The end of a long Cyberpunk road

 

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.

Promises Promises.

 

In this world of steel and brush, there is little in our lives that means more and less than a promise. We make promises and break them every day, whether formally or silently to ourselves and occasionally those we live around. The very premise of a promise imbues some faint visage of sacred authority, that to break one would incur some mystical godly wrath that would shatter the wills of the staunch most out there- but it is a myth. A myth we need to believe in for the sake of functioning in a world so dependent on a mutual trust- trust that hangs on the balance of the 'immutable' promise. Perhaps that is why there are few betrayals so profound as being thrown from the stability of an assured 'thing' into the mire of indescribable uncertainty once that fragile trust has been shattered. Like being left out in the woods by an absent parent, it's a primal and bone shaking fear.

Recently I've found myself thinking on the nature of such promises following the recent debacle of the Life at Sea Cruise ship. Or rather, the lack thereof. You see, a proposition of some all-inclusive three year pleasure cruise for the elderly to spend their twilight years visiting hundreds of worldwide ports was recently cancelled, one week before launching for lack of a ship. As it turns out, the event organisers were planning to turn this around on a dime, and had vested all of their hopes on the purchase of a cruise ship a few months ago. Yes, they sold the premise of this cruise to people before they even had a vessel to command. Seems insane but who knows, maybe that's common practice in the cruise business. Either way, the deal ended up lagging and eventually falling through entirely just weeks before setting sail in Istanbul, for which many of the prospective guests had already travelled and were waiting to embark on the next three years of their lives. Needless to say, the cancellation was a shock.

Because when you really break it down, having three entire years of your life planned out to take place on a cruise ship (I couldn't imagine a fresher hell) is a giant commitment. Giant enough that some people had put all their chips into living on this cruise ship, to the extent where they sold their houses, auctioned off their possessions, long-term rented out their manors and whatever other lavishly overexpansive hostel belongs to this breed of octogenarian. (I feel comfortable regarding them as 'the other' because my grandparents were lifelong hippies- wouldn't catch them dead falling for an expensive grift like this.) This situation is recent enough that there has been no resolutions ironed out and the betrayal is still fresh in the news cycle- but I think it fair to present this example out front for the matter of perspective. Because everything else we're about to delve into, squarely back in the realms of gaming, thankfully pales in comparison to this: the cock-up of the decade by my humble estimation.

Yes, we're going to talk about Overwatch 2. Can I help it? This one hits pretty close to home for me, personally. The promise? An apparently outdated plan to provide Overwatch 2 with the one thing that the Overwatch brand had been missing since it debuted on the main stage- context. Overwatch 2 was advertised featuring a top-shelf, hand-crafted, single player RPG campaign covering each of the main heroes and implementing some genuine interactable agency in this grand universe that had, until now, been relegated as little more than a colourful backdrop to one of the generation's most successful and pervasive multiplayer shooters. But of course, the very pitch was a lie. The story mode had been scrapped before the game even hit digital shelves and the team kept their lips shut for fear of sacrificing the momentum of their launch. The results? The lie grew, the expectations mounted and when everything came out Blizzard burnt every bridge with that sector of the community they had. The vast waves of Internet folk hanging on with bated breath for Overwatch 2 to finally achieve it's potential were scattered to the winds as they learnt the lesson that every other Blizzard fandom had already had stamped onto their foreheads: Blizzard live to disappoint and betray- it's their one kink.

Now that Cyberpunk 2077 has returned to the good graces of the Internet there is a sizable portion of people crawling out of the wood works to declare that 'they knew the game was good the whole time' and such typical trite, strawmanning for public pity points- what else is new? Curiously though, then the conversation shifts to the actual marketing for Cyberpunk 2077 and a curious pattern emerges. I've heard more than once how, if you actually look at the marketing, CDPR were shockingly upfront with everything they presented and never once misled the audience and it was actually fans who drove hype for the game up to unattainable heights. Is that right? So we're just going to ignore the several months of trailers then? The bold claim that this was the 'next generation of open world game', carrying implications that this title would not just be a more polished Far Cry? How about the presentation of the game's most reactive mission, the Malestrom deal, capped off with a summary of all the different ways that situation could be handled with the stinger. "And that's just one mission-" Which in a way, I guess was actually true. That level of reactivity was indeed, reserved for just one mission, everything from then on was largely straightforward and staunchly binary until the endings.

CPDR lied to their consumers. And I use that title as a collectively, hitting out at one element of the CDPR team, the marketing arm or the managerial arm or the shift workers or the accountants or the janitors who never managed to dry off the slippery floors in time- it muddies the water. The company as a whole presented an image of a game that Cyberpunk wasn't and still isn't. What makes Phantom Liberty so good is that it's no longer trying to be the super mega RPG that the game was pitched as, but just a damn good open world FPS game with solid progression- which it absolutely is. Before then, however, CDPR were the public latrines for everyone to relieve themselves in- and there was a time when it was seriously a question whether or not anyone could trust them again. Even now the whole 'trust first' mentality has been robbed- nobody wants to give that team the benefit of the doubt until they deliver something worth talking about. Which is fair, but a damn 360 compared to where they were at before this game launched after the love afforded to The Witcher 3.

Of course this brings us to one of the more recent of such stories and a sad one all around, as Crowd Funded Pony Fighting game 'Them's Fighting Herds' has recently announced that after their first season of content is wrapped up the game will be ceasing development, which in turn means the cancellation of the story mode, and some of the other promises from their Kickstarter days. This one is fresh off the presses so there is no deeper truth to dig into outside of the small studio themselves, but there doesn't appear to be any malicious intent in this one. It was an idea that never really had a chance to kick-off, the premise was pretty niche for all but My Little Pony Fans who really wanted Twilight Sparkle to go nuts and off one of her friends, the game launched in the dreaded 'Early Access' state which turns so many players off from the get-go unfortunately and the game slipped into Free-to-play; the typical make or break last desperation move for a project on the ropes. Promises broken sure, but what can you do without the traction and success to make it work?

A promise is a vow, and what we've come to see is that people seem to take those vows quite staunchly to heart. Every single one of these cases has resulted in vitriolic and disgusted backlashes from the affected, even the Pony Fighting game who's players were run ragged by the idea that development had dragged on for so long- apologies are worthless at this point. And there is indeed a point where a promise becomes a noose around the neck of the giver, further illustrating how sparingly some should be made in the face of the shifting tide of capability most are bound to. Maybe it's best to hedge your bets a bit more in life. Be a politician. Afterall, what makes failure even worse? Being reprimanded for your failure and dragged out to be a public whipping boy for all the world to see.

