In this collaboration, the authors produced quite atmospheric dark electro music.
Overall, Cyberpunk 2077 turned out to be a strange game. The problem with the game is that it is only half ready, and this makes it feel incomplete. One moment you get pleasure from the visuals and action, and at another moment your bottom explodes from the empty open world and a terrible number of bugs with unrealized or cut ideas. Yes, I understand the disappointment of many players, CD Projekt RED essentially deceived us. When buying a game on PC and consoles, players expected to receive a technically and qualitatively fully made AAA-class product, but in the end they received a stump, which over time was brought into a more or less digestible form with patches, but the aftertaste of such deception is very difficult to overcome with patches alone.
By the way, nothing has been done to the fullness of the game yet; the open world has been dead and remains so. Needless to say, this is not the norm? By its actions, CD Projekt RED simply lost a colossal share of the trust of players, ready to buy their games with their “eyes closed,” which, in fact, is what happened.
CD Project has a difficult road ahead; it will have to re-gain the trust of players. Do I recommend the game? No more than yes. In general, if you go through only the plot and additional. missions, then you may even think that the game is good, but as soon as you start studying it deeper, this is where it begins to crumble, showing its true insides. However, if you are a crazy fan of cyberpunk aesthetics like me, then you can buy the game for the visual component (if the price doesn’t bother you). To everyone else, I can only say that this entertainment is not worth your attention until it is put in complete order, and you don’t even have to worry about it if you don’t pass it. And on this sad note, I leave you. Khromov was with you, see you soon.
