 Oh boy, Cyberpunk 2077, the most anticipated game in the last generation is finally released after years of impossible hype, repeated delays, and unrealistic expectations. I finished the game last week and there's a lot to talk about, so much that this video is going to have to be a couple of parts. Let me start by saying this, outside of the obvious performance issues on console, strictly talking about the game itself, I think Cyberpunk is a good game. At times, it's even a great game. And while there are still some annoying performance issues here and there, like in the very center of the city driving really fast drops the frame rate into the 30s, the fact is, I experienced very few bugs and was able to run the game on highest settings with ray tracing reflections and shadows and still got a relatively stable 60fps. But I also think Cyberpunk has a ton of missed potential because the game is in many ways unfocused. The things that Cyberpunk does well, it does better than any other game in the genre, and the things it doesn't do well, are the kind of things that are very common amongst games like this. We're going to go over the story and presentation, its combat and navigation, its missions and its progression, its map and its pacing, we'll talk about the PC performance and its disastrous launch on the 7th generation consoles, the base versions. And at the end, we'll try and figure out whether this is as great as the people who love it say, as bad as the ones who don't like it say, or somewhere in between. As always, if you like what I have to say, or at least how I sound saying it, do me and you a favor and like, share, subscribe, comment if you got them. Cyberpunk 2077 after the logo. CD Projekt Red Following the release of The Witcher 3, CD Project Red became a massive naming gaming. Praised for the quality of that game and their pro player business practices, the company had become something of a reference point for players around the world. Every time a game like Star Wars Battlefront 2 disappointed everyone, somebody would talk about how CD Project Red was doing it right. Every time a studio released a mediocre overpriced DLC, someone would praise Blood and Wine and lament that more companies didn't make expansions like CD Project. And all that stuff was true. CD Project Red did do players right. Their expansions were great and amazing values and The Witcher 3 is an amazing game. Still, I think something had been overlooked in all of that praise. While CD Project Red has been around for a long time, they'd only made three games. And all of them were fantasy ARPGs. The first Witcher was janky, but a pleasant surprise nonetheless. The second game was admittedly excellent, though it's modest in size and scope. And the third game was the first truly AAA sized open world game the studio had done. As great as The Witcher 2 and 3 were, there were still only two games and the studio's sterling reputation was built mainly on the quality of the third game alone. From the early days, CDPR has built the company and their reputation around quality. There were lots of people pirating Western RPGs in Poland in the late 80s and early 90s. CD Project Red set themselves apart by charging more for a superior product. They made boxes and artwork. They included handmade maps and guides. They even did basic localization. When Soviet influence finally totally ended, CD Project Red was positioned to quickly turn the company legitimate and they did. By being a company that treated customers right, they were able to build the business enough to finally start making games of their own. They made The Witcher and did well enough to make a bigger, better Witcher 2. And that did well enough to make an even bigger and better Witcher 3. All while building GOG, a vehemently anti-DRM game store dedicated preserving old games and serving players who did not want DRM on their machines. So all the plaudits about treating players right wasn't hype, it was earned. And it was earned through a commitment to doing the very best they could by the people who loved the games. I'll give my two cents on the catastrophic console launch at the end of these videos, but I thought it was important to recall that CDPR is rightfully respected for its business practice while having a larger reputation for games than they had perhaps fully earned. And to at least address it a little bit upfront, while it's beyond obvious that Cyberpunk simply was not ready for release, I think it's important to understand the pressures a company gets under. Many issues with Cyberpunk weren't because CDPR suddenly didn't give a shit about players. Things are quite a bit more complicated than that when you're a company with investors that has grown tremendously in the last five years. I'm assuming that CD Projekt Red and its investors bet a tremendous amount of money on Cyberpunk. The game's bad release is a shame, but it's not a sign of greed or malfeasance. It's almost certainly a sign of a difficult development and a release date that simply had to happen to keep investors from freaking the fuck out. Okay, either way, leaving aside the business aspect, the amount of hype for Cyberpunk as a game was probably way too high either way. One great game