Cyberpunk 2077: Underwhelming, Insulting, Badly Managed

Warning: This article contains a discussion of racism, ableism, transphobia, and anti-sex worker rhetoric.

Cyberpunk 2077 was announced in 2012. We first saw a teaser trailer for this thing in 2013. We next really saw it again in 2018 at E3, before a 2019 announcement gave us an April 2020 release date. When it was announced, The Witcher 3 hadn’t yet been released and was besieged with bugs and development issues that caused its release to be delayed.

The Witcher 3 ended up as CD Projekt Red’s breakout game and came to be widely regarded as one of the best video games of all time. This built more excitement for what would come after The Witcher franchise for the company.

So it was that, with glossy trailers and celebrity cameos, CD Projekt Red developed the hype train for Cyberpunk 2077 with near-ruthless efficiency. Off The Witcher 3‘s back, they had already accrued a lot of good faith from the gaming community. An outspoken belief in single-player games. An apparent pro-consumer approach that decried microtransactions and season passes. A pro-developer stance that repeatedly promised to exclude crunch from its development process. All these enabled CD Projekt Red to develop a reputation as a community darling.

No doubt this contributed to the (by now highly puzzling) slew of nominations and awards Cyberpunk received in 2018 when no one from the wider public had played it yet and all we had to go on was 45 minutes of officially touted gameplay. Expectation and excitement netted nominations for Best PlayStation 4 Game and won Cyberpunk Best Game, Best Xbox One Game, Best PC Game, and Best RPG at E3 2018.

Necessary sidebar: maybe it’s just me, but I’m thinking corporate entities that exploit, underpay, abuse, and take advantage of their employees without giving them a single avenue to object or articulate their needs shouldn’t win awards. Oh, wait, it’s not just me.

In other words, games also shouldn't win awards if they're tested by QA workers who aren't paid enough to eat three meals a day, or if their CEOs make $40 million while laying off hundreds, or if their workers are kept on indefinite contracts to deprive them of benefits, etc

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) December 12, 2020

This reputation also played directly into audience responses as Cyberpunk 2077‘s development continued. People were willing to wait and were excited enough to pre-order the moment it was an option. Of course, it’s not just about securing sales through direct marketing, CD Projekt Red reached out to community members and merchandise piled up too.

Gaming chairs, graphics cards, action figures, branded gaming mice, running shoes – I could go on. Many of these memorabilia items were shipped to content creators and streamers who, understandably excited and grateful for the partnership opportunities, lent their time, energy, and platforms to building still further anticipation for Cyberpunk‘s release.

Altogether, the gaming community at large had a lot of patience for the long development period. CDPR was excited, excitable, and engaging. Charming, even. Patience was, broadly speaking, had when 2020 almost immediately went off the rails due to the pandemic, bringing a shedload of difficulties to the world of game development. Work shifted to home and distance working, which in turn slowed down the game itself.

Many gamers were forgiving, even as one delay followed another. After all, we were all in the same boat, weren’t we? We were all struggling to acclimatize, to keep up, to meet our obligations the way we had before. To get out of bed, even, some days. If the pandemic meant that game devs needed more time to take care of their health and produce a finished product they could be proud of, then the delays were more than worth it.

Others though had their selfhoods so embedded in a game they hadn’t even played (because no one had) that they barraged the developers with death threats on social media. This behavior really should have been a glaring warning sign for how people would behave after the game was released.

It wasn’t a rosy road to get there and It wasn’t a rosy road once it was released. Cyberpunk 2077 would be delayed three times before finally releasing on December 10th, 2020.

I want to address one thing in regards of the @CyberpunkGame delay.
I understand you're feeling angry, disappointed and want to voice your opinion about it.
However, sending death threats to the developers is absolutely unacceptable and just wrong. We are people, just like you.

— Andrzej Zawadzki (@ZawAndy) October 27, 2020

It would eventually come out to, honestly, pretty good reviews. People have claimed it’s been review bombed on Metacritic, but at the time of writing, it has a bright green 89 review score from professional critics and a reasonable 7.0 from users.

