I’m enjoying myself in Cyberpunk 2077, and that bothers me.
To be clear, it doesn’t bother me because I find myself stuck in 2021, unwilling to acknowledge that a game studio – especially one with the resources and willingness to crunch like CD Projekt RED – can’t improve a video game post-launch. I’ve seen what No Man’s Sky has turned into, for instance, and I remember what it was – the difference between the two is night and day, and No Man’s Sky is better for it. It also doesn’t bother me because this sentiment goes against the grain of Skeleton’s scathing review – indeed, a lot of what Skeleton observed at the time of launch is still present in the game today.
It bothers me because we saw this coming.
In their review, Skeleton wrote:
“Well, here we are. We should probably start actually talking about things forever. We can’t let them disappear over the horizon every hype cycle. Reviewing Cyberpunk 2077 now is tantamount to critiquing an artist who hasn’t even finished priming the canvas. In six, ten, twelve months – this game could look and feel entirely different. That’s why — fuck it — we should be irritating and keep bringing up the bullshit the employees at CDProjekt Red had to go through just to launch their early-access-ass videogame.”
CD Projekt RED has released the “2.0” update of Cyberpunk 2077, and with it comes an overhauled progression system, rewritten stories and re-recorded voiced dialogue, and two-ish years of bug fixes behind it. They’ve also released the single piece of DLC the game is getting, Phantom Liberty, but I’m not “reviewing” that here as Skeleton wants to return to Night City to look at it. We’re most likely going to get some kind of corpo-laundered “making of” documentary, probably from NoClip or maybe even Geoff Keighley himself, that goes into the blood, sweat and tears it took to make this 2.0 update to Cyberpunk 2077. And when it comes out, we’re going to watch it and it’s going to make us feel the same way we felt when we learned that Naoki Yoshida made the Creative Business Unit 3 team crunch for months to put out Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. It’ll be a documentary designed to override our critical judgement and make us sympathize with what we’ll be told was a “justified” abuse of employees. Or maybe we don’t end up getting that kind of emotionally affective garbage. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
Cyberpunk 2077 remains a game where you pick three paths – nomad, streetkid, corpo – and from there watch your life as you’ve constructed it get shattered by a job gone bad and a new hostile resident in your head. It remains a game where you have to run around Night City, doing random wet work for the different nebulous factions while you try to figure out the best way to remove Keanu Reeves’ wooden voice acting from your skull. It is still a game where you can run around town all you want, making further modifications to your body, collecting all the best weapons money and violence can buy, but you still don’t have to worry about making rent. Remember Cyberpunk: Edgerunners? That short anime by Studio Trigger and CDPR chronicling the life and times of David Martinez? Do you remember why he stole the military-grade Sandevistan? Why he had it installed? It’s because he was recently made an orphan and about to be evicted. You either die a hero in Night City or you live long enough to be forgotten.
Nothing in Cyberpunk 2077 matches that level of folklore.
I’m enjoying myself in Cyberpunk 2077 all the same, and it still bothers me. It’s given me cause to think about what we consider to be the act of “critical reevaluation.” The game’s discourse was already flattened down to: the game sucks because it’s buggy and full of jank and doesn’t run very well on consoles (to the point that Sony took it off their storefront for the PlayStation 5). These are fixable complaints. The game still has bugs, it’s still janky at times, and its performance on lower-end hardware isn’t wonderful, but a lot of that can be handwaved away. When video reviewers like SkillUp build a fucking F-35-ass supercomputer to re-review Cyberpunk at max specifications, something not easily replicated by workaday plebs like you or me, I just genuinely don’t think graphical performance matters in the final calculus anymore, if it ever really did. But that was never the full breadth and scope of the discourse, was it? Do you remember how the game left PC players’ computers open to a major security breach? Or how the braindance sequences actually caused seizures in some journalists before launch? Do you remember that Sony didn’t just take the game off its storefront, but the game remained unpurchaseable on PlayStation until like June or July 2021?
Do you remember CDPR’s marketing team engaging with shitty edgelords and doing a bit of cheeky transphobia in the process? Or how fans of the game harassed reviewers who pointed that out, or who mentioned that the game had problems with representation across the board? It’s okay if you don’t, the nature of the discourse means that for as much intense hate-filled vitriol as writers like Carolyn Petit and Kallie Plagge got for their reviews (at Polygon and Gamespot, respectively), everyone simply forgot that it happened when those same gamers discovered the bugs and jank for themselves.
Every layer of discourse about a given game simply stacks on top of what came before, like sedimentary layers in the side of a hill. Is three years enough time to look at a game and go, “actually, our read on it was incorrect?” I’m inclined to say no. But Cyberpunk 2077 2.0/Phantom Liberty has the benefit of launching alongside games like Redfall, Starfield and Baldur’s Gate 3 – three games that have shaped the discourse this year around how game development “should” be carried out. So maybe we feel compelled to look at this game that almost launched with actual cognitohazards built into it, see that it no longer actively wants to kill its players, and go, “oh yeah it’s actually way better than we said it was.”
I’m having fun in Cyberpunk 2077, and what bothers me so much about that is that maybe I always wanted to. Maybe this is just me giving up, giving into the zeitgeist. I understand fully when some of my peers say they feel like they’re being gaslit by the response to Phantom Liberty. That is what it feels like.
Criticism is not a science but an artform. There is no empirical process of criticism, no scientific method to hold its subjectivities accountable. Critics attempt to make tangible the intangible: to describe feelings they had, to unpack their comforts and discomforts at the beholding of an object, to place a piece of art into context with other pieces. This makes it possible for criticism to weather the roiling tides of discourse but it also makes it far more likely to fall prey to… well: exactly what is happening here. How does criticism navigate a situation where a cultural product has been revised methodically to the point where it is no longer recognizable as the same product it was? The answer is probably “very carefully,” but it is just as likely to be “in ways that struggle to acknowledge what the product was before.”
I’m having fun in Cyberpunk 2077, and maybe there will come a day where I will have completely forgotten what it was before, and what it took to get here, and who was harmed in its production and release. And that bothers me.