Hi Dreamers!
Today I want to talk about one of the most controversial games of the last years and I’ve got a lot to say, not only about the game, you’ll see. There’s just some information you need to know: I played Cyberpunk 2077 for 100 hours and after that I decided to quit (until the DLC release forecasted in 2023), and I wasn’t neither tired, nor bored. I was completely addicted and I thought 100 hours were enough for my brain and it was time to move on.
…But just with the videogame.
1. The most wanted videogame ever
Cyberpunk 2077 is a videogame released at the end of 2020, during the pandemic global crisis. It was one of the most awaited games of the last 10 years or maybe 20, it’s hard to say. Every gamer started talking about Cyberpunk since it was announced. The target of CD Project Red (the developers) was huge. A GDR game set in a futurist crazy city. One of the most stunning graphics ever seen in a game, a deep story, a lot of moral decision for the player, tons of missions, characters, vehicles, weapons, multiplayer mode, a city that looks alive. Night City.
The budget for this game may sound crazy: over 316 million dollars.
That’s enough to talk about the game. Cyberpunk 2077 writes the history of videogames even just considering its numbers.
2. From Hype to Rage
Well, whoever doesn’t know the story could think “It was a bestseller in few hours” and they couldn’t be more wrong. The game was successful on day-one but only as for sold copies. The users were really angry. The game was a buggy crap. Every sort of glitches or bugs were inside and a lot of features were missing. Not even Elder scroll series, the worst of the worsts could have been so bad.
A lot of players asked for a refund, so CD Project Red lost also a lot of money in the stock market. Therefore a hell of loss and disillusionment for the studio and for the players.
Once more after No Man’s Sky,the videogame industry tried to sell a bad game thanks to unreliable promises.
3. Others skeletons
This closet hide more skeletons. Just before the release some employees of CD Project Red were interviewed and they revealed a big problem of crunches and poor management inside the company.
Crunch is a common issue for employees of IT companies, but videogame companies (especially the majors) usually suffer a lot of this problem and sometimes articles pop out to confirm this nasty situation. CD Project Red did his worst, and employees talked about crazy schedules, abuses and a lot more.
Also other companies were involved into this storm, like the QA team (outsourced).
In conclusion, the development process wasn’t so clean and nice (even for IT standards). Probably shareholders should start to think how to keep financial margins reducing stress on their employees.
4. Redemption
Every great story reach the worst moment and only after the heroes come back to defeat the enemy and win.
This story is not different. After the release, the team had been starting to fix bugs. It was a long and tedious process during which the online community alternated between ignoring and making fun of Cyberpunk.
Silently, the game had disappeared from radars, overcome by newest games. And finally the redemption!
CD Project Red released an anime on Netflix based on Cyberpunk universe called “Cyberpunk Edgerunners”. It was a complete success.
With Edgerunners, a lot of old players and also new ones have started playing the game and it has reached new records on Steam regarding the game most played in a day.
Also my game started in those weeks.
6. Cyberpunk is a complex Genre
Cyberpunk genre started as a branch of science fiction novels during the 80’s. The idea is a futuristic world where people can upgrade their bodies with technology devices to overtake the human limits.
The society is governed by a few big companies, everybody knows it and try to be part of those or be near as possible to get enough money to live.
People have a low moral due the difficulty of living in a world like this.
Crazy world, right? This is just the surface. Cyberpunk is really complex and put on the table a lot of thoughts about our present world with parallelisms and metaphors not very far from us. Could be realistic that we will live in a future similar to that? What can we do to prevent this?
7. Influences
Generally speaking after 80’s and 90’s cults like Ghost in the Shell, Akira and Blade Runner, Cyberpunk as genre seemed dead, but around 2016-2018 some experiments like Ghost in the Shell movie kicks in and made it to live again.
Cyberpunk 2077 is not the first of this new wave but probably the most iconic and biggest into videogame industry, so a lot of games artistically influenced by Cyberpunk 2077 pop out after it.
As a designer I can’t say Cyberpunk 2077 has stunning mechanics but technically and the graphics are really a benchmark for the next AAA and overall it is a great game, easily in my personal top 10.
