> Gameplay Type: First Person Shooter Role Playing Game
Summary: A long anticipated release with eight years of development time, the game’s launch has been plagued with bugs and poor performance as well as decidedly mixed reviews. Regardless, the title offers gamers the largest open world cyberpunk universe thus far, so despite the rather uninspired art design and a plot that brings nothing new to the genre, this game is the best available to allow players to immerse themselves in a cyberpunk setting.
This is a very dated and seriously opinionated review.
My biggest complaint about the story is that it basically robs you from player agency. You are the side character in story of someone else. It is fully forced on you. And not in traditional I say acceptable manner. I understand if you are playing story of set character. But with Cyberpunk it feels like you are not. You are just carrying someone else around.
Side content itself is fine. I can pick to do it or not and approach it at least in some ways. With main story I only get to choose how to suffer.
Yeah, I wasn't a great fan of the story - it felt like they put a lot of emphasis on Keanu Reeves given he's a big celebrity and helped promote the game.
Hopefully, the sequel (which I believe is already being worked on) won't have such a story.
That said, I really liked the story in Phantom Liberty. In fact, that entire DLC was really well done.
Interesting. When I was playing I didn't care about Johnny and anything related to him. He was basically, mostly a politely treated hallucination for me.
I call this genre of game, "Illusion of choice" games, but to be fair to cyberpunk 2077 it still does it better than any other games of its type.
If you think of it as a tree and each decision point branching out to millions of possibilities and outcomes then you'll be extremely disappointed, but if you think of it the other way, of a strong narrative that has a funnel of lots of different ways to reach the same outcome you'll find there is an impressive amount of ways to interact with the world.
If you suspend your disbelief and never play through a second time, then you may even come away feeling like your choices had severely important consequences.
That's about as good as you'll ever get from the genre. If you want full world simulation then you'll ironically end up with a boring game, because if all choices have genuine consequences, then it becomes impossible to tell a narrative, and you end up with something like rimworld or dwarf fortress. Impressive games in their own right, but are story generators not story-tellers.
Haven't really played CP2077 so I can't tell, but I was always of the impression that CRPG works best for fantasy or apocalyptic (System Shock, Fallout) genres because the world is typically much less complicated and the information doesn't travel easily, so it doesn't have to be fully simulated (especially in terms of consequences to your actions).
That I believe was always a problem for true cyberpunk games. In cyberpunk stories, information is everything. I am not sure I have seen a game that does cyberpunk really well by leaning into this complexity.
That is such an old school way of describing dialog trees. This isn't how it's done anymore. You're going to see more NN's making the decisions than fuzzy matching. That said, I think CDPR kicked the can when they didn't add more "lived in" scenarios in CP2077. The story was good but the world was hollow.
I enjoyed the game for the reasons you mentioned. I'm even able to enjoy the completely scripted and linear railroad shooters just like I'm able to enjoy a Hollywood blockbuster when my mood calls for it.
I have some issue with the initial marketing and the discussion surrounding the game though: choose your own backstory? Absolutely no impact at all, except some pre-recorded wingers in dialogues. RPG with a skill-tree? Absolutely 0 impact, you always have a way to get to a closed room, regardless of the perks you pick. And even if you pick non there is a vent open.
As long as you are aware that you are getting into what is basically a linear story in an open world, instead of another CD Projekt RED game _à la_ Witcher 3 which involved side stories that are as fleshed out as other full-sized games, yes it can be enjoyable.
It still one of the most amazing open-world futuristic games I have personally explored, which is a shame considering the rest of the game.
I agree with that, and there was another thing that really bothered me: The combination of "realistic" graphics and weaponry with "RPG-style" hit-points and combat mechanics simply doesn't work. It can't possibly work. When you empty a magnum revolver's cylinder directly into somebody's face, and they're just fine, still fighting you at 100% capacity -- there's too much dissonance between what you see and what you must expect to see.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution got around this by making gunplay genuinely dangerous, especially to your enemies. (Okay, much-maligned boss fights aside...)
In CP2077, the majority of enemies were just bullet-sponges, though. It was frankly terrible.
And, yeah, the world was disappointingly empty and lifeless. I don't think that the aesthetics were bad -- the game hewed closely to the fairly generic 2005-2015 "cyberpunk" tumblr aesthetic, and didn't do anything too interesting or take too many chances, but it was okay for all that. The setting was just vacant and boring, though.
I mean, yes the technical problems have been fixed, but it's still the same old boring story, repetitive gameplay and a very abrupt ending. And for being a cyberpunk game there definitely too little cyberspace and 'netrunning' in the game. It's essential a "GTA 2077" with slightly better gunplay.
