I played as a very technical boy, infecting enemies with powered-up hacks into their vital organs while I stalked around the combat zone. The combat also seems markedly different from the initial release. They behave “realistically,” and like most of the non-player content in the game, seem to be a drastic leap forward from the videos you might remember from the disturbingly gleeful “ look at this shit” responses that highlighted technical problems in 2020. NPCs interact minimally with their environment, and they panic when gunfire starts nearby. If there is a key maneuver in patch 1.5, it is that these fantasies seem to be fulfilled. They are there to give context, and a certain aesthetic feeling, to a player speeding by them in a souped-up future car. The people on the sidewalk in any given game are not there to be full people. It is a strange marker of current video game culture that this is the thing that we most desire, since by definition the entirety of a video game environment is a technical illusion to make a player feel important. Now, 16 months later, the prevailing question I am still regularly asked is, “Is Cyberpunk 2077 ‘good’ now?”Īt launch, Night City lacked a sense of weight - it felt like the illusion of a city, rather than the evocation of a real metropolis Substantial performance errors prompted its removal from Sony’s PlayStation Store, and the intervening months have been a slow crawl of CD Projekt fixing, adding, and tweaking the game in incremental updates - an extensive bid to bring it in line with its marketing promises. Over all of this loomed a series of technical problems that quickly transformed Cyberpunk 2077 into a generator of glitchy memes and exposed a rushed game produced under distressing crunch conditions.
The game landed with a dull thud, the stark reality of which could be blamed on any number of factors called out by reviewers and players: plodding cyberpunk gameplay, the general emptiness of the world, and a lack of compelling narrative. It was all portrayed in first-person perspective, to really sell us on our protagonist V’s embodied relationship with the world around them.īut in a move typical for the cyberpunk genre, there was a stark difference between the hype and the actual thing. Talsorian Games’ sprawling cyberpunk Night City with storytelling chops that made Geralt’s adventures in The Witcher so compelling for so many of us. The newest project from The Witcher developer CD Projekt Red, it was promoted as a sea change in video games that would merge the deep history of R. Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the most anticipated releases of 2020.
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