After denying more than once that CDPR would force its developers to crunch, they came out shortly after celebrating that the game had gone gold, and admitted that they were instigating crunch for their workers. Subsequent coverage found that, in fact, developers had been working under crunch conditions perhaps since as early as January of this year, in essentially direct contradiction to statements from CDPR executives.

The official Cyberpunk 2077 Twitter account made repeated edgy jokes and dismissed trans voices about the representation and ideas in the game while fetishizing trans bodies as a deliberate, concerted part of their marketing. After touting an inclusive character creator as one of the game’s major marketing points, the game would provide no non-binary options and tie your character’s pronouns to their voice.

Essentially, as far as Cyberpunk is concerned, what makes us trans is in our pants (gosh, they were so proud of their genital customization) and even then, they don’t care about our pronouns. Classy, right?

The game is doing no better when it comes to other aspects of diversity and inclusion, while we’re at it. A white gang that posed as Haitians, originally a commentary on cultural appropriation in the TTRPG Cyberpunk 2077 is based on, became actual Black Haitians in the video game, laden with disrespectful tropes and stereotypes. An Asian gang is just that, nondescript, nonspecific East Asians.

The game, in general, carries a particular anti-Asian sentiment throughout. This is something that is frequently seen in the cyberpunk genre but also specifically noted here, ranging from shallowly tropey depictions to outright lazy and insulting objectification.

One reviewer suffered an epileptic seizure while reviewing the game, due to the similarities between the gear in-game and real-life equipment and techniques used to induce seizures for medical purposes. This same reviewer was promptly barraged with harassment and videos deliberately and now maliciously, intended to cause additional seizures. Purely because they commented on this aspect of their experience and the lack of warning or accessibility settings.

The game rewards players with “street cred” points for killing gang members, who are overwhelmingly depicted in racist, stereotyped, and insulting ways while protecting police officers. These bounties “aren’t optional.” Meanwhile, full-service sex work is widely available to characters in Cyberpunk‘s universe, yet at the same time, sex work is depicted as dangerous, criminal-adjacent, and something from which sex workers need to be rescued.

As explained in the linked Twitter thread, it’s not just inconsistent. It’s well-demonstrated that decriminalization of sex work makes it safer for sex workers, and Cyberpunk 2077 clearly wants sex work to be widely available and taboo, which simply doesn’t add up. More than that, it’s also insulting and condescending, with in-game responses to sex workers ranging from pity and assumptions that sex workers are victims to outright vitriol and anti-sex worker hatred.

Then, in the days just before release, came the reports that if you were to review the game, you could only use footage from official trailers and none of your own recorded footage. There were claims that more streamers than journalists were getting keys for Cyberpunk 2077, signaling to almost everyone that they were more interested in positive coverage from enthusiastic streamers than the potential for critique.

Many of these content creators are people of color and/or members of the LGBTQIA+ communities, content creators who may not be able to turn down partnership opportunities lest they be blacklisted or otherwise dismissed from such opportunities in the future. Content creators who, by virtue of existing, can be wielded as convenient excuses for offensive in-game content, “we can’t be transphobic or racist, look at all the minority streamers who said our game was okay.”

Further still, copyright strikes seemed to be often leveled against community members who posted screenshots to criticize the game for appropriative and disrespectful content. Not like that whiffs of critique suppression or anything.

Cyberpunk can you please not!!!! How many times to we need to have this conversation!!! pic.twitter.com/IkQ7H72v1e

— Timothée Kalameet / Conquest of Dread (@dreadconquest) December 4, 2020

Then the game came out to the wider public. On PC, if you have a good enough set up, it runs well enough. If you have a current-gen console like an Xbox Series X, it runs smoothly and looks good. If you have a PlayStation 4 or an Xbox One, however? Well, the game’s quality is so all over the place that OpenCritic has placed a warning about significant version disparities on its Cyberpunk 2077 page.

In but the first of several murky communications around this issue, CDPR themselves have apologized for “not showing the game on base last-gen consoles.” This just scratches the surface of a myriad of underlying issues. I’ll concede I don’t know all the ins and outs of game development, and I’m happy to be corrected. For now, I’m struggling to wrap my head around how a game announced eight years ago still ended up with executives demanding crunch time from their employees and ended up riddled with bugs and glitches.

