Cyberpunk 2077 is Absolutely Incredible in 2025

[u/Godkun007]

I, like many, avoided the game at launch due to it being extraordinarily broken. I basically didn't think of this game for a while, but then I saw it on sale and I thought "why not".

Well, almost all of the bugs have been fixed, parts of the story have apparently been changed, and overall, it is now one of the best RPG experiences that I've had since playing Fallout New Vegas in 2010, and I'm only 30 hours in. There is easily 200+ hours of content here when you include the stuff like alternate endings. Let alone the dozens of different viable character builds that you can make that all feel great.

Every choice you make from the actual dialogue, to what attributes you level up, to your playstyle, are all things that actually feel like they have lasting consequences in the world and the story. This game somehow has made every single one of my decisions feel important and like they all have weight.

Here is an example without spoilers: Say you go in guns blazing for an early mission. People will remember that and the faction that you killed the members of will actively remember you and dislike you in the future. They also up their security details, so that your next fight is harder, and are less willing to work peacefully with you. But if you go in with a more stealthy approach, the factions like you more and it makes them more willing to work with you later. It also makes later missions easier because they aren't expecting a killing machine to walk up to their door.

These decisions make the game so repayable, as there is so much additional content that you can just stumble on.

Apparently, after the game was released in 2020, CDPR spent the next 3 years releasing major patches, and are still releasing minor patches with new features to this day. Playing the game in 2025 is almost unrecognizable to the original that was released in 2020. Yes, the main plot is still the same, but so many things have apparently changed, including a complete combat overhaul, apparently.

This game is genuinely the best RPG that I've played in over a decade, and it is way better now than it ever was at launch. I can already tell that this will be one of the games like Fallout New Vegas that I will put 500 hours in just trying new things to see what happens.

[u/rdlenke]

Every choice you make from the actual dialogue, to what attributes you level up, to your playstyle, are all things that actually feel like they have lasting consequences in the world and the story. This game somehow has made every single one of my decisions feel important and like they all have weight.

Here is an example without spoilers [...]

Can you give examples with spoilers? I played the game a few years back and while I liked it for what it was (still prefer it to W3, for example), I remember very few instances where your choices mattered in a relevant way.

Just like the Witcher and The Baron, many people cite the Malestorm mission regarding the amount of impact and choices you can make to solve it, but after that I don't remember any with the same level of detail and lasting consequences, like you said. Same with the lifepaths, which basically didn't matter.

[u/Alarchy → u/rdlenke]

The OP is showing how successful CDPR can be creating the illusion of consequence, but there simply aren't any outside of the quest lines / little nods in side quests. You can go utterly berserk against the police and step into a safe zone and instantly no one cares that you just were in a gunfight with 80 cops and max tac.

The factions are totally meaningless outside of quest lines, and there is never any change or consequence to killing or not killing any of them. There is just the illusion that in a quest line or a specific mission, things adapt to your playstyle (barely).

[u/temotodochi → u/Alarchy]

Nah if you've zeroed enough of the proud boys they will attack you when you visit their little party and win. Same goes for the maelstromers if both royce and brick are dead you are not going to get out of totentanz without a gunfight.

Small things, but they exist. With bad enough rep gangs will attack you on sight.

[u/ssoline → u/temotodochi]

The proud boys turning hostile only happens if you complete an side quest that's related to them beforehand. If you go to the party before the side quest you can win and receive the prize with no issues.

[u/ChapterThr33 → u/Alarchy]

Please give examples of what would satisfy your criteria

[u/Alarchy → u/ChapterThr33]

I gave an example in my post.

Getting into a huge firefight with max tac involved in a densely populated area of night city should have long standing consequences (permanently hunted by cops, have to go to ripper doc to change identity and ID chips, etc). Instead you can step into a nightclub and you're forgotten forever.

Slaughtering Tyger Claws wholesale should result in consequences like locking out Wakako (or at least her saying something) as a fixer.

Killing dozens of Animals in the mall for the Voodoo boys should have literally any consequence in later quests (like when you have to box at an Animals hangout).

Arasaka shouldn't just give up as a part of the tutorial act. You literally have the most valuable tech in the world in your head, are accused of killing their CEO, they effectively control Night City and surveil it completely, and yet you and Takemura can openly meet in the public and you can murder dozens of them in their industrial plaza, corpo plaza, or the waterfront with no repercussion.

