The Fool on the Hill: Cyberpunk 2077, and flawed art

{:description "I often think of Elon Musk when I play Cyberpunk 2077. Cyberpunk shows us the world of which he dreams — a world in which the power and privilege of the rich is unlimited, in which everything can be bought by those who have enough money, a world in which labour unions are crushed and the human rights of the poor are trampled, a world in which the pollution of Planet Earth is of no importance since the rich can escape it, to orbital space stations, to the Moon, and, very soon, to Mars. A world in which people literally do have neurally linked chips implanted in their brains.", :tags #{"Cyberpunk", "Reviews", "Game Worlds"}, :date "2024-03-19", :draft true, :klipse? false, :title "Cyberpunk 2077, and flawed art", :author "Simon Brooke", :image "/img/uploads/800_hours.png", :toc? true}

This essay is unfinished: come back later to see a better draft.

I often think of Elon Musk when I play Cyberpunk 2077. Cyberpunk shows us the world of which he dreams — a world in which the power and privilege of the rich is unlimited, in which everything can be bought by those who have enough money, a world in which labour unions are crushed and the human rights of the poor are trampled, a world in which the pollution of Planet Earth is of no importance since the rich can escape it, to orbital space stations, to the Moon, and, very soon, to Mars. A world in which people literally do have neurally linked chips implanted in their brains.

But it also shows us the world Musk most fears: a world in which inscrutable, autonomous, self conscious and self aware artificially intelligent entities of immense power and presumed malign intent exist, separated from the world that the rich rule by only the most tenuous and perishable of barriers.

It's an irony on many levels that Musk's real-life trophy-concubine du jour at the time of the making of Cyberpunk 2077 appears in a minor but significant role in the piece; and plays, although under another name, pretty much herself. We all now know what happens to Lizzy Wizzy's wealthy, over-privileged, manipulative boyfriend in the drama.

It is in the nature of human art that it is flawed. All art is flawed. It has been widely said that Cyberpunk 2077 is a flawed game, and that is true; it has been widely said that Cyberpunk 2077 is a very flawed game...

Yesterday, I passed 800 hours of playing Cyberpunk 2077. That's equivalent to 107 full working days; equivalent to six months of full time work. It's an extraordinary length of time to voluntarily spend, as a consumer rather than creator, with one work of art. It would be extraordinary, indeed, to spend it with a very flawed work. Consequently, I obviously believe that Cyberpunk 2077 is not very flawed, and I'm going to try to show you why I think that. In doing so, I shall argue that

1. Many of the flaws relate to one very stupid decision, made by management;
2. That actually, the game never has been very flawed, except on hardware on which it could never have been expected to run.

The great strengths of Cyberpunk 2077 are in storytelling and in the world, which is very much related to storytelling; I'm going to tackle these last. Before I get to them, I'm going to talk about interaction, under which I'll talk about the use of weapons; and about movement, under which I'll talk about walking, motor vehicles, rapid travel, and the metro system. But first of all I'll talk about that very stupid decision. There should be a table of contents at the head of this essay; if the details of game mechanics don't interest you, skip ahead to Surface Detail.

Act One

The Player of Games

Sometime early in the development of Cyberpunk 2077, some idiot in management or marketing in CD Projekt Red went to Sony and promised — contracted — that their new and vastly ambitious game would run on game consoles that were frankly already obsolete. The idiot did this because Sony would not have their more powerful new game console, PlayStation 5, ready in time for the game's launch. An idiot — probably the same idiot — also made a similar promise to Microsoft, but it's my understanding that the promise to Sony came first.

There's nothing that was promised for Cyberpunk 2077 that wasn't deliverable on high end personal computers at the time of launch. Indeed, I'm pretty sure that at some stage quite late in the development, CD Projekt Red had playable demonstrations of all the key promised features. I say this with reasonable confidence because we saw pre-release video featuring a lot of things which weren't in the final game, and because many of them were clearly doable. Whether they were all doable at the scale required to deliver the project's vision, within the project's available budget, I can't say; and it is alleged that what CDPR got in exchange for that stupid promise to Sony was a considerable amount of upfront cash.

