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I love the ‘Tower’ (DLC) ending to Cyberpunk 2077. (Spoilers etc)
I don’t think Cyberpunk 2077 is a particularly great game. I don’t think it’s a bad game, especially now, and there are aspects of the world (especially the now functioning metro system) that are immersive, and the fashion is fun and I like that they put effort into it (although I would have preferred the ability to dye clothes) but the combat and stealth are fine, the story is quite linear in an often frustrating way (versus a linear game that doesn’t create the expectation of player choice), there’s a lot of dull busywork, the animations outside of some motion-captured key cutscenes are surprisingly bad for AAA, and I think large parts of the open world lack the detail of a true marquee Rockstar production or even, really, a premier Ubisoft open world. By that I mean things like props, clutter, pedestrian detail (not just density), building detail, interior detail which is often weirdly bad etc.
The writing is also often bad. Not in the terminally annoying Baldur’s Gate 3 way but in the sense that a lot of the second-to-second dialogue, despite some great VA, is just a bit cringe, stilted, unrealistic, clumsy and generally doesn’t feel real. My theory for why the writing is so much worse than The Witcher 2/3 is that those games were predominantly written in Polish and then translated by professional fiction translators who actually understand good writing because they mainly do novels, movies etc. So they approach the game the same way. Cyberpunk, though was written by a combination of English-speaking video game writers (not a group who, by and large, should be allowed any involvement in published writing of any kind) and Polish writers writing in their second (or third) language - so the game has a lot of weird dialogue that makes clear it wasn’t written by Americans or native English speakers even though it’s set in the US. Weird vibe.
Still, with all those caveats, I love this ‘new’ ending to the game. After a hundred hours in first person, you die, come back to life after two years, all your friends forget about you, you lose all your power and can never get it back, and you get beaten up by some nobody thugs. Then, in something that is at the same time cheesy and kitsch and bold and wonderful, your character says their final line of dialogue and then the game switches - do the first time - to third-person as your character literally walks away from you, the player, out of the screen and into the world, and becomes another faceless NPC in the crowd, stilted walking animation, bad pedestrian collision AI, the whole thing. They disappear into the crowd. And then it ends.
Even a couple of years later I can’t get this out of my head. It may be one of my favorite game endings of all time. It’s perfectly congruent with the setting and theme of the story. It feels like the thing that should happen. It’s shot - maybe unintentionally - beautifully, because it’s not a high quality cutscene but instead literally you becoming a third-person NPC, zooming out of your own head and then watching yourself walk away. It is the dumbest, funniest, and therefore most Cyberpunk ending. No, you don’t cede your body to a rockstar or corporation. You don’t die in a blaze of glory robbing the space casino. You don’t flame out and enjoy a short retirement in the desert. You just go back to being a nobody, so the whole thing was pointless.
Great game developers seem to spend, I would guess, a lot of time thinking about how they introduce the player to a playable character. Far fewer seem to spend as much time thinking about how the player leaves a character. Most games have no finality in this sense, you leave your character and it feels like the story isn’t over, that you’ve left a party that’s still going on, even if the protagonist dies or something in the narrative but especially if they don’t. Cyberpunk has a finality with this ending - we join V’s story, and we decouple ourselves from it, vividly and silently. Whatever they do next isn’t - as in most RPGs - something for the head canon, or ending slideshow, of fanfiction. The story is simply over. I like that.
I got interested in the Cyberpunk setting a while ago, trawling through the various TTRPG books(and good lord, the Cyberpunk v3.0 books are hilarious to read). Through some odd happenstance soon afterwards, Cyberpunk 2077 went on sale(with the DLC), so I decided to bite the bullet and grab it.
I never had any real dog in that fight, but I was well aware of 2077's rough, bug-laden start, but I was told that the story was so good it gave enough traction for Project RED to finalize and polish things off, getting it into a usable state. So when I finally got to play the damn thing, the first thing that came to mind was 'How the hell did people think this story was good?'
2077 feels schizoprenic - a sandbox game that despretely wants to be a fixed-charachter style single-player game a la the Witcher, but gives you so many illusions of choice you're fooled into thinking you're playing a customizable sandbox - until you get to the point that the polish wears off and you realize all those pretty choices are just meaningless and all those customization options are painfully superfluous. Make your charachter look any way you want them to... except the entire game is almost always in first person. Slot in all the augments... except you're still extremely limited in choices and have to pick and choose. Fuck, I can't even go full chrome - yes, as a matter of fact, I do want to play as fucking Adam Smasher, the flesh is weak, we will be going full Adeptus Mechanicus as I carry around a minigun better suited to a fixed-mounted technical.
Even the story itself is fairly limp-wristed. It's just yet another paint-by-numbers 'learning to accept death' style story that's neither interesting or innovative. The only way you can potentially escape is just going the Soulkiller route and escaping into the net with Alt, but that involves you actually trusting her and oh BOY is that a big ask given what she mentions what'll happen to all the other uploads in Arasaka's servers. (Don't get me started on Soulkiller, every time I consider that fucking thing I damn near loose my mind on the implications thereof.)
Weirdly enough, I only felt that 2077 came into it's own was, yes, with the DLC. Phantom Liberty really felt like the game devs finally 'got it' in terms of storytelling and directing, with every new charachter you encounter being an absolute banger in terms of writing. Forget the two boring romantic options, let me get with Songbird, instead. I can't lie - the intro quest where we first meet her was damn near chef's kiss in perfection, if only for the fact that we finally got the option to tell Johnny to fuck off for once and put him in a goddamn box. Thank you, So Mi, I will pull your boss's ass out of the fire for that alone.
Maybe mods could help save the game in terms of actual gameplay, but, annoyingly enough, mods were severely hit and miss for me in terms of actually working. I'm no virgin to the modding scene, but getting them to work seemed to be an utter crap shoot, much to my annoyance.
So, yeah. Color me one of those that are very, very confused that 2077 got the reception it did or managed to hang on as long as it has. Maybe Keanu Reeves star power really is that good, I dunno.
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