Based on a board game franchise Cyberpunk created by Mike Pondsmith, Cyberpunk 2077 had awesome intent, but it was a complete mess all of a sudden. During the later part of its eight-year development cycle, the game has generated overwhelming hype among the gaming community, with CD Projekt releasing several promotional content and promised it to be "the next-gen open world experience". However, after a series of incidents and CD Projekt's internal problem, the game's release ended up to be one of the most disastrous launches since the release of Fallout 76.
So the plot is this: the player character, known simply as "V", is offered a contract from a big-time fixer called Dexter DeShawn to steal a device from the Arasaka Corporation known as the "chip of immortality" along with his/her mercenary friend Jackie Welles. This plan goes disastrously as Welles is killed and the chip gets damaged, forcing V to insert the chip into his/her head to prevent its destruction. Angered about all the attention he is going to receive from the police and Arasaka, DeShawn shoots V in the head and leaves them for dead, with DeShawn getting killed shortly afterwards. V awakens in a landfill, where he/she is haunted by the digital ghost of Johnny Silverhand, a very famous war veteran and rock star. Through Silverhand's memories, V discovers that an AI called "Soulkiller", which can be used to prevent Silverhand from taking over V's body. V then sets out to plan about how to access Soulkiller to remove Silverhand from his/her brain before Silverhand completely takes over.
Most of the issues, which involved bugs and problems with AI that made it behave braindead, were fixed as of 2022. I will first cover the pre-2022 version.
The game was announced back in 2011-2012, however, due to shift of the workforce to The Witcher 3, the development had been halted until the aforementioned game was released in 2015. After 4 years of hiatus, CD Projekt Red finally started their work on the game in 2016. The game was rushed, however, in order to meet their 2020 deadline resulting in a broken and (at times) unplayable mess. This was all because the heads of CD Projekt were so confident that they could complete it because they made The Witcher 3 even though the developers constantly told them that it wouldn't be ready. After the game went gold, they delayed the game by two more months; while this isn't the first time this happened to a game, it's never a good sign. During the first few hours of the game's release, CD Projekt released a 58 GB of hotfix patches for the game, with the patch itself being as large as the base game's file size.
Because of a combination of rushed development and various publicity stunts, CD Projekt made many promises when Cyberpunk was announced, but two things happened to all those promises: either they were in the game but were very poorly implemented or executed or they were just lies. In the early months of the game, CDPR said they would fix the performance and game code issues. While a majority of them were fixed, the damage was already done. What's worse, during their massive promotional campaign between 2019 - 2020, CDPR tried to promote the game to be as "immersive" as possible by advertising even the tiniest and ridiculous of details. The most infamous example being when they tried to promote the penis customization (yes, really, sorry I had to mention that) feature to generate internet clout about the game.
An absolutely horrendous number of bugs and glitches (plenty of which game-breaking) are possibly even worse than FIFA. Now with the numerous patches these problems don’t happen usually but they were an absolute plague when the game first launched. The textures suffer long loading times; oftentimes certain textures will disappear when the camera is at a certain angle and suddenly re-appear when the camera is no longer at that specific angle. The NPCs disappear when you move the camera away from them. Falling out of the world is common thanks to glitchy collision. Vehicles explode for no reason when started up. V dies by simply running into something. Your character does T-poses, loses clothes/body parts, and starts to flicker while driving on a vehicle. Animations may not load, such as the character's mouths not moving when talking outside of cutscenes. The NPCs can also get stuck in T-poses and fly for no reason due to poor physics and collision, which can lead to cars being sent flying out of nowhere. The poor physics also cause objects to get flung into the air at high speeds, as well as the game sometimes acting as if the player drove into a wall when they hit an NPC. V's death (depending on your choices) is otherwise pretty emotional.
Even worse are unobtainable items. Prior to patch 1.5, if something is even slightly compenetrated inside a box, a table or a ramp of stairs it cannot be collected. The iconic Nue handgun “Death and Taxes” is the most notable example as before patch 1.3 there was no way to get it outside of spawning it through console commands. Also, sometimes the enemies will automatically detect your presence from afar and start shooting even if you just arrived and didn’t do anything yet (also corrected in patch 1.5).
The A.I. is laughably idiotic, especially the police that don’t react to gang members attacking you and appear out of nowhere every time you commit a crime. Sometimes the police spawn in the wall making it impossible to kill them (to make matters worse, they can still shoot you). On the other hand, ordinary NPCs behave as if they were blind and live in an alternate reality as you can see how they touch (and occasionally clip through) each other while walking or even enter the object through an unnatural way, like entering the stairs from the vertical side (in the sense that they won't go up the stairs from the normal path, but climb to a little wall with their legs, like they do in parkours, without jumping). The player can also sometimes clip right through them as if they weren't even there. When getting shot at, at times NPCs tend to pretend like nothing's happening as they rarely ever take cover and walk around casually. Due to the lack of driving A.I., police car chases are mostly non-existent outside of missions.
