Cyberpunk – there is so much in this word, for some it is a genre. A genre of works of completely different caliber and type, from books by William Gibson, who actually gave us the concept of cyberpunk, to films like Blade Runner and Tron. And how many topics and questions can be raised in such a work: the ethics of using and creating artificial intelligence, the dependence of all humanity on technology, ubiquitous corporations that essentially become higher than the government in the hierarchy of the state, social inequality between people, virtual reality replacing for many what surrounds them in reality, the list can be continued endlessly, but I think you understand the main point, all these things are becoming more and more real for us every day, and at the same time they still remain something of a fantasy, so how It seems to me that so many works are in the cyberpunk genre and create entire cults of worship around themselves.

However, when many people mention cyberpunk, completely different thoughts arise in their heads than an uncontrolled reflection about how wonderful this genre is. In fact, I am almost completely sure that as soon as you hear the word cyberpunk, only one image appears in your head and that is cyberpunk 2077. This image, it is worth saying, has become for absolutely all people at least a little passionate about video games something like a symbol, a symbol of a certain gaming messiah who was supposed to come and turn the entire gaming industry upside down, but who, unfortunately, never came. And immediately all these loud exclamations appear in my head: The gaming industry’s greatest failure! Buggy and unplayable crap! A billion promises and not one fulfilled! Poles have forgotten how to make games!

Well, whether these exclamations are fair or not, I offer you with me, here on stopgame and figure it out. And yes, I understand that the game is almost 2 years old, however, the fact that the controversy surrounding it still does not subside, and also the fact that our corporate overlords recently released an anime based on the subject along with the announcement of the story dlc, makes me understand that the time I chose for the discussion is the most correct.

I’ll say right away that I more than liked the creation of the Poles and I enjoyed literally every minute spent in the city of dreams and its surroundings, however, I can also understand people who literally foam at the mouth and prove that in their life they have never seen anything worse than a fake cd project red. In general, I want to talk a lot about cyberpunk, and there is a lot of both good and bad, because God knows it deserves it, but I propose to break my story into points, first we’ll talk about what’s good in the game, then what’s bad in the game, and finally we’ll touch on the most painful topic with bugs and unfulfilled promises.

part 1: the basics as well as the pros

It seems to me that it’s worth starting from the base, Cyberpunk 2077 is an action-RPG in an open world with a first-person view, the events unfold, as you might guess from the name, in the year 2077 of an alternative history in Night City, a town located somewhere in the vast expanses of sunny California. We are trying on the role of V: ​​a mercenary whose appearance, gender, as well as background with starting attributes is chosen by the player himself. In general, in terms of cosmetic customization of the character, our hands are absolutely free, you can create for yourself anyone from sexy beauties with outstanding forms and brutal men to cock-girls of all stripes. As for the background, we have a choice of corporate, street child and nomad, and you shouldn’t trust people who claim that this choice only affects the introduction and a couple of dialogues in the game, since from my own experience I can say that whichever V you choose will make the main character feel different in principle, which in turn will help you become more attached to him, and this is achieved precisely because optional dialogues related to the protagonist’s past appear quite often in side missions and in each story mission. However, you should always remember that even though the game ROLE-PLAYING In any case, you will play as V, but here CD PR went the same way as in The Witcher and gave us a specific character instead of letting us completely immerse ourselves in this world in our own role. For some, this may be a turn-off, but on the other hand, it seems to me that this approach allows us to tell a more complex story with unique chemistry between the characters, which I will talk about a little later. And so we decided on what kind of V we need Find City today and connect.

From the very beginning of all three starting scenarios, an atmosphere as thick as grandma’s jelly is poured on us literally in buckets, no seriously, it doesn’t matter whether you chose to be the watchdog of Arasaki or your favorite kid in the area, the creators of cyberpunk 2077 give you a feel for the city that never sleeps, there are always some kind of showdowns on the streets, and somewhere out there on the top floors of skyscrapers as high as mountains, people make deals into amounts with some indecent number of zeros at the end and decide the fate of millions.Right away, without leaving the first impression box, you see how good the visual part of the projects’ creation is, everything glows very beautifully, glitters and shimmers, and if you add ray tracing to all this, then I can confidently say that cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most beautiful games that I have ever touched with my own hands, not only in terms of the sustained atmosphere of the notorious cyberpunk city, with all these neon signs, barely somewhere in the translucent sky between high-rise buildings and flying transporters, but also in terms of the polished textures and the general appearance of everything.