doesn't make a company the world's best studio. By only judging the company on its well-deserved business practice and The Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077 started out with expectations that were just ridiculously high. And one stops to consider that this was the first game they'd made from a first person perspective, their first shooter, and only their second fully open world RPG, all with incredibly sky high expectations. The table was perfectly set for people to react poorly to Cyberpunk being anything other than the greatest game in history. I am going to try and look at this game independent of its expectations. The truth is, making a first-person shooter story-based RPG is pretty hard. There are very few good examples of it, to be honest, and the games that have succeeded in this genre have all had issues of their own. Shooters just don't gel very well with progression-based RPGs. Let's take a look at how they did by starting with what the studio does as well as any other. In this video, we're going to talk about the story. Cyberpunk's story, like everything else about the game, is both great and kind of disappointing. There are aspects to the story that are as good as anything else ever made, but then there are also flaws that really hold it back. Many of these flaws are a result of the genre itself, and seemingly not having enough time to bring the vision to completion. We'll get to what the story fails at shortly, but let's at least start with what it does really well. What's beyond about true is that this game does storytelling, characters, and world-building very well. Stories in games aren't usually very good when held up against movies or books for a variety of reasons, like the fact that games need to spend a ton of time on gameplay so there's simply less time for story, and that it's tough to keep a player invested in a plot when 75% of their time is filled with gameplay mechanics. And of course the acting is usually poorer than films. The direction is usually done by people who weren't good enough to be film directors, and the technology simply hasn't been good enough to fully utilize the visual language of cinema. For the history of games, animations of faces and bodies has often at best achieved Uncanny Valley. Cyberpunk manages to achieve a game that's a legitimate form of film-like entertainment, and that's due as much to its tech as anything else, so let's start there. When it was revealed that Cyberpunk would be doing all of its cut scenes not only in first person, but actually in engine, people were disappointed. Games to really mimic film have had to pull control from the player in an effort to perfectly choreograph scenes. Cyberpunk's graphics, lighting, and direction is so good it's able to be more cinematic than almost any other game made, even with you still controlling the camera. When you stop to think about that, it's really quite an achievement. Let's consider some of the other great examples of cinematic game moments in this generation. Welfenstein 2's story wasn't actually that great, but it was still a spectacular cinematic experience because it was basically directed and executed as if you were watching a Tarantino film. When that game is feeding you its story, it is using every trick in cinema to keep you engaged. Lighting, blocking, editing, all of it combines to deliver the story basically exactly as good films deliver a story. Stop and ask yourself this. How would this scene here play out from the normal first person view that you spend most of your time in Welfenstein with? The Last of Us 2 is a very different style, but uses all the same tricks. Try to imagine this scene here with Joel without the cinematic technique and instead shown with you having control of Ellie in the normal third person perspective. You would have to have done these story moments with no camera cuts, no shifts in perspective, no close ups or tracking shots. Or how about this scene here? Do you think this scene is as memorable if it happened from this perspective? How well are any of these moments remembered today if the camera was controlled by the player instead of a director using the techniques of cinema? It's almost impossible to even imagine because for all the progress games have made as a storytelling medium, the fact is for the most part they are still just kind of bifurcated. Almost all big budget cinematic games are two things. Most of the time they're games and then they're interrupted by short movie scenes set between sections of gameplay. There are of course plenty of other games that do in-engine or first person cut scenes and several of those games have stories that players love, but almost all of them, aside from one I can think of, are known for a different kind of storytelling. A game like The Last of Us is basically providing a cinematic experience while a game like Half-Life 2 is using different methods to create a memorable narrative. You recall Half-Life 2's story so fondly because it's leveraging what games do best, not what films do best. Through carefully building a world and setting the player free inside of it, that game is providing a carefully constructed place to player inhabits. The only other game that really attempts