It’s been interesting to watch the re-evaluation of this game over the course of the last year. I haven’t played the Phantom Liberty expansion yet, but I have a pretty huge chunk of the 2.0 update, and if nothing else, I’ll say that CD Projekt Red have produced a functional version of 2020’s biggest discourse-generating disasterpiece. The police are no longer phantoms who apparate 16 feet behind you every time you commit a crime, and instead have an actual a presence on the streets now (there’s a police scanner, even!). NPC drivers are more rational than before, only sometimes doing something really unhinged like, say, driving into a busy intersection, pulling on the E-brake and then screaming at the top of their lungs. NPCs also don’t seem to stand around waiting for death quite as much during combat encounters. The perk system has been completely re-done, simultaneously making the upgrade system about 300% more immediately coherent than before while also making the player’s ascendance into godhood a guarantee rather than a possibility, trivializing most (if not all) combat encounters long before the endgame starts up.
I first played through Cyberpunk back when it released in 2020, and like everyone else, was disappointed by it. Regardless of the technical difficulties, the writing in the original release of the game felt insufficient, as if it was afraid to commit to a perspective. This, to me, has been the most mysterious aspect of the discourse around the game. Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 is ultimately the same game as before, only more beautiful. But regardless of how photo-realistic Night City becomes, no matter how high the NPC count gets or how in-depth the simulation of urban life is rendered, Cyberpunk 2077 will still always be the game where every outfit worn by every character looks like if a marketing manager from The Gap circa the 2000’s was asked to make ‘punk’ fashion for 11 year-old boys. This is still the game where its late-capitalist dystopia is informed by 80’s-era orientalism (anxiety about Japan outpacing America in the tech sector? please – America has moved onto even more pernicious and pronounced forms of xenophobic angst since the ‘80s!). Cyberpunk is still the game in which every line of dialogue is pockmarked by the corniest examples of fake urban slang in basically any media released within the last twenty years. A choom might say the sitch is so un-nova it makes me wanna zero a corpo gonk!!!
Everything Cyberpunk 2077 does right is undercut by its inability to commit to saying anything coherent – anything, at all – on any kind of ideological or philosophical level. It’s always struck me as weird that this massive dystopian sci-fi blockbuster, this story about corporations ballooning to such an extent that they actually, rather than functionally own the state and its police, that they have granted themselves the right to kill and even, in a literal sense, own peoples’ literal bodies – a story filled with criticisms of corporations and corporate culture more broadly – explicitly disallows every character in the entire game from ever, in even a single instance, disparaging capitalism as a system in total. Even Johnny ‘Keanu Reeves’ Guitarhands, an implicitly left-leaning terrorist who sets off a nuclear bomb inside of a corporate weapons manufacturer, asserts he doesn’t specifically have a problem with capitalism, but with social ‘entropy’ (look at my leftist terrorists, dog, etc etc).
The worst part, for me, has always been that Cyberpunk 2077 is a game about a low-level twenty-something crook looking down the barrel of their own mortality, forced to slowly fade away before they can do anything with their life, that also lets the player indefinitely prolong their character's life, so long as they still want to complete open world content. This is the contradiction that is too extreme for me, the one that turns the game from a messy but occasionally compelling attempt at dystopian crime drama into regular old video game mediocrity. Other games have toyed with this exact idea - another AAA open world game in recent memory has depicted a wasting disease suffered by its protagonist may come to mind - but Cyberpunk simply erases whatever symptoms the protagonist experiences whenever it might inconvenience the player. So, Cyberpunk 2077 becomes a game about death, about wasting away, that doesn't want to inconvenience you, and so it trivializes death.
This profound inability to communicate a coherent perspective on its own subject matter extends to the game’s mechanics. This is a game that is nominally about living in and experiencing a fictional city, that nevertheless does not enable the player to actually do stuff in that city outside of gun combat. In the latest update, Cyberpunk added working subway lines, which, impressively, actually work like subways do. You have to study the train route, choose the correct direction, and figure out where you want to go on the map to use the subway – and then you have to actually sit quietly in the subway car and go to your destination. This is all executed beautifully, too – CD Project Red nail the almost meditative vibe of quietly minding your own business on your commute while you’re squished into a tin can with a bunch of other people. For a brief couple of minutes, Cyberpunk seems to remember it is a game about people who live in a place, and not a game about a gun that shoots enemies and harvests resources for itself. Romantic partners have also been upgraded, now occasionally sending text messages to the player and hanging out in the player character’s apartment semi-regularly to maintain a sense of continuity in those stories. And so, Cyberpunk becomes a simulation encouraging the player to immerse themselves in its massive open world – before the player leaves Judy in their apartment, double-jumps across the street, and explodes eight criminals’ heads with their cyber-mind, at which point it returns to what it actually is, which is an Ubisoft-esque power fantasy.
All this is to say, Cyberpunk 2077 is a profoundly insecure game. A lot of my frustration with it comes down to the fact that, unlike so many AAA open world games, Cyberpunk has so many of the right pieces to really build something that matters, something that transcends the kind of blockbuster superficiality haunting the open world genre – but much like Starfield, it is dominated by a directionless-style of direction, an ideologically blank expression of ideology, in which the pursuit of the ‘ultimate’ cyberpunk video game subsumes all, producing an ideologically-conflicted, cyberpunk-themed amusement park. And did I enjoy the amusement park? Sometimes! There’s no question in my mind, at all, that the decade-plus of labor that created such a dense, fantastical simulation of a hyper-urban dystopia is in itself worth the price of admission, if only to experience the spectacle of this big, ungainly, wacky thing CD Projekt Red cooked up. But as far as games which are about something go, games which earnestly seek to explore grief, or the fear of death, or the annihilation of the self through the forced anonymization of capitalism, Cyberpunk 2077, whether its given yet another shiny new coat of paint or not, is still rendered with the color of television tuned to a dead channel, a media object which embodies what it criticizes and trivializes what it takes seriously on its surface.