But anyone with any technical knowledge could have told you that the vision for Cyberpunk 2077 could never be delivered on PlayStation 4; it just was not possible. And I'm absolutely certain that the technical leads within CDPR did say this, loudly and repeatedly, as soon as they knew of the promise (I'm also certain that senior technical people in Arasaka — sorry, I mean Sony — knew this too, but that's another matter).

I'm very sure that the final months of development, which should have been spent on final testing and polish, were instead spent tearing huge chunks of working content out of the game in order to try, somehow, to make a gallon fit into a quarter pint pot.

It didn't work.

At launch, predictably, it didn't run at all well on obsolete consoles. Surprise, surprise. It ran so badly on obsolete consoles that Sony had a huge falling out with CDPR, which resulted in them delisting the game. But I played it from day one on what was then a medium tier personal computer, and although there were a few glitches, it ran well and was completely playable. Now, at version 2.1.2, many things have had the polish that they should have had before launch, but there are still glitches; and some of those glitches boil down to the choice of engine, which we will come to next.

But the reason the launch was a disaster was because of a player of games: a person who didn't take the project sufficiently seriously, who thought they could wing it, who thought they could either (probably) override the warnings of CDPR's technical team, or (less probably) did not even consult them, before making that utterly stupid, careless, and unnecessary promise to Sony.

If they hadn't made that promise, could the game still have been delivered? Yes, I'm sure it could have been. Developing games on this scale is enormously expensive, but CDPR had enormous good will, from the fan community, from the Polish government, from the EU, and from many private investors. The money to build the game could have been raised.

Feersum Endjinn

CD Projekt Red has made four significant games: the three Witcher games, and Cyberpunk 2077. The first Witcher game was written using the Aurora game engine, developed by Bioware for Neverwinter Nights. The Witcher stretched that creaky old engines to its limits, and although it was amazing to me how much the team achieved, it clearly wasn't capable of open world games, of of graphics of the quality that top teir games are now expected to show.

For The Witcher II, CD Projekt Red wrote their own game engine, called Red Engine. It was intended to be the foundation of their future work, and that engine was then reused to build both The Witcher III and Cyberpunk 2077. For each successive game they have extended the engine, and it has to say in its current state it handles Cyberpunk's essentially seamless open world and fluid presentation style extremely well. But building a robust game engine and telling compelling stories are two different skill sets, and CDPR's core competence is in story telling.

While I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with Red Engine, or that it would be impossible to continue to build games using Red Engine in future, the fact that they have made a clear decision to switch to Unreal Engine doesn't seem to me a bad decision. And certainly for anyone who knows the four games extremely well, as I would say I do, it's very easy to see the influence of the Aurora engine on Red Engine, and elements of game mechanics which have been carried over essentially unchanged from The Witcher series.

Some of these inherited features will be mentioned as flaws in what follows. The engine isn't a problem, as such, but does show its age in places.

Act Two

The Use of Weapons

I've argued before, many times, that the use of lethal force as the default method of interacting with non player characters in video games is unnecessary, unimaginative, unethical and lazy, and I'm not going to repeat that argument here, beyond saying that it's especially disappointing in games which are primarily story and character driven, as all of CDPR's games are. Suffice it that only a small fraction of Cyberpunk's characters have any verbal repertoire at all, and even those that do have only extremely limited repertoire. A

Part of that extremely limited repertoire is in the decision to voice-act everything that is said by any character, and to voice act all that for every single different language in which the game is delivered. Thus, adding a single line of dialogue means a few minutes of actors' time (and director's time, and sound engineer's time) in each of the [] languages the game has been released in. This adds up to very expensive very, very quickly. It also adds up to inflexible: while programmers continued to make changes and improvements to the game not just until launch, but right up until now more than three years later, calling back voice actors to get them to make changes to performance in every one of those different languages would be a nightmare.

