Thoughts from Night City: A look at Cyberpunk 2077

It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment Night City gripped my shoulders and pulled me into it like a lovers embrace. Perhaps it was climbing into a Bladerunner style Corpo Vehicle as it lifted to show Night Cities breathtaking Vistas. Maybe it was in the middle of the parade, as V held out her hand and a holographic cherryblossom passed through it. Maybe it was in the middle of a drag race with my transgendered bartender as we veered off road to catch the accidental killer of her husband.

But once I was gripped, it was impossible for me to escape.

Cyberpunk 2077, released in late 2020, is a beautiful adaptation of… Cyberpunk, the 1988 Cyberpunk Tabletop Roleplaying game. Of course, Cyberpunk itself was adapted from, every cyberpunk novel in existence, a fact that while allowed nerds of all shapes to relive their favorite movies, games, and tv shows, it also disallowed Cyberpunk of having anything of its own to say. It's funny because the game based off the Medium that usually has so much to say is often silent behind stat blocks that tell you just how much hardware you can buy before your character goes cyberpsycho.

Cyberpunk 2077 often inherits the thrill of being an Edgerunner under the dystopian skies, while also inheriting Cyberpunk's many flaws. Firstly, it is very derivative. The main story itself is Altered Carbon by way of Johnny Mnemonic, it even casts Keanu Reeves.

You play V, a former Corporate Stooge slash Streetkid Punk slash Nomad of the Bad Lands who after a series of events finds themselves back on the streets with nobody but their best choomba, Jackie trying to make themselves a Legend of Night City, just like Johnny Silverhand--Why is that monkey paw closing?

It's here that you get to know the character of Night City, and it's the Character of a hundred cyberpunk novels, amalgamated together in a fully realized and beautiful monstrosity. But I do mean it's beautiful. As an avid cyberpunk fan (genre, not specifically the game) I recognize my favorite books in the twists and turns of the city. I see Blade Runner in its towers and neon lights, I see Robocop in its crass and over-the-top advertising on every corner, I see Deus Ex in its rotten streets and corrupt Corporations. I also see how well it all came together.

It's here you find your V, embroiled in her own mission, side to side with her best Choomba, to become fucking legends of Night City, when you're contracted by a Night City boss and a cyber prostitute to find a relic, an experimental datashard. Going through this I couldn't help but be reminded of the Shadowrun instructions to on how to set up a run. The Johnson (the guy who contracts you with the Run), the Job (What the run is supposed to accomplish), the Plan (How you plan to accomplish it), and the Hitch (The unexpected thing that goes wrong in the midst of the job). This formula is beat by beat matched in this opening job, mixed with high octane action.

 It's an incredible mission. Set up like a classic heist gone wrong, with excellent set pieces, such as sliding down Arasaka Tower, or flying down the streets of Night City as you're being chased by security forces. And it ends with you in the back of a cab, talking to your best friend, your choomba. And he succumbs to his wounds. My last words to him, was "See ya at the top, Jackie" which is so fucking corny, but it works. That's your relationship to the man. Throughout the prologue you two have been complete idiots for the mercenary life. Best friends who just wanted to see the world from its highest places so you could piss off of its edge;  now, only one of you walks away from a botched job. So you say the only thing you can in this situation: See you at the top, buddy.

It's from here, a series of events leads you shot, body dumped in the dump, somehow surviving with the aid of an unexpected ally, but also the knife twists. After being taken to Vik, the ripper doctor, the relic you had placed in your head is killing you, you are dying, and the construct of Night City terrorist, Johnny Silverhand awakens in your mind. And from here on you have a hitchhiker, to appear and comment on your missions. But I'll cover Johnny later.

