Intro: What is it like to live forever? What is it like to taste immortality but have it snuffed out? Tell me what is it like to be strong, unstoppable, mechanically enhanced, and yet so human? In a world where cyber wear and prostheses have taken over, the term “guarding your humanity” has never been more prevalent than it has now. War, famine, destructive chaos broke loose and created this existence of organized mayhem and tainted realism.
It All Starts With V and an Unclear Storyline: Cyberpunk 2077 was in production for close to 10 years. Saying that this game is an accomplishment is an understatement. The concepts, topics, and overall themes in this game are mind-bending and tragic, beautiful and mentally trying. Seeing this game unfold before me left my mind with many questions, sometimes blurting them out loud in my small bubble of a recording room. In an altered universe where prostheses and body modification have become the norm, would you take a dive to become less human and more robotic? It’s an honest question I ask since so many of the themes and stories surrounding this game have to do with a loss of humanity and a sort of trying to regain what was taken away if you will. Cyberpunk 2077 looks into several storylines, the first one being V stealing “the relic” aka the biochip from Arasaka Corporation, the other is Johnny Silverhands story which closely ties in with the story of the Relic. Bringing in multiple plotlines into one overarching storyline makes it confusing at the beginning of the game because I wasn’t sure where the story was going, or what its aim truly was. Having an open-world game, plus a linear plotline, plus side quests, and five different endings is a task that is difficult in itself to complete. Because of the sheer magnitude of this game, it had several delays, coupled with the ever so elegant neon yellow screen that gave me and every gamer a form of PTSD, and I don’t say that lightly. Each delay felt like an excuse to a lot of people, but for those who know the gaming industry and how many times you have to revise, redo, go back and forth between the writers, the developers, the designers, motion graphics team and everyone in-between the process becomes wearing and overall emotionally draining. Not to mention the crunch time that was also in effect during the later parts of the project from what I’ve read. No story should EVER, I repeat EVER come with a crunch time. Be it that this game is almost a decade old from when it was created. Yes, they should have had a decent running and COHERENT storyline from the start of the game, but even with a decade-old story and a team that has been working tirelessly on a game that is in a sense revolutionary in its concept, they should still be allowed the time needed to complete it without worry that it won’t meet people’s expectations. While you can never please everyone you can come close .
Glitches In this Game are Subjective: Speaking about not being able to please everyone, this game made some monumental hits and some disastrous misses, and in my eyes some extraordinary leaps as far as the story, which I will get to later. In Cyberpunk 2077 the bugs are what killed the experience for a lot of people. For those who were playing it on a PS4, it looked like it was running on a PS1. It has been officially removed from the Play station Store from what I know and people were able to get their refunds successfully. What I will say is that while there were bugs, they were subjective. Did I experience some bugs? Yes. But it wasn’t enough to take away from the enjoyment of the game. I experienced a total of five bugs in the game. There was one that actually helped me in defeating the final boss, and some that were ones I would expect in any game. There weren’t any that broke the game, or stalled it, or made it impossible for me to play. In my eyes, Cyberpunk 2077 is beautiful, created with love, and made me feel the hard work and love put into it.
There are many people who like to voice their grievances, annoyances, and entitled feelings towards this game. When one purchases the game they are the owner who put their hard-earned money into something that costs $60, $70, or even upwards of $100. The consumer has the right to voice their grievances and do what’s right for them, however, when it goes into the territory of bullying, harassing, and gaslightlighting the developers who are already stressed enough as it is about a games very rocky release that’s not appropriate what so ever. In my view this game should have had a release on PC first, then current-gen consoles then previous-gen consoles. While there were so many delays, it was rushed, we all know this. It should have been released in 2022, or even 2023.
Store Your Soul For Later:
One of the best things in this game by far is the story. By the time you got to what the concept of the story is, it was in the middle towards the end of the game. We knew that the biochip was a danger to V and it is our goal as the player to remove it, but we also know that Johnny Silverhands construct is in the chip as well and it is slowly overwriting V’s information if you will. When V was shot it triggered a resurrection nanotech, and through this, we have Silverhand’s construct overwriting V’s, with me so far? So why is sliverhand in V’s mind? To make a somewhat complex storyline into something simplified, Johnny silverhands girlfriend Alt Cunningham created Arasakas version of soul killer which would house all souls in a digital fortress Mikoshi. By the year 2077, a program called “Secure your soul” was created writing a digital copy of the mind, into a human brain hence why the need for the relic arose because it's my guess that there needed to be a safe way to house all of these souls and personalities.
Now here’s the fun part and where psychology comes into play. Would it be possible in the future to store your personality, and what makes you, you, your essence your you-ness. Nature versus nurture, hereditary attributes that are passed on, are all things that cannot be downloaded onto a USB drive. We already know what can be done with biomechanical engineering such as prostheses, why not take it a step further and cheat death entirely. Well, there’s a problem. The soul is an incorporeal part of a human. It cannot be downloaded like a program. Your “you-ness” in a sense is one use only. Replicating that is very difficult, damn near impossible, Google recently had secured a patent for “robot personality development” which stated that they could house the personalities of the dead as well as a living person's personality. I don’t know where the world of tech, in particular, biotech is headed but I'm intrigued and slightly nervous. I doubt it would be like Cyberpunk 2077 where you sit on a table and your personality is housed in containment software of sorts, just waiting to be used or downloaded.
The Lack of representation in this game: This game is quite binary, isn’t it? for a world that prides itself on being unique and different, the gender norms are split in the traditional male is aggressive and female is tough yet soft. Kind of woke without really being woke kind of principle. You will have brutish females but you only see them in other life paths not in Corpo oddly enough. When the discussion on gender representation comes into play I feel like the creators of the game are all in, they are happy to represent the LGBTQ+ community, on Twitter and social media platforms, but when it comes to ACTUALLY putting in the work and research to implement it in the game it's little to nowhere being found unless you created a trans character or a character that doesn’t follow a normative path. From what is saw besides one poster, there were no people who identified as transgender in this game.
The same could be said for autistic persons. There is a suggestion in this game that people with autism can be “fixed.” The autism spectrum is, what I like to call another branch of a person's personality not a disorder. I know it's classically deemed as such, but someone with autism is no different from you or me. There is also a suggestion that cyber wear in the game can help one overcome their autism, which is lunacy to me. Autism is something that someone is born with, not something that someone can magically heal from. It’s like someone saying “let me cure your homosexuality.” It doesn’t work, and that’s the game's ignorance showing. You cannot cure what is a part of your DNA. You can not cure what is you.
Taking Life into your own hands, Final thoughts: This is a game that will forever be one of my personal favorites. Yes, a lot of work needs to be done in the representation of the LGBTQ+ community and how autism is viewed but that comes with time, education, a lot of patches, and MAYBE A DLC. The reason why I found this game incredible is the story. It is this concept of storing your soul in a Makoshi which is basically an electronic library. Then add the philosophy behind what that could mean for the human race as well as the character V, on top of trying to be as human as possible, going through ranges of emotions, just to get through and live every day. We are V; we are every human searching for a purpose. Whether that means to live the quiet life or die in a blaze of glory, we are all looking for that one thing that makes our journey a unique one.
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