Cyberpunk 2077 E3 Gameplay Impressions

CD Projekt RED went to Los Angeles and nailed it once again during the Xbox conference. Some will attribute the success to the game itself, while for others, Keanu's involvement was crucial. And I say it doesn't matter at all, because yesterday, I had the opportunity to see the Cyberpunk 2077 in action at E3 for the second year in a row, and I found that CDPR aims very high... and it seems that, once again, they want to set a new standard.

CYBERPUNK 2077 IN A NUTSHELL

1. Release date: 16 April 2020
2. Platforms: PC, PS4, XONE
3. Price: $60
4. Cyberpunk 2077 in our Games Encyclopedia

What's Cracking in Night City?

You all should be more or less familiar with the setting of Cyberpunk, but I think we could use a short introduction. The action of the game takes place in Night City, a fictional place in California. In late 21st century, there are three things you need: power, money, and them implants in your brain. The game tells the story of V, an aspiring mercenary, who's trying to arrange his/her life in the dystopian metropolis.

Last year, we met V. The heroine, together with her friend Jackie, performed a mission for Dex DeShawn. The assignment was supposed to promote them to the criminal A-league of Night City. This year, the Reds opted for a move that left me thoroughly impressed. Since last year, coverage of Cyberpunk showed V, Jackie, and their attempts to get to the top. However, the trailer, shown during this year's E3, threw it all into the toilet and unceremoniously flushed down the drain. In the trailer, Jackie dies, Dex wants us dead, and V even kills T-Bug, the girl, who was helping the protagonist in last year's gameplay. Things go FUBAR fast, and then, all dressed in white (albeit with a silver hand), he enters the stage – Johnny Silverhand, an iconic character in the world of Cyberpunk, privately Keanu Reeves, Caesar of action-cinema.

The only issue is that, in the Cyberpunk lore, Johnny Silverhand is considered dead. So how come the character played by the same actor as John Wick appears in the game? Turns out V has a special chip installed, which, allegedly, hides the secret to immortality and at the same time allows the protagonist to chit chat (and perhaps more) with Silverhand. During the demo, the long-haired rockerboy appeared on the screen several times, commenting the current events. We can thus assume that for some time – at least as long as we have the said chip installed – Reeves will be speaking quite often. But we have a theory about Silverhand.

Before seeing the demo, we managed to have a little talk with Mike Pondsmith, the creator of the table-top RPG system, Cyberpunk 2020. We of course asked him about Reeves' involvement, and how it was possible that he was playing a dead character. Pondsmith, unsurprisingly, didn't answer directly, but pointed to the fact that in his story, Silverhand is admittedly considered dead, but his body was never found, suggesting that perhaps the not-so-young rockstar somehow managed to survive the nuclear blast. While these are merely theories and surmise, we do hope that Silverhand will accompany V not only as a hologram.

JOHNNY SILVERHAND

In the original, Silverhand was a rockerboy (the cyberpunk equivalent of, say, Zack de la Rocha) the frontman of the band Samurai (the one, whose logo V wears on the jacket). Johnny, however, was not only a musician, but also a rebel warrior who didn't like how much power corporations had over the world. His alleged death occurred during the assault on the headquarters of the Arasaka Corporation in the Night City. Good résumé, innit?

How much RPG in RPG? Loads!

Let's move on to the content of the demo itself, because there's quite a lot to talk about. Although the developers have been shifting the nomenclature a bit lately, calling their game an open-world action game, it still is an RPG. The first thig we saw was the character creation menu, which already looks a bit different than last year, but still offers a set of choices to define our hero or heroine. There were also attribute points, which have undergone some changes compared to last year as well. The available attributes are body (which most likely has replaced strength and endurance), intelligence, reflexes, technical (hacking skills) and cool, which, according to Pondsmith, is more than just the equivalent of charisma, a stat defining how others perceive the character, changing the attitude toward them.