what Cyberpunk does is another technical marvel, Metro Exodus. Cyberpunk is the rare game that gives the player agency over the camera and tells the entire story from your perspective while still managing to feel like a directed cinematic experience. It's both subtle and extremely impressive. Let's take a look at how Cyberpunk manages to be cinema while still letting us control the camera. It's all in the details. So how does Cyberpunk manage to feel like a movie without stopping being a game? It's the combination of a bunch of really impressive technical achievements, spectacular acting, and writing, and incredible art direction. And the common denominator in all of those things is a maniacal attention to detail everywhere in the game's story and cutscene design. At times, I mean most of the time really, Cyberpunk's storytelling is as good as any other game ever. It's as impactful and impressive as The Last of Us, but it's important again to really drive home that this isn't the game Cyberpunk most resembles in its storytelling. In fact, if there's one game that Cyberpunk most resembles in its gameplay and story design, it's this. Cyberpunk, very much like The Witcher 3, is really most similar to a Bethesda game, and specifically to the 3D Fallout games. In fact, as I'll touch on in a later part of the video, in many ways, Cyberpunk is just one of the best examples of the Bethesda game. Bethesda has been iterating on the way it delivers dialogue and story scenes for a while, and they've really kind of set the formula for all of the studios. Bethesda struggled with making its story moments feel cinematic because of the constraints of having player dialogue choices. Moving from the Oblivion Skyrim Fallout 3 style camera during dialogue to the more cinematic Fallout 4 system was an important step forward even as the actual dialogue itself keeps stepping backward. It seems like a small thing, but the difference between this and this is pretty big. Now let's leave aside how bad the actual dialogue system was in Fallout 4 and just think about the positives and negatives to the way the player dialogue was shot in both games. In Fallout 3, entering dialogue takes control away from the player and focuses straight on the NPC we're talking to. This is not at all cinematic, but it does shift focus to the dialogue system and makes that feel important and consequential, but it's also very flat and is completely devoid of any kind of visual storytelling. The focus here is on the words and the words alone. The writers and game designers can't use any of the visual language of film to assist in the storytelling. Moving to Fallout 4, Bethesda was obviously trying to make the story more cinematic. They added a voice actor and once you add an actor, this view here isn't going to cut it anymore. If you have someone reading lines, it would be too weird to never see them speak, but actual scripted cutscenes would not work either because the player is choosing the dialogue. So Bethesda tried to go with some kind of automated and often highly janky shot reverse shot thing. The NPC talks, you choose a response and then the camera switches to your character when he talks. It is very basic and rudimentary, but the difference is pretty stark. It does end up being far more cinematic. The good thing is, it's visually engaging and makes dialogue feel less like reading a choose your own adventure. The bad thing is, it's simply not very good cinema. Still, the Fallout 4 solution has become the default choice for the genre. Every game in the open world Bethesda's genre now does dialogue pretty much like Fallout 4. Horizon Zero Dawn, Watch Dogs, and the new Assassin's Creed games all use the Fallout 4 system of having the NPC speak, then you choose and watch your character say your dialogue option with very simple, alternating camera shots. Cyberpunk had a tough choice to make here. Having dialogue options while also trying to create a Last of Us style cinematic experience would have meant having to adjust all of the cutscenes around the choices the player makes. How do you animate all the different lines? Each line requires different direction, different shots, different angles. And then how do you implement cinematic camera work around the player pausing to think about which dialogue option to choose? You can't do a full dialogue system and still have it be directed like Wolfenstein or The Last of Us. So instead, Cyberpunk went with a sort of hybrid model and the result is something pretty spectacular. Cyberpunk manages to convey the cinematic experience of those games with a dialogue system like Fallout 4 and the player agency of something like Half-Life 2. And while it works perfectly here, anyone who's played Half-Life 2 knows the benefits and dangers of letting the player maintain control during story moments. Let's use one of the more memorable scenes of Half-Life 2. Valve went to great lengths to almost never take you out from behind Gordon's eyes. It's one of the things that contributes to the game's masterful pacing. So in the relatively few times the game wants to stop and deliver story, they decided to not take control from you. This means you never feel like a pure spectator. Even when you're getting exposition, it's