Well, just look how beautiful it https://31bets.co.uk/login/ is

After you have been introduced to the setting of your future misadventures, as well as to your new best friend Jackie, a prologue begins in which the player is taught the basic rules of the game itself: how to shoot, how to stealth and how to delve into other people’s electronic brains, and here it is worth going into more detail. In general, shooting, and combat in general, is an ambiguous thing in cyberpunk, as is, in principle, every aspect of it. On the one hand, here we have all the disadvantages of a shooter with RPG elements, headshots do not always mean death, if you shoot from a low-level weapon or the enemy is much higher in numbers than you, then the bullets will look like they are made of cotton wool, etc. However, this is also very significant, however, if you properly develop the hero and know from the very beginning how you want to conduct aggressive negotiations, then combat can generate simply an unlimited amount of fun and moments that are breathtaking in their beauty and epicness. That very moment when you shoot enemies with a shotgun behind cover, and the music starts blasting at full blast, and you, in an adrenaline rush, grab your katana or uncover the hands of a mantis and, like a real street samurai, run out into the crowd and start a bloodbath, there is little that can be compared with, and at these moments you don’t feel the imbalance of the system, you just get stupid animal pleasure and want only one thing – supplements. The main thing here, it seems to me, is to immediately decide what you like and build on it, if you want, like a Voroshilov shooter, to shoot adversaries with a rifle while sitting somewhere on a high roof – please, if you want, like Rimbaud, to pour lead rain on those freaks, and for good measure, if you want, like in Akira Kurosawa’s films, to take out a katana and divide that guy’s face into 2, be my guest, no one will stop you in anything and everything the game takes into account all the wildest wishes in terms of weapons and satisfaction from using them at the level, you just don’t have to try to be a jack of all trades and try in both stealth and open clashes and also be a netrunner for change. Oh yeah the nettraner’s way, it’s just pure brilliance. In general, when I was talking with friends on the topic of cyberpunk, several people told me the same phrase, which I later also saw in reviews on Steam – a good netrunner doesn’t need guns, and you know what? This is the honest truth! Not right away, of course, but over time you will become just a machine that kills tons of people with just one look and it’s just an indescribable feeling to complete a mission in a shooter (and let’s not lie to ourselves, cyberpunk is mostly a shooter) without ever taking out a gun. Just don’t assume that from the very beginning you are turning into a demigod with inhuman abilities, no, you will suffer quite often, especially at low levels and especially doubly at high difficulty, all I want to say is that if you know exactly how it will be more interesting for you to replenish the lists of victims of Night City and you competently swing in this direction, the game will fully reveal its dance in front of you, and the feeling of progression does not leave, because with each new level you become stronger and better. Now you’ve pumped yourself up, raised your level, earned a street reputation and bought new implants, and now you’re no longer hiding behind cover, timidly leaning out to fire a couple of shots, but jumping like a grasshopper throughout the entire location and delivering headshots in bullet time, or ordering a couple of guards to blow their brains out while the turrets you captured shoot their former owners, and those who are still alive wait helplessly in turn blinded by combat scripts or suffering from melting synapses. And with all this, it seemed to me that the combat is quite balanced and there is a plug for every hole, if you are a skilled netrunner, then your carcass is quite frail and they will shoot you in an open confrontation quite quickly, but otherwise you are quite vulnerable to enemy scripts, and at some point you will think that you are already too strong, jump out into a crowd of enemies and you will immediately be turned into a sieve by enemy forces significantly superior yours.

