Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) by CD Projekt Red

Present-day internet discourse certainly leaves a lot to be desired.

It seems like with every major game release a cabal of confirmation bias-seeking nincompoops skitter out of the woodwork with the specific goal of weaponizing any piece of data they can find which confirms that New Game™ is either the best thing since sliced bread, or an unholy amalgam of everything that's wrong with the medium, the industry, and human civilization as a whole.

The amount of ridiculous, false criticism I've heard regarding Cyberpunk 2077 so far is astonishing and depressing. 

"It's not an RPG!" It most definitely is. There's ample roleplaying to be had here, and not limited to just whether you want to play stealthily or in open-combat.

"Your choices don't matter!" They most definitely do. I've replayed several story missions and been surprised by how much they change in general, but also by how the game recognizes small things such as reading a single e-mail which grants you a dialogue option with a character who's hiding something later, or asking a minor question which ends up raising suspicion of a snuff film compound you are later tasked with infiltrating, causing them to add more guards patrolling the perimeter (you learn this via a specific email you can find on a computer in the compound, which is not there if you never ask the question earlier). Perhaps most notably, a key choice you make in one of the first story missions has a massive impact on a very important side quest in Act 3. There are dozens more examples I could list.

"The worst open world." NPC AI complaints aside, this is the best open world I've ever seen. Specifically from an art direction and level design standpoint, this world succeeds in spades. It looks gorgeous, feels real, and features an endless number of carefully crafted nooks for the player to explore. It's mind-blowing.

"Stealth sucks! Shooting sucks! Driving sucks!" Stealth is good. Shooting is better. Driving is adequate. All three aspects of this game are much better than I had expected from a developer who had never made a game featuring any of them before.

"It's got no heart!" Cyberpunk 2077 features some of the most human, charismatic, and carefully crafted characters I've ever come across in a game. Cyberpunk chooses a dark satirical angle with exploring its world, but the game's true heart—where it opens itself up, makes itself vulnerable, and, as a result, becomes most earnest—is in its character writing and its characters' story arcs. The experience of this game relies on how you choose to affect the lives of Night City's denizens, and the emotional payoff from following these arcs through to their conclusions is where the game lives or dies.

More than ever, people interested in video games need to take early post-release hot takes with a grain of salt. Cyberpunk 2077 is a hugely flawed game, but every CD Projekt Red game has been hugely flawed due to the ambition the developer pours into the games they produce. Witcher 2's branching storylines feature two wildly different stories, which require the player to play the game twice to fully experience everything it has to offer. On the downside, this makes a single playthrough feel a bit abrupt and incomplete, requiring the player to bludgeon through content they've already seen in order to gain a grasp of the full story. Witcher 3's narrative and world have so much effort packed into them that the actual combat sometimes fails to bear the brunt of it all and becomes dry and repetitive for some players. CDPR shoots for impossible goals and inevitably fails to accomplish everything they set out to, but still makes pretty damn great games because they end up succeeding here and there, and when your goals are so lofty succeeding only sometimes is usually enough to float the experience even when so much of it is flawed and outright broken.

Where CDPR doesn't deserve slack, though, is in the way they've treated console players. I'm a PC-only player, so I played Cyberpunk 2077 on PC. But what CD Projekt Red did in purposely obfuscating how poorly this game runs on last gen consoles is extremely sketchy at best, and outright malicious and deliberately misleading at worst. This company fucked their console consumers. I refuse to believe they weren't able to provide review copies because they were "working until the last minute"; that's silly. They deliberately prevented the truth about how poorly the console versions ran from seeing the light of day in order to cash in on hype and holiday dollars, and that sucks.

CD Projekt Red is a developer of extraordinarily ambitious narrative- and character-driven RPGs, and I love that. They are also a developer who has taken advantage of their reputation as consumer darling who cares about their customers, when that is plainly not true. They are just another AAA developer, and they deserve to be treated as one from this point onwards.

The hype for this game clearly ran out of control, and many people already recognize that the largest problem with Cyberpunk 2077 is not actually anything in the game, but the warped and unrealistic expectations players had when they ran it for the first time.

The lead-in

I'm not sparing myself from said hype. I honestly can't recall the last time I was as excited for a video game as with Cyberpunk 2077. Covid-19 has kept me indoors and not working for a while, now, with books and video games as my chief time-sinks.

I adore Witcher 3. It might be my favorite game of all-time. I've poured nearly 600 hours into the game over the past 5 years, over 3 separate playthroughs. So knowing that the same developer—the same team, even—was working on a new game really lit my fire. I must have watched the 2018 gameplay reveal a half-dozen times. I watched all the Night City Wire preview episodes. I gobbled up preview interviews with developers like I was starved. On December 10, 2020—the game's release date—I counted down the hours, chatted online to friends and others on various Discord servers and subreddits and shared in the collective excitement. In the last hour, I watched the minutes tick by as I took in the release party stream on Twitter. When I finally finished up downloading the day one patch and first launched the game, the experience of starting up the game was something like this:

And then I jumped into the game. So, how was it? Did it live up to the hype? Yes and no—like any CDPR game. But, for me, mostly yes (I know, I know; shocked gamer noises).

