So there’s no confusion, I’m properly biased on this one.
Over the last few weeks while convalescing after some minor surgery I’ve been smashing the PS5 edition of CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077. I played the original v.1, pre-patch/pre-exorcism, on my Xbox One X the day after release, way back in 2020. I saw the absolute state the game was in, swiftly switched the console off, and rubbed soap in my eyes to purge them of the horrors they’d just witnessed; the prologue was a bugged-out hellscape that was nigh unplayable; burnt and bummed out, I didn’t touch it again until almost exactly a year later. By then the game had undergone extensive corrective surgery, litigants had started sharpening their pencils, and CDPR had taken a thorough drubbing from the mass of frenzied fans whose hype train had caught fire and careened off of a cliff.
Burnt, but not broken, I stepped back into the fray in December 2021 against the pleas of my traumatised Xbox One. I made it past the prologue; I sat through trite, shite, and occasionally dull-as-dishwater gameplay for over 150 hours in service to settling my opinion on the game; endless cookie-cutter shootouts with carbon-copy NPCs ridden by lobotomised AI; looter-shooting begetting more pointless loot, distinguishable only by bigger or smaller numbers next to pygmy-sized, migraine-inducing text; despite all the ‘hotfixes’ the game still had more bugs than a software engineer with the clap; all of these gripes plagued all of my playthroughs, both on the Xbox One in 2021, and again when they rose from their neon-gilt graves like vengeful, peckhead poltergeists on my most recent run on my PS5 in 2024…
And I can say without sarcasm that Cyberpunk 2077 is my favourite video game of all time, and one of the most life-reaffirming experiences I’ve had in my life.
With 2024 hindsight I see now that the Xbox One version of the game was an ailing, pox-ridden bin fire that shouldn’t have seen the light of day. Playing the PS5 version in 2024 I see that this was what CDPR wanted to release back in 2020, and frankly what should have been released. But I still dove headfirst into that bin fire and played the absolute shit out of it for 2 reasons:
1. V’s story is one of the most compelling and evocative video game plots ever written
2. Night City is one of the most immersive settings in any medium, period.
But with that said, I’d also contest that everything else about the game sits just above average at best, and downright painful to play at worst. Pick any constituent element that makes up the game, and you’ll find a counterpart that does the job better, without the game system collapsing in on itself in the process. The writing and setting truly are the Atlases holding up a beige pile of mediocrity, and without them would have been resigned to the recycle bin of history.
To be clear, this isn’t going to be an exposé on the Insectile Hellmouth that CDPR opened back in 2020. Writing in 2024 it’s clear that the CD Pest Control Unit has been hard at work; there’s still a smattering of irritating cockroaches that survived the purge, and it crashed more than 10 times on the PS5, but all-told it was relatively painless compared to v.1. The Bugpocalypse of Cyberpunk’s release wasn’t what made its gameplay bang average, and speaks to more sinister industry-wide trends in video game marketing/development that wouldn’t look out of place in the Dark Future of Night City. So I’ll just say this and move on: CDPR Fallout 76’d themselves, the developers aren’t to blame, and whoever was in charge of scheduling at CDPR from 2012-2020 ought to consider a career working for Northern Rail (IYKYK).
What this is going to be is an overlong, rambling diatribe of why I think Cyberpunk 2077’s gameplay is average-at-best, and why I think the writing is exceptional. My titular love letter to a sick friend.
Before we get to that preem writing, we need to wade through the sewers of gonk, and unfortunately, there’s a lot of gonk.
THE GONK
Behind that teeming mass of glitches, crashes, and ghoulish no-faced NPCs, there’s an Unholy Trinity of reasons why Cyberpunk 2077’s gameplay falls flat on its faceplate:
1. The Shoot-Loot-Cash Loop
2. Busted Progression/Busted Difficulty
3. The Long Shadows of Geralt, and The Runaway Hype Train
The 1st and 2nd are conjoined twins, while the 3rd serves to beat those twins over their heads with steel and silver swords.
