Cyberpunk’d

Or another open world game I'll probably play again

I caved and bought Cyberpunk 2077, the notoriously buggy game that was taken off the PlayStation store in 2020 for being literally unplayable. It was a nice break from the only game I play anymore, Final Fantasy XIV which is notoriously not buggy and literally endlessly playable by thousands of adoring fans. Plus you can get a pink Chocobo, which is something you cannot get in Cyberpunk.

I had virtually no hopes for Cyberpunk, given the controversy it stirred when it was released. Which is probably the right position to take when playing yet another open-world game in 2022.

It’s fun to play and has some interesting parts to it. It’s also following the trend of big studio-produced games that give you “masculine” or “Feminine” options rather than the standard male/female divide. It also has openly trans characters in it, which I guess is nice if your primary form of inclusion starts and stops at just calling a character trans.

There are lots of problems with Cyberpunk’s main story. The biggest is that it’s incredibly boring and nonsensical. The general premise is that your character, known as V, is a hired mercenary charged with retrieving a new chip from one of the major corporations that control the futuristic world. The plan goes bad, your friend nearly dies, and to save the chip you lodge it straight into your brain which is perfectly fine until something happens and it’s not. Then you’re stuck with an aging rocker who looks (and is voiced by) Keanu Reeves, who hates your guts, and whose identity is writing over your brain and killing your body slowly.

A bunch of stuff happens next, none of which really matters, because the choice you’re left with at the end of the day is “do you want to die now or later” making the whole journey more or less pointless. If your next thoughts were, “I bet you at least take down the massive corporations controlling the society” no, you don’t really do that either. Society just ticks on like normal and your character learns (do they?) something about the world. 

Other major issues in no particular order:

• You get exactly one male-male possible romance option who is of course an aging twink. 

• You can’t romance the one hot muscular romance option in the game if you’re male, because he’s heterosexual. Why? Who knows. All of his dialogue options are nearly identical whether you’re female or male, but if you’re male and try to kiss the guy you just spent days forming a close personal bond with, who invites you to dinner with his family and then to watch the stars while drinking beer from a water tower, he goes “Woah that’s not what I meant.”

• The one hot male romance option is also a literal cop ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• So much Copaganda which is odd because cops are most definitely not the heroes in this game and pretty sure the punk aesthetic isn’t “anti-corporation but pro cops”

• Johnny Silverhand doesn’t need to be in the game at all. His storyline feels connected because he’s in your head, but…like who fucking cares? You’re meant to feel some sort of kinship to him as he tried to blow up one of the corporations in the past (with a literal nuke??) but he doesn’t claim to do that for any other reason than he’s an angsty rocker who hates technology. That sort of misses the whole point about punk culture being a reaction to fascist politics.

• It’s rich to make a video game from a big game studio that pretends the major problem in their world is capitalist/corporate control over the world. Like, give us more miss “we’re going to release so much DLC you’ll end up spending three times the amount you did originally”

• Despite wanting my character to be a gay man and designing him that way, I had to have sex with at least three women just to move the plot along. So pros for making the story bi-friendly while simultaneously anti-gay.

A plea to stop caring about user choice.

Another problem that is absolutely not Cyberpunk’s fault is how pointless your user choices are. Plenty of people have written about this in the gaming world, and whole game studios have been designed solely around the concept of users selecting silly little dialogue options that branch outwards into consequential choices for the players.

It’s the whole “X will remember this” meme replicated ad infinitum across every new game.

The illusion of choice is just that: an illusion. Sure plenty of people will appreciate the fact that there are slight tweaks in dialogue that ultimately result in “final endings.” I will also personally do everything possible to get all of them too. But please, can we stop pretending there are actual choices baked into the game and just accept that in order to have a thrilling experience modern gamers have to accept some level of hand-holding by the people writing the narrative?

The demands for massive open-world games with sprawling maps, unique personal choices, and customized sections based on player interactions lead to bad working conditions and massive to-do lists masquerading as gameplay. 

Dialogue trees that are expansive and open are just tricky to nail mathematically. And thanks to the MCU’s constant badgering of the multi-verse theory most modern consumers understand the concept that small changes = big changes long-term.

Even with the biggest, most well-funded teams, keeping track of all of the dialogue options in the game becomes a nearly impossible task. This leads to obvious overlaps or mistakes that we’re just expected to ignore for continuity’s sake anyway. 

Ultimately there are five endings to Cyberpunk, and two primary choices you can make about what your character wants to do at the end. A few are theoretically only unlockable by progressing to certain points in side stories, but given that most people are going to do those side quests anyway, you’re not actually getting a choice in how your world develops. 

Instead, you get a dialogue option at the end, that paraphrased amounts to “do you want ending 1, 2, or 3?” 

Elden Ring does a good job of forcing choices on the character based on their actions rather than simply asking them to opt in to a final cutscene. Progression through certain events in the story negates other events, removing those options from the game and forcing you down a final path.

Consumers probably hate that approach (im not a games expert idk) because it means they can’t squeeze every little bit of content out of the game, or 100% it in a single run. I’d personally like if more game studios stopped giving us choices and just forced us down one narrative that was well written and shocking, but what consumers want is what consumers get.

/end

Other things i consumed recently:

• Gilmore Girls S1 E08 - E10  

  • It took me a while to start enjoying the pacing of Gilmore Girls, but I’m enjoying it now.

  • I am convinced though that my partner’s current love for me revolves solely on him conflating me with one of the characters in Gilmore Girls (constant need for coffee, endlessly quipping to no one in particular).

• The Bear

  • Love seeing a show that’s pure stress and manic energy being propped up by former restaurant workers being like “yup it really is fucking hell, but so much fun.” True PTSD energy.

  • Still, 10/10 

• About 4 - 8 cups of hot coffee 

  • Not the same as cold coffee, but still effective

• This Garlicky Chicken Thighs With Scallion and Lime recipe from NYT Cooking.

• This Twitter thread that’s a finalist for the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Short Story

• Ms Marvel finale - Teasing her as a mutant gives me so much anxiety, please don’t screw up the mutants, i beg you.