I first played through Cyberpunk back when it released in 2020, and like everyone else, was disappointed by it. Regardless of the technical difficulties, the writing in the original release of the game felt insufficient, as if it was afraid to commit to a perspective. This, to me, has been the most mysterious aspect of the discourse around the game. Cyberpunk 2077 2.0 is ultimately the same game as before, only more beautiful. But regardless of how photo-realistic Night City becomes, no matter how high the NPC count gets or how in-depth the simulation of urban life is rendered, Cyberpunk 2077 will still always be the game where every outfit worn by every character looks like if a marketing manager from The Gap circa the 2000’s was asked to make ‘punk’ fashion for 11 year-old boys. This is still the game where its late-capitalist dystopia is informed by 80’s-era orientalism (anxiety about Japan outpacing America in the tech sector? please – America has moved onto even more pernicious and pronounced forms of xenophobic angst since the ‘80s!). Cyberpunk is still the game in which every line of dialogue is pockmarked by the corniest examples of fake urban slang in basically any media released within the last twenty years. A choom might say the sitch is so un-nova it makes me wanna zero a corpo gonk!!!
Everything Cyberpunk 2077 does right is undercut by its inability to commit to saying anything coherent – anything, at all – on any kind of ideological or philosophical level. It’s always struck me as weird that this massive dystopian sci-fi blockbuster, this story about corporations ballooning to such an extent that they actually, rather than functionally own the state and its police, that they have granted themselves the right to kill and even, in a literal sense, own peoples’ literal bodies – a story filled with criticisms of corporations and corporate culture more broadly – explicitly disallows every character in the entire game from ever, in even a single instance, disparaging capitalism as a system in total. Even Johnny ‘Keanu Reeves’ Guitarhands, an implicitly left-leaning terrorist who sets off a nuclear bomb inside of a corporate weapons manufacturer, asserts he doesn’t specifically have a problem with capitalism, but with social ‘entropy’ (look at my leftist terrorists, dog, etc etc).
The worst part, for me, has always been that Cyberpunk 2077 is a game about a low-level twenty-something crook looking down the barrel of their own mortality, forced to slowly fade away before they can do anything with their life, that also lets the player indefinitely prolong their character's life, so long as they still want to complete open world content. This is the contradiction that is too extreme for me, the one that turns the game from a messy but occasionally compelling attempt at dystopian crime drama into regular old video game mediocrity. Other games have toyed with this exact idea - another AAA open world game in recent memory has depicted a wasting disease suffered by its protagonist may come to mind - but Cyberpunk simply erases whatever symptoms the protagonist experiences whenever it might inconvenience the player. So, Cyberpunk 2077 becomes a game about death, about wasting away, that doesn't want to inconvenience you, and so it trivializes death.
This profound inability to communicate a coherent perspective on its own subject matter extends to the game’s mechanics. This is a game that is nominally about living in and experiencing a fictional city, that nevertheless does not enable the player to actually do stuff in that city outside of gun combat. In the latest update, Cyberpunk added working subway lines, which, impressively, actually work like subways do. You have to study the train route, choose the correct direction, and figure out where you want to go on the map to use the subway – and then you have to actually sit quietly in the subway car and go to your destination. This is all executed beautifully, too – CD Project Red nail the almost meditative vibe of quietly minding your own business on your commute while you’re squished into a tin can with a bunch of other people. For a brief couple of minutes, Cyberpunk seems to remember it is a game about people who live in a place, and not a game about a gun that shoots enemies and harvests resources for itself. Romantic partners have also been upgraded, now occasionally sending text messages to the player and hanging out in the player character’s apartment semi-regularly to maintain a sense of continuity in those stories. And so, Cyberpunk becomes a simulation encouraging the player to immerse themselves in its massive open world – before the player leaves Judy in their apartment, double-jumps across the street, and explodes eight criminals’ heads with their cyber-mind, at which point it returns to what it actually is, which is an Ubisoft-esque power fantasy.
All this is to say, Cyberpunk 2077 is a profoundly insecure game. A lot of my frustration with it comes down to the fact that, unlike so many AAA open world games, Cyberpunk has so many of the right pieces to really build something that matters, something that transcends the kind of blockbuster superficiality haunting the open world genre – but much like Starfield, it is dominated by a directionless-style of direction, an ideologically blank expression of ideology, in which the pursuit of the ‘ultimate’ cyberpunk video game subsumes all, producing an ideologically-conflicted, cyberpunk-themed amusement park. And did I enjoy the amusement park? Sometimes! There’s no question in my mind, at all, that the decade-plus of labor that created such a dense, fantastical simulation of a hyper-urban dystopia is in itself worth the price of admission, if only to experience the spectacle of this big, ungainly, wacky thing CD Projekt Red cooked up. But as far as games which are about something go, games which earnestly seek to explore grief, or the fear of death, or the annihilation of the self through the forced anonymization of capitalism, Cyberpunk 2077, whether its given yet another shiny new coat of paint or not, is still rendered with the color of television tuned to a dead channel, a media object which embodies what it criticizes and trivializes what it takes seriously on its surface.