Hello, and welcome to The Back Page of Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, all right, how’s it going? I said it differently today. Yeah, freaked me out, to be honest. Yeah, I could hear that it threw you, I’m so sorry. No, it’s fine, it’s fine. You normally go, hello, and I’m like, oh yeah. Hello. Ready to do some fucking podcasting. So, that’s the feeling, isn’t it? So Matthew, before we start recording this episode, which is about Cyberpunk 2077, you DM’d me saying, a food hut in Bath has closed, of significance, would you like to discuss that? Yeah, it sent shockwaves through the Green Park station, food hut community. Yeah, macro economy. Yeah, Goulash is gone. Yeah, the Goulash hut, legendary Goulash hut. Legendary Goulash hut named Goulash is no longer there and has been replaced by, drum roll, a Jackie Potato place. Oh, what, is that, oh, that’s so mediocre as a replacement. We can, we could do better. It’s got a good name. What’s it, why does it go? It’s called Straight Jackets. Oh, that’s all right. I mean, is it fun to make light of mental health issues, Matthew? I don’t think so. No, it’s like Straight Jacket Potato. Oh, I see, yeah, Straight Jackets. Yeah, I was- You took the wind out of my sails with that one. I was only trolling. And it was better than Goulash, which was really like phoning it in. Look, the Goulash Hut survived the pandemic. And like, I don’t believe they looked at the cost of living crisis and thought, oh, I’m not sure we can get through this, lads. The returns on Goulash have got to be pretty high. They’re charging like, what, seven or eight quid for it? Enough that they’ve moved from the Hut to the cursed shopfront, which, a business which seems doomed to fail every couple of years. Yeah, like that little strip of extra shops is getting pretty good. They’ve got Tacker Tacker there now. Did you know that? Yeah. That’s pretty solid. I like Tacker Tacker. They do good wraps in there. There’s now a dude who works in that Tacker Tacker who worked in another place I used to go to for lunch. And there’s a real awkwardness when he sees me. It’s not Tony from Intermezzo. No, that would be bleak. I like to think he’s retired into the sunset. This is another guy who’s like, I think like maybe in the first restaurant he thought, oh, you seem like a nice guy. You come to this restaurant, good for you. And then he sees me in another restaurant repeating my really bad food habits elsewhere. And I think he’s like, you’ve got a genuine problem, haven’t you? Kind of like vibes to it. And like, he’s not, you know, if he believes that, he’s not wrong. That’s what I’m saying, Matthew. But Goulash maintains its brick and mortar presence, which baffles me. Did you see that there’s a milk bun opening on that strip of shops too, which is like a high-end burger restaurant from Bristol. Is that replacing the Wolf Weimba? Yeah, yeah. Which I thought would really thrive, Vin Bath, but I guess not. The wine guy always seems like he’s pretty moneyed though. He didn’t seem too caught up about… Yeah, I mean, the wine hut is successful, and they’ve pulled off the quite big power play of they’ve now got two sheds in Green Park Station. Oh yeah, yeah. That second shed doesn’t seem like it from the outside looking in, right? It’s a good hang. I went there on Bathtoberfest, hashtag Bathtoberfest, and had what I would describe as an eight out of 10 time. It was like rock solid. Yeah, it doesn’t seem like a party hangout from the outside, once you’re in there. It’s got good ambience. It looks like it might have alpine lodge energy, and they’ve also got very fine wines, or so I’m told by Catherine, who likes wines. Yeah, they are good wines, actually. He’s got excellent tastes, as you’d hope for a place called The Wine Hut. The beers are more mediocre, but that’s what I’ve got independent spirit for. They’ve got my back on that. So I can go sit in The Wine Hut’s hut, and you can go sit in the Jack and Potato Hut’s, and yeah, we’ll occasionally converse. I think that’d be a good use of an evening, if not a lunchtime. How long was that? Like 12 fucking minutes about restaurants. Let’s talk about Cyberpunk. Matthew. So yes, this episode, I wanted to revisit Cyberpunk because it’s been really interesting to see its reputation turn around this year. It was this massively hyped game launched in 2020. Had a bunch of issues, particularly on consoles and a bunch of bugs and other issues. It clearly wasn’t ready for prime time. And yet, two years have passed. They’ve been patching it constantly. They’ve released a bespoke next-gen version. And they’ve also released an anime, which has supercharged interest in it. Seemingly, that was the anime sort of doing. But it means that the player count for it has been incredibly high. So on PC, I think it, when I checked yesterday, 50,000 plus people playing it at one time, which is pretty amazing for a game from two years ago. It’s the type of thing you might see with a Skyrim, but very rare with a single-player game on PC. So I was curious to come back to it because I’d only played a few hours at the time, Matthew, and thought I’d come back and I know that you finish it at the time. So I thought the contrast in our opinions might be good. Even if it’s not, there’s a God of War episode next week that people can look forward to, and this could be a write-off, which is fine. Matthew, I thought we’d start back at the beginning. So, the Cyberpunk hype cycle, that was something that was firmly happening while you and I were in, if not games media, then adjacent games media. What are your memories of that hype cycle? Does it conjure painful feelings from the past? Yes, but that might be from working on Rock Paper Shotgun specifically, who managed to earn the eye of what seemed like the entire internet at the time by being less than enthusiastic about the kind of build where Cyberpunk really exploded, that first behind closed door thing. It wasn’t even the first time, I think it was the second time it was shown. The first time there was all the kind of breathless excitement as everyone watched this locked away demo and then spilled out and desperately tried to scroll their thoughts about what they’d seen because it was so dense with information, you know, it was total overload, it was quite a hard demo to kind of really get the full scale of in any particular write-up. But I think it was actually in the Gamescom follow-up, one of the writers on RPS was slightly down on it and then it basically marked us out as enemies of cyberpunk online and me working on the YouTube channel at the time, who hadn’t even seen this demo, was just inundated with shit about this game, which is I know it’s got nothing to do with the wider cyberpunk experience and no one else will have experienced that particular experience, but it really definitely soured it for me at a time where I wanted to be getting pumped for this never before seen level of detail and crazy technical ambition and actually I just associated the game with its really horrible, horrible fanbase. I had to add every cyberpunk adjacent word imaginable to our word filter on YouTube, so if you commented on it, your comments basically went into comment limbo. Because we had all those kind of YouTuber, kind of hate preachers who kind of stir up shit and try and get everyone to pile on channels. We got it because of this one preview on RPS, so as you can clearly tell I’m not entirely over that experience and I know that’s got nothing to do with CD Projekt RED, but the game spoke to a particularly unpleasant bunch of people back then and actually it seemed to sort of die off quite quickly once it was out. Yeah, surprise, surprise, they probably turned their eye on the people who made it instead because they’re a piece of shit boys on the internet or they got invested in the Snyder Cut movement, Matthew, which is… Well, why though, because normally you go, oh, there’s a certain set of maniacs who you expect this from, but there were some people I actually legitimately liked who piled on us as well and now I hate them and it’s really annoying because they’re still liked by other people. So I won’t name them because I’m not petty, but you know, there’s some quite mainstream channels who went to bat so hard for this game years before it came out, lost a lot of respect, you know, for quite a lot of YouTubers through this experience. That’s poor form. That reminds me of when I was on, there was like one YouTuber who shared, like shared like a bit of text that was quite inflammatory about a game that wasn’t from actually like from PC Gamer, but said it was from PC Gamer and then said it was due to like waning editorial relevance. And I thought, you absolute prick. I just thought like, there’s no need for that. Like why don’t you just make your thing and not slam your peers? It’s not fucking hard. Do you know what I mean? Like it’s hard. It’s hard enough out there on the internet. Don’t be a prick. It’s really simple. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, that’s, you know, the Cyberpunk story is long and complex. It starts, it starts quite unpleasantly. But then when it comes out, it obviously gets a taste of like its own horrible community and by sympathy shift a bit. Yeah, for sure. I remember it just being like an exhausting time of every single detail that dropped in an interview for, you know, maybe translated from another language into English. And then that would become like a new story that you’d see throughout the day. And then like the very provocative marketing. I remember like one piece of key art that I had completely forgotten about, actually, one piece of artwork of like an advert in the game of like depicting a trans character, fetishizing a trans character that got kicked up so much shit. And like, that was just a knackering cycle to live through. And it went on for so long as well. It was such a long period. Like the thing is, like this game was, I think it was like 2012 they first talked about making this. I remember when I was on Running Games TM in 2013, we ran a feature on Cyberpunk. They had that one piece of artwork of that girl in the knickers with her arm blades in the road, which was like, which dated really fast. And then like Mike Pondsmith was doing interviews about it, CD Projekt did an interview about it. So that was like, you know, eight year cycle ultimately, they even before they properly developed The Witcher 3, they were talking about, you know, we’re making this thing. And then, yeah, I just remember, like, those two, you know, backward in person events were a thing. But like, I think it was 2018 and 2019, just Cyberpunk being the centerpiece of everything going on at like E3 and Gamescom. These presentations that were highly coveted, that people wanted to get behind the scenes and see it, because they would like not actually reveal it to the public until later. And I think it’s fair to say that the first time they showed it, it didn’t really look, it looked too good to be true. And then when you play the finished game, it doesn’t quite look as good as it did the first time they showed it. Now, I’m not passing off blame there. There’s loads of reasons that that could be the case. They had to show off like an early slice of it, games, you know, performance and stuff doesn’t and graphics, that stuff can come down to the wire in a lot of cases. So you know, but it was so exhausting to live through. And it means I never quite was able to escape that shadow when it actually came out, you know? Yeah, that’s fair. I will say that my interactions directly with developers on this, you know, when we got quite good interview access, you know, funnily enough, while the internet was saying we were these, you know, enemies of cyberpunk, you know, CD Projekt RED were, you know, still inviting us to all their previews. And we were doing all the interviews at E3 and Gamescom. And you know, they’re always very open. It was a difficult game to interview someone about because the demo seems so unlikely. You kind of think, do I spend my time mining them for new information? Because like you say, you could have the headline, they’re swimming in cyberpunk and it would get you like a billion views. I think that was specifically on PC Gamer actually. But you also felt like, well, I actually want to kind of interrogate what this is going to be. And I feel like I did waste a lot of my opportunities talking to them or basically going, come on, come on, this isn’t real. This isn’t right. This isn’t what you’re promising for an entire game, is it? This can’t be. And, you know, hearing sort of slightly bemused developers go, well, you know, yeah, you know, trying to talking around it and trying not to kind of commit either way. I will say, you know, when we talk about the final game, we covered this, but like it is a game which has moments of incredible detail, which are close to what they showed. And then it scales down to something far less impressive. Like sometimes in the course of a single mission, it’s a very interesting game as to where like resources and time and effort went, I think. