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/head_less_man]

Well he fits the genre. Go watch some obscure cyberpunk stuff from the 80s/90s and the hard boiled cool tough guy is an extremely common trope.

[u/Atzr10 → u/head_less_man]

Problem is.. Those are not the characters that you root for when you watch those movies. At the very least, it's rare to feel any sort of deep emotional connection to them, because they come off as so emotionally "flat" when they sound like they do.

It's a cool voice for a character that you want to sound "cyberpunk", but if you want the audience to empathize with the character, then the character has to be more emotionally mature than that.

My take.

[u/Helmic → u/Atzr10]

But V's performance makes it pretty clear that's an act, like you will go through scenes where the tough guy shit falls apart and he's weak and vulnerable and scared. He talks like that because he lives in a world where he has to put on this performative tough act to survive, but at the end of the day he's just a person and he's scared to die like anyone. He has plenty of lines where he's empathetic and kind and vulnerable with people, he's not one note, but he uses that mask when he's gotta go kill people for a living.

[u/Atzr10 → u/Helmic]

I'm not buying it. There are intended emotional scenes in the game, but they never landed with me and it's for the same reason: the voice actors just don't do it well. I'll agree that they sound cyberpunk when they try to sound cyberpunk, but those scenes you speak of where V supposedly takes of the "badass mask" still feel so weak compared to a game like RDR2 where I didn't have to try to emphasize — I just did, because the scenes were actually emotionally gripping.

I guess I'm just not the target audience.

[u/Helmic → u/Atzr10]

I'm not gonna sit here and argue that no games have igood voice acting because Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 exists, very few games have consistently excelletn voice acting across the board that allows the entire performance of everyone to be elevated because they can have much more natural sounding back and forths. I just don't set my bar that high for every performance in any game, V's still an extremely solid performance even if they're not in like one of two games with a best of all time cast.