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Recently, I made the mistake of getting a 1440p monitor. It was a mistake because my computer wasn’t powerful enough to run games at this resolution. Once I realised my mistake trying to play Cyberpunk 2077, I had to buy a whole new machine. Here’s where I will preface that I had no expectations going into the game. In fact, if I did not buy the game for my brother, I probably would not have gotten the game. After playing it to completion, I have confirmed my suspicions that it is not all that great and not for me. I am fully aware of the problems the game had shipping on the 8th generation of consoles and am quite perplexed how it was even released in that state.
CD Projekt Red is famous for The Witcher series, which are famously known for their storytelling and sub-par gameplay. For that reason, I’ve never played them. Personally, I play games for the gameplay, a good story is nice to have but isn’t necessary; For that reason, if a game focuses on the story before all else, I’ll give it a pass. God of War (2018) is a good example of a game that has managed to coalesce its story and gameplay into a nice cohesive whole. I prefer exposition and story elements as a pacing element to the gameplay. The story in Cyberpunk is not as intricate as it could have been. As far as I could remember, there is only one real choice that has a far-reaching effect that changes a quest late in the game. There is also a certain relationship that has to be built over the course of the game that impacts the ending. The game has dialogue options, with plenty of those options only available with a high enough skill check, but none of those change any outcomes. I understand that it would be difficult to write and script in multiple branches in quests, but the game practically has none. You don’t want to have players feeling “punished” because they pick the “wrong” stats and are locked out of certain choices, so developers have to be very careful that all stats have an equal number of viable choices for progression. In this game, all the stat checks do are for additional dialogue; There is no way for the player to “talk” their way out of a bad situation, something that has not been in RPGs for a long time, at least not to my memory. Most of the dialogue in the game serves as exposition or some sort of mission briefing. There is a lot of dialogue in the game. I have to say that the voice acting (all dialogues are voice acted!) and computer automated lipsync is done quite well. Some dialogue choices will unlock romance options with certain characters and continuation of their quest chains, and I’m not sure how strict these dialogue choices are because I used a guide to not miss anything of such sort. In any case, they should not require to take an unknown series of specific choices to continue questing.
What they could have and should have done is have stat checks that change dialogue options which then change the gameplay. Of course, that would increase the scope of the game exponentially. There are quests of varying production value from fully realised and voice acted to one-step quests that just have you go into an area and fulfill an objective; Even then some of them have variable quality. I can’t think of a way to add more quest branching, unless some of the more repetitive one-step quests were not worked on. A few of them were just go into a location and carry someone out stealthily, some with a proper fleshed-out plot with an intro, middle, and climax, while some are just a mission briefing and an ending. Maybe they could have reduced the map size? The map is a bit too big, but the content is spread out quite evenly… Some of the side quest chains are really top quality and are key to unlocking the different endings. Another thing that could have been done would be to delay the game even more or increase the manpower. Ultimately, while I would appreciate more branching and player choice, they probably did the best they could.
While character building and player choice is gameplay, there is shooting, stealth, and melee. First, we’ll go through the actual mechanics, then how the player can influence these playstyles through their stat and skill choices can influence them. I played on a high difficulty so enemies were quite deadly to me, I would die in a few hits. Initially, I adopted a stealth playstyle, sneaking around and distracting enemies using the environment. The stealth is serviceable, mainly due to enemy placement, in this instance, the level designers made sure it worked rather than the actual mechanics. For instance, the player goes from in stealth to discovered within a frame, and there is also no way to take them down from the front; What happens is that you might sneak up on someone, they turn around, and stealth is broken. Usually, stealth games will add a delay for the enemies to go into alerted or combat to give the player some leeway, but no such thing exists in this game. This makes stealth highly annoying. There also aren’t a lot of stealth “tools” available to the player, the most useful being able to “Ping” enemies to see where all of them are, and a “distract” function that can be used on certain objects. Still, with careful routing and good level design, it was still operational, but definitely sub-par compared to proper stealth games.
A bit into the game I gave up on stealth and adopted a run and gun playstyle. Due to the Cyberpunk nature of the game, the guns have some interesting properties to them. Guns are designated as “Power“, “Tech“, and “Smart“. “Power” guns will ricochet their shots, “Tech” guns can charge up and shoot through walls, and bullets from “Smart” guns will change trajectory and fly towards the enemy. “Power” and “Smart” guns require some special cybernetic implants to use. I honestly spent the entire game not ricocheting my bullets, choosing to use more of a traditional hide under cover, pop out and shoot playstyle. There was a particularly strong “Smart” gun that I used for a long time before the enemies started scaling too high for it to do significant damage. “Tech” guns are not as strong, probably to balance the fact that they shoot through walls, but they do scale off certain stats and skills. The most interesting gun was one that would talk to the player character like Clippy from previous versions of Microsoft Word. In any case, the gunplay (recoil, SFX, animations) in the game is definitely not as crisp or sharp compared to proper shooting games. See the pattern?
