Cyberpunk 2077 (2020)

Going back to casually playing this to turn off my brain at the end of a busy day. After playing a game so rich in opinions like The Talos Principle 2, it's now struck me how toothless Cyberpunk'2 narrative is.

Characters talk about the "corpos" and there's some lip-service played to an ultra-policed society, and some hints of issues with companies "owning" parts of your body but none of that is reflected in the actual story. So far there hasn't been a single conflict rooted in politics, economics, right issues or ideology. Everything is interpersonal problems and petty vendettas.

For instance, Jonny Silverhand hates corporations because a "corpo scum" killed his girlfriend and never articulates any coherent reason to oppose them on an ideological level. Same with Claire, apparently the only trans person in this world obsessed with body modification and plastered with futa adverts and her grief with the "corpo scum" is, again, that they killed her husband. Even River Ward's story; he is an idealist cop whose corrupt partner covered up the murder of the city mayor and the game does absolutely nothing with that, instead going for a "insane serial killer kidnapped my nephew".

Everything is so small scale and completely lacking in any convictions or moral fiber.

Well, at least they did have one trans character in this game with themes of body modification and questions of identity.

Will the game explore what it means to be trans in a cyberpunk world? Will it touch on deeper social issues that are sadly more and more relevant as the game gets patched? My bet is on no.

I'm very disappointed in this game's clothing options. They all look like shit and there's a distinct lack of variety, especially compared with something like Saint's Row.

But last night I the ting that really took me out of the game was entering a high-end clothing shop in which the introductory dialogue was along the lines of "here everything is really expensive" and finding mostly the same shit I could find everywhere else and at the same price. Shops also have displays with clothing items that you then are not available. For some reason that kind of ludonarrative dissonance really broke the immersion.

I'm fully aware that this is a very petty complain, but I absolutely HATE the startup process in this game. I double click on the icon, get to a launcher in which I need to click "Play", then wait a few idents and then press spacebar to start and then spacebar AGAIN. And that's just to get to the main menu.

What the hell is going on here? How is it that between starting the game up and just getting to the main menu I need to go through 3 layers of friction press 3 buttons?

I re-read @BMO's thoughs on the game and I have to agree on on everything they said. The game it's just hopelessly generic. It feels like a mishmash of cyberpunk tropes without any new though or interesting idea at all. There's zero innovation either in story, themes or presentation.

And is not like it's a very well-written generic story. As I complained about before, the plot leads you through the nose without any idea of what are you doing or why. For instance, the whole questline trying to find Evelyn the game was throwing so much undecipherable jargon, names and gangs that I literally had no idea what was happening. I still don't fully understand the motivations of anyone involved.

And gameplay is as generic as the story but also janky and buggy. It bores me that I complain about the bugs in every status, but I cannot get through a single mission without experiencing some sort of weird bug or glitch.

So yeah, the incoherent story, scattershot mission structure and constant low-level bugs are starting to annoy more than amuse me.

I feel that this game is a very strange mix of greatness and awfulness barely stuck together with janky coding.

The conversation system is cool, and characters are more dynamic and natural-looking while talking than something like Mass Effect. Characters are interesting and there's a lot of worldbuiling.

At the same time. I literally have no idea what I'm doing most of the time because the game throws a bunch of opaque nonsense words without explanation. I'm now in a conversation and had to search what "Blackwall" was, and a quick trip to the wiki now informed me that humanity is hiding from rogue AIs. What?

Also, I'm a bit annoyed at how they fucked up the stealth. Minimap lies about vision cones. Every enemy in the area is alerted the instant one of them sees you, which takes you out of stealth altogether. And they did the Deus Ex Human Revolution thing of making stealth viable in normal play but not during bossfights.