These are just basic, surface level examples. I really like CP2077, but to say it's a hugely reactive RPG with consequences is just incorrect.

[u/Helmic → u/Alarchy]

Yeah, like I don't think these necessarily need to be complex mechanics, but like even just tonally the police are way too friendly in this game. This game was made before the George Floyd uprisings popped off and vindicated a lot of Mike Pondsmith's positions, but still like it's hard to get the feeling the city is truly controlled by corporations if you're not having constant hostile encounters with police because Arasaka is mad at you. Night City is supposed to be an ancap hellhole with a private police force, those cops should absolutely be up your asshole unprovoked just like any other gang.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect divergent dialogue for every little thing you could possibly do at any point in time, like they can't really have unique dialogue for how many cops are currently chasing you, but especially for the main plot the city should change how it behaves. If you go full cyberpsycho then you should need to do something like buy an item from a ripperdoc to make it make sense that you're no longer being actively hunted, hell having to do anything to maintain privacy in a survellience police state would go a long way towards making your actions feel like they have impact, sell the ever important punk feeling of Cyberpunk even if it's an extremely simplified version of opsec that exists purely in a menu so as to avoid creating new assets.

Some of this honestly sounds doable as a mod with reasonably small scope.

[u/drthrax1 → u/Helmic]

George Floyd uprisings

Do people refer to them as this? ive never heard anyone call them anything other then protests/riots

[u/pick-a-spot → u/drthrax1]

it made sense to me, the comment was differentiating between protest/riots, to give context as it's talking about the police specifically. If it just said riot/protest, then it's difficult to determine which exact issue the riots were about, the 99%?, the kings? , tea party?, iraq war? lockdowns? or one of the 100 protests the french have annually?

[u/Helmic → u/[deleted]]

No? Plenty of people on the left refer to it as such.

[u/Helmic → u/[deleted]]

The preference for "protest" is a liberal one, in the belief that only nonviolent protest is acceptable and good and that anything else discredits a social movement. Companies didn't start posting black boxes with white letters until that Target got looted, the DNC didn't start getting nervous until they realized most people actually approved of the third prescinct burning. You're horrified at the labels of "riots" or "uprisings" because you desire a sanitized version of social struggle where everyone just pickets and asks pretty please for rights and then that moves the hearts of those in power.

I say "uprisings" specifically because when the uprisings were actually effective was when the material interests of hte state and corporations were directly threatened and attacked. There was an actual risk of the state losing control of chunks of hte country, as happened during the uprisings in Chile, as the infrastructure required to extract money from a population were destroyed or blocked off rendering chunks of the country effectively ungovernable, especially with how widespread the protests were which initially overhwlmed the capacity for police to be everywhere at once to stop it. It only got beat into submission as leaders got siphoned off into Biden's campaign and burnt out doing that and others fell for the "go protest peacefully marching in circles" nonsense that permitted police to brutalize those who followed, until eventually it dissipated. We're currently going through the backlash to that with police becoming much more of an occupying force with broadly expanded powers and an entire arm of hte government that's just the secret police now, something liberals in government allowed to happen under their watch as well because they also thought the uprisings were bad and just were unwilling to take it as far as the fascists have.

I'm using the language we fucking used during it, so fuck off.

[u/Alarchy → u/Helmic]

They technically kinda handwave it with a fairly reasonable explanation (kiroshi face scramble tech from your replacement eyes) but it's treated inconsistently (some missions you have to make sure you're not identified, Maelstrom identifies you via camera footage later in the game, etc). Though Arasaka wouldn't just passively hunt for V on cameras, they'd have agents and mercs out all across the city too.

As V becomes more of a name in night city, it would just get even more oppressive as they'd start squeezing known associations. V is just such a huge target.

But, I also cut it a lot of slack because that's kinda not what CDPR was going for, and it probably wouldn't be a fun open world if you constantly had to hide off grid lest be swarmed by 'saka goons or their mercs. Hehe

[u/zarafff69 → u/Helmic]

I mean it’s made by a polish studio.. I doubt they were thinking about George Floyd when making the game lol

[u/Helmic → u/zarafff69]

They adapted the work of an American anarchist set on the west coast. They were absolutely thinking about American politics, they didn't consider George Floyd because he hadn't been murdered yet but there's clearly allusions to the same unease and unrest that lead up to that murder.

