My hot take is that this is actually a really good RPG--it's just very different. One thing that stands out to me is how Night City is probably the highest-budget, most detailed backdrop I've ever seen in video games. The story here is really about selfhood, entropy, and external manipulations. To paraphrase Mike Pondsmith, cyberpunk really isn't about saving humanity or changing the world or anything, but about saving yourself. The whole story is ultimately about V struggling to reclaim agency that Arasaka, Night City, Johnny Silverhand, a poisonous gig culture, etc. has stolen from them. At its best, the path story is one about how choice and agency are constantly denied to Night City's inhabitants, then giving the player the opportunity to kick and flail and beg to be a person again. I think it's a very beautiful story.
As an open world it's carried by beauty and flow (save for when that flow is interrupted by bugs) but is ultimately really counter-immersive. If Night City is meant to be this detailed place for realistic human behavior and meaningful engagement, then countless open world objectives dotting the map, encouraging you to play murdercop for thirty minutes to an hour to grind out a level or two is seriously destroying that objective. It is aided by a few gigs and notes that seem to draw everything together into one big meta-story about Night City itself, but it's got major problems. It is hard to immerse oneself in a city that also is, additionally, a double-jump-hacking-katana-wielding murder playground. Eventually, the player is going to just speed between murder objectives, double jumping over civilians, laughing at crude advertisements, and racking up a quadruple digit body count.
I think the endings are the strongest point. I am baffled by people who insist that because there is no perfect ending, the game is pointless. V being doomed is known from the start--all that you do is desperation and insistence to not fade away. Enshrining yourself into Night City legend in Johnny's preferred ending is cold comfort--empty, in the end, because V changes nothing. Trusting Arasaka is the grim supplication to the capitalist order, admitting that you have no plan for altering the world. Even the Panam ending, often called the best, only imagines a way out of the capitalist order by simply abandoning hope for altering it altogether.
Perhaps the main story's only real weakness that still frustrates me is an inability to imagine what the alternative to Night City's order could be. But making a game about that would necessitate a more complex political statement--one that would have to be more than "shoot everyone in Arasaka" or "commit to Arasaka" or "fuck everything about this." The alternative, of course, is a political aim that unites the people of the city and all their power under the banner of a representative party that could feed and house everyone and dismantle the corporate overlords. Doing so would be, necessarily, socialist, though, and it frustrates me that even in this cyberpunk fantasy world, we are still unwilling to openly imagine an alternative to capitalism.
This is a good video game. Its failures are not actually that special in the grand scheme of things. It's thoughtful, kinetic, gorgeous, but also buggy and dissonant and kind of shallow. I can name at least fifty games that are just like that. Why are we acting like this is a special case?
As an open world it's carried by beauty and flow (save for when that flow is interrupted by bugs) but is ultimately really counter-immersive. If Night City is meant to be this detailed place for realistic human behavior and meaningful engagement, then countless open world objectives dotting the map, encouraging you to play murdercop for thirty minutes to an hour to grind out a level or two is seriously destroying that objective. It is aided by a few gigs and notes that seem to draw everything together into one big meta-story about Night City itself, but it's got major problems. It is hard to immerse oneself in a city that also is, additionally, a double-jump-hacking-katana-wielding murder playground. Eventually, the player is going to just speed between murder objectives, double jumping over civilians, laughing at crude advertisements, and racking up a quadruple digit body count.
I think the endings are the strongest point. I am baffled by people who insist that because there is no perfect ending, the game is pointless. V being doomed is known from the start--all that you do is desperation and insistence to not fade away. Enshrining yourself into Night City legend in Johnny's preferred ending is cold comfort--empty, in the end, because V changes nothing. Trusting Arasaka is the grim supplication to the capitalist order, admitting that you have no plan for altering the world. Even the Panam ending, often called the best, only imagines a way out of the capitalist order by simply abandoning hope for altering it altogether.
Perhaps the main story's only real weakness that still frustrates me is an inability to imagine what the alternative to Night City's order could be. But making a game about that would necessitate a more complex political statement--one that would have to be more than "shoot everyone in Arasaka" or "commit to Arasaka" or "fuck everything about this." The alternative, of course, is a political aim that unites the people of the city and all their power under the banner of a representative party that could feed and house everyone and dismantle the corporate overlords. Doing so would be, necessarily, socialist, though, and it frustrates me that even in this cyberpunk fantasy world, we are still unwilling to openly imagine an alternative to capitalism.
This is a good video game. Its failures are not actually that special in the grand scheme of things. It's thoughtful, kinetic, gorgeous, but also buggy and dissonant and kind of shallow. I can name at least fifty games that are just like that. Why are we acting like this is a special case?