3 months have gone by and finally CDPR have released the long awaited E3 2019 gameplay demo for Cyberpunk 2077. Now, I feel that at this point I no longer need to press upon you how excited I personally am about this game. Cyberpunk seems to be a polyamorous marriage between all my favourite aspects of video games into one supergame that isn't even been sold by some shady extortionate company like... almost every other AAA company nowadays. The fact that this game, being made by this company, ever made it to production is astonishing when you think about the amount of smaller, and just as promising projects, that get snuffed out in their infancy by money men.
Early this year I wrote a pretty extensive blog detailing the many accounts I had heard of the 50 minute E3 gameplay demo and everything that CDPR revealed through it. This was the same amount of research I had do for the initial Cyberpunk E3 demo (Although I didn't have my blog going at that time) and that had still managed to blow me away, so I was over the moon for this demo. I loved the way how CDPR let their game do the talking and provided mere context for that original 50 minutes, allowing the viewers to paint their own stories in the frame; when I saw that CDPR promised another demo I expected the same treatment, obviously I was mistaken.
Things grew more uncertain when CDPR started doing their tours around the world to gaming shows and then revealed that the public demo would not be shown off the same that they showed it E3, but a 15 minute supercut. I must admit I was disappointed but didn't let it dampen my excitement, cutting the trailer down to its salient wow-moments seemed to make sense and would keep things focused. I kept this optimism up all the way until yesterday when they released the thing, and I was less than impressed. I was so unenthused that I couldn't even stomach the Q&A afterwards, I stuck about for 30 minutes before going to off to play some Battlefront.
To be fair it was mostly my own fault for ruining this trailer. CDPR opted to showcase this demo through a highly narrated and cut-up walkthrough that simply jumped from scene to scene (Out of order, I may add.) whilst talking about systems that I already knew about. I'm no 'incredibly-connected-industry-pundit' either, I'm just a ass on the Internet who writes blogs and I still knew about everything in this trailer months before they put it up. I dispelled the illusion for myself by doing my research and I suppose I have no one to blame for that but myself. That being said, I still don't think the reveal was that impressive.
I have since rewatched the footage, whilst doing my best to ignore the narrator, and I have been able to appreciate it a bit more. (By transplanting my experiences with similar games and pondering how this one can expand and divert my expectations.) Although I still have some nagging concerns about this game and what the end product will actually be, the kind of nagging which at this point will only be answered when the game finally comes out. But I'm sick of being a Debbie downer, let me get into breaking down the beats of the trailer (again) and seeing the things that I really liked and maybe some predictions into where I believe the story will go.
The 'Deep dive' (good joke) demo started at the end of the gameplay slice, with V being piled into an ice bath and sent into the 'net'. Visually, this reminds me of the ramshackle organ farm from the first demo, so I'm already dubious about how trustworthy the Voodoo boys (the featured gang of the trailer) actually are. At this point the players are guided through the basics of Netrunning by the Voodoo boys' leader; Brigitte, as she shows off a plot device that I believe with have paramount importance to the overarching plot; (Or at least what I believe will be the meta-struggle of this game) The Black Wall.
For those unfamiliar, the Black Wall is a new plot thread added to Cyberpunk lore by Mike Pondsmith's newest release of his tabletop RPG; Cyberpunk Red. (No relation to CDPR, the naming was pure coincidence.) Red is designed to bridge the time gap between Cyberpunk 2020 and the upcoming game by explaining how the world ended up in the state it will become. This means explaining how new gun manufactures popped up, where certain new gangs fit in and, why Netrunning in Cyberpunk 2077 is so more hands on then it is in the tabletop. (With 'Netrunning' being the act of physically interacting with the Internet, usually with the intention to perform a hack.)