And after that extended prologue, Night City finally opens up to you. And what a city. Night City feels like a City. One both living and breathing, and also uncaring, omnipotent. It's winding streets, decaying villas, all of it breaths a life that's hard to capture in text. I have lived in or around a city my entire life, and never before have I been in a game that captures what it's like. In Grand Theft Auto, if I want to get from point A to B, all I need to do is turn my car and point. In Cyberpunk, I had to navigate. It has dimension. It feels like a fully realized city that grew upward. So that some of it's neighborhoods tower over others. It has a downtown, a market district, it has slums, and all of them meld together lacking any sense of being constructed, but rather grown from the ground up. It's character ends up being the star character of the game, which may be good because of the actual main character: V.

A lot of criticism has been lobbed at Cyberpunk 2077 over the last year and some change, much of which has been directed at V. Not all unwarranted. Some of this I suspect is because a lot of people's V were male, and no offense to Gavin Drea, his V is just not as compelling or emotive as the top notch performance of Cherami Leigh. Much of Drea's dialogue comes off as transactional, meant to just move the plot along, or honestly just flat. Which is a problem female Vs just don't have. Cherami Leigh brings so much character to her performance, she ends up outshining much of the colorful cast. She comes off playful when making fun of her friends, mercurial when attempting to extract information, and vulnerable when talking about herself. This may be the main reason to select a female V, a found a lot of problems smoothed over by her performance.

But other issues with V can’t be addressed by the raspy charm of Cherami Leigh. Mostly having to do with the roleplaying aspects of this roleplaying game. The dialogue options are very limited, granting only a few responses. That being Suspicious V, Mercurial V, Nice V, and [Insert Background Here]. This can often feel restraining, the option you would pick are sometimes (or even often) not present, and sometimes you can get caught offguard with what your V says. This can be addressed in the same way you could address problems with Arthur Morgan from Red Dead Redemption 2 or more appropriately, Geralt Rivera from the Witcher. That V is no wholly your character, she has a personality of her own. And that I would mostly agree. Unfortunately, Cyberpunk doesn't seem to be under that impression.

A lot of V is customization. Her background, how she dresses, whether or not she has a long uncut girldick. The game wants to signal to you that this is your V, and in many ways it is. I can't imagine another V than mine, even though I know that within limits, there are other Vs on the same disc. But that phrase: within limits, that is the operant word. Your V has limits to who they can be. Your V will always be a runner. Your V will always have a hard life, your V will always do that sick as hell montage, your V will always want to become a Legend with Jackie. A lot of your V will be found not in the dialogue, but in the inferences.

What you choose to do, what you choose not to do, what quests you take. That is what makes your V.

I decided to lean as heavily into the derivative nature of Cyberpunk and made a Molly Millions style build. Clever, though not incredibly bright; Ruthless, but with a Devil May Care attitude that brings out the better in others; prone to breaking face, as well as hearts. It was in character creation that I ran into the first hurdle. Her eyes. There was no way for me to replicate the classic mirror eyes of Molly Millions. This struck me as odd. As much as the game pilfered from classic Cyberpunk, it didn't allow me the ability to stylize after, debatably, it's most iconic side character. This is a running problem with Cyberpunk. It is lousy with options, but hardly any of them are ones you want.

Most of the options are your standard looter shooter affair. Options that make an abstract number go up. And while I'm sure this is exciting to the enthusiastic mathematicians, very few of the options make the game more fun to play. Some of them do, but they are lost in the noise of color-coded guns, cybertech, and a byzantine perk point system. And while some might say this is "variety", Variety is meaningless if it doesn't change anything.

Now the things that do work, work well. Ways to slow down time, a rocket leap, motherfucking blades that come out of your arms. These work and improve the game. Unfortunately the buy in for these abilities means you're slogging through several Gigs, which themselves can be fun Far Cry style outposts, but in aggregate can become wearing,  in order to even afford or unlock upgrades. Meaning the most fun you can have in the game comes either right at the end where you can hardly use all the fun stuff, or after you've done so much side content you've become near sick of the game. Cash balance is a particular problem in this game, as the ability to unlock cars becomes staggering at some point.