I love cyberpunk as a genre/style/aesthetic but there are almost no open world videogames that actually nail it.
For me the cyberpunk aesthetic basically requires bustling small streets with tons of detail (shops, trash, crowds). That's where most games that try to use an open world fail in my opinion. We just don't have the technology yet to create these dense detail rich scenes without a lot of work on the developers/artists side as well as keeping it performant so it can run on mainstream gaming PCs.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a prime example of that in my opinion. Most parts of the city look like it's Covid again and people must stay at home. Some parts of the map come remotely close but the illusion breaks once you inspect your surroundings.
I like Cloudpunk (https://store.steampowered.com/app/746850/Cloudpunk/) a fair bit but even that suffers from the walkways and buildings feeling slightly empty. At least the pixel art style helps it from falling in the uncanney valley that cyberpunk constantly dips in.
I think Cyberpunk has a good basis but as you say, it's heavy weight; they did increase or tweak crowd density in an update I think, but also it's a PC game so it can be modded and improved as hardware gets better. The challenge - and you already see it on lower crowd density numbers - is getting enough unique and different characters. Cyberpunk seems to have a number (dozens?) of NPC characters making up the crowds, but it gets repetitive and you frequently see identical ones.
Procedurally generated characters would already improve that, and some games do have it but they tend to pick from a fixed set of animation and behaviour stereotypes still. More of those stereotypes make it better (think GTA), but it's still fixed.
I don't think going all in on procedural generation or even AI would fix it though; especially AI has a tendency to go for a mean / average character quickly. And in video games, you still want predictability.
That said, maybe a different visual style (lower fidelity or 2d) would work.
I would add Citizen Sleeper to the list. Board-game inspired narrative cyberpunk RPG with a nice story. I loved it and currently I'm playing the second one. It's a short game. Took me around 10 hours to finish though I didn't go throught all the tasks or the full DLC.
Citizen Sleeper portrays exactly the kind of future I have nightmares about. A rented artificial body owned by a megacorporation with a required subscription and planned obsolescence built in. And this was why the game really clicked for me.
I second that - they do write "this list has been truncated to those titles with heavily involved narratives with settings and themes that are decidedly within the genre", but a game about a hacker hired to hack the AI controlling a space station, who gets a neural implant as a reward for completing the task, and then wakes up after the operation to find out that they're the only survivor after the AI ran amok, is as cyberpunk as it gets...
I absolutely loved Burn::Cycle on the Philips CDi, where it was the definitive version (apparently the visuals were much better than the PC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoLw7SEmLYk
The gameplay itself was a bit rough, but the music and immersion I felt while playing it I still recall to this day.
I loved Syndicate, but I never beat it. There was a mechanic I couldn’t figure out that caused my whole operation to fall apart after a certain amount of time.
Gamedec is a cyberpunk story driven , sort of rpg game with a very interesting dialog system that makes reading the dialogs and sometimes picking bad options worth it.
What's a fluff text in other games in Gamedec gives you psychological affinity point. With enough points in relevant affinities you can retcon a specific background for your character that lets you to perform cool actions later (basically like a special perk/trait).
The story is decent too. Society where messy virtualization of huge chunk of human experience is common.
Get Shadowrun 2058 for the Genesis/MegaDrive version ROM plus an IPS patcher and enjoy a much better gameplay experience (and balancing).
On Deus Ex (the first one) installing GMDX and playing it with that MOD it's a must. No, forget that crappy HDTP or whatever it's called, it has broken Chinese/Japanase Hanzi/Kanji in Hong Kong and it looks tacky as hell. GMDX it's tons better and it expands the game areas, interaction, objects and such a lot. For instance, the NYC Statue Park looks far more realist this way, with logically (and architecturally speaking) set objects for a more lifelike environment.
It's a spiritual Syndicate remake and I like to do a playthrough about once a year and it's still great.
> Gameplay Type: First Person Shooter Role Playing Game Summary: A long anticipated release with eight years of development time, the game’s launch has been plagued with bugs and poor performance as well as decidedly mixed reviews. Regardless, the title offers gamers the largest open world cyberpunk universe thus far, so despite the rather uninspired art design and a plot that brings nothing new to the genre, this game is the best available to allow players to immerse themselves in a cyberpunk setting.
This is a very dated and seriously opinionated review.
Depends what you mean by "immerse". If it means driving through Night City on your bike and enjoying the view, sure.
If it means role-playing as a character and building it your position in the city via meaningful choices with consequences, really not.
Side content itself is fine. I can pick to do it or not and approach it at least in some ways. With main story I only get to choose how to suffer.
Hopefully, the sequel (which I believe is already being worked on) won't have such a story.