Sideways expansion

 

So you have a video game and it has everything in it. I'm talking the Kitchen and Bathroom sink, spinning wheels, boiler plate- everything you're little heart could desire. But it's not enough. I mean it would be enough, but we live in the age of 'Live Services' wherein every game is as much of an investment as being hired to direct a CW series. You know the studio aren't going to let you leave until that ship hits an iceberg with you riding the wreck all the way down to the frigid depths, because there are no gracious exits in this business, no sir! What do you do? Well, you could go the route that everyone else does and put less and less effort into every subsequent update, never really thinking about where you intend to take things and just shrug when it all collides a few years down the line. (Thank you so much for the stellar example of that in motion, Destiny 2.) Or you could be clever with it.

I consider the topic of Sideways progression fascinating when it comes to the way that developers design content for game progression. Instead of going the stereotypical route of becoming stronger at the one thing you're good at, the game encourages the player to diversify and start afresh at something totally new. The way that Runescape adds skills instead of just bumping up the level caps of existing skills. (Albeit very rarely.) It's such a painfully difficult way to make a game because it requires clever integration with everything that exists in order to feel natural. That means every new addition needs devs to revisit finished code, pull apart working systems, and remodel them from the inside out. That's the kind of insanity you need passion to pursue- or a complex about going to the Nth degree like I'm mostly sure the Larian Team has. (Someone should make sure they're not killing themselves to make their next game already.)

But whenever I've brought up this kind of development topic before I've always thought about the way this would work during the design process of a game that one expects to have updates, like an MMO or a Live Service. How would such an ideal work for a finished and boxed game? DLC has a typical approach that isolates it's content from the majority of single player games for the sanctity of the developer's sanity, but what if some madman was to design an expansion which expanded on sideways progression paths instead of upwards ones? (The actual terms would refer to 'Vertical' and 'Horizontal', but I like my choices better.) And whatsmore, what kind of games have already created systems like that and how do they effect those games?

One famous game which has avoided sideways progression for eons is Grand Theft Auto V, although it's the online portion (now it's own separate application) which I want to highlight today. Every few months or so Grand Theft Auto Online throws a new bunch of cars into the game that it's online players are expected to grind over, then give up and spend real money to cheat the fund in order to purchase. But what if, here me out- they added those cars to the traffic spawning database instead? Imagine how that would change up the pedestrian makeup of Grand Theft Auto to see the style of vehicles across the region evolve over the decade! The game would mimic the real evolution of modern roads, albeit much more sped up, and it would expand upon one of the key pillars of the Grand Theft Auto experience- stealing and driving cool cars. That right there would be a perfect opportunity for sideways expansion!

Perhaps one of the most successful recent examples of a sideways expansion would have to be 'Phantom Liberty' for Cyberpunk 2077, even if it unfortunately ended up being the only expansion the game received. As it sits, much of what the Phantom Liberty upgrade offered slid alongside the game that was already there, rather than piling itself on top of the existing content. The entire perk tree was remade in order to accommodate new styles of play, level scaling was utterly gutted to facilitate a smoother experience, police systems were implemented across the whole city, car vendors were consolidated into terminals- CDPR went every distance they could in order to make Phantom Liberty an all-around expansion that slid neatly into the game that was there, such to the extent that even without the DLC the 2.0 update was enough to totally turn around opinions on the quality of Cyberpunk 2077.

You see, the way that expansions interact with the base game is I think what makes sideways expansions such an interesting prospect, kind of like the 'Fallout 76' approach of- fix the game that's there in hopes it raises the overall experience for all. And event though it probably took an obscene amount of time to redo the main questline of Fallout 76 in order to accommodate for the new NPCs that were ushered into the game circa The Wastelanders update- the results spoke for themselves. Positive headlines for Fallout 76 for the first and last time. What a world! And what a painfully large undertaking it is, which is probably why every subsequent update has detached itself from Appalachia and focused solely on vertical expansion.

The dangers of building atop yourself should be fairly obvious. Anyone who has played a game of Jenga in their life knows that the higher you stack you tower block, the easier it is for it to fall over onto itself. For MMOs that comes in the form of the endless 'race to the top' which is what makes all MMO's feel exactly the same these days. There's no 'simulated life' aspect to these games anymore, they're linear adventure tales chasing the current level cap and the single best set of gear which was revealed this expansion. Soon to be topped by the next best set the next expansion, or the next set of abilities and power levelling which totally invalidates everything before it. Such games end up feeling less like consequential adventures and more like step ladder journeys towards an unreachable destination. And if that's your kink, just get a job.

Horizontal expansion by it's very nature engenders creativity in the design room, and when you've got the designers thinking outside the box about how they can enrich the game, you're going to pass that excitement onto the player on the otherend. Just look at the kings of this style of development- Mojang. Even those who don't play Minecraft all that often pay a visit to the changelogs every now and then just to see what sort of crazy new direction Mojang have decided to commit to in their 'dart board' development style. That's the kind of spontaneity the game's industry could do with a bit more of if it really intends to commit to this 'Live Service' world like they certainly want to insist that they do. Onwards and upwards? Nah, Imma do my sideways thing.

Wait, Fallout 76 is redeemed?

 No one told me

Cyberpunk Live Action

 I knew this was gonna happen

So now it's time for Cyberpunk 2

 To the future!

Cyberpunk 2.0 proved me right

 And I am going to brag!

Starfield and Writing

Writing hurts my fingers...

The *real* star of Phantom Liberty

 Proof that most humans have terrible judgement.

So how is Phantom Liberty?

 "Think we can find in our hearts to forgive each other?"

I want to live

The clock won't stop and this is what we get...

Cyberpunk 2.0

 Anthem's dream

So here we are. After all these great many years mocking and prodding and laughing and weeping and being lightly gas-lit as to the quality of Cyberpunk original, we stand on the cusp of a game that CDPR can feel proud of. Okay, that's being a bit cattish- I actually think that from a narrative stand-point Cyberpunk is a genuinely fantastic experience and though great swathes of the narrative were ceded to the dulcet tones of Keanu Reeves' Johnny Silverhand- I loved exercising that story and thought Reeves did a fantastic job! Still, it's hard to swallow the game around as being anything more than the best faux-RPG ever made in a subgenre resplendent with Far Cry's and Assassin Creed's and all those other titles that try to walk the line between genuine gameplay systems and more standardised action gameplay. It failed to really went beyond just the narrow scope of story consequence or the small number of ways to interact with the glorious and fascinating Cyberpunk world beyond shooting holes in it- I just didn't really feel like a RPG character.