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, we’ll definitely come back to that. So I suppose like two years after release, Matthew, what do you make of the consensus around Cyberpunk? Where do you think it currently sits in people’s favour? Were you surprised by the spike of interest in it that came out came along this year? Not really, I mean, like, you know, they’ve been tidying it up and there’s I know lots of people kind of decided they didn’t want to have that experience, particularly on console. It just seemed so underpowered, like I, as did most of the people who reviewed it, reviewed it on PC. I don’t think you could review it on console. So all its scores are PC scores. And while it was definitely wonky back then, it was like, you know, very playable and you’ve got a much better idea of like, you know, what this thing was meant to look like and things I’ve seen of the console versions, they still don’t look quite as good as it looked on my PC, you know, in that review session, really. I think at the time, the conversation was so dominated by like the technical bug question. I don’t really feel like there was a lot of like, particularly interesting engagement with this game mechanically. Like my review didn’t really go either way on the on the tech stuff. Like I didn’t really massively ding it for its for its bugs and glitches. Like I had bigger problems with it. Like I don’t think it is a masterpiece. I don’t think if you fix it and polish it up, this game is a brilliant, brilliant game. I think it’s a sometimes great game and certainly very interesting, very rarely boring. But I felt like the consensus at the time was of very little value to me because it felt like it was either people going, it’s the best thing I’ve ever played, or it seemed to be people going, this thing is so fucked, no one could possibly ever like this. And so to sit in the very unsexy position in the middle going, well, you know, I think it has major mechanical limitations and RPG, no one really cared for that line. So if you know, and I don’t feel like it’s been critically revisited until this podcast, this groundbreaking podcast. Yeah, I feel like whenever I saw like updated pieces on it, it would tend to be, is it fixed now? Was it kind of headline, which is, you know, completely fair because a lot of people are asking that. But it’s, but the problems that everyone was really worried about, while visually really important were also like so far from what was really wrong with it, I felt, you know, and they have addressed some of it, you know, they have re-tinkered with some of the skill systems and things like that. But I think it’s still quite an inherently flawed game. It’s not like once the glitches are fixed, it’s a 10, that just isn’t true. Shall I get into it, Matthew, shall I jump in with my thoughts here? So yeah, I played about two or three hours at the time, not enough to see like the first major twist that kind of sets up the entire story, including like how you get Keanu Reeves in your head and stuff, which is not something that happens straight away, it happens a few hours in. So I’d like, I had my experience of driving around the city thinking, oh, that’s pretty. But I will come back later on when some of these bugs are run out. And I think superficially, it’s like, it’s pretty much there. I had like a couple of bugs, like there was a cut scene near the end where two characters got in a car and then the car was upside down and they climbed into the car while it was upside down. That was probably the biggest bug I had throughout the campaign, other than like one where I couldn’t get into a vehicle I needed for an objective. And then a few like NPCs just wandering into different buildings and generally being a bit sort of tricky. But I do agree with you that like there hasn’t been a huge amount of evaluation of how this functions as an RPG, because or like as a game generally, I think the weird thing about this game is it is an open world game, an RPG and a first person shooter. And that is a lot to take on at once. And I would say that it does all of them okay. I would say it’s like probably the worst at being an RPG, I would say the changes you make to your character are so incremental, they don’t feel that meaningful. I felt that for about the abilities throughout the game, like, no matter what I sort of put my points into, in terms of stats or in terms of like specific kind of like, within every step is a different set of like sub sub stats basically that allow you to tinker things like you know, reducing fall damage or increasing the amount of damage that a shotgun or light machine gun does in combat, that sort of thing. I would say that none of that made for a meaningful or exciting sort of like RPG curve in terms of power. And as an RPG in terms of how you affect the story, it’s very weak really. Like, it’s not a game that’s meaningfully affected by your choices. You do make a few choices, but a lot of them kind of live in a vacuum really and don’t make a huge difference. There is like one narrative arc they want you to sort of exist within, I suppose. Then as a shooter, it’s fun and flashy and I think the guns feel nice. But it is a little bit like, what if someone tried to build Call of Duty levels for Fallout 4? Like, this combat that is sort of limited by the RPG numbers and RPG-ness of it, it means it doesn’t quite convince as a sort of shooter, as a Twitch shooter. It’s a little bit messier than that. And then, as an open world game, I think it’s probably at its best because the spectacle of the city is amazing. It does seem like just very shiny at first and there’s not much to it, but every now and then it will pull you into a corner of it where it will investigate that part of the city in real detail or make it feel very characterful and make it feel like a real place in ways that really, really dazzle you and constantly made me think, why on earth did they try and get this running on a PS4 and Xbox One, like, just foolhardy. So it’s such a spectacle. And then as an immersive sim, it’s also flawed. It’s not very good at telling you when you should add powers. It’s not very good at using the critical path to give you new powers that make meaningful differences to the way you play the game. You can play each level in stealth or go in all guns blazing if you want. I would say the game’s pretty well calibrated for stealth, but it doesn’t give you… It makes you go out of your way to turn it into an immersive sim, I would say, as opposed to naturally being an immersive sim. But what I will say is despite all that, it is more than the sum of its parts. Combined, I found all of that just incredibly entertaining because there’s not really one part of that game experience that drives the whole thing. It’s like it’s all experiential. It’s all about being in this city and living the life of this character. Collectively, on that level, I think it’s actually really successful. I don’t think it even has enough first-person shooter levels for you to stop and think about its immersive credentials that much. I feel like I counted maybe six proper levels in it. There’s not many in it really. Yet, that represents 20 hours of game. But that’s because they’re pinging you through story bits or exploring or whatever it might be. So, yeah, those are my base thoughts, Matthew. What do you think? Yeah, I think that sounds vaguely similar to how I felt about it in that I went back and reread my review of this and the second you think about it, it does break down into all its constituent parts in a way which suggests they never quite nailed what the whole was meant to be. It’s interesting you said Call of Duty in there. I actually think the main campaign is probably closer to a Call of Duty campaign than it is anything else. It is so scripted and cinematic that actually the character you bring in, the mechanical character, I don’t really think makes any difference. If this game wants you to have a bit where you’re shooting robots climbing up the bonnet of your car, it doesn’t matter if you had a stealth build. You’ll have an amazing gun that’s capable of doing that set piece. This game always gives you the tools you need regardless of what you bring in. In the actual central storyline, I think there’s only really two or three scenes where you really get a big area where you get to choose to play stealth or go in loud. Otherwise you really are doing it by the game’s rules. Stealth is very scripted stealth in the central campaign anyway, in a way like or ghillied up or whatever. It’s kind of, you shoot this guy in the head and I’ll shoot that guy in the head. It doesn’t really matter about your stats because they’ve gamed it so that it looks impressive and it works. And I actually don’t have a problem with it. That’s probably my favorite mode of Cyberpunk because that’s the incredibly shiny mode. That’s where all the money’s gone. That’s where the crazy set design, the amazing motion capture and the characters, that’s where all the story stuff is. And I think the space where the mechanical view you’ve built, the more Deus Ex-y side of it of which body parts have you assigned and which perks you’ve unlocked are kind of more in the open world content. There’s like a big side line of story called, I think they’re called gigs, which aren’t really story content. It’s kind of, you know, 20 or so buildings that you’ll basically have to go in and steal something or rescue someone or kill all the guards inside. And those are very like approach from whichever direction using the unique build you have. But I found those very unsatisfying because you really feel the absence of story and script and and that kind of like authored hand on it. And it feels very flat by comparison. So it’s quite a strange game where actually like the less ambitious it is, I think the more successful it is. Yeah, I can sort of see that, to be honest. It’s a weird one because I feel like the game is weird to be in a world where everyone’s talking about these different augmentations they’ve got and like, you know, things have been grafted onto them or whatever. And then the main story I think gave me like one or two of those. And then I got to the end of the game, had a spare 30k in my pocket and