Cars are a particularly thorny subjects because driving in Night City is abysmal. It might be because I play most games with keyboard and mouse that the driving became such a chore through an otherwise gorgeous city, but the twitchy and jittery controls made driving segments, bar a couple of vehicles, impossible for me. The weird part is: Jackie's Motorbike, and the Beast both handle, at the very least: fine. So this wasn't a problem that was insurmountable, it's just every other vehicle felt like it was on ice. I rarely went anywhere when I wasn't on bike. Or I just fast traveled. I honestly don't think it speaks well about your game that, despite its beautify and masterwork design, so many people will forgo navigation to teleport by way of loading screen.

It's tempting at this point to say that Cyberpunk 2077 is as wide as the ocean but deep as a puddle, and there are parts of the game that is certainly true. Pacifica, for instance, is one of the most conceptually fascinating parts of the game.  A casino, carnival, and mall packed by the ocean side, that lost money, or traffic, or whatever, and was abandoned; leaving the neighborhood in the ruins of these monuments to unchecked capitalism. Now populated by a Haitian group known as the Voodoo Boys. All of this could have made for a real, breathing area. But it's there for one story mission and like three side jobs, mostly gigs, and then you just leave. There's not a lot there to do, not many locals you can talking to, which makes the segments you spend there and the choices you can make kind of ring hollow:  choose to help the Voodoo Boys, Betray them, Storm Out after the mission, offer to buy them a beer, it doesn't matter. Because you'll never go back.

So it's tempting to call it shallow, but there are times in Cyberpunk 2077 that have surprising depth, that if you're not careful the undercurrent will grip you and pull you under faster than you can think.

Panam's Quest is an example of one of the top tier this game has to offer, and is some of the best video game content I've ever played. We start out meeting up with Panam, fixing a junker she's been driving when her partner screwed her over and stole her ride and her load. And what followed was completely unexpected. It was the story of a nomad, who came to Night City seeking freedom, but found a heartless town that either consumed or your soul. After having spent hours in Night City, having lost my only friend, I related to this, hard. I too lived in Night City and found it often soul crushing, the cold towers jutting from the concrete jungle only serving to remind me that I was alone. It was here Panam showed me another way. Her journey was about making peace with her family and finding freedom on the road. It was after a few interactions, when V and Panam hacked Power Terminals to overload the junctions to knock a sky carrier to the ground V made a realization: She was falling in love.

(Full discretion: I was not playing a fully vanilla version of Cyberpunk. The one mod I had was the ability to Romance Pam as a female V. The primary reason being, I did not want the best love interest in the game locked behind a substandard vocal performance.)

Now, up until this point, after the Death of Jackie, I had been playing V as increasingly erratic. Prone to go off the handle, short to temper, shorter with people's lives. V would drink whenever V could (and a lot at that), V would tell Johnny to fuck off every time he opened his stupid fucking mouth, and V will kill quickly and mercilessly. But that changed after she met Panam. Sure, V had romantic encounters before. A brief fling with River before breaking it off gently because she did not feel the same way about River as he did her. Another with Judy after a SCUBA trip. That wasn't so clean of a break. But nobody left V quite the impression as Panam. Maybe it was her balls to the wall method of heists, maybe it was the cool military hardware, maybe it was just her sheer gumption and attitude. My V was helpless.

Other content was similarly absorbing. Judy's Quest to find out what happened to her girlfriend, the cyber prostitute who disappeared after the first act is both gripping in concept and in execution. Kind of a Girl With the Dragon Tattoo investigative noir, that ends brutally and tragically. It's beautiful and dire, as Judy and V are the only ones to survive at the end. This leads to a conversation in a darkly lit bathroom after a SCUBA adventure that just rips your heart out, when you realize: there was nothing you could have done. Cyber Prostitution and Human Smuggling is a big business in Night City. And the Clouds was among the biggest. And you don't take on Titans and just walk away after that. There are consequences. But that night you had each other.

Not being able to do a lot about outcomes is a common criticism of Cyberpunk 2077. People who have done multiple playthroughs have gotten a peak behind the artifice and saw how the game narrowly guides you these conclusions became disillusioned. In so much of the games content the players choices don't matter outside of maybe a character is alive later, or you can call them for the final mission.