you Gordon Freeman, not the character Gordon Freeman. But the danger of this is the player can fuck it all up by being an idiot. How many of you have spent this scene running back and forth or jumping up and down on the desk? I do, that's how I have always done it. During this one, have you ever just wandered over here and played with whatever the hell this is? I'll bet you have. And that's because while Half-Life's story is actually quite good and its characters are very memorable, very little effort went into making these scenes feel like you're part of a movie. And you can hear what they're saying while jumping up and down. You can pay attention if you want, or you can see if it's possible to jump onto Kleiner's head. Cyberpunk is trying to tell a far more nuanced and cinematic story than Half-Life 2. The narrative here is above average, even with some pretty serious flaws. And CD Projekt Red clearly wanted it to feel as much like a movie as possible. So why did I never find myself turning V in little circles waiting for an NPC to stop talking? It's because there's an amazing attention to detail in everything from how characters walk, to how their faces are animated, to how the actors are animated delivering lines or listening to what you say. When you add in the fact that almost all of the important story conversations happen in memorable locations that were meticulously designed and lit, the player does end up fully immersed. In Fallout New Vegas, as great as that game is, and it is really great. It's hard to make looking at this feel cinematic. But in Cyberpunk, the NPCs are so ridiculously well animated, the conversations take place in such realistic feeling environments, and the acting is so great that subtle emotion becomes clear to the player. The NPCs don't stare blankly back at you with dead eyes. You'll pretty quickly realize that the NPCs all have unique walking animations, postures, facial expressions, and that these details, as well as the incomparably great voice acting, make the conversations quite easily the very best they've ever been done in a game like this. The fact that NPC character models look so good, even when you're walking around with them, means that the difference between how the game feels and looks when you're walking and talking, and how it feels when you're in actual cutscene dialogue, is pretty close. And even when you move into the higher quality models that you get in the scenes where the game won't let you move around anymore, you don't find yourself dicking around with the camera. There are two different types of actual NPC story dialogue in Cyberpunk. Much of the story is delivered while you'll have full control of the character. You'll be walking with an NPC through regular maps, talking while you move towards an objective. But for crucial, important story moments that require an even more cinematic feel, the game will lock you in place and turn on all of the animation bells and whistles. Just like these allow the developers to control the lighting and the perspective closer to how most games do cinematic cutscenes. The quality of the textures in the game is insane at all times, but when you get into these more directed scenes, there's literally nothing to take you out of the moment. The game has put all of its resources into these scenes, and is therefore able to bump the fidelity, detail and animations up to like impossible levels of realism. It's a super impressive technical feat, and while this animation, art and attention to detail is usually important, it wouldn't matter all that much if the actual writing was garbage, so let's get to a spoiler free look at the world and the story the game offers up. Writing Before we get to the ways this story ultimately falls a bit short, let's acknowledge just how great the characters and dialogue are here. The game ultimately revolves around a few main characters and all of them are interesting, fully fleshed out, real characters. I was a Keanu skeptic, but he actually delivers a pretty good performance playing himself here. Writing believable characters is all about making sure everything they say is authentic sounding. They have to fit in the world, and they have to feel like people that exist beyond their role feeding you exposition. Games are generally miserably bad at this because so much time is spent on gameplay. The rest of the time really needs to be force feeding you plot at every available moment. This usually leaves very little time for subtle character moments. Cyberpunk manages to pack a ton of character into very little time mainly because the world instantly feels real simply because of how well it's designed. This lets the characters in the game slot into believable places. Rogue, Goro, Judy, Panam, Johnny, Jackie, all of these characters are fully fleshed out believable people. All of the dialogue feels like real people living in a real world. Rogue in particular is just a great character. It doesn't get much better than this when it comes to character writing and games. Nobody feels like a stereotype or cardboard cut out except for Keanu as Johnny Silverhand, but even that works because he's literally supposed to be a stereotype, which makes it all the more interesting to watch him change over the course of the campaign. Character development is what this game does best. What's here is more than good enough to keep you playing until the end, and there are plenty of memorable moments. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean the story is as good as it could have been. Normally, when I point out a story's flaws, it's because the writing is bad. But Cyberpunk's writing is pretty universally excellent. Problem is that the story is too big for the time the game has. I'm always complaining about games being too long, but Cyberpunk either needed to be like 15 or 20 hours longer, or it needed to focus its story way down. Because the issues the game brings up, it does not have enough time to really dig into and resolve, and leaves a ton of story threads hanging. I'm not going to do major spoilers, or even minor spoilers really, but I'm going to talk broadly about what this game is about, and the issues it tries to address, and why ultimately it's kind of just abruptly runs out of time. Plot. One of the valid criticisms of The Witcher 3 was that the game was so long, and there were so many great side missions and characters that the main story about finding Siri kind of gets lost. While I understood criticisms about that game's lengths, I generally didn't think there was actually much of a problem with the Siri storyline, because I think everything else going on felt so important that the story is ultimately larger than Siri anyway. Siri was the catalyst, but the politics, wars, and people of the world were the real story of The Witcher 3. Ironically, the story of Cyberpunk fails not because you lose track of the main story, but rather because the game just doesn't take the time to explore the most interesting questions the main story asks. Cyberpunk's narrative is actually quite short, and the game is generally very poorly paced. By this I mean there came a point where I got to the no turning back warning, even though I had all of the side character quests not finished. This is because the game wants to like rigidly pace these quests out, but it just like totally fails at directing the player. It's impossible to talk about how the story works without at least touching on how it's structured. Big open world games are totally built around having a diverse set of things to do. The main draw of a game like Fallout or Horizon Zero Dawn or The Witcher is the simple act of exploring the map and discovering cool stories, interesting characters, and fun gameplay sequences. Knowing this, it continues to really annoy me that so damn many games choose to have what I call the ticking time bomb narrative. Fallout 4 is rightly mocked for choosing to have finding a missing baby son as its driving motivation. If you are looking for your infant son who is kidnapped from the arms of the wife you saw cruelly murdered before your eyes, that would be a pretty fucking all consuming quest. This overarching narrative clashes disastrously with fucking planting melons and building settlements and chatting with Preston Garvey. There are a ton of ways to tell stories that don't depend upon a ticking time bomb. CD Projekt Red built a huge world filled with interesting places and side jobs that allow you to explore that city. But this again badly grates against the main story that is literally a ticking time bomb that will destroy your brain and kill you in a couple of weeks. If you're making a six hour level based linear narrative action game, the ticking time bomb works great. In a Gears of War game that's all about pushing forward and constant action, this narrative style perfectly fits the length and feel of those games. But when you decide to make an open world RPG, it causes all sorts of problems for the game and the narrative. And in the case of Cyberpunk, this isn't especially big problem. Big, big problem, man. This game is constantly, constantly interrupting you with phone calls and texts to give you new missions or hints or whatever. This would normally be a super welcome thing in an open world game, especially one with, you know, moderately decent combat and a fantastic map to explore. But the actual main story missions are all important things. They're the kind of things that if you were really this person V, would need to be done right now. So you need to literally turn off the main story in your head. If you want this game to last more than 15 or 20 hours. As a player naturally caught up in CD Projekt Red's competent storytelling, you naturally gravitate to running through these main story missions all in a row. I've been told I only have a few days before I explode, so, you know, like buying cars or hunting down collectibles is not high on my list. And the side missions, which are almost universally excellent, suffer as a result. Many of them only tangentially tie into the main story, and some of them have almost nothing to do with it at all. This makes everything less urgent and less powerful than it should be. The game tries to mitigate this massive issue by having NPCs say, oh, okay, let me work on it, I'll call you later. But it still isn't nearly directed enough. You end up having all of the main missions feel disjointed because the player can't focus on any one