Cyberpunk's 2.0 update, to coincide with the release of their first and last DLC, seems to be on the way to solve that exact problem and in doing so I honestly find that promise to be more interesting than Phantom Liberty itself. I'll still probably pick up Phantom Liberty just to see how CDPR have managed to expand upon what I consider to be a fairly open-and-shut narrative, but the thing that's really going to bring me back are all these crazy overhauls to the very core of the game which, whilst not amending the woefully underutilised open world like I might hope, (They couldn't make a more immersive world for the life of them, huh.) still, at least, zap a dose of interest back into the prospect of playing the game in a different way again.

Back when I played Cyberpunk, I did find myself slipping into the rhythm of a playstyle suited to the way I was enjoying myself, specifically I was a quick-hack casual stealth enjoyer- but that more came about as a realisation of that game's itemisation, rather than a navigation of the painfully overstuffed and under built RPG tree. Cyberpunk's RPG tree is an ARPG-like nightmare of obtuse stat increases and actually intriguing stat upgrades locked behind upgrade paths you have to dig out with a magnifying glass and a fine tooth comb. Why are successive levels of item crafting all presented in separate nodes like this is a game of 'find the right stat to improve'? It's asinine, unspecific and it makes the process of levelling up feel more like a chore to navigate than an exciting boost in personal power.

I wasn't actually expecting CDPR to address this at all, particularly after that candid comment where the team tried to gaslight the entire gaming world into believing that the original release was actually totally fine and the tidal wave of negativity spawned from that most vacuous of foes 'The Haters'! But lo-and-behold- a totally reworked perk system that scraps stat increases in favour of new abilities and substantial change so that you can really build a... well- build. Finally, the prospect of starting again in the City of Dreams doesn't feel so daunting to consider now that I won't have to wait until level 30 midway through the game before I actually feel distinct somewhat. Genuinely the most exciting part of the entire update for me, right there.

Of course, the second most interesting change to the game comes in the introduction of car combat, a very surprising proposition given the rather stern declaration that the original game had perfectly serviceable car combat made around about the time of launch. (Fact check: The game featured a couple on-the-rails shooting sections that were so standard and lacking in depth that they couldn't even be called 'RPG action moments.') What we have in front of us are actual car combat scenes, with shooting from the windows of cars and car based weaponry where appropriate- it looks pretty cool! Of course, I wonder how much opportunity anyone will get to actually engage with these systems given that the main game rather purposefully featured no car combat outside of those scripted scenes. (Did they add in car combat moments retroactively or will this be unique to the new DLC district?)

And to match that the team are 'rehauling' the police system. Which is a marble-mouthed way of saying that they developed a police system for their crime game finally. The tweaks they made over the years did little to nothing for the game and personally I only met the Police a couple of times during a playthrough and both times they were more "Damn it, I can't save because of these annoying gnats that are shooting pebbles at me" then an actual factor to be considered in gameplay. Now we have an actual progressive police aggro system which is, fancy this, exactly like Grand Theft Auto! Higher 'heat' means more cops, eventually MaxTac come after you- (Which is cool. I don't even remember if MaxTac exist in the main game outside of that one cutscene from the intro.) and at the topmost level the team even teased 'minibosses'. (Whatever that shapes up as.)

Finally the Cyberware system is getting something of a reworking in order to make the act of embracing the transhuman question just that little bit more involved than it previously was. Which to remind everyone, just kind of shaped up as 'interact with the menu and select your new super power'! It's not quite clear the extent to which CDPR are going to go here, some have speculated about more visual repercussions for implant overloads and there's even going to be some sort of limiting system with limitbreak potential that sounds... peculiar to say the least. All I want is for Cyberware to do a little more than act exactly like 'ARPG gems' and I'll be happy. Because I didn't buy Cyberpunk to play an ARPG. I came to play Cyberpunk.

I like Cyberpunk 2077, and if the game had been left the way it was patched to be I would have considered to be a good game, not excellent, but certainly good. I feel like this might be CDPR's attempt to establish excellence back into their portfolio and in that pursuit I'm willing to give it the second chance. Too often I've seen grand statements from headline hungry articles that 'Cyberpunk is Back!' everytime CDPR so much as fix a typo in their captions, but this will be the real test to see whether or not cranking up the system requirements and rewriting the face of the game was enough to create an experience that at least feels like the game that CDPR pretended the base game was all those years ago. Even now that dream still bounces around my head at night, and even now I wonder if the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing us that miracles don't exist. We will see. Soon.

The politics of release dates

 Delays abound.

Finishing a game is a monumental achievement. Throwing together all those warring professional artists and egos into that vast blender of creation in order to pop out a completed game the other side- the work of majesty and magicians as far as I'm concerned. But that is unfortunately only one step in the battle to make a profit in the games industry. Because this ain't the 90's anymore. A great game alone isn't going to stand atop the pile of mediocrity and shine out like a diamond. There's too much competition on the market these days, too much daily trash to stand out from, and too many distractions to draw the eye of a potential consumer elsewhere. These days you have to deal with marketing campaigns, genre models, PR, community management and, most dauntingly of all, the release date itself. The killer of a thousands games in the flesh.

You can't just drop a game when it's done and expect it to make a living on it's own- that's just not how things are done in this line of business. You have to announce the release date to get people excited even when you're still in the making process, and you have to try and juggle the act of gauging interest in the project to keep investor money coming in, the attention span of the audience to not get sick of the project if it's been in development for several years and the ability of the studio to neatly hit that deadline with a finished product that is going to live up to all those marketing cheques that have been written. It's something of a minefield to navigate and enough to drive anyone insane- which is probably why it's an equation that so often goes wrong.

We get games revealed way too early in their development life cycle to the extent where they disappear from the public eye for years before they come out, losing all the marketing momentum and essentially wasting the cost of the reveal in the process. Then we get titles that are given release dates that are way too close for the development team to possibly finish all they need to on time, which of course leads to cutbacks needing to be made, projects having to be scaled back and- in some cases- projects been given up on altogether. That must be why the older gen ports of Cyberpunk 2077 were so unplayable that they had to be withdrawn from the Playstation store, no matter what the CDPR devs are trying to gaslight us by saying nowadays. (Can't believe they really tried the "Actually the launch was fine, people are just haters" approach.)