A better example maybe is Peralaz missions. The Peralaz missions are great on the surface of them, led by two awesome side characters the Mayor Jefferson Peralaz and his wife, Elizabeth, as you uncover a conspiracy. They are being spied on, and they hire V as a contractor to feel out what is going on. Through twists and turns, you find: it's not that they are being spied on. But controlled. Their minds are being tampered with, memories, tastes, feelings. They're being overwritten by a shadowy force that Johnny seems to think is an AI. After this, you have a choice: Do you tell the Mayor? You see, in an interesting twist, Elizabeth has known about this for a while. She has been part of the coverup. It's not her fault really. She discovered the inconsistencies on her own and when she began to poke around to this end she was on the wrong end of a whole lot of bad. To keep her family safe she kept quiet. And she asks you to do the same.

And at face value, this mission is incredible. A genuine Sci Fi mystery that takes advantage of it's setting to truly horrifying ends. But none of your decisions or competency matters here. Do you catch the spies? If you don't Elizabeth will tell you anyway. Do you tell Jefferson? Either way they block you and you no longer can interact with them. From here a lot of people saw this as another example of the game taking power from the player, and interfering with the ability to make meaningful choices.

To this end a good argument can be made that the only meaningful choices you make is at the beginning and at the very end. But, this leads me to two questions: First: Is it important for a character to impact the world in a story? And Second: What do you mean by 'meaningful'?

To the first, personally I never minded the artifice, because impacting the world of Cyberpunk conflicts with its premise. The world of Cyberpunk can't change. Nothing will ever change this world because it is too far gone, corporations have too much power. Johnny nuked Arasaka tower 50 years ago, but there it still stands now. Do you honestly think a small conversation is ever going to change something in this uncaring city? You might have minor impacts, but as a whole, the world doesn't react to you, because it doesn't care. This is what makes Cyberpunk… cyberpunk. These are noir dystopias. The point is to live in them, not change them.

And the second point also brings a weird expectation to me, because to me, the choices I made were meaningful. They didn't change the story, but they changed what I thought about V. So much of Cyberpunk 2077 is in inference. What missions did you choose to take? If you thought you were on borrowed time what would be meaningful for your to do? Did you go to Jackie's Funeral? Did you speak? What item did you put on his Offrenda? Mechanically these choices don't matter. But didn't they matter to you? So much of what I found meaningful were choices like what to put on the offrenda? do I make Misty feel part of the family? How do you treat Johnny?

Johnny is a peculiar character. You meet him right after first heist and your first impression is not good. He wakes up, demanding a cigarette then threatens your life, beating your head in on the windowsill of your apartment. But when things get deeper, and tensions cool down, you scratch the surface to find… an amazing asshole. He's manipulative, egocentric, has an outsized view of his own self-importance, and a nasty habit of getting people to trust him before he screws them over. He's a bigger-than-life asshole who uses his natural charisma to consume others. A lot is said about Keanu Reeves' performance, that it was lackluster or phoned in, but, and not to be insulting to our modern Jesus, but this is on par with Keanu Reeve's performance in other cyberpunk titles.

He shows up, chews the scenery, acts like a jackass at every opportunity… and yeah, that's cyberpunk Keanu Reeves. It might be difficult to remember in a post John Wick world, but a mixture of subdued acting combined with wild moments of scenery chewing was Keanu Reeves' thing for decades. It was a joke for a long time. And it's kind of nice to see him back at it. Time enough has passed where this seems to be a distinctive style and one, combined with Keanu's very presence, adds a layer of legitimacy to the cyberpunk scenery. Keanu Reeves has been part of cyberpunk since forever. Not even getting into the Matrix: there's Johnny Mnemonic and a Scanner Darkly. He is recognizably cyberpunk. And Johhny being recognizably Keanu Reeves helps sell Johnny to the player.

