After 80+ hours of Red Dead Redemption 2, a question pops up in one’s mind:
In the process of making a game that examines the fall of the American frontier and the decline of the Wild West, did the irony register at all with Rockstar that they were also making a game about the end of the triple A design structure that has plagued the medium ever since the birth of the 7th gen?

Regardless of what pre-established biases one might come into RDR2 about the value of graphical fidelity and closeness to real life and focus on cinematic design and film language in games, it’s impossible not to be impressed by Rockstar’s commitment to the simulation of realism. Your character will meticulously grab each item he loots and place it in his satchel, craft each new tonic or bullet one at a time with detailed animations, remove and place his weapons on his horse whenever you switch them up, shuffle dominoes and grab each piece one by one in every game, and skin every hunted animal with gruesome detail and carry them on his back to his horse every single time. NPCs all have their per-determined schedules that happen regardless of your presence or not, wild animals behave accordingly to their nature and even hunt other species, and every mundane action, be it taking a shower, mounting a camp, cleaning your guns, or brushing your horse, carry a level of detail and weight never before seen in a blockbuster game. It also boasts one of the most beautiful environments to walk around, filled with detail and big expansive nature landmarks, frequently creating moments of awe as you ride around the mountains and landscape.

This level of realism is further elevated in the gang’s camp, where you have a group of misfits you can deal with daily and who all have their respective quirks, goals and actions. Rarely will you hear the same line of dialogue from these characters in the course of 80 hours, and the impressive amount of scenes and conversations that occur not only between your character and them, but also between themselves, means that you will finish the game without experiencing half of the camp scenes that happen dynamically and without feeling like scripted events. When you find yourself around a campfire with your gang after a well succeeded mission, being able to join in the singing and festivities with them, suddenly all the effort in creating a realistic world comes together and for a few seconds the immersion is achieved and one feels like he is a part of a fully realized world and that these characters are tangible and real.

It’s unfortunate then that each time you get into a story mission, that effort is collapsed and you are thrown back into the videogame. What was once acceptable in RDR1 now feels incredibly dated and restrictive, with the usual design structure of having you ride to the mission on horseback and having a chat with an NPC while you follow a yellow line, following every single instruction the game tells you without any chance to deviate from it, waiting for something to inevitably go wrong, and then shooting a comical number of enemies that spawn out of nowhere like a NES game until everyone is dead. Rinse, and repeat. The level of realism found in the open world aspects of RDR2 only serves to call attention to how detached and out of touch the story missions are, leading to incredibly absurd scenes where the main character chastises a crew member for killing too many people during a story cutscene, when you the player yourself have been forced to kill 50 people during a house robbery just the previous mission.

What ends up happening is that most of the stuff you will be doing in the open world won’t matter at all because that would be stepping on the story’s toes. Regardless of how much money you have or how much you have contributed to the camp and NPCs, nothing will have effect on how the story will progress, with the exception of a very simplistic and outdated Honor system. This in turn inevitably leads to the open world map feeling like just a bunch of lines between check marks to fill, with the occasional scripted event to deviate you, but not much!, from the beaten path, and the rare exploration quest that happens when the game decides you should. Even the act of hunting an animal in the wilderness is affected by Rockstar’s grip on your hand, having a highlighted line on the ground that flashes and leads perfectly to your prey. The simulation aspects end up being surface level mechanics used to visually impress the player, not really influencing in any meaningful way either the gameplay or the story. It’s all shallow spectacle.

Which is a shame, because RDR2 has one of the most compelling videogame characters ever created. Arthur Morgan’s story takes a very contemplative and introspective direction in it’s final act, as he finds out he doesnt have much time left in this world, and it leads to some of the most interesting and emotional moments that Rockstar has ever created. Arthur’s effort in making something out of the few life he has left ends up influencing the player’s action outside of the story, and in one of the most poignant and humane moments in the whole game, you are forced to lay down your controller for a few secs, as Arthur requests a moment from you so he can catch his breath, something that makes the player care and empathize with a bunch of polygons much more than any cutting edge cutscene in the whole game could. Even the act of playing the last stretch of the game mimics Arthur’s new perspective, the missions feeling like a slog to go through, Dutch becoming increasingly frustrating, repetitive and annoying to be around, and the creativity being lesser and lesser, which would have been an interesting and insightful direction, had that actually been the intention by Rockstar. But RDR2 is adamant in separating the story from the gameplay, even bafflingly inserting black bars on top and bottom of the screen each time control is removed from the player, as if to signal that it’s now movie time and no time for interactivity. Regardless of all the issues with the story and gameplay, Arthur’s story is enough to carry the whole game on it’s back, and any player invested in his tale will have a hard time not getting emotional at the gut-wretching ending.

