Fixing Cyberpunk 2077

Massive spoilers for Cyberpunk 2077

In September of 2023, CD Projekt Red released the Phantom Liberty DLC for Cyberpunk 2077. Coinciding with the release of the DLC was a massive patch, designed to fix many long standing issues with the game, as well as implement new features such as Perk trees and a more active police AI. And while the game had been…controversial on release due to the massive amount of bugs and story issues, this, in many fans’ minds, confirmed something they’d wanted for a while; Cyberpunk was finally good!

And like…is it? Is it REALLY?

I didn’t play Cyberpunk until April-May of 2023, more than 2 full years after its initial release. I’d wanted to track down a copy of the launch PS4 version, which was so notoriously broken that it was delisted from the PSN storefront, to play on stream. But it was delisted too quickly for me to get it digitally and finding a physical copy proved enough of a hurdle that I dropped it out of lack of interest. I only finally played it on PS5, as part of a request from a friend, after many stability patches had already been rolled out, and found it to be a frustrating piece of art. And playing it again, in October, it still is. And while all the bugs were occasionally irritating, and yeah I like the gameplay tweaks (even if I still had to crank up the difficulty to feel any real friction), none of the patches address what really made it frustrating as a piece of art.

Cyberpunk 2077 fancies itself as a hybrid between an open world sandbox crime game, in the vein of Grand Theft Auto, and a character focused RPG in the vein of Mass Effect or maybe, more appropriately, The Witcher 3. It tells the story of V (known by a single letter mostly to allow the player to pick their gender without too many alternate voice lines) a mercenary and petty criminal in the appropriately cyberpunk Night City. After a heist gone wrong they are left with the digital mental construct of a rockstar/terrorist named Johnny Silverhands (Keanu Reeves) in their mind, slowly overwriting their brain and giving them a ticking clock to figure out a way to get his mind out of theirs before they die.

I am, to put it nicely, not super qualified to judge the game as a crime sandbox. It’s a genre I have minimal patience for, I’ve never actually managed to reach the end of any Grand Theft Auto game, and frankly, the GTA-esque elements feel kind of minimal. The driving is there, sure, even if it feels floaty and awkward (in my first playthrough, I eventually gravitated towards motorcycles, partly as a nod to my Nomad background but mostly for improved turns at speed and to just slip past traffic) and while you can steal cars and buy new apartments,you can summon cars for free and start the game with a centrally located apartment so it always feels kind of superfluous. No, the RPG elements feel a lot more central to the game, and luckily, that’s much more my bag (I am one of the apparently only 27% of players who have seen The Witcher 3’s end credits). And RPGs are heavily built around writing, dialogue, tone, characterization. And that is where the issues are.

To be clear, it’s not that there’s no good writing in the game, there’s many characters and quests that have decent, even good, writing. Judy, a romance option for lady V’s only, has one of the better storylines in the game, a small scale and surprisingly tragic story about sex workers seeking agency and dignity in a world not inclined to give them either, and her romance is extremely sweet, especially in the ending where you leave the city with the Nomads (yes, I did the lesbian romance, contain your surprise). Panam, a romance option for male Vs, also has a decent storyline about her re-finding connection in her Nomad community, and even if not romanced, her connection to V is realistic and believable. There are interesting sidequests throughout, like one where you have to crucify a man to death to record his religious ecstasy for a Braindance (a kind of recording where the viewer experiences everything the recorder experiences, emotions and all).

Thing is, while those storylines are well written and engaging, they have to share space with all the other quests. For instance, when I first met Panam, while meeting with a character for another quest, when I turned around I ran into a quest giver for a different quest. This quest eventually turned out to be transporting a Japanese man who you are clearly intended to believe is the victim of human trafficking. Dark subversion of expectations I guess, which then gets subverted again when it turns out your employer was working to rescue the man from organized crime. So what’s the problem?

The problem is that when the Japanese man is called upon to explain the situation, he does so via a reference to The Office. And not like, a story that upon further examination is a reference, he just stands there and recites an entire punchline from The Office, with a couple proper nouns changed. And it’s far from the only direct reference; A mission to bring down a rogue AI cab has it sitting there spouting dialogue from Portal and Portal 2 more or less completely unaltered.

These are extreme outliers, but far from the only examples of weirdly dissonant sidequests. The alternate option for romance for a lady V is River, a Cop on the Edge Who Gets Results Dammit. And before you start rolling your eyes at that ball of cliches, that’s before we get to the second half of his quest line, where it turns into a Serial Killer hunt so over the top and ridiculous, it wouldn’t feel out of place in a Season 2 episode of Hannibal. Sincere attempts to engage with V’s death sentence sit uncomfortably alongside extended bits about a dude lighting his dick on fire.

Cyberpunk has a tone problem, is my point.

And that’s without getting into the moments where the writing just flatly falls on its face, either leaning on weak cliches or failing to think through its ideas. I still have no idea how the game wants me to feel about Johnny Silverhands; An enormous amount of time is spent trying to make him look and act like a teenager boy’s idea of a Cool Guy, but while he is a well realized character, he is a well realized look at an absolutely colossal piece of shit. He’s not even a piece of shit in fun ways, he’s mostly just a condescending user who drains everyone he touches dry, and the game saddles you with the responsibility of finding the right dialogue choices to make him better.

