Summary
When I eventually got around to playingCyberpunk 2077, I was disappointed. Much like its marketing, it was style over substance. Night City looked amazing, but walking up to a door immediately revealed it was set dressing. Give me a Skyrim with a dozen wooden huts you can actually go inside any day of the week.I just wanted to eat the noodles. Was that too much to ask?
Clearly, it was. Even worse than the uninteractable world, however, was Cyberpunk 2077’s failure to interrogate any of the systems present in its world. You were forced to help the police –very punk– and hypercapitalist ideas like theTrauma Teamwere completely unexplored. A private healthcare service where platinum members were greeted with a personal bodyguard of armed healthcare professionals? Tell me more about where our society is headed! But Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t want to talk about it.
“We thought that we were dystopian, but… we just touched the surface.” - Paweł Sasko, CDPR associate game director
It was all cyber, no punk. After questioningwhy everything, especially multi-million dollar triple-A projects, had to be labelled ‘punk’ these days, I turned to indie games for my cyberpunk fix.Death Noodle Deliveryhad frustrating gameplay, but its vision of a depressing cyberpunk future was exactly what I was after.Citizen Sleeperquickly rose to become one of my favourite games of all time because it told a relatable story of the struggles of everyday people in a futuristic setting. It also let me eat the noodles. There’s a good reason its sequel,Starward Vector, is tied for my most-anticipated game alongsideThe Legend of Zelda: Echoes of WisdomandThe Plucky Squire, and it’s not because of anedgy, transphobic marketing campaign.
However, CD Projekt Red has promised it’s changed. As well as making good on its promise to fix the broken game it released (a low bar to clear), the developers have been looking at what they can improve in the sequel.
“I see that we didn’t push the envelope far enough in some places, for instance,” CDPR associate game director Paweł Sasko said onthe company’s AnsweRED podcast(thanks,RPS!). “Like, let’s say the homeless crisis… when I look at it, I’m like, we weren’t far enough in ‘77. We thought that we were dystopian, but… we just touched the surface.”
Sasko’s nailed it. But assessing the issues of the first game – the issues that persist now the bugs have been fixed, that is – is only the first step. It’s not enough for CDPR to add homeless people to Cyberpunk 2078 or whatever the sequel will be called. We need a narrative that includes them. It’s probably too much to ask for a playable character, but an important NPC with agency and their own voice is the bare minimum.
These are the interesting questions that the cyberpunk genre asks. How do the vast technological advances impact normal people? Why is this technology, and the billions of dollars that come with manufacturing and selling it, solely in the hands of the rich, rather than distributed equally? Why is cyberware mostly used for warfare rather than welfare?
These are the questions that I wanted Cyberpunk 2077 to answer – or, at least, ask – and want the sequel to interrogate further. These are the kinds of questions that independent games like Citizen Sleeper aren’t afraid to tackle. These are the kinds of questions that games like Cyberpunk 2077shouldtackle. CD Projekt Red has an enormous platform, and it should use it to say something.
However, I’m taking all this with a grain of salt. We all saw Cyberpunk 2077’s marketing. It was an almost decade-long affair, filled with lies and mistruths. We were told this game would reinvent the RPG, but when it arrived, it did everything RPGs have done forever. Complete side quests. Loot bodies. Upgrade your guns. Press X to pick up credits. Yawn.
Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t a bad game (now), but it’s derivative, bland, and two-dimensional. Hey, at least it looks pretty! I hope its sequel improves on this baseline in nearly every way, but mostly I hope it better understands what makes cyberpunk punk. I hope it takes inspiration from the great works of the genre, I hope it gives Philip K. Dick and William Gibson a run for their money. But I won’t dare to do any more than hope. I’m not going to fall for the marketing campaign again.