I’m struggling to wrap my head around what, exactly, was being done for eight years to make any of this “necessary” (heavy emphasis on the air quotes; crunch is never necessary). This is to say nothing of what increasingly looks like a deliberate, precise series of maneuvers to leave Cyberpunk 2077 untouched by any possible criticism.

Keeping the game out of the hands of journalists and game critics until it could no longer be justified, and even then not allowing said critics to publish the bug-and glitch-laden footage that was shown on current-gen hardware, is a glaring red flag that smacks far more of deliberately misleading marketing than it does miscommunication.

Even this though, pales next to the (and I don’t feel I’m exaggerating here) horror show that is Cyberpunk 2077‘s frankly soulless depiction of everyone from trans characters through sex workers to characters of color. I say soulless for a reason. It’s not just trite, dull, and overdone. At best it’s dangerously, hurtfully ignorant. At worst it’s deliberately cruel.

If indeed we detect malice here (that together with the culture of fear inherent in a forced crunch) has only been mirrored by the very gamers Cyberpunk was meant to ship to. It’s been posited by legal experts in the past that deliberate incitement of epileptic seizures via social media could constitute assault, and this wasn’t just one rogue gamer.

This was multiple gamers in tandem, in fact nearly in unison, because one critic broke from the pack and from CDPR’s “community darling” stance to state that the game contained a health risk. This nearly resembles a cult of personality at this point,

This incident (if we can call it that) is just a microcosmic example of a much larger problem. I’ll be forthright: I too was willing to forgive the delays over the course of this year for exactly the reasons mentioned above. However, I was unlikely to purchase Cyberpunk in the first place. It’s way out of my price and hardware range. Maybe I would have watched someone else play it, as opposed to where I am now purposely avoiding streams and YouTube playthroughs left and right, but I wasn’t in the club.

This club, at the time of writing, consists heavily of #gamers who have precisely and deliberately been worked into a buzzing excitement of what essentially amounts to brand loyalty. A brand loyalty so intense that Cyberpunk became integral to not just their finances but their identities so that any criticism of the game upon release felt like a personal attack that supposedly needed swift and vicious retaliation.

This is the result of 8 years of development. A glitchy, buggy, visually unappealing mess that doesn’t run competently on the very systems it was developed for, laden with racism, transphobia, fetishization, and anti-sex worker rhetoric. An exemplarily repugnant show of capitalist greed with bad management and dishonesty all the way down that overinvested gamers are still willing and eager to assault and harass people to defend.

Wait, what? And they called it Cyberpunk? Not to get all Inigo Montoya here, but someone needs to tell CDPR what the word “punk” means.

CDPR could, at the bare minimum, have used the community goodwill they’d accrued to their own advantage and taken more time with the game. That they have made their money back already is evidence of that. They could have fostered a comfortable, crunch-free environment for their developers without holding Metacritic-dependent bonuses over their heads like a threat: “if the game does poorly, it is because of you, and we are going to punish you for it.”

Of course, CDPR has reneged on that bonus stance now, but they’re continually reneging after the fact, instead of getting it right the first time. Even then, would they have delivered a truly impressive game? Something that really embodies transhumanism, futurism, and exploring the ideas of cyberpunk that are interesting and groundbreaking?

I suspect the answer is no. The execs at CDPR might be responsible for people paying out of pocket for an unfinished game. I believe that most of the flaws of Cyberpunk 2077 rest on their shoulders. I also believe that the developers are the ones who wrote in police-positive, racist, transphobic, ableist, and anti-sex worker content on purpose. It’s not an accident.

All of this is to say corporate entities don’t need your sympathy. The developers have already been paid, although nothing can return to them the time, emotional expenditure, and relationship costs inflicted on them by executives. Nothing can return to them, the time they will now have to spend bringing this game up to par either.

These are sentiments we have to hold in tension, that these developers were both exploited by executives and exploitative of their audiences. Both things are true. All of which, essentially, goes to say that you, the gamer, can say no. You do not have to invest your money, your time, or your identity in a product and a company that has repeatedly, and on purpose, shown that it doesn’t love you and won’t.