Cyberpunk 2077, a first-person RPG by the studio behind The Witcher, achieves feats we didn’t know were possible yet.
So I’m deadly serious when I say: I didn’t think Night City was possible. Not yet, at least. I literally didn’t think the technology existed. What I saw during CD Projekt’s demo was astounding.
Night City felt like a living, breathing place.
Even in V, your character. For instance, to upgrade your skills you need to go to a Ripperdoctor—someone who specializes in implants. Nothing is abstracted, though. You want an eye implant? You’ll watch the Ripperdoctor lean in to pull your existing, organic eye out (in first-person) and then see the mechanical eye flicker to life. And don’t forget to take your post-operation meds.
Anyway, the demo took us through two missions. The first, which opened the demo, had us infiltrating a “Scavenger” apartment. These monsters are kidnapping people off the streets and harvesting their cybernetic implants for cash, then tossing the bodies. It was our job to rescue one of their targets, a woman we found naked and on ice in a bathtub—but still alive.
After taking out all the Scavengers, we removed the virus infecting her locator chip and handed her over to the Trauma Team, which was described as “high-end medical insurance for rich people.” They looked more like another mercenary squad, dragging her into an ambulance while keeping their guns trained on us.
The other mission was much more involved, tasking us with crossing the city to talk to a mysterious agent—who turned out to be part of Militech, a megacorporation. She was angry because V’d done some work targeting Militech in the past, and in lieu of killing us, hired us to take revenge on another gang. Our goal: Get them to insert a virus-ridden credchip into their computer system.
We survived the gunfight of course, taking out the gang’s boss and boosting our street cred considerably. That’s about all we got out of the deal though. As the Militech agent said on her way out, “Only the corporation gets what it wants. Remember that.”
Again, cyberpunk tropes. But if there’s any studio I trust to make a hackneyed genre interesting again, it’s CD Projekt. After three spectacular games, with some of the best writing the industry’s ever produced, it’s hard to argue they haven’t earned that.
