Cyberpunk 2077 Cemented a Generations Legacy

CD Projekt Red launched their oft delayed sci-fi first person role playing game on December 10th, 2020. The game hit basically every platform, including Stadia, where I spent my 70 or so hours in Night City. In short, the game was under cooked, and the marketing team was clearly not pitching the same game the developers were making. That isn’t to say the is bad, but the performance issues and game breaking bugs lived up to this generation’s legacy. Before I unpack that, let’s talk a bit about the game.

As mentioned, I played the game on Stadia, which was one of the better functioning versions of the game. You had two performance profiles, and both felt like they ran near their performance targets. I had one or two major bugs, including one that stopped you from reloading your weapon, but I was spared the majority of progress blocking bugs. The best and worst part of the game was the characters and world. When everything was working, the world was completely immersive, and the characters were three dimensional. Those moments were too few however. Often the beautiful Night City felt shallow. This was only made worse by the massive amount of two dimensional side quests.

The game looks amazing, and the voice acting and general sound is great. It is just everything can feel too shallow. It is not the game we were sold in the advertisements, and the game was just too buggy. This is why it helped cement a generation.

The last generation of games gave us some truly incredible titles, but also really took the day one patch concept to the extreme. While the industry had been trending this way for a while, almost every game now is significantly different from what comes on the disc you buy. AAA titles seem to be some of the worst offenders, requiring huge day one patches. I am having a hard time articulating this, but there is just a huge wave of disappointment when a game launches in such a poor state.

You know the developers didn’t want to roll out their baby in a bad state, and they poured their hearts into making it the best they could, but at the end of the day these companies must enforce deadlines. We the gamers, and the developers themselves are the ones that suffer from this.

So yes, Cyberpunk 2077 is fun, and Stadia is a great place to play it. That being said we can and should be disappointed in the state the game was released in. We should also be upset that the game we were sold wasn’t what was advertised. We shouldn’t however blame the developers for this. They did their best.