CYBERPUNK 2077 AND “THE RULE OF COOL” AS SUBSTANCE
I don’t think I need to do much explaining about the controversies surrounding Cyberpunk 2077 following its release in December of 2020.
It was a game I finished at launch but didn’t stick around for much of the side content due to its myriad of bugs and technical issues that I felt prevented me from seeing the game as it should be. My experience of working my way through that game’s main narrative felt like I was playing an early or unreleased build. Not something that was meant to see the light of day
However, after almost two years worth of updates, an expansion announcement, and a very well-received anime series on Netflix, Cyberpunk 2077 is back in the cultural conversation. At least for the time being. Just this past week it entered the top 10 most actively played games on Steam, and is seeing a surge in sales due to a generous 50% discount.
So, I figured I’d hop on the bandwagon and finally get back to a game that I felt was actually a lot better than the technical issues, for which it was rightfully criticized, made it out to be. With the main narrative already out of the way, I was excited to dive into the world and see exactly what else there is to do in what is ostensibly the follow to The Witcher 3, one of my favorite open-world RPGs of all time.
My thoughts? It’s... alright. Playable? Absolutely! Worth playing for the first time? Definitely, at a sale price! But did it “wow” me? In some ways, sure, but mostly not.
Up front it's worth saying that I don’t think there are many games, especially large open world ones, that are as visually stunning as Cyberpunk 2077. That was true when it launched in 2020, and it’s still true today.
From the neon-drenched and crowded streets of downtown Night City, to the dark and dusty expanses of its outskirts, Cyberpunk truly looks like a game that most people have only ever dreamed of playing. It capitalizes on every part of the playbook set forth by films like Blade Runner, Akira, Escape From New York, and even Mad Max. It evokes every piece of futuristic and capitalist dystopian digital art in the likes of Simon Stålenhag. A world built atop layers of failed capitalist venture and the bones of the labor exploited in vain to get there.
You don’t need me to explain what cyberpunk, as a collection of visual tropes, looks like. But, it is worth noting that this is the most impressive depiction of it we’ve ever gotten in a video game. And possibly in any visual medium. Of course, all of that being said is completely divorced from my thoughts on how the game presents the textual and thematic elements of the genre.
Cyberpunk 2077 looks really fucking cool, and I don’t think its possible to dispute that. But it also smacks of something that was made to look really fucking cool first, and to be an interesting piece of art second.
Which, to be frank, has always sorta been the running theme of cyberpunk entertainment. At least, among audiences.
It’s no secret that the love of cyberpunk and other semi-related genres of art such as the similarly neon-drenched and crucially distinct retro-futuristic “outrun,” or the musical stylings and cover art for most synthwave, and furthermore vaporwave works, is primarily driven by nerdy white guys with no other guidelines for their tastes other than the “rule of cool.” A concept that hardly needs explanation, where a piece of art’s value is inherent to how “cool” it is. As such, these genres become a patchwork of relatively thoughtless pastiche. Pulling from works like Blade Runner and Akira with no consideration given to most of the artistic choices being made by their creators other than those things looking... well... very cool.
An example of the “outrun” aesthetic.
The vaporwave art everyone has seen. The cover for “Floral Shoppe” by Vektroid.
The neon lights, the rainy streets, and old duster jackets create the perfect environment for somebody who wishes they were Ryan Gosling’s character in Drive to find solace. Nevermind the fact that characters like Rick Deckard of Blade Runner are deeply unhappy men who live in relative squalor. These men are violent, angry, and of course, treat women... very terribly.
But, they do wear very cool jackets, say very cool things, and get to eat at very cool ramen stands like they’re in one of my favorite Japanese animes!
Which brings us to the big racist elephant in the pastiche parlor that is cyberpunk as a genre, and that is its obsession with injecting random elements of asian cultures, although usually Japanese, into the language of its visuals.
One can trace the lineage of these cultures entering the genre to its most well-known progenitor, Blade Runner. In that film, the presence of Japanese culture was a decision made by an American filmmaker to evoke the “terror” of a distopian world in which Japan, and more broadly, “The East,” had become the cultural and economic center. It wasn’t just that capitalism had reached its natural conclusion and consumed every structure of our society, but furthermore that it wasn't the American flavor that had done so.
