Cyberpunk 2077

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Cyberpunk 2077 (Pre-2022)
Wake the f**k up, CD Projekt! We have a game to fix.
Protagonist(s): V Genre(s): Action role-playing Rating(s): ESRB: M CERO: Z PEGI: 18 USK: 18 ACB: R18+ OFLC: R18 Platform(s): Microsoft Windows PlayStation 4 Stadia Xbox One PlayStation 5 Xbox Series X/S Release: Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Stadia, Xbox One December 10, 2020 PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S February 15, 2022 Engine: REDengine 4 Developer(s): CD Projekt Red QLOC (Stadia) Publisher(s): CD Projekt Country: Poland Series: Cyberpunk Predecessor: Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

"What the f**k is this? Did you bite off more than you can chew? You're supposed to be setting an example for the other kids, not joining them and encouraging this shit! I am really disappointed in you. You used to be on the A honor roll! Do you remember your last win for us? Witcher 3, it was a school legend! And now look at you, you're on the wrong path."

— Principal AngryJoe

Cyberpunk 2077 is an action role-playing video game developed by CD Projekt Red and published by :CD Projekt. The game was based on a board game franchise Cyberpunk created by Mike Pondsmith.

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 contents and promising 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 being one of the most disastrous launches since the release of Bethesda Softworks' Fallout 76.

Plot

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 afterward. 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 an AI called "Soulkiller", which can be used to prevent Silverhand from taking over V's body. V then sets out to plan how to access Soulkiller to remove Silverhand from his/her brain before Silverhand completely takes over.

Bad Qualities

NOTE: Most of the issues, which involved bugs and problems with AI that made it behave braindead, were fixed as of 2022. This article covers the pre-2022 versions.

1. Rushed game development: The game was announced in 2012, however, due to the 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, 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. After all, 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.
2. 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 most of them were fixed, the damage was already done.
   • 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 most ridiculous of details. The most infamous example was when they tried to promote the penis customization feature to generate internet clout about the game.
3. A horrendous number of bugs and glitches (plenty of which are game-breaking) that are possibly even worse than FIFA 21. Now with the numerous patches, these problems don’t happen usually but they were an absolute plague when the game first launched, with the most notable examples being:
   • 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.
   • Your character does T-poses, loses clothes/body parts, and starts to flicker while driving a vehicle.
   • The NPCs flying for no reason due to poor physics and collision, which can lead to cars being sent flying out of nowhere.
   • The poor physics also causes objects to get flung into the air at high speeds, as well as the game sometimes acts as if the player drove into a wall when they hit an NPC.
   • The NPCs are getting stuck in t-poses.
   • Falling out of the world thanks to glitchy collision.
   • The vehicles explode for no reason when started up.
   • V dying by simply running into something.
   • Animations not loading, such as the character's mouths not moving when talking outside of cutscenes.
   • Unobtainable items. Before 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.
   • 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).
4. 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 unnaturally enter the object, 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, as they do in parkours, without jumping). The player can also sometimes clip right through them as if they weren't even there. A.I. would eventually be improved in Update 2.0.
   • When getting shot at, at times NPCs tend to pretend like nothing's happening as they rarely ever take cover and walk around casually.
   • 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 NPCs will never try to evade it.
   • Due to the lack of driving A.I., police car chases are mostly non-existent outside of missions.
   • 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.
5. 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 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 is 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. This would eventually be added in Update 2.1. But even then, you're better off just using it as a fast travel station as riding in trains only serve as scenery.
6. Because the game is 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.
7. False advertising: As mentioned above, 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 such as Saints Row, Mafia II, plea of GTA games such as IV, V, San Andreas and even GTA III (a game released almost two decades before Cyberpunk) and even also the hated later-released Definitive editions (which added some new gameplay features and improving the old AIs) 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 version and provided footage themselves instead of letting critics show their gameplay.
8. As mentioned above, the physics are terrible for 2020 standards as they are incredibly buggy, the vehicle 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 run over by a car.
9. 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.
10. 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 the gameplay of arcade games in their respective arcade cabinets. Eventually, a mini-game, Roach Race, was added on patch 1.6, but that's still only one.
11. 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, unlike in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, and you also have to press X/triangle/E for things that should happen automatically like taking a shard or exiting a vehicle.
12. 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 time their respective framerates can at times dip below twenty frames per second, 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 fewer 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 an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 graphics card can 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.
13. 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.
14. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions suffered from very blurry graphics before 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.
    • The PS4 version was removed from digital stores and later returned for 6 months, but if you go to the digital store page, it will warn you about playing the game on anything that isn't PlayStation 4 Pro or PlayStation 5.
15. Although good for the most part, some of the dialogue is also very corny, such as Smasher’s "You look like a cut of f**kable 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.
16. Speaking of dialogue, the player is provided only a few seconds to choose a dialogue option before getting scolded for not choosing fast enough, which is very annoying.
17. 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 f*** all to do”.
18. The gunplay can feel clunky at times, thanks to the often poor hit detection and cheap bullet sponge enemies.
19. Melee combat is especially awkward.
    • 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?!
20. 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.
21. Similarly to Grand Theft Auto IV, the player will constantly receive messages and notifications on their phone. The problem is, unlike GTA IV, 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.
22. 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.