The Shoot-Loot-Cash Loop
At the end of one of my playthroughs on the Xbox One I was struggling to rack up the scratch necessary to bag all of the flash whips the game had to offer, and by extension the achievement tied to said whip collecting; no amount of head-popping, Net-hacking or scanner hustling could beget me the coin I needed to buy all of the available vehicles in one playthrough. Did I mess up? Is there a foundation of eddies tucked away somewhere in NC that I missed? Nope. The game anticipates this and allows you to spread the collecting across multiple playthroughs. How generous, I thought, I would relish the chance to grind some more!
Fast forward 4 years, 1 Phantom Liberty, and an eon’s worth of patches; I fire up the game and blitz my way through the prologue; I spy the icon for the Autofixer terminal, curiosity folding into nauseating as the actuators in V’s cyberlegs begin to quiver: there’s even more cars to buy than before. Fool me twice, I said to no-one; it was at that moment that I vowed my V to be the thriftiest loot-magnet in MC, gobbling up every piece of trash I found, chucking every low Tier weapon into a giant sack marked ‘Drop Point,’ and hacking every access point in sight, boring mini-game be damned.
Playing this way, alongside all the workaday grinding through side content, my hoard grew, and grew, and grew. Eventually I reached my first million eurobucks. I don’t remember coming close to that back in 2021 and simply assumed CDPR had scaled everything up to account for the bigger catalogue of flash whips. With my metric-tonne of wedge in my pocket I did a monster stint at the Autofixer terminal, buying as many vehicles as I could, certain I’d have to march back out into the night to the land of blood and broken bones and rack up another mil.’ But I didn’t. The trophy pings. I’d done it. I stood there, slack-jawed and square eyed, confusion edging into bitterness for my past self: they had overcorrected the problem.
In 2021 cash was tighter than Jackie Welles’ topknot, and in 2024 cash was falling out of the sky into my arms like NC acid rain. In both playthroughs, however, the grind bored me to tears.
Specifically, the NCPD ‘scanner-hustles’ and a good proportion of the ‘gigs’ boil down to a short firefight, or a glorified fetch quest with some extra frills and no thrills. There are some exceptions, and for the attentive reader-gamer there’s almost always a snapshot of a larger story in each mission, usually in the form of a text log to give context; ultimately, they serve as a means for V to get that eddie bread.
In both 2021 and 2024, wearing its knuckles dusted, the Loop bashed me about the faceplate as follows:
· Go to neon-soaked locale
· Shoot/Villains de jour
· Pillage the area/their corpses
· Sell the loot
· Buy more loot
· Repeat
To get you up to speed, here’s a list of what stands under my Lootbrella, and why the Loop is an exercise in futility:
Weapons
That blood-soaked Eurodollar burning a hole in your trench coat? Well don’t bother spending it on new iron because you’ll find a ready supply of better weapons on your regular pillages that will only cost you your principles of morality.
Clothing
Firepower secured, maybe you want to get some fresh digs to show off to the nameless gangers you’re inevitably going to slaughter? Well, you’re in and out of luck. You can buy all the flashy futurewear you like, you just can’t see them outside of riding a bike or looking in a mirror. (Side bar – who, my brothers in Christ, would make a first-person shooter with an extensive character customisation system and no third-person option?).
Cyberware
Okay, the cyberware catalogue is rad, and arguably the best gameplay feature the game has to offer, and rightly so in a game centred around the concept; It’s even pretty expensive by the time you hit the top Tier of enhancements, but by that time you’ll be an unstoppable maelstrom of cyberchaos and any challenge that might have existed will have been crushed beneath your shiny new cyberlimbs, rendering additional scratch no longer necessary.
Apartments
What if you want to unleash your inner property magnate and have a crib in every district? Go for it. What’s in it for you? A minor health boost if you bathe in it, and an XP boost if you sleep in it, helping you smash through that level cap at warp speed (more on that later).
Vehicles
There’s about a jillion to buy, and the game hands you one of the fastest bikes in the game for free at the start of the Act Two: need I say more? Some go fast, some go slow, some handle better than others, but most feel like shopping trolleys loaded with cinder blocks. The Bugatti clone is pretty cool, I’ll give the game its due.