This was a decision made for an audience that can imagine no more a culturally “alien” world than one in which white people are not the taste-makers.
Through this lens the genre points to the crowded city centers and street markets of China as a failing of their culture, rather than to the miles of land in the United States dedicated to freeways and sprawling un-walkable cities rather than housing or anything remotely environmentally sustainable.
Now, this read on the orientalist and racist elements inherent to the genre is, of course, lost on most of its target audience because signs “look cooler” when they’re written in kanji or kana, and people “sound cooler” when they’re speaking Japanese. But one would hope that more contemporary pieces of cyberpunk art would have something to say about all of this even if the audience doesn’t catch on. However, that's rarely the case; and Cyberpunk 2077 is no exception.
Promotional art for the 2017 live-action remake of “Ghost In The Shell.”
The main villains of the game are the all-seeing and overtly evil Arasaka Corporation, and and its head is the “mysterious” and oft-untouchable family from which the company gets its namesake.
A line of dialogue which has become synonymous with the game’s advertising is delivered by Keanu Reeves’ Johnny Silverhand. “Wake the fuck up, Samurai,” he tells the player. This is despite the fact that the title of samurai isn’t given to the player by anyone in the game, even in passing. It’s the name of Johnny Silverhand’s band. Really, he only says that to the player because it’s a cool thing to make Keanu Reeves say. I’m pretty sure it’s the only time in the entire game that anyone calls you that.
The game embraces these tropes uncritically and, likely without even stopping for a second to consider why Blade Runner made the choices it did all those years ago. The only reason that stuff is in this game is because it's supposed to be. Which, I think, makes it all the more ironic that an anime produced largely for American audiences is what spurred the game’s recently found goodwill.
When you look at it on paper there’s no real cultural or textual reason why Cyberpunk: Edgrunners needed to be an anime, other than because... it looks cool. I haven’t seen the show at the time of writing this however, so I can’t comment on it much more than that.
While the visual tropes of cyberpunk as a genre are hardly ever interrogated, I didn’t really expect them to be. Largely because they rarely are. However, I did go into my recent dig at Cyberpunk 2077 hoping to find well-written stories about the nature of humanity, identity, class, bodily autonomy, and societal structures as a whole.
There are definitely moments where the game makes strides to touch on these points, but really only ever in glances at a message deeper than, “capitalism bad,” or “police bad.” Which, I guess, are relatively progressive messages to be delivering in what was one of the most highly-anticipated AAA video game of recent years, but it’s pretty clear that Cyberpunk 2077, as a piece of art, doesn’t believe those things.
Whether those messages are delivered sincerely or not aside, these moments seem to be largely confined to the game’s main narrative, and even then they rarely concern the player character directly.
The thrust of the story being that the consciousness of Johnny Silverhand, a long-dead anti-capitalist terrorist, is implanted in the player’s (a.ka. V’s) head, and if the player doesn’t get it out eventually their mind will be overwritten and Keanu Reeves will take control of the body forever. It sounds like a story that would be rife with questions about what it means to be effectively immortal in the sense that Johnny is resurrected through technology and about what the push and pull going in on V’s mind means for their bodily autonomy going forward, but in reality the only reaction the player character ever has is, “I need him out of my body so I don’t die.” Which isn’t very thought-provoking motivation.
It’s also a world where every character uses technology to freely change any aspect of their body at any time. Beyond just the immediately apparent expression of gender identity, people are able to enhance the performance of their limbs and their organs. They can have electronic eyes, multiple mouths, blades that spring from their forearms. The main character is constantly pulling at an all-purpose data cable that protrudes from their wrist and plugging it into computer interfaces, vehicles, sockets in walls, and even other people at times.
But in story and gameplay the ramifications of these bodily adjustments are rarely discussed or even pondered upon. There’s no discussion about what it means for V to replace their arms, legs, lungs, hands, and eyes with shiny chrome replacements. There’s no care for what it means for a person to have weapons embedded into their body. No concern for the fact that a person’s very brain is able to be wirelessly pressure cooked by a hacker on your local wi-fi network.