The heart and hard work required to craft a city from the ground up

I grew up just outside of New York City, and I've spent a lot of time there throughout my life. Cyberpunk's Night City is the first video game city that truly feels like a real city does. The most minute of back alleys feels like a real, lived-in place. Different cultures melt together, creating numerous examples of differing architecture, shops, NPC chatter, and loudspeaker announcements in different languages. There's detritus scattered about, clutter on fire escapes, empty bottles on back-alley porches. The way the nooks and crannies of this city fold inwards onto each other, overlapping and intersecting, is incredibly life-like and bleeds realism, but at the same time, doesn't; the first time you see glowing, neon advertisements which stretch upwards into the sky, or see airborne vehicles zipping through the air, you'll know you're in a science fiction setting. It's just the right balance of realism and fiction; enough to feel familiar, but at other times, utterly foreign. It's a joy to exist in such a surreal, satirical, curious place. And as far as gameplay, although Night City appears labyrinthine and layered, built up and up on itself over the decades, but its levels never manage to feel overwhelming or too difficult to navigate. It's a truly masterful job done by the people who have designed this world.

There is an endless amount of love put into each and every area I came across in this city. The environmental artists and level designers have created extraordinary spaces which satisfy both your brain and your heart; they appear to be real, logically, while also satisfying your heart's desire for an aesthetically pleasing place. I can't say enough about it. Walking through the city and taking in these spaces and grasping the stories these level designers are telling you just with a few pieces of clutter never gets old, and it subconsciously heightens every other experience I've had with the game. I may be deep into a story mission, focused on what's happening with the characters and how to stealthily clear this next room, but I'm also subconsciously noting what this person's living space is telling me about them—what kind of food they eat, the clutter indicating that they might be depressed, old framed army photos of them and their friends long passed. The amount of sheer effort, sheer manpower involved in designing a single arcade, or a single liquor store on a single block in this game filled with dozens—or hundreds—of these things, is almost unfathomable. Someone asked me recently if it was readily apparent where they had spent the past 8 years developing this game (or 4 years in full-scale, active development). I answer instantly; in designing the bones and the flesh of this city. It jumps out of its pixels and slaps you in the face. You feel as if you exist in this world as just another function. You never feel as if your player character is the focus, you always feel as if you are witnessing one of the thousands of machinations that go on in this world each day. The way soda pop cans are placed on a shelf, doubtlessly the hard work of a cornerstone wage slave. The trash bags piled up against a fence in the badlands; a year's worth of a hard life's waste. The way a food stall's vendor looks at you as you walk past and the way you can read their experiences just from the way their area is organized.

If you enjoy games for these sorts of carefully crafted spaces—the Bioshocks, and the Dishonoreds, for example—then you're going to adore it in Cyberpunk.

The worldbuilding greatly supports this effort. The corporations, the brands of different drinks and porno ads and cars. All of this stuff is so strongly crafted from an artistic perspective that it's difficult, sometimes, to believe it's all not real. The history of this world is alive and mutating as the game goes on, living within its characters and imparted to the player with a level of skill only truly great writers can manage. Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith has a fantastic creation that feels real and lifelike in the worst ways; our deepest fears come alive. In this way Cyberpunk feels more like a post-apocalyptic setting than a cyberpunk one. But I suppose that's perhaps what the subgenre is; post-apocalypse without the big bang. Just a slow slide into ennui, depravity, poverty.

Cyberpunk 2077 is what The Outer Worlds tried so hard to be: A biting satirical look at consumer culture, a rabid display of the dark savagery of humanity, a dark story that's peppered with the naïve good intentions of some of its characters and its black humor. Cyberpunk strikes the balance far more deftly than Outer Worlds ever did.

The game looks flat-out jaw-dropping. I'm running it on my system without real-time ray tracing enabled and it still looks marvelous. Roads throw a damp slickness and reflect the omni-present glow of the city at night, the neon of buildings reflecting off them with precise screen-space reflections even with ray tracing turned off. Textures are high resolution. Cars gleam chrome and red and have so much effort put into them that it's insane to think about the man hours it probably took on behalf of the developer. Each car you own has a fully fleshed out interior, which you can inspect at any time in first-person. Every car has an opening hood and trunk. And all of these designs are fictional, yet look superbly realistic, gorgeous, and appropriate. The off-road cars or heavily modified ones have spare wires and screens strewn about. The luxurious supercars feature leather which looks so real you can almost feel it against your skin.

The sound design matches how ambitious the visuals are. This is perhaps the best sounding game I've ever played. Guns sound universally appropriate; all have fantastic impact. My favorite weapon, a sniper rifle called Overwatch that I got from a character-driven side quest, is my favorite sounding gun I've ever used in any video game, ever. It's that good. The thump it plugs into your ears is matched only by chonky bolt-action effect, and the reload clack is so sexy it'll leave your ears begging for the next time you empty the magazine. Revolvers, silenced pistols both sound great. Submachine guns titter away like late autumn insects. 

The amount of music, too, is astonishingly vast and universally excellent. CD Projekt Red has brought on several well-known artists create original music for the game's radio stations and it's all superb. Refused, Run The Jewels, and Nina Kraviz all make appearances. Refused's effort as Johnny Silverhand's band Samurai is particularly good, and I find myself looking for extra driving destinations whenever one of their tunes comes on the radio. In addition to this, some of the ambient and combat tracks are so good I've already found myself listening to them outside of playing the game, when reading or driving in real life. The ambient stuff in Cyberpunk 2077 is so atmospheric and feels appropriately sinister, hinting at what horrifying atrocity is always around the next corner.

I can't speak enough about how unbelievably great this game sounds. Music, cars, guns. It's a cacophony of beautiful noise that all crafts the experience at least as strongly as the visuals do. Bravo to the sound team at CD Projekt Red. They're the finest designers working in sound at any video game developer, in my mind.

In general, the sheer amount of work and heart put into various artistically-driven aspects of this game is nearly unbelievable and readily apparent.

Ambition

The fact that this game does not succeed universally in everything it does is dwarfed by the fact that it tries to do so much. 