thought, well, I’ll go to the Ripper dock and see what I can afford. And the answer was not much. That got me like one pretty good ability, which was to basically have like a super jump to hop me over places quite. And that’s really fun because the city is quite nicely built for letting you explore that way. So that was good. But otherwise, I had loads of empty slots and I was at the end of the campaign. I thought, this is really strange, it’s like a game where you’re meant to customize your ultimate V. That’s at least how they felt like they sold it to me. And yet it just isn’t that game. What’s that V for? Like I say, because the main missions, they’re not designed to play themselves, but it’s very, very hard to lose those missions, I found anyway, that you get to the end and you’ve maybe made a dent on like 10% of the skill tree. But you haven’t really explored any of it in detail and you’re like, what’s the super V you could potentially build like actually for, other than doing this very unimportant like side material? You know, I think the art of a very skill led RPG like this is that you never want it to be so unbalanced that you’re having to grind in menial tasks to be powerful enough to do the central storyline. But this is like the exact opposite. This is like, it literally doesn’t matter, like anyone can basically complete the hardest content in the game. Anyone can complete the hardest feat in the game or what the story calls the hardest feat. You can save the day and take on the huge corporation or whatever. And then you’re meant to build this amazing V who just exists to like clear out garages and offices and things. This is like very, very odd. I’ve just found that pacing very, very strange and it gives it like the end game of Cyberpunk quite a weird aftertaste because you’ve done all this spectacular shit, you know, you’ve potentially gone to space and done all this zany bollocks up there. And yet here you are kind of just sort of buying cars to drive to nowhere and buying upgrades for missions that don’t exist. And I just, I felt like they’d really like blown that side of the game. I think it’s weird because it does have some really good side missions in it, but those side missions are tied to characters. And like there’s a massive delineation between, like you say, gigs and those side missions. And so once you’ve used up those side missions tied to those different narrative characters, it’s not like there’s necessarily like a deep, a deep pool of them to go out and find and enjoy. And so, yeah, I can definitely see how you would end up with like an empty world of just, you know, more gigs to go and tick off. Yeah, that is a kind of, that is a strange thing. It’s quite a risky thing they do where really those side character stories should probably just be in the main campaign. And to call them side quests is a bit strange because they are all characters you meet in the story. And so to like cordon them off specifically is a bit of an odd choice, I think, because they are so tied to that main story. I guess maybe that’s part of the RPG, we want you to forge your own path sort of element to it. But I don’t necessarily think it matters that much. But it takes a risk in being like, here’s the main story that’s about 20 hours long. And then there’s about 20 more hours of sort of meaningful stuff to go get. And then there’s like a big map of just other things to get and do. Yeah, it’s a strange one. Despite that, I still really like it. It is a great place to sort of explore and be in. I didn’t necessarily think it was at first. I thought, is this actually quite a small city? Will I get kind of bored of these different areas? But at the best, the little, the sort of most dense sort of hotspots of the city feel like walking around the hubs in Deus Ex, Mankind Divided, for example, except there are loads of them and they are rendered in such, to such a scale and in such detail and feel so alive that I really like that about it. That doesn’t apply to like the entire map. There’s definitely this massive dead spots in that map for sure. But every now and then, I would forget I was driving around a fictional city and then just look up and see something flying overhead or like a Blade Runner-esque sort of like, you know, big sort of brutalist structure in like the mist in front of me and stuff. And I was like, oh, wow, this is, it’s quite a, quite a thing, Nights in City, it is quite the place to be in. Yeah, it’s, it’s sort of, it has a, the game has like a strange relationship with height in, in that there was no flight in the city. You can’t like just fly around it and take a look up there, you know, it’s, it’s all, you know, you’re always kind of craning your neck to look up and the skyscrapers are sort of more there for like effect than any, you know, purpose in terms of, you don’t have like any huge interaction with them. You know, occasionally like a mission will take you in and like some of my favourite moments are when you, a mission does take you into one of those buildings and suddenly you’re at the top of the city looking down on it and there’s, I can’t remember the name of it, but there’s the region which is a bit like Hollywood Hills, I guess, where there’s always luxury mansions, kind of slightly removed but up on a hill there’s like a monastery there as well and, but there are always great big glass monstrosities where you can explore there and there the kind of city becomes this background and I think one thing it does do very well it’s like it’s almost built this amazing place sort of as a backdrop like you know the stuff where you’re outside the city in the badlands or like I say these houses you kind of appreciate it being there because it gives like the horizon this amazing quality I just I just don’t know if there’s much sort of meaningful interaction with it or as much meaningful interaction with it like when you’re actually in the city. I don’t know do I agree with that I sort of like I certainly felt like I had reasons to sort of be there but like I suppose like because key story characters are fixed specific places so you’ll go to the same few places over and over again yeah in some cases but like and I suppose like when I would go to like Japan town I wouldn’t necessarily do anything I think I just kind of look around and maybe I go search for like one of those crates that’s got some stuff in it but I suppose that I suppose yeah like I suppose like the quest do the quest develop make you develop meaningful relationships with your environment maybe not like I think about a great side quest in Deus Ex Mankind Divided is when you find like a body in an alley and then have to go investigating around the city over like who did it and why they did it and stuff and that’s really good when it games that small scale in terms of like those those were not massive hubs you can build that very intimate relationship with your surroundings I think Night City might just be too big too damn big to actually. I’m sure you can. I’m sure you can. I’m sure you can. I’m sure you can. I’m sure you can. I’m sure you can. There’s not a lot which make use of the size of that city. There’s a few bits where you shoot people as you’re driving along roads, and there’s four racing missions, which is kind of hilarious for a city this big, that it has literally four races in it. That’s somewhere where those races are full of story content, which makes them, obviously, a lot harder to make, and the cost of them. But then you’re like, well, once you’ve done them, there’s no racing to be done, and you’re potentially buying a fleet of 50 cars, and there’s nothing to do with them other than drive around, and maybe that just speaks to my lack of imagination, that just driving around, maybe I need more than that. Where they did and didn’t pump time and money to fill this open world is quite an interesting thing to me. There’s also the sense that, I guess I’m assuming a lot about game development here, but in theory, I would think that adding some new racers to the game wouldn’t be that strenuous in terms of creating content. I would assume not compared to designing a level that has enemies in it. If you’re just saying point A to B and then you’ve already built car AI that knows how to path find, surely it’s not the hardest thing in the world to add to the game if they wanted to shore it up a little bit. I think that’s a fair point. It’s funny how it almost grades its own content so you as a player know that it’s less meaningful. The gigs do have some story content attached to it, but they are all like those shards which are basically codexes that give you information on what just happened. And I didn’t read any of them, to be honest, Matthew, because that’s not why I was playing Cyberpunk, to read a bunch of text. There’s so much writing in this game and it’s buried in so many boring text files like that. It just speaks to me of like, you know, you had a writing team on this and they ended up making the game for 10 years and they just wrote so much shit that like every random fight you have, someone will pretty much drop something telling you like why they were in that place. But that just isn’t like interesting storytelling or world building. If you just kill five generic hoodlums and then there’s some thing saying they were there for a drug deal and then you go into the next alley and kill five generic hoodlums and they drop something saying, you know, they were there to get a case of money or something. It just seems so, it’s like so arbitrary. You can really like feel the pain of different departments in this game. Yeah, there’s also like the thing I never quite understood from the marketing was they were definitely selling it as, oh yeah, you’re like, it’s you forging your story in this city. And like the game is not about that. It’s about you think you’re going to do that, then one thing happens to you. That means you have to go to one corporation to resolve what’s happened to you. And then, you know, you’ll get to the end of that and then there’ll be like several different outcomes, depending on how many side quests you finished in terms of like endings you can unlock. And like that journey is quite different to the one I think they were they were maybe selling with it. And I don’t mind that because I think the story is quite concentrated. It has an intent to it has momentum. It reaches that conclusion and as discussed is beautifully presented. I would say that one of the strange things about this game is the reason the kind of like the jankier bit stand out is because the polish on characters speaking to you in first person without any loading screens and shit is fucking amazing in this game. And you will continually encounter that sort of like that sort of thing and doing that kind of like, you know, painstakingly hand done animation. That’s like a massive amount of work they put into it. So I never I never like lost my appreciation for that. But yeah, I suppose like I ended up feeling like it was I was slightly at odds with what I thought the premise of the game actually was by the end of it. I thought, oh, this is this what you made was a kind of a character driven sort of like A to B plot storyline and that’s kind of disguised as an RPG, you know. Yeah, I think that’s fair. Or like, I just wonder if it started off with this broad RPG aim and, you know, the stuff they fell in love with was actually this like character driven stuff and stuff outside of you as a character. Like, you rarely feel like the most important person in that world, which is kind of what a lot of RPGs are about. You know, you are the whatever, you know, king of the universe, commander shepherd