But then the game continues. For 5 more hours. And it’s at this point that the dam breaks and the flaws of the game become full center and aren’t easy to ignore anymore. The epilogue, which lacks any self awareness as it presents itself as a two parter, drags it’s way into a fan pandering ending, filled with needless shooting, redundant subplots, and characters that completely undermine the impact of the actual ending of the game. We can’t have a simple mission about just herding some sheeps, shopping with a friend, or fly a hot air ballon. No, every mission has to have a bloody battle with a body count that would make Stalin jealous, because Rockstar cannot bear the idea that some players might be bored if there isnt anything to shoot at. During an exchange between Morgan and an NPC the screen fades to black as they start talking about their lives, as if to spare the player from all those “boring details”, instead leading straight to the action once more. Rockstar can’t bear the thought of giving more opportunities for normal interactions between the player and the NPCs, while I sit here thinking about how one of my favorite missions was when I crossed the whole map to see a character I was fond of, only to get a kiss and that being the end of the mission.

RDR2 is a bloated game that can’t read a room on when’s it’s time to bow down and stop the show, deciding instead to outstay it’s welcome for an absurd amount of time, like an old frail man clawing at the last moments before his time to move on. And maybe it’s also time for Rockstar to move on, and let ideas of cinematic grandeur and realism in videogames finally lay rest once and for all.

While it certainly didn’t set the world on fire as CDProjektRed hoped it sure set someone’s PC on fire.

The best way to describe Cyberpunk 2077 is that it could’ve been a solid mid-next-gen game that got released way too prematurely and suffered because of it. While I can respect the technical ambition with pushing hardware and graphics, even on mid settings it’s still fairly commendable, bugs, flaws, and all, bumping the lamp can get you so far until the real blind-spots of the game start creeping up.

There’s a lot of games to compare to Cyberpunk in whatever it’s trying to achieve as a game. It has the open-world sandbox approach of a Rockstar game, the cinematic non-interactive walk-and-talk sequences reminiscent of a modern Naughty Dog game, the sprawling story-based approach of a BioWare game, the walking simulator shoot-and-loot idiosyncrasies of a Bethesda game, and the unloaded gameplay garbage of any Ubisoft game. Out of all the games I can compare Cyberpunk with the two that stick the most throughout my 30 hour playthrough are the Deus Ex games (obviously) and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. Bloodlines especially since both were based directly from tabletop role-playing games. Along with starting out as a player navigating their way through the criminal underbelly of an urban city where factions and notable people are vying for power, the antagonistic force being a high society upstart wrestling control over the city, the MacGuffin basically involving a dead corpse (more or less), and even V’s journey of grappling with their mortality and individuality is strikingly reminiscent of the player’s in Bloodlines. It’s a worthwhile comparison to make because of how these games translate their source material. Bloodlines took it to become a worthwhile if imperfect first-person RPG, while Cyberpunk 2077 only really takes the lore and names of the systems?

I started off trying to play it like an RPG but midway through I stopped because the RPG systems themselves were just useless. The perks you get fall into the mainstream AAA camp of being arbitrary stat bonuses and percentage increases. It became mechanically spread super thin that it hardly became worth investing any points into. I don’t know why the game continued to keep up the pretense that it’s an RPG through the quest structure, dialogue tree, and mechanics if it hardly commits to any real player choice or freedom until the endgame.

On the related subject, what’s the point of having a Commander Shepard/Adam Jensen/Geralt protagonist if they neither feel like their own character or one purely created by the player? V’s clearly supposed to feel like their own character that we define/shape except for when they’re not? We never see them like one because everything’s strictly first-person which implies they’re completely our creation but then why give them a voice and set personality?

Then I started to just play it more like GTA where I drive around Night City and wreak havoc and do what I want. Sadly, this experience barely lasts because of how much of a joke that police AI was, how miserable driving feels, and how static this world felt. I can’t quite put my finger on what specifically tore the illusion of immersion apart, but Night City, for all it’s hardware ambition, feels just so unresponsive and boring to be in. It has good characters with quests (mostly Panam’s) that are worth doing, but it’s all a drop in a bucket full of shovel-ware radiant missions that were a chore to do.

I guess the problem stems from how uninteresting Cyberpunk 2077’s setting is for me to care about. As far as cyberpunk settings have gone in the genre, this feels like a 16 year old’s idea of what cyberpunk is. It’s a game that only pushes neon street grunge visuals and behind that shallow aesthetic completely avoids any attempt at a critique of capitalism other than having Keanu Reeves say corporations are bad in different ways. This is probably why I enjoyed Panam’s quests because pretty much all of it took place outside of the actual cyberpunk setting.

Near the endgame, I just gave up on whatever way I was supposed to play this game as the developers intended and played it like it was Deus Ex because stealth seemed the most engaging gameplay wise. For all the patches and continued promises CDProjektRed made in hopes of doing a No Man’s Sky rebound of delivering the game they promised, I don’t think it’s going to achieve it anytime soon. The newest patches can tweak driving and add stuff like being able to buy apartments which I guess is cool but they feel so minuscule to the real meat that Cyberpunk 2077 severely lacks as a game to become a genuine game changer.