Cyberpunk 2077 runs great now and I mostly shrugged

I was crossing a Night City avenue on foot when a sedan put me on the pavement, ten feet from a cop who could not have cared less. Fifteen minutes later I was the one driving, I clipped a pedestrian's foot, and the whole city came down on me. Of the seventy hours I spent in that town, that's the memory that surfaces first, which tells you roughly where I landed.

I promised this write-up back in July, in a piece about Clair Obscur, while I was settling into Cyberpunk 2077 six years after it shipped. Here it is, main story done, expansion done, most of the side work behind me.

They promised me a wreck and I got a city

You have to remember December 2020 to see how far this game has come. The game shipped on the 10th, turned out to be unplayable on last-generation consoles, and Sony pulled it from the PlayStation Store on the 18th with refunds for anyone who wanted one, eight days after release. The game needed six months to earn its way back onto that store^[1]. CD Projekt apologized for never showing those console versions before launch. As for the scenery, the studio had to ship a hotfix to thin out the dildos the game was scattering through the streets at random, a quantity the studio itself described as "distracting"^[2].

None of that survives. Across my whole playthrough I saw no crashes, no frame drops, and no missing textures. Night City has never been better behaved about its props. The game has now sold forty million copies, announced on July 3^[3], and a few days before that its co-CEO said he wasn't "100 percent convinced" the redemption arc was finished, since he figured the studio had "lost the faith of some people indefinitely"^[4]. He's probably right. I showed up without a grudge, so I had nothing to forgive. All that was left was to love the game.

Sneak, hack, shoot, repeat

The loop lost me well before the end. Every job comes down to the same three moves, get in unseen, hack whatever is sitting on the local network, and shoot everything that moves once stealth falls apart, in an order that barely changes from one district to the next. I also overdosed on the relic malfunctions, the short circuits that seize V at regular intervals to remind you the clock is running. Impressive the first time, still effective the fifth, heavy by the twentieth.

The voice work never slips, and I've rarely heard dialogue carried that well in a game. Which makes the rest a little sad, because down the home stretch I was running missions on autopilot, a feature update 2.3 reserves for cars^[5].

Idris Elba couldn't close the deal

Phantom Liberty shifts register and comes out ahead. The expansion, released in September 2023, locks V into the Dogtown district for a spy thriller in which Idris Elba lends his face and his voice to Solomon Reed, a federal agent with flexible loyalties. Critics scored it above the base game^[6], and I understand why, since the writing is tighter, the characters murkier, and the final choices meaner.

I still finished it the way I'd finished everything else, thinking how well made it all was. Some work you admire without loving, and I spent twenty hours admiring.

I'm the wrong customer for Night City

Worth saying where I'm standing, because my verdict is worth exactly what my taste is worth. Fantasy carries me off where science fiction leaves me at the dock, and I skip cutscenes in every game I play with a speed my family finds worrying. Clair Obscur cured me of that once, and it remains the only one. A game built on hours of conversation was starting in a hole with me.

The immersion I won't take back. Night City exists, with its verticality, its signage, its sidewalk arguments, and its alleys you get lost in on purpose. The 2.0 patch notes did promise drivers who are better at avoiding you on foot^[7], news my shins never received, but the city itself holds up.

So I won't tell anyone to skip this game, and I won't sell it either to someone with no patience for endless dialogue or for neon worlds where you spend more time listening than acting.

I'm glad I missed 2020

If I'd bought this at launch I would have quit within the hour, and Starfield is my proof, since I bounced off it during the opening conversations. Blame the camera that snaps onto a character's face the second they open their mouth, a trick from fifteen years ago that killed the immersion on the spot. I'm not alone in hating it, since a mod exists whose only job is turning that camera off^[8].

The fixes came too late for everyone the launch burned, and CD Projekt's boss is honest enough to say so. They came right on time for me, because I had no opinion to revise. Showing up six years late spared me the wreck and handed me a city that runs clean, which beats a sour memory and an angry uninstall.

The sequel isn't expected before 2030^[9]. That gives me plenty of time to let the patches pile up, and at my pace I should get to it around 2036.