Intro and Overview
I find Cyberpunk 2077 sort of puzzling. Like many things that elicit strong reactions from people, I feel moderately about it, not because I found it middling throughout but because its highs were countered by persistent lows and, yes, some of it was middling. The world, the characters, and the relationships can reach some great highs, but the general clunkiness and incongruity takes away from it at every turn. Guns disappear from characters’ hands, even after all the bug fixes. A lot of the voice acting is good, but V’s leaves something to be desired. I liked the game, but it’s simultaneously too straightforward a main path and too vast outside of the main story to feel like I’ll be revisiting any time soon. It’s just not a smooth enough traversal experience, despite how pretty parts of it are to look at. It’s astounding what a labor it must have been to create; the sheer size and scope of it; the sound design; the depth of the soundtrack in the radio stations (playing jazz while driving in the rain is one of its best experiences available early).
It took me about 13 months to put 60 hours onto my first Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough. Part of this is my persistent falling back to FIFA 21. Part of it is that there were other narrative games I was playing like Elden Ring and Fallen Order, and games I got paid to review like Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands (which I’ve been revisiting and might get to writing about), Weird West, and Trek to Yomi. But some credit must be given as well to Cyberpunk’s buggy nature (beyond its catastrophic brokenness at release) and general unevenness. I bough it about one year after it released, during an $11 Black Friday sale at Game Stop. And after all that it seemed worth waiting five months for the next generation update once I knew that was coming and felt I was playing an unfinished game.
I waited until the Action Button review where Tim Rogers said the game was ‘pretty good for something made entirely out of problems.’ I found much of what Tim Rogers had to say about the over-engineered skill tree to be true, and we’ll get to that. But another thing that stuck out to me from that review was the idea, as influenced by impact on side quest availability, that the closest thing to a canonical V was one played as a woman, so that’s what I chose.
To that end, amid its many updates, the game eventually included the option to change the appearance the player sets at the beginning at either a mirror or a ripper-doc (the game’s back-alley and storefront surgeons that can add and change cybernetic implants). This includes changing the genitalia. The fact that you could have a large or small penis, a vagina, decorated pubic hair, and different sizes of breasts were all caught in the press before release. After the update, all of this and more could be changed at-will by going to a bathroom mirror or a ripper doc.
What couldn’t be changed was character voice or body type, and it is those two things which determine how the world of Cyberpunk 2077 treats your character’s gender. Most remarks are down to the voice, though a couple of characters’ romance possibilities are also affected by body type. Genital choice (or hiding the genitals with underwear in the character designer) are a matter solely of player expression that doesn’t figure into the game’s romances or, sort of more confusingly, optional sex scenes.
Lifepaths and General Design Ethos
Another part of starting the game is choosing one of three life paths - I was waiting until I got through a second playthrough or take my present V through the two alternative pathways, but I’m no longer certain that’s necessary, or at least that it won’t happen for a while. There are five major endings – three ending paths based on a choice players make after the point of no return, plus an option that is only unlocked if you’ve got a good enough relationship with the former rockstar-turned-terrorist cohabitating in V’s body and played by Keanu Reeves, Johnny Silverhand. I’m curious about the other paths, but my *roleplaying* experience is tied up with what I chose and it’s harder every day to justify revisiting those options.
I started with the Corpo background, which meant V was a counterintelligence operative for military contractor megacorporation Arasaka. Her boss went for a power play, frying members of a mid-level management commission (literally electrocuting their brains plugged into an advanced zoom meeting) during a hybrid remote/in-person meeting, and people from another part of the weapons contractor (subordinates of a rival supervisor) show up to retaliate and put V out of commission when V goes to hire a hitman through her friend Jackie (or is he to be the hitman?). She’s robbed of her technology and cash, saved by her homie from the gutter. The other starting options are as a nomad (the high-tech equivalent of a Mad Max wanderer, they survive on the central California desert outskirts of Night City) or street kid (starting from the slums). To me, as my head filled in the blanks of why this corporate hacker-assassin’s best friend was a mercenary with gang ties, it became obvious that V had climbed the corporate ladder out of the slum; it’s not like other corpo types were hanging at the sort of jukebox bars we frequent.
One big flaw in this early section is that V develops her ground-level reputation as a mercenary in the background, basically – audiences are shown a montage of doing jobs and developing relationships. V and Jackie also become friends with a fixer-hacker who dies in short order as you end the prologue. I can’t remember her name.
