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Since Edgerunners has me thinking about Cyberpunk 2077 again, I remember a bunch of thoughts I had about the game's design and overall structure. Not that these ideas would necessarily turn it into a great game, but there was always a huge disconnect between the gameplay/world structure and the narrative that bothered me.

The game is designed in the fashion of a linear narrative game, something like an Uncharted or even Deus Ex: HR to a degree. There are a set of linear events that happen in a sequence. You have some choices that affect the direction of events, but otherwise you flow from A to B to C and so on. At the same time, the game gives you a massive open city to move around in. Districts, sidequests, all kinds of environments.

I think one of the major problems was that the narrative flow of the game didn't really complement the open world structure at all, and as such they always felt at odds with each other. I've played good Open World. The best Open World I ever played was Just Cause 2 (maybe other games in the series are good too, but I never played them so idk).

JC2 was a great game because everything was designed around encouraging the player to both explore the open world and fuck around in it. Story events pop up on the world map only after the player has racked up enough points fucking around on the map. You get points by doing all the things you want to do in an open world... find new places, blow shit up, knock over enemy bases, and do side quests.

These are things players want to do anyway, so it meshes great with the overall game. You fuck around for a while, which is fun, and then a story quest opens up that you can go to at your leisure. Once you complete it, new shit opens up on the world map and you can get back to fucking around with it even more until the next story quest opens up. Lather, rinse, repeat.

What does CP2077 do? "The story is progressing because of something I, an NPC, did off camera. Meet me here at this location. Don't keep me waiting, player". More than a few times, the language of the game was a hand at the player's back rushing them to get to the next story quest. At no point did it feel like the game encouraged exploration of side questing.

In fact, exploration and side questing felt really incogruous with the narrative. You have a chip in your head that's slowing killing you, and the story stresses several times that you need to get this out of your head as fast as possible. You get a blurry filter and a sound effect at random intervals to remind you "hey player, you're slowly dying". And yet at the same time, the game offers you the opportunity to join a street racing league, or help deal with local gang squabbles, or perform in a rock concert... and the whole time I'm thinking "shouldn't I be trying to deal with this deadly brain chip problem instead of frittering my life away?"

CP2077 should have taken a page from both Shadowrun Dragonfall and Hong Kong. Both had plots where there was a sense of urgency and stakes, but forced the player into doing side jobs... not because they were there, but because they were the only way to make huge stacks of cash in a hurry, and that was the only way to pay off people important enough to get to the bottom of the main quest.

If Night City was going to be an open world, the main story quests should have been locked behind the regional Fixers, and the Fixers should have gated them behind huge price tags in Eddies or a minimum Street Cred. Then you'd absolutely have a reason to troll around the city helping randos with their pointless bullshit. Knocking over a gang HQ or helping uncover a corpo conspiracy would earn you the stacks of cash and reputation needed to get the Fixers to take you seriously, and give you hints and clues leading towards the main story missions. This would have the additional benefit of making the pace of the game set by the player's actions, and not NPCs that phone in and rush you from A to B like an impatient soccer mom.

Thank you for reading my gaming blog post.

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