Day one with Cyberpunk 2077 has come, and as the clock ticks past 5:00, day one with Cyberpunk 2077 has gone. For many, the most anticipated game of the year this side of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and certainly the one that seems destined to generate the most discourse save perhaps The Last of Us Part 2. It’s a day that has made me glad that I bought a superpowered, 2080 ti-focused rig, that’s for sure. And it’s a day that has me radically changing my expectations about what the rest of this playthrough is going to look like.
I think that, for the most part, I expected more of a role-playing game, something I’ve decided to type out rather than just saying “RPG” for a reason. Maybe that’s because of its tabletop roots, or because of words like “choice” and “open” hammered into my head. But that’s not the game I’ve been playing today: the game I’ve been playing today is a much more straight-ahead affair, which isn’t bad but requires adjustment.
The disconnect happens as early as the beginning of the game. You spend your first moments in the much-vaunted, genital-altering character creator, where I lingered for a little longer than I usually do, creating a nomad character with a long, braided beard, eye shadow, and long, gold fingernails: I thought, but the time I was done, that I had an idea of who he was, and I was excited to make him real. And then the game started.
You quickly learn that your character in this game is not your character: your character is V, and V actually talks quite a lot, with a personality all their own steered by, but nor directed by, your choices. There’s not much role-playing, in the traditional sense, going on here. You are V, and V might use different weapons or say somewhat different things at different times, but they are still V and it doesn’t seem you can do much to change what that means.
It’s a lot like Geralt from The Witcher 3, to be honest. But of course, there was no character creator or illusion that we had control over our personality in that game. We were a literary character, and a more interesting one at that.
In the first mission, I had to drive through customs on the outskirts of night city with contraband: I saw different lanes for whether or not you had something to declare, which struck me as an interesting choice. No dice, however, because all lanes but one were blocked off. I actually can’t remember which lane it was, because of course, it didn’t matter.
This continued throughout much of my time on day 1. I had choices about how to deal with a different situation—stealth, hacking, or whatnot—but it always felt like the outcome of the situation was basically the same, especially considering how cinematic those outcomes could be.
At the end of the day—the day, in this case, being my first full day with the thing—the game doesn’t feel much different than a much more lavish, much more complicated version of The Witcher 3. It is a narrative-driven single-player open-world game, where you can follow the narrative path or do side missions as you explore the world. So far it is an excellent, captivating version of that thing, but it is a deeply recognizable thing.
This isn’t terrible, it’s just not nearly so reactive or open as I had expected coming into it. That might be my fault, but there has been frankly so much preview information about this game that it’s hard to know whether or not I’ve processed the right streams, at the right time.
Is Cyberpunk 2077 a good game, after my first day? Definitely. But it’s a little more familiar than I had hoped, a little less of a role-playing experience, a little more like a solid, if beautiful and expansive, open-world game. More like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which is a great game, and less like the original Deus Ex, which is an incredible game.