story for any length of time. Cyberpunk has like six separate plots that would have made an incredible story. Unfortunately, having six plots means none of them can really be explored fully. The one that comes closest is the redemption of Johnny Silverhand, but because so much time is spent on other things, even that, the most finished of the stories, doesn't go into nearly as much depth as you would like. In the final moments of the last mission, I found myself desperately wanting more. Cyberpunk is about Johnny Silverhand and his redemption. It's also about corporations and Arasaka internal politics, also gangs and AI and what really matters in life. Each one of these plot threads is presented really well at first. They're intriguing and they will get you interested. But then the game leaves them barely addressed because it's time to look at something else. For instance, there's a bunch about rogue AIs, the old web and something called the black wall. This sounds like it's going to be super duper important and it's one of the most interesting things you're presented with in the game and then it just kind of stops. One of the gangs is devoted to making contact with these AIs to get them to help humanity. It's really awesome. But then that gang just kind of disappears and the whole AI thing isn't explored at all beyond being kind of a deus ex machina for the plot at the end. The political intrigue surrounding Arasaka is really fascinating. It involves family rivalries, a murder, betrayal, power and ideology about what companies should be. But what seems like it's going to be a major component of the story just fades into the background because the story kind of devolves back to the ticking time bomb. Every single one of the major quests would have been better off being the plot of the game. If we weren't going to learn a bunch about Arasaka and why certain characters are doing what they're doing, the game would have been better off just making them an ancillary enemy. If we weren't going to explore AIs and the old web, it really shouldn't have been given any time at all. Because there are so many interesting plots, it means none of them get the attention they deserve. When I actually walked up to the bar and got the point of no return message, I was shocked. I thought, oh, they must just mean like point of no return for a little while. I was convinced that the Arasaka storyline was just beginning. I was certain way more was coming about the AI and the black wall, but the story just kind of runs out of time. The game would have been improved by removing the ticking time bomb and choosing any one of these issues to really focus on. I personally would have made Arasaka and the AI the main focus of most of the missions. Finally, the structure has other negative effects on the story. The game wants to give the player freedom to tackle things in their own order, but at the same time, it wants to control the pace of those main missions. What ends up happening is a totally disjointed pacing. The Witcher 3 paced itself pretty well because the story was basically done in a specific order. You arrived in a new area and did that area's entire storyline. You might have done some side missions in between, but when you got to Oxenfort, you basically just did the entire Oxenfort storyline, same with Skellige, same with all the other areas. The game didn't have you do two missions with Triss, then have her tell you she'd text you in a couple of days and maybe go to Skellige for a little while. The Witcher 3's method of doling out the story worked better. I get why CDPR used this weird system where you do two missions, then wait a couple of days until you get a text. The reason is they didn't want players just blasting through the main missions and only getting 20 hours out of the game. But the solution is both inelegant and detrimental to the story as a whole. Let me suggest a better way to do it. They could have just weaved side missions and gigs into each area's storyline. So when you were doing the major side quests in the Badlands, simply make it so the gigs are required because the plan you're going to do requires money or you need to get certain materials or gear or whatever, man. Instead, you end up criss-crossing the map, getting bits of each story all at once. It's a real drag on the pacing. It's also disappointing how little the gangs are actually involved. The Voodoo Boys are a super interesting faction and it just boils down to doing two missions and then you never hear anything about them ever again. The cool cyborg guys from all the marketing are in one mission and then a brief appearance in another side mission. The steroid using animals gang, one mission and then a brief appearance in a side mission. All of these problems boil down to a lack of focus and a failure to exert some control over the player. By insisting on making the player constantly do something else, every story fades into the background and you never feel like you're building momentum and that's why the ending feels so damn abrupt. I honestly feel like most of these problems are the result of the game needing at least another year to like really fully nail down the story and the pacing of how the player would interact with