Cyberpunk 2077 is a massive game with fascinating quests and characters, but it feels a lot more like gaming’s past than its future.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a promise. But it’s a different promise to different people. For many, it’s the blockbuster sci-fi followup to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt that will do everything that game did but bigger. For me, Cyberpunk 2077 was the promise of the next generation of choice, simulation, and interactivity. Now that I’ve played it myself, I think that developer CD Projekt Red delivered a big-budget thrill ride with entertaining quests in a thriving setting. But it isn’t much more than that. Here are the basics: Cyberpunk 2077 is out December 10 for PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Stadia. It’s $60, and it will also run on PS5 and Xbox Series X, but it won’t get a next-gen patch for those system until next year. You create and control the character V, who lives in Night City and is looking to make a couple of big scores to enter the upper echelon of the criminal underworld. What Cyberpunk really is, however, is a big open-world action role-playing game. What it’s not is a look at gaming’s future. Instead, it feels like a summation of where we’ve come in gaming since the Xbox 360 generation. It feels like a game built by people looking around to see what works — like Grand Theft Auto’s open world, Watch Dogs’ hacking, Assassin’s Creed’s quest-filled maps, Fallout’s combat and character progression, Mass Effect’s dialogue system, Batman: Arkham Knight’s crime scene investigations, and every games’ skill trees. At the same time, Cyberpunk doesn’t try much new. It feels big and expensive — and getting all of these parts to fit together seems like an impossible challenge. But because of this, Cyberpunk 2077 is a glimpse at where we are and not what is next. Playing this game before most of the world puts me in an odd position. I’m torn due to a desire to answer two questions: Is Cyberpunk 2077 good, and does it live up to expectations? I think when it comes to characters and quests, the answer to both questions is yes. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the studio that made The Witcher 3 made another game with great quests. It’s arguably what the studio is best at, and that holds true for Cyberpunk. Yes, the visuals and ray tracing are often stunning. And the worldbuilding is impressive. But Cyberpunk is at its best when you’re putting together the plans for a big job with a cool cast of characters. The game still has a small bag of verbs it puts to use within these quests. You’re primarily going to shoot and sneak. But CD Projekt Red keeps things fresh by breaking each quest up into stages that naturally build on each other while also revealing more about the world. One quest that I really enjoyed started with me trying to track down an engineer that I needed for important story reasons. That led me to one of the city’s many fixers, the people who set up underworld jobs (and apparently also all sell used cars). But she wouldn’t give me any details until I paid her, which gave me a chance to interact with the Side Jobs and Gigs. After putting together the scratch, however, she pointed me toward my target as well as the Nomad character Panam who, of course, needed help of her own. That involved us setting up a trap to distract a gang in an abandoned ghost town to steal back Panam’s car. She then took me to an underground tunnel for a fight and then to a motel in the California desert where she laid out a plan to help me find my engineer.
