Why Cyberpunk 2077 was so disappointing

[CT Phipps]

It goes beyond the fact that they assumed everyone in 2020 would have a PS5 or Xbox X and half-assed last generation consoles before, oh no, it turned out those were less than a fraction of the owners that bought it due to Covid shortages and the majority of owners had a buggy ass piece of crap. No, I feel the problem is primarily storytelling and delivering far less than we deserved. This is why I feel the game feels undercooked.

1. I think that a lot of fans created a video game in their head which was completely divorced from the game that was promised and presented. There's people who are complaining about the Militech, Meredith Stout, and Night City PD plotlines that are completely products of their imagination of things that they thought they MIGHT do in the game. Ditto playing the corporations against each other and entirely separate Life Paths. I've actually PLAYED Cyberpunk 2020 and that game is all about being a mercenary criminal so this is silly.

BUT the game developers never gave a clear idea of what the game WAS supposed to be about: which was being a criminal in Night City like the tabletop game.

2. The game is pretty damn shallow and that is something that is entirely on CD Projekt Red. The game's main quest is about 30 hours and that's about 10 hours less than Dragon Age: Origins with far less focus on Companions and strong NPCs that make these sorts of games. Everyone generally likes Panam, Judy, River, and Kerry (they may even LOVE a couple of those) but the game is pretty absent of time to spend with them. Indeed, Johnny is about the only one you do get a decent time with. The plot is also incredibly "meh" in terms of stakes because you dying is something that isn't as motivating a quest as people think.

It's like Arthur Morgan's plot in RD2 except its absent the idea of Arthur trying to save his friends and doing a little good with his life in his little time left. V is just selfishly trying to save himself/herself and that makes him/her less interesting.

3. The game kills a staggering number of characters just before they actually get interesting and the player develops an attachment to them. Jackie, Evelyn, Dex, T-Bugg, and potentially Goro all end up dead before you can really build a storyline about them. In a game as short as this, the NPCs are going to determine whether or not you are going to become immersed in the world. Cutting out the entire first ACTs worth of companions leaves you with having to develop all those attachments again.

4. The game has no actual villain and that is pretty ridiculous in a fucking noir crime game. Yorinobu doesn't even know you're alive and you never face him down, Dex is killed by Goro before you can get revenge, and Adam Smasher has just a few lines here and there. Ironically, I most hated the Voodoo Boys but you deal with them (or don't) too much even when you might want to avenge Evelyn. As such, the game really feels impersonal as not only do you not have love to motivate you (jackie aside), you don't have hate.

5. So much of the game is busywork that is variations on the same theme. You do a massive amount of fighting gangs for the police (why?) and then you do work for 9 or 10 different Fixers who hire you for the same sort of things. While a few of the Fixers have personalities, you could work for half of them and have them be more developed.

6. The plot actually makes no goddamned sense after the Heist. You are supposedly guilty of murdering the world's richest man (Saburo Arasaka) but no one attempts to turn you over to Arasaka after Dex and plenty of these criminals actually hire you to their petty ass jobs. You're also dying and probably don't need a few hundred credits for murdering a local gang lord or kidnapping a woman guilty of manslaughter. In RD2, Arthur Morgan STOPS doing random sidequests and heists when he's dying or at least has the option of forgiving debt because money doesn't matter anymore. Hell, Arasaka never sends any more bounty hunters after you.

 

[Walpknut]

Johnny Silverhand is like the Joker in Arkham Knight, an omnipresecent riff trax that nobody even interacts with that gets grating fast, but unlike the Joker there is no fame or good faith from players to fall on, unless you are one of those weirdo Keanu Reeves hyperfans.

 

[Millim]

I admit that I'm probably the one Cyberpunk 2077 fan out there, but I will say it has plenty of issues that are down to the game itself.

The second act of the game is the worst part, as it forms a very loose story with your character going from one point to the next.
The first act sets up stakes that never pays off.
You can tell that the most amount of work both gameplay wise and narrative wise was put on this first act.

The third act saves it a bit for me, as we gradually get the story that V is effectively dead, and Johnny is taking over his body.

This is where a lot of the emotional payoff comes in, it's just a shame that the first act has hardly any bearing on the rest of the game.
I do like the idea of a heist happening so poorly, and yet there were a large number of factors that could have caused it it go smoothly. It's just a shit hacker was helping you the whole time.