I've argued for a long time that the solution for this is dynamically synthesised speech, produced by the game engine itself by applying stored voice profiles to text, where that text might itself also by dynamically generated. Having seen and heard the quality of the voice acting in games like Cyberpunk 2077 (and to be fair, like Horizon Zero Dawn or The Last of Us), I'm not so confident. Yes, synthesised voice performance would allow much more richness of gameplay, and would, I believe, allow you to interact with non-player characters much more naturalistically (and consequently not be driven to killing them nearly so often), but I very much doubt that synthesised voices could give us anything like the dramatic performance that good voice actors now provide. This is a depth versus breadth comparison, of course; and the majority of the game industry, at present, has chosen the path of dramatic depth.

However, because none of the characters can hold a conversation lasing more than a couple of minutes, and none has any semantic understanding of what is said, the main way of resolving problems is physically harming or killing characters. Given this is the case, the question is, how well is it represented, both as a representation of a real action and as something which is fun in a game?

Before going on to consider this in detail, there are some encounters where you can make progress in the game while avoiding killing. There are a few — actually, very few — situations where the opposing characters have sufficient specially crafted repertoire that you can negotiate a successful resolution to the particular problem without violence. There are many more — not a majority, but a substantial minority — conflict encounters that you can sneak or stealth your way through, again potentially without violence. But this is generally hard, and in many of these encounters where it's potentially possible, in practice almost impossible. To successfully complete the game, it is necessary to kill a quite horrifying number of characters. What's even more horrifying is how quickly you become accustomed to this, how quickly you find yourself coming up with justifications and rationalisations for doing so.

The weapons available to the player are

1. Their fists, generally non-lethal;
2. Blunt weapons (batons, clubs, baseball bats, et cetera), also generally non lethal;
3. Edged weapons, chiefly swords (and, indeed, the swords are with one exception, katanas);
4. As a special case of the above, throwable edged weapons, chiefly knives;
5. Throwable grenades;
6. Overwhelmingly the largest class, having within it a bewildering complexity of sub-categories, guns;
7. Finally, not really weapons in the normal sense at all, 'quickhacks' — electronic warfare at a distance attacks on an opponent's systems, including, critically in a game where almost every character has some, their cyberware.

One of the big changes from the Witcher games to Cyberpunk is the change of viewpoint. Instead of the player's viewpoint being above and behind the player's character, as in the Witcher games, it is now through the character's eyes. This does have real advantages for immersion, but it means that the player's situational awareness is much more limited. Add that to the fact that it's extremely difficult to model the complexity and subtlety of melee combat through either a keyboard and mouse or a game controller, and the first three-and-a-half categories there are fairly unsatisfactory.

All you can do is flail about, clicking madly; and while, once your character has acquired the necessary attributes and reasonable quality weapons, you'll probably win, there's not much sensation of accomplishment to it.

Throwable knives work fairly well in the game; they're silent, and if used right they can kill opponents with a single throw. But, in version one of the game as in the real world, when you've thrown a knife you've lost it, at least until you can get round to where it landed and recover it. Version two solves that by making knives boomerang back to your hand, mysteriously without injuring you. This makes knives much more viable weapons but it also horribly violates the willing suspension of disbelief, and, to me, feels like cheating.

Which leaves guns.

I've never actually fired a real firearm in my life, so while I understand the theory, I don't have real experience to base my evaluation of Cyberpunk's representation of guns on; but it has to be said that some at least of them feel very satisfying to use. I experience a real feeling of skill and accomplishment sitting up in a high place with the Overwatch suppressed sniper rifle, picking off heavily armed opponents one by one with single shots to the head.

And that is realistic. A single heavy high velocity bullet to the skull — or, realistically, to anywhere else in the head or torso — is going to put you out of the fight not just for the day, but for at least weeks, if it does not kill. I'll come back to this later, because it is a serious point.

Pistols which can be precisely aimed, especially if silenced, I also find engaging to use in the game. With careful use they can be very effective, again giving that sensation of accomplishment.

Sub-machine guns — relatively small, light guns which fire lighter bullets in very rapid bursts but with limited precision — are also very satisfactorily realised, and, to me, engaging to use.

