Cyberpunk 2077: A Passionate Endorsement

You probably owe it to yourself to play CDPR’s masterpiece

[Spoiler Warning: extremely mild spoilers for Cyberpunk 2077 might follow, I suppose]

Some Tiresome Disclaimers

Before you express your incandescent love for Cyberpunk 2077, it’s extremely important to first regurgitate at length all the dreary muck everyone harps on. Law has also historically required you register a sense of righteous shared outrage at CDPR (Damn Their Cursed Filthy Eyes!) so that it may mush in with the droning echos of those who came before you until the soupy reverb of concurrence turns it all into a viscous sludge that coats everything in sight. This I suppose lest someone preternaturally impressionable mistake you for a Bizarro World denizen for whom up is down, love is evol, and good equals bad.

I don’t make the damn rules, so here’s a coupla short paragraphs of that kind of crud, I guess just to listlessly uphold the status quo or something:

Cyberpunk 2077 got a butt-load of flack after its release. Some of it of course well-deserved: the relentless swarm of technical issues, bugginess, even unfinished nature of the game upon release; the legendarily overhyped marketing; even the probable downright dishonesty surrounding these circumstances.

The complete subversion of the understood state of console play alone is remarkable: games on consoles just work because that’s the deal. Releasing a game certified for a specific console and then having it literally be non-functional is… is… theft? For love of all that is decent and sacred, it may as well be anarchy!

“For France - I do this!” — “Oooh! Smoking is forbidden!’

Why do I even lead off with this? Am I worried I’ll get a pompous and unnecessary ethics lecture from some insufferable dweeb if I don’t cover my butt? I don’t even have comments enabled—I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid! At any rate, maybe there’s someone out there for whom this exercise was still satisfying. Is that something to be hoped?

Bleah.

Let’s Talk About My Big “But”

In addition to all the reasonable criticism we’ve heard about the botched launch ad infinauseum, there have also been a considerable number of people expressing the opinion that the game content itself—story, narrative, characters, setting, style, design, etc—is no good, regardless of the technical, marketing, and ethics issues sullying its release.

Well. As a gamer utterly besotted with this game, I feel duty-bound to do what I can to help set the record straight. Quick, to the magenta & teal keycapped oversize-cased 65% mechanical keyboard!

I believe there are three main types of people who might knock Cyberpunk 2077 for the quality of its content: The first I understand perfectly; the second are a plague; the third I warm up to hopefully and see as a potential opportunity for sharing.

Here they are:

Not the Target Audience - Maybe they’re just not a fan of flashy, gritty scifi, or open-world games, or heavy, dark, existential content. Or the cyberpunk genre itself! Well, who is anyone to judge them? I hope they don’t waste any more time here, and that they go play the types of games they like! And if they find something great out there that really knocks them out, maybe let me know, too?
Angry Enough to Throw Their Reputations to The Wind and Become Truculent Partisans - People who bought a game that was essentially guaranteed to work on their console—then felt cheated when it didn’t—are perfectly reasonable in being quite frustrated and angry. But slipping into an ends-justify-the-means attitude about truth, speaking out of turn about the quality of content they haven’t played in a whatever-it-takes approach toward inflicting whatever damage they can whenever possible out of spite, in spite of the fact that they’ve got their money back… Everyone knows that people who’ve decided they’re at war can lose sight of their basic responsibility to those around them to be fair and truthful in their discourse (among a great many other things). These people are of little informational use to anyone because they’ve chosen to be.
Focused on the Wrong Thing - …through no fault of their own. It’s not that they’re too dumb to focus on what really matters. They’re just understandably focused on all the stuff that’s not really any different than GTA (and isn’t any better) because that’s unfortunately what CP2077 initially puts in your face.

It’s this third type of person I’m focused on with this blog post. If you happen to be one of these people, and if deep down you suspect you may be missing something great by passing up on this game, well here I am, waving my arms to flag you down, telling you that it’s true! What you’re looking for is further in, beyond all that other stuff, and I think and hope it really may be worth your while…

It’s Story and Narrative (and Characters, and Setting, and Style, and Design, and Sound, and Music, and…)

Once you get past some of the game-balancey run-around-shooting-randos wish-my-gear-were-better phase of things and start to get upside-down and neck-deep in story, characters, and atmosphere, the game blossoms into something truly beautiful and deeply emotionally-affecting.

Play the endings. All of the endings. There’s an obvious save point of no return before you walk into the club Embers to talk with Hanako in the Nocturne OP55N1 mission: Use it, reload as often as you need to, and do it all. You will be copiously rewarded with great narrative, done superbly. You are faced with capital-C Choices, and there are great Surprises as well.

Do a little google-fu to find the hidden endings and play those too! CDPR put unbelievable effort into things it’s doubtful most people would even find, and it makes finding and playing those sections all the more special. Even if you “cheated” a little (in quotes because for godsakes it’s a single player game take it easy on yourself) to get there.