If you’d said to me that having too much cash would be worse than not having enough, I would have called you a maniac; but the maniacs at CDPR managed it for me. Before I’d gotten halfway through the game and before I’d started the DLC, I had:
· Bought every car for the Autojock trophy
· Bought every apartment
· Filled every cyberware slot with Tier 5 chrome
· Upgraded every quickhack to Tier 5
Did I feel like a baller? Yes and no. I felt like the newest addition to NC’s elite, my yoros falling down they were so laden with cash, but with absolutely fuck all to spend it on. And yes, I know there’s a shop added in the DLC where you can buy Iconic Weapons you might have missed, and they cost a tonne, and yes, I know there’s a motherlode of stat-boosting items you can buy to buff your V, which also cost a bomb, but all highways lead to the same dump: the core gameplay loop is boring, and it’s too easy to become Night City’s Warren Buffet and annihilate any challenge the game might have had. Let’s segue to the other half of the pair of conjoined, poorly-thought-out gameplay twins.
Busted Progression/Busted Difficulty
I don’t know about you but I’m an excellent consumer. Back in 2021, when CDPR dropped me in their playground of violence and extreme wealth disparity, filled to bursting with all that content, I did what any self-respecting content-consuming sweaty gamer would do; I went down to the local ripperdoc, pointed my hand cannon in their face and demanded they install the QuestGuzzler Mk 2077; I then proceeded to completely ignore the main character’s impending death and set to work tearing through every ounce of content the developers had set out in front of me.
I dipped in and out of the main questline, so I didn’t lose the thread, but I was determined on having done most of the side content done and dusted roughly in line with the endgame, so I was appropriately levelled. What a sweet summer child I was then.
Alarms started to blare when I hit max Street Cred less than halfway through the game, and after hitting the level cap 10 hours later, just after the midpoint of the main story and after completing maybe just over a third of the side content. Not ideal. I had this in mind when firing up the Phantom Liberty edition and made a conscious effort not to gorge V on all the delicious side content too quickly (unhappily, it goes without saying); even with this deliberate pacing – that went against all of my instincts – the results were much the same: max Street Cred, max level, all before setting foot in Dogtown.
But what’s this? Level 51?! Hold my Smash, they’ve solved it, the mad bastards…! Ten levels in half as many hours later, I hit the new level cap of 60, and the disappointment pall came crashing back down.
By level 60, assuming you’re a min-maxing heathen like most gamers, you’ll have nearly 3 Attributes at 20, two(ish) perk trees filled, and not much in the way of bodily resistance from your foes; essentially, unless you’re going out of your way not to, V will either be an unstoppable bulldozer of flesh and metal, a cyborg Arthur Morgan with limitless stamina (but less charm), or the entire anonymous collective bundled into one person. Is it fun? For a bit. But irresistible force meeting melted chocolate marshmallow goons over and over and over again is NOT fun. Even on Very Hard the enemies often feel like they’re lining up to cash in their free cranial boreholes.
Here’s where all the ingredients of this shit sandwich start to mix together. On middling difficulty the game already feels like a stroll through a bucolic meadow; if you ramp up the difficulty, you get slightly more XP, meaning you level up faster, but rather than feeling like wading through a nuclear firestorm, it’s the same rosy meadow but with a few extra cyber-wasps; faster levelling means smashing through the level cap sooner and getting stuck in the gameplay doldrums for another 20+ hours while you mop up the remaining side content; TLDR, by the endgame, if you’ve been playing in the way any sane developer would expect you to (see above: QuestGuzzler), you’ll be left overpowered and overbored before you’ve had the faintest whiff of 100% completion. Let me be clear, I’m firmly in the camp of mouth-foaming devotee when it comes to this game but having to hit the giant pause button just before the end sequence to mop up the last of the worst side hustles going is ball-bitingly-boring.
Couple that with the Shoot-Loot-Cash Loop and every way your Mantis Blades slice it you will, at some point, be doing fruitless busywork, piling on pointless eddie after eddie onto your lackadaisical hoard, just to 100% the game. Fuck. That.
