Cyperpunk 2077 was lesson in promise, in potential and in crushing disappointment. A slap around the head and a clip across the ear not to believe everything you see- even when it looks so tantalising- and a redemption arc for the ages. And now the journey of Cyberpunk 2077 has come to it's end after long last, giving us chance to take a look at the whole thing from a vantage. I can't pretend I was abroad the Cyberpunk train from the beginning but I was invested before launch and have kept a close eye on it ever since and so from the stance of a coverte- I'd consider the transformation that this game underwent nothing short of extraordinary. Did it live up to those vast promises of sweeping Role Playing potential? No, not really. But it did end up providing one of the most comprehensive custom first person shooter experiences on the market today and that alone is wildly impressive!
The release of Cyberpunk 2077 could only really go worse for a game if you happen to have put out a title called Concord- but objectively one might even call Cyberpunk's launch worse because unlike with Concord- people actually cared. They cared that Cyberpunk didn't run on half of the hardware it was purported to be built for. They cared that the promised uncompromising depth of the role playing potential in a game slated to be 'a true next generation RPG' was whittled down to key choices in supremely linear settings. They cared that the game was so unrelentingly buggy that it took actual years worth of improvements for people to realise that the scene of someone climbing into a car for it to then explode was intended behaviour- it's supposed to represent a car bomb, but everything was such a mess that no one could tell the difference! And they let their voices be heard.
Stocks dropped, faces fell- and the game sold. Oh, did the game sell! See the anticipation for what this game could be was enough to carrying it far and away past the finish line- so that even when reports of the mess hit the fan people were already to far locked into their purchase to back-out now. Even if that purchase was the largely unplayable last-generation versions of the game that ran like actual mud. Sure the game was pulled for sale on the Playstation storefront for a time, and a slew of refunds embarked upon their offices, but Cyberpunk was still a roaring financial success. Now deliver that situation on any other studio the size of CDPR's and that would have absolutely been the end of the story. They put out a product, people largely disliked it and it made money- but I think the years that followed went some way to distinguish CDPR from being not just 'money men' but actual 'artists'.
Putting out a bad product never feels good. Not to an artist. It doesn't matter how much you make, your reputation and perceived competency is on the line. A non-artist might not get that feeling and be totally happy leaving their game in that slightly rotted state and bump right on to the next disappointment- that's how Ubisoft have operated for over a decade. But a modern video game developer who actually wants to fix their mistakes actually has an avenue to do so- and so the journey of patches began. A long and frightful journey that would take up a handful of CDPR's staff several years in order to keep atop. Patches to every bug, each performance problem, every crack in the exoskeleton of the game they could feasibly patch together- all whilst something big and actually transformative was worked on in the background.
In it's base state Cyberpunk was a decently fun game with sparks of genuine brilliance hidden beneath a body that felt unfinished and badly welded. This journey of patching helped solder down those plates and give the good, the raw gameplay, a chance to shine. The Cyberpunk that I played, when I had the chance, was deeply fun from a raw moment-to-moment stance. Even if some of the RPG holdovers struggled against the game's systems- namely that god-awful levelled equipment illness that many games of it's age had become sad devotees to. Nothing sucks worse than disregarding an entire armoury worth of imaginative and interesting weapons because they no longer work to any effect against these outlevelled bad guys- they just about got away with it in Witcher- but for Cyberpunk that felt like a chain around the neck!
I cannot overstate how much of a heelturn the game did for the DLC and 2.0 update. Totally rewriting the progression system in order to better work with building, stripping the mediocre crafting system, actually adding in a police response system and car chase gun fights- the amount of work required as truly horrific. But this was truly the final step winning over the broken trust of those still willing to stick around. After release Phantom Liberty ended up winning near universal acclaim, scoring huge with critics and fans alike, shooting up sales numbers and affirming our faith in the abilities of CDPR to tell gripping narratives with meaty characters and ponderous takeaways that haunt our waking dreams. They brought it all.
Although to the devoted fan that actually wasn't the end. A small team of developers were kept aboard after all the work on the DLC was done and the majority of projects for CDPR's future were prioritised. These guys did the small work that kept the community alive with smaller scale features and the fanning of fan conspiracies such as one curious little phone made active in the middle of nowhere that spun a web of conspiracy around it reminiscent of the mount Chilliad mystery for GTA V. They chucked in new iconic weapons hidden in corners of the map, slapped together a totally reworked free-roam system around the romanceable characters to spend time with them outside the mandated missions and injected that bit of community life this game would have called for had it launched as intended.
Unfortunately all things must end, and as of the most recent update to Cyberpunk the development support team has been officially reduced to nothing as everyone is now working on new projects. Which means that the Cyberpunk we now have will persist as it's completed state from hereon- warts and all- and can I just say what a great place to leave this once wreckage off in. I know what happened was not ideally for literally anyone and the path to redemption was absolutely fraught for all parties, but if the game as it is now is the standard to which CDPR are comfortable leaving their games then I'll take that as a vote there's still role model of a company working somewhere in that over-bloated machine they call a studio. Let's hope that soul comes out to shine first next time around come the new Witcher game.
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