Jan. 16, 2021, 12:03 p.m.
Night City, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down
Thoughts on Cyberpunk 2077, with apologies to LCD Soundsystem
Good Screen
Cyberpunk 2077 hasn’t become my most-played game on Steam by accident; I honestly, unironically enjoyed a lot of it. Night City is gorgeous, Keanu Reeves’ turn as Johnny Silverhand is honest-to-god fun, and the game’s side quests have the kind of depth you’d expect from the studio that created The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
At the same time, it’s hard to call it a good game. For this edition of Good Screen, I want to talk about the things that’re on my mind after 46 hours in Night City.
The thing that got me about The Witcher 3 was that its world felt massive, but it did so much with it at the same time. Small settlements felt unique; massive cities felt impersonal, but could still make you feel the consequences of small actions. Both kinds of place provided you with new odd jobs to drag you into them, and you could drown in an ocean of little noticeboard side quests.
If the continent of The Witcher 3 was an ocean, then Cyberpunk’s Night City is a paddling pool.
For all its gorgeous visuals, Night City is a barren, dull place, a cookie-cutter open world setting that could have been taken from any seven-out-of-ten title from the last ten years. Random buildings on streets invite you to open their doors, only to instantly tell you they’re locked. Beautifully-rendered arcade machines refuse to take a leaf out of the Yakuza 0 playbook and become something you can interact with.
You can tell Cyberpunk had ambitions to be an expansive, immersive open world in the vein of the better Grand Theft Auto games; unfortunately, it falls far short of the mark. It doesn’t help that the game’s open world feels like it’s being held together with prayers and Duct Tape. Pay enough attention and you’ll see NPCs are just walking in circles, doing the same interaction over and over. Cars on the road will only see big obstacles — so they’ll run you over, and hold up a block’s worth of traffic if you park your car in front of them.
In a moment that made me consider the words ludonarrative dissonance for the first time in a half decade, the game’s story will tell you that the police won’t investigate a dead body for a working day, while the game’s world will spawn a half dozen trigger-happy cops if you run a random civvy over.
For all the attention Cyberpunk’s had for being a mess of bugs and glitches — and it is full of bugs and glitches — it feels like the game’s biggest problem is in the stuff that can’t be patched without changing the game entirely. It’s an open-world game whose open world can’t justify its own existence.
A note on bugs, while we’re here. I’ve been playing on PC, so haven’t had to deal with sub-par framerates and a tendency to lock up my system which seems to pervade the console releases. At the same time, a lot of obvious bugs cropped up.
On one occasion, two NPCs called me at the same time, popped into the same Holo-call window, and started talking over each other. While streaming the game over Discord to friends, a joytoy’s textures didn’t load in, so I proceeded to have sex with a character from a PS1 game. Summoning my own cars would have them either drive straight past me, trigger a random car crash, or spawn them in mid-air, as if the game’s taxi firm had decided its cars could float.
All of this is before we get into the game’s broken audio; characters would stop talking for a few lines, guns and crashing cars would miraculously become silent, and radio stations would just stop playing music mid-song to make way for the randomly-scheduled news headlines.
Look, none of this is honestly a deal breaker; I can handle a game being a little bit weird, especially one of this size and ambition. The problem is that this game wants to take itself so damn seriously, and every one of these bugs made it unintentionally funny.
Cyberpunk isn’t a game I regret buying at full price, but it’s not one that I can recommend — at least not right now. Look, if you can lower your expectations, put up with some bugs, and play on something other than a PS4 or Xbox One, then you’ll have a good time, but honestly, it’s worth waiting.
I just wish they’d kept to their 2013 teaser trailer promise of delivering it “when it’s ready”. Seven years on, the finished product is far from that; it’s an undercooked mess, high on its own hype, an enjoyable story packed in a clunky, distinctly last-gen video game.