In the tabletop, Netrunning can be performed practically anywhere due to the interconnectivity of the Internet, essentially allowing a skilled hacker to conduct an entire mission without ever leaving the safety of their home office. Of course, this wouldn't exactly work in stealth based action game where encounters are meant to be balanced, designing every mission to be completable without any physical interaction would be far too great a workload. So CDPR and Mike Pondsmith made the decision to tweak how Netrunning works and they invented the Black Wall to achieve this. As I understand it, the Black Wall was instituted after some catastrophic incident wherein the hack of the century was pulled off, all major Internet firewalls were breached and information lost all market value for a time. In order to combat this, the entire structure of the Internet was reworked and remade, with all the old infrastructure being hid behind an impenetrable super-firewall known as the Black Wall. Now, all 'nets' exist on decentralized networks that require an individual to physically interact with the area in order to 'jack in'.
In the mission shown, they allude to the importance of this Black Wall to the Voodoo boys nearer to the end. The narrator explains that Netwatch (The body designed to, what else, vanguard the Net) are locked in a struggle with the Voodoo boys over the 'free AI's' behind the firewall. Although we have little context to put that into perspective, we were told that this struggle between liberation and containment has the potential to cause the 'end of the world', pretty heavy stuff to talk about in a demo featurette. Although we'll likely have to wait until the full game to figure out if that statement is poetic or literal.
The demo then goes on to introduce us to the district of Pacifica, a very different locale to the district of Watson from the original demo. Here we really get to see the diversity in the environments that we can expect from Cyberpunk 2077, in that whilst Watson was very built up with city-scrapers and pristine highways, Pacifica is rundown and torn up; an idyllic dream that slipped into a nightmare. Just looking at the skyline shows off unfinished skyscrapers being strafe bombed by police VTOLs and streets lined with debris and homeless tents. As I explained in my last blog, this was due to the entire district being pitched as a tourist hotspot before some mysterious event caused all corporate investors to pull funding and leave the place unfinished and the migrant workers jobless.
In the middle of all this, resides the district's aforementioned Voodoo gang. These people are introduced as being much more integrated with the local community than the Skinners from Watson, therefore you're less likely to be unceremoniously shot by the first one you bump into. Also, as the community of Pacifica are mostly comprised of Haitians that have fled from their natural-disaster torn country, you can expect to hear snippets of Haitian Creole floating about the local dialect. Another step towards the unwavering authenticity of the world by the uncompromising folks over at CDPR.
V, the protagonist, is tasked with infiltrating an old rundown mall in order to discover why a new gang (Known as the Animals) have set up shop on Voodoo turf. From here we get to see the combat and stealth gameplay of the demo, and there was nothing really new to show from this point. We see some physical combat as well as heavy weapons work from the strong-woman V, as well as a little peak at the hacking minigame and nano-wire (Not 'mono-wire' like was originally reported) slicing from the sneaky-man V. This all concluded with a bossfight that looked less intense than the last one we saw, and a hodgepodge of lore tossed at us at the end.
The only thing new that I took away from this trailer was legitimate concern over the character customization system. As a fellow with a less-than-standard facial structure, it is hard for me to make someone who looks like me in character customisers, which is partially responsible for the way that I never make characters who resemble me (With exceptions to my characters in Fallout 4 and Mass Effect Andromeda.) I always do enjoy it when I can spend hours in systems like this making everything just right, but from what I've seen I'm doubtful that Cyberpunk is going to provide the systems to allow for that. It makes sense, I suppose, the entire game will be in first person so why bother on making a unique face? But seeing as this will be the face I see whenever I look in the mirror; or, even worse, whenever I open up the inventory screen, it would be nice if I could be happy with what I get to look at. Perhaps it's selfish to say, but I don't want to look at some square-jawed handsome action hero whenever I see the face of my back-water struggling mercenary; I want to see the face of someone who looks real and whom I can relate too. (Ideally my own face.)
However, in a way this conversation does actually go back to the overarching themes of Cyberpunk as a whole. This is a society wherein we have outgrown the boundaries of natural evolution and completely surrendered to the current of transhumanism. One factor of this means that it is entirely possible that 'ordianry' looking people don't exist anymore as everyone can just genetically enhance themselves to look however they want to. Natural beauty no longer exists in a world ruled and shaped by the synthetic. But by that same merit, if beauty is no longer a status symbol, then why pursue it? Wouldn't that lead to more people who shun the 'laser surgery' and 'plastic implant' lifestyle of the elite? At this point we're talking about theoretical societal trends which can get hugely subjective, so I can't really say for certain.
