Niccijade Reeves-Alhark
Staff Reporter
Cyberpunk 2077 is an open-world, action-adventure video game that was released on December 10th, 2020. It is about an upcoming mercenary that goes by the name V. V runs around Night City doing mercenary jobs, bounty hunting, and many other jobs that are given to him throughout the story. His main goal is to become a legend in Night City, one of the most popular places in the United States where people become successful.
The game is based on the pen-and-paper role-playing game Cyberpunk 2020, written and designed by Mike Pondsmith. The tabletop game, also known as Cyberpunk Red (its 4th edition name), was published by R. Talsorian Games in 1988, claiming itself as the roleplaying game of the dark future. The setting of Cyberpunk 2020, according to the article by Meeple Mountain’s Than Gibson, takes inspiration from the cyberpunk fiction that was created in the ’80s, when movies like Blade Runner and Akira were being created, along with novels like William Gibson's Neuromancer. The lore establishes villainy within Megacorporations as their major impacts leave the world of Cyberpunk 2020 an extremely violent and chaotic mess, or as the game summary puts it, an urban wilderness.
Cyberpunk, in general, is, according to Oxford Languages, “a genre of science fiction set in a lawless subculture of an oppressive society dominated by computer technology” The word, as claimed by Marriam-Webster, was coined by the writer Bruce Bethke. He combined the word “cybernetics”, the science of replacing human functions with computerized ones, with “punk”, a loud, fast-paced, aggressive genre of rock that was popular throughout the 70s and 80s. The term didn’t gain popularity until Neuromancer was published in 1984, from then on it became the term and genre it is now.
Mike Pondsmith worked alongside Konrad Tomaszkiewicz in designing Cyberpunk 2077, bringing Pondsmith’s visions of Cyberpunk 2020 to life. Composers Marcin Przybyłowicz and Paul Leonard-Morgan worked together to create the diverse soundtrack of the game, collaborating with several different artists around the world, including Grimes, A$AP Rocky, Deadly Hunta, Gazelle Twin, Ilan Rubin, Nina Kraviz, Conway, and Rat Boy.
The first trailer for the game was released on January 10th, 2013, the development of the game being shown on the game’s YouTube channel with interviews with the devs and Mike Pondsmith himself. The game gained lots of traction over the 8 years it was developed, creating its fandom before it even released. The game’s popularity increased when the famous Hollywood actor, Keanu Reeves hopped onto the project, his face and voice being used for one of the main characters of the plot, Johnny Silverhand.
When the game finally came out, it came with several mixed responses, from players of all platforms. The general rating for the game, according to Google’s statistics, is 3.3 out of 5. Gaming review websites’ opinions on the game were split, depending on what platform they played on. The game’s graphics had seemed to go down immensely when it came to playing games on consoles, whether it be next-gen or current consoles. It had a lot of bugs and glitches that the fans were not happy about after all the years of waiting. CD Projekt RED began to let people have refunds and the Cyberpunk team released a statement on the game website that they were working on the bugs and glitches in the game as of immediately for those who still had the game.
Despite all of the problems and not meeting up to its expectations, Cyberpunk 2077 got good reviews from gaming websites that played it on pc. The game got a 9/10 from IGN, an 8/10 from Metacritic, and another 8/10 from OpenCritic.
Image Credit: CD Projekt RED
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