Cyberpunk 2077 will not only allow a great dose of freedom in terms of conducting the story, but also provide incredibly flexible gameplay. That's why the game will not feature a rigid class system, but rather a form of smooth character building oriented towards the preferred type of gameplay. In order to achieve this, a system of perks was implemented, which players will develop for points obtained for completing missions. During the presentation, we managed to jot them all down, which was not an easy task, but here they are: pistols, rifles, blades, hacking, guns, two-handed weapons, assassinations, cold blood, sniper rifles, engineering, melee, and athletics. That's plenty of stuff to wrap your head around – maybe too much, at first glance – but it seems to me that after having a better look at the system as a whole, we should be able to determine our favorite way to play the game in no time. Let's also remember that the game is still far from finished, and some elements are bound to look different than today, which may also include the system of perks.

When creating a character, we also need to choose her or his background story. In the E3 demo, three origin stories were available: Nomad, Street Kid and Corporate. Interestingly, all of these elements – attributes, perks, and even the origin – can influence the dialogues, and sometimes, the players will have access to special dialog options provided by one of these factors. This doesn't necessarily mean that every such possibility will be the right one – we still need to carefully select the answers, since things such as our story background can dramatically change the attitude of the NPCs towards the protagonist.

So, as you can see, dialogue has a big role to play in Cyberpunk 2077. Moreover, dialogues can allow you to complete the game without killing anyone. Of course, this will sometimes require sneaking and sometimes using non-lethal force, but there also will be many occasions, where we will be able to escape a dire situation by conducting the conversation correctly.

Freedom over Style

Let's focus on the gameplay for a moment. The developers from CD Project Red presented two approaches to the same mission. We've been able to see two completely different builds in action. The male version of V was conceived as a hacker who has to rely on sneaking and manipulating the environment to achieve his goal – however that doesn't mean he's harmless. The female version of V is a continuation of the build from last year's gameplay, specialized in combat. The developers switched between these two builds at different times to display the versatility offered by the game, but of course nothing like this will be possible in the final version – our decisions on the development of the main character will be final – you won't be able to change it all just like that.

Hacker V preferred a quiet style of gameplay, combined with deadly efficiency. At one point, he hacked an access point, which lead him to other devices in the vicinity. Thanks to this, the player was able to turn up combat efficiency of a practice boxer robot, which then killed its opponent. This build also used what was called "mono-wire," or "nano-wire" (apparently, the studio is still working on the names of some elements), which looked like a shiny thread – you could actually see it in in the trailer, it was that glowing whip. It looked like a pretty powerful weapon, and at the same time, it could also be used to hack enemies. Impressive.

The female version of V was a real destroyer. Since her Athletics were pretty high, she could pry-open locked door, which was accompanied by a nice animation of hand implants reinforcing the grip. But it gets better! During the shootout with a group of thugs, the main character was pinned down by a stationary turret. Playing another build, V would have to duck down behind cover – in this case, though, she just walked up to the turret, snatched it from the spot and used it as a portable weapon, raining enemies with led. Hats off (blow with the turret)!

And since we're talking about shooting, let's also mention that the game comes with a system of environment destruction. This of course isn't a Battlefield-style system, where each building can be leveled to the ground, but a lot of the decorative elements in the line of fire ended up shattered. A nice touch, and something to look at – until you shoot it down.

Playing as hacker, you will find that sneaking is the most efficient way of dealing with situations. Sometimes we need to bypass opponents, sometimes distract them – by hacking, for example – and in other cases, risk a non-lethal takedown. This is when the game reminded me of Hitman a bit – we can catch someone from behind with a strong grip and decide whether to kill them, or just knock them out, immediately carrying the body to hide it somewhere. Nobody will notice something is off!

And if you're a keen hacker (I know I am – my first playthrough will sure be Netrunner), then you will love the possible ways of dealing with enemies in battle. V could buy special software called Daemon on the black market, which allows to remotely hack into opponents and give them deadly instructions. At one point, V forced an enemy to pull the pin from his grenade in the middle of a group of his fellow thugs; on another occasion, the protagonist resorted to a rather classic way of getting rid of an enemy, making him eat his own bullet. Bloody, gory, and highly impressive. I'd like to have some more of that.