Quests are constantly interlocked with one another. In the beginning I believed gigs were just uninteresting, one-off, side activities. But as I progressed through them I found this wasn't true. Several of the characters introduced in gigs re-appear later, either by mention from other characters, or in e-mails or shards. For example, one early gig I did—convincing an under-cover cop to drop her case when the gang was onto her—showed up 40 hours later, when I did a separate gig and found out she had been speaking with a crooked cop who refused to help her with the case. There are numerous examples of this throughout the game, but they're relatively subtle and depend on the player paying close attention to be noticed. The way side jobs are given to you, too, feels organic. You aren't simply dumped with quest line, one after the other, but rather the game gives you space of several days before having an NPC contact you with the next 'episode' (so to speak) of the quest.

Nearly all of the Main Jobs, Side Jobs, and a significant portion of the Gigs are high-effort, compellingly written stories, including some of the best characters written into a video game in years. Their production values are extraordinary; the standards in acting and animation in this game are higher than any video game has ever accomplished before. They bring these characters to life, and although the city and the narrative is at times horrendously dark, these characters regularly bring light and joy to it. The missions themselves constantly put the player in interesting circumstances and always ask questions of them: How do you judge a person's crimes, and is it your right to decide death is their proper punishment for what they've done? Is it better to live free, independent, destitute, and in poor health, or shackled and dominated, but in the lap of luxury and with every technological advancement in the palm of your hand? What does identity mean, and where's the line for when you stop being you? It gives you the means to affect not the world, but the characters you spend time with. You cannot save this world—it's already doomed. But you can save some of the people in it, and perhaps even yourself... If you're lucky.

I completed all of the side content Cyberpunk 2077 had to offer

Aside from these high-effort, well-written, well-designed quests, though, there are the NCPD Scanner Hustles. These appear as blue icons on your map, and there are a lot of them—150+ scattered throughout the game world. This is, unfortunately, where the effort begins to lack a bit. These small ambient events usually task you with cleaning out the enemies of an area and securing "evidence", which is almost always a container with a few pieces of loot, and a data shard giving you some background on why the incident was taking place. Typically it's something like a drug deal gone wrong, or a corporate stooge stealing from their employer and getting caught. They add some nice flavor to the world, but begin to become very dry and grindy after hitting only one or two of them. I think it was a mistake to include these on the mini-map and expect the player to clear them. Leaving them off the mini-map and letting the player stumble onto them organically as they played would have worked far better at making Night City feel a living open world. As they are, they feel too much like busywork and open world fodder, and thus come off as far too gamey. The icons appearing on your map and associating with an achievement push the player too strongly towards completing them, when they should have been left more ambiguous and had a more optional nature to them.

When the Scanner Hustles stumble into mundanity, though, you always have the interweaving, dopamine drip-feeding systems of Attributes, Perks, and Cyberware to drive you forward. I cleared every single Scanner Hustle in the game despite their relatively uninteresting nature simply because I was so hooked on the game's character specialization system and I enjoyed both the stealth and combat so much.

The carrots

Attributes, Skills, and Perks. Guns, Gear, Cyberware. Cyberdecks, Daemons, Quickhacks. The amount of systems in place, and the layers involved in each system allow for absurd amounts of depth and customization in the way you play the game. They're all interweaved.

Guns, too, feel incredible. I fully expected CD Projekt Red's first go at first-person shooting to be a sub par affair, but this turns out not to be the case. Shooting as a whole feels good, although the unique reload animations randomly pepper into the game as your skill with a weapon type increases always does a lot to heighten the experience. Once you begin finding iconic weapons, or receiving them as rewards for quests, everything hits an entirely new level.

The player's style of roleplaying is regularly referenced by NPCs

The game is constantly recognizing and calling out the way you spec you roleplay. On missions in which I went berserk and murdered every bad guy in sight, my allies and questgivers would make note of that; calling me a bad-ass, or being surprised I took out every guy. When I was stealthy, they'd notice that, too; calling me quiet as a mouse, calling me a ghost, or commenting on how quick and clean my job was. There are also specific characters you will vibe more closely with, via special dialogue options, if you spec a certain way. Nix, the netrunner at the Afterlife, will be much more chummy with you if you have high Int and netrunning capabilities. Likewise with Panam, a repairing and scavenging nomad, who will respect a more technically-talented player characters. The way the game specifically makes it a point you recognize your roleplaying and call it out to you was a constant joy for me, as it's something RPGs often fail to do. It puts you more strongly into the role you are crafting for yourself.

Your roleplaying is regularly given opportunity to show itself. The game gives you two characters to play: V, the street mercenary doing odd, often violent jobs for cash, and Johnny, whose consciousness has been imprisoned on a biological computer chip. V is the more open-ended of the two, as Johnny (played by Keanu Reeves) is an established anti-hero who's already famous in Cyberpunk lore. In the beginning, I played V as I wanted to roleplay him: cool, professional, competent, but prone to extreme violence at times. I played Johnny as he was written: drunk, arrogant, angsty, and sometimes cruel. I typically chose stealth and hacking with V and open combat and aggressive dialogue options for Johnny, no matter the situation.

As the story continued I found myself bridging the gap between the two; my Johnny softened, and my V became more brash and aggressive. Johnny's responses become softer, V's more aggressive. It's hard to expound on why this is so noteworthy without getting into more spoiler territory than what I've already dipped a toe into, but realizing that my manner of roleplaying the two characters had been slowly creeping towards the middle of the two was an experience I'll never forget, and something that could only be managed in the medium of video games. It was a rare case of the writing of the game matching my own personal experience. In most games, the way I feel and the way the game expects me to feel at any given moment are usually separate enough that it causes a jarring incongruence in the way I experience the game's narrative. Cyberpunk instead took advantage of its designers' ability to know exactly what my experience would entail, and to heighten that experience with their writing.

