Cyberpunk 2077: My Thoughts One Year Later
Deserving of praise or disappointing? Why not both?
When the first trailer for Cyberpunk dropped in 2013, I was in high school and had just gotten a PS Vita for Christmas just to play Persona 4 Golden(The only reason to get a Vita don’t @ me.) I honestly had no idea what to think of the game but I did know that the trailer was great. It was so good that I used it in a music video I made years ago (Shameless plug for my favorite thing I did on YouTube.)
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When that first gameplay footage came out in 2018, I talked about it with people in my Biology class in college (The only time I talked to them.) When the game got close to its final release date, I pre-ordered it digitally and used the Xbox New Zealand trick to play it early before a job interview (I got the job and quit it six months later.)
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I spent four days traversing Night City and simping Panam and I’ve got to say that I loved every bit of it. At the time I’m writing this, Cyberpunk has been getting a lot of praise on Steam despite its reputation as a glitchy and broken mess of a game. In the past year, its quality has been improved through a lot of patches.
My own experience on the Xbox One X was a middle of the road experience. I had the graphics of a next-gen console but the performance issues of the PS4 and Xbox One. The game crashed at least a dozen times during my four days with the game. I had minor glitches like enemy bodies sinking in the ground, or moving around after they had been killed. I also never knew what Misty’s tarot cards looked like until I played the PS4 version on PS5 two weeks ago because they were always invisible. Despite all of this, I managed to play through 98% of the side quests and finish all the story missions.
I think one reason I was able to get sucked into this game so much was the first-person perspective. So many people were crying and whining about the game being a first-person RPG like Skyrim and Fallout don’t exist but it worked in the game’s favor. It’s easy to get immersed in a game like this when you’re staring a character directly in the face and can see all the emotion in their face as you have a deep conversation about death and mortality.
These conversations give the player control. The player can control where V looks using the camera and controls the conversation. Depending on your V’s backstory maybe you can chime in when someone talks about food in Night City because your cool stat is at level 8 or if your intelligence is high enough you can be a smart ass anD give some super smart explanation about a piece of technology. The choice is yours.
The conversations between characters work so well because the characters themselves are well written. V is a mercenary who wants to die a legend in Night City but when they find out they’re slowly dying after a job gone wrong, they try their best to survive. Jackie, V’s best friend, is also a merc who has ambitions of moving up in the criminal underworld but most people see him as a joke and don’t take him too seriously because they don’t take the time to know him better as a person.
This sounds cliche but these characters feel like real people to me even when I replay the game. I actually got sad when a certain character who goes from a total stranger to being one of your best friends tells you that she’s leaving Night City. I find myself making the same decisions that I did in my original playthrough because I don’t want to hurt their feelings. It’s incredible that a game can make me feel this way. Mass Effect is the only other game that’s made me feel like this.
Cyberpunk 2077 is slowly becoming one of my favorite game ever as I replay it. When the next-gen version finally comes out, I hope that I’ll be able to experience the story without the game crashing on me. The glitches definitely hurt the game’s reputation but I’m glad that people are slowly starting to recognize it’s greatness.