Cyberpunk's representation of 'precision rifles' — essentially, designated marksmen's rifles, one step down from sniper rifles — don't feel to me to be a good compromise, either. It's true that in the real world, sniper rifles still use bullets as heavy and as powerful as those used in the first half of the twentieth century, while modern assault rifles typically use lighter, less powerful ammunition. But this is because with lighter ammunition you can carry more of it, and also because these rifles are capable of firing bursts, so that if an enemy is hit at all it is likely to be with more than one bullet. Precision rifles tend to use the same ammunition as other infantry rifles, for logistical reasons: less types of ammunition you have to supply.

But in the context of the game, a good sniper rifle will kill one enemy for each well aimed shot, whereas a precision rifle will take two or three well aimed shots to achieve the same effect.

The representation of shotguns and of revolvers I don't find engaging to use at all. Clearly other people do. In the right circumstances they kill representations of enemies very successfully indeed, but if you're in circumstances where they're the best tool for the job it's usually because you've rushed into a situation without a careful tactical assessment, and that's not the way I personally choose to play.

But hang on a minute. If I'm ruling out shotguns and revolvers simply because they only get you out of situations you shouldn't have got yourself into in the first place, why am I not also ruling out submachine guns?

Sandevistan.

What?

There's a technology in the world of Cyberpunk 2077 called Sandevistan, which essentially slows time for its user so that they can move very much faster, for brief periods, than opponents who don't use it. I don't use it, because you can't use both Sandevistan and quickhacks at the same time, and I prefer quickhacks. If I don't use Sandevistan, why is it a problem? Because some opponents do.

One answer to an opponent who moves so quickly and unpredictably that you don't have time to get an aimed shot off is to send a cloud of projectiles in roughly the right direction in the hope that some will take effect.

Cutting across the real-world classification of guns into rifles, shotguns, machine guns, pistols, revolvers and so on is a wholly fictional categorisation. Guns in Cyberpunk 2077 can be 'power' guns, which is to say they work more or less like real-world guns; 'tech' guns employ some technology something like a rail gun, which means that the longer you charge them up before releasing the projectile, the more energy it has; or 'smart' guns which shoot target seeking projectiles, which means they don't have to be very precisely aimed.

For me, there's a certain synergy between submachine guns and the concept of smart weapons. Submachine guns are, by their nature, guns that you don't — can't — aim very precisely. The idea that you could miniaturise a guidance system so small that it could be fitted into a bullet is not completely implausible. There's one particular 'smart' submachine gun in the game — the Shingen Mark V prototype — that is so ludicrously effective that it's a very useful thing to have in your arsenal for times when you are faced with a Sandevistan-user, or your tactical plan has completely failed, and a particular 'smart' pistol, Skippy, which is a joy to use for, uhhmmm, quite different reasons. Apart from these, 'smart' guns don't really appeal to me; in particular the 'smart' sniper rifles feel like cheating.

Tech weapons just generally don't appeal to me. The 'charge up' mechanic just makes them more awkward to use, without enough of a payback. Yes, they can (mostly) shoot through walls, allowing you to shoot enemies who are in cover

In none of these guns is it evident that bullet drop — the fact that a bullet falls, under gravity, towards the centre of the earth, and that therefore for longer shots you have to aim progressively further above your intended target — is modelled. However for a future game this is not wholly unreasonable, since a computerised gunsight which automatically compensates for bullet drop is entirely plausible, in exactly the same way in which modern cameras autofocus. Windage — the effect of wind on the trajectory of the bullet — is also not modelled, and that's more of a challenge to the willing suspension of disbelief.

Complicity

Against a Dark Background

Anyone who has worked out where I'm taking section headings from for this essay will understand why this section is about travel and traversal; anyone who thinks 'but that's not cyberpunk' really needs to read it again.

The city of Night City, as presented to us in Cyberpunk 2077, is not actually very large. It has many monstrously tall buildings, and the megabuildings presumably house very large numbers of tenants, but the actual area is not huge. It is pretty much walkable. However, walking takes time, and CD Projekt Red have provided us with a number of faster ways to traverse the city and its environs.