Firstly, because none of the body modifications you make in gameplay are reflected visually on your character outside of some changes to the hands (despite needing to look at an anatomical diagram to apply them). A pretty large ball-drop on the part of the developer CD Projekt Red, and one that had to be corrected by players through modding. Then secondly, and more crucially, because... that’s just the nature of life in Night City.
The menu where players apply prosthesis is unfortunately the closest you get to seeing their own extreme body modification.
Circling back, even as a genre that lends itself well to depictions of queer and trans stories, there’s very little in the way of that here. From the jump it’s obvious that most of the visual design for the characters in the game are explicitly made to appeal to straight men. The women are hyper-sexualized and the the men are lifeless bricks. In fact, most people exist within cisnormative gender binaries. There are no stories about trans people, and certainly no depiction, from what I remember, of non-binary people.
Well. There is the controversial in-universe ad for some kind of drink that’s strewn around the city, featuring a feminine model with a massive penis, emblazoned with the catchphrase, “Mix It Up.” But that’s about the most explicit non-cis representation of gender expression I can remember from the game.
It’s worth mentioning that a few of the romance options are queer but that’s not really praise-worthy either because that’s the extent of that, and Mass Effect was doing it a decade ago.
None of this is uncommon in video games but it’s unfortunate considering the breadth of gender expression the world of Cyberpunk world could provide. The inhabitants of Night City have lived amongst the tropes of that genre for so long that they now treat these things as incidental, in the same way that the developers approach telling stories in that world.
As I mentioned much earlier in this piece, the main thrust of this look back at Cyberpunk 2077 was to see what the side content in the game had in store for me. What I found was that every side quest was mostly the kind of fare that you’d see in something like Grand Theft Auto V. In fact, you could take the plot and activities from most side quests and drop them into any open-world crime game and they wouldn’t need too many adjustments to fit right in.
Any side mission, big or small, usually plays out in one way. You drive to one location, kill a bunch of people, steal or scan something, drive to another location, and repeat until you’re done. Of course, that’s a massive simplification, and that’s also not to say that I don’t find the combat in Cyberpunk 2077 to be enjoyable, but it’s that there’s rarely anything memorable about these quests. The context in which I’m doing the combat just isn’t interesting.
Even the combat itself, which I just mentioned that I do enjoy, suffers from this issue of ignoring the possibilities of its setting.
The combat is fast, loud, and frenetic. The particle effects and destructible environments suck you into each encounter, to the point where at times you’ll outright avoid approaching a situation quietly just so you can get another hit of the adrenaline that CDPR was able to provide here. However, there’s nothing about any of these combat scenarios that are made possible only by the cyperbunk setting.
There’s hardly anything a player can do that says anything interesting about the world, or about how it might feel to exist in that world.
The closest thing to this idea is that players are able to deploy abilities called, “quick hacks,” which apply different effects to enemies. This can be anything from the ability to blind an enemy for a short period, increase the damage they receive, or even to set somebody on fire. The issue here though is that the combat isn’t nearly difficult enough to necessitate players getting good at using these abilities, and they don’t really do enough to set themselves that far apart from a spell system you might see in something else like a high fantasy RPG for example.
Another genre of game that Cyberpunk 2077 touches on frequently for its mechanics is the immersive sim. This genre includes games like Dishonored, BioShock, Deus Ex, and Prey (2017). One important aspect of these game is the ability for the player to interact with the world in almost any way that they can imagine possible. For example, in BioShock if a player is using lighting abilities then they can electrocute enemies who are standing in bodies of water. The second piece of the immersive sim pie is that these games also give players a wide breadth of freedom in regards to creating their characters, choosing what skills they want to use, and in how they approach obstacles. Crucially however, it’s typical of the immersive sim that deciding to invest in one skill and its benefits will lock the player out of opportunities afforded by others. In Prey if a player invests their experience into hacking abilities and stealth, they might be able to open locked doors and command secruity systems, but they won’t be able to lift heavy objects or sustain a lot of damage.
Cyberpunk utilizes a lot of those design philosophies. The issues arise however when its apparent that almost every encounter and quest is designed around allowing the player to complete most objectives without ever having to choose a specific path and stay on it. Sure, there may be a door that you aren’t strong enough to rip open, but there’s more than likely going to be a computer somewhere else in the building that unlocks it. The two biggest problems with the way these choices are designed is that firstly, you’ll likely be able to get enough points to be good at hacking and have high strength anyways, rendering the decisions moot, and secondly these choices aren’t very fun or interesting.
