Cyberpunk 2077 is the most popular game at the moment. It was announced at E3 2018, and since then there has been a huge stir around the game – people were waiting for the game, and the developers posted beautiful gameplay videos and made promises. I had high hopes for this game myself, in my mind this game had the image of a “GTA killer”. Not since GTA 5 has a PC game made so much furore. And now, the game is finally out. To say I’m disappointed is nothing to say. I’m just confused. The game was very weak, it was unbearably boring to play. Now, in order, the pros and cons of the game:
PLUSES:
Atmosphere, aesthetics, designs, city design. But all of this is negated by the minuses, which are more weighty.
MINUSES:
Horrible gameplay organization, terrible storytelling, bloopers, jams and general underdevelopment of the game, bugs.
Now let’s look at it one by one
Gameplay.I’ve never been a fan of story-driven games. The main thing in a computer game – exciting gameplay, this is what separates computer games from other forms of media. Plots in computer games have never been the same as plots in movies, literary works or even anime. So if I want an interesting story – I go see a movie, read a book or watch an anime. The story in Cyberpunk 2077 is told through dialogues with characters that take up 90% of the total playing time. And in fact ninety percent of the time in the game there is absolutely nothing meaningful, it is a two-button cinzo, requiring a minimum of effort, the promised third-person cutscenes are not imported, so there is no room for directing in the game. The same dialogue system is present in the game The Witcher 3, as well as Bioware games – Mass Effect and Dragon’s age. And I think that dialogues of this kind are the scourge of the game industry. They take up a huge amount of game time, they’re moments where they take away the player’s control and make you watch a dull movie. In all the games I like, the story never comes first, but serves only as a nice addition to the gameplay.
Can you imagine a movie where 90% of the camera is focused on an emotionless, talking head actor? The critics would have trampled such a movie in the mud, but for some reason this is forgiven for a computer game, and everyone gives it high marks.
The gameplay mechanics in Cyberpunk 2077 are poorly implemented. The open world is teeming with monotonous tasks of the type “sweep the area with 5 enemies” and the typical traders. Typical Ubisoft type open world content. The system of leveling in this game suffers from the same problems as in The Witcher 3. So, if the enemy accidentally got on the way to the quest is “older” than the player by 5 levels – it is absolutely useless to fight with him, any weapon becomes useless after 5 levels, two completely identical weapons may have completely different parameters of damage. The system of pumping and loot – an attempt to copy Borderlands, improved skills and augmentations made in the spirit of “-5% to the damage from falling” and “+5% to the speed of aiming”, and part of the perks does not work at all.locations for the shootings poorly planned and the shootings themselves are built on a random “Brownian motion”, the enemies of the crap AI. Stealth and hacking mechanics – nothing surprising here, it was in hundreds of other games that came out before, it does not reach the level of Deus Ex. In general, the game mechanics in Cyberpunk is an attempt to copy the gameplay mechanics of popular games.
The open world is worth a separate mention. The work of artists is good, the whole city looks good, you feel that the artists took their inspiration from the movie Blade Runner 2049, that is the classic of cyberpunk genre. But in terms of interactivity, this open world is just a layout, a setting. At the level of development it is not far from the world of GTA 3, and in some ways loses even him! All the inhabitants of the city – the mask, they do not have any practical purpose, except to be a scenery. Cyberpunk shows that open worlds in games have not evolved in 20 years, which is unfortunate. The police AI is worse than in GTA 3, they show up behind their backs and don’t know how to lead a long-range pursuit. The AI module for traffic police is completely missing from the game. And this in the era of machine learning, when in real life on the roads are tested unmanned cars… Cars don’t get any visual damage or dents when they collide, and some surfaces don’t even have bullet marks when they’re shot. 2021, a $317 million game, enjoy!