 

[Walpknut]

I would have liked a game that was entirely the first act of this game. That mission about saving victims of human traficking was so taylor made for E3 presentations with even tits on screen it's kinda funny, but at least that kinda had stakes, character interactions and a hint of a bigger world. But thwn Jackie just says he doesn't wanna do a job like that anymore and you get sent to the heist.

 

[Millim]

I would have liked a game that was entirely the first act of this game. That mission about saving victims of human traficking was so taylor made for E3 presentations with even tits on screen it's kinda funny, but at least that kinda had stakes, character interactions and a hint of a bigger world. But thwn Jackie just says he doesn't wanna do a job like that anymore and you get sent to the heist.

Yeah the game is weird, because it comes close to doing interesting things, and I'll argue it succeeds at some points.
But then it's like "Hey! Tits! Amirite?!" And it has about as much maturity on the subject than Bethesda has integrity.

 

[Walpknut]

The ads are such a time bubble of what some 20 something would have thought was a scathing and clever croticism of advertising... In the 80s, but in 2020 it just comes off as completely detached. A lot of the world building and dialogue is like that, but that might be just slavish devotion to capture the style of a TTRPG from the era without thinking on using the genre for what it is supposed to be. It just ends up being pure aesthetics.

 

[Millim]

Yeah, it's a game at odds with itself.
I don't even mind the fact that it presents itself as being as apolitical as possible with the main story, I just wish there was some political tensions, at least in the side content m

 

[CT Phipps]

Yeah the game is weird, because it comes close to doing interesting things, and I'll argue it succeeds at some points.
But then it's like "Hey! Tits! Amirite?!" And it has about as much maturity on the subject than Bethesda has integrity.

One of the odder but not wrong criticisms of the game is that it has a lot less mature use of nudity and a lot less of it period than the Witcher 2. They even use the "x" bandages to cover up the breasts of women even as it has massive violence and murder. I wonder if CDPR got a backlash over the previous use of, GASP, breasts.

 

[Walpknut]

It's like: Human traffickers to maybe explore the concept of dehumanization? A Hybrid of mercenaries, paramedics and insurance agents to drive further the divide between the rich and poor? Developing a friendship with a person you started at odds with and might change their outlook on the world around them? Tits? Yes please I want more.

CBP2077: mmm can't do, how about a story about getting mind cancer from a usb drive and most of the cast has nothing to do in it?

 

[CT Phipps]

It's like: Human traffickers to maybe explore the concept of dehumanization? A Hybrid of mercenaries, paramedics and insurance agents to drive further the divide between the rich and poor? Developing a friendship with a person you started at odds with and might change their outlook on the world around them? Tits? Yes please I want more.

There's a few stories in the game that would make better games than the actual game-game. River's story about tracking down a serial killer and saving his nephew may be cliche but it's actually got real stakes, choices, and characterization.

Judy's story IS the best part of the game because having V be Dwight from Sin City and rescuing a bunch of hookers so they can be independent is EXACTLY what I wanted from the game.

I especially like the moral ambiguity of it too.

Bizarrely, I'd also say that helping Kerry Eurodyne try to kill Us Cracks is better cyberpunk. Its so fucking insane, like Keith Richards wanting to kill Babymetal, that it actually has edge.

CBP2077: mmm can't do, how about a story about getting mind cancer from a usb drive and most of the cast has nothibg to do in it?

That's what I was getting in there that the stakes are spectacularly low in the quest. Your motivation is saving your own life, which you can't do, but there's no option to do anything with your life if you can't save your life. Which you can't because the game reveals that all of your efforts are in vain.

I mean, is there nothing V has a motivation about?

* Give money to Jackie's mom?
* Reconnect with their family (if they exist)?
* Kill some bastards that they were wronged by.
* Sacrifice yourself heroically to do something good with your time left?

There's been quite a few games that deal with dying and V has perhaps the least interesting and most selfish take on it. Which is weird because you'd believe that was under your control over it.

 

[Walpknut]

It's so funny how you don't even confront Yorinobu at all in the game. Imagine a version of Fallout New Vegas where Benny is never confronted and you just find him crucified and then the war in Hoover Dam happens but off screen because you were just interested in finding a cure for Bulletheaditis and you couldn't find it. Roll credits.