Going back to 2017’s Prey (one of the best games of the past decade, please play it), a game which gives the ability for players to take on the form of almost any object in the game should they choose to invest in their skills with mysterious alien powers. You can use this ability to interact with the world in ways that aren’t only fun but are also likely unintended by the developer.
In the video above, you can see a player use this shapeshifting ability to turn into a coffee cup, and then roll through a small opening in the glass on a security station. This isn’t required, and for all intents and purposes it isn’t the “correct” way to get into that room, but it’s still possible. The player can use this ability to roll under doors, or between a crack in the opening of a vent and a heavy crate that would have otherwise required a high strength skill to access. Now of course the developers know you can do that, and they let you, but it feels like getting one over on them, and that’s a fun feeling! This maneuver also directly connects players to the setting, and provides intrigue to the main mysteries of the game’s story about the nature of the world, and even of your own character.
In Cyberpunk 2077, the abilities given to the player that have any affect on the world extend very little beyond shutting off security cameras, or using those cameras to apply the same “quick hacks” to enemies. Just from a different room. The closest that Cyberpunk gets to giving me this feeling is in a double-jump upgrade that allows me to scale buildings, sneak around easier, and climb to places I wasn’t necessarily intended to. Unfortunately, if I am able to get the drop on my targets from up above, there’s little else to do other than engage them in the same ways that I’ve done before.
And much like the action, these abilities are all presented through well-designed, snappy, and flashy menus to hide that fact that they’re all relatively unremarkable.
One point of comparison I intended to make here was between Cyberpunk 2077 and CDPR’s previous outing, The Witcher 3. Now, I can’t sit here with a straight face and tell you that the combat in that game was very engaging either, in fact it was pretty trivial in the later hours. However I will say that most quests in Witcher 3 had something to surprise me with, which Cyberpunk 2077 rarely did.
There’s the occasional quest involving a talking gun, or hunting a serial killer, or investigating a brain-washing plot against a mayoral candidate, but even then these contexts are largely unimportant details.
Around every corner of Cyberpunk 2077 is a dingy apartment or dirty garage filled with NPCs who are more like “psychos” lifted out of the Borderlands series than any semblance of a convincing Night City resident. The territories in which those locations exist and the factions that control them do not matter, and you largely won’t even notice a difference unless you pay close attention to data you can scan out of the environment. Every inch of the world can be divided into alleyways, interiors of apartment buildings, or the desert. It’s a world that looks amazing on its surface, but hardly one that feels like it was designed with any particular experience in mind.
It might just be a matter of personal taste, or of different genre even, but at least in The Witcher 3 my exploration of forests, mountains, and countrysides would give way to stories about ending wars, rescuing wizards, ending plagues, racing horses, and helping wayward cave trolls. The politics were complicated but also made for a rich world of conflicting worldviews, tragedy, and irony.
The different factions and societies at play in The Witcher 3 all stood for something and wanted something unique, which made decision making very difficult at times and didn’t always present a clearly correct answer. In Cyberpunk most of the time you’re fighting evil gang #1-4 or evil corporation #1-4. All of whom want the same things and occupy the same spaces.
The game itself derives its name from the genre in which it's playing. So it should come as no surprise that this is the most straightforward and uncritical look at the thing there could possibly be. It’s just that I’m a little disappointed because there’s yet to be many takes on the genre that are what I’m looking for.
I’m also disappointed because Cyberpunk 2077 has the potential to be a game I really love. Its world is intricately detailed, the combat is satisfying, its narrative is engrossing, and its main characters are interesting. I think, despite how I’ve come across here, that the story it tells is actually a pretty hopeful one and can be affecting depending on how things play out for your version of V. But, that affecting story being told in the detailed world, realized using hundreds of thousands of ironically exploited man hours and hundreds of millions of dollars doesn’t actually say anything that is unique to its setting. Many of its beats could exist in any other world, in almost any other time, and they’d still work. They just look really fucking cool here.
For a game that stands so alone in its ambitions to show me something I’ve never seen before, I wish it would apply the same effort to telling me something new as well.