A popular release window that so many of that 'upper tier of video game' endeavours to follow is to try and get their game out by the month of September. Typically this is the period known as the 'Holliday window', being the time when consumers are typically coming out of the outdoor Summer fun and are edging towards the indoor months leading up to Christmas. Although not December itself because that's too late to establish the game's reputation. Of course, this does mean you'll get Call of Duty releasing in the same month as Battlefield, or that one time when EA threw Titanfall between those two releases resulting in one of the most predictable underperformances of all time. This year the big game entering that window is Starfield and you can already see the effects is having on those around it. Baldur's Gate 3, once due for late August, shot it's release window up to early August just to distance itself from the game. To quote Thulsa Doom "That is power!"

Then you have the certain days of a week that a game needs to release on in order to squeeze out those day one sales. Now common logic would tell us that the ideal time to release a game you want to be popular would be on a Friday, just before everyone goes home for the weekend- but that hasn't been the case. As it just so happens Tuesday tends to be the ideal date the releases and the reason why is actually impressively shrouded in layers of mythos and tradition. As the myth goes, back in the day SEGA branded one of their most popular game releases "Sonic 2sday" which turned out to be so successful that the industry has stuck to that standard ever since. The more logical explanation would be that the journalists who are tasked with covering these games are typically free to make their articles on Tuesdays, as Mondays are busy dealing with the left over work from the weekends and Fridays are wind-off days before a weekend break.

Whatever the case, the result is that games tend to release on the same day of the week, which makes the danger of releasing in the same month even more serious. Rather than 30 odd days to drop your game in, now there are only really four or so dates, and I'll bet there's some internal marketing politics deciding what part of the month is the most ideal time as well. When it comes to projects with this much potential capital on the line you just know there's someone out there with hyper precise flowcharts and correlation graphs attempting to discover the maths of the universe for solving permanent profitability. That's just the price you pay for being in an industry that proports the highest amount of earnings in entertainment at large. (Although if you're here to make the serious bucks, than the crappy mobile market will be your destination.)

And, of course, the general rule of any entertainment product is simple: Don't release your product around a direct potential competitor. The philosophy is inherent here; there are only so many potential consumers out there with so much free income and free time, going head to head with someone else may seem like a form of aggressive competition but the truth is that you're never going to pinch the entirety of an audience. Sticking two games in close proximity to one another just forces the consumer to make a choice about where their time should be spent and it ultimately cannibalises the potential sales of both products. Give it a couple of weeks at the bear minimum. Smaller titles just face actually killing themselves if they release at poor timed moments. The actually decent Mad Max game got stomped by 'Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain"; the 'Horizon' franchise seems to harbour a secret fetish for being silenced by Zelda- at the end of the day there are just too many games in the world, don't make it harder for yours to stand out.

When it comes down to it, these are the rules that are known the industry over; especially by the money men who make the sort of decisions about when these games are going to actually come out after being ripped from the hands of the perfectionist developers. Yet still we get collisions in the rules that lead to these disaster examples we lament across the industry. (Still we weep for Titanfall 2.) And why this is can lead back to an even higher echelon of politics. Budget constraints, fiduciary over-promised commitments, straight up corporate sabotage; a lot of the stuff we can only ever speculate on and which will never see the definitive light of day unless in the light of court. Because it is wild what we're learning about inner Xbox lately. I wonder if any new, as-of-yet unspoken, rules of release will come out? Exciting!

Cyberpunk 2077 review

Nowhere to run, it's all undone! Everything Burns! Everything Burns!

Finally I've come around to the moment I've put off for years now, actual years. After seeing the state of the base game, the optimisation issues and realising that this was a game designed for a richer tier of video gamer than myself (and considerable more tolerant for bugs) I put this one on the back burner. But deep in my heart I always knew I'd come around on it. I knew that someday I would buy Cyberpunk 2077 and engage with the dream which was snatched from me and so many others on that faithful day so long ago. And now, as we stand on the cusp of the game's first and only proper expansion, I need to clear my air with this game. Also, as the game was finally optimised enough to run on my hardware, I need to finish this blog before that update comes out which bursts the game out of the range of my hardware once again- because apparently CDPR are simply disgusted at the prospect of having people of my tax bracket among their fans.

First off I'm going to start by saying this won't be the sort of review where I go into the history of the game before release as I usually do, and that's because if you've hung around this blog for any amount of time you'll know that I've done that incessantly over the years. Here's the cliffnotes. CDPR hit it big with The Witcher- promises were that the next game was going to be even bigger. Their mouths ended up writing a lot of cheques that their accounts couldn't cash and when it launched the 'next generation of open world game' dissolved into a better Ubisoft-style game. This was never quite going to be the Grand Theft Auto killer that the team were selling it as, and I bet only Rockstar themselves knew that from the get-go. But let's put all that history behind us and ask- what about the game that did arrive? Is that any good?

Cyberpunk 2077 takes us to the far flung year of 2077 in the 'independent' lands of Night City; techno-powered vice-soaked rotten apple on the West Coast of the New United States. (Although, clearly, Night City itself it not a member of the NUSA) As an adaptation of the old Cyberpunk 2020 Table top role playing game, this world is one seeped in decades of lore and stories pertaining to a society bought and sold by megacorperate mandate. Where capitalism is like an internationally recognised religion that counts just about every single remaining member of the human race as it's congregation. A world of commercialised technological augmentations turning high quality functional prosthetics or skin grafts into ostentatious fashion statements, indulged in to escape the pit swallowing reality of extreme economic inequality, overwhelming disenfranchisement and that ever inescapable sense that you're roaming around the dystopian wastes of an apocalyptic world that doesn't know it's ended yet. The definition of a porcelain mask- delicate and beautiful, but fragile and false: that is the face of Night City in Cyberpunk 2077.

We are brought kicking and screaming into this world through the eyes of V, a two-bit mercenary thug with any of three reasons for being in a city he or she can't escape from. 'The city of dreams'. Through the course of the plot V will be dragged into events beyond their paygrade, thrown to the centre of a massive web of plots, violent aspirations and conspiracy- be broken down to the core and built back up again as something else- something unstoppable... and we'll see V pushed beyond the limits of their understanding to corners of the world they can't reconcile, or are incapable of. All whilst racing a ticking clock in the back of their head threatening to rip away the one thing they seek most of all- more life. Think of Blade Runner if the protagonist was Roy Batty and you'll get both the rough premise and to some degree the thematic emotions the narrative attempts to alight. That of how it is we experience and compartmentalise the trials and irreconcilable limitations of our own lives. Only V is a lot more violent.