saving everyone, you know. Here, you’re kind of interacting with people who are a lot more important or a lot more powerful, you know, you’ve got someone a lot more important and powerful kind of inside you. And, you know, again, I don’t really have a problem with that. I think they I think they honed in on the right stuff. You know, like, I wouldn’t want less of that to have a character who can express themselves a bit more. Like, I wouldn’t. That isn’t a swap I would take. I wonder if they kind of like got to the point where they had sort of worked out what they wanted to do and then just realized how much harder it was to make that than making another witcher, for example, because there’s so much in this game that they would have to completely learn how to do from scratch, you know, from first person combat to those lavishly presented cutscenes in first person like driving around to building an open world city as opposed to, you know, a sort of an open fantasy landscape. Like, what a massive flip that is in terms of like the expertise you need to actually do all that shit must have seemed so, so challenging to them. I could see why even five years wasn’t enough for them to like basically finish this game. Just it’s even even even when it doesn’t feel like it’s like, you know, as strong as an RPG as it could be, it still feels like they set the canvas so broad in terms of everything they wanted to pack into the game. So, yeah, strange. It’s both like massive in scope but also weirdly limited at the same time. It’s a strange, strange game. I will say, though, that this renewed popularity seems obvious to me that like the lack of big blockbuster games means that a fixed version of this has been, you know, found it easy to slide into the calendar this year and like take up people’s time when they’re waiting for like God of War or whatever. I think like something that, well, first of all, I’ve been playing the PS5 version, looks really, really nice. Yeah, so I was going to ask you about that because like I’ve dipped back in on PC and it kind of looks largely how I remember it looking. Maybe like less chuggy in places because it’s got all that whatever DSS, you know, version 5000 now makes everything smooth. But like, you know, not to buy in, but how is the how is how is it looking on on PS5? It looks nice. I couldn’t like I was messing with the HDR settings a lot to try and get like Keanu Reeves to look less pale. I just couldn’t quite get it like in some lighting Keanu Reeves looks really weird in this game. And then in some lighting, lower lighting, he looks amazing. And I found that kind of strange. Like sometimes there’s this stark light with how cyberpunk is like is portrayed that makes a lot of the character models look a bit weird or a bit bit too synthetic, a bit too, you know, inhuman. Right. But then like maybe maybe it is just at nighttime, the game really comes alive. And a lot of those characters look a lot better. So that was kind of that was kind of strange. It largely tallied with my memories. I look better at night as well. Just like lighting turned down to like 10 percent and like in a corner. Oh, yeah, that’s perfect. That’s like that’s my dream. That’s why my house is like all dimmer switches all the way. Yeah, you just try to give yourself sort of cheekbones and, you know, sort of like, yeah. Makes me a very easy end of level boss in a Splinter Cell game. But, you know, I get to have a bit of self respect at the same time. Yeah, that’s it. A bit like Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. It’s like, well, don’t turn the light up too high and I look fine. If you turn it up too high, I’m Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr. Moro. Now that’s too harsh on yourself, I think. I think both of us are pox make up at Apocalypse Now thing. I will say whenever I watch the documentary about that or read about that making of that film, they’re like, oh, Marlon Brando turned up and he was really fat and I look at him. I’m like, I’m pretty sure that’s what I look like now. You know what I mean? Just like not bald and not Colonel Kurtz. So yeah, a good side note there. It does look good. Yeah, it looks as good as I remember the PC version looking, but you’ve probably got fucking Catherine’s like mega graphics cards in your house, haven’t you? So the game probably looks like hottest shit with all that AI tech or whatever running. Yeah, even even then, I remember playing it for review. I spent ages tinkering with it when I first got to like V’s apartment inside that kind of tower block and I’ve got it super buttery. There was always like ray tracing, malarkey, it was all going. I was like, this is apps. This looks absolutely amazing. I’m going to have such amazing screenshots for this. I’m really, really dead pleased with it. And then the second I got out of that apartment block, that’s that’s the first like choke point is when you go down to street level and there’s suddenly NPCs everywhere. And it just was like, oh, God. And you have to go in and like recalibrate. I had to recalibrate that game so many times in so many different places. Like by the end, it was like muscle memory of like what it needed to look like. You know, I could get the Badlands looking rad as shit. But if I was, yeah, driving around like inner city, very bad news. I could have like ultra settings. There’s that area where there’s just like suburbs with just like loads of white picket fence houses and like no missions. I can drive around that place with maximum graphics for days, but it is not where the game is at its most exciting. Yeah, yeah, that is funny. It’s funny because that moment of walking out the the tower block is what I remember from like those behind closed doors presentations they did at E3. The first one they did where it does look like, oh, you’ve never seen anything like this in a game. And it still looks really good in the main game, but not as good as it looked when they showed it off for the first time. And it’s definitely the first point I noticed in my old 1080 Ti that struggled a little bit out of the gate. It was like, OK, this is, you know, we’re hitting the limitations here. It runs mostly fine on PS5. But yeah, it was like because you have less flexibility over the graphic settings. There were times where it just it looked far worse than it did at other times. But when it looked good, it looked really, really good. And that tended to be interiors tended to be, yeah, like I say, nighttime and then lighting kind of like bringing everything to life. But in stark daylight, it kind of everyone looked a little bit like a little bit more sort of Thunderbirds puppet. Brando. So yeah, that’s the that’s the graphic setting full Brando. I do think this is the other reason it’s like so pervasively popular now, right? Is they’ve been selling it dirt cheap for so long. Like this past weekend, they were selling it 15 quid on Amazon for the PS4 version. And it gives you the PS5 version with no extra like nonsense attached to it. Although, as ever with these cross-gen versions, it will forever retain a fucking PS4 symbol on your home screen that you cannot get rid of, which is like, oh, come on. Yeah, that’s my big regret with buying Horizon Zero Forbidden West on PS4 for the cheeky PS5 upgrade is it’s always like, oh, do you want me to install Forbidden West for the PS4 now? And I’m like, no, don’t know. Never, never do that. It’s not something I would ever want. Why are you even asking me that? But anyways, it’s like, now? Is it now the time? And you’re like, no, no, you little fucker. Yeah, the same for Death Stranding, where it was like, oh, I have to like, figure out where I have to go and find the update I’ve got for this to make it the director’s cut. And like, oh, it’s just, yeah, just like slightly sort of like less slick than the old Xbox version. But yeah, it does, it also loads incredibly quickly, just like the amount of city it’s loading in like five seconds is very impressive. They’ve put some proper effort into it. As I said, the thought of this running on the old 2013 fat Xbox One that was meant to, Don Mattrick’s like TV DVR dream machine, like that just seems so incongruous to me. I can’t see how this would ever run without looking like Lego basically. So yeah, I appreciate them giving it a pun. So yes, so Matthew, I think that I strongly like recommend playing this. We will have some more specific story observation stuff that we’ll talk about after the break. And we’ll go into that a little bit more, because I had some thoughts on that after finishing it. I’ve still got a bunch of side quests to go, but I would say that everyone should play this. And yes, I think that in this year, there was a bit quieter for blockbusters. This did scratch the itch that I kind of needed. This is not really another game like this. Here’s the other thing I liked about it as an open world game, right? It reminded me of older GTAs, like the inner-city GTA experience, you know what I mean? Like you get in little bits in GTA V. But that is mostly about the grand sweep, right? But it reminded me of playing GTA III or playing GTA IV. It just has that feeling, that slightly New York-y feeling, except every now and then you’ll look up and see bright lights, flying shit and all these weird characters and be like, oh yeah, I’m in this kind of like made up sci-fi world, but it’s so richly presented. Yeah, I rate it, Matthew. I’m glad it was a rewarding experience for you. Yeah, it’s good. Shame that we’re about 50 minutes in and I’ve run out of observations, isn’t it? So let’s talk about something else. So this Phantom Liberty, the first DLC, is coming to the game in 2023, more than two years after the original release, which seems ridiculous. They’re like a DLC, but games take ages now and they have been fixing it. Vee seems to be working for the United States government, Matthew. Do you think we can assume this is a side story to the main game, as in, like, you go and finish it before you finish the main story? Are you excited about playing this? Only on the base that I think they have tremendous previous form of DLC. I mean, I think the DLC for The Witcher 3 is some of my favourite DLC of all time, probably is my favourite. I think, yeah, both the expansion, yeah, Blood and Wine, like that was a whole new area. Obviously, that was thrilling, you know, because I felt like I had sort of exhausted the huge continent of The Witcher 3 by the time they came along. But even Hearts of Stone, you know, that just sort of embedded missions in areas which weren’t well populated before. And like, there’s a lot of that real estate in Night City. Like when I was mopping up stuff in the game after I’d done the kind of like all the central missions and the kind of story side missions, there were so many interesting places I kept finding thinking, did I make a wrong decision and just not find a mission there? Like, would another decision have taken me there? Because it looks so crafted as an area. Especially around some of the other companies, there are kind of like big gleaming office buildings with just a little bit too much detail to be there for nothing. But, you know, and then once the game was out and everyone had like strip mined it completely with SEO guides, you know, you could go in and see like, oh no, I really did see everything. There was nothing there. So it always felt like a third of the city was waiting for its missions to turn up, which I would imagine is what this is going to be. I mean, my big failed prediction in… I can’t remember if it was 2021 predictions or 2022 predictions was that. 2021 predictions was that the DLC was going to be set on a space