The Long Shadow of Geralt, and the Runaway Hype Train
When one of my Monster-soaked pals flicked the first Cyberpunk trailer over to me waaaaaay back in 2013, my interest was piqued, but I wasn’t slipping over my own salivate nor building shrines in its honour. Five years later, and post-Witcher 3, I caught myself slipping a bit more and eyeing up an empty corner in my living room where I could begin the Great Work. It seemed like a sure thing, just another slam dunk by the golden child of video game developers. The Hype Train began to gather steam, passengers were falling over each other to catch a ride; another trailer released, more lofty promises made, the Monster-soaked masses started whispering ‘the next best game ever made;’ dynamic weather hanging over a living city with thousands of NPCs living out totally unique lives independent of XYZ sociopath players; a reactive faction system, spilling out tendrillike based on your choices; the usual sermon on the E3 mount that all your choices matter, but no really this time, a script that all video game developers must have tattooed on the inside of their eyelids at this point. By 2019 the Train was running at breakneck speed, all the compartments fit to bursting, the Polish government is handing out grants hand-over-fist to CDPR while hands are clutched tight, bodies pulled together: you’re our last hope gang, do us proud. The excitement reaches a critical mass until, in December 2020, through the haze of coughing, facemasks and global economic crises, and after multiple delays to release, the tracks vanish, the passengers hold their breath, and the train launches itself into Refund Ravine. CDPR had done the worst of all unthinkables: they’d fucked the game, their stock price, and their reputations in one fell swoop.
At the bottom of the ravine, amongst the smouldering wreckage and dashed hopes, looking up at where they had fallen, survivors could see a figure standing over them, the sun at their back, casting a great shadow: Geralt of Rivia shook his head forlornly, turned, and went to take yet another shower of money and acclaim.
If you locked someone in a room with only an Xbox 360 and a copy of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings for company, forced them to play through it several times, then asked whether or not they thought a potential sequel would end up being one of the most lauded and successful games of all time, they would probably say ‘ who are you, get me out of this room, don’t make me play it again.’ They would also say ‘probably not.’ I’ve done exactly that, and don’t get it twisted, it’s a decent game with an excellent story that follows seamlessly from Andrej Sapkowski’s Witcher book series; was it a prophet of unparalleled success and monsoons of coin falling unto its creators? Definitely not. The Hype Train was on a siding, brakes on, with no-one clambering to board. They were almost zero expectations for the The Witcher 3.
Cyberpunk 2077 did not have the luxury of a middling precursor, but instead was saddled with sky-high expectations and frankly impossible heights to reach: it was doomed to disappoint from the start. I empathise ‘disappoint’ because the perspective is what matters here. The Witcher 3 loomed so large in the minds of the Cyberpunk horde that anything less than perfection, or at least one-upping its older, dreamier brother, would have been disappointing. Add the fact that it was in fact a total shitstorm at release, and any muted disappointments were supersized to embittered rages.
Cards on the table, I never watch E3 announcements. There’s something about them that I just can’t stomach, aside from the meteoroid strike of cringe that hits me when there’s so many of my own kind gathered in one place. To me, promises made by video game devs are largely unimportant, because at root they’re all exercises in marketing, not showcasing actual features (most of the time). When I hear X developer boldly declare that Y Scrolls Z will have the most dynamic faction system inside the most dynamic living, breathing setting, where all, not just some, not just most, but all, really for real guys, your choices matter, I just assume it’s probably overblown bluster at best, sheer bullshit at worst. The proof will always be in the pudding: the game will either be fun, or it won’t.
With endless time, limitless budget, and stoic patience from the developers and fans alike, every game would be a smash-hit-critical-hit; but such is the unstoppable hunger of the ultra-capitalist machine, games are often released on a budget, stripped down, and on time regardless of what sorry state they might be in. Cyberpunk 2077 is the case study par excellence in why products shouldn’t be released unfinished. I wasn’t in the nerve centre of the Cyberpunk squad of CDPR, so I don’t know how things went down, but whether it was gutsy hubris, cash-infused delirium at their own ability to deliver the goods, or just godawful scheduling, Cyberpunk was not finished and needed a few more years strapped firmly in the ripperdoc’s chair.
To butcher an obvious alchemical analogy, if we mix together our base of Gargantuan Expectations with the reagent Uncontrolled Hype, and at the point of contact, a swam of Gamebreaking Bugs flies into the broth, we’re left with Explosive Disappointment (I’m sorry).