As a studio known for the fantasy RPGs following the rigors of an established character, Geralt of Rivia from 'The Witcher' novels, it's quite the change of pace to shift to a player built sci-fi shooter premise. CDPR, ever ones to challenge themselves, took the task to heart by redesigning everything about how their games worked on a fundamental level. Gone is the third person perspective and the elaborately choreographed cinematography for cutscenes- sacrificed in favour of a staunchly rigid locked 1st person perspective designed to tie you fully into the role of your V. And, of course, that means this game is a First Person Shooter- but it does actually go deeper than that. You are in V's eyes for cutscenes, when entering into cars, when being debriefed on missions, when undergoing surgery. You are inhabiting the world through the eyes of V fully until the adventure is complete, as staunchly attached to their psyche as The Construct of Johnny Silverhand is.

So how did that transition from third person swordplay to first person shooter turn out? Increadibly well. If Bethesda are ones to take notes, Cyberpunk is the game to learn from. The way the first person mechanics of Cyberpunk function, from sliding to lean-shooting and snap aiming all the way to the sensation of the weapon in your hands, the feedback of the recoil, the damage response from targets, the brutal carnage of a successful kill- the variation of weapon types, with alternate damage effects or even firing quirks. Smart bullet, wall punching rounds, ricochet shots- it feels so intuitive to play with. Some staunch FPS fans who play games that endeavour to the exact same standard of shooting might scoff their nose about this because doesn't play exactly like Call of Duty or Destiny, and blame the RPG core for holding the game back- but I disagree completely. The game plays it's FPS mechanics flawlessly to it's own strengths. It plays differently to dedicated first person shooters, sure; but it doesn't play worse than them. It feels great, snaps just right, provides every bit of feedback you could want and ties in solid RPG mechanics alongside for good measure. I started off impressed with the combat, but familiarity made me completely satisfied with- I think the combat of Cyberpunk is top tier.

The UI, on the otherhand- not so intuitive. There's a trend I've noticed a lot in modern games, to design these overly hostile looking and cluttered screens of information that pack everything you need to know for a veteran, but to someone just getting started it comes off as particularly unwelcoming. Cyberpunk compounds this with one of the messiest and badly laid-out inventory screens I've ever seen. People who mock Bethesda's inventory systems better lay down their apologies stat because Cyberpunk literally floods all of it's items into a jumbled grid of chaos and asks you to understand it. Thankfully food item buffs are largely useless so you'll probably never have to check out this screen beyond the times you go weapon scrapping. But every now and then you'll get a quest objective that forces you to interact with something in your key items, or read a specific info shard, and those are the most galling objectives in the entire game because of the absolute colossal task of navigating that dumpster heap of a poorly laid-out inventory menu

This is yet another one of those games that surrenders to the pressures of levelling systems, but the way that gun scaling and level matching works isn't quite as bad as some of this generation's less clueless siblings. You get higher level gear and weaponry out in the world quite often, and even legendary weapons don't always offer buffs strong enough to warrant using them over a slightly better machine gun you just picked up; which does feed into the bizarre 'constantly chasing the green arrow' playstyle we've all but assimilated into general gaming culture at this point. There are systems for improving weapon damage but, curiously, later guns do tend to be more interesting anyway. The buzz of finding a smartgun with ammo that literally jumps around corners far beats out the strong punching rifle you'll have jealously hoarded at the beginning of the game. (Firing around a cover without having to poke out your own body is one of those special feeling combat moments you only really get in Cyberpunk.) Also, although it wasn't available at launch, the Transmog system neatly helps relieve the problem players used to have of chasing the strongest clothing gear and ending up dressed like an insane 90's fashion disaster brought back to digital life.

As you progress through the game and start piling on skills, the freedom of your gameplay choices really starts to blossom out. This isn't quite an immersive sim unfortunately, and stealth approaches, whilst fully possibly, don't feel as bespoke or fleshed out as one might expect from a game like Deus Ex. Patrol routes aren't particularly layered or complex, quickhack makes non-human complications all resolvable in the exact same way (pointing with your scanner and disabling) and there's only two animations for stealth takedowns. But providing you're willing to play with the tools that the game does offer you, Cyberpunk encounters can feel drastically different depending on your playstyle. You can engage in a straight room-to-room shoot-up, dashing around impressively cluttered and realistic environments picking shots through a dry-wall of ripped up apartment blocks. You can charge in with drugs and a sledgehammer, soaking up roads and splitting open skulls. Or you can take a hybrid approach, donning the versatile Mantis Blades and a camo-skin implant- jumping about as an invisible assassin, picking off the stragglers in the flurry whilst the survivors search frantically about for their unsee-able opponent. You can even go the 'hacker' route of installing infectious malware into your targets that poisons the victim and then jumps to his nearby buddies, or drives one of them into a cyberpsychosis killing his own friends, or hack someone's system and force them to kill themselves. And, of course, you can switch between all these playstyles depending on how you feel that day. Cyberpunk offers that level of gameplay freedom and moment-to-moment action choices. It is quite special. 

Of course, the gameplay is only a third of the factor when it comes to games like these, there's also the story and the world that story plays out in. Focusing on Night City for a moment, I have to express how impressed and simultaneously disappointed I am in what CDPR delivered for us. Visually, Night City is a total wonder. A techno-futuristic flurry of skyscrapers and billboards, caught between a mix of LA and Tokyo and pulled directly from Ridley Scott as he laid out the sets for Blade Runner. Moving neon billboards, holographic Koi fish, harsh industrial sectors- every district of Night City, and it's surrounding badlands, breathes with a life of their own- distinct and personality rich. You know the districts of the various gangs, the rich, the poor, the rockerboys and the netrunners. In the faceless and homogenous uniformity of a corporate dystopia, CDPR remembered vividly how to retain the colourful variety of the people that live there.

And it goes deeper than looks. We hear the variety in the various fantastic battle themes that engage whenever any of the factions becomes hostile, each unique to the culture or personality of that gang whilst retaining the overall synth-metal theming of the genre and world. We hear authentic voices speaking their authentic dialects and languages, Creole, Japanese, Spanish, Brazillian Portuguese and so on. It truly feels like a hub of world wide cultures, or perhaps more fittingly- a run-down flophouse where all these walks of life have collided in the piss-stained mess of a hovel they call home. Everybody, no matter where they come from, are united by their desire to get out of the rat-race the city traps them under, and you feel that desperation, indignancy and air for rebellion any direction you choose to go in.