Finishing up a game of Cyberpunk 2077 (no matter which path/ending you choose), then sitting back and letting the end credits wash over you while the end-of-game phone messages roll in from your friends—who may be looking for you, worried for you, or just saying goodbye—is a bittersweet experience I have seldom, if ever, seen matched in a game ending, and it’s not to be missed. That cello.

The people who made this game—not the ones “in charge” who forced a too-early release despite being explicitly and repeatedly warned of the likely consequences—are at the top of their game and have delivered peak-level work of exquisite quality. There is beauty everywhere you apply your senses. It’s not just the usual audiovisual suspects (and they are stunning): even the writing and the voice acting work together to create characters who feel real. You can lose yourself in experiencing many of CP2077’s scenes the way you may remember doing when you went to movies as a child. There is a deep and worthy earnestness to this game.

So C’mon, Play It Already!

Cyberpunk 2077 deserves far more completely unapologetic fanfare and more entirely unbridled appreciation than it gets. I am an enthusiastic evangelist for CP2077 not only because I want to spread the word about a great game, but because it’s important to me that it catch on with those who will love it so that there is more of a chance that I (and we all) get even more of it.

I think there are a lot of people, sadly, who have stayed away because of the built-up narrative (including lies) of an angry mob, but who will love it if they give it a chance. Don’t listen to the fools and liars! I bought Cyberpunk 2077 at full price shortly after release and have never had a single moment of regret.

Judged on its own merits it’s a positively sensational experience. It has storytelling that gets under your skin, storytelling you will most likely always remember. You must experience this devastating, gripping masterpiece for yourself. Plumb its depths, suck the marrow out of it, develop a stirring, Pavlovian emotional reaction of intense poignancy to a very specific cello riff: I want this for you.

Listen to me: Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, this is one unbelievable knockout of a game.

Asterisk: PC and The Save Editor

YES, there are caveats & conditionals, and it would be irresponsible of me to leave them out. Let’s get into the nitty-gritty so you can decide if any of this is actually worth your while (I hope I hope it is!).

Play on a PC: The best way to play Cyberpunk 2077 in my opinion is on a PC, not on a console, especially if you’re running a last-gen console like the Xbox One or PS4.

The more your PC looks like hardware you might *actually see in the game,* the better (God rays help too)

Use a Save Editor: The Save Editor is the most compelling reason to play on PC by far. This one tool gets you around all the crafting and money BS which bores many of us story hounds to tears.

I used the simply-named Save Editor (Project CyberCAT-SimpleGUI) over at Nexus Mods to edit saves for my GOG-based install. You have to do a little hunting around and reloading to figure out what some of your items are called in the Inventory list, but it’s reasonably simple and intuitive.

Tired of either looking like a clown or else getting riddled with holes every time you face down a crew of Valentinos because your favorite outfit doesn’t do squat to protect you? Take the clothing you like, make it Legendary, fill those plentiful new mod slots with armor and forget about it.

(edit: this approach is no longer necessary now that the game includes “wardrobe transmog”. You can now wear your best armor, no matter how dumb it looks, and essentially present the world with a hologram of your best-looking outfit, regardless of what you’re actually wearing for protection)

Don’t want to grind and grind and grind just to get a bitchin car for cruising Night City? Give yourself a zillion Eurobucks and go joyride all the cars in the game!
Buy all the cool new apartments from Patch 1.5 while you’re at it. That’s what I’m going to do when I finally dip back in for the DLC.

Dispense with the grind, stop sweating the details and obsessively collecting ashtrays & stuff like a big weirdo, and get right into the incredible Story.

You can simply *have* the cars; I just enjoy finding and buying them in-world.

A Sidebar About Grind

Grind and crafting were among the most annoying things for me about games like Skyrim and Fallout 4: I’d like to just play, please. I think a big reason so many of us would love another New Vegas, other than its incredible story content, is its lack of crafting, settlements, and other time-wasting grind disingenuously posing as value.

To be fair, I’d actually love FO4’s settlements if they worked properly and weren't so forbiddingly rough to build & manage. The tools were so provisional and broken that you have to jump online and watch a bunch of building-hacking videos on Youtube to wring any fun out of it at all. Eventually, every time I’d find an interesting new site on which to build not only a settlement, but also hope for the future of humankind, the prospect of more intractable faffing and fumbling with that half-baked interface was just a drag.

(Sure Fallout 4, we’ve got all the time in the world)

(With all due respect: Skooled Zone really is pretty fantastic)

Should such an in-game opportunity feel that way? The functionality kind of there, but almost impossible to use… It’s like... like a game released with some sort of unfinished beta system which doesn’t fully deliver on its promise...

