These days, most video games could use an extra week or month of fine tuning before they launch. But there are deadlines to hit, shareholders to please, shipping obligations to fulfil, and competition on the calendar to worry about, so they often come out not-quite ready. Devs then spend that first week or month of release working their way through all of the parts that are not-quite working and make them just-about work. That’s not what happened withCyberpunk 2077at launch.
Cyberpunk 2077 was awful when it released. It was unplayable. Not that ‘I’m not having fun’ kind of unplayable, but actually unplayable. In the first week, playing on aPS5, I kept count of the longest it went without blue screen crashing. Across a 25 hour playthrough, it never went more than 40 minutes without giving up. It was so bad thatCD Projekt Redoffered refunds, before it emerged that it had no power to do that, causing PlayStation to delist it entirely. When it came back months later,we were told not to buy it on PS4, even though it was a PS4 version being sold on PS4 stores.
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If you didn’t have a PS5, which were in short supply and which the game had not yet released for, you weren’t supposed to play the game. It was historically bad, and every move CDPR made in the aftermath for monthswas flagrantly anti-consumer, despite the company having spent a decade building up its parasocial image as the last of the ‘good ones’. Now, as the first (and only) expansion draws closer, CD Projekt Red executive Michał Platkow-Gilewski wants to tell us that the only reason people hated the game wasbecause it was cool to do so.
This was not Coldplay or the word ‘moist’. People weren’t building their personality around an imagined animosity in order to fit in. They were justified that probably the most hyped game to ever exist, that had constantly banged its own drum ahead of launch, delayed itself several times to a chorus of cheers that it would be worth the wait, and misled consumers by only offering PC review codes and misleading reviewers about upcoming bug fixes, was broken. Not bad, not boring. Broken. It fundamentally did not work. Sony did not delist Cyberpunk to be cool, it did it because the game was truly, verifiably busted.
And now that’s the conversation. If Cyberpunk gets us to fixate on the fact that it didn’t work at launch, then it can turn around and remind us that it does work now, so everything is lovely again. But that’s not quite the whole story. As well as fixing what was broken, CDPR has also been on the typical not-quite working fixes - the brainless AI, the soapy driving physics, the inability to even get a haircut, and so forth. These too have now been patched. What we’re left with is Cyberpunk 2077 as it always should have been. What a shame it still isn’t very good.
Cyberpunk 2077, in its current state, is a perfectly passable triple-A game. Given its budget, that’s a low bar. There are still all the various ways the game objectifies women, fails to develop or interrogate the racial stereotypes of its gangs, and fetishises trans bodies while keeping you locked into a cisgendered body during romance scenes regardless of your character creation choices.
But that’s woke! I don’t care about that if the game is good! Bad news bucko, it’s still not. The lack of third-person play, the lack of wall-running, and the emptiness of the city that locks you out of each building reveals the hollowness at Cyberpunk 2077’s core, and no amount of polish can fix it. Plus, the driving is still bad. While some missions have depth and heart, many more feel rushed and linear, while most of the extra abilities remain useless, the economy is imbalanced, the guns lack much sense of variation, and hacking has no meaningful function in the game. Also, the driving still kinda sucks after the upgrade.
Cyberpunk 2077 was a broken video game and in fixing it they turned it into a bad video game that looks like a good game and feels like an amazing game because we’re used to how broken it once was. Wanting to be cool isn’t the only reason we hated it, but it is one of the main reasons people have decided they love it now.
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