Good details, bad details

CD Projekt Red has repeatedly manifested their great attention to detail. Everything needs to go well together – not only artistically, but also conceptually. During the presentation, we've met gang members from Pacifica (a city included in the agglomeration of the Night City), with whom we needed to interact to push the quest forward. The thing was, they spoke Creolean. In the Cyberpunk world, however, cybernetic implants are as common as smartphones today, including ones that translate speech on the fly. And so, when an NPC is talking in another language, subtitles appear on the screen and we see the beginning of the first sentence in that language, but it promptly animates, looking as if the chip was indeed working inside the protagonist's mind, translating the statements with minimal lag. A trifle, minute detail of interface, but it does wonders for immersion. I really dig it.

I had a minor issue with the minigame of hacking access points. It wasn't bad, strictly speaking – you had to select the appropriate characters in hexadecimal code in order to fill in a buffer, but why and for what reason it was necessary to specify character sets alternately in columns and rows is beyond me. However, the devs assured that anyone who spends a few minutes with this mini-game should very quickly grasp how things work, although it's difficult to explain the rules in detail, without seeing it for yourself. So let's leave it for now.

Just as last year, I wasn't impressed with the driving model. This time, V wasn't driving a car, but cruised around Pacifice on a Yaiba Kusanagi bike (for some reason I thought it was a good idea to share this completely irrelevant information). It all looks rather ponderous, as if you're driving a brick around. However, it's possible that driving will actually feel great and will be the best arcade driving model, but at that point, it certainly doesn't look like that.

And since I'm complaining, I should complain about hand-to-hand combat. At the demo, I saw V cutting enemies up with a knife, and the pick up a bottle and use it as a weapon. At some point, this bottle obviously shatters, and V ends up with glassing them dudes. I like the idea, but the movement seemed terribly rigid, as if drawn with a ruler. I hope these animations will be more fluid.

I could also write that the game isn't perfectly optimized at the moment, since dropping framerate was quite visible at times. I could. But bearing in mind that almost a year is left before the release, the optimization process proper hasn't even started yet, and the occasions when the animation stuttered were usually moments of some graphical witchcraft taking place on the screen. Riding a bike through the slightly dilapidated Pacifica and lighting up the streets shrouded in fog must have been quite a strain on the PC (presumably very strong) on which the game was running. Cyberpunk 2077 has a dynamic day/night cycle that will certainly not make the optimization easier, but we have faith in the wizards from Warsaw.

The developers also reiterated their words from last year that the entire city will be accessible without loading screens. This declaration looks really nice, and I'm willing to believe it – the creators have their own ways of concealing such elements. However, keep in mind that the loading screens will not disappear entirely; fast travel, for instance, will surely require a few seconds of loading. It seems bypassing this is impossible with current technology – neither PCs nor consoles can load data so fast. Unless the next generation of consoles with solid-state drives actually proves such a breakthrough...

Let me play it!

Cyberpunk 2077 managed to drop jaws for the second E3 in a row. There are lots of things that I really dig, and a few elements that I'm not really sure about. All of this, however, is based solely on watching the game, rather than playing it, so you know – no way to really tell how the pudding tastes. I can sing praises about what I saw, the city living its own life; I can report the words of the developers, I can be happy about how it all looked in the small fragment prepared for the expo. However, I am dying to try the game for my own, to see for myself weather all the things I heard about it are true.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Divided Mankind, in spite of their flaws, have enkindled a fascination with the cyberpunk vision of the world. I like dystopia in games because, although it often imagines crazy concepts, it always makes me a bit anxious: "Is this really the way things are headed?” Writing this from Los Angeles, one of the most characteristic cities in the world, housing one of the most characteristic cultures and societies, on the West Coast of the United States, not so far from the fictional Night City, only reinforces this atmosphere. I see what inspires the Reds, I see where they're going with the mood of the game, and I admire how well they're able to render this fictional world rooted in reality.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a full-blown role-playing game, it's an open-world adventure, in which we can shape the hero exactly the way we want, but from the onset, there's no telling where will our decisions lead us. We sure can do that in style, however – kick asses, or blackmail corporates. We can hack, kill, and make dough. We can do anything, and do that with Keanu Reeves, too. It's all pretty breathtaking.