Players can get through the story in probably 30 hours or so. It took me 60. I plumbed many depths, if not all. The game is assembled like a combination of two or three types of open worlds. The obvious ones are GTA (car-and-city-focused crime simulator) and the Witcher 3 (Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red’s successful predecessor game), but the bloat and crowded map which follow combining these styles allude to the Ubisoft house style of Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed as another point of reference.
I didn’t realize how close I was to finishing around the 30-hour mark until a Twitter mutual consultation, and then I began to get really invested in developing relationships with characters and exploring the world. There were a few hours where I just walked to random icons for jobs and gigs (a fuzzy, subtle distinction) and met, for instance, an apparently self-aware vending machine overjoyed to have someone to talk to, or a meditating Buddhist who used the in-game virtual reality technology known as “braindances” or “BDs” (which V commonly uses for investigations along different major and minor quest lines) to share communing with nature.
At one point I was so frustrated with my trash entry-level car that I was using the mass transit fast travel between objectives, but once I started unlocking cooler cars through missions or the occasional purchase from a fixer about town, my perspective on driving and, thus, exploration changed. Even just walking around – which I started high on and got low on – regained some level of awe and prestige as I visited the various neighborhoods and let the distinctiveness of the locales sink in. The sunlight hits different in Corpo Plaza than the mall in Pacifica or the outskirt deserts. And when you’re at a bar trying to pick up a side quest from a guy worried his wife is cheating on him and you’re threatened with a fight from a Valentinos gang member because the local area fixer sent you to mess up one of their operations on a different side quest, it adds some depth and dynamism.
I think about the Valentinos in the context of the fact that you first meet them at Jackie’s funeral. He was an associate of the gang even if no longer a fully fledged member, and at his funeral they say to come look them up sometime. Oddly enough, the priest who acts as a fixer in the area, sometimes working against them, is also someone you meet a Jackie’s funeral. One last note about the funeral – you get to contribute to making an ofrenda, and that was an experience I hadn’t had in a game before.
I also think about the Valentinos in comparison and contrast with other factions. There are the meathead muscle junkie Animals, who left no lasting impact; 6th Street – war veterans who feel like they ought to have been more connected to the ex-soldier roots of some of the Nomads; the Tiger Claws – a Yakuza-derived street gang; the Mox (sex workers looking out for each other); and the Voodoo Boys. While the fixer in the Valentino neighborhood seems to mostly work against them, the fixer in the Tiger Claws neighborhood seems to mostly work for them. And both, like the Voodoo Boys, fit an obvious ethnic profile.
“The Voodoo Boys”
The Voodoo Boys were originally created by Mike Pondsmith (the black man that created the Cyberpunk TTRPG) as white hackers appropriating Haitian culture and recreated as Haitian refugee migrants that reappropriated it when they moved to town. What’s most interesting about any conversation around the name and depiction when it comes to stereotypes as part of worldbuilding or representation as part of art is that the Voodoo Boys don’t go by that name. That’s what other people call them. But you only uncover this information if you ask Placide, your Voodoo Boys contact, about the name. When queried, he says they didn’t invent it; when asked why it’s used, he says to ask the people that use it. It’s instructive about the game and the critical analysis it’s inspired, the external critical circumstances reflecting a reflexive lack of curiosity based upon an instinctive shunning or judgment of what is presumed to be problematic without deeper consideration. Though in this case the deeper consideration is just waiting around to ask a character questions when you don’t specifically have to, which is pretty normal player behavior in an open-world RPG.
I don’t understand people that complain about not getting the full context of a story or world that they rush through. It’s a conversation separate from but connected to that of whether games need to be this big – they don’t, but if they give you all this space to explore and you beeline the critical path, you’re going to miss things that make the world richer, something even as simple as a supporting character telling you that all of your assumptions around who he and his people are and what they believe are necessarily limited by an outsider perspective that you cannot correct. This isn’t one of those games where you earn the trust of every faction and unify them or even pit them against one another. V is alive and meeting the people they do because of happenstance and trying to turn bad luck into good opportunities. As audience members and critics, we can make assumptions or demands about who is allowed to tell stories about what, and who is allowed to put what characters in their work, but our analysis and understanding will always be constrained by how much we attempt to engage with the work.
For my part, I didn’t much care for the Voodoo Boys. I thought they were interesting, but I mostly just didn’t like that they left V for dead twice. The initial operation for them leads to a confrontation with a hacker-cop (NetWatch) that warns they’ve implanted V with a virus. As a jilted ex-corpo already burned by the system, I couldn’t afford to trust a cop. Turned out he was right – the Placide used me to fry every NetWatch operative online and then I got killed to boot; I was resurrected by Johnny again, luckily enough. The Voodoo Boys offer very little in the way of remorse or contrition, but they do use V as bait to meet Johnny’s ex-lover superhacker who’s transcended into a sort of AI-goddess that’s lost much of her humanity. They’re nearly as surprised to see V return as they were the first time, and were stringing V along the whole time; never had the offered cure for the slow death of the construct fusing with V's brain. I nearly rampaged through their HQ.
