Cyberpunk 2077 Is The Galaxy Fold Of 2020 Video Games

There was a lot I liked about Samsung’s first two foldable smartphones — the Galaxy Fold and the Galaxy Z Flip — but the prospect of recommending people actually buy them remains fraught in much the same way as it does for CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077.

Right from the outset, CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 has sought to push boundaries. Some of them good. Some of them not-so-good.

On one hand, Night City brings Mike Pondsmith’s William Gibson-esque vision of a dystopian future consumed by corporatocracy and grotesque tech gone wrong to life in a way that’s never before been realized with this kind of fidelity.

On the other hand, Cyberpunk’s hyper-aggressive tone — often played up by the marketing for the game —has left it under-equipped to handle the more nuanced or volatile aspects of the subject matter it’s playing with. Prior to release, Cyberpunk 2077 failed trans audiences again and again. Shortly afterwards, it also garnered additional criticism for seemingly-replicating a technique used to induce epileptic seizures. The latter has since been addressed by a post-launch patch. Regretfully, the transph obia remains.

Calling on the game to do better when it came to its representation of women and casual sexism, Kotaku’s Leah Williams said that:

You could argue the world and narrative shows how women can thrive despite the hyper-corporatisation of sex and constant undermining. But Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t attempt to paint the sexualisation of women as wrong in any way. It just highlights poster after poster calling women ‘whores’, ‘babes’ and ‘milfs’. If the game’s story doesn’t subvert sexualisation through its own story, then all Cyberpunk 2077 is doing is just plain sexualisation. There’s no critical thought behind it.

Then, there’s the fact the material conditions under which this feat was accomplished have been, by all reports, quite fucked. As reported by Polygon in December:

Employees at CD Projekt Red, the Polish studio behind the game, have reportedly been required to work long hours, including six-day weeks, for more than a year.

Beyond the superficial challenge of whether audiences are ready to reckon with the fucked-up future depicted in Cyberpunk 2077, 2020’s biggest release has become something akin of an informal referendum on whether or not games made this way should be celebrated and whether the ends undertaken by CD Projekt Red justify the means.

It’s at this point that I am obliged to say that the answer to the above questions is no.

There is little point debating whether or not a world exists where Cyberpunk 2077 shipped in a state that justifies the unnecessarily cruel conditions that went into its production because it clearly didn’t in this one.

If you’re in the best case scenario bucket (ie; playing on a high-end PC kitted with the latest hardware from Nvidia), Cyberpunk 2077 is supposed to be about as a buggy as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was at launch — which is far from ideal.

Even the most lavish praise for CD Projekt’s breakout RPG noted the inconsistent performance of the console versions of the game:

The one caveat on all that though, is the technical performance on both the Xbox One and PS4 versions. 30 frames per second was sometimes too much to ask, transitions between The Witcher 3’s two main maps are just a bit too long, and minor glitches do pop up from time to time. None of it ever impacted gameplay in any meaningful way, though it did compromise the beauty of the experience ever so slightly.

In line with this legacy, the state of Cyberpunk 2077 on console is much more severe.

In the days since it launched, dozens of videos, screenshots and angry rants about the game have circulated in response to the bugs, poor performance and frequent crashes. Worse still, this poor performance makes CD Projekt Red’s insistence on only providing media with access to the PC version of the game ahead of time look a lot more slimey.

It’s at this point I want to pull in my earlier reference to Samsung’s foldable smartphones because in a weird way, Cyberpunk actually reminds me a lot of them.

Like those products, Cyberpunk tries to show you something you’ve never seen before — and it pulls off that specific trick a decent amount of the time.

In my review of the Galaxy Z Flip, I said that:

At a starting price of AU$2199, there are still too many compromises and risks involved to make buying a Z Flip a better proposition than buying the best non-foldable phones available that Samsung, Oppo or Apple can muster. It’s one thing to add flexibility and subtract fidelity when it comes to the screen on your smartphone but that’s only one of half-dozen caveats here.

Unfortunately, like Samsung’s first-gen foldables, Cyberpunk 2077 is riddled with compromises. This is the first game that CD Projekt Red have done with vehicles, an open world and shooting mechanics — and you can absolutely tell.

I expect that the inevitable follow-up to this game will improve these aspects in significant fashion in much the same way as next year’s Galaxy Z Flip 2 looks poised to amend the mistakes of its predecessor.

Like-wise, the writing in Cyberpunk 2077 is often closer to functional than fantastic. Everyone kinda says what you kinda expect them to say. There’s no easy analogue to something like The Witcher 3’s standout: the Bloody Baron questline.

CD Projekt Red have told a cyberpunk story in a very immersive way but they haven’t exactly told a particularly interesting or exceptional one — let alone one that comes anywhere near selling you on the convenient myth that only through great suffering is great art possible.

Writing about the accolades heaped upon Naughty Dog’s The Last Of Us: Part II, another game made amid brutal crunch conditions, Kotaku’s Ian Walker says that:

Let’s be clear: the existence of crunch indicates a failure in leadership. It’s up to game directors and producers to ensure workloads are being managed properly and goals are being met. If workers are being forced to crunch, explicitly or otherwise, it means the managers themselves have fallen short somewhere, either in straining the limits of their existing staff, fostering an environment where overtime is an implied (if unspoken) requirement, or both. And as ambitious as The Last of Us Part II director Neil Druckmann and his projects may be, “questionable experiments in the realm of pushing human limits” are not required to make a great game.

Back in January, VICE condemned CDPR’s framing of crunch as some kind of sick inevitability:

No matter how good or bad ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ turns out, CD Projekt Red has no problem admitting that the latest delay will result in crunch for its workers, which means that management has already failed.

CD Projekt Red may have brought the seedy underbelly of Night City to life with unprecedented fidelity (so long as you’re running the game on a high-end PC) but that accomplishment can only mask so many other shortcomings.

They made a world that’s incredible to look at but not one that’s particularly enjoyable to navigate or engage with. Without sounding too dismissive of what they have made: it often feels like the developers behind this game were more interested in building a place than a game.

As opposed to something like Deus Ex or Dishonored, it rarely feels like you are creating solutions to each mission in Cyberpunk 2077 so much as you are choosing your solution off a menu. You’re never finding a way to sneak or hack your way around a problem so much as you are finding the way to do so.

In a world where games like No Man’s Sky and Fallout 76 can be redeemed, the notion that Cyberpunk as a franchise can recover from this rocky start is a more than likely possibility but the idea that it was worth it is — and has always been —childish and obscene.

People may have suffered to make this experience but their toils are not what great games are made from. Even in a world without the bugs or crashes, the game that CD Projekt Red has delivered isn’t particularly innovative or elegant. Their choice of subject material does a lot of the heavy-lifting here and it feels like the game only really achieves the overwhelming effect its going for through attrition. They threw bodies at the problem until the world depicted here rarely bore little resemblance to the facade of other, lesser, city-based open-world video games.

Like the first wave of foldable smartphones, Cyberpunk 2077 is something of a mixed bag. There are moments when it all comes together but plenty more where the caveats and various shortcomings steal the spotlight.

There might be a time when CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077 lives up to the hype but that future isn’t here yet.