it, leaving the consoles aside. The PC version of this game is pretty damn polished visually and technically but narratively it is sloppy and unfocused. That ends up being the case with progression, with crafting, with looting and even the combat. The game is still pretty damn good because the basics are all more than good enough. Combat is fine, writing is fantastic, world building, animations, art direction, all that stuff is great but the lack of focus on how it all fits together holds it back from being the game it could have been. Finally, we need to talk about the dialogue system itself and the player's freedom and agency within the story or lack of it. While the game succeeded really well at both the actual dialogue, writing and the cinematic execution, it has major issues with the way the dialogue actually works in the game. Dialogue. So games in this genre have moved decidedly away from the Fallout 3 model, unfortunately. I suspect that in looking to make a cinematic experience with voiced actors, game designers realized it's weird and anticlimactic to choose a dialogue option and then have an actor read exactly what you choose. Man, it's almost as if like games and movies are like two totally separate things and that maybe games should be games and movies should be movies, but anyway. Mass Effect was a big innovator in this regard and while I understand the reasoning, the way it has typically been implemented basically sucks ass. Mass Effect 1 pulled it off decently well. You only get a small snippet of what Shepard is gonna say. The goal seems to be to convey the overall meaning and tone of the response while still keeping the actual dialogue a surprise to the player, which really, should the dialogue you're choosing be a surprise, be that as it may. Probably the best example of this ever, for me at least, is this right here. Only sane one left. I gave him an extra dose of his meds after the attack. Say goodnight, Manuel. You cannot silence the truth. My voice must be heard. What did you do? That might have been a little extreme, Commander. You can't just go around whacking people in the head. You understand the tone of what you're gonna choose there, but what actually happens is hilarious and a genuine surprise. The problems arise when the little snippet completely fails to properly represent what your character is gonna say at all. Mass Effect 3 had this problem in spades, as does Fallout 4. In RPGs with real choices and consequences, this is a disaster as you can't have the player make an important choice without understanding what they are going to say. And it makes me wonder if this is why we just don't get consequential dialogue options anymore. Cyberpunk fails this basic system pretty much totally. The game gives you a ridiculously small snippet of dialogue to choose from, and it consistently fails to convey to the player what they're actually choosing. It happens all throughout the game where you would choose a dialogue option only to find that what then comes out of V's mouth is a total surprise in both meaning and tone. This is a disaster to have in a dialogue system, man. The entire point of dialogue at all is to give the player choice in story cutscenes. When you don't know what you're choosing, you can't make a real choice. That's a guess. You're just clicking to continue the cutscene. This is so poorly done in Cyberpunk that in the very final cutscene, when you literally choose how the game will end, I actually chose precisely the opposite of what I wanted to happen, twice. I did it twice because the first time through, I realized that I'd chosen the option I didn't want. So I reloaded the game's hilariously terrible checkpoints. Seriously, they are comically terrible. And then I went through the five minutes until the choice came up again. And then I chose wrong again because the writing is so bad, I reflexively chose wrong again. So listen, this is mainly a very bad mechanical flaw but it's not an uncommon one. As games decide that they need to be more and more like movies and less and less like games, all RPGs are using this system and they all run into this same highly annoying problem. But in reality, the status thing is that it doesn't really matter in Cyberpunk because the fact is there is a truly depressing lack of player agency and choice in Cyberpunk story. It's all an illusion. The Witcher 3 had very little actual choice in its campaign. Dialogue would change some things about how missions were accomplished and your relationship with characters. But for the most part, you couldn't choose to be a different Geralt. And that was actually fine because the Witcher wasn't your story. It was Geralt of Rivia's story and Geralt of Rivia is an established character in a series of books. Cyberpunk is an entirely different thing. Cyberpunk is a world and a game. As a tabletop RPG, Cyberpunk like D&D is all about player choice and agency, which makes it a real shame that there's simply none in CD Projekt Red's video game version. The themes and narrative of this game are all about really interesting things that would have lent themselves perfectly to actual player agency. The reason Fallout New Vegas is still the very best of the games in this genre is because