What all this boils down to (I said I was sorry) is that Cyberpunk was always going to disappoint. The medium simply isn’t ready for the complexity of mechanics touted ad nauseum by developers, but we all keep falling for it when the next runaway Hype train pulls into the station. We’ve seen what ‘best games of all time’ are made of, and it’s not just down to how many bells and whistles and reactive testicle physics mechanics a game has. The Witcher 3 is undoubtedly an excellent game, but mechanically it didn’t set the world on fire, and often feels a lot worse than other, lesser titles. What I think makes a game the top of its game:
1. The game is polished to a high standard (NOT necessarily graphically)
2. The story is engaging
3. The game is fun
Unfortunately for Cyberpunk, it fails miserably in the 1st category, and runs, trips and falls at the 3rd
…But it Is exceptional at the 2nd.
THE PREEM
It’s worth restating that despite all of that trash I just talked ad infinitum, I still adore this game, and the universe it’s set in; the story and setting are so strong and they held up the lacklustre gameplay so well that I dragged myself bloody through the broken glass, ganger spit and discarded needles of mundane content just in case there was an interesting story to be told, or a hidden pathway to saving my (V’s) bacon.
Speaking of V, I’m long overdye in splurging all of my stanboy-like affections for their story and the series of emotional gut punches it slugged me with.
V, Death, and Dreams
Cyberpunk 2077 follows the story of V, a gender fluid, would-be ‘Night City legend’ looking to carve their initial on the face of the city and into the collective memory of the Street. A ‘legend’ in Night City can be taken to mean being in the uppermost echelon of morally bankrupt thieves/killers amongst an entire underclass of hitters, hustlers and has-beens. By the start of the prologue, they’ve caught they big break into the ‘major leagues:’ a high stakes heist for a Big Fish in NC.
The big break breaks down to V and their partner-in-crime and topknot extraordinaire Jackie Welles – a character so clearly destined for death that even I, who did NOT see the trailer which revealed his fate, immediately called out at the TV that he’d be dead before the 10-hour mark – stealing a biochip from the dauphin of NC’s most influential corporation, Arasaka. Unbeknownst to V and Jackie, the biochip contains the ‘soul,’ or more accurately the consciousness of Johnny Silverhand, a rockerboy-terrorist 50 years dead who shares a striking resemblance to John Wick. By way of cinematically convenient bad luck, the merc’ duo find themselves in a dire situation, ultimately netting V one bullet to the brain, courtesy of that Big Fish, one dead best friend, and one Keanu Reeves shaped migraine lodged inside their neuroprocessor.
Unbeknownst to V, when they take the biochip from Jackie and stores it in their own skull, they’re signing their own death certificate. After returning to the Big Fish to account for their monumental fuckup, V gets a bullet in the brain for their trouble. It’s from that point, as the shot rings out inside a sleazy motel, that the rest of Cyberpunk’s story explodes outwards along with V’s grey matter. V doesn’t die from that bullet, saved by nanomachine-ex-machina courtesy of the biochip, dripping thick with irony. They survive, but it soon becomes clear that it’s only a temporary reprieve, as they learn the Reeves consciousness inside the biochip, by ‘saving’ V, has also started to slowly, inexorably erase their consciousness, and replace it with Silverhand’s. It’s V’s race to find a cure that forms the central beam of the game’s story.
The plot’s Ham-Factor is Iberian-rich, and I’m here for it. A race against time for a plucky ne’er-do-well to save their own soul; a rocky beginning for the two protagonists as they struggle to live inside one body; from death threats, to a begrudging , tenuous alliance, but ultimately ending in a bromance for the ages; the most CYBERPUNK soundtrack you’ve ever heard in your life; Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t just lean into the genre, it swan dives head first into the chrome wormhole lined with mirrorshades. There’s no escaping the magnum sized cheese veneers on Cyberpunk’s grill, but hidden beneath the bluster, the faceplates, subdermal armour and more synth than a Kraftwerk album, there’s a profound melancholy, and emotional depth that I wasn’t expecting, which kicked me square in the teeth.
But first we need to talk about Death for a hot second, because Cyberpunk is drowning in it. Death stalks every corner of Night City, hangs above each of its citizens, and most especially over V; they are literally shot dead at the end of the 1st Act, and is snatched from the jaws of Lady Death by the thing that will ultimately kill them; their best friend dies in their arms in service to a shared dream, an uncomfortable reminder of a divergent path-not-taken by survivor V; the ‘killer’ slowly unfurling in their Self died 50 years prior, and ‘lives’ again in Undeath; V is dealer and deliverer of Death throughout Cyberpunk’s wider storylines; V lives with the spectre of Death, and faces it down bravely for the most part, but the grim truth that V has fought so hard to defy comes into focus by the end: it doesn’t matter what they do, and V will die no matter what. Their death takes on several different forms but all roads lead to the grave, of one kind or another, a truth equally difficult for fictional cybernetic hardmen and us in the real world.