casino, which is involved in one of the endings of the game. It just felt like such an obvious self-contained area. And that particular ending of the story seemed to set itself off of like, you know, you’re heading towards this place and what’s going to happen. So, yeah, I was surprised, also surprised that Keanu Reeves is in it. You know, you would have felt like that, you know, that was just all done, you know, years ago and there wasn’t space for more. Yeah, my theory there is they recorded it at the same time because they had so long to work on this game. It wouldn’t be surprising to me if they had the overall plan for like what the game was and then the story they just recorded while they had him. It’s possible he did more recording for it, but like, yeah. Or they recorded so much with him they could stitch together any sentence from his previous words. So this DLC is like, oh, Johnny’s glitching out a bit. And then he’s like, hey, let’s go to the bar and talk to the cool guys. And you’re like, hmm, this doesn’t seem right. It’s like V on the phone is the president of the United States. Yeah, I sort of like I got the impression from what they showed that it was maybe a different setting as well. But I would prefer them to be like, oh, yeah, this is also stuff that’s in Night City because yeah, I don’t feel like the landscape is used up. It’s quite weird because it’s easy to get quite bored of an open world game if you’ve spent 100 hours pottering around in it. This is like the opposite problem where I feel like it could stand to have more stuff in it and then I would be happy to spend more time there because the vibes are good. There you go, Matthew, the old vibes. All the DLC was stuff that was just in the game that they cut. So that’s why Keanu Reeves is in it. Oh, no, I doubt that. It just it seems too big and I don’t know. It does seem themed around one specific thing. I guess we’ll find out, won’t we? Yeah, I guess if the game had taken this huge detour, given that it has this ticking clock scenario of having Keanu Reeves inside you is kind of killing you, it would be a bit mad if you went off and had a hilarious 10 hour jaunt with him. I just felt like in the main story of Cyberpunk proper, it was really nicely paced and it kind of jumped. It felt like it did jump. I was suddenly at the end of it, like way before I was expecting to be, which is why I maybe wondered if something was missed at some point. Well, I have some more thoughts on what the story does well or not well that we’ll get into the next section. This is the only DLC they’re doing as well, which is quite interesting, isn’t it? Because one of the reasons The Witcher would just keep selling forever is because they made two DLCs for it. One very good, apparently, then one that was excellent, that people celebrate widely. So, you know, this only getting one is interesting. It makes me wonder, is this just because the game is really hard to develop for? Or do they just want to move on and, you know, get work in the sequel that they’ve actually announced now? Something I love about the Witcher 3 Blood and Wine expansion is there was a big storyline in it about Geralt taking over a vineyard and running a vineyard. I’d just love it if that became like a company trope. And that’s also what happens in the Cyberpunk DLC. Like you and Johnny just setting up a kind of cool, I don’t know, craft beer company or something. I like the idea if you could like sort of infiltrate the ranks of one of these mega corps and take them over by like murdering the CEO. And then it’s like kind of management sim has also bolted on to this open world immersive sim, FPS RPG. They should bring in the, they should bring in the Orc system from Shadow of Mordor for like all the corporate structure. So you can just focus on, you can either play the game or you can focus on taking over the city by climbing the power ladder. That would be amazing. And still less bleak than working at actual Twitter right now. Still less dystopian somehow. So yes. Yeah, we’ll see how that pans out, Matthew. How are you feeling about the proposed Cyberpunk sequel then codenamed Orion? I find it quite interesting that a bunch of CD Projekt devs are actually moving to America to found like basically their studios there and build this game. So I take from that this is at least like four or five years away. I’ll be a very old man by the time I’m playing this. What do you make of this? Do you think there’s a sequel, something that’s assigned to you, building on the ideas of this is good? By the time this comes out, you’re going to have to be downloading yourself into a younger gamer’s body like Johnny Silverhand in order to enjoy it. Good. That’s my prediction. What will you be doing at that point? Well, we both will. And some youngster will be like, Oh no, what’s going on? Imagine that whole scene, except it’s you or me instead of Keanu Reeves in a junkyard. Yeah, I suppose that is like a question to ask you. What do you think of Keanu in this? I actually forgot he was in the game until I got to the bit where he turned up and I was like, Oh yeah, I thought Keanu is like a whole part of this. Yeah, I actually think he’s kind of bad in this game. Compared to like every other professional voice actor. I like Keanu Reeves in films perfectly fine. I think he’s got a very, you know, he has got a very limited register. I just felt everyone else in it was so alive and the spotlight is so hogged by him being at this huge celebrity. It’s kind of a shame. Everyone else is just doing what their day job is and like absolutely knocking out of the park. Like there’s some, you know, we’ll talk about this in the second section. But one of the things I think this game does do really well is create like this really sort of empathetic cast of characters. Several of them are just so likable and they really give you a foothold in this world. I find him so stilted by comparison. You know, there is such a craft to doing voice work. And I just don’t think you can just put up any celeb in and just expect it to work. I sort of I could picture him in the booth by himself. That’s what I could picture when I saw him talk. Like I could feel him not interacting with other people. Maybe he did it with other voice actors, but it kind of had the energy of like you’re running a mag and then you’ve hired this asshole staff writer who just like drags you down by like talking about the things you’re doing wrong and stuff. And you’re like, can you just shut up a minute, mate? Like there’s a little bit of that to him. But yeah. I feel with the films he’s successful and why he’s having a bit of renaissance now is that people are like very good at building things around his incredibly limited specific like persona. He’s not a good actor. He does not have any range. That isn’t to slam him. Like as long as you find the right project for him, he’s gold. You know, like John Wick is absolutely perfect for what his skill points are. But like if you put him in, you know, like if you rewatch, if you watch the new Bill and Ted, like he’s even more limited than he was when he was younger. Like he’s terrible in that film. He’s completely lost whatever kind of comic voice he once had, I felt. Yeah, this game, like if there’s any moment he actually has to do some kind of acting, I think it completely falls apart. Did you do the side mission? You like play acting as like film noir gumshoes? No, I haven’t done that one yet. Is it good? Oh, it’s so it’s, you know, the joke is you’re basically, I think you’re spying on like a woman who’s having an affair or something. You get hired to do this kind of like sort of 1930s style kind of, yeah, Keanu Reeves is doing this kind of like hard boiled dialogue, but you just can’t sell it at all. It’s really bad. I don’t think he has a full grip on Silverhand to begin with, but Silverhand trying to do like a comedy character himself, I was like, yikes, this is just, other voice actors must be like, fuck this guy trying to get in on our turf, you know? Well, it’s tough because he does undeniably add star power to it. Like you see him every now and then, you’re like, oh yeah, that is fucking Keanu Reeves just in this game. Yeah, that is quite exciting. That is novel at the very least, you know? Yeah, for sure. I just think that there’s, I think there’s some genuinely outstanding voice work in this game. And shamefully, I couldn’t tell you who the actors were, you know? I couldn’t tell you who voiced Judy, say. But I think she’s an amazing character. Param as well. Yeah. And I think both of these as well are like, you know, they do so much, they convey so much without you being able to see them. That’s the hardest role in the whole thing. And it’s just a shame that we get like wowed so easily by things like Keone Reeves, although it is impressive and it probably would be a lesser game if it was just some like complete rando. Yeah, it would be really, I would say it’d be really hard to get right if it was some rando because you’re someone who has to interrupt you constantly. And so if that person happens to be one of the, you know, probably like what? 20 most famous people on the planet, it’s like, yeah, that just it just hits different, as the kids say. Is there any other actor you would cast as Johnny Silverhand? Oh, that’s a good question. Oh, dear. That’s like a very specific energy. I would love like basically 70s Dennis Hopper. Also, it’s all my apocalypse now. Just like a kind of like mad unhinged, very unhinged energy that he has. Like just talking really fast, man. Johnny Silverhand, man, that kind of thing. Like I think that I could I could go for like a game of Dennis Hopper. Just see how it shakes out. Blue Velvet, Johnny Silverhand. That’s a very scary voice to have in your head. Yeah, I suppose he’d go for like an actual real rock star. Who would you pick for that? Like someone like Chris Cornell when he was alive? I don’t know. You don’t want someone like fucking Lemmy doing it, do you? Rod Stewart. What about Jack Black? Very different energy. Hey man, it’s me. It’s Johnny Silverhand. You’re like, oh man, this has got a very different energy. They’re like, we should have gone with Keanu Reeves. In some ways, I think he is very right for it. Yeah, maybe he is perfect. Maybe this exercise has proven how perfect Keanu Reeves is. What, because we read out Dennis Hopper and Jack Black that gave up immediately? And then gave up. No, we can workshop this some more. Who else would be like… Well, maybe that would work. Because I think what does kind of work about Keanu is his presence registers, but he is slightly innocuous just as a man. And therefore, he doesn’t kind of like knock you off too much tonally. Like, he is just sort of… his voice sort of… Yeah, it’s not a… it doesn’t… Like you say, it doesn’t have loads of range to it. So he can’t ever be that offensive. And I think Jared Leto would have a Simba effect, depending on if he would go into like full kind of like morbid mode or fucking, I don’t know, like his asshole character in Panic Room would be a bit too much. You know what I mean? Yeah. Lots to think about there, Matthew. Matt LeBlanc, you know, just like, how you doing? I’m Johnny Silverhand. What about Matthew McConaughey? That could be quite good, actually. Unless he’s too chilled. I’m trying to think of people who’ve got a bit of like… What’s interesting about the characters, they need to be a little old. I know they’ve been dead so they haven’t aged, but they are from the past of the world. They’re meant to feel like of a different generation to the rest of Night City. Yeah, I suppose so. But then McConaughey could work quite well for that, because just