The driving A.I. is completely absent from the game. Every NPC car always drives in a fixed path as programmed meaning they offer little to no interaction with the player since they will never attempt to dodge any explosion, escape from firefights or behave dynamically with the traffic situation. You can easily park a car in the middle of the road and the NPC's will never try to evade it. Since all cars move in their fixed path, thanks to an unpolished driving path, the A.I. driver will attempt to drive and clip through obstacles and walls, which can result in their car exploding due to collision. Also, when fighting vehicles in close quarters, the destroyed vehicle will oftentimes block the player's way, preventing them from progressing further and forcing them to restart the mission.
A lot of content was cut due to the game being rushed:
- One notorious example is the life paths the player chooses at the beginning of the game all playing out exactly the same once the players are done going through the intros (which are vastly different from each other). The only remnant of these life path exclusive plot elements are missions where V steals back their old car (Nomad)/does one last job for Kirk (Street Kid)/confronts their old friend (Corpo). Speaking of which, a few plot elements exclusive to the intro of the Corpo path are ditched entirely in favor of going down the same plot as the other two life paths.
- Abilities such as running on walls weren't included in the final cut.
- The robot teammate T-Bug was supposed to be a companion throughout the entirety of the game but gets killed near the end of the first chapter.
- The player would have been able to unlock multiple apartments for V instead of just one. While the game does include unlockable apartments, these apartments aren't V's, meaning that the number of features in those apartments are very limited. This feature was eventually added in patch 1.5.
- Third-person cutscenes were scrapped as well, which would have been one of the few ways to see what V looks like.
- As shown in the trailers, players were supposed to be able to ride on trains and use the train stations.
Because of the game being mostly in first-person view, character customization feels somewhat pointless as there is rarely any opportunity to see what your character looks like outside of opening up your inventory. A few customization options commonly present in other games are absent here, such as adjusting V's height.
As mentioned earlier, many of the features seen in the trailers and mentioned in articles (such as dynamic NPCs, buyable apartments, an impacting Day/Night cycle, bar and food places that are open and interactive, and most famously, a wanted system and corrupt police that you can bribe) are completely absent in the actual game.
Many of the standard features in the game are downgraded, such as cars being invincible to weapons, water effects being absent, and NPCs not reacting to being rammed by your car. Even many open world games decades ago of the 3D universe games have way more functional features than this game.
CD Projekt said that the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions work well when they have plenty of hiccups and them being first released in an abhorred state. What's even worse is that they knew about this and made critics review the PC version instead of the console versions and provided footage themselves instead of letting critics show their own gameplay.
As mentioned above, the physics are terrible for today's standards as they are incredibly buggy, the vehicles controls are rigid and sluggish and everything feels very light and floaty. The ragdoll physics are especially terrible and stiff feeling which becomes extremely noticeable when an NPC is ran over with a car. Adding to the terrible controls, the vehicles have weird collisions with the vans being the absolute worst due to both slow speeds and a gigantic hitbox that will often block your bullet. The motorcycles are just as bad, but are at least more versatile than the cars.
There are no playable minigames unlike The Witcher games which are known for their great minigames (one of which, Gwent, got its own game). The closest thing players have is seeing gameplay of arcade games in their respective arcade cabinet. Eventually, a mini game, Roach Race, was added on patch 1.6, but that's still only one.
While there are dialogue options in the game and the players can decide whether to spare or kill enemies, these choices barely make any difference to the story at all, and you also have to press X/triangle/E for things that should happen automatically like taking a shard or exiting a vehicle.
The game is infamously known for its terrible optimization. The worst offenders are the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4 versions, as most of the times their respective framerates can at times dip below 20 fps, making the game almost unplayable; though to be fair the patch 1.3 fixed the issue for the most part on the last generation consoles. The PC version has less framerate issues, but the problem is that the game requires a very high-end PC just to run the game, something that contrasts with the official requirements that state that a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card is able to run the game at high quality, and even if you have a high-end PC there is a probability that the game will run incredibly bad or have stuttering issues, mostly when you're driving or walking through a highly populated zone. This game does not support SLI/NVLink or AMD's Crossfire, probably due to the terrible optimization. The game performs the same as one GPU regardless of having one or two GPUs or not.
Stealth is poorly designed and broken. Enemies can detect you through a wall or will ignore the player when stealth killing in front of them and a well placed headshot with a silenced Overture revolver can one shot the majority of the enemies.
