I was not yet a fan of The Witcher by the time Cyberpunk 2077 was announced in 2012. Assassin of Kings hadn’t managed to capture my interest, and it would be quite a few years still before I sunk any significant amount of time into Wild Hunt, so I was merely a witness to the events surrounding one of the biggest release flops in my memory. The anticipation that built over the next near-decade expanded to astronomical proportions. Even before its release, it was receiving awards and accolades for the sheer scope of the project, and what they promised did sound compelling. A living, evolving city that reacted to your every action; dozens of ways to approach problems, from running and gunning to hacking from the shadows; choices having far-reaching consequences in your story experience. What we ended up getting was a much more limited, buggy game that only shows a fraction of the potential it had. I purchased the game on sale for $25, and I feel like I paid a fair price for that quality of game. Had I paid more, I’d have felt ripped off.

Players have a relative variety of customization options to create their own version of the main character, V, including their own life path and backstory before the game’s events. Whether a Nomad entering the metropolis for the first time, a Street Kid making their way while avoiding ganglife, or a Corpo agent working for one of the city’s megacorporations, all paths eventually lead to Night City. The city itself is its own character; it’s multifaceted, with different districts that have their unique aesthetic while still falling under the umbrella of cyberpunk. Regardless of the life path you choose, your goal remains the same: to become the best fixer in all the city. No agent works alone, however, and the cast is quite diverse. Judy Alvarez is one of my particular favorites, but there’s also Viktor Vektor, Alt Cunningham, Panam Palmer, and Johnny Silverhand. Speaking of the rocker boy, the character himself is played by Keanu Reeves, whose presence does add a little bit of spice to the game. (Likewise, two of the voice actors really stuck out to me in particular; Cherami Leigh and Erika Lindbeck, who play female V and Misty, respectively, are also the voice talents behind Makoto Niijima and Futaba Sakura from Persona 5! What a small world.) The narrative itself tries to take on topics including anti-capitalism and sex positivity, but they ultimately boil down to the shallowest attempts. It ends up being reduced to “Corporations bad! Technology bad!” but without actually saying anything of substance as a commentary on the subjects it broaches. It’s almost like a teenage trying to speak as an authority on topics of which they only have secondhand knowledge. If that wasn’t bad enough, many of the choices you make in the game have little-to-no impact on how the story plays out. Really, the only choice that matters is the ending decision, and all that does is give you a different cutscene to watch. Characters won’t react differently to you based on the choices you make or the things you say, while Night City remains stagnant and does not reflect any of the decisions you make in the game. However, everything that makes Cyberpunk cyberpunk is present. It very much does its best to live by the four core tenets of the tabletop RPG: Style over substance; Attitude is everything; Always take it to the Edge; and (Break) the rules.

It’s not as though the game is entirely bad. When taking on enemy gangers or corpos, mastering the combat system is essential to surviving long. The combat can be brutally difficult. I found myself dying repeatedly during many of the encounters, and I was only playing on normal difficulty. You can never take as much damage as you think you can, leading to many frustrating restarts at the checkpoint. Once you do begin to improve, with the help of your skill trees and cybernetic upgrades, the battles can be fulfilling. I found myself trying to stealthily engage most encounters, taking out enemies using quickhacks, and then, when I’m inevitably spotted, I would pull out my tech shotgun and mow them down. When I wasn’t using fast travel, I would drive from combat sequence to combat sequence, taking in the surroundings of the megacity. Color me surprised when I open the in-game radio and there’s a whole channel dedicated to black metal. Listening to Tomb Mold while cruising through Watson certainly enhanced my experience with the game. There are little moments like that which stood out to me and provided a little mirth. Two which come to mind are acquiring the Kusanagi motorcycle, a reference to the main character of Ghost in the Shell; and when you assist the Voodoo Boys in repairing the roller coaster.

Three years post-launch, however, and not only is the game still lacking real substance, it’s still riddled with bugs and glitches. Driving pathfinding, for example, doesn’t always work, leading to hilarious collisions caused by either yourself or the AI. I’ve also noticed enemies randomly resetting into T-poses mid-animation. Major mechanics like crafting feel superfluously tacked-on. Apart from upgrading my own items, I never actually made anything from scratch. Most of the gear you find in your explorations will be more than enough to carry you. Consumables, however, are a trap. These items you find literally littered in the streets are probably helpful on higher difficulties, but in my playthrough, they just cluttered my inventory like an overstuffed purse, tossing aside spare change and old receipts in an attempt to dig out your phone. None of this compares to the disappointment that is Night City. While supposedly brimming with activity, in actuality, it feels quite barren. More often than not, I found myself hopping from fast travel point to fast travel point. I would occasionally drive through the streets in order to take in the skyline or come across randomly-generated combat scenarios, but in the end, I felt like I was just wasting my time. I wasn’t really experiencing the city, which leads to another problem: there isn’t anything to “do” in the game apart from going from mission to mission. There really aren’t any side activities or hidden collectibles in Night City (except for the tarot, which is a side quest; not hidden necessarily). You can’t go to clubs, you can’t invite friends out, you can’t experience braindances outside of relevant story quests. It adds to the hyper-independence that is at the core of the tabletop RPG, but it ends up feeling completely isolating.

Why was it such a mess, though? In the decade leading up to its release, hype was building at a rate I’d never before seen. CD Projekt Red was under intense pressure to complete the game “on-time” after years of development hell and millions of dollars, even though the game was nowhere near ready. Having already been delayed numerous times, they made the decision to start scaling down the project. Significant sections of the story had to be cut out entirely, like V’s first six months within Night City; promised features like NPC daily routines and quest decisions having an impact on the world were stripped down or removed entirely. Developers had to enter “crunch” in order to ensure it came out on time, essentially amounting to weeks’ worth of unpaid overtime. Between fans’ excitement for its launch and developers’ trying to patch holes in a sinking ship, tensions were ready to explode before its release. And like a volcano, negative reviews and vitriol spewed out like lava. When it did finally come out, it was plagued with so many performance issues and game-breaking bugs that it was literally unplayable for PS4/Xbox One users, and only just barely playable for PS5/Xbox Series X/PC users. Character pathfinding was so poorly implemented, it made controlling V like piloting a Steel Battalion mech. Clothes would literally disappear off characters. Years later, as I’ve described above, many of these issues are still present in the game. Despite numerous promises of patch fixes, the game doesn’t run all that much better now than it did on launch.

CP2077 went from being promised as an “RPG first and foremost [… with] a much, much deeper roleplaying experience than The Witcher 3“, but what we got instead was an “open-world, action-adventure story“. Your tale as V is predefined, forcing you on a path down which your choices don’t matter. The background you decide and the kind of character you want to play as are shoved into the specific mold the narrative requires. This is fine for a typical, linear story, but in an RPG, your choices ultimately have no consequence. That disparity between the desire to create your own legacy and the experience CDPR expects players to encounter is crux of why CP2077 is disappointing in the end.