Which brings us to the radio and soundtrack- wow! CDPR commissioned a plethora of artists not just to bring the Rocker Boy Johnny Silverhand to life, but to fill the world with in-universe bands playing music in their various styles. In a universe were the power of music is so very important, in it's rebellious spirit mostly, this is a irrefutably important part of the mythos that CDPR needed to devote the amount of serious attention to that they did. I'm not typically one for heavy rock, but I absolutely loved every iota of this game's soundtrack. The artistic heart of every contributing artists is engaged to create music in the mindset of a citizen of the Cyberpunk future, downtrodden and disengaged from the world, screaming their frustrations into powerful and catchy beats. I literally went to work for months banging my head to some of my favourites, 'Resist and Disorder', 'Never fade away', 'Holes in the sun'; every band delivered the assignment to the absolute letter and most went above and beyond the call. What results is, in my opinion, the best in-universe fictional soundtrack in gaming, perhaps in the art of fiction as it stands. How often is this scope of art even attempted, and when has this much heart and passion ever gone into it?

Oh, and the dialect! How could I not mention the dialect! The Cyberpunk franchise employs this curiously distinct timbre to the way people speak, with turns of phrase, manners of structing sentences and unique idioms. This is by no means unique in fiction, but I've never seen another piece of entertainment sell the constructed vernacular quite as strongly as Cyberpunk 2077 does. The natural ease of spoken dialogue, the cohesion between pronunciations and emphasis- I can feel the amount of work the linguistics team put in to make the voices of everyone sound real and natural, creating a world that sounds unlike any other in otherwise normal conversation. You detect the real world influences, the draws from Latin speech patterns, Afro-American speech even hints of that classic transatlantic verbiage- but the result feels distinct and evolved, like a manner of speaking which could easily exist in a melting pot that just never came together in our version of the world. Kudos is required for the effort that went in here.

Perhaps one more controversial angle of the world of Cyberpunk, although one I found so interesting with how different it was to ever other interpretation, is it's fascination with the extremes of commercial oversexualisation. You'll find hyper-sexual billboard advertisements looming down on the streets or being broadcast in every mega-building elevator, read excerpts of gaudy smut novels left lying around in guard-posts covering all walks of life, see the ugliness of a world built off  ofsuperficial sex appeal clear on the face of the narrative and the seedy places it drags you. This isn't the exaggerated beauty of hyper-sexualisation, the idealised glimpse of a glittering world were everyone confirms to the uniform standards of conventual beauty, but a hedonistic and lascivious corruption of it, drunk on the heady fumes of vice and debauchery.

Prostitution, drugs, cosmetic surgery- all glorified and beloved pillars of Cyberpunk society highlighting a society where you can change yourself to look however you want, intoxicate yourself to see the world however you wish to and engage in whatever most base desire takes you at any point- and in the depth of all the hedonism and excess you're still empty and soulless on the otherside. At the end of the day it's all just pomp, glitz, smoke and mirrors. Cake for the masses so they don't feel the corperate boot of faceless 'innovation' and 'expansion' slowly squeezing down on their necks. Which is why it's so important for the rebellious screaming music of the Rockerboy movements calling for people to wake up to the world. And so ironic that by the time of the game, 2077; that entire movement is old-hat and washed up, a vestige of a long-gone age enjoyed only by those who can't let the past go- despite the fact their message is just as relevant today as it was in their hey-day.

Damn, I could talk about the spirit of the world all day- but for this blog it's important I highlight the let downs as well. Namely, the interactivity. For all this effort that went into making the world feel so real, it's utterly criminal that CDPR couldn't go the distance to let us live in that world to a convincing degree! We can't buy food from vendors, go for a drink at the bar, visit an overcrowded nightclub in the wrong part of town, shoot-up unspecified narcotics and wake up hazed out in an alley four blocks away with nothing but our long-johns on. We can't even sit down on benches. For all their effect, Night City is functionally nothing more than a backdrop for another Ubisoft style open world. You have police scanner missions, which are just pockets of enemies that attack anyone who get close. They do, increadibly, all have lore and data shards explaining each criminal going-on; but the encounters themselves are never more than a minute long, so why would I care enough to read about what these murderous arseholes were doing wondering around in the viaduct?

Most all of the world boils down to chasing map markers for side quests, scanner missions or the more involved love-child between those two- Gigs. And as you can imagine, that really does pull away from the wonder of exploring the world for yourself. Driving isn't particularly great, the controls feel sluggish or floaty depending on what ride you pick: whatever class of vehicle, the control always just feels wrong. (And no vehicle combat whatsover) You can buy new apartments for V, although there's no benefit to visiting them beyond a small EXP buff for sleeping in your bed. It feels like everything CDPR attempt to put into the guy to create more of a simulation for the world just ended up feeling half-baked and hollow. For all the thousands of Eddies (Eurodollars) you'll make throughout the narrative and side-objectives, there will never be anything worth spending it all on. Which could be construed as a commentary on the emptiness of commercial pursuits but come-on: We know it's just weak design.

Plus there's the police system, a curiously anaemic anomaly considering one of the core-most taglines of the Cyberpunk 2077 marketing was literally "In Night City: What makes you a criminal?" Nothing, apparently! From hours of shooting my way all up and down Night City, reckless driving, blowing up highways and maybe, accidentally, not always causing hostile casualties- I never once saw a Night City Police officer. Oh, I got a wanted level every once in a blue moon- but the actual units themselves took their sweet time getting there so often that I was typically in the next city district over before they showed up. And apparently Night City PD can't splurge on pursuit vehicles for their unit considering the only time I ever saw them chase me in a car was during on side mission for Kerry, and they gave up before I reached the end of the road. There just isn't a police system at all, even after the 'overhaul' it received-  That probably shouldn't even have ever been an aspect of the marketing.

The Journey

From the start Cyberpunk places the power of controlled destiny in the hands of the player, by allowing us the chance to choose between three origin stories for our V. Each of these introductions, Street kid, Nomad and Corpo, come with their tailor-made prologues and a unique trait for call-back options in dialogue throughout the game. (And an increadibly tiny side quest which isn't really worth mentioning.) Unfortunately, it's hardly more than a hour before your introduction is over and you're thrust onto the unified story path of every character. This belies how the 'choose who you want to be' presentation is merely a smokescreen that conjures the illusion of choice and consequence without following through on that promise, which is a theme the game continues on until, bizarrely, it's very end- at which point choices suddenly mean something for the first time.