…as if they didn’t have the time they needed to really get it working before release…

You know, I'm just really not so sure where I'm going with this since most folks just lapped it up and played it anyway.

Oh well, back to Cyberpunk 2077.

Some Background: This is a Love Letter

I’ve geeked out about the cyberpunk genre since I have been able to. I’ll forget much, but I’ll still try and give a rundown here as some means of explanation as to the sweaty, mouth-breathing place I’m coming from.

My parents took me to see Bladerunner far too early as a kid because I was already a rampaging Star Wars spawn and Bladerunner was “a new scifi movie with that Han Solo guy in it.” In retrospect, maybe not such a great idea: Two long, Star Wars-starved years after watching Luke lose a hand and Han Solo get agonizingly frozen in an electronic coffin (look at his face, don’t tell me that’s not agony) and now I get to see this Rick Deckard guy get his ass kicked clean off on the regular for a couple of hours.

I didn’t sleep for ages after witnessing Joe Turkel, wearing his comfy dressing gown, getting his eyes gouged out and his skull crushed right in his opulent bedroom, but seeing Syd Mead’s designs used with such quiet grace in such a hideous yet atmospheric dystopia put a mark on me that has never, ever faded. Profit was king (commerce the goal, “more human than human” the motto), acid rain coated everything in sight, and Rick Deckard and Roy Batty each embodied the hero/villian/pawn it would take to try and make sense of the nascent madness which would begin to infect the world during the Reagan years.

Side-note: Bladerunner, The Thing, Creepshow, Poltergeist, The Dark Crystal, Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, Conan the Barbarian, Tron, E.T., Pink Floyd: The Wall, all in 1982? What a year.

I was gobsmacked by William Gibson’s world when I read Burning Chrome, then Neuromancer and the rest of the Sprawl trilogy in high school. I then voraciously moved on to other stuff like Walter John Williams’ Hardwired, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (yes, I want to talk big, sticky contact patches!) K.W. Jeter’s Dr. Adder (is nothing sacred?), Rudy Rucker’s Ware tetralogy (that’s right, nothing’s sacred!), all while working my way through Philip K. Dick books as the simmering paranoid medium everything floated and steeped in.

I was instantly infatuated with Moebius’ work when a friend of mine spotted the first book (Upon A Star) of the 9-issue Moebius collection Epic started releasing in the late 80’s. But it was a more cyberpunk story in the 4th book—Dan O’Bannon and Moebius’ The Long Tomorrow—which hit me about as hard as Bladerunner and Neuromancer, and stuck with me similarly. I remained a lifelong Moebius fan, but always felt more appreciation for his grittier, more hard-bitten worlds, like The Airtight Garage, the insane cities of The Long Tomorrow and The Incal, and the spacesuits and gear of Alien than I ever did for the crystals, peaceful desert landscapes, and pastel leotarded pierrots of his other work.

This may be a little apocryphal, but the purple-backgrounded panel on the upper right (below) contains what is regarded by many as the inspiration for The Empire Strikes Back’s Imperial Probe Droid

“Welp, Dune is screwed. I guess let’s make a comic and change the world or something.”

I tore into the first edition of R. Talsorian Games’ Cyberpunk role-playing game with predictable zeal when it showed up on store shelves, and couldn’t stop rolling up Solos who were near-cyberpsychos. Most of them were human visual doubles of Boaz, Cyd’berg Assassin, pretty much all of them were smartgun/HUD optic-equipped, and after the release of the Hardwired Sourcebook every last one of them had Sarah’s disemboweling “snake” weapon implanted in their esophagus, just in case it came in handy.

The art in the first edition books (box on left) was so Nagel.

Most of the Cyberpunk RPG sessions I actually played degenerated into Friday Night Firefight bloodbaths before any real adventuring could be accomplished, and this suited me fine. One weekend, though, after re-reading and coming to a much deeper understanding of Gibson’s book, I GM’d a friend through an improvised-but-detailed single-player retelling of Neuromancer (He hadn’t read it, and played a Solo-class Molly analog). When he started to freak out after being contacted by Wintermute, I basked in stolen literary valor—then told him shit man you gotta read this book!

Despite the healthy way influences tend to mash around and alter one another once they enter a person’s mind, Neuromancer has remained the pinnacle of the Cyberpunk “thing” for me; the very singlemost important touchstone at the center of all this great material.

I still consider it practically a crime that none of the attempts to make Neuromancer into a movie has yet borne fruit—what the hell is wrong with Hollywood?—and I continue to root for Tim Miller to Push. His. Way. Through with his Neuromancer movie adaptation…at least I hope he’s still flying the flag and striving to proceed with the thing.