I'm not the first to recognize that that celebrity appearances in video games are generally lackluster. It's honestly usually distracting, playing a game and suddenly BAM Kevin Spacey and thanks to modern rotoscope technology he is on my Call of Duty in all his Kevin Spacey glory, but in Cyberpunk 2077 this it actually fucking works. That moment of recognition, where you go "That's Keanu Goddamn Reeves" has to be similar to the moment V looks up and to see the abusive asshole and thing "Is that Johnny Silverhand?"

If it had only been this, CD Projekt Red would have done their job. But on top of this they managed to make Johnny a compelling character. Johnny is undeniably a massive asshole. Manipulative and often abusive. But there is a dimension to him. He's a burnout. A man who built a legacy fighting against what he saw as an evil, and what noone else would even recognize. This consumed him, fueling a narrowminded obsession with taking down Arasaka. And he finally does something big. Two thermonuclear charges right at the building. It costs him his life, but it also cost him more. He was trapped by Arasaka, put on a datashard to be tortured for his crimes. And we he emerges, stuck in the head of some punk runner 50 years later, the tower still fucking stands. Like a giant middle finger piercing the sky directed at him. His legacy was an unmarked grave in a dump.

It would have been so easy to take this complicated backstory and make it the reason he's such an asshole. But they don't. He was always an asshole. The question is can you, can V, make him into something more? For all his flaws and they are many, Johnny has a charm that is undeniable. And In that way he is a lot like Cyberpunk 2077.

The game is flawed. Broken in places. And I'm not talking about bugs. By now with the 1.5 patch, most of the bugs are smoothed over. Not nearly all of them. I had several in my play through, characters popping in and out of the universe, dialogue audio not playing during key story moments, vehicles appearing in midair, the game is still a buggy mess. And only a couple times did it force me to reload or at worst, revert a save. No, mainly the problems run deeper. 

I mentioned 17 paragraphs ago about Pacifica, on how conceptually interesting it was as it was empty. And it’s upsetting how much of the game is actually like this. CD Projekt Red has a built a beautiful city that is quite easy to get lost in. But all it takes is a little closer examination and you’re flung back to your chair where you are no longer elite mercenary on the streets of Night City but an out of shape nerd vying for a crumb of escapism. Fire your gun in public and watch everyone crouch simultaneously like flash mob dancer choreography. Use your detectovision and find out the majority of people are just “citizen npc” this is a stark contrast to games like Watch_dogs, which put a lot of effort in giving small blurbs.

 This is also a problem in the amount of things there are to do in Night City. With the exception of couple side missions, your only interactions with the city itself is gigs. These inorganic things you get when a guy you’ve never met calls you out of the blue to tell you that a couple blocks away is something they’d like you to steal, or kill, or rescue, or all of the above. The thing is these missions are often quite good but because you’re only made aware of them if you’re already a block away, and you rarely get a chance to have a meaningful interaction outside of these weird phone calls to the fixers of the job, means they come off as artificial. “Why am I getting these gigs?” Well because you were in the neighborhood, I guess.

This artificiality is also a problem with a lot of the side missions. They appear on your map, marked as a place for you to check out. The people involved presumably being frozen in place until player 1 decides they’re going to intervene with one liners and a black trench coat.

 The problem is, once you notice this artifice, it’s hard not to notice it, and it takes a good deal of ignoring it to get lost again.

Another form of this artifice can be seen in the romance side plots. All of them follow the same exact beats. You get to know them as part of a job, you work as their partner, they reveal that they want some sweet sweet revenge, you have the option to either help them, or talk them down, then you have a date side mission that involves some sort of neural interfacing, you get the option to kiss them, and then after doing the dirty they have a long chat with you on what all that meant.

All of these are well written and nice, but once you notice that this pattern it’s hard not to think about it.

So why, after all of this, and far more criticisms that can be had about 2077, how did I still get lost in it? And to me, it is the rare example on how spectacle can actually make an experience. 2077 is almost all spectacle, but goddamn what a spectacle. It manages to hit just right in just the right times that I found myself effortlessly wallpapering its flaws as I went through.