While I can’t remember whether Tiger Claws called V gaijin, I did notice Valentinos call her gringa even though my V was – I thought obviously – black. The Haitian refugee gang treating her as an outsider regardless made all the sense in the world to me.
Their adopted home of Pacifica was a place I didn’t return except to drive through once our business was done. They left a bad taste in my mouth, but in a way that made me feel connected to my character and the world she inhabited.
Open-World Sci-Fi and Johnny Silverhand
The exploration of the city grew on me as gigs and jobs operated as channels for sci-fi short stories, interesting thought experiments about the way technological advancement and heightened corporate control of the government change everyday life, from food to combat sports to municipal elections. It’s unfortunate that the gameplay sometimes lets these experiences down – the sentient taxi service and the choices you make about reincorporating the erstwhile children (subordinate cars) back into the father construct are fun to mull over conceptually, but rather flat as far as what you actually do in the game. Drive great distances, beat up a car; in the second stage, there’s platforming that’s a bit more interesting, but still generally clunky.
Does this feel disjointed to read? It was disjointed to experience, as if three or four different good core game ideas got stapled together into a mess. I didn’t hate the driving like some, but it wasn’t exemplary. The gunplay was serviceable, but not great. And while every big swing side quest (like the one where you participate in a felon’s volunteered brain dance crucifixion recording) will have its lovers and detractors, there are lots of middle-of-the-road forgettable tasks that are, in effect, a grind to level and clear the map.
Open world games have a real problem with urgency, as a rule; Cyberpunk 2077 exemplifies this issue. Central quests almost always indicate that the protagonist is on a running clock; that’s especially true in a game where the protagonist is being killed by the construct that first revived them after they died on a smash-and-grab job. But if you mainline the game, you’ll miss out on everything interesting about it; the street racer widow on a quest for revenge, the braindance artist who wants to protect sex workers… of course it’s also a problem how repetitive some of the smaller jobs can get, but even they flesh out the world and through the different ways you can solve them create a novel experience “Do I want to fight through this whole building to get to that corner office?” “Can I knock everyone out remotely?” “What if I buy leg upgrades for 40000 Eurodollars and jump the three stories into the safe room I was worried about accessing?”
Even the substitute for new game-plus – after the credits roll, the game provides you a save file without Johnny at your last checkpoint before the point of no return, breaking immersion with the story to provide an opportunity to more reengage with the world – inadvertently acknowledges that the game might have been better without its central narrative gimmick. I didn’t mind Keanu’s performances as Johnny Silverhand as much as some people; he’s a very talented actor. His popular conception as a swell guy that’s dealt with tremendous personal emotional trauma in the wake of success has nothing to do with the characters he played, this one least of all. The parasocial celebrity construct of Teddy Bear Keanu doesn’t make Silverhand such an obscene break from his previous performances. Loathe though we may be to admit it, Johnny Utah and Johnny Mnemonic and Neo and John Constantine and Ted Logan and Jack Traven and Shane Falco and Alex Wyler are all distinct roles, J first names notwithstanding.
I found Silverhand generally obnoxious, out of touch, and self-absorbed, but that was clearly all intentional. The possible development of a relationship with him over the course of the game or even giving him V’s body *is* conceptually interesting. It’s just somewhat at odds with uncovering every mercenary nook and cranny. It does figure interestingly *into* some of those adventures – some tied to Johnny’s old band, like him fawning over a busking guitarist, seeing an old venue he performed at has been turned into a restaurant, and discovering a collector has some old merchandise; or otherwise just commentary. But the urgency of “I need to remove this man from my head because he is part of a machine that is killing me” is certainly undercut with multiple tiers of odd jobs from various contacts throughout the city.
Across these adventures, my V went through phases in her morality, and even in how she did combat and traversal. I mentioned the hydraulic legs (there are two options – one that gives a double-jump feature, and the one I stuck with, which provides a hold-for-super-jump feature), but I also added the mantis blades (giant metal appendages shaped similar to a praying mantis’s arms which extend out of V’s arms) because they seemed uniquely of the setting and just very cool. I did at one point also try the wrist-held grenade launcher and the electric wire that can be used as a whip; the latter is probably a close second to the blades.