The first act of our play is very prototypical for any crime-fantasy story, but CDPR's talent lies in their ability to elevate the material they work with. Whereas on it's face playing the 'merc looking for his big break' sounds very by-the-numbers, there's a level of authenticity with how the world is portrayed, the nature of opportunity is presented and the stellar performances of the actors engender the worth of the circumstance and situation. Right from the word go you'll come to be embroiled in the relationship between V and their best friend Jackie, the allure of the Night City underworld where everyone is trying to use you with a smile on their face, and the monumental scale of the target- enough even to make the most cocksure and arrogant of your circle sombre up their act a little. It's a delicate balance of high quality writing and higher quality performance that brings the world to life in stunning vivacity.

Of course, this intro also demonstrates the span of reactive choice and consequence available to the player as during the set-up for the heist they are capable of approaching their tasks with any number of alternatives, redundancies and short-cuts to get everything into place. Of course, I endeavour to remind you that this is absolutely not indicative of the rest of the game- but rather a startling standalone reminder of what Cyberpunk 2077 could have been if CDPR had unlimited resources and time. Which they didn't. Still, enjoy the freedom whilst it lasts, because it really does feel great when you have that malleable narrative in the palm of your hands!

Another aspect present in the first act that I like, and is actually present throughout the whole narrative, is the willingness of the story to take a break for quiet moments of emotional vulnerability. Whether to get closer to Jackie before the Heist, learn more about the sort of motivations that drive Johnny Silverhand or, my favourite, delve into the person that V is through brilliantly written and acted introspective confrontations such as the unforgettable one-on-one with the Doll inside of The Clouds. Whereas some games simply can't stomach taking their foot off the gas for a single moment, or don't know what to do with themselves unless the hero is shooting something- Cyberpunk recognises the value in moments of peace. Letting the emotional stakes be set up in the story, the connections between characters be established or the tensions of the campaign be released in a time of still. Some of my absolute high-light moments of the game were great conversations between solid characters who shared little nuggets of themselves in arguments or trauma sharing. In a world of action, it's the peaceful times that ring the loudest.

It isn't until Act 2 where the actual narrative rears it's head and the bigger themes that the narrative wants to carry for the long haul are revealed. Spoilers from here on out in case you haven't even seen the basic premise of Cyberpunk- but in a series of events with consequences larger than you could ever have known in the moment, V is afflicted with a data chip in their head affixed with the engrammatic personality data of the long dead 2020's rockerboy and one-time Arasaka terror bomber, Johnny Silverhand- frontman for the band Samurai and icon for anti-corporate sentiment across the land. Or at least he was. Johnny has kind of faded away in the fifty years he spent dead, all until he woke up in the mind of an unsuspecting mercenary. But of course the penny has to drop- Johnny's psyche is slowly overwriting the host bodies in a process that is slowly starting to make V's own body see his or her mind as a foreign entity, activating the antibodies. Essentially, V's body is slowly killing itself and Johnny Silverhand's engram is slowly taking over the corpse that process is going to leave behind. That is the set-up for the narrative; a ticking clock where the protagonist and the ghost of Johnny Silverhand have to race to win V more time to live. A race against mortality itself.

Now narrative wise Act 2 is a lot messier than the first one. The game loosens it's tight grip on the player and almost immediately events start to drift. Right away I discovered a pretty obvious cohesion error where I could, and did, activate the Delamain side quest when going to retrieve my car, which activates a little friendly back and forth with the ghost of Johnny- a bit jarring since before that point you've never shared a conversation with the man and are fully under the belief that he's trying to kill you. It's a small sequence break in the narrative, but there's actually a few of those dotted about in bizarre places that disrupt an otherwise flawlessly presented and told narrative about facing the inevitable however you can stomach it.

This is also the act when it really starts to dawn that the Choices from part 1 aren't really coming to substantive consequences. Choosing to side with the Corpo scrooge from Act 1 in a tense stand-off scene and proceeding operation, even as it puts you in danger, doesn't net you a valuable contact you can call in a dire moment but a brief bedroom fling. Really? That's the best that could be devised? A few side quest decisions don't appear to present any consequence that we get to see at all, such as the Peralez missions which seem to end at the exact moment the questline got supremely interesting, probably victim to the messy late-development troubles we now know that the game was subject to. But if there's one thing that really started standing out to me in Act 2, it's the voice actor for V.

Now I played the male lead, I would have liked to play both but with the recent announcement that CDPR are soon going to make me incapable of playing the game by cranking up the specs, it looks like I won't have the time to. But from my experience with the male V, I have to say I found the performance to be honestly powerful in it's most emotional moments. That scene where V first learns that the chip is killing him is heartbreaking, as you can hear this ostensibly tough-as-nails street-smart merc beginning to crumble in the face of his impending mortality. It's his ability to sell the razor-sharp thug and the scared lost soul without losing the thread of V that made me had me totally mesmerised during his prominent scenes. Gavin Drea elevated this role with his work. 

Side quests are a large part of the CDPR identity ever since The Witcher 3 blew practically every other RPG out of the water with the quality of every one of it's side missions; and I'm happy to say that Cyberpunk 2077 continues that legacy and then some. There isn't a single throw-away side quest, each has character and payoff at the least or reoccurring chains of quests at the best. Seriously, some of these quests were so good that I found myself thinking back on characters a week later and wondering whatever happened to them. I loved the criminal with the Jesus Complex, and wanted to know more about how the whole thing effected Rachel Casich, or how my choice at the end of the Peralez questline changed their fates, or even what Claire got up to once our races were over. In some ways it's really frustrating that we never seem to leave these characters with everything said and done that needed to be done, but in other ways I can tell that's kind of the point of the story. Night City is this boiling cauldron of activity writhe with all these people trying to either whether the flames or hop out and run- it's totally natural in a world like that to brush by people on their own journeys, catching just a glimpse before their swallowed up by the hustle of the City that Never Sleeps. (Wait, isn't that New York? You get what I mean!)