old and grizzled enough, right? He’d be like, hey man, like… That’s Bill Clinton, I think. Night City man, Night City man. He’s probably too chilled. He hasn’t got the rage of… He doesn’t strike you as a man who would nuke a skyscraper. No. He’d just be like, let’s just work it all out, man. That’s such a good detail of Johnny Silverhand’s story, by the way. Because in my head, I’m like, what the fuck does nuking a skyscraper look like? I couldn’t quite… You kind of half see it. And then I was thinking, do they clean it up afterwards? What happened exactly? What happens if you let off two nukes and a skyscraper? But yeah, maybe Keanu is perfect. Maybe we have… If it was Troy Baker, it’d be like Bioshock Infinite Part 2 where you’ve got like Booker DeWitt talking to you. And that’s… You have enough of that after three or four hours, I would say. Well, we fucking went down a long road here, didn’t we? So yeah, Cyberpunk sequel, Matthew. Do you care about that? Do you think there’s unrealized potential here? Given it was a long… You get the idea of slightly troubled development or at least them taking a long time to find what makes this world tick. Being able to go into that with that knowledge can only be a good thing. Like, if anything, this is the kind of sequel I am up for because there’s so much room for improvement in my mind. You know, this isn’t like a clean ten. You’re trying to make a very easy sequel. This isn’t like a smooth transition from God of War into Ragnarok, you know. Yeah, you could make a substantially better game that still kind of has the magic from this that does work. And that’s super exciting to me. Yeah, for sure. There’s a good basis here. I even think they could shift genres slightly, make it more RPG or less RPG, and just see how that goes, you know. Yeah, so I’m with you on that. This game will be a long way away. And I think CD Projekt thinks it’s going to have like three Witcher RPGs out in like four years or something. So there’s that to happen first. But in theory a Cyberpunk sequel will follow. Did you try Edge Runners, Matthew, the Cyberpunk anime that seems responsible for a lot of this new goodwill towards the game? I watched one episode and I kind of watched it while I was probably messaging you on Discord on my phone or something. So it left very, it didn’t break through the phone layer of my interest, unfortunately, like whatever was going on. This wasn’t particularly exciting enough. Yeah, I don’t even know. I couldn’t even tell you what it was about. I think there was a kid in it. Yeah, there was a kid in it who, what I liked about it is that, so it does authentically feel like part of the game’s world. It uses a lot of the same sound effects and things like that. I think it was written by one of the CD Projekt writers who wrote the comic book times as well. So definitely feels like the real thing. And basically, yeah, there’s this kid who is a bit of an air do well. And then it’s like, mom is basically shot dead by some random Night City gang. And then he decides to basically just start getting his body augmented and quitting school and just trying to rise up in Night City on his own terms and stuff. And I liked it because it actually made me think that maybe a lot of the ideology of the different gangs and how the city operates, the game doesn’t do that good a job of portraying. They are just people with names who, once you see they’ve got a criminal record, you’re like, OK, well, I’ll get out my fucking precision rifle and start headshotting them without knowing anything more about who they are or what they’ve done. Whereas this as a TV show is a bit more like considered about, well, here’s this gang, here’s what they do, here’s what like these asshole rich kids are whose dad works for like, you know, Arasaka, the corporation in the game. Yeah, having said all that, I didn’t really think it was for me. And I watched two episodes and that was enough for me. But I do feel good for all the kids out there who thought this was good enough for them to install a grand par RPG like Cyberpunk 2077 and see what the big deal is. As time content goes, Matthew, it’s up there, I think. But yeah, that’s that basically. So, yes, Matthew, should we take a quick break and then we’ll talk a bit more about the story and how that plays out. A little bit more spoilery territory. Welcome back to the podcast. Matthew, I had a question for you, actually. What was it? Oh, fuck, I’ve forgotten now, it’s gone. Oh, shit. Oh, it’s a good start. Okay, I’ll pivot. Are you enjoying God of War? Are you having a good time? What an emergency pivot. Just pulled out your back pocket, amazing. Yeah, I am having a good time. It’s certainly more God of War. Yeah, it is. That’s my hot take. Yeah, yeah, that’s it. I think having just finished 2018 and going straight into it is a bit of like, this does kind of feel like the same game, except people are telling me where to go a lot more than they were previously. Yeah, and Neil, did you do the thing where you adjusted that option menu thinking it would make the puzzles harder and it was actually making them easier? Did you do that? Yeah, yeah, I did do that, yeah. And I felt like such a clever clogs, but I didn’t fucking know anything, did I, Matthew Castle? I knew nothing at all. Yeah. Yeah, okay, good. Well, I forgot what I was gonna ask you about, so we’ll just continue with the podcast. We’re gonna pivot back into Cyberpunk. Yeah, great, seamless, absolutely seamless. I was curious, what do you make of this as a setting, Matthew? Because for me, I felt like it being a pre-existing RPG setting gave it a real sense of a lived-in quality, but at the same time, it maybe didn’t explain the fiction well enough for me to understand what was really going on in the story, and I felt like that was a slight weakness of it. What did you make of Cyberpunk as a setting for an RPG, slash whatever this is? Yeah, I think the part of the world you actually see is quite limited. You interact with a few things in great detail, but you maybe don’t get a general idea of what life is like in this place. I think one thing it does really well, in fact, one of my favorite things about this game in general is that, and I think this comes from it being this established world, with this established history, there is this buzz throughout, about, like, cred and reputation and, like, legends, which I found very endearing and also gave me quite an important sort of foothold in that world of, like, I sort of knew what these characters are about, like, right from the start. I replayed the first few hours of this over the weekend. And, you know, once you’ve done that very first mission with Jackie in your car and, you know, he’s talking about all these characters who are, like, legendary characters from the RPG lore, you know, the tabletop lore, you know, Adam Smasher and all this kind of stuff. And there’s this sense of, like, you know, this world is full of these amazing legends and I really want to, like, become one of those. You know, that’s what we all aspire to. Like, it has quite a… That’s quite a graspable idea and it kind of grounds quite nicely. Definitely that first act of the game, but, like, where these characters are coming from, that they’ve grown up in this world where there are these just massive names that are, like, all-encompassing, you know, in terms of, like, you know, whether they’re, like, mercenaries or pop stars or a mix of the two, like Johnny Silverhand. You know, this idea of, like, you too could be a legend, like, one of those guys. I think that’s, like, a really nice, kind of, like, sort of dialogue with the world’s lore. Tell you what’s quite funny, actually, is I went for a pint with former PC Gamer production editor Tony Ellis last week. Yeah, and he told me about how, like, when he was a kid, he spent his, like, pocket money on original Cyberpunk, the very first iteration of the tabletop, of the whatever, sorry, the pen and paper RPG. And he said, oh, it was crap, so I never played the later versions. It was just really boring. It was like the normal world, but, like, just slightly in the future, and there’s just too many guns in it and stuff. I quite enjoyed that. But I would say that, like, just sort of playing it and kind of, like you say, kind of just feeling the sense that there are these figures who have defined it. And then the game does a good job of… This is where we get into slightly spoilery territory. It gives you flashbacks to what, like, the city looked like 50 years ago, to give you a sense of how things have changed and how these figures can rise and fall and how corporations are just, like, immortal amidst all of that. No matter what happens, like, the company always wins. That, I think, just works really, really well. Where it translates to weakness, Matthew, is early on in this game, right, the big kind of twist that kicks things off is you go to this big kind of fancy hotel, basically, to steal something, Kampeki Plaza, I think it’s called. You go in to steal something. You meet Hideo Kojima. Yeah, he’s in the bar. Oh, right. I didn’t notice that, fuck. That’s on me, that is. I think I can go back there. Which, it makes no sense that I could just wander back into that bar after what happens in that game, but I think you can. Yeah, all that after, like, a horrible heist in that building, Kojima would still be hanging out in the bar. He’d find a much safer bar, I think. Yeah, I think so. Fuck, I can’t believe I missed that. That’s disappointing. Does he just appear in other people’s games now, is that a thing he’s doing? Will I play, like, you know, fucking, is he like one of the gods in God of War Ragnarok? Is he like, a lesser-known Norse god? Yeah, so you go into this building, this heist kind of goes wrong. This emperor, Saburo Arasaka, who is murdered while you are a mid-heist, basically, and ends up getting pinned on you. And this kind of kicks off the story. You are sort of, like, basically betrayed, and then you end up with Johnny Silverhand in your head to kick things off. I would say the game is not very good at explaining what the significance of the corporations even are at this point. Like, what they are in the world, who this emperor guy even is, and why it matters when he dies. And since that’s, like, the jumping-off point for the entire story, Matthew, I found that like a little bit of a shortcut for shortcoming, and I wondered if they just assumed too much knowledge from you about what this world is with that. Did you have any thoughts on that? Or am I going being too granular there? I think they can safely assume that you’d be like, oh, future dystopia, the corporations are probably bad. You know, because that’s very, like, easy shorthand. But the president of a company being killed, and the kind of power play that follows, I mean, that, I wouldn’t say it, like, jumped out to me is, like, hugely baffling. Which life path did you play as? Nomad. Well, I played as a Corpo, so, like, you start in that world. Right, right. Which, I wouldn’t say, like, what you do is particularly interesting, or that it sets itself, you know, it basically, it’s like a half an hour vignette to show you that it’s very dog-eat-dog shock horror. But, yeah, maybe that had, like, an impact on it, that I was less sort of like, what is this place? Who are these people? I think, like, the Nomad one is sort of like, you start in a desert, have a little chase, and then you’re just in Night City, and then every now and then you’ll just go, oh, I’m a Nomad, and here’s my point of view of Nomad stuff, and, like, that was kind of what a Nomad story was. Basically, if anyone mentions cars, you’re like, yeah, I like