Near the end of the game, I had plenty of stat points, skill points, and money to spend. I decided I would go full Cyberpunk and invest heavily into a hacker build. This required buying some expensive Cyberware and equipping them to my character, and luckily enough I had some powerful Hacks that I acquired through the course of the game. Think of Cyberware as your mana pool and mana regen, and Hacks as Spells. This was probably the most fun build I played with. I would just go into an area, discover all the enemies with the “Ping” and Hack all of them from a distance; The Hacks range from setting someone on fire, spreading poison, and some outright kill. There are even non-lethal options available should you feel a bit more magnanimous. In general, I didn’t kill anyone who was just “doing a job” like a factory worker or security guard, but I killed gang members with impunity. Still, this reduced my gameplay loop to… Go into area, eliminate all threats, spend the next 10 minutes picking up all the loot. I also lost all the realisation of the other playstyles, since this way caused me to just see everything happen in the silhouettes of the “Ping” mechanic. The way I was playing it, I could just aim my reticle at bad guys and click a button and they would die while I was totally hidden. Maybe if the Hacks had to be cast in the way that magic is in Magicka, that would add some gameplay. The player could progress from having simple Hacks with simple cast sequences to more powerful versions with more intricate casting mechanisms. This would of course increase the complexity of this playstyle from fire-and-forget to highly involved which would also increase development complexity.
Character Building in this game works by levelling up and allocating stat points. These stat points then unlock Skills related to them. Engaging in mechanics related to certain Skill Trees also progresses that Skill Tree, i.e. using swords will cause the Blade Skill Tree to gain experience. Most of the Skills just increase damage, which can be levelled up multiple times. Others will add functionality to certain mechanics. Some Skills are all but mandatory with their associated playstyles, whereas most are uninspired. At the very least, it isn’t possible to max out everything, so the player has to decide what kind of playstyle they would like to focus on. Even though the Skills are useful, it is entirely possible to complete the game without any. The main bulk of the damage comes from just progressing through levels and acquiring guns with higher damage numbers. If you find a gun you like early on, it is possible to Upgrade it using various materials and keep it current, but it is never worth it. In fact, I wanted to keep using a certain Iconic (rare, one-off, usually tied to a character or story) Weapon but constantly upgrading it cost so much materials and added so little damage that I just used the most recent gun that I got with the highest damage. I am starting to be less of a fan of these kinds of bracketed traditional RPG mechanics where the numbers of everything (weapons, enemies) are always relative to the player’s current power rather than being properly balanced. They could have completely done away with the “Upgrade economy”, and balanced everything relative to the story, but they probably had too many misc objectives to make this work.
Cyberpunk’s strongest suit is the realisation: Music, Sound, Art, and Lighting. The atmosphere of every area in the game is just sublime. The world itself, all the buildings, are a bit of a facade as not all of them can be accessed, in fact, relative to the number of buildings there are in the game, probably only 10% have interiors. This is fine, but it’s not the total immersive sim package, which would probably be impossible as the world is so huge, but it is good enough. What exists is absolutely dripping with detail. The whole environment team absolutely carried this game. There is a bit of gameplay involving reading messages and then unlocking doors but it’s quite minimal, and they could have done more puzzles like these. Levels have gates in them that require certain stat checks, and are well designed with good stealth routing as well as serving as viable combat arenas.
While playing I did get some bugs that caused me to reload the game a few times, but overall it was okay. The “Wanted” system like Grand Theft Auto is not at all well done. Certain enemies are tagged as “civilians”, and if they get hurt from player actions, the police will appear from out of nowhere. This does not require any perception system, I once killed an NPC in a closed room with no witnesses, and the police just appeared. Driving isn’t as refined as it could be, but then again I played on PC, so I lost some precision. The most intense melee battles were the boxing matches, but it still felt a little clunky with the parry timings. Melee combat overall could use some help, maybe blocking could deflect bullets.
Overall, I didn’t like the gameplay. There were some cool story beats and storylines but I would never play a game just for that. The world is fantastic but definitely not worth playing the game for. After all that, I’ll admit that I played the game for 100 hours and did all the side quests, but not all the optional go-somewhere-and-kill-everyone-objectives. The game needs more branching and better gameplay that leverages more on the setting. Such issues wouldn’t be fixed by patches unless they totally overhaul the game. CDPR said they will continue to patch the game and add new features so I will probably keep an eye out, but I am not convinced. I don’t regret my time with the game per se, but I definitely didn’t totally enjoy it, it is a bit weird and hard to express.