But let’s get back to the story. After the prologue, which we all already know how it ends, but at the same time its ending still remains very emotional, we present you HIS, the great and terrible Johnny Silverhand, and now there are already two personalities living in your meat body and only you can decide how they will get along, in general, for the sake of logic, we should talk about the plot, but it seems to me that first we need to talk about the person who sold this game to so many of us, because the main plot is tied to the fact that you have a new neighbor under your roof, who, unfortunately, not of his own free will, but is slowly getting rid of you and therefore that same roof begins move out slowly. In fact, Johnny is wonderful and not only because he was played by Keanu Reeves, but also because he is a real cyber punk, he is a real bug in the system, his whole personality revolves around complete disobedience to corporations and their corporate ethics, all his actions are a protest, but one should not assume that his life position consists solely of these protests and disobedience, of course at first glance it seems that Silverhand is nothing more than youthful maximalism elevated to Absolute and a sort of devil on V’s shoulder who only tempts him to give a shit to someone, but to check his motives are much deeper and all this is revealed from constant disputes and conversations between the heroes, as well as from the way various inhabitants of this world speak about our fellow traveler, in general the synergy between the protagonist and the terrorist of almost a century ago in his head is almost the most important thing in the game. And if we enter the territory of extensive thoughts, then Joni interacts more with the player himself than with V, because he is the same entity as you who understands this world much more than its inhabitants and, just like you, just wants to get rid of all the shackles and quickly break out into this very world. And this essence inside your head reminds you of itself all the time, if there is such an opportunity, especially if you don’t rush through the game like a locomotive, neglecting additional quests and paying attention only to the main plot. It’s hard not to get attached to Silverhand, and even if you don’t like him as a character, you can’t deny that, in principle, all interactions with him are very well written and feel as organic as possible in a situation where you have another voice in your head that, unwillingly, over time, overshadows your own. All these constant appearances out of nowhere in the next seat of the car or interruptions in the dialogue do not allow you to forget about the fellow traveler in V’s skull, and after a while, already playing another game, you even begin to miss this guy and, if possible, send the erotic KEANU Reeves on foot in your head.

Well, if we talk about the main plot thread as a whole, and not about its main feature, then we must immediately say that it will not surprise those who have read “neuromancer”, otherwise, the plot is very strong and interesting, not without unexpected turns and adrenaline shootouts, the whole story itself feels like a kind of journey with adventures, a journey from the very bottom to the very top. however, here, as everywhere else, there are shortcomings, in particular one character parameter, and in fact the second level indicator. I’m talking about reputation, of course. The indicator of your reputation does not affect the history at all, even if you have at least the first level of street reputation, even the last Panama hat will still repeat the same phrase that irritates me over and over again. And this is especially offensive when coupled with what I said about how the lines depending on the character’s background allow you to better get used to the role of V and the fact that in the main plot the topic of street reputation is raised repeatedly, thus the player is simply deprived of at least some opportunity to get the effect of completing all third-party quests for his character, in other words, you can be a god among Wokako Okada’s mercenaries, but at the same time you’re not worth a penny for Bestia, and To be honest, sometimes it causes such ludonarrative dissonance that the entire narrative collapses into inferno. What about additional tasks, you ask me?? they exist and there are many of them, I will answer, and there are whole chains of additional quests that very well reveal new details of the cyberpunk world and slightly lift the veil of what is happening in the world of people who run everything, there are also those that sometimes raise very good questions in order to reflect for an hour or so at your leisure, sitting on the windowsill and looking like a cat out the window. There are also simple sides that are designed solely to tell a short story or simply entertain the player, all with their own written plot, written by hand, in general, it’s fun to watch. BUT, but here, as usual, a nuance arises. Half of these tasks are orders for fixers, the description and plot of which is a couple of sentences from the fixer himself and an attached letter in which the whole narrative is written around what you will do now, and there aren’t that many big, truly interesting quest lines, while there are enough interesting quests, don’t think just that this whole system works the same way as in the third Witcher with its simple orders and additional quests, but in terms of content there is much less and this makes you despondent.

