I felt lucky (punk)…

If you’ve read some of my previous blogs regarding video games, you might remember that I don’t buy big games on release, and I certainly don’t pre-order them. The last pre-order I was tempted to do was years ago when No Man’s Sky was the big talk, and fortunately Dawn talked me out of it as it became an infamous debacle on its launch. Fast forward a couple of years from that and the big talk was Cyberpunk 2077, an adaptation of the venerable 1980s tabletop RPG Cyberpunk 2020 with an updated timeline considering the world was almost to 2020 with no wetware or flying cars in sight. If anything we got Covid 2020 instead… but I digress. The hype surrounding CP2077 was insane enough it was my turn to talk Dawn down from a pre-order, despite the developer CD Projekt Red having a good rep with its Witcher series. Games–particularly ambitious games–that work as promised right out of the gate are such a sad rarity these days we’re surprised when one does. Besides, the requirements necessary to run the game, much less run it well, were really starting to push what our five year old rigs could handle.

But the game on launch ended up having a distinct lack of “well” regardless of someone’s hardware. The botched launches of No Man’s Sky and Fallout 76 were nothing compared to the crash-and-burn of CP2077, which released in a near unplayable state much less one whose features were going to push gaming forwards to the next level. So much so that even by the time Dawn and I acquired systems (theoretically) capable of playing it, our interest had fallen to “thick shrug” levels.

Because I’m a cynic about these things, I expected CDPR would just cut their losses and move on. But as the article I linked above shows, CP2077 stayed on the radar somehow. People were still playing it. Maybe because as a single-player game it was mod friendly in a way FO76 could never be? And then apparently at some point this year Patch 1.5 dropped, and (at least for PC) fixed and restored a lot of… well, okay, brass tacks would be that Cyberpunk 1.5 seems to be what 1.0 should have been.

I state this because I must justify that it recently went on sale to celebrate CDPR’s 20 year anniversary, and while the sale meant $29.99 rather than $59.99, after some hemming and hawing I bought in at long last. I mean look, I always found cyberpunk to be a cool genre. Take one glance at Santone in Zombie Ranch and you’ll see the DNA of Blade Runner and other such imaginings of future dystopia all over it, even if people aren’t running around with robotic arms.

But I really didn’t know what to expect. I was taking a chance. After all, the narrative since its launch was all about what had gone wrong, what was missing or buggy or half-baked–not what was there, or perhaps more accurately what was there now that the 2022 patch job was in.

What’s there is… actually quite a lot! At least for a guy like me who values exploration, immersion and a good story. Maybe I’ll get more into it in a future blog, but with a pair of good headphones on walking or driving around the main setting of Night City is a great experience, and even if you can’t go into a lot of places the illusion of a bustling futuristic metropolis is there, particularly in the downtown streets at night where your senses are assaulted by holographic ads and diverse crowds in the best way. The voice acting is superb and the in-game models are expressive in form and face enough to make the conversations you’re having feel real. Forget side quests, I can get a thrill in this game just traveling from place to place sometimes.

Now, that kind of immersion would be impossible if the game is crashing constantly or NPCs are sliding around in T-poses, so I’m not going to be any kind of retroactive apologist for CDPR, and I can only hope that maybe, just maybe the industry will slow their roll a bit on releasing games too soon and making paying customers act as beta testers. But long story short, I took a chance on the game and I’m glad I did. Though I’m also glad I waited to do it.