that game features real, legitimate choices with moral and ethical consequences. There is a huge difference between Siding with the Legion, NPR, House, or Yes Man, and every one of those choices is defensible in some way. Cyberpunk has a universe tailor made for creating a new, better version of New Vegas, but it just fails. This is a game with several well-established factions. There are a bunch of gangs with their own ideas, ideologies, and goals. There's a Nomad faction, all the gangs, several corporations, and the government. If CD Projekt Red had crafted the story around these factions, they could have had a game with real player agency and choice which would have made it an all-time classic. A game that's sought to make the player part of a larger world with real consequences for their actions. Like, you know, what are those called? Right, RPGs. But the fact is, the story simply isn't about any of that. Instead, it's about a ticking time bomb in your head. Everything ends up revolving around how to save your own life. Even if they wanted to have that be the jumping off point, to craft truly compelling RPG, you need to have the player choosing sides. But you don't choose sides. You don't choose anything, really. And that means ultimately, nothing you say matters. You really are just left clicking to continue the cutscene. The clicking does give the illusion of choice. It lets you slightly adjust the tone of conversation, and it keeps you engaged for the most part, but it's only an illusion, and that's a damn shame. I praise the game for trusting the player to control the camera and how that first-person storytelling keeps the player involved in the story moments. But when it comes to the actual story, CD Projekt Red's writers had no trust at all for the player because you have zero control over anything that happens. You can make a choice at the end, and you can choose who to take with you on the final mission, and you can choose to sleep with certain people, and you can choose which missions you are or are not going to do and which order you do them in. But you can't choose what actually happens, and your dialogue options, outside of a very few rare instances, do not matter at all. If this was really well-hidden, like for instance in Mass Effect, it might not have been a problem, but it's not particularly well-hidden because it becomes really obvious that the NPC responses are not dependent upon what you chose. The NPC feeds you a line, you choose a sentence, and then they say whatever they were gonna say anyway. It's obvious the developers here spent way too much time trying to make a movie and not enough time trying to make an RPG, and that annoys me because I don't play games to watch fucking movies. I watch movies to watch fucking movies, and I play games to play fucking games. Most of all, what you end up with is something that doesn't do justice to the tabletop property it's based upon, because it's kind of the antithesis of those type of games. The reason people love RPGs is because they love the consequences and the freedom they offer. And by freedom, I don't mean the ability to do this side mission before that side mission. I mean the freedom to choose what is actually going to happen in the story of the game. The genre isn't about watching a highly curated story play out independently of the player except when they're shooting things. In fact, historically shooting things or stabbing them has been the least fun part of this genre. Fallout 4 has the same problems except there, the story is actually garbage. Though honestly the gameplay in Fallout 4 is vastly superior because the mechanical systems of Fallout 4 are where all of the effort went. At the end of the game, you start to realize that Cyberpunk is a complicated mix of successes and failures. It fantastically succeeds at its art and world building, its character writing, animation, its map, they're all leap forwards for games. But the actual story, though engrossing and entertaining and it will keep you playing, it's just disappointing because it could have been done so much better if more focus was put on the most interesting parts. And it wasn't so set on rushing past everything interesting as it races to disarm a bomb. When you add that to the mechanical failure of the dialogue system and the very disappointing lack of any real agency beyond poorly executed illusion, what's left is something that is still well worth playing and watching but fails to achieve any kind of greatness that will last. People will not look back at this game like they do New Vegas or for that matter, The Witcher 3. Again, as I wrap up, I wanna make it clear that Cyberpunk is well worth playing. It's one of the better games in recent memory and it's one of the better games in this genre. But the places it's truly excellent make the flaws even more disappointing because it shows that this could have been one of the greatest games ever but it just falls short. All right, I think that's enough for today. Next time we'll talk about the gameplay and progression and why Cyberpunk is both one of the best of these Bethesda style open world games and also very, very sloppy at times. All right, thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.