In todays Cyberpunk 2077 and CD PROJEKT RED video we are talking about last years 48 minute work in progress gameplay demo, which spots stood out as a work in progress and some mechanics and details I hope they have improved upon or are shown better or more in-depth this year.
First up we have Enemy AI / Dumb Grunt Enemies not falling in with the lore of Cyberpunk. In last year’s demo, the narrator and Jackie claim we are meeting the Maelstrom gang a gang on the verge of Cyberpsychosis tricked out with high tech military grade equipment worth millions. When it came down to it though they acted like any other dumb grunt AI you would find in any other shooter. No unique abilities, no unique weapons or cyberware used against you and no nuinanced combat based on interesting things they would do. They would hide, look the wrong direction, stand still or look around all confused. Now I know for the ease of viewing the difficulty had to be turned down or this aspect might have had to be nerfed for the demo to showcase all the other elements and to proceed through it at a quick pace, but honestly the enemy AI and lack of their abilities made the gameplay look dry.
The next concern I have is them making the world feel large in a car. Now they have mentioned this before as a challenge for the game, and I’d have to agree. In the Witcher travelling over a more horizontally vast environment was long enough ontop of the fact that you would have to take a horse or walk. In Cyberpunk we have speedy super cars, bikes and aerial vehicles whizzing around at light speed through the air. I have no doubt that they will be able to make the world feel vertically large, but it has to have some sort of horizontal scale as well. I hope they make the city infrastructure so that there are a ton of roads and alleyways that weave around the city to make it at the very least feel horizontally substantial, but it is something I’m sure that is hard to implement.
Next we have More customization, sliders, options, clothing. The demo showed 10 different options for things like facial features and skin tones but as detail oriented as Cyberpunk 2077 is aiming to be, I think sliders to really nail the detail along with pinpointing how you want your character to look before loading in is just as vital. What we saw, whilst a good introduction of first step needs a dizzying array of options to match the style versus substance missions statement of the Cyberpunk genre. The vibrancy of all these options for ourselves has to match the vibrancy and level of choice once we finally get out there and this can only be matched with a lot of options in the character creation screen. Clothing is another entity by itself and since we have seen very very little of that so far, I’m not going to harp on it for too long, but again the more options the better.
There were repeat models in the demo wearing the same thing and this is a no go for the final build. Each character in Cyberpunk should be unique because that is the only way to stand out in this world of peacocking and elaborate fashionware trends.
Companion commands are something initially talked about in our Cyberpunk 2077 community podcast. This would be us directing our companions into doing actions in combat or during dialogue sequences. Examples would be to command Jackie to lift the car here, or TBug to hack the panel here through our own hotkeys or instructions. In the demo they are largely done autonomously and although this has to happen, there has been rumor of the companion command system being deeper than this. A small example is a dialogue option with Jackie where he tosses you the Air hypo, or you can choose to do CPR on Sandra yourself. Maybe without the air hype she would die and this causes consequences with Trauma Team later on, and makes a choice you made on your companions behalf have weight and impact within the narrative. I would like to see this explained better, or for it to be shown.
Next we have The Net as a 3D interface and an alternate reality instead of a jack in and click mini game. This style of jacking in is more of a Crystaljock method of hacking from the lore, so I hope netrunning is exactly as mentioned in the lore with the 3d user interface filled with icons, viruses and hostile netrunners to go to battle against. It has to be more than what we’ve seen and yes they specifically mention it’s a work in progress before this moment in the demo so it’s likely they have changed it.
Finally we have The gunplay. Whilst the sound design of the weaponry so far is fantastic, it does look a tad floaty and weighty. Even the scavenger boss doesn’t seem to know how to handle this huge weapon and it lacks the oompf or power a big gun like that should make us feel like it has. Yes he may have subdermal armor, grips, linear frames and borg attachments to take the brunt of the recoil, but we need for the shooting experience to feel more visceral.
