There is a game I consider brilliant. The game that is full of issues, doesn’t even look that good, doesn’t even have a balanced gameplay. Its PC port is notorious for numerous issues that were never fixed by the developers and still require fan-made tools to deal with. On many-many levels it’s a disaster of a game. But to me it’s THE game. Playing that game to me was an experience that elevated gaming and made it clear why in a GAME the gameplay is more important than anything else.
I remember myself clearly, even though years have passed: looking at the pause screen, controller on the table, hands on my head, sitting in complete silence as minutes pass. Shocked.
Prior to that I was going through one of the final sequences of the game. Playing as a character I never liked. Doing things I never really liked to do in this game – a series of annoying hacking mini-games. They were several in a row, becoming more and more difficult and with no possibility to save in between them. Each time I was beating a new one, another one would emerge and I would fail and be thrown all the way back to the beginning. After what seemed like an eternity of trials and failures, I lost it. I almost threw my controller at the wall and yelled: “I’m never going to make it! It’s a stupid useless minigame! It’s unfair! It’s pointless! All of it is pointless!” And then it hit me. Instead of throwing my controller I put it on the table and just sat there. Angry, desperate, feeling betrayed and useless – all the spectrum of the emotions my in-game avatar was experiencing right now, at this point of the story. I, the player, was set up to do an impossible task for an unclear goal in a situation when none of my actions ultimately mattered – and it was a perfect mirror of what was happening in the game. And when I realized that, I was shocked. I had to stop playing. I had to just sit there for a moment and take it in: for the first time in my gaming life I felt exactly what the in-game character felt. And it happened outside of a cutscene, outside of a dialog. It wasn’t something I’ve been told about or explained. It was something I really truly felt. Through the gameplay.
The game I am describing is, of course, NieR: Automata. A game with many flaws, far from perfection, but the one that redefined the gaming for me. Just with one moment that redeemed everything else. I’ve played a lot of games since that one, very good games, but that one moment is something I will never forget.
Why am I writing this now? Because we’re seeing too many promises from different developers to “redefine the gaming”. To bring it to a new level. And with what? Graphics. Ray tracing. Reflections. Eye candy. And this is something I strongly disagree with. Games should not look good, they should play good. It doesn’t necessarily mean they should be ugly. But it also doesn’t mean that they should be focusing on visuals as much as they do now.
Cyberpunk 2077 is finally out. And this… product, its state, its ambitions and its unfulfilled promises is what made me write this. When I make attempts at criticizing CP77 using facts (!), I get just one answer – “oh, but it’s a next-gen game!” Well, it has ray tracing, big city and pretty textures (not talking about polygons per ass count – N:A will probably still beat it) – but that’s it! In all the other aspects that define a GAME it has nothing. I cried during ending E in NieR: Automata because of how the game made me feel before and because of how that ending reframed my feelings and gave me hope. I can’t cry watching a certain CP77 character die – yes, he’s a nice looking character, but I don’t care about him, because you can’t make me care just by showing me a several minutes long cutscene and declare him my friend afterwards. I don’t buy CP77 characters and stories because of that – they’re not backed up by gameplay and often contradict it. There is no coherence between what the game shows, how it shows it and what it requires from the player to do. This is why to me CP77 is hardly even a game, let alone a good one.
WARNING! The discussion in the comments below contains spoilers!
Old Ghost Stories 
Hi Ghost,
I just want to share my experience and give my quick impression of cyberpunk 2077.
What CD Projekt Red does is tell great stories that often involve equally great characters. They force you to make decisions, often hard decisions that may or may not have an impact later in the game. It’s their game design philosophy. It’s what they did for the last 15 years. Each game improved on areas from the predecessor, sometimes at the cost of others. But they were always taking the same direction.
What they delivered with cyberpunk is exactly the continuum of their game design, but in another setting. So this is where I don’t understand the complaints of most people. CDPR didn’t change. They mostly stayed true to themselves with this entry (for better or worse). Characters’ development is mostly done during key dialogues and cutscenes. The open-world is as dynamic as in the witcher 3. The major difference between the two games is how much they expanded the freedom of choice to the gameplay.
And while I understand some criticism about the game, if cyberpunk does something better than The Witcher, it’s the gameplay. The outcome of a quest is no more limited to key dialogues or very scripted events, but by your actions in-game. There are many ways you can take care of any given situation, depending on your build and the game often reacts to it. A lot of gigs/side-quest have multiple outcomes based on who you killed/spared. Combat builds play completely differently from one another.
But personally, I was sold on the characters. They are not one-dimensional pieces of garbage we often see in games or movies. They are believable people with motivations, backstories who take decisions that make sense based on their situation and how fucked up the world is. Moreover, the FPP really sold me. Characters can convey so much more expression than I’ve ever seen in any video-games. I mean, did you see how the characters look at you when you romance them? Their eyes, their smile, it’s so believable.