As the story progresses the narrative presents one of those false junctions that Grand Theft Auto popularised back in it's 3D era. Three distinct paths of questline to follow that all, ultimately, have to be explored before the story can progress. A false choice, if you will. But at least these three questlines play out like small contained stories on their own with self contained narratives, branching side characters who can blossom into strong relationships and even romances if you wish, and some pretty exciting set-piece moments to round them out. Of course, the 'Barge' questline is the most impressive, with hands down the best boss fight in the game near it's conclusion. That fight had everything, build-up, speed, versatile challenge and a venue to die for- highlight of the game right there!

It's in the final act that agency and choice returns to the player. All roads lead to the same funnel from which the choices you made and relationships you've formed will come to play in the form of quite distinct and explosive finales in the race to save your life. Honestly, I was a little shocked by how quickly this final part of the story came upon me. It seemed the story had just started to open up before I was being told to meet my fate and The Embers and getting told to wrap up all of my loose-ends- not that I think the story is horrifically short so to speak, just that the second act really could have used more meat on it's bones to make the whole story feel more full-bodied. As it is I feel the game has a supremely strong intro and a powerful conclusion, with a bit of an aimless middle with glittering moments that shone here and there. There's just no unified purpose in the second act beyond 'following leads', most of which don't really push the needle of the plot further than a small inch, the last of which drags you all the way there. It's not the most satisfying way to lay out a narrative and I suspect it's probably not what CDPR originally planned for. (The Witcher 3 shows they typically know better when it comes to plot composition.)

Luckily what the main plot lacks in, the increadibly fleshed out various character questlines make up in droves. If the side quests lines are sparkling gems, than the character questlines are flawless uncut jewels. Huge and completely contained narratives that each brim with character progression, pathos and set-piece scenes you'll remember. A few of which can prove important enough to change the prospects of whatever ending your hurtling towards. These character quests are tied to strong relationships you find throughout your journey, friends or lovers from various walks of life providing a full perspective of just about every angle of Night City life- and though not all of them have the potential to tie back into the narrative, they all have satisfying conclusions that wrap up their arcs and give you a better understanding of yours and Johnny's journey by perspective.

Now it's only fair, after talking so much about companions, that I focus on the man himself: Johnny Silverhand. Brought to life by Keanu Reeves; Johnny is the perfect encapsulation of meeting an arsehole celebrity who turns out to be more than the persona implied. I cannot understate how perfectly I think this team did writing and performing the personality of Johnny Silverhand to make him a character worth spending the entire breadth of the story around. A shadow of yourself but also a distinct entity, Johnny is like the devil on your shoulder commenting on your choices, critiquing your allegiances and sometimes even taking over the wheel when he feels he's needed. Having him in your head you would expect to have a one way easy street into his inner-most soul, but CDPR knew to make him so much interesting than that.

Johnny is his own personality even within your head. All the ego and narcissism and pomp still radiates out of the perception he wears, a mask so finely crafted it's become who he is- unravelling the actual human beneath that takes time and shared introspection- companionship wrought through conflict and contest. Moments simply talking with Johnny about his thoughts on old believers in SAMURAI, and those prying into his history serving in the corporate war- those are cracks in the armour Johnny's soul is made out of. But then at the same time, Johnny isn't just some book to be read. He's his own person with personality, desires and decades old vendettas. Sometimes it's impossible to distinguish between moments when Johnny is being truly vulnerable with you, and when he's trying to radicalise you into being the same self-destructive anti-corporate soldier he was in life. Maybe he doesn't even know himself. The special moment when you realise you no longer know where V ends and Johnny begins marks the point where you have to take off your hat for Keanu Reeves for doing an incredible job losing himself in the complex and rich role of Johnny Silverhand. I was foolish enough to consider the man just another 'Celebrity casting' when I saw his name: he proved me wrong soundly with his work. Reeves whipped up and summoned the spirit of Silverhand right off the page and brought gaming one of it's most lovably narcissistic anti-heroes ever. 

In it's endings Cyberpunk 2077 has quite a fair share of choice, and even though the actual ending acts themselves all funnel towards roughly the same decision lane, the actual disparate final missions themselves are all high octane and thrilling finales. Each decision and ending stays close to the same theme, feeding to an artistically pure message that survived through all the heavy monetary production and fingers from a thousand creatives. Experiencing a few of those endings reminded me of the human souls conjuring these narratives in the same way that some of my favourite games ever do. Now I don't want to over-bake the dessert here; I'm not calling these finales as emotionally rich and cathartic as a Persona finale or anything, but they were fitting. They fit the story being told and gave the send-off we needed them too. They give V, and the player, one last chance to seize their destiny; and that's as far as this game needed to go.

Now I've put it off for a bit but now I should ask the big question: is the game still buggy? Yes, yes and triple yes. Cars still fall through floors, police never seem to show up, faces sometimes stop animating in cars, sometimes my arms become glued to my feet. There's no first person option to look through my rear view mirror (Maybe that would be fixed with Ray Tracing- I don't know, my computer wouldn't even dream of running that), there's no route on your map when racing, there's no goodbye option in conversations- oh, and the increadibly frustrating 'Can't save at this time' bug is still alive and well. But the game runs. That last one is important because the more available this game has become over the years, the more it has been able to nurture that battered reputation and it should be nurtured; because the game they was a great one. It wasn't the one they sold it as, and it wasn't even the game they set out to make, but as the game they ended up with, it's still something to be proud of.

Summary

This has been an important blog for me, a chance to release a grudge I've been holding around for years by getting my hands on the game that aggrieved and, despite it's flaws, forgiving it. Playing the game for myself to completion, seeing all the things they got right against what they got wrong, it's clear that CDPR are still masters of their craft and that were just dealt a bad hand they made the most of. The composition of the world, the authenticity of the emotional themes, the complex life within the script and the blood, sweat and tears put into the performances; Cyberpunk 2077 is an achievement of collaboration which ran afoul when the time came to put it all together. But do the positives outweigh the still present shortcomings? That depends on what you want to see. If you're still holding out hope for the Cyberpunk 2077 we were promised, then nothing this game does will get through to you. If you instead take the game for what it is and judge it by it's merits, then I'd go so far as to call this game a flawed but earnest masterpiece. I will go ahead and recommend Cyberpunk 2077, amazingly, and use the powers invested in me by my arbitrary review system to award the game a respectable -A Grade. I come away from this game with the relief of a man who held in a breath for two years, finally tasting the air and liking the sensation as it tickles on his nose. I like the heart of Cyberpunk, and one day I'd love to see it beating in the body it was built for.