They've provided us with this ways using the facilities provided by Red Engine, which is the engine they built to power The Witcher games. It's obvious to anyone that the rapid travel points in Cyberpunk are simply the signposts of The Witcher III, reskinned. They do the job; but it's in the nature of rapid travel points that they're gamey, that they break immersion, that they take you out of the fantasy and remind you that in actuality, you are just sitting at your computer in your home in the mundane world. So a lot of people (including me) preferred to traverse the world of The Witcher by walking or on horseback; and, although the the world there was actually much bigger, the fact that it was also astonishingly beautiful made traversing it relatively slowly enjoyable in itself.

The world of Cyberpunk is also astonishingly beautiful, a fact I'll return to at length later, but the pace of life here is more frenetic; so although it's possible to get around by walking, I don't often choose to. And there is an alternative: cars and motor vehicles generally. I joked when Cyberpunk was launched that the cars were just the boats from The Witcher III reskinned, and there is an extent to which I do actually believe this was then true. However, boats don't have to stick to relatively narrow roads, and the seas and rivers of The Witcher's war-torn medieval eastern Baltic aren't especially crowded with other traffic, so the fact that the boats weren't especially controllable wasn't a problem.

Most people who play games on personal computers expect to play using keyboard and mouse, but controlling Cyberpunk's cars using keyboard and mouse was never enjoyable. The experience, once I got myself a game controller, was much better; but nevertheless, the implementation of the physics of driving, in early versions of the game, was... sketchy, and while the many different cars were many different degrees of bad, they ranged from clownishly, ridiculously undriveable to rather challenging.

The cars all looked wonderful, from day one; and many of them sounded wonderful, too. An enormous amount of effort went into the models for these cars, and the sound recording. Once I had a game controller, three cars became favourites, and actually enjoyable to drive. These were the Little Mule, a small off-road adapted four wheel drive pickup truck; Javelina, a sort of rough, tough Mad Max drives the Paris-Dakar rally desert racer, and the Caliburn, an extremely sleek sports supercar. Of these, both the Javelina and the Caliburn are ludicrously overpowered and careless use of the throttle will get you into trouble very quickly indeed; but even in version one of the game, they were reasonably tractable.

Version two improves driving physics enormously; most, possibly all, of the vehicles now drive reasonably well. But it seems that the handling of all of the vehicles has improved equally, so the rank ordering has not, in my opinion, changed. In short, driving is now an entirely enjoyable way of traversing the world. Having said that, the first person view does not work well for driving, for exactly the same reason that it does not work well for melee combat: you simply don't have enough situational awareness. Fortunately, CDPR provides a third person view for when driving, which does improve things greatly.

In version two a number of new vehicles have been added, including a Porsche cabriolet. I intend to spend some time driving this in first person view, to find out whether the lack of structure around you makes any noticeable difference to situational awareness.

In addition to cars, there are motorbikes. The motorbike physics just isn't well implemented; they don't handle or perform anything like real motorbikes. But they look pretty, sound good, and are very rapid ways to get around, particularly in inner city areas and when traffic congestion is high.

Finally, there is the metro system. The metro system was always planned, and there's some evidence that it was actually substantially built and working before version one was released; but it was only actually delivered in version two. And what is released is underwhelming. It's underwhelming because you can't actually walk through the barriers onto a platform, wait at the platform, get on a train, choose a seat, and sit down. Instead, you make a menu selection at the barrier and suddenly you're magicked into a seat. You're taken out of the world, out of the immersion, in just the same way as you are with the rapid transit system.

That CDPR could have implemented a system which allowed you to go out on a platform and walk onto the train to a seat is evidenced by the fact that you do exactly that when you catch the maglev train from the spaceport terminal to the launchpad in Phantom Liberty, but for some reason they didn't do it for the metro.

Don't get me wrong: the metro is not unenjoyable in itself. You get magnificent views over the city. But it's very close to being something which could have been much better, and that is a disappointment.

Act Three

Surface Detail

(the world)

The Hydrogen Sonata

(music)

Matter

(story telling generally)

Inversions

(particular quests)

The State of the Art

(Conclusion)

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