Why is V doing a bunch of gigs when her life is about to end? Well, she wanted to make good on her promise to Jackie I reasoned. Why do most of these people not have names? They’re just the faceless crowd to me. Why do the police watch me run for two blocks before giving up? Corruption and laziness. They were thin excuses, but goddamn the spectacle made me want to believe them. The spectacle made me want to live in Night City for the time I was there.

So live I did. I got an apartment in the Glens, had a favorite ramen shop in the Cherry Blossom markets that sold packaged ramen to its customers. I went home every night, took off my running gear, took a shower, and called my girlfriend. I ate and drank and had coffee every morning. And on hard days, I’d call Jackie and leave him a message telling him I missed him.

When the final act came and I got the incredibly immersion breaking prompt screen that this would be my last chance, I tied up all loose ends. I went to my favorite Ramen Shop, I went to the afterlife and ordered 2 Jackie Welles (A shot of Vodka on the rocks, with lime juice, ginger beer… oh and most importantly — a splash of love), then went home, did my nightly routine, and called Jackie one last time.

Living in Night City wasn't easy. It took effort, but once I did it, it was total. And that night looking out of my window to the city as I drank my Jackie Welles. I knew I'd miss this city.

The endings of the game is both a source of praise and criticism. The criticism comes not, I think from the endings themselves, which for the record are all great, if a varying level of satisfying; but rather that the only meaningful story choices happen here. Whether you call your girlfriend, what pills you take, if your bromance meter with Johnny is filled up by now, these are the choices that matter in the end.

Cyberpunk boasts a respectable 7 endings depending on if you storm the place with Alderados, or knock down the front door with Johnny's gang, or accept help from the sister of the head of Asaka herself, with a secret ending where you and Johnny run a solo mission kicking down the door guns blazing. You can even choose to end it all right there. Take the gun, and no one else gets hurt. There are also endings depending on whether you say "fuck it" and just let Johnny take the body.

The issue is that you don't have a lot of power beyond these ending choices for the overall direction of the story: but I've already argued that's largely the point. There was never going to be the ending Where V an Johnny team up to take down the corrupt power structures of this world. V and Johnny might be legends, but the corporations live on. They always live on. Arasaka tower took two thermonuclear bombs, but here it is, still standing 50 years later. There is no changing the world in Cyberpunk stories, but rather, the story is always going to be a bittersweet character journey. And to me, Cyberpunk delivered.

A lot of people have said the most satisfying journey was the Nomad-to-Nomad arch, and I have to admit that it does have a satisfying full circle journey. But for my money, the Corpo to Nomad arc is just as satisfying. My V had started her journey high on the corporate ladder, and was knocked from grace by company politics, then after trying the mercenary life, toward the end of it, it all became tiring. Night City is complex place, as uncaring as it is corrupting. And for all of its beautiful Vistas and flashy neon is plaster to sure up the cracks. Night City is in decay, and if you let it the decay sets in you as well. Given 6 months to live, my V decided that the open road, the world away from Night City was the life for her. In Night City all she had were broken dreams and lost friends. The Nomads gave her something more: a home.

My time in Night City was meaningful, to me. The little interactions, the moments of connection. The small moments where I simply lived in its sprawling decay will stick to my memory. The question of how much of that experience was because of the game, and how much was what I added to it comes to mind, but honestly? What's the difference? That was what I took away, that's mine. And so was my choice to leave.

And like V, I don't think I will be returning to Night City. The spectacle of the city, it's architecture, it lives with me now, the memories of the time I lived there will live on. But my V's story is done and continuing in its streets feels wrong to me somehow. In the end, I have a lot to say about Cyberpunk 2077, and not all positive. My thoughts are complex, and the game is supremely flawed, but goddamn did it grip me. Perhaps the spectacle of it all is all I needed to fill in the cracks on my own. Or maybe it was the small moments of connection that got me. I'm just glad I lived there for a little while.