IIt’s amazing how reports of a company forcing its employees to work months or even years of overtime to meet any deadline can dampen your enthusiasm for a video game.
This phenomenon is so common in game development that it has its own cute little euphemism: “Crunch”. And many of the most controversial studios use it: Rockstar Games, makers of the blockbuster Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption franchises, is notorious for its use and the technical marvel of it The Last of Us Part II stemmed in part from that overtime reportedly resulted in at least one hospitalization.
And above that is Polish developer CD Projekt RED, a company that takes six-day weeks for its employees to make a 2020 release for their highly anticipated new title, Cyberpunk 2077. But despite all the hard work those employees put in, it’s just not ready.
Given the hype surrounding the company, it’s a bit surprising that it stems mostly from a single release: 2015’s The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. While the first two games in the series were well received, the third became an absolute phenomenon, making the creators one of the most respected developers in the industry and the source material popular enough to watch a pre-eminent Netflix series starring Henry. Cavill in the lead. The Witcher 3 and its numerous reissues have ceased against those of Bethesda Elder Scrolls, and CDPR’s superior technology and narrative chops are often cited as an example of how Bethesda could be rather than what they are. That’s why it’s ironic that no Bethesda game has ever been as unstable at launch as Cyberpunk 2077.
The game is inspired by the pen and paper RPG series Cyberpunk, which is inspired by people like Blade Runner, Neuromancer, etc. It’s meant to be a hundreds of hours adventure that you play multiple times to see all there is to see in all the different ways they can be seen. You’re V – and you’re in trouble. When a job infiltrating the largest company in Night City and possibly the entire world goes wrong, your brain begins to merge with that of an anti-capitalist Rockstar / “terrorist” named Johnny Silverhand, here played by the always-play Keanu Reeves. And this process is potentially deadly, so you have to figure out how to stop it – and maybe the company that caused it in the process.
Although it doesn’t look like it Cyberpunk is role-playing at first, so I wanted to play a role … but the game makes it harder than you’d expect. For starters, you can’t be “cool,” which is strange for a game so obsessed with watching it. But what seems like the “cool” dialog options always comes out at least 25% too aggressive and 50% too harsh. It’s a game about merging with an anti-capitalist, created by a company that deals with capitalism at its best. It is anti-corporate lip service from a company whose head misled investors about the circumstances in which he forced its employees to work. Only apologize internally if he was publicly called for it. You can’t really get any less cool than that.
You can feel the focus on aesthetics at the expense of the soul right from the start, on the expanded character creation screen. The interface is clearly designed with a mouse in mind, and seemingly no effort has gone into making it work properly on a controller … but there’s a penis length slider too. And while I would have preferred them to make the game more enjoyable to actually play, I can’t help but appreciate their effort to make this the, uh, fattest game imaginable. But those penises caused quite a commotion as players soon realized almost immediately that the fully modeled members burst through the characters’ pants, and immediately turned to Twitter to show off their wares and immerse themselves in the business that made them do it. The move has also caused concern among streamers, such as when the wildly popular PewDiePie restarted its stream of the game after accidentally exposing V while creating a character due to concerns about nudity restrictions on platforms. It all feels a bit like a child’s impression of what an ‘adult’ video game should be – compounded by apparently not testing the interaction between a hanging appendage and the game’s tight-fitting costumes.
Not that I’m convinced something has been properly tested. Big-budget, “AAA” games often have issues at launch, but this is next-level. And while it’s clearly management’s fault, it’s the fans too: when the game was delayed (for the third time) from November to December, developers were harassed and threatened with death by the same rightful brats that female game developers expelled from their homes during the height. from Gamergate. I can’t imagine what they would have gone through had the game completely missed the 2020 window, and yet it should have been.
Even with multiple patches coming in, the game continues to see full crashes every few hours, and I’ve rarely left more than ten minutes without encountering some sort of glitch. Most are quite insignificant and sometimes even funny – characters and cars teleport around or disappear altogether, an enemy gets caught in the ceiling and instantly dies, spawns in another character’s virtual space and sees her eyeballs floating in front of me until I get permission to move again – but sometimes they are actively harmful: one mission did not start because the game did not recognize the internal timer, another was stopped because a door I had to go through refused to open. At one point, I had to deal with a shaker screen effect for about twenty minutes as the game forgot to turn it off after a few seconds.
