Inside Round8 Studio's boardroom

scrub Round8 employee: "Sir! We can't just make this game an exact copy of Bloodborne!"

CHAD Round8 BOSS: "Fuck yes we can. Bloodborne fucking OWNS."

NOTE: This was written in March of 2021. I got nostalgic looking through my old writings, and liked what I wrote here. It is in no way a critique of the game in it's current state, as I have not played it. However, it is important to remember the past, whether that be the shitty video games we've played, or the small pieces of ourself we've left across the Internet. I am leaving it mostly unedited (got rid of a few things like how it addresses a list I had put it on) because I used to get anxiety while proof-reading, then deleting my work. It seems fitting to present it as I would have back then. Please enjoy.

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Now that we are, at the time of this writing on 3/30/2021, almost three full months removed from the year 2020, I feel it is both necessary and appropriate to unpack how severely our lives, and the lives of our many billions of other human beings, were affected by the COVID-19 virus. 2020 was a trying year for anyone who was not lucky and/or skilled enough to possess the required attributes for maintaining employment in a safe and well-paying workplace. Even for the many who began to work remotely were forced to become intimately familiar with the walls of their own homes, even more so than what had been previously known. The only people who appear to have succeeded throughout the pandemic which currently continues to rage appear to be those in a position of power over some industry which benefits from everyone being alone and depressed. The true 2020 experience was one of utmost despair. It resulted in countless lives being destroyed by death and by other means such as depression, drugs, and finances. With all that surrounded us, many took solace in media, which provided a portal to escapism which was, at times, drastically needed.

2020 was not a year in which I experienced the need for escape. I acknowledge my situation involved me knowing the right people and having the exact skillset I needed in order to find work. The harshest parts of my 2020 were entirely unrelated to COVID-19. In January, I began to experience intense depression after having whored myself out in October, November, and December to three different women in the most unfulfilling and shallow ways possible. I even went off of my medication for my anxiety-related disorders because it was not allowing me to perform well in these encounters. After literally being celibate for almost five years, I had expected to find joy in such excursions. In reality, I became more aware of my emotional needs being far more complex, and such a prospect caused me to become severely distressed. I found out toward the end of January 2020 that my internship supervisor was planning on hiring two of the three interns which were working under him. I was the one who was not being hired. I became obsessed with this negative feedback, attempting to become far more pushy with clients, making a strong effort to “force” improvement. Anything I could do to show that I was, in fact, hirable. In early February, I was told by my supervisor not to come in after he heard I had conversed with a client in a way he felt was reductive. He explained to me that the client in question had understood my comments toward how he was feeling suggested I was telling him these were not real and were instead being forced. I explained my true meaning behind the dialogue was to enforce reframing to explain how he didn’t deserve these feelings. My supervisor told me to take the day off, and that he would think about what needed to be done moving forward. The next day, I was told by one of my teachers that the internship was being terminated. To this day, I have not had contact with this man since that morning when he told me that I was not good enough.

After this experience, my emotions took a nosedive into the darkest territory they had ever touched. I can comfortably say, toward the beginning of March 2020, I was not wanting to continue on with my life as I wanted. I had signed up to take part in a class which involved traveling to Jamaica to perform casework and therapeutic services with severely neglected populations in the mountains. The night before going, I did not sleep. A part of me intended to not show up. To tell the instructor of this class that I had overslept through a text I planned to send moments after the flight was set to depart. I am not sure what possessed me to go against this plan, but I had found myself in the tiny lobby of an airport in southern Indiana hours before the flight would depart. I had done this trip before, and I found the experience life-changing. The time spent on this excursion became a desperate grasp to achieve the same feeling I did in the year prior. I craved a way to escape the reality of my situation. The reality that I had not succeeded and would need to wait an entire year before I could try again.

I only slept for about three hours on my third night in the small Jamaican campground our group was staying at. The next morning, I requested to speak to my professor in private about everything running through my head. She gave me insights to my situation I did not know or think about prior. I felt better afterward, but my situation did not change. I was still not going to be able to graduate in May like most of my other classmates. I still needed to level with the fact that I was told I was not good enough to do what I felt was my calling. I still craved an escape. One can become intimately connected to their fellow human being when they are unable to utilize an electronic carrying device such as a phone or laptop in a setting where you are surrounded by extreme poverty and severe physical and mental disorders. I shared with classmates, most of whom were total strangers, my issues, and they listened. I felt better. I had not escaped. It has become clear to me that shifting my reality to something other than my own is not a productive way of dealing with my own thoughts. I can not escape my life, whether I want to or not.

When I returned from Jamaica, COVID-19 had just claimed dominance over the United States. The restaurant I was working at to pay my bills had to shut down, and I was laid off from my position as a server. I spent two weeks doing basically nothing. I filed for unemployment but never received word back. After a couple more weeks, I moved back in with my parents, despite my lease still having three more months on it. I got a part-time job at a wholesale grocer I had worked at before starting graduate school. I made fifteen dollars an hour, which was significantly more money than I was making as a server. I asked my Jamaica classmates if they knew of any opening for social work. One of them gave me information. I applied and was hired. This was my first full-time job. I went back to dating. I met a girl. We hit it off. Currently, I am still at the same job and still with the same girl. I never escaped reality. I never changed reality. I simply lived life honestly, and managed to succeed while the world around me burned.

