Cyberpunk 2077 Early Review

Yeah. I played CYBERPUNK.

I admit Cyberpunk 2077 is a very big thing for me. It has tremendous AND magnificent Night City, it has action, it has RPG features, it even has the breathtaking Keanu Reeves. So yes I'm was on the hype train. But my first few days in the game have been plagued by lots and lots of little problems, and I’m yet to escape them. I actually got more excited for the game when I heard it was going to be buggy, since I thought it’s not gonna be like Ubisoft bugs, it amuses me. So I figured I would just overlook the bugs and enjoy the game that would eventually be left once everything else had been patched up. But so far it’s been difficult to do that. I did not expect quite so many bugs, occurring so frequently, and in so many different parts of the game! This isn’t going to be something they fix overnight. The patches are coming very fast, but they do not affect me other than that I need to wait for playing the game. Thanks to my INTERNET. So while there may be certain things I talk about that may be fixed, it’s fair to say that Cyberpunk is still in a really buggy state. For the most part, these aren’t GAME BREAKING bugs, but merely lots and lots of small things that continually distract from the world it’s trying to simulate. Also, many factors such as huge optimization problems, the spawning of the characters as identical while walking around the city, the uncomfortably low voices of the car radio and character speeches, and stupid physics bothered me during the time I played. So I kind of feel I wasted my precious time while playing this game.

Umm… ALMOST.

In its defense, I haven’t experienced any crashes. I’m happy to report the game feels stable to me. The one game-breaking bug I’ve found so far when I was going to get into the car and go somewhere with Panam, the car suddenly fell into infinity. There was no way of me getting through it. Reloading saves didn’t fix this. It took me reloading the entire game and the problem went away again. The bulk of the bugs I’ve experienced have merely served to bring me out of the immersive world this game’s trying to simulate. People do just randomly appear and disappear around me. I rarely walk down a street WITHOUT this happening. And it gets even worse once the combat starts- Fire a gun, spin 360 degrees and suddenly everybody’s vanished! Cars in the distance sink into the ground then bounce out again. The nature of this whole great world, which does not care about my actions and does not affect what I do, is distasteful.

The world around me is too fragile, inconsistent, and too easily broken for me to believe. And that just makes me feel cheated. It’s not just one part of the game that needs polishing- it’s every bit of it! There are graphical glitches. There are weird floaty animations. The physics system glitches out. So yeah, lots of things that simply hint that the game needed a lot more time before being ready for release. But I think the problems I have with this game extend beyond the stuff that’s obviously eventually going to be fixed. I think this game has deeper problems that will require bigger changes to remedy. The biggest disappointment for me is the gameplay. Not to mention that Cyberpunk constantly reinforced my fear with the trailers it released in the game’s release year. Advertised as an RPG with a constant atmosphere of open-world action, the game wants to be many things at once. That way it leaves me in a fooled situation. I entered the game with a great RPG search!

I was also struck by the charm of the dialogues and the variety of characters. But the game has not been able to achieve what it shows or what it wanted to be. We can start the game in three ways. I started as Corpo. I wanted to witness the speeches of many characters among companies, to be in charge of dishonoring, to be an asshole of the companies that run this giant world. So I could focus on my search for the RPG game I wanted. I could also create my own character’s personality in this way. But the game fucked me from the very first part, throwing in a direction I had to play as a gangster. By showing me parts of the trailer of the game! This isn’t a breathing world full of actual people; it’s an illusion, where behind the scenes numbers are all that matters. And I don’t think any patch could change this. Okay but. What do I WANT from this game? Before it was released, I expected that I would play the game with a magnificent visual, sitting on much larger lore than the lore of the Deus Ex series. But now it’s here, it’s not quite what I expected. It feels like the world is filled with go do that and grab that missions, hundreds of unreal people, people that I don’t care about who constantly call and throw a lot of side missions in my face… And many more.

I don’t know what I expect from the game right now. Not sure if I’m playing GTA or a weird Watch Dogs. I am on the verge of a giant and truly beautiful world, running around and having fun with bugs. Cyberpunk amazes me because of its world’s design. It feels huge and looks beautiful. I just wish there was more going on inside it… So Cyberpunk might not be my dream game. Its gameplay may or may not improve as I play through it. But one thing I can say for sure is: The game needed more time before it was released. There’s no arguing with that. It had already been delayed by almost a year, but so what: it needed longer still. I’m just disappointed. I can overlook these bugs, I can say to myself they will all be fixed in a few months, and I accept I’ll have to put up with them if I want to play it now. But the game’s reputation has already been damaged. In the eyes of players. And in the eyes of viewers. When I finish Cyberpunk, the first thing I will do is check out the beauty of CDPR’s previous game Witcher and play it again.