 

[RangerBoo]

One of the biggest problems I had wasn't really the game itself (You pretty much did a good job of covering that Phipps) but how CDPR expected people to have next gen hardware at a time when those were all in massive short supply due to COVID and crypto mining. For all the shit I give TLoU2 (and I will give it more shit when I do the livestream of it one of these days) the one thing I will praise it for is how well it runs on the PS4. They took that engine to it's limit and were able to work wonders with it. In contrast to Cyberpunk 2077, I get the feeling that CDPR originally was going to have the game be for next gen. However, they promised everyone before that the game would be for the PS4 and XBox One era so they found themselves in a rock and a hard place.

 

[Walpknut]

Also the "It's too next gen for this world!" thing doesn't hold water when we are 7 months after release and there isn't a PS5 version of the game, and the patches have removed events and npcs from the PC version as well and the game lacks mechanics games on the PS2 managed to have.

 

[Millim]

Yeah, even now, working in a Game shop, it's almost impossible to get a PS5.

Sony have said to us that we probably won't be able to get them from them until next year.

 

[RangerBoo]

Yeah, even now, working in a Game shop, it's almost impossible to get a PS5.

Sony have said to us that we probably won't be able to get them from them until next year.

Pretty much the same for RTX graphics cards unless you are looking to fork over 1k+ on a card. According to my local computer shop they told me that Nvidia and others told them that prices won't get back to normal until some time next year as well. XBox is also the same too according to a friend of my step dad who works at Microsoft's headquarters. There this too many people with too much time on their hands and Sony, Microsoft and Nvidia can't keep up with demand.

 

[Millim]

Pretty much the same for RTX graphics cards unless you are looking to fork over 1k+ on a card. According to my local computer shop they told me that Nvidia and others told them that prices won't get back to normal until some time next year as well. XBox is also the same too according to a friend of my step dad who works at Microsoft's headquarters. There this too many people with too much time on their hands and Sony, Microsoft and Nvidia can't keep up with demand.

There's a massive chip shortage that's driven prices up.
My friend bought one back in October and he is still waiting to get it. Every week he tells us he has moved by about 2 or 3 places

 

[CT Phipps]

Also the "It's too next gen for this world!" thing doesn't hold water when we are 7 months after release and there isn't a PS5 version of the game, and the patches have removed events and npcs from the PC version as well and the game lacks mechanics games on the PS2 managed to have.

There's a single version of the game that runs adequately on PS5 and was a complete unworkable mess on PS4. So I'd say it is the PS5 version.

But yes, the game was flat out not finished by the time it was released. It oddly reminds me of Fallout 4 except much-much worse in terms of seeing where they clearly had plans to do things but stripped them out at the last minute. I wouldn't be surprised if the game was a year or two behind schedule to getting all the stuff they wanted done. They then ripped them out and tried to patch it over but the result was empty and the game STILL didn't work.

In contrast to Cyberpunk 2077, I get the feeling that CDPR originally was going to have the game be for next gen. However, they promised everyone before that the game would be for the PS4 and XBox One era so they found themselves in a rock and a hard place.

I actually think it's closer to the game being in full-on development hell for a console generation. Apparently, they started work on it before The Witcher 3 (8 years ago was when the first trailer hit) but to get that game ready they moved the entirety of the Cyberpunk 2077 team to work on TW3 to get it polished. Except the Cyberpunk 2077 release date never moved and they only stopped working on TW3 after Blood and Wine. Then suddenly they were like 3 years behind.

So the game isn't done and they're now close to the next generation. But they pretend everything is fine and rush the game out in the remaining time to 2020.

 

[Millim]

Personally, I would have just preferred it if they delayed the game by a few years, not show anything off until now (it was only at E3 2018 it started getting bigger traction) and then put it on the next gen consoles.

But hey, they gotta make the shareholders happy, you know, the guys who want the game out as soon as possible and then act hurt when it doesn't do as well as they wanted.

 

[CT Phipps]

Personally, I would have just preferred it if they delayed the game by a few years, not show anything off until now (it was only at E3 2018 it started getting bigger traction) and then put it on the next gen consoles.

But hey, they gotta make the shareholders happy, you know, the guys who want the game out as soon as possible and then act hurt when it doesn't do as well as they wanted.

The problem here is that they had in fact delayed it for years. 8 years is a long development time. They had also promised it for another console generation. The shareholders and fans had been made promises. They also had received subsidiaries by the government to do Cyberpunk 2077 too because Poland is weird.

Maybe they should have hired the staff necessary to do both games or at least better balanced their resource allotment, no matter how awesome Blood and Wine was.

 

[Millim]

I mean, Poland's economics were built off the success of Witcher 3, so that doesn't surprise me.