And yet despite all of this, there are strong criticisms on the internet suggesting that Cyberpunk 2077 fails as an RPG.

"It's not an RPG!"

One of the main criticisms of this game is surrounding its supposed lack of player agency over the narrative, or via dialogue options in general.

I've replayed several story quest chains and dialogue options impact their arcs—sometimes even just minor ones. There are the obvious choices in which you choose a particular faction to side with, which heavily impacts the quest chain, but those are pretty obvious. Examples being Maelstrom versus Militech early in the game, or Voodoo Boys versus Netwatch in the mid-game. But there are more subtle ones, too. For example, at one point I asked a seemingly innocent, information-gathering, optional blue question in dialogue to a BD dealer, which tipped off the snuff film compound you are tasked with infiltrating afterwards. The dealer lets them know that you were asking suspicious questions about them, and the compound added more guards. You can find an email on one of the computers which specifically mentions that someone was asking questions. I'm sure there are more instances such as this that I'm not aware of, but that will be more clear when I replay the game.

Is Cyberpunk 2077 a wide-open cRPG? No, of course not. V is a set character with voice acting, so that was never in the cards. But it's definitely comparable to Witcher 3, and, in my opinion, a more open RPG than that game was. It's not Fallout 4, though, which seems to be what most people are hinting at with this sort of criticism directed at Cyberpunk's supposedly limited dialogue options.

Your questions in dialogue can drastically affect quests, but these 
effects are usually subtle enough that the player won't realize their impact
unless they play a given quest twice

The conversation for how much an RPG should facilitate allowing the player to affect the actual narrative is a good one. Witcher 2 versus Witcher 3 is a pretty solid comparison, just choosing from CDPR's own oeuvre. Personally, I greatly prefer Witcher 3 because, although the player doesn't have nearly as much power to impact the grand narrative (the player's agency to change how things go is typically limited to individual quest chains, like it is in Cyberpunk), I felt it allowed the writers to tell a tighter, more affecting story, and I personally value storytelling over having a major impact on the narrative via dialogue choices. Cyberpunk's method of restricting this agency in order to tell a more cohesive story is what I prefer, because I always found Witcher 2's narrative to be too fragmented. Yes, you can greatly change where the story goes via your decisions (the entire middle portion of the game is completely different based on your choice in Act 1), but this is not always for the best, in my opinion. In Witcher 2, characters become stretched too thin, the plot spreads a bit too unwieldy, and you end up having to play the game twice to fully grasp what is happening. I think CDPR learned from this (I believe the same person who directed Witcher 2 directed Cyberpunk, so there is shared DNA there). But, there's an argument there, for sure. I know some people prefer that kind of agency over the plot. That being said, as far as Cyberpunk offering only (or even "mostly") false narrative choices, and dialogue choices which do not affect anything (or even "very little") in the game, that I definitely disagree with and there are examples pretty readily available throughout the game which contradict that criticism.

Drawbacks

Gushing aside, there are several things Cyberpunk 2077 does very poorly which deserve to be called out.

Firstly, crafting is nearly completely broken economically. It's far too expensive to upgrade the gear you currently have. I got to a point where, in order to upgrade my favorite pair of ~75 Armor shoes, I needed hundreds of rare upgrade components, when dismantling rare loot (which doesn't drop often, as the name suggests) only yields in the single digits. This quickly made my favorite pair of boots obsolete, so I was forced by necessity to chuck them for a clownish pair of neon green plastic snow-boot looking monstrosities. The player ends up endlessly swapping out their old gear for new gear in this fashion because of how broken the crafting economy is. It also has the ill effect of making their character appear to be a complete clown with ridiculous, mismatched clothes when they might rather appear to be street-savvy, or a professional operator. The opportunity for roleplaying with clothing is thus completely lost with the failure of this system.

The UI is also a completely broken mess. The way shards are sorted is particularly awful. I've currently got nearly 100 in two separate categories both titled 'Other'. It's impossible to locate shards by name because they aren't sortable, nor do they default to sorting alphabetically. If a shard pops up on screen, you'd better press 'Z' immediately, because once you have to search for it by navigating the menus it's pretty much gone for good. Even more severe is the fact that the quest log features utterly unhelpful blurbs. I had a quest I set down for a few hours when I felt like roaming, then, upon going back to the blurb to refresh my memory of what's going on, I saw only this summary:

How is this helpful at all? I have no idea whatsoever of where I left off, what was happening in this quest, how it started, etc. How the hell am I supposed to grasp the dozens of quests I've picked up when returning to them later? You'll often pick up quests just while driving somewhere in the middle of another quest, so it's impossible to do them all as you get them, and this sort Quest log fails abysmally at keeping the player's head in the game.

I feel like I must comment on bugs, since that's the big news these days. The only bugs I encountered through my playthrough were either minor graphical glitches—a character's cigarette getting stuck in the air, or my player character occasionally T-posing out of the car when I drive fast—or broken NPC triggers, which were always relieved on a reload.

For comparison's sake, I recently played Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and that game was far buggier than Cyberpunk 2077. I haven't experienced a single crash or soft lock with Cyberpunk 2077, yet I experienced numerous such issues with Valhalla—one of which caused me to lose hours of gameplay. I put about 40 hours more into Cyberpunk 2077 than Assassin's Creed Valhalla and I experienced markedly more bugs in the latter, overall.