part 2: cons

Now let’s talk about what’s really bad about the game, just don’t think there are much more advantages in the game than I listed in the text above, just if I start listing everything, then what I really like about cyberpunk, this video would never end, well, since I’ve already started touching on the topic of disadvantages, I can completely immerse myself in this topic with peace of mind. And here I may sound a little absurd, I understand, but you remember what I said about the combat system? So, forget this for a second, because the combat, purely mechanically, is absolutely FUCKING broken, and this comes from the fact that in terms of calculating damage and various variables, it is very, very complex, and complex, so complex that it is already too much, of course I didn’t hold a candle, but something tells me that in the pursuit of more accurately conveying all the subtleties of the Friday night shootout from the tabletop original and at the same time not throwing the player constantly on checkpoint game in the end just doesn’t know what to do with all these numbers. You see, what is the absurdity of the situation cdpr inherited a very complex combat from the original and in their pursuit of conveying the entire complexity of the system, they simply ended up riveting together another generic shooting game with numbers like in some dying light, and I honestly don’t understand the point of such a decision. As a result, the Poles do not know what to do with their combat system, which sometimes simply cannot cope with the flow of data that is dumped on it, and the game itself does not know what to do with it, what can we say about mere mortals like us, fortunately if you play on the most godly platform, then mods will come to the rescue, because they exist and there are many of them, especially those that radically change the shooting, as for the brothers of console players, then of course you can only sympathize. Well, okay, let’s say we’re all oil tycoons with top-end PCs and we can all be covered in mods from head to toe, but mods won’t be able to fix the absolutely fucked up non-linearity in the game. Here’s the thing, no matter what anyone says, but cyberpunk 2077 is a very, very nonlinear game, and its nonlinearity is done in the best possible way, you are not just given a choice, like go to the right and you’ll get a good ending, but if you go to the left, you’ll see two chairs, well, you get the idea. Of course, there are also moments where you are simply presented with options for what will happen next, but much more often you will reap the consequences of your actions and what you said to someone, and this is just wonderful, right?? Is it true? HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHE, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. While quite a bit of drama is of course great, most of the things that need to be done to take the story in a different direction are simply not clear.

my eyes probably doubled in size when I found out that it turns out that it was still possible to save Goro in that bedlam when the arasca begins to attack you

And at first it seems like it’s great, the game still has a lot to offer you, the game can be non-linear, and at first you really enjoy it, and then you go through it a second time and just don’t understand what you need to do to make at least something change. The prologue of cyberpunk generally treats the player like a bastard in this regard, because in the ill-fated task of being thrown into the Maelstrom, a program with non-linearity and different options for how your actions will affect the picture as a whole and the upcoming task is simply worked out as a standard, and you already begin to happily think that it will be like this the whole game, but you are suddenly plunged into cold water and you never see such tasks as so-and-so again? The question immediately creeps into your head is that you didn’t have enough time or something to think through all these options, but in fairness it’s worth saying that if the whole game had been structured like a prologue, we wouldn’t have seen it for another 10 years, because in fact the developers tried to make a non-linear story with a bunch of variations of events, and I’m still surprised when I come across scenes on the Internet that I haven’t seen in any of my playthroughs, it’s just that it’s all done so unintuitively and it’s not clear that all that remains is to cry about how it could have been. And another thing that indirectly relates to the prologue, as well as to the disadvantages of the entire game, is the chases, or rather their absence, or rather not even that. Why the hell do we even need police officers in the gaming world?? As soon as you do anything that attracts their attention to your person, and now you see that you are now wanted, you immediately jump into the car and drive a couple of hundred meters and that’s it, that’s where your interactions with the police end.

there won’t be any chase or any kind of drone that will keep up with the same car, after a couple of minutes they simply forget about you and in the end there is no need for cops at all, and if you try to play with them on your own two feet, the guys from Max will immediately come running to you and will simply divide your ass into zero. This is interesting you say, but how does this relate to the prologue?? And so in the prologue there were two chases at once and they worked normally, in a fun way diluting the gameplay. Why the prologue, in principle, feels like a full-fledged game when, like the rest of the game, there are no things that were even in it, even I cannot explain or justify. I would also like to write down the lack of variety in the missions as a disadvantage of the game, but I’ve already kind of spoken about this, so let’s move on to what the players’ righteous anger continues to this day, namely shoddy optimization and the number of unfulfilled promises that can compete with the fairy tales that Peter Mulenier or Sean Murray fed us.

part 3: pain

Let’s start with the fact that I didn’t encounter any bugs at all while playing, wait what??