Good Qualities

1. The game has fully improved since 2023 thanks to many patches that saved the game and CD Projekt's reputation.
2. 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.
3. 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 (named as a tie-in to the Netflix/Studio Trigger anime prequel Cyberpunk: Edgerunners), was the final major update for old-gen consoles, adding cross-progression, Performance Mode for the Xbox Series S, and more customization.
   • Update 2.0, meant for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, meant that Enemy AI has been heavily improved, you can initiate vehicular combat, the introduction of the amount of Cyberware capacity you can equip, armor, smoke grenades, melee weapon finishers, and a revamped skill tree.
   • Update 2.1 made it better with traceable quick hacks, the ability to ride trains, listening to radios on foot, Adam Smasher being a more challenging boss fight, new cyberware along with some balances of the old cyberware, leaning while riding bikes, you can even do tricks on bikes, as well as multiple bug fixes.
4. 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.
5. 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 safe houses.
6. A lot of the missions are pretty fun to play through and many of them have some kind of interesting story to them.
7. Even if the optimization and performance are really bad, the ninth-generation versions via backward compatibility look and work better, as they run at 60FPS without drops, though bugs, glitches, and crashes are still present.
8. The story itself is good and the first act does a fantastic job of making you feel for the characters and introducing you to Night City.
9. 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.
10. The soundtrack is fantastic and fits perfectly with the cyberpunk vibe and what is happening on the screen in general.
11. The voice acting is pretty great with Keanu Reeves as Johnny Silverhand being a standout.
12. A good variety of likable characters, with Johnny Silverhand, Judy Alvarez, Jackie Wells, and Goro Takemura being standouts.
13. V's death (depending on your choices) is pretty emotional.
14. The loading screens are generally pretty short, even if they don't give enough time for the textures to fully load.
15. And of course, Keanu's most memorable line of the game, "Wake the f**k up, Samurai, we have a city to burn."

Phantom Liberty

1. This DLC adds a new location, Dogtown, which is very interesting as Night City rejected it as part of their districts due to its run down nature.
2. The newly added are likable. With Songbird aka So Mi, Reed, Mr. Hands, and President Myers being standouts.
3. A new skill tree is added, the Relic tree, which increases your combat abilities to even more brutal killing machines.
4. Increased level cap to 60.
5. Once you complete certain requirements, a new ending for the main game can be unlocked, in which V is cured of the Relic but at the cost of losing Johnny, their combat implants, and their relationships with their friends. V is forced to live their life as a regular civilian from now on.

Reception

Before release, Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the most anticipated and hyped games of the 2010s decade. It won over a hundred awards during E3 2018, and had far more pre-orders than The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, with 8 million pre-orders compared to the 1 million pre-orders The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt had.

Upon release, however, Cyberpunk 2077 was met with mostly mixed reception, more specifically receiving a mixed-to-positive reception on PC, while the console versions received mixed-to-negative reception. It is considered not only the most disappointing game of 2020 but also one of the most disappointing games of all time. On Metacritic, the PC port has a Metascore of 86/100 and a user score of 7.1/10. The scores for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 ports however, were much lower, with a Metascore of 57/100 for the PS4 port, a 61/10 for the Xbox One port, a user score of 3.6/10 for the PS4 port, and a 4.9/10 on the Xbox One port.

Joe Vargas of AngryJoeShow gave the console ports a 2/10 before the patches, a 4/10 for the console ports after the patches, and the PC port a 6/10. During the review, Joe admitted that he didn't even want to play the game due to how disappointed he was with the game, let alone review it.

The Act Man considers Cyberpunk 2077 to be the "one of the greatest disappointments in gaming history".

As of March 2022, the game was reviewed and bombed again on Steam by Russian players, because CD Projekt removed all their games from sale in Russia following the invasion of Ukraine.

In July 2022, CD Projekt reported that the company had lost 75 percent of its value since the game's release.

In September 2022, following the release of the web anime series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, and all of the patches, the game's player base increased to 90,000 concurrent players.

Over time, the game eventually improved and is considered by many players to be the best turnaround for any videogame ever. With the release of the Phantom Liberty DLC, gamers agree that this game is worth a purchase.

Trivia

• Thanks to the marketing team of CD Projekt, the game became an Internet meme even a few years before its release. The meme itself revolves around images of various crude improvisation devices/replacements with the game's logo serving as a "caption". Even CD Projekt said on their Twitter account in 2018 that the "Whole game is going to be a meme".
• Upon CD Projekt announcing that players can customize V's genitals, a bunch of popular memes during mid-2020 were created.
• The city's environment was inspired by the 1982 sci-fi movie Blade Runner.
• A Cyberpunk mobile game that predated this game, subtitled "The Arasaka's Plot", was released on Java devices and was met with better reception than this game.
• With a budget of US$312 million, this is one of the most expensive video games ever made.
• Due to the number of times CD Projekt delayed the game, they have received death threats from some fans.
• The Yellow background that CD Projekt would announce a delay of the game became a meme that even studios like Arc System would meme it.
• Lots of tweets from the Cyberpunk 2077 Twitter account have been laughed at due to how they did not age well.

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