Primarily, though, my V was a netrunner, that is to say a hacker that could shut down enemy cyberware systems from afar – this includes knocking people unconscious or killing them instantaneously (at a high enough level) but also otherwise causing them to overheat, to lose control of their limbs, to knock them out of combat readiness, to disable their ability to hear, and more. I figure, I’m playing Cyberpunk, I should try a style of combat not easily approximated by Skyrim or Mass Effect (or GTA or Far Cry or etc.). Being able to hack a camera, change to a camera in another room, and from there hack opposition, causing them to go unconscious or die depending on what I selected, was sweet. And when bodies start dropping and you hear an enemy intone, scared “Oh shit, they’ve got a net-runner!” or something of the like, it feels empowering and engaging. One of my favorites was the “contagion” ability which, with a high enough level version of the quickhack (like weapons, these abilities go from common to uncommon to rare to iconic to legendary) and a few of the feats leveled up, would just bounce back and forth between adversaries until they died. One feature is that if you’re going up against a team that has someone with similar quick-hacking abilities, they’ll start tracking V’s location once they get hit with a virus, or someone on their network does; but, if you get good enough at it, you can dispose of them before it finishes tracking.
Once I realized I could craft quickhacks instead of buying them, things went up another level for me. I was always aware it was possible, but never how much easier it makes everything (think about crafting and augmenting weapons or making potions in Skyrim). It was probably in the back third of the playthrough that I started doing this, and it really elevated the gameplay. My V was nigh unstoppable. Upgrading her cyberdeck to expand options for violence was also great. And higher in the tiers from things like “overheat” (which does nonlethal heat damage to opponents and has multiple tiers) and “ping” (which just shows you where everyone on a network is) are things like “suicide” and “cyberpsychosis.” The first is what it sounds like; it’s pretty dark to watch and makes V appear mercilessly powerful. The latter is interesting because it’s a warning in the lore of the game that’s a major part of the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime – with too much cyberware and external technology tied into a person’s nervous system, they lose their mind and become violent.
It would have been a good story option to have player characters at risk of losing their mind from too many upgrades. It was no less brutal and satisfying to set gang members or corporate soldiers or – on one covert occasion – police against their compatriots; unlike “turncoat” spells in some games (Fable initially comes to mind, but it's a common enough ability across RPGs) it doesn’t time out; the opponent you’ve set up isn’t turning back around to sanity, they’re just going until they kill all their buds or their buds all kill them.
You could also make V a giant machine-gunner, or lean even more heavily into stealth than I did but substitute the tech-heavy focus for a melee-heavy one. You could put points into Body and use the Sandevistan nervous system-fused machine that allows your character to move super-fast around people, something else showcased in the anime. There are a lot of ways to customize the protagonist for this big world, but sometimes it feels like too much to no end. Upgrades to the skill-tree, as well as weapon modifications, sometimes make infinitesimal differences to what your character can do moment-to-moment. On the object side, it’s easy enough to navigate, but you end up with so much extra loot. The skills and feats at least build and stack in such a way that you’ll eventually see a result. With weapon mods, it’s sometimes an imperceptible difference, but there’s also such an overwhelming amount of loot that I found myself replacing weapons much more often than buying or upgrading them. In fact, even when I got to the point that I was only keeping legendary- or occasional unique/iconic-graded weapons, I still had to keep some hidden in my stash (accessible via vehicle trunk or apartment weapons room) to avoid over-encumbrance.
It's easy to get into an embarrassment of riches with this game. I’ve never been the best at inventory management in RPGs – it’s a reflection of the bad habits of holding onto things in real life. And I similarly never seem to get my money together in games as quickly as some people. But I remember when Cyberpunk’s internal economic arc went from needing to scrape things together to having more money than I know what to do with. There was a boss fight during the Arasaka parade (a major story inflection point that’s much further along the main path than I thought) that I had to play like four times (the X-Box crashed twice) and on one of those goes, I realized I could simply use my big tactical rifle instead of my other weapons. That’s the last time I remember running out of ammo, which had been a problem to that point. And once I passed the €$70,000 mark, the money seemed to always stick around longer than I could find reason to get rid of it. Once I discovered some quest icons on the map led to free cars with little database entry stories (instead of BioShock-like recordings, the game leaves short stories in the form of data shards, similar to reading through entries in a Fallout computer terminal; here with finding cars it’s a massacre at a film scene in the desert in one place, in another a Batman analog with an all-black hypercar in a cave I’d explored but a storage container I’d overlooked, and others, including at least two that came as rewards of more regular quests) there wasn’t much need to buy a new one. Though I might still, out of curiosity, buy a fancy apartment in Corpo Plaza in this quasi-new-game-plus mode.
