A Thing of Beauty Will Never Fade Away: A Cyberpunk 2077 Rant

It's been a while since I've written anything here in Hive and I won't pretend to apologize or anything, I just have been really distracted and out of it for a good while and all my time has been just going to other things but in the midst of all the chaos and negativity (although the situation is quickly changing) I feel like writing my experiences with Cyberpunk because I actually think there's a pretty good game underneath all the corporate greed that brought us this horrible launch state but I digress.

I will say it right off the bat, I have been waiting for this game since the teaser trailer released almost a decade ago, and even though it wasn't the masterpiece everyone was expecting I believe this title already has managed to change gaming forever and if managed properly with updates, fixes, and future content it will continue to change it and raise the bar for what a game is, starting from the topics a story goes into to gameplay freedom and character development.

As I probably put in the title this is not a review but a massive dump/rant of my opinions on the game, at the time of writing I have invested a little over 135 hours into the game and I feel like I have a solid opinion on the whole game and experience it provides and what it aimed to do, what it got right and where it went wrong.

Ambition Unchained

Yes, there's such a thing as being too ambitious and this game suffers from although the blame doesn't fall all on the developers (they are not blame-free) the main culprits of the release state were the higher-ups in the corporate ladder trying to make their quarter shine and hit up those Christmas sales numbers because even though the witcher 3 has been their subsistence cash cow for half a decade there was simply no way for that cow to not dry...

Not a lot more you can add here what's done is done and there's nothing you can do about that other than either decide to move on and work on something else or buckle up and fix the project and thankfully it seems they have gone this way, I do hope for positive results similar to those seen with No Man's Sky but I do wish for a future where we need not wish for these outcomes and games come out in playable states again.

Things that I cared about (This was supposed to be "Story" but I dropped it, sue me)

This is the part where I warn you about spoilers

The story of Cyberpunk 2077 isn't really anything that hasn't been explored before in different media, although it packs a good punch thanks to its legitimately good writing, especially on side-quests, and their amazingly written characters and character development. The short but heavy story is probably what will drag people to the end.

The Cyberpunk genre hasn't been exploited well in gaming in the last decade and these guys although did a good job writing a story for the setting they choose, it felt more punk than cyber except for a couple of places here and there.

The characters shine more than anything else and the main character as advertised its actually Night City itself, every inch of the city is worth exploring to check out what shenanigans the citizens and gangs are up to and to see a futuristic but not too distant place.

These characters have character, you'll immediately fall in love with Jackie, Panam, Judy, Johnny Silverhand, and the rest of the gang. Was Keanu Reeves necessary to make the game and story a success? I don't think so did it improve/enhance the experience to have Keanu Reeves talking to you for 20 hours? well maybe...? Did I enjoy a field trip with my buddy Keanu into the dark future, where we burned a fucking city down and trashed Corpo scum? Hell yes!

The music, everything music-related nuff' said, a lot of pretty good headbangers for all tastes and ages!

Things I didn't care about

I was lucky enough to play on PC and only experienced like 3 crashes in my 135 hours and a few minor graphical bugs here and there, nothing really too major and nothing experience ruining but I am aware that a lot of people had a terrible experience on PC, Xbox, and PS5 so I'm mentioning it anyway.

As I got to this part I realized there were not a lot of things I disliked about the game... It's mostly disappointment of features delivered incomplete or just not in the game at all, it is hard to dislike something that isn't there and that's where the game and everyone's opinion of it starts falling through the cracks, the first 8 to 10 hours got you super hooked, then you slowly start realizing what is missing and what it could have been.

The game is just another cautionary tale for corporate greed, hilarious considering how many times the game presents those very same themes. I do hope the game gets fixed and gets close to what the true developer vision was, if No Man's Sky managed to do it, Cyberpunk will too since there's a bigger community backing it, and it's growing and growing, especially thanks to the modding community.

I might or might not write more about cyberpunk in the near future, probably a look back in 1 year to see where the game is then, hopefully, fixed and in a better state, CDPR has a lot of trust to recover, and sadly the ones that are gonna have to put in the blood, toil, tears, and sweat are the developers and not the higher-ups.