Two weeks after I finished the game, I still think about all those characters. How Johnny, who must be the biggest d*ckhead in the universe, reacted when seeing his own grave. How disillusioned he was when he found out that everything he fought for was all for nothing. It felt so real, the realization in his eyes, that still haunts me today. All of that to say that no, I don’t think the visual fidelity in this game is unimportant, or that one five-minute-long dialogue can’t make me care about a character. Because in this game, they serve a purpose. And it may not work with everyone, but when it works, it’s to the point of perfection.
I don’t often express myself online, so I’m sorry for the lengthy and messy writing. Also, the ending still feels really heavy in my heart and I need a bit more time to better make my opinion on this game. I know I didn’t address the bugs, but they didn’t ruin the experience for me, though I acknowledge it doesn’t make them more acceptable.
Even if it didn’t change your mind, I hope that you understand my view and that you will someday give cyberpunk 2077 another chance.
I do understand where you’re coming from, but let me ask you a question.
You’re saying that CP77 forces you to make hard decisions that have consequences later in the game. Please, give examples of such decisions. Not just dialog options that look like they might lead to different consequences. But actual decisions that work.
Because this is the problem. In The Witcher 1 you had a small task to defend goods from elves. And you had a decision: to kill those elves or to sympathize with them and give them those goods. Later, if you were sympathetic, you would find out that those goods were weapons and elves used them to kill a person who was supposed to help you solve your problem. And you had to find another way. Alternatively, if you didn’t give those goods to elves, the guy would live and the quest would play differently.
And this is just one example of why I did like The Witcher 1 much: your decisions were the actual decisions and they had actual consequences you could feel playing the game. The Witcher 3 didn’t have much of those, but it had very good cinematic dialogs and lots of small world events you could discover by exploring. Cyberpunk 2077 has neither. Dialogs are reduced to static person saying their lines. The world is reduced to a bunch of people you don’t know constantly ringing on your phone you can’t switch off. You don’t even have an option to drop the call. It’s the most awkward implementation of quests that one can think of – no ties to places or people, a chaotic mess of overlapping calls and messages.
The gameplay does not offer any freedom of choice, because it simply doesn’t offer any difficulty. It doesn’t matter what character or equipment you pick – you simply cannot fail. Because even if you pick a hacker, fail as a hacker and get attacked, you are still able to just kill everyone and everything. It’s not a freedom of choice nor flexibility. It’s a total failure in game design. For example, in The Outer Worlds failing a dialog as a diplomat and being attacked means certain death. There are many definitions of what game is, but all of them agree on one thing – a game should have a failure condition. Without that it’s not a game, but a toy. Yes, it can be a good toy with lots of features, but it’s still a toy, not a game.
The gameplay is shallow, the choices are fake, the bugs are not even present – they *are* the game. The company is under investigation by law for making intentionally false promises. And yet somehow some people are still willing to forgive. This is something that feels bizarre.
/!\ Spoilers /!\
From the top of my head, there is the Delamain quest. At the end, you have three options to chose from, and each had implications, and (the new form(s) of) Delamain still talks to you long after the quest. Another one would be during the quest with Judy when you had to go to the penthouse to kill the manager of Cloud. You have to choose if you trust Maiko and the consequence of losing the Tyger-Claws protection.
There is a lot of impactful choices during the game but they are often hard to notice. For example, when Arasaka finds Hanako and burst into the motel, you can save Takemura. Even if there is no clear indication that we can do this. saving him gives you access to exclusive dialogues, text messages, and a clip at the ending (I didn’t play the Arasaka ending, so I can’t speak for his role in it).
When you send the corpse of Jackie to his mother, you will be able to go to his funerals and unlock his bike. If you chose to send him to Viktor, Arasaka will intercept his body and use the soul killer on his dead mind for experiments(he even appears at mikoshi in the end). I know this is not in any way a moral choice, but it’s worth pointing out.
But yeah, I agree that those choices are harder to find and generally aren’t as impactful as in the witcher. But that doesn’t mean that they’re non-existent or that they are of bad quality. They’re still good IMO. There is not enough AAA that allows for such freedom of choice, whether in dialogue or gameplay. I mean, when was the last immersive sim released? Prey in 2017?
As for the difficulty, the game is too easy, can’t argue. Even in the middle part, you can kill pretty much anyone in the head with any of the weapons you find. So, as I did in MANY other games, I had to fix the rules myself. Went for a low-armor rating and no gun blazing. My V could be almost one-shotted by anyone, which forced me to use a stealth approach and hack my way through most of my encounters. Also, it rendered the boss fights way more rewarding to beat, especially Oda with the mantis blades.
I think the “failure” of cyberpunk was over-exaggerated by a lot of peoples. And I really wonder to what extent it ruined the experience for some. I had the chance to cut myself from the internet during my play to forge my own opinion. I think it’s the best decision I made in 2020, as it allowed me to finish the year on a good note, and not on a nightmare of hatred. I mean, have you seen the Twitter of Pawel Sasko??.
In the end, I won’t lie. It all feels deeply unfinished. The core is there, but we both played an inferior version of a game they will hopefully deliver in the following months.