those, too, because I’m a Nomad. And you’re like, this is powerfully underwhelming. Yeah, I sort of appreciate the effort for that, but, again, I think it speaks to the fact that this game’s strength is not being an RPG, you know? Or at least not a traditional RPG. It’s like, it’s not the same as picking an origin in Dragon Age Origins, so throughout the game, people would react to the fact that you are, like, basically an elf from a very poor part of a city or whatever. Like, the entire game would be built to cater to that. This is not that game. No. So, yeah, that I found a little bit weak, but I would say that what worked for me is the overall fiction of the city and the sort of tone of the game did work for me on the level of, like, all the things I questioned about, like, about the tone of the game before it came out in terms of, like, the very, like, shock and awe marketing approach, which is what I felt like they used to try and get people’s attention. That sort of dissipated, because I think the game tonally justifies why everything is the way it is quite well. Like, it makes this world of disposable people feel very real, and, like, the characters in there are kind of, like, holding on to their humanity and still feel like real people in the midst of that, but they’re also used to everything being fucked up, and that, I think, is a major world-building triumph of Cyberpunk 2077. Do you agree with that? Yeah, I agree 100%. I think what amazed me about this game, and I think the one bit of it, which is actually, like, properly special, is that, you know, it approached with such an obnoxious swagger, you know, and so many people kind of took to that and warned to that. You know, I think that’s where some of the kind of, like, toxicity of the conversation about it, because it’s like, fuck, yeah, this is the future. You can do what you want. You can be out as outrageous as you want. And in Night City, like, all this fucking evil, vile shit happens, and yeah, like, we’re really gonna like, we’re like a pig in shit in this horrible city. And actually, when you get there, you realize it’s like a load of people who are recognizably people, just trying to kind of get by in this hellish place, kind of holding on to a bit of humanity. You know, it’s weirdly like a really nostalgic game. Like, there’s loads of people who are constantly thinking back to something they had. I think the fact that you have this like ghost of the past living in your head, who has this relationship with, you know, all his friends, again, spoiler territory, but you know, the friends that he rolled with back in the day when he was a terrorist have survived and lived on and basically got on with their lives and given up the cause and I think that stuff is actually like really brilliant. Like the, I don’t know if you did the side missions with them, you know, towards the end, but when you like dig into his band friends and you basically try and like put things right with them, you know, on Johnny’s behalf, I was like, this is like, this is so far from how they sold this game. Like this is about the people trying to be good or decent or decent counter to this wretched world, which I thought was a spectacularly good bit of storytelling. Yeah, for sure. I think that’s a really good observation. There’s a lot of people obsessed with the past or dwelling on the past. Like that extends to Panam, who has, you know, basically been excommunicated from the group she was in and like is now, you know, as part of the story, again, spoilers, like loses someone from that group and then has these complicated feelings she’s reckoning with, or, you know, Judy, who loses someone in real time in the story and you get the sense that her life is quite lonely and sad as well. Like it just, yeah, it taps into that really well. And then V herself, sorry, my character was female V, but like basically like the whole story is about, you know, when you go to Compeki Plaza, Jackie, your companion, who I think the marketing made it feel like Jackie was gonna be in the entire game as like a side character, kind of wisecracking, basically dies. And then like you get to the end of the story and then basically Johnny Silverhands and like Misty, this other character and other characters saying to you by working with this corporation, are you not betraying Jackie’s memory? So everyone has something they’re looking back on. Yeah, it’s true. That’s a really good observation, Matthew. So yeah, like- Thanks. Well, just that kind of character focus side, that is like strong. That is what you associate with strong RPG storytelling. It makes you think of like loyalty missions in Mass Effect 2, right? Where it’s like, you know, it’s a great self-contained story in itself, and it sheds loads of light on this character who I’m kind of emotionally invested in. And that’s something they do really well. That’s where the RPG heritage copies over nicely. The thing I would say though, like in Mass Effect though, as a genre piece, it’s part of a much more like noble sci-fi tradition. You know, it’s more Star Trek where you expect to find people who you’re going to respect and spend time with. Like you go into that world expecting to like people and to earn the respect of people who don’t know you and to like, you know, live up to the expectations of the people who look up to you. You know, that’s all kind of par for the course in quite optimistic space adventuring. Well I think here, because they sold it as such a sort of like nihilistic world, it’s like a much bigger shock that there are there’s so many likable people in it. I thought this is going to be like Borderlands. I thought that was going to be the tone where everyone is just like a shrieking lunatic and it’s really knowing and shrill and sarcastic and dripping with irony and, you know, I thought it was going to be a really like hard hang and actually I couldn’t really name many people who you kind of spend substantial amount of time with definitely in those big story missions who I was like, oh fuck, this guy’s really hard work. In fact, the one bit of that kind of I was like, oh, that’s a bit naff is there’s a, you find a talking gun in an alley, which is a bit like the talking gun in Borderlands and it is because it is just a Borderlands quest again and I was like, you know, but then at the same time I thought, well, I thought it was all going to be this and actually this sort of like wisecracking hilarious gun. I thought it was going to be just a hundred hours of wisecracking hilarious guns and it really isn’t like it’s people feeling like lonely in a shack in the desert and things like that. Yeah. And then every now and then, like maybe not the talking guns case, but like one of the wackiest side quests will actually really pay off. So I wasn’t massively into the idea of Delamain, which is the taxi firm in Night City, which is run by like an AI. And basically, you are tasked with basically several of the the cabs have broken away from the kind of main AI and basically form their own personalities, and you have to go and retrieve the cabs and each have very different personalities. And it’s a really good example, I think, of a side quest doing a lot with a little. All you’re really doing is going to fetch some cars of which there are fucking loads in Night City. So it’s not a big deal. But because they put so much effort into the writing and then the voice acting of bringing those different versions of this, like, quirky AI to life. A quirky AI who I thought, well, yeah, fucking I’ve seen Turtle Recall or whatever. I’m not bothered about this. And then, I don’t know, just finds depth in it. And then your character builds this relationship with this taxi AI. Like, that sort of stuff just really worked for me. The show kind of like, it can have a fun side and really succeed on its own terms in that respect, too. God, what a complicated old game this is. What a strange game this is. Really weird. There’s a lot of stuff in it, which I think is quite like The Witcher, particularly in those character beats. You know, I think when people talk about The Witcher, you know, they often think about like, The Bloody Baron, like a really bleak quest where there’s like no happy endings and it’s like a real moral quandary. But those games were also really good at great hangs. You know, like Hearts of Stone, the DLC, had the famous Dead Man’s Party, where actually in quite a Cyberpunky twist, like Geralt is like possessed by the spirit of a ghost and is basically trying to show this ghost like one last good time by going to this party and he kind of has to live, he has to let the ghost kind of take control of his body, which is something that happens here a couple of times with Johnny Silverhand as well. And there’s the comedy of seeing like Geralt act as someone else and deliver like very different line readings to the traditional character. But there’s also the kind of sort of sadness of this quite wild obnoxious character who kind of reveals, you know, throughout the course of that mission, the kind of, you know, tragedy of their life or kind of how in love they are. And actually by showing them this one last good time, you’re actually doing a really good thing. It’s actually like a very sincere thing. And I think there’s a lot of those arcs here as well, where you meet quite cold, callous people who are revealed to be quite sincere, sort of softies underneath it, which, you know, maybe that speaks to me because I’m quite a sentimental person. I will always buy into characters are revealed to be a bit warmer as a narrative arc. That’s like, you know, I just reviewed Pentament and there’s a lot of that in that as well. Where there’s always like miserable fucking monks who turn out to be like a bit of a laugh or whatever. And you’re like, yeah, this is all right. You know, that’s, that’s just such an easy way to get me on board. Pentament or your trip to Bruges, Matthew is indistinguishable. The fun, loving monks reviewing Pentament in Bruges, where like there is always talk of like Flemish history in Pentament. I was thinking like, I wonder if anyone else is reviewing this, like in where this game is sort of set, you know, I went full method for that review. We play on Steam Deck there. Yeah, I did. Yeah. Review game on Steam Deck. That’s a nice thought, isn’t it? I reviewed it. I was wrapped up in like a nice blanket on a couch in our little hotel suite. I had a mini bar of complimentary Fanta. Yeah, the dream, the Matthew Castle dream. I thought, I don’t even know that they gave out review code these days. I thought they just went, ah, yeah, it’s on Game Pass, like go play it, but that’s cool. Hashtag pump for Pentament. Yeah, but I don’t want to derail this into a Pentament. That’s fine. But yeah, I take your point about, you know, warmer character arcs being easy to sort of like, but doing them well still requires great execution and you absolutely get that here. I will also confess, Matthew, that I have not finished every major side quest in this game. I still got that to go. Surprisingly for the listeners, or unsurprisingly, you can’t finish the entire God of War series and then do everything in Cyberpunk in the space of about two weeks. That’s like not doable. So I basically just settled for like finishing the main story and doing some of the side quests. So I’m excited to pick through some more of that side content for sure in the in the weeks after we’ve done our fucking game of the year research, which is my next big project for this podcast. Yeah. What’s the stuff outside Delamain that like did resonate with you or kind of got your attention? I guess like I did follow the the Judy side quest