That said, I really liked the story in Phantom Liberty. In fact, that entire DLC was really well done.
Interesting. When I was playing I didn't care about Johnny and anything related to him. He was basically, mostly a politely treated hallucination for me.
If you think of it as a tree and each decision point branching out to millions of possibilities and outcomes then you'll be extremely disappointed, but if you think of it the other way, of a strong narrative that has a funnel of lots of different ways to reach the same outcome you'll find there is an impressive amount of ways to interact with the world.
If you suspend your disbelief and never play through a second time, then you may even come away feeling like your choices had severely important consequences.
That's about as good as you'll ever get from the genre. If you want full world simulation then you'll ironically end up with a boring game, because if all choices have genuine consequences, then it becomes impossible to tell a narrative, and you end up with something like rimworld or dwarf fortress. Impressive games in their own right, but are story generators not story-tellers.
That I believe was always a problem for true cyberpunk games. In cyberpunk stories, information is everything. I am not sure I have seen a game that does cyberpunk really well by leaning into this complexity.
I have some issue with the initial marketing and the discussion surrounding the game though: choose your own backstory? Absolutely no impact at all, except some pre-recorded wingers in dialogues. RPG with a skill-tree? Absolutely 0 impact, you always have a way to get to a closed room, regardless of the perks you pick. And even if you pick non there is a vent open.
As long as you are aware that you are getting into what is basically a linear story in an open world, instead of another CD Projekt RED game _à la_ Witcher 3 which involved side stories that are as fleshed out as other full-sized games, yes it can be enjoyable.
It still one of the most amazing open-world futuristic games I have personally explored, which is a shame considering the rest of the game.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution got around this by making gunplay genuinely dangerous, especially to your enemies. (Okay, much-maligned boss fights aside...)
In CP2077, the majority of enemies were just bullet-sponges, though. It was frankly terrible.
And, yeah, the world was disappointingly empty and lifeless. I don't think that the aesthetics were bad -- the game hewed closely to the fairly generic 2005-2015 "cyberpunk" tumblr aesthetic, and didn't do anything too interesting or take too many chances, but it was okay for all that. The setting was just vacant and boring, though.
I wonder if they actually played the game to write such nonsense.
It's freeware, available from GOG: https://www.gog.com/en/game/beneath_a_steel_sky
https://store.steampowered.com/category/cyberpunk
For me the cyberpunk aesthetic basically requires bustling small streets with tons of detail (shops, trash, crowds). That's where most games that try to use an open world fail in my opinion. We just don't have the technology yet to create these dense detail rich scenes without a lot of work on the developers/artists side as well as keeping it performant so it can run on mainstream gaming PCs.
Cyberpunk 2077 is a prime example of that in my opinion. Most parts of the city look like it's Covid again and people must stay at home. Some parts of the map come remotely close but the illusion breaks once you inspect your surroundings.
I like Cloudpunk (https://store.steampowered.com/app/746850/Cloudpunk/) a fair bit but even that suffers from the walkways and buildings feeling slightly empty. At least the pixel art style helps it from falling in the uncanney valley that cyberpunk constantly dips in.
Procedurally generated characters would already improve that, and some games do have it but they tend to pick from a fixed set of animation and behaviour stereotypes still. More of those stereotypes make it better (think GTA), but it's still fixed.
I don't think going all in on procedural generation or even AI would fix it though; especially AI has a tendency to go for a mean / average character quickly. And in video games, you still want predictability.
That said, maybe a different visual style (lower fidelity or 2d) would work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_(video_game)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_Streets_(video_game)
The gameplay itself was a bit rough, but the music and immersion I felt while playing it I still recall to this day.
What's a fluff text in other games in Gamedec gives you psychological affinity point. With enough points in relevant affinities you can retcon a specific background for your character that lets you to perform cool actions later (basically like a special perk/trait).
The story is decent too. Society where messy virtualization of huge chunk of human experience is common.
Also missing the classic Dreamweb.
https://supergiantgames.bandcamp.com/album/transistor-origin...
It plays an important role in the story, so it double the reasons to talk about it :)
Heck even the games that aren't that good (of which there is arguably only 1) have an amazing OST.
IYKYK :)
On Deus Ex (the first one) installing GMDX and playing it with that MOD it's a must. No, forget that crappy HDTP or whatever it's called, it has broken Chinese/Japanase Hanzi/Kanji in Hong Kong and it looks tacky as hell. GMDX it's tons better and it expands the game areas, interaction, objects and such a lot. For instance, the NYC Statue Park looks far more realist this way, with logically (and architecturally speaking) set objects for a more lifelike environment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(1991_video_game)
An oversight. This was one of the very first viable multiplayer network games and it definitely belongs in the list ..