Was Cyberpunk 2077 too big not to fail?

Cyberpunk 2077 was a triple-A threat that promised to tower over the Action RPG space. But what happens when your house of cards gets shoved out of a sprinting getaway car headed for a brick wall?

Cyberpunk 2077’s journey began with the TTRPG (Tabletop Role Playing Game) Cyberpunk, released in the late 1980s. The game had mixed reception, but the vibe was something that attracted many. The Cyberpunk genre has been highly popularized by films like Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, and The Matrix and has only further cemented itself in the current culture. In 2012 CD Projekt Red, known for games like the critically acclaimed The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, announced its acquisition of the IP with its first trailer for Cyberpunk 2077. It was a beautifully grim cinematic view into a future of extreme augmentation and violence. The trailer ends, notably, on a black screen with old-school PC font that says "Coming, when it's ready". A sentence that would no doubt later haunt CD Projekt Red and fans alike.

After this CD Projekt Red gave years of trailers showing the scale of the title. They showed the expanse of the world, the endless possibilities, and deep immersive experience that they wanted to create. Players could be anyone, go anywhere, and create a name for themselves in the neon-filtered nightmare of Night City. All culminating in the E3 showcase of 2019. Here CD Projekt Red showed us a glimpse into what we would later learn to be, the main story. They then ended with the surprise reveal that Keanu Reeves himself would be playing a central role in the game. To say the moment was "breathtaking”, while cheesy, is also completely true.

Of course, only several months later the world was hit with the global COVID-19 pandemic, which has had wide-reaching ramifications on every aspect of human life, least importantly, the game development sphere. The game was delayed multiple times, leaving fans concerned about what the state of the game would be. On December 10^th, 2020 Cyberpunk 2077 was finally released and to say that the game was disappointing is an epic understatement.

The largest criticism was that the game was littered with more bugs than a Watson alley dumpster. Cars would explode without reason, the physics would slingshot players across the map, and the customizable genitalia that everyone was so excited to make would suddenly become visible for every passing NPC to witness. I experienced a bug that if I was in my inventory for more than about 10 seconds my game would crash. So, while some of the glitches were funny (Bethesda-esque even), a lot of them made the game genuinely unplayable. This compounded by the fact that no one wanted to see Keanu Reeves play a chaotic neutral asshole and that the game wasn't nearly as open-ended as advertised led to one of the largest video game failures in history. Word spread like wildfire and CD Projekt Red was suddenly center stage with proverbial genetically modified tomatoes all over their faces.

But now, three years after the game’s release, and the smog has cleared - is that all there is to it? Did CD Projekt Red jump headfirst into the negligent trap of “overpromise and underdeliver” or is part of the blame for Cyberpunk 2077’s disastrous launch on the environment surrounding it? I’m not arguing that the game didn’t have substantial problems that should have kept it from releasing, it did. But the game performed very well on PCs, the world has some beautiful environmental storytelling, and when bugs don’t get in the way it is genuinely fun to play. So, was it really as bad as it seemed? Or was it rather that years of hype for a game that promised to change the Action RPG Open World genre having to release smack in the middle of a global catastrophe can’t possibly be fulfilled. At the time of release, the pandemic was still in full swing. We were at home, uncertain of the future, just looking to distract ourselves from the actual terror out our door. So, when Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t fulfill our escapism needs it felt like taking the last sip of water away from someone in the desert. And even without COVID-19, it’s hard to compete with the depths of player expectations. Over such a long period of time fans had built this title up so large in their minds that it very likely wouldn’t have been able to fulfill those expectations regardless. I’m not suggesting that we as players shouldn’t get excited about things. But we should learn to temper our expectations with the marketing tactics of gaming publishers. Cyberpunk 2077 wasn't the first, and certainly won't be the last, open-world RPG to be released unpolished. But it certainly had the worst luck of any of them.