Conclusion

At one point in my playthrough I had been forced into seeking out help from a certain gang in one of the more disreputable areas of Night City. My point of contact with said gang had already double-crossed me once before, trying to kill me due to a specific choice I had made. Yet, due to the situation, I felt it wisest to continue working with them. A few steps later in the quest line, and I found out that they actually could not help me at all, and were just using me the entire time—even after having tried to kill me once before, they screwed me again.

I was fully in my character's head at this point. Beyond frustration, my pride as a top-class merc in the city was insulted—they're really gonna try and screw me, again!? I had previously made the choice to side with them because it seemed the better option of the two, but now I realized I had made a mistake. This frustration bled into my roleplaying. The game was going to allow to me to leave the gang's building scot free, since I had sided with them despite being screwed over. But, via dialogue options, I was given the choice to antagonize my point of contact. I took this option (because fuck them, you know?), and progressed it into a decision, hidden in dialogue, to tell them all to get lost, and that I was going to kill them. I gleefully took it, unsheathed my Mantis Blades, and went ham on the lot. Limbs and blood strewn everywhere, I finally felt payback had been due. But it wasn't done yet. Shortly afterwards, a few more gang members came in to see what was taking so long, chattering to themselves. I quickly hid on a scaffolding as they came into the room strewn with gore. They commented, fearfully, that I had killed everyone, and they wondered at why and how I'd done this. I took them out stealthily, continued to the exit, also killing the person who had attempted to kill me beforehand.

This sort of agency is why I play RPGs. A major choice I had made in a quest prior led me to this path, and I reacted as my player character had. Being in your player character's head is something that no other medium offers aside from video and board games, and at this, Cyberpunk 2077 succeeds wholeheartedly. The quality of its world, its characters, and its gameplay only help facilitate this even more by often granting you in-world commentary based on your choices, and NPC reactions to said choices, even when it's a choice most players will not choose to make.

My strongest big-picture criticism is that the main story felt too short. Its quality was so high throughout that I was almost ravenously hungry for more, even after 150+ hours of gameplay. When I hit the point of no return, I was still wrapping up some side quests and map markers (I ended up clearing every single side job, gig, and NCPD Scanner Hustle in the game), and seeing the warning message that there was no more content to experience created a sharp pang of remorse within me. The end of Cyberpunk 2077 left an ache similar to the feeling of mourning a great novel when you're finished, and that's something that only the best, most affecting video games can manage.

I ended up completing every single quest and open world marker. I bought every single car. I completed every single cyberpsycho boss non-lethally. And yet, at the end, after nearly 200 hours of gameplay, I still wanted more. I didn't just like this game—I loved it. I'm still hopelessly infatuated with it. It's one of my very favorites of the past decade, and I would not be surprised to see all of the most fervent criticizers of this game change their tune, years from now, to argue that they really loved it along.

Perhaps in the years to come, Cyberpunk 2077 will eventually get the credit it deserves for being one of the greatest RPGs ever made—as games with rough launches such as Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines and Fallout New Vegas have before it. For me, it's already firmly ensconced in that pantheon, and things will only get better from here as the game receives further patching and post-release support.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Playtime: 173 hours

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (2011) by CD Projekt Red

Witcher 2 is a mix of positives and negatives whose positives ultimately far outweigh the minor complaints I have with the game.

It shares some of this roughness with its predecessor, The Witcher, which I find to be so rough as to be almost unplayable nowadays. The Witcher 2 had similarly convoluted, poorly designed levels which make it a chore to navigate to and fro while completing quests and exploring. The forest outside Flotsam is guilty of this. It's exceptionally difficult to get where you need to go without circling around hedges and trees and carving through numerous cannon-fodder caliber enemies. Additionally, looting and interacting with the environment is a huge chore given the cooldown on your amulet scanning ability, and the way the game locks out looting for what feels like an eternity once combat starts. Crafting and inventory management is a gigantic chore due to the obtuse user interface, which I felt like I had to fight with constantly. I also experienced a few lock-ups in which Geralt would get stuck in an animation, and a few crashes here and there. Transitions into different areas of the map are bothersome as well. There are numerous small complaints like this that show some of the roughness the previous game also exhibited, albeit far less of them overall.

But there are significant improvements, too. This game looks beautiful, especially when compared to the previous game. I was surprised by how high a quality some of the textures were, and the art design in general is noticeably improved from the first game. The character and monster designs are fantastic, with some of the sorceresses and Geralt's outfits being particularly stunning. Even just the background of the dice poker board, or the deranged drawings on the wall of the burnt out asylum are artistically impressive. Due to this mix of artistic prowess and a powerful new engine, a lot of the visuals on display in Witcher 2 still hold up today, nearly a decade after its original release in 2011. This is made more impressive by the use of developer CD Projekt Red's in-house REDengine, which they developed and used for the first time with this game, to glorious effect. Although I dealt with a few crashes, the game otherwise runs superbly (I'm near 150 fps at all times with max settings) and it still looks great despite being nine years old. It's a pretty impressive achievement for what was a small studio at the time to develop such a solid engine, and the game is made much stronger than the first Witcher, which used the ancient Aurora Engine, licensed from BioWare.

The combat is also substantially improved, ditching the previous game's ridiculous and shallow faux-rhythm system for classic third person combat which is far more satisfying to execute. It feels a bit loose to me, especially when compared to The Witcher 3, but it's still miles better than the first game's combat and far more intuitive. Enough depth has been added to make things more interesting throughout.

Where The Witcher 2 really shines, though, is in terms of narrative, quest design, and providing the player agency. The strongest thing The Witcher 1 did was weaving its quests together, so you feel especially detective-like once you begin uncovering all the pieces. This is also true of Witcher 2. For example, in Chapter 1 you very quickly obtain a series of side quests very early, simply by talking to people. Almost all of these quests turn out to be intertwined in some way: An incense-maker turned fisstech dealer and a drunken troll turn out to be related. Sounds far-fetched, but the common ground not only turns out to be reasonable and compelling, but also teaches you more about the political situation in the game's setting of the Pontar Valley. And if you're looking for a game in which you have the power to impact the story with your choices, then look no further—The Witcher 2 features perhaps the best example of "your choices matter" that I've ever seen in a game.