Yes, yes, none at all, it seems to me that the catch here is that you need a very powerful machine to normally play a very expected game with very beautiful graphics, although considering that I have met a lot of people with hardware and more powerful than mine whose game produced the famous 6 frames, I just like to think that I am a very lucky person, because I played on a laptop) with a stable 30 frames with ray tracing and a solid 60 without ray tracing, so yes, for the time being, I didn’t even understand people who so actively hated the performance of the entire game. The funniest thing here is that the very patches that have been feeding us for more than a year and a half are making everything only worse in my case, even after the release of the significant 1.51. I finally began to meet them what I saw in all the clips with the most terrible cyberpunk glitches and now with a clear conscience I can join the club and in unison with everyone declare that the Poles absolutely do not understand how their game works and with every attempt to fix it they only make it worse. All these cars appearing out of nowhere, frame drops out of the blue, blurry textures, disappearing interface elements (and the piss at the very moment when I hack someone) the only thing missing is the forever standing people in t-poses, and yes, the full set. And as it turns out, I’m not the only lucky person whose game was transformed in this way after the patch, just look at the reviews on Steam and everything falls into place, so my advice to you, if you try to play cyberpunk 2077 now, and it works like a potato, don’t despair and just try the previous version of the game, you’ll see that Night City will sparkle with new colors for you. (to be fair, it should be said that the latest patch improved a lot of things in the console version of the game and made it much more playable, but what was at the start was just quiet horror) But as for unfulfilled promises, things are very bad here. You see, when I first sat down to play cyberpunk, I didn’t know anything about it at all, I didn’t watch the presentations, I didn’t catch every word from the developers, nothing at all except that trailer and this video from sg from which I picked up exclusively lore information.

I was just waiting for the game to come out, and it was precisely this perception, unclouded by high expectations, that simply prevented me from falling in love with this game from the first minutes, but after completing it, I began a more careful study of the lore, then immersion in the tabletop original, and then I began to wonder why people were so indignant at what seemed to be such a wonderful game, and then I realized that what I got was not even a tenth of what the developers promised. In fact, I really regret that I opened this Pandora’s box for myself, because before I just enjoyed the game and it was great for me, and here and there sometimes there are things that seem incomprehensible, unfinished or annoying, but in general cyberpunk for me was just a great thing, wonderful music, a fun and interesting plot complete with Jonny Silverhand, cool game mechanics, interesting and unusual combat for the netrunner and I have all this right now and I’m already playing it, God, what could be better than this game? and then you realize that. You see how much cooler it would be if the game had a clearer class system, what scope there would be for roleplaying a character if the original idea of ​​creating a character like in a board game had been left, how great it would be if I could climb walls on my praying mantis arms. You see? Wherever before I saw solid advantages, now I see only unrealistic ambitions of developers and unfulfilled promises, why is this so?? Does the story with NO MAN’S SKY teach developers nothing?? Or it seemed to the PR department employees from CD Projekt RED that Peter Mulenier’s position had been empty for too long, and they had accumulated too much credit? I don’t think so, I think, and here it’s worth understanding that these are exclusively my subjective speculations, based on when we were shown the first trailer, and that early build that surfaced immediately after the game’s release. The developers simply couldn’t decide for a long time what they wanted to do. Cyberpunk 2077 was destined to become a completely new experience for the studio and at the same time their largest and most ambitious project and being in constant attempts to do something unusual, something grandiose and at the same time something that would keep the quality bar set by previous products released from cdpro. after Keanu Reeves himself came out to present the game, and his own desire not to lose face, all this turned into a snowball that became bigger and bigger every day, and which finally fell on CD Projekt RED when the long-suffering cyberpunk finally reached the players. And yet, despite everything that I said above, cyberpunk 2077 was and remains just a wonderful game that can and will give players just a lot of pleasure while you go through it, another thing is that you need to approach the game with a cool head, and even better, forget completely everything you ever knew about it and try to look at it all from scratch, you see, then other people will also admire Night City and everything that fills it, just like I did during my first playthrough.

But enough of the lyrics, let’s try to sum up what’s good about the game: music, plot, combat, atmosphere, graphics and the ability to tell Keanu Reeves to go to hell. What’s bad about the game: poor non-linearity, purely mechanical combat, boring and mostly monotonous additional tasks and simply an absurdly large amount of unrealized potential based on what the developers showed throughout development. To exaggerate too much, it seems like there’s an equal amount of both, but does the game deserve so much hate in its direction?? I think definitely not, because if you omit all these purely technical shortcomings and the fact that this game will never appear again, then you still have on your hands just a wonderful RPG with a lot of variability in the passage and sometimes just incredibly amazing gameplay, before I began to figure out what the developers promised there and why the public is so negative, I really thought cyberpunk was almost the most underrated and misunderstood for no reason, the game of 2020-21, and draw your own conclusions for yourself. And that’s all and see you at stopgame.ru