As for the investigation, that often happens in the game industry. Nothing to see apart from some suits wasting money over the stock market and overpriced lawsuits.
I do not forgive cdpr, the game is unfinished, there are loads of bugs, cut content, and the game’s state on consoles is unacceptable. However, I can’t help but loving it. It’s a bit like with VTMB, it has shit loads of issues, but the game is so enjoyable that it makes me forget about them.
OK, let’s see.
> From the top of my head, there is the Delamain quest. At the end, you have three options to chose from, and each had implications, and (the new form(s) of) Delamain still talks to you long after the quest.
Not a real choice as it doesn’t affect anything – you get the exact same new car either way and Delamain (or his “son”) as a character never appears again. Same as the freed AIs if you decide to free them.
> Another one would be during the quest with Judy when you had to go to the penthouse to kill the manager of Cloud. You have to choose if you trust Maiko and the consequence of losing the Tyger-Claws protection.
Not a real choice as doesn’t affect anything – the dolls still meet bad fate and you can’t fail Judy quest line even if you ended up with the worst possible outcome where everyone is dead.
> For example, when Arasaka finds Hanako and burst into the motel, you can save Takemura. Even if there is no clear indication that we can do this. saving him gives you access to exclusive dialogues, text messages, and a clip at the ending (I didn’t play the Arasaka ending, so I can’t speak for his role in it).
I did save the guy and it changes nothing. If he’s dead you get the exact same ending but with a different character (Hellman). “There’s no indication…” c’mon 🙂 First of all, there is: you are literally told that if you leave him he dies. Praising the game for the only quest that has no GPS route for a side objective in 2020 (2021) when even Ubisoft releases games with zero markers is bizarre.
> When you send the corpse of Jackie to his mother, you will be able to go to his funerals and unlock his bike. If you chose to send him to Viktor, Arasaka will intercept his body and use the soul killer on his dead mind for experiments(he even appears at mikoshi in the end).
Wrong – no matter the “choice”, his consciousness ends up at Arasaka. And you get his bike no matter what. With this “choice” you either get additional content (the funeral) or don’t.
> There is a lot of impactful choices during the game but they are often hard to notice.
They’re ‘hard’ to notice, because there is no actual impact on the game. 98% of the time your “choices” only slightly affect dialog lines that you hear. Funny how Horizon Zero Dawn options were called useless for being the same ‘flavor’ choices. The other 2% are endings which are undeserved, because your decisions don’t lead naturally to one of them, instead you literally manually pick them at the end and the difference is minimal. Funny how Human Revolution was criticized heavily for the same approach.
The game goes as far as forcibly making your character pick the other option the player didn’t pick – on several occasions I was trying to say one thing by choosing the option I liked, but my character expressed his doubts and then proceeded to saying the line I refused to pick earlier. There are even timed choices in the game that work the same – they change nothing, but 1-2 lines you hear. It’s a fraud and I’m not afraid to use this word, because those fake choices are deliberate – they exist for the players to think there is a choice while there actually is none.
I felt, from the first paragraph of your post, that you were talking about NieR: Automata; then when I read ‘”This is pointless! All of it is pointless!”‘, I just knew, even though I didn’t actually struggle with the same section you were describing. There are other moments like that and the game is just one of the most unforgettable experiences I’ve ever had. I will suggest that with this game, it’s not just the gameplay that prepares you for a moment like the one you describe; The beautiful soundtrack, always in the background, also does a lot to prepare the player for the bittersweet end. It’s a confluence of elements I have found impossible to reduce to individual aspects.
Yes. This game is a monument to coherent game design. It’s amazing how all of its elements are far from being perfect when viewed separately, but form an amazing whole when experienced together.
You’re quite correct about new games not fulfilling their implied or even explicit promises. The cause is multi-faceted, but one of the most crucial reasons is twenty-something developers who lack experience: they haven’t played all the historic games in a genre in great depth, and so lack knowledge of the past failures they must avoid repeating and the successes that they should repeat.
An example is the micromanagement in RTS and turn-based strategy games. Most make no attempt at all to limit – abstract – micromanagement so that players can focus on the grand strategy. Fer chrissakes, what emperor or admiral or general lacks subordinates to actually implement his plans?! In many games lip service is given to abstraction of micromanagement, but only lip service. A very few games, like Pax Imperia, have tried to implement useful abstractions.
No strategy games that I have encountered has ever tried to implement such abstraction the way that it obviously SHOULD be done: progressively scaled with the scope or progression of the game. Micromanagement that may tolerable and even necessary in early stages of a game can grow to be unbearable in the latter phases of the game, especially if the player chooses the largest playfields or scope that the game allows.
Well said. The gameplay should evolve through the campaign otherwise it becomes a chore.
The day that one realizes that “progress” in GAMEPLAY in game development is an enduring lie is probably the day that one stops eagerly snapping up every new release in a genre on launch day. I gave up hope many years ago. Visual improvements are nice, but ultimately they usually aren’t nearly so important as how the game flows and plays.
Great article and discussion, I enjoyed reading it a lot 🙂