The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions suffered from very blurry graphics prior to patch 1.3 and felt more like hopeless ports from a game released on previous console generations. Even worse, these versions are limited to 30FPS at most, even though the graphics are very downgraded in comparison to more powerful hardware versions. Even the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X versions don't fix this. Speaking of the PS4 version, it was removed from digital stores and later returned for 6 months, but if you go to the digital store the store page, it will warn you about playing the game on anything that isn't PlayStation 4 Pro or PlayStation 5.
Although good for the most part, some of the dialogue is also very corny, such as Smasher’s "You look like a cut of fuckable meat." The citizen NPCs have limited dialogue, which will get old fast. A lot of what they say doesn't make any sense, such as an NPC telling the player to "feel good" about themselves when held at gunpoint. And speaking of dialogue, the player is provided only a few seconds to choose a dialogue option before getting scolded at for not choosing fast enough, which is very annoying!
The story itself is good and the first act does a fantastic job at making you feel for the characters and introducing you to Night City.Although Night City is big, there’s almost no interactivity with your surroundings outside of missions. Just like The Act Man said, “in Night City there’s a lot to see and fuck all to do”. The mini map is very imprecise as the trace can go nuts sometimes and other times it can make you do a thousand turnarounds for nothing. At least a lot of the missions are pretty fun to play through and many of them have some kind of interesting story to them.
The gunplay can feel clunky at times, thanks to the often poor hit detection and cheap bullet sponge enemies. Melee combat is also especially trashy:
- Dodging attacks and crouching are mapped to the same button.
- The AI cheats, as they often land attacks even after dodging them (they'll punch or kick the air, and the game registers that as landing the hit), and often having invisible walls in front of them to prevent the player from quickly defeating them.
- Blunt weapons are really weak compared to blades, which are much quicker and overall better options for stealth play. Also some brawler enemies can block almost every melee weapon you’re using, including a machete. How can anyone block a machete?!
The player will constantly receive messages and notifications on their phone. The problem is these messages will pause the game every time the player receives one, which severely disrupts the flow of the gameplay. A lot of the notifications are about things players most likely won't care about such as sales on specific cars.
Now that the game has been revived, I still think it can be playable for the most part, as long as crashing doesn't occur EVERY NOW AND THEN. In fact the game has fully improved thanks to a lot of patches that saved the game and CD Projekt's reputation, and in addition the game's first (and possibly the only) expansion pack, Phantom Liberty, will be released in 2023 for PC and current-gen consoles.
Graphically, the game looks very nice and has serious attention to detail even on the lowest settings and with the ray-tracing turned off. That is of course when all the objects are fully rendered, you can see polished objects, character models, or even Night City itself.
The Xbox One and PS4 versions of the game since the 1.3 patch have looked and performed way better than they ever did. Patch 1.5 was released in February 2022, with optimization for the PS5 and Xbox Series. The PS5 version is much smaller (56 GB) than the PS4 version (100 GB). The same patch also fixes many bugs, improved AI, details, and much more. Patch 1.6, the "Edgerunners" update, was the final major update for old-gen consoles, adding cross-progression, Performance Mode for the Xbox Series S, and more customization.
Despite the cumbersome weapons and bad AI (which was mostly fixed in 1.5), the combat can get pretty fun a lot of times. The weapons are fun to use and their sounds and animations are amazing. Johnny Silverhand's gun reload animation is nothing short of awesome.
Despite some setbacks, the character customization is extremely detailed, with customization options ranging from tons of hairstyles to many different styles of eyes to even customizing V's genitals. In patch 1.5, the player can also change V's appearance by using the mirror at apartments and safehouses.
Even if the optimization and performance are really bad, the ninth-generation versions via backward compatibility look and work definitely better, as they run at 60FPS without drops, though bugs, glitches, and crashes are still present. The loading screens are generally pretty short, even if they don't give enough time for the textures to fully load.
Aside from some corniness, a lot of the dialogue is well-written and oftentimes pretty lengthy, detailed, and packed with lore. The first-person perspective helps in making these conversations feel more immersive.
The soundtrack is fantastic and fits perfectly with the cyberpunk vibe and what is happening on the screen in general. In addition to this the voice acting is pretty great, especially with Mr. Keanu Reeves (of Matrix and Speed and John Wick fame) as Johnny Silverhand being a standout, along with a good variety of likable characters, Judy Alvarez, Jacky Wells and Goro Takemura being standouts. And of course, don't forget about Silverhand's most memorable line of the game, "Wake the f__k up, Samurai, we have a city to burn."
I really hope this game ceases crashing very soon if these issues are resolved. And another highly important thing, video game industry: NO MORE RUSHING A GAME'S DEVELOPMENT. Even the best games ever made have not even been rushed in the slightest. You are not supposed to rush a game for its deadline or whatever reason if you want it to be the greatest.
Overall, though it may be revived and repaired very soon (I hope; please, I don't want this game to continuously crash on PlayStation all the time), an awesome game.