Video games are not a form of escapism for me. I do not become immersed in the experience of false worlds in the same way the average person may consider immersion. When you have as intimate of a relationship with video games as I do, they don’t take on that sort of role. ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ came out while I was sick with COVID-19. I was halfway through my extended quarantine, having no interaction with anyone in-person aside from my mother, who forcefully hugged me without my consent. She also got COVID-19 after this. We are all fine. If there was any time I could have immersed myself in a video game, allowing that to become my reality for a brief period, this was the time to do it. When I started playing ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ I literally had no responsibilities. As I was playing ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ on my base model Sony PlayStation 4, I heard constant criticism online concerning the extremity of the game’s visual bugs and performance issues. I spent five paragraphs on what seemingly has nothing to do with ‘Cyberpunk 2077’. Aside from my own personal decompression over events of the prior year, I wanted to establish that I play video games to be entertained. I did not anticipate immersion. I did not anticipate an escape. I did not go more than five minutes without experiencing a visual, audio, or input bug. I did not log this for active proof, but I am pretty confident in saying this, and I welcome CD Projekt Red pursuing legal action over this comment. The game also crashed, like, forty times over the course of my time with it. Again, I have no logs of this, but I feel confident in my ability to defend myself in a court room if it does, in fact, become that sort of thing. I, however, did not care about any of these. I am saying this, not as a CD Projekt Red simp, but as a man who both plays video games and is grounded in his own reality: I enjoyed ‘Cyberpunk 2077’.

Obviously, given it’s score, I have many issues with the ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ experience. The overarching story is quite shallow and redundant in comparison to many other gaming experiences. The looting system is barren of any interesting ideas. The combat encounters, whether you choose to be stealthy or action-oriented, are incredibly barebones, and you see the extent of their depth within the first hour of gameplay. There are many systems, such as crafting, vehicle buying, and crime rating to name a few, which are not fleshed out in any way and simply exist to be there. The “cyberpunk” in ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ is merely there as an aesthetic, and there is little in the overall plot to address many of the more complex themes the genre is capable of tackling.

One quest I find particularly annoying involves a monk who is being forced by actual criminals to modify his body with cybernetic enhancements. The potential for a complex moral quandary is quite significant. Much of Night City, the sandbox which one plays ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ in, operates around an assumed use of cyberoptics. The ethicality of designing services and support of basic needs around the assumption that civilians are utilizing cybernetic enhancements could be fun to explore, even in a light manner. The study of transhumanist philosophy is quite intriguing, and it asks many questions about the nature of improving our quality of life in favor of becoming a bit less fully oneself. ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ dips it’s toes into something potentially interesting, then turns it into a mission where you simply rescue the monk by murdering his captors. He thanks you and you get the experience points. Did it seem like it would be too boring to make a quest where citizens were mandated by the government to enhance their bodies with cybernetics, and you had the job of working with the monks on this issue? The problem with designing quests around whether or not you will be able to murder individuals is that it railroads you into a specific structure. It’s why the game’s three best quests: ‘Pyramid Song’, ‘Sinnerman’, and ‘Coin Operated Boy’, involve no murdering. The writers on the team excel in telling smaller-scale stories with minor consequences. I murdered hundreds of actual criminals in ‘Cyberpunk 2077’. The gratuitous death lost it’s weight quickly.

As far as I’m concerned, the bugs in ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ actually enhance the experience. This leads to an interesting question of how games criticism operates. Is it a critic’s obligation to discuss a game’s many bugs if they personally do not care about them? Even more interesting, should talks of these bugs be displayed in a negative light if the critic in question feels they improve the quality of the experience? I like the bugs in ‘Cyberpunk 2077’. They are funny. I do not like the crashing, though. By the time I had completed ‘Cyberpunk 2077’, I felt empty. The parts of the game I enjoyed were long removed from the experience, and all I had left to do was murder the correct amount of actual criminals. The bugs were the most enjoyable part of the experience. I had exhausted all the entertainment I could find in the gameplay and story, and was playing to check it off of my list of games I had to finish. The bugs kept me coming because they were consistently fun to experience.

‘Cyberpunk 2077’ is not a game I would recommend to most people. As an experience, the moments where it excels above competition are far too sparse. In a year where we received the gunplay of ‘Doom Eternal’, the stealth of ‘Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales’, the story of ’13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim’, and the graphical prowess of ‘Demon’s Souls’, it becomes abundantly clear that ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ is an imitator, too self-absorbed in the prospect of having numerous systems and taking no time to flesh any of these out. At their basest level, they are enjoyable. But the game never moves beyond the basest level, so you have 50+ hours of video game that I would describe as, “fine”. Also the driving is the worst I’ve ever seen in an open-world game.