Speaking of which, I wonder how the new Idris Elba-helmed DLC, where Johnny clearly plays a prominent role in critiquing V as V is recruited by the government, will figure into the existing storyline. But that’s a problem for another time.
Back to those Endings
So, I talked about how there are a variety of endings. Some allow you to stay in Night City or leave it and return to it. My ending had V leaving the city with her girlfriend, Judy Alvarez, and platonic bestie Panam Palmer along with the rest of the Aldecaldos nomad clan. The combat and driving required in this epilogue are relatively minor. While I have mixed feelings (leaning positive) on Panam’s characterization, the fact that Judy left with V was meaningful to me. Their romance plot, where Judy shows V the underwater ruins of her childhood hometown, actually got me, made me care about the character and her place in the world. People say V is a cipher – necessarily, as a character you inhabit with little personality or skills that you don’t choose – but I thereby felt like the choices players make about who V is and what they do can be satisfying. I was reading Luke Plunkett’s second reevaluation of the game – he didn’t like Judy or Panam, from what I can recall of the adjacent Twitter thread, and said that the ending his V deserved was trusting Arasaka, ergo being kept in a space station by them to experiment on and test the construct.
My V, having been nearly killed by Arasaka as an employee and trying to make do in the world, couldn’t return to old masters. A side quest that snuck up on me includes ta former coworker calling and asking for help. When you meet up, he pulls a gun. Before I could even select a dialog option to try to talk him down, I’d already pulled up my quickhacks and incapacitated him out of reflex. He represented a shadow of Arasaka tower, the human detritus it leaves behind through the endless pursuit of profit and its use of corporate espionage and violent mercenaries. This was a moment that pushed my V into more violence, not by story consequences of the quest but gameplay decisions which represented my own feelings about the city.
When the option came, it made sense to play nice with the Arasaka heiress when she invites V to talk; to act as if V intended to reenter the fold. Almost always taking the unique Corpo life path dialog options was part of my playthrough, after all. But to actually commit to a decision to go back to Arasaka? An available decision on the board, but not in the mind of the V that I had created.
Was the alternative path with the Aldecaldos satisfying? Well, it seemed too easy to get past Arasaka goons getting into their construction tunnel in the desert, but then we did have a stolen tank, it was a victory that required much sacrifice, and I did have to fight the giant legendary cyborg Adam Smasher, in the end. (Which reminds me – one thing that confounds me about this game is how aging works; I guess in the future with advanced technology someone like Rogue could look like she’s in her 30s when she’s in her 70s and there’s no telling what Smasher looks like because he barely resembles any connection to humanity.)
I still wonder about choosing to go live on the internet – V has the option to go beyond the “blackwall” that separates the contemporary internet with the old net, where Johnny’s ex-situationship superhacker Alt Cunningham has transcended beyond human form. I want to see what that’s like, but the V that developed a relationship with Judy and a family with the Aldecaldos couldn’t give that up so Johnny could cruise in her body. When I wrote about the game for the first time, and its viewpoint on revolution, I was only probably 10 or 15 hours into the game. In the end I felt like the game did allow some small opportunities for rebellion and community, but even then, in the end, you’re not trying to change the society (though there is some good commentary on what our world is and is becoming) you’re just opting out.
Cyberpunk 2077 has some clunkiness and unevenness and could be more focused. I didn’t hate the driving but thought lack of a backup camera angle was a ridiculous oversight. I though the shooting was fine, in the tradition of RPG-based shooting, most reminding me of a better version of the PS360 generation Fallout games. Better than those, if not on part with modern looter-shooters. I enjoyed quickhacking, and the fact I could reset all my skills at any time almost makes a new save seem redundant as far as trying different gameplay, and I’m not sure how much differently I’d like to play through the story. It’s hard to adequately underscore how putting you back in the world to clean up the map without Johnny but erasing the ending story choices feels weird and arcade-like, providing options but removing consequence.
Regardless, I had my fun in Night City. Cyberpunk 2077 is not a game that changes what I think is possible with videogames, though it is a showcase for how to squander good will and a big budget. A decade might be too long to develop gaming software. You pick up and put down trends and create something that feels dated. That the ballooned budgets of triple-A titles demand these increasingly long development cycles are a problem. Hopefully, with the world already built, the next Cyberpunk game can hone what was good and cut some of the chaff from the wheat. Could you have leaner gameplay with a more robust story and characters, or just tighten it a little? Could you add a third-person mode? After all this time, Cyberpunk 2077 is still lacking polish, and isn’t the defining example of any of its genres. But it’s hard for me to believe I won’t ever return to Night City.