Just like how I can't say for certain whether or not Cyberpunk's character creation looks entirely robust. One could, and likely will, argue that this game is 'still being developed' and how the developers even tweeted about expanding upon character creation after 2018 feedback, but I actually find neither fact comforting. Both mean that diverse creation systems were never the focus of the main team, therefore, if no one on board is passionate about it, we are unlikely to get a system even nearly as deep as those created by people who are all about providing great character creation tools. I'm not upset because we likely won't see anything as grand as the Sims CAS or Fallout's 'racemenu', but because I think it'll end up being something more akin to the option select screen you find in MMO's. (I.e. pick a face out of these 4, pick a nose out of these 4, there you go, face done!) It's a small point of contention, but seeing as how everything else about Cyberpunk seems masterful, even a little bit of mediocrity sticks out like a sore thumb.
But enough complaining, let's delve into rampant speculation. Let me start be saying, I think that CDPR have subtly let onto the main conflict of the game through this trailer. I think that the struggle of the Voodoo boys will be a central driving force of the main plot to coincide with the personal story we already know about. I know that seems rather far-fetched, afterall, the Voodoo boys are just another gang, there's one in each district, but I don't believe that is entirely the case. The Voodoo boys have already been presented as different from traditional gangs in that they are pretty much a pillar of their respective community, they are the law on streets that the state police refuse to tread on. Rather than acting like leeches to the community, the Voodoo boys support and provide structure to the local Haitians and give them a network in which they feel safe. Already, this morally grey representation seems ripe for some 'pick-a-side' choices down the line when it comes to the rule of the Corpo's.
Plus, this seems to fit in with CDPR's track record with storytelling. In The Witcher, Geralt was always set off on his own personal adventure during which a huge meta narrative was going on around him. In The Witcher 2 there was the strained relationship between the Nilfgaard Empire and everyone else. The Witcher 3 expanded this into all out hostilities between the king of Redania and Nilfgaard. Wouldn't it make sense for Cyberpunk to be set in similar straits? We already know that V is mainly driven by a desire to learn more about the Johnny-Silverhand-hallucination-causing chip embedded in their head which (spoiler alert) is apparently the key to immortality. (My guess is digital immortality, Soma style.)
Also, I'm going to take a guess now that Jackie (The best friend from the original demo who was killed off in 2019 trailer) is not only inconsequential to the overarching storyline but an overall optional character. I think that CDPR just wanted to show off their 'widely different' introductory sequences that is linked to the selection of the character's background. Why else would they kill the guy off in a trailer? It makes no sense. I originally suggested that this may be to show of the 'action/consequnce' mechanic, symbolized by the way that V stares at his blood soaked hands in the bathroom, but this never sat right by me. Consequence-based RPG choices have been a stable of gaming for over a decade now, it's not worth spoiling a, potentially major, character death just to show it off. I think Jackie's fate is a foregone conclusion and V is destined to tackle the forces of Night City alone. (Apart from the snarky comments from his resident Keanu Reeves)
Well that's everything. I've covered the trailer and thrown my thoughts about everything that might happen, and that is likely going to be the extent of my Cyberpunk 2077 coverage until the game is out. (10 days before my birthday!) Until then I will handle the agonizing wait the way that I have learnt to do after many years of hype-train jumping; by forgetting that the game exists. (Much better than wishing my life away.) I hold high hopes for the future of CDPR, despite what my tone this blog might suggest, and also impose heavy expectations. It seems that no AAA studio is free from being scumbags in this day and age, and CDPR are lone standouts in that regard. It seems cruel to place such huge responsibility on their shoulders, for the respectability of all high-budget games, but that is simply the situation that they have been placed in by their contemporaries. I hope Cyberpunk 2077 will be as good as it looks, and I know that CD Projekt Red will do right by fans either way.
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