This has become such an issue that CD Projekt RED was forced to issue a statement on Monday apologizing for the state of the game on consoles in particular and outlining next steps, including an update schedule that expects “the most prominent issues will be addressed. by February. It’s such a pitiful turn of events that the company is even offering refunds to understandably upset players, with a particular emphasis on those using the latest generation of hardware, where massive performance issues abound. (Luckily I was saved this one by playing the PlayStation 4 version on the newly released PS5 in its impressive backward compatibility mode, which flattened the frame rate significantly.)
But let’s say you wait until February, and clearly you should: what do you get then?
Good, Cyberpunk 2077 is an open-world game along the lines of one Grand Theft Auto: you have a large, densely populated city to explore on foot or by car with a full day / night cycle and even a simple weather system. There are dozens of shops to enter and oh so many random people to talk to, many of whom have their own storylines that you can jump into whether you follow the main plot or not, resulting in a seemingly endless series of gigs and random street crime to stop.
Plus, it’s a first-person action game with fist, knife, and sci-fi firefights * and * a stealth game where you can hack machines and perform silent takedowns. There is also a crafting system, a strange detective system, and all of this will earn you experience points that allow you to unlock more skills that will help you do the above better. Her a lot of. And if all you care about is the width of the content, Cyberpunk 2077 has the potential to keep you busy for literally years.
But the actual gaming part of this all-plus-the-kitchen sink experience is usually just OK. The driving is overly floaty, and I really didn’t enjoy the number of shots each enemy bullet took to take down. The game clearly wants you to play tactical, use stealth and hacking to select your targets slowly and methodically, but at some point I got bored or frustrated with AI glitches and wanted to go with fireworks.
“Like everyone in the world, I am a huge fan of Keanu Reeves, and making Johnny Silverhand your regular companion was inspired and made for the easy climax of the experience.“
But CD Projekt RED has made a name for itself with its world structure and stories, and on the first, Cyberpunk is a resounding success: first-person open worlds require an almost absurd amount of detail, as you can get to the bottom of everything and examine it closely. And Night City does. It’s a stunning virtual design that only gets more impressive as missions take you into buildings with deep, complex and unique layouts. There is so much care and craftsmanship that it is impossible not to be impressed or even surprised by what it can bring you over and over again. Of course you would expect that from a team of hundreds who overwork themselves.
The stories are more mixed. Like everyone in the world, I’m a huge fan of Keanu Reeves, and making Johnny Silverhand your regular companion was inspired and made for the easy climax of the experience. I was less enamored with the myriad of other characters and factions for me to join (or not).
Perhaps the most pivotal scene in the early game involves an argument that turns into a murder, seen in two directions from behind a mirror. You can’t move, which means there is absolutely no excuse for the fact that several times during this sequence one of the characters will be right in front of the other and * both * block their faces from view. This kind of basic staging issue is widespread and baffling. Has no one watched any of these sequences?
Then there is the dialogue. If you are given options during a conversation, usually one or two will continue the story, while the others will be optional flavor text that will eventually revert to the original choice. Unfortunately, it has no idea that the game actually understands what you have and haven’t said, reading consecutive lines with vastly different tones and repeating information as if it were brand new.
And frankly, I am surprised by all of this. As I entered Cyberpunk 2077, I expected a broad and very immersive experience to match the developer’s pedigree and long development cycle. I thought all that overtime would result in a game contradictory in its excellence: so good that all their work would feel almost justified, even though I regretted the situations it resulted in. But all those people were convinced that this Game or the year or the generation or even the decade were wrong. It’s just a different game, albeit a hugely impressive one. And we as a culture have to really approve of that, with big games like things they like and not what they base their identity on. Crunch exists because players want games that are as big and complex as possible, and management is pushing their employees to commit.
Johnny Silverhand wouldn’t like that. We neither.