Reeves seems to be here mostly because he’s an overt reference to major works of Cyberpunk, The Matrix and Johnny Mnemonic, and while I unironically love them both, this kind of reveals the weaknesses in the writing; They include things because they’re just kind of Cyberpunk-y. The villainous corporation is Japanese because, well, Japanese corporations are big in Cyberpunk stories. The game isn’t interested in the history of that, or in exploring the cliche or even expanding it (all of the Japanese characters talk like characters from a bad 80s Samurai movie), it’s just a Cyberpunk Thing. The Mayor is revealed to be being brainwashed and controlled by an unknown organization, but this never comes to anything, and the storyline just peters out. Conspiracies are big in cyberpunk right?

It’s not like the main plot provides much in the way of more complexity or depth, consisting mostly of a walking tour of various characters and factions to allow you to spin off into whatever sidequests you find interesting, which never manage to escape the question of what you’re doing spending so much time helping Claire win races or fighting boxing matches when you have weeks to find a way to survive. The endings mostly don’t so much provide closure as double down on the bleakness inherent in the story, most of the endings involve V self-destructing in some way, from torching all their relationships to continue their life of crime to just handing their body over to Johnny Silverhands. The only ending that had any degree of hope involves V leaving the city with Panam (and possibly Judy), and even then they still have a death sentence, but at least there’s hope. The new ending added with the DLC just shows that this nihilism is a feature, not a bug, freeing V from their death sentence, at the cost of their ability to do their existing job, as well as every relationship they’ve built. You can live, but your life will be empty.

Part of this inconsistency is just a product of mismanagement. The development of Cyberpunk 2077 was legendarily poorly run, leading to the devs being forced into brutal crunch by managers who would rather abuse their employees than push it back, which is where all of the famous bugs obviously come from, as well as weird amusing failures of narrative. Panam, for example, is straight, and will reject a romance with a lady V. But they failed to include separate romantic and platonic scenes for many of her plot beats, leading to several scenes where Panam will flirt intensely with a lady V, right up until she tries to escalate and she backs off. It was cheaper and faster to just animate a single extra line of dialogue rather than an entire extra scene.

But more relevant I think is the influence of the GTA style crime sandbox. Lots of elements, from the billboards (which oscillate between overtly sexual parody ads and references to The Matrix) to the game’s weird, often mean spirited tone, seem to be ported over from the GTA influences. And yeah, GTA works partly because of the overt nihilism at its core; No one but you is real, the game drawls, so why not steal a car, plow it down the sidewalk and fire a rocket launcher into a Starbucks? It’ll be fun, who cares?

But Cyberpunk fancies itself an RPG too, and RPGs require you to take the world somewhat seriously. Yes, in every RPG no one but you is real still, it is still A Game, but I have to invest myself in the idea that Karlach and Shadowheart or Harry Du Bois and Kim Kitsugari are Real People, that our relationships, my actions, the world, they all matter, and a good RPG will commit itself to that illusion. And Cyberpunk can’t maintain that illusion consistently, it can only lift it up often enough that its absence elsewhere feels worse.

So yeah Cyberpunk might run better now, the game might crash less and I might see fewer NPCs clipping into the walls (though not none). But that’s not the shit that matters; Fallout: New Vegas is notoriously unstable, the last time I picked it up it crashed within the first hour. But it’s still one of the most beloved RPGs of all time because the world, the characters, the ideas, they’re all so good. And I dunno if any of that 120 million dollars CDPR supposedly sunk into patching Cyberpunk was allotted to patching in better writing. I dunno if you even could.

Early in my 2nd playthrough, I ran into an issue; I wanted to get downtown to go to Jackie’s funeral. Jackie is an NPC who you grow close with in the introduction, and who dies in the heist gone wrong, and the relationship is one of the better ones in the game. But my car had gotten wrecked in a setup for another quest, and I hadn’t unlocked another. And I wanted to get down to Jackie’s funeral because I knew I would unlock a motorcycle there. I could have stolen a car, I suppose, but that seemed like a bad idea; the one time I tried I’d gotten mulched by 3 cops.

So I did what someone with no car and a limited budget would do in a city with no public transport when they just Have to be somewhere at a certain time; I walked.

I walked downtown, along sidewalks and footbridges. I waited at stop lights and skittered along the side of roads without footpaths. I stopped on the way when I passed a building where I could turn in a quest for my reward. I grew up in Anchorage, an excessively large city with no real public transport to large parts of it, and this felt authentic, it reminded me of walking down De Armoun to go to the grocery store and Blockbuster when my dad was at work. It reminded me why I refused to skip car rides on my first playthrough, because the game actually started to feel immersive.

And then, 20 minutes in, about 2/3rds of the way there, a gang in a hostage situation saw me across the street and started shooting at me, a random stranger. And I, naturally, started shooting back. And when the dust settled, I was standing there, surrounded by corpses, and wondering why I was putting in so much goddamn work to make the game immersive. So I took one of the thieves’ bikes and drove the rest of the way to the funeral.