CD Projekt Red took a massive chance in the way they designed this game, because there's a significant choice to be made at the end of Chapter 1 that leads to two nearly exclusive routes through the plot. Meaning that no matter your choice, you will end up missing out on about a third of the story content in this game because the two paths moving forward from this choice are so different from one another.

It's a ballsy choice by the developer, because these people had to be designing these entire areas and questlines knowing that half of their players would likely never experience them (unless you're a nerd like me and replay the game to take the other route). The consequences of this choice further reinforces the fact that you are actually impacting what is occurring in the narrative. Few games take player choice to this extreme, and the fact that CD Projekt Red did makes The Witcher 2 something special for that reason alone. Furthermore, the choice is packaged appropriately—you likely won't even realize that you just made a game-altering choice, even though you still realize the gravity of the choice when you made it. The game won't pause and give you any hint that a massive choice is about to occur, which I love. It's an exceptional, ambitious move that is perfectly executed and it makes this game far more memorable and impactful than it'd be without it. Bravo to the developers for making the difficult decision to include two branching paths like this.

If for nothing else, this game is worth playing due to the quality of its narrative. It's a politically-driven game with strong social commentary and genuinely interesting characters, and it gives you the opportunity to pass judgment and act within this world as you see fit. It's constantly satisfying in this manner and it left me thinking about my own moral code regularly. Although Witcher 2 does not feature the classic, epic story that is featured in Witcher 3, I appreciated the narrower scale and the stronger focus on the political machinations of this world's elites. It might take some concentration, but once you grasp what's going on in the narrative, it's quite compelling.

The Witcher 2 is not without its warts, but it shows a staggering improvement over its predecessor and it remains more than enjoyable today. If you're in the mood for a good story, check it out. You'll probably be well-satisfied.

⭐⭐⭐

The Witcher (2007) by CD Projekt Red

I feel really bad doing this because I absolutely love CD Projekt Red and I enjoy later games in the series such as The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings and The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, but I just can't recommend this game. It's not a terrible game, but its age and some of the mistakes made by the developers working on their first game do a lot to make it a terrible experience to play.

Most notably is that the combat is awful. It's incredibly easy for the most part, but also very bland. Potions are all but useless, leaving you to whack with your sword repeatedly in its faux-rhythm game. I was completely exhausted of it by the beginning of the second chapter and was beginning to choose just to run past enemies.

There are a number of side quests that are worthwhile as far as story and character development, but too many are simple fetch quests and just not worth your time despite the experience and money they reward you with. Too many "fetch 10 wolf pelts", and "find the 10 sephirahs" here—the latter of which broke me for good and had me uninstalling the game.

Probably most tiresome is the fact that the maps are some of the worst designed playing areas I've ever seen in an RPG. I am not exaggerating when I say that 90% of my gametime here was spent running around the map. They are not cyclical at all, but require you to run end-to-end, which is incredibly boring and frustrating. The maps that are open, such as the swamp, often have shrubbery and fences blocking paths that you might use to get somewhere more quickly. I don't mind padding out some gametime, but you've got to be smart about it; give me some good dialogue with NPCs, or entertaining combat. Here even the skill trees—one of my favorite parts of an RPG—feel ineffective, and like a waste of time.

There are minor annoyances as well, such as the awful character models, or poor dialogue writing. The game also starts off about as terribly as possible, with awful, generic, clichéd fantasy dialogue, and bad animations and storytelling.

I used to think of this game like the first Mass Effect—a good game, but very rough around the edges. But while it does do some good things, it's nothing like Mass Effect, which has competent levels, character building, and far better writing and dialogue.

Pretty much all The Witcher has going for it is some interestingly complex quest design and a great setting. Aside from that, this game is nearly completely skippable. Witcher 2 is a far better game, and probably even a better starting place for the series. But if you're dead set on playing the entire trilogy, you can give this one a shot—It's going to be all but impossible to play once you've experienced the later, better games and CD Projekt Red's maturity as one of the best game developers on the planet.

⭐

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015) by CD Projekt Red

I try only to write reviews if I've got something to add about a game that I haven't seen many other reviewers already noting. I'll make an exception with Witcher 3.

This game is just as good as every media outlet and amateur reviewer says it is. It might actually be, all things considered, the best game I've ever played.

This game creates an experience that's far more than the sum of its parts. The excellent visuals and music, the lovely sound design, and the painstakingly well-crafted environments, NPCs, and quest and dialogue writing all combine to give this game a lived-in, realistic feel that very few games have been able to exhibit. Every corner of the world feels real. There's so much to experience across the several maps that you can simply wander from place to place for hours upon end, taking in all that there to experience. None of this is procedurally generated, either. It's all hand-crafted, and for those willing to look, there are some incredible things to find.

Early in the game, the player character Geralt meets a gung-ho historian off to chronicle the war. Geralt tells him not to go, that the warzone is a chaotic, anarchic wasteland and he'll be killed simply for the quality of his boots. The historian laughs it off, and offers to play a Gwent card game with Geralt. If Geralt wins, he can win a unique card from this NPC. Later in the game Geralt and Vesimir find themselves underneath a tree full of hanged civilians. Upon searching the foot of the tree, Geralt can find a half-finished history book, and the Gwent card the historian was carrying if it wasn't won from him earlier. The entire game is littered with moments like these; very subtle, missable details that only a minority of players will experience, yet CDPR has worked hard to place in the game anyway because they truly care about the depth of their world. I've played it through to completion several times and each time I find something new.