A chance to do Villa Straylight justice? The *terminal?*

Crucially, Miller is one of the few breakthrough Hollywooders who can possibly command a worthy budget, along with wielding the necessary technical/VFX know-how, who also may have the presence of mind to understand the following:

Neuromancer’s 80’s-hard-futurism projection of near-future technology just gets better and more compelling somehow as we veer past some of Gibson’s predictions at furcate branches and our feckless present nihilistically careens along toward whatever. Just as the best way to make a good Bond film is (I feel) to set all of them forevermore during the Cold-War—Bond isn’t a “secret agent for the times, whatever times ya got”; he’s specifically a goddamned Cold-War superspy—the best way to present Neuromancer is as-is; a now-alternate timeline specifically extrapolated years ago and containing the scintillatingly idiosyncratic artifacts of that time, not something that’s been tiresomely updated to feel like it could still be a possible future in our queasy dumb present.

All This is to Say…

Cyberpunk 2077 was a homing missile pointed straight at the quivering little spot between my dewy, glistening eyes from a distance of precisely three (3) inches. Coming from the geniuses who gave us the fantastic Witcher games, it looked to be a very faithful translation of one of my favorite TTRPGs (itself a loving distillation of one of my very favorite genres), and it was developed in collaboration with Mike Pondsmith himself. I was not going to miss this game if it was any good.

Left: Geralt, the Witcher — Middle: cool-ass bird — Right: Mr. Pondsmith

As it turned out upon release, Cyberpunk 2077 hewed to the 80’s spinoff timeline standard as one would hope, looked astounding, and took place in Night City. NIGHT CITY! It also appeared to play well enough on a current PC from what I could tell, and I had just built a nice render rig with hearty graphics capabilities. Sold.

The rest is history. Just like me when that V theme kicked in, my eyeballs started to dart around my screen, and my fingers began twitching across my deck.

In Conclusion

This post needed a thumbnail, so I jumped on TurboSquid, broke out a VDB pack, fired up Redshift and threw one together. Then what the hell I animated it & primped it up with a little reverb-soaked sound editing. It’s the first “fan-art” I’ve made since I think grade-school. Feels good.

Cyberpunk 2077, like most great games destined to be revered by history, is flawed but utterly sublime. If you’ve been hesitant or on the fence about the game, I hope something I’ve said or referenced here has some chance of moving your needle a little bit in the direction of letting it in. Just a little bit.

Download GIF

My GIF to you HURR DE HURR

Appendix: More Viewing, More Detail

Below are a couple of long-form YouTube videos about CDPR’s towering masterpiece from creators whom I think have actually got it right, and have played a role in helping me formulate my thoughts about CP2077. My main goal with this post has been to put a much-needed and deserved, enthusiastically positive rave for Cyberpunk 2077 out in the world without revealing spoilers, so I’ve almost completely avoided details in my praise. If you’re not convinced by my nebulous claims, these two really get into it and do a lot of heavy lifting regarding game specifics.

Cyberpunk 2077 - An open minded review from the amazing NeverKnowsBest, who as far as I’ve been able to tell is incapable of creating content that’s anything short of impeccable. My experience matches his: Sure, CP2077 is plenty buggy (but so are Bethesda games), but also virtually crash-free. Did you hear that? CRASH FREE. This review is balanced and extremely thorough.
The Complete Cyberpunk 2077 Review and Analysis: Uncovering the Masterpiece from ProbablyJacob. I haven’t watched a bunch of this guy’s other videos, but I think he’s pretty spot-on re: Cyberpunk 2077 in this example. Warning: don’t watch this video if anything I’ve said has already convinced to you give this game a chance. He is absolutely ruthless in relentlessly spoiling literally everything! He’s also forthright about his intentions to do so, so don’t say you weren’t warned.

Incidentally, these are both great insomnia listening, as is just about anything by NeverKnowsBest. Lest that sound like a back-handed compliment, it is not. Anything short of “Really Good” makes me seethingly wakeful. Also no lie, just really great pipes on that guy.

NNB almost has me convinced to go back in time and play the patched version of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, a game which, when I hear about it now, I can’t believe I passed on back in the day. I probably just couldn’t get past some of the thirsty npc models.

UPDATE: BTW, I did end up playing VTM - Bloodlines a few months later via Good Old Games and I freaking loved it.

UPDATE:

Why Cyberpunk 2077 Will Never Fade Away by Mad Italian is a more recent video about the merits of CP2077. Also pretty spoileriffic, this video is, like me, unabashed in its unflagging love and admiration for the game. Though not as polished and exhaustive as the NeverKnowsBest video, Mad Italian’s blazing passion shines through here, and he makes his points well.

I love seeing more videos like this being released as time goes by, because I believe Cyberpunk 2077 will ultimately have a well-deserved redemption arc, much like John Carpenter’s The Thing: “How could everyone have been such complete fools from the very beginning?” I’m certain history will be extremely kind to Cyberpunk 2077, and in the long run it will be remembered as a high point in narrative achievement which few games have ever equaled: It’s nice to be able to watch it happening in real time.