That’s the first hook Cyberpunk 2077 lays on the player, and it’s immediately followed by the second. It’s bad enough the protagonist is doomed to be snuffed out before 30, but it’s made worse by the calibre and scope of their Dreams. V’s in-game epitaph: Dreamer. Through the lenses of V and Johnny we see the path to glory and legend from two places in time: a dreamer on the path itself, and a post-legend idealist, on the edge of obscurity save for a few past-glory hangers-on. The man who wrote Never Fade Away, the thematic anthem to Cyberpunk, did indeed fade away. Ultimately, given the right choices by the player, V can achieve the status and respect they’ve always dreamed of, but only for a fleeting moment, and with assurance that one day it will be for nothing.
I found the ending profoundly, crushingly sad. Most of us (I’d hope) can’t relate to the feeling of no longer being able to paint a city red with their infamy; but most of us can relate to the tragedy of a life cut short, and of dreams never realised, or dashed before they get off the ground.
I had expected an ultra-hammy, camembert-drizzled cyberpunk rock opera, and that’s exactly what I got, but it also had the audacity to pull desperately at my heartstrings/centres of existential dread and not let go. Death and Dashed Dreams: that’s fucking cyberpunk.
(Before anyone corrects me, yes, V does technically survive post-Phantom Liberty, but you’re not telling me that that isn’t a twisted monkey’s paw pseudo-death-into-crippled-rebirth).
This level of quality in the writing is sustained in virtually all of the side quests (NOT including NCPD scanner hustles and a swathe of the Gigs); I would even go as far as committing video game blasphemy and say that the story-driven side content in Cyberpunk is stronger than The Witcher 3’s, though as you’ll recall, I’m very biased.
And even saying all of that, V isn’t the real main character of Cyberpunk. There’s a master of puppets sitting behind events, colouring every choice, dyeing every thought, directing events wordlessly. The real main character isn’t even a person, and wasn’t created by CDPR at all in fact, but by an American graphic designer called Mike Pondsmith, all the way back in 1988…
Night City: 2013 – 2077
Never has a setting swallowed me up body and soul quite like the City of Dreams, casting me down writhing in its seedy underbellies, corruption above and below the poverty line; Night City epitomises the coming-together of the darkest recesses of the human condition into one foul whole; a ruling class of Gordon Gekkos and Patrick Batemen, greedily squeezing the life, soul, and last few pennies of the everymen on the ground floor; white-collar crime pays, greed pays, and the winners pay no mind to the losers; Night City is Faust come to the future to sell their soul for a shiny new cyberoptic suite; either that, or join the weathered masses at the bottom of the food chain and shoot it out for the scraps: the American Nightmare of the Dark Future.
There’s a tendency in video games for cities to feel compressed, as if hundreds of thousands of people live in a hamlet’s worth of one-storey houses. Night City feels big, it feels real, and often swerves into the uncomfortably close-to-home. The wretched and abandoned northern district, once touted to become the new centre of gravity within the city, a new economic centre, now gathers dust and blood as the urban poor struggle to eke out a living against the backdrop of gangers robbing and killing in the streets; southwards over the river the landscape changes dramatically as the neon spires of the Corporate Plaza erupt out of the street below, forming a phalanx of concrete and metal for the monied upper rung to shield themselves from the grim realities of their unfortunate neighbours; all the money flows to the centre, and the further out you go, the changes are stark; limousines turn into burnt-out cars left in the road for an unwitting mark to get trapped behind; high-rises slope sharply down into shanty towns and suburbs, crammed full of the downtrodden who’d sooner stick you up than give you directions; vast synthetic protein ‘farms’ the size of whole districts ‘feed’ the city a dun slop of null-nourishment kibble, while the executives dine gourmet on actual, honest-to-god organic food; all of this is to say nothing of the third-world conditions in the wastelands surrounding the city, where Nomad tribes and marauders roam and border control is lethally enforced. Foot to the floor, in the fastest whip the game has to offer, threading the needle between obstacle and pedestrians in one unbroken line, you’d be lucky to cover the whole map in under 10 minutes.