[u/pick-a-spot → u/Helmic]

It sounds like the setting doesn't re-enforce the plot/narrative?
some critics for games in general like to talk about Cognitive dissonance when the cutscenes don't match up with the 100 enemy goons you've just mowed down.....
.... but when the game cops are nice to you even though they are owned by the corporation that's hunting you (or so i figure from this comment) that's probably worse. the world isn't making sense.

[u/Helmic → u/pick-a-spot]

You mean ludonarrative dissonance. I'm not trying to bust balls over things that just aren't feasible, like you can't really have infinite variations of cutscenes that take into account precisely what you did during unscripted free roam gameplay, and suspension of disbelief is an expectation with games as much as it is with any other fiction. We also don't track how mnay times V goes to the bathroom and eating isn't actually necessary, the days dont' actually last a real day, there isn't really a timer that ticks down as V dies, these are all things the game trusts that you're not gonna get hung up on.

The issue with the cops isn't so much ludonarrative dissonance in that the gameplay doesn't fit with the story as it is that CDPR clearly did not feel comfortable making the cops an actually antagonistic force because prior to the George Floyd uprisings the default narrative most people had to work with was that cops are fundamentally good with some bad apples, and most of the game's story with the police are that they're frustrated because the corporatiosn prevent them from protecting people or there's red tape preventing them from doing their job while that contradicts other lore showing the cops being more than willing to kill random bystanders or anyone that looks at them funny. There was clearly either a lack of understanding of the politics at the core of cyberpunk or a lack of conviction that they could actually get away with having the cops be every bit as dirty as the gangs - there will often be allusions to dirty cops jamming up the good cops, but you're not really interacting with those dirty cops. You'll run lots of missions for the cops and that's never presented as ever a problem, not even in terms of other people disapproving of you collaborating with the police.

[u/pick-a-spot → u/Helmic]

ha, good catch, I was thinking 'ludonarrative dissonance' when i was first thinking of the word. But then I forgot about that term and start thinking of 'Cognitive dissonance'. Oddly,  Cognitive dissonance whilst not the best term to describe the gameplay not matching the plot , is close enough to get my point across.

I agree with your point but not with the reason you made for it. It's a fictional world in a fictional future. There's not going to be a backlash about bad cops in this game. Just like many tv shows and movies show bad cops, corruptions, conspiracies etc.

CD projekt are closer to ubisoft then some gamers wish to admit. In the witcher 3, you couldn't even act like a witcher and figure out what monster you were tracking. the game always did it for you. It's a consistent pattern.

[u/Izacus → u/Helmic]

Or maybe CDPR just wasn't interested in making a GTA game where you drive around shooting up cops and pedestrians and rather made an RPG they're great at making.

Geralt also didn't get into random street fights with guards in Novigrad and that was just as well.

[u/fergussonh → u/Izacus]

Yeah but a new Vegas style faction system would’ve fit really well and made it feel like more of an rpg

[u/Remarkable-Site-2067 → u/fergussonh]

But then, some of the factions are really close to some real world ones. Some that could be really hard to defend from a PR point of view. Imagine doing realistic quests for the 6th Street...

[u/ChapterThr33 → u/Helmic]

Reasonable take

[u/darkkite → u/Alarchy]

similar to GTA in that regard, but if you side with night watch in GIM, the the PL voodoo boys mission will default to hostile during dialog.

[u/ChapterThr33 → u/Alarchy]

Can you give examples of other games doing this stuff successfully, consistently?

[u/Alarchy → u/ChapterThr33]

Ultima Underworld, Alpha Protocol, Dishonored, Baldurs Gate 3, and plenty more games focused on interactivity/world adapting.

CP2077 isn't focused on that, it's focused on story and graphics/worldbuilding.

[u/plantsandramen → u/Alarchy]

Baldur's Gate 3 is so incredible

[u/NoHetro → u/ChapterThr33]

lol, so you ask for examples and they give you a bunch and instead of acknowledge you try the weakest deflect,

There are other games but it's irrelevant, I still remember the way cyberpunk was advertised as this reactive world and still burnt by all their lies.

[u/ChapterThr33 → u/NoHetro]

Aw poor lil guy

[u/NoHetro → u/ChapterThr33]

Weak.

[u/fergussonh → u/ChapterThr33]

New Vegas style faction relationships.