The quality of writing is so good that it will propel you to finish the game regardless of whether or not you like the combat. The characters are so likeable that you'll grow attached to them before too long, and the quality dialogue and voice acting makes the plot points hit that much harder. The unique thing about this game is not so much the quality of its writing, as there are quite a few games with solid writing, but the depth to which this quality of writing goes. From the main questline to the most minor sidequest, you can always expect to be pleasantly surprised. I was hooked by the very first monster hunting sidequest in White Orchard when you discover just why this Noonwraith is roaming around the well in this small village. Each NPC seems to have a lovingly crafted backstory of their own, and even the most minor fetch quest has its own wrinkle to make it interesting. The high quality of these quests is even more impactful in a world of Mass Effect Andromedas with their disposable, MMO inspired, procedurally generated fetch-quests. They don't make them like this anymore. This is a game in which the most minor sidequest you take on will take you nearly an hour, and it will make you stop and think about a dilemma, or a question it poses, through its quest writing. It's amazing just how much quality content the writing team put into this game. Nothing is disposable, everything in the game serves to garner an emotional reaction or ask an important question. It's packed to the brim with quality content to experience.

The most criticized aspect of this game is the combat, which I actually find to be quite enjoyable. I recently finished my first Death March playthrough and I found the challenge to be quite satisfying. I very rarely felt cheated, never had to cheese the game to get past a particularly difficult section. The difficulty was very well balanced and I felt a strong sense of accomplishment upon completion. The abilities scale very well, going from utility in the beginning to being overpowered within the game world if you focus solely on improving one aspect. Aard, my favorite ability, becomes an absolute world-wrecker if you continue to improve it, allowing you to force blast a small city of enemies at its highest levels. All other abilities are equally useful, and they allow you to build Geralt in whichever way you choose without feeling like you're missing out on anything. Very few RPGs are as balanced as this one is. The combat itself is enjoyable as well, requiring quick dodges and counters the way you would expect a witcher to fight. Each monster type is unique and requires its own strategies, allowing you to fall back into similar patterns whenever you face one type, but there are enough different types of monsters that you'll never face one type for long enough to get bored. To me, the humans were always the most challenging.

When it first released there was some talk of graphics downgrades, bugs, and obtuse UI. However CDPR have completely eliminated all of these issues with the most extensive round of post-release patching I've ever seen for a game. Every major bug I remember encountering has been eliminated from the game, it looks phenomenal and runs very well, and the UI flows like a dream whether you're using mouse and keyboard or a controller. In addition to this they added a ton of free DLC, so make sure you've got all that stuff set to download after you purchase the game.

To top all of this off, this game has the best DLC offerings I've ever seen in a video game, period. Better than Minerva's Den, better than Lair of the Shadow Broker. The writing in Hearts of Stone is the best I've ever seen in a DLC, and is the high point of the entire Witcher series in my opinion. And the sheer amount of content added in Blood and Wine is mind-boggling. If you buy Witcher 3, buy the Game of the Year edition without any second thoughts.

This is a game you'll put hundreds of hours into without regret. You'll be missing the characters long after you've finished it. Any time you hear a music track from the game on YouTube you'll immediately become nostalgic for the game. Witcher 3 is truly a towering achievement in every sense of the term, it's one of the very few games in which I can't find anything to criticize. It's an absolute masterpiece, and no matter what types of games you enjoy, you should buy it and give it a shot.

It might actually be better than everyone says.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Downloadable Content: Hearts of Stone (2015)

The most compelling aspect of this expansion is the characters it includes, the story it tells, and some of the art direction—the last of which is something far different from what you find in the main game.

The character of Gaunter O'Dimm introduces something that all Witcher games have lacked, in my opinion: A compelling antagonist! O'Dimm is a well-nuanced villain and extremely compelling for that fact. In addition to him, the character of Olgierd von Everec and his brother Vlodimir may be some of my favorites in the entire Witcher series. It's tough to say too much more without spoiling it, but the presence of these characters in addition to Shani from Witcher 1 made this content a joy to play through. Learning about their backstories kept me interested the whole way through—especially Olgierd's—and I think they're worth the price of admission alone.

AHHHH! Spooky.

In addition to this, the sheer artistic muscle of the design of some of these characters and locales—Iris von Everec, the Caretaker, and the von Everec estate—are all superb. They're so dark and horrifying in the way the main game was not, that I can only assume the artists were either let completely off their leashes, or some fresh blood was brought into the team specifically to help design some of this stuff. I never really found myself spooked during the main game (save for maybe the Rats in the Tower quest on Fyke Isle), simply because in most cases Geralt is so powerful and in-control of what's happening that I ended up sharing his confidence. Hearing his bewildered reaction to the horrifyingly creepy content of the von Everec Estate led me to having a similar reaction. I loved the experience of that.

It's not all rosy, though. The new enemies added by Hearts of Stone are often way too spongey. I'm not sure the answer to complaints about the main game being too easy was necessarily, "make them take more hits to kill". Some of the Fallen Knight enemies are a complete chore to whack through—even on lower difficulty levels—taking a dozen or more hits to kill and not offering any difference tactically from human enemies in the main game.

In addition to this, the new gear and runecrafting abilities are nearly completely ignorable and don't offer significant change to the way you build Geralt's gear loadout or abilities. This was later fixed in Blood and Wine with some really inspirational additions, but don't come into Hearts of Stone expecting a huge revamp.

