Peter James Mann
Tonight, at Midnight, millions of gamers will be downloading Cyberpunk 2077, followed by a 43 GB Day One Patch, before diving into the world that CD Projekt Red has barred reviewers from showing up until this point. Every score that isn’t 10/10, 100 percent, or higher, is being bombed in comments left and right for pointing out major glitches and bugs to gamers prior to launch.
In reality, this game will be, eventually, higher quality than The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. That isn’t the case now. Consoles will have issues with frame rate, as will older PCs, and that will improve with further patches. There will be issues with NPCs, some lackluster voice performances, game animations, the massive open-world design and plethora of side quests that create even more branching narratives. It’s ambitious in scope, in choice, and the development cycle has been close to a decade. That includes a massive crunch at the end, one that rivaled the studios that are famous for that: ID Software, Blizzard, EA, and literally every other major developer in the US.
We, as a community, have experienced this before. The words No Man’s Sky should give us all flashbacks. Yes, the game is much better now. Arguably, it has delivered on every promise that was made during the bombastic marketing campaign that preceded the inevitable crash of their gilded lead balloon. It was so bad that the game isn’t even allowed in my house. My wife barred a game from my house. My wife. Barred a game. From my house. I’m not even allowed to reserve games anymore. YES, I TAKE MY WIFE’S THREATS SERIOUSLY! Happy Partner, Live Larger, or something to that effect.
What about Duke Nukem Forever, which had a similar development cycle that resulted in an extremely lackluster shooter perpetuating itself on what it thought was the trappings of the genre, when they were just making Duke somehow worse than he was in the late 90s, early 2000s, and I played Duke Nukem: Time to Kill. You know, one of the 3rd person ones because “1st person was over.”
The Fable series and Lionhead Studios lived on the hype machine like an iron lung. Peter Molineux offered lavish promises that exaggerated what amounted to be little variances in spell choice and aesthetic differences. Black and White was interesting in concept, but offered little extra in the city-builder, God genre of games.
CD Projekt Red has a lot of goodwill from The Witcher series, but in particular The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which built upon their previous two games greatly. The first in the series was difficult to control, and combat wasn’t really great. The second expanded the combat, making it more nuanced, but it was the last entry that shot the company to the top of the charts on what otherwise was a niche title in the action RPG genre.
Cyberpunk 2077 has massive roots in the Tabletop RPG scene (something I’m quite fond of, I literally just collect and read rulebooks/systems), with R Tailsian Games, and CEO Cory Pondsmith, creating Cyberpunk 2020 back in the 1980s. While everyone was going fantasy, Pondsmith went into hard, dystopian sci fi. Arguably, the Cyberpunk genre as a whole predicted a lot of our issues today. It’s hard not to admit that the timing of this game, this sub-genre coming to the limelight, is absolutely perfect for 2020.
Which is exactly why I’m worried about the flurry of hype. Keanu Reeves coming back, and from what I’ve seen of the plot, executes essentially a Rocker boy version of Johnny Neumonic. Yeah, the hacker movie with an assassin with a coke-nail-lazer-whip, Henry Rollins as a neurosurgeon, and Ice T the leader of a revolutionary warband listening to a cyber-implant infused dolphin. That doesn’t give me a ton of hope about the main storyline, which has already been said to be short and underwhelming compared to the side missions (the exact same problem The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt had, by the way, which was just doing favors for information in a rinse and repeat fashion). The way Keanu Reeves talks is even in a similar, albeit older, cadence to Johnny Neumonic.
So, should you be downloading Cyberpunk 2077 at midnight? No. You shouldn’t. You’re just buying into the hype machine if you don’t wait. You won’t miss out on extreme details, and you’ll get a more stable game with a lot of major issues ironed out. You might even save some cash if it turns out to be not what was promised. The hype is meant to sell you on something you don’t own. With press blackouts until now, including footage being barred of glitches and current gameplay, further proves my point. Don’t take the corporate path on this mission, it might be better to live like a Nomad and wait to see what the city brings in the coming months before diving into that Street Kid life.
Peter James Mann is an independent writer and author. He is a contributor to Dork Daily. You can find his new short story, “Where Skin Once Was,” exclusively on Amazon.