The biggest complaint I have about Night City is that I couldn’t see all of it; every cloud-breaching skyscraper, every apartment in every megabuilding, every bloody back room in every dingy cellar; the game is loaded with engrossing vignettes, slices of life in the most desperate city I’d ever seen: I was just greedy. When I finished the game for the 4th time back in 2021, I was left with an aching longing to erase it all from my mind so that I could soak it all right back up again.
In Cyberpunk 2077 the player only gets to see role-play one thread of the total social fabric that makes up Night City, and while it’s a rewarding and thrilling romp, and I wouldn’t change a thing about it, I wanted to see it from every angle, and not just through the eyes of a hotshot mercenary; I wanted more quests, more stories, more time in this devil’s playground.
And I was in luck.
In the midst of my post-Cyberpunk withdrawal period, I got to thinking: what’s with the 2077? Why then? The lore black hole opened up. There’s a couple of sequences in Cyberpunk 2077 where you play through two key events in Keanu Silverhand’s life; the first takes place in 2023, in his apex of angst, planting a nuclear payload in Arasaka Tower, and followed up with being Soulkilled for his efforts, setting off the chain of events leading to V’s untimely death; the second takes place in 2013 and concerns the kidnapping and accidental death of Alt Cunningham, Netrunner extraordinaire and Johnny’s ex-girlfriend/lover. The two sequences are cyberpunk AF and act as both a bridge between Acts and a relatively engaging way to exposition dump on the player. That’s all I thought they were at the time, but the dates are anything but random but are actually tributes to the game’s roots: Cyberpunk 2013 and Cyberpunk 2020, a tabletop RPG created by R Talsorian Games, released in 1988 and 1990 respectively.
I – along with the rest of the world – knew about D&D, and I wouldn’t have minded playing it, but it never lit a fire under my arse like Cyberpunk 2020 did. A chrome demon erupted out of my chest as I went from interest to intrigue, to serious dabbling; I hoovered up every podcast, every Actual Play, every lore channel, interviews with Mike Pondsmith, tutorials from fellow enthusiasts, anything I could get my hands on. The premise was intoxicating: form a crew and join the struggling masses to eke out a living in Night City, except the crew were your pals, and the possibilities were endless. A naïve dreamer, I set out my Reddit stall again and again: ‘someone, anyone, put me in your game!’ No responses came. I waited a few weeks before becoming dejected and defeated. I guess I wouldn’t get to play it, and I should just get over it and move on…Then someone in the comments stated the blindingly obvious:
‘This is usually the point where you decide to DM it yourself {;’
And I did. I rallied a gang of willing nerds, gathered them in my flat, and we never looked back.
(Yes, this is a hidden plug for Cyberpunk 2020 and I don’t care who knows it)
All that longing evaporated. I wrote the stories I longed to experience, visited all the places the game had locked me out of, and created all the Night City citizens I wanted to meet, all while doing a lot of silly voices, fudging the rules, and belly laughing with my pals. The sourcebooks filled all of the gaps I wanted filled, written in blistering cyberpunk argot and dripping with angst; famous faces and places mentioned in 2077 that meant fuck all became familiar friends as they unfurled on the page; what I thought was dreamt up CDPR nerds was actually a faithful and meticulous recreation of another nerd’s dreams.
This is the ultimate Cyberpunk experience, and the game itself, while still my favourite video game of all time, pales in comparison to the fun I’ve had with 2020.
Finally…
Sidenote, thank you so much for reading this far. Both this essay/love letter and running Cyberpunk 2020 games are both passion projects and I hope you’ll forgive me for some of the gushing above.
Without baring my soul too much, it wouldn’t be overstating the case to say that discovering Cyberpunk 2020 saved my life, and I’ll always be grateful to R Talsorian Games, CDPR, and the creators of Dark Future Dice podcast for setting me on the Rebel Path.
If you take anything from this rambling mess of a post, let it be this:
Rally your nerds and play Cyberpunk 2020. It’ll be the best decision you ever make.
Cheers, choomba