Olgierd and Geralt finna drop the hottest hip-hop album of 2015

In the end, this is well worth playing just on the strength of its characters, its antagonist, the darkly compelling new locales it adds in the northern Novigrad area. Although it can be played after the conclusion of the main game, I feel it fits best when played during the main campaign, somewhere within the Novigrad storyline, before completing Triss's quests and before leaving for Skellige. The end of the game provides significant changes to the world depending on your choices during the endgame quests, and it can feel jarring to go directly from the world of the epilogue into Hearts of Stone, where things are set back to how they were before the conclusion of the game.

Hearts of Stone rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Downloadable Content: Blood and Wine (2016)

Blood and Wine provides an historic, beautiful send-off for one of the greatest games ever made

This is the best piece of downloadable content I've ever played, and it's not close.

Blood and Wine hearkens back to a time when developers released on-disc expansions rather than simply pieces of DLC—which are often disposable nowadays. There's an unfathomable amount of new content present here; a brand new map that's the equivalent in size and content of Velen/Novigrad and Skellige of the main game, making equal to around a third the size of the main game. There are also dozens of additional quests, an entirely new storyline filled with new characters, new ways to upgrade your skills, new gear, new monster types, a completely different setting, an all-new soundtrack. Blood and Wine probably could have been called Witcher 3.5 and that wouldn't have been an exaggeration.

Players who have experienced the main game can be confident that the level of storytelling in Blood and Wine's main quest is equal to that which you've come to expect from CD Projekt Red. It provides an exceptionally satisfying conclusion to Geralt's story, and introduces some new characters who are as interesting as you'd expect. That said, one of the most disappointing things about Blood and Wine is the drop in quality present in most side quests here when compared to the main game. By far the strongest aspect of Witcher 3 is the universally high quality of its side content. Nearly all of the side quests in the main game are extremely compelling and feature a high level of writing quality. Sadly, Blood and Wine falls a bit short of this standard. The Vintner Contracts are all disappointingly similar; speak with the vintner, take the contract, go kill a monster in a cave. There are disappointingly few narrative wrinkles added. Additionally, some of the side quests fall victim of the "Help 5 Stonecutters", or the "Complete 15 Camerlengo tasks" type of open world bloat that always serves to bore. While this drop in quality from the main game was disappointing, they're often still at least as satisfying as other open world games, and in most cases, more satisfying. Compared to other open world games, they're pretty good—but compared to Witcher 3's main game, they fall a bit short.

The lower quality of side quests aside, what I find most compelling about this expansion is the way in which it fixes some of the mechanical, gameplay side of things that I thought fell short in the main game. One of the things I love most about RPGs is how addictive it can be to continue exploring and unlocking higher, more devastating skills. In the main Witcher 3 game, this is more subtle; often the new skills you're unlocking progress Geralt in small ways, and you have such limited ability slots that you're forced to specialize. The most impactful change in Blood and Wine, for me personally, is how it blows up this subtlety and grants Geralt some extremely powerful changes in the form of Mutations via one of its side quests. These mutations unlock new, powerful modifications to Geralt's abilities, such as adding a freezing effect to the Aard spell, which is capable of devastating crowds with ice akin to a Northern Wind bomb in absurdly satisfying fashion. It also unlocks new ability slots, allowing you more diverse powers. These new abilities are very expensive, and require a large investment of Ability points and Greater mutagens, but they're worth it, and they gave me that strong addicted feeling that I get from RPGs with great skill progression systems that I felt was missing in the main Witcher game. It's by far the best skill system ever in a Witcher game, and it's on par with what I consider some of the best skill trees in gaming—something like Mass Effect 3, for example.

CD Projekt Red has also fixed a common complaint I have regarding Witcher gear. I never want to wear anything aside from Witcher swords and armor sets, because they seem appropriate narratively, look really cool, and have great ability buffs. However, in the main game, it's very easy to level to the point where they become obsolete. They've changed this with the Aerondight sword, which levels alongside you—a welcome change—and Grandmaster level Witcher gear, which provides significant bonuses when all items of the same set are equipped, for example; being able to add 3 different blade oils at once (Grandmaster Wolven gear), or strongly buffing the Quen spell (Grandmaster Ursine gear).

In addition to this kind of addictive stuff, you also acquire a villa, which you can pour money into to improve. Another thing I've loved in games ever since Monteriggioni in Assassin's Creed 2.

Tying this all together, of course, is the superb world and narrative design, giving you a stunning locale and populating it with vast, incredible stories to experience. The new enemy types are very fun to fight against, and seem to have more involved twists in fighting them than those of the main game—which were very simple—and those of the prior expansions, Hearts of Stone—which were too spongey to really be enjoyable to fight against. The Shaelmars are fun to bait and dodge, the new vampire units in the Alps and Bruxae provide ample challenge and force you to approach the fights tactically and prepare with oils and potions (at least on Blood and Broken Bones, my preferred difficulty level). And the main plot of the expansion takes some very unique twists and turns that I didn't expect, including one setting that was so superb and unexpected it literally knocked my socks off. They flew off my feet, at force. That happened. I swear.

It's really, really hard to find fault with this expansion. If you liked Witcher 3, it's an absolute must-play. I'd gladly pay $40 for it and not second-guess my decision—it's that good. At $20, it's an absolute steal, and if you can find it cheaper than that, then go for it. If Witcher 3 wasn't your thing, this isn't going to change your mind, as it's just more of what the main game did well along with a further refinement of the RPG elements that were already present.

Unlike Hearts of Stone, I'd wait until after the conclusion of the main game to play this one. It's essentially the final chapter in Geralt's story, and it'd feel weird playing some of this stuff before completing the events of the main game.

Blood and Wine rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