the most. And I think it’s quite funny the love interest in this game because there aren’t many. I think is it two for the male V and then two for the female V? Yeah, something like that. And like I really like the character Judy, but there is almost like this market research. Like I spent a lot of time on Instagram figuring out what this character should look like element to her where I feel like she’s so engineered to appeal to a specific type of what I would say like a video games player that exists. Like that’s that’s not me saying there’s anything like wrong with the design. I think I think like the character is is very like, you know, appealing for sure. But I feel like she was very much engineered for a specific audience. This is definitely a game where like, you know, the love interests the second you see them. Because they were just there are like, there are just a couple of people in this world who are just so not not like, like sexualized gorgeous, but like, they’re just so like beautifully like nuanced in such a beautiful way. And like, yeah, they’re just presented in such a, like warm and winning light. They’re built. It’s kind of like a beam from heaven shining down on them of like, this is, this is someone you will love. Yeah, it’s like, yeah, it’s very, it’s very, very true. It was like, like meeting Pan Am and it’s like, oh, this is the characters built to appeal to me. I see. I see how this works. And like, yeah, it’s, you know, and I don’t think there’s anything cynical about that at all. But yeah, I do. I just felt like I felt like the creators hand at work when I met them. You know what I mean? I felt like these characters are firmly designed to be, you know, for the for the player to like really engage with and really have affection for. They help so they have like three times as much detail on their face as a standard like Night City sort of like, you know, like, yeah, dummy man. The nearest NPC, like their heads probably like rotating 360 degrees, which really isn’t in their favor. Yeah, exactly. Who are you going to go out with, someone who’s like half glitch through the pavement or this absolute like 4K mega babe? It’s like 4K mega babe or PS3 era sex worker, but like pick, choose your fighter kind of thing. Yeah. So I dug into her side quest a bit. I’ve got, I think I’ve got one more mission to do in that. And then I got, I think I did only the first one of Pan Am side quests and I haven’t done any of that Johnny Silverhand stuff. But I acknowledged that I’ve got like a lot of it to go. That said, I feel like I can still talk about it with confidence after finishing the main game. Oh yeah, absolutely. Oh, that last Judy mission. I’m assuming you haven’t done the mission with her with the dam. I think that’s the last one. No, I don’t think so. Oh yeah, that’s really good. Yeah. Just really nice character beats. They’re weird though side missions, because a lot of them are so like relationship driven. Like the actual, like what you have to do to complete them as a character again doesn’t really matter who you bring into them. Like you don’t have to have good guns, you don’t have to have good stealth powers. You know, they’re designed to be finished because they almost don’t want the game getting in the way of like the writing and the character beat and the moment. There’s like no frustration. It has like a lot going on weirdly with like an amazing walking sim in those missions. Like it’s just about spending time with someone really cool and doing an activity with them. I will say actually just to go back to like the game criticism a bit. It’s not very good at rewarding like a stealthy play through. I think I did four missions without getting caught once, like four main missions and like in one of them, the game glitched and it considered me having been caught before it even entered the premises. That was like that big industrial estate you have to go into. The game just like whatever reason about what I did, the guards knew I was already there even though I hadn’t even entered the level, which was an unfortunate bug. The one acknowledgement I think I got was Judy saying to me in one level, Wow, you never waste a bullet, do you? and I was like, Okay, better dialogue there. But I feel like Deus Ex, for example, is really good at being like, Oh, you didn’t get caught throughout this entire mission, have like a thousand XP or whatever. Yeah, or the story would change. This person didn’t get killed because you didn’t alert the guards or something. Yeah, that’s it. So that’s again where I was like, I feel like I’ve engaged with this like it is an immersive sim, but it hasn’t responded like one. Yeah. So yeah, that’s such as it is. Yeah, I think you’re right. Maybe with these side character, side quests, it is best to treat them that way. It’s like the narrative comes first. You just got to shoot all these dudes in the head with your fire bullets until they’re all fucking gone, and then the nice story moment can play out. That’s okay. So the ending, Matthew. I’ve only seen the one ending, the basic bitch ending for Cyberpunk 2077. This is where I thought, oh, is this game actually an RPG? Because as far as I could tell, you couldn’t meaningfully change anything along that ending path. It’s not like you got two or three major decisions to make. One of them was, do you kill the big angry cyborg man Adam Smasher or not? That doesn’t seem to change anything. I don’t think you can really change anything about the outcome to the Arasaka family, which is a key part of the family civil war in this corporation that you’re caught in the middle of. That drives the last half of the game. That didn’t seem to be meaningfully changed. There’s one choice you can make that basically gives you one of two cutscenes in that entire ending. I found it really disappointing. Now I know that the other endings are tied up in completing these side quests. But I do think as the basic ending that probably most people will see, this was incredibly unsatisfying. Basically, you lose, no matter what. I think it’s kind of weird to punish people for an ending, to punish people with an ending like that in a game that doesn’t allow you to meaningfully make choices that affect the outcome. Yeah. Yeah, what do you make of that? Yeah, it funnels you towards that point of no return incredibly quickly. Like I think I was taking my time playing for a view and I still hit it in like 30 hours or something. And I played the game for another 30 hours before I like eventually came in and did, you know, maybe that’s not true. I think I then did all the other side stuff maybe in like 10, 15 hours and then another 15 hours on top of that to mop stuff up. I basically had a 60, 70 hours safe file at the end of this and felt like I’d pretty much done everything I could do in that world. Given that so much of the ending hinges on you having won over side characters and given that the side characters content, I would say is like the heart of the game in terms of the emotional heart of the game. I’m amazed they don’t just go, you have to do that as part of the story before you get to the point of no return. You’re right, the basic bitch ending just doesn’t give you anywhere interesting to go. Yeah, so that ending for people, in case you haven’t played it for a while or you haven’t played it and you don’t care, basically, because you have Keanu Reeves stuck in your head, the whole thing is can you get Keanu Reeves out of your head? And you basically make a deal to do so. And then basically that you’re told that they can, this Arasaka Corporation can basically trap your conscious self inside their big like a digital prison, essentially, until one day they might be able to put your conscious self into a new body so you can live again. So there’s a sense of like, why should you trust them? Or you can go be terminally ill and live the last six months of your life. And I picked the terminally ill ending and basically got lots of unsatisfying phone calls from side quest characters whose side quests I had not completed. And it was very much like everyone shrugging at your funeral kind of vibes to it, like, fuck this guy kind of thing. It’s like, it may be how my actual funeral goes when like people ask like my former sort of like, depeds and art editors, like, what did you think of Samuel at his funeral? And he’s like, yeah, he was all right, I guess. Like, it’s very much that kind of vibe to it. Would you turn up to someone’s funeral if you only thought they were all right, I guess? Like, you know, baths are a long drive from a lot of places. Yes, like, no. I don’t think you’re going to die in baths. I think you’ll die somewhere exotic, but. I appreciate your optimism. Depends on me, more of these Takataka raps I get through Matthew in the next year or so. Or you have a heart of Takataka. That’s very good, very, very specific bleak joke there. So yeah, I found it very odd. It was like, oh yeah, I thought it was cool to say you’re dying, I guess. Sorry about that, mate. Just really odd. But yeah. Without spoiling the other endings for you, because I think you should go and do those. And I imagine you will. The big problem with this game is that on the surface, the variety of missions that can conclude the game are quite exciting. Like each faction plays out incredibly differently, like how you approach the situation, what happens. Like there are always a couple of decisions which decides a few character fates along the way. But the problem that I do have with it is that it sort of silos everyone into like one or four endings. There’s no ending which kind of paints an entire picture of your time in Night City. It’s kind of like in this ending revolves around, you only cared about the nomad people who lived outside the city. In this ending, you’re super in with Johnny’s ex-bandmates. There’s this ending attached to them. And in the moment, you’re like, yeah, this is fun, but there’s, having played all of them and a couple of variations of each of them, like I really mined the endings when I did the original review. I just felt like none of them accurately portrayed my time in the city, because you have all this interaction with the particular faction. And then everyone you don’t choose is basically pissed off with you. So like, if you die in the ending or your life goes on, like I say, they’ve all got quite different endings. It always has this gimmick of like, you’re hearing like voice messages from people and they’re like, so I guess you didn’t care about me after all. And it’s like, well, actually there was like no path where I could choose to like, granularly care about all of you. You know, there was nothing, like there should have been an ending to this where you have spent the time earning the affection and loyalty of all these people and together something spectacular can happen. But instead it’s kind of, ah, you chose them over someone else and I would not naturally do that. It’s, I think it’s kind of a total bust of an ending for me personally. Yeah, what you kind of want is an ending like the suicide mission in Mass Effect 2 where maybe the first time you play it, you make a few errors and a few people die and you leave things too late. And then on a replay, like you say, you kind of like, you know exactly where to send people. You go exactly the right time and you kind of like, you fuck up the sort of like the enemies and then like the big terminator robot man and everyone’s still alive and you feel like you’ve properly triumphed. Yeah. And like that, it doesn’t have the reactivity of an RPG, but I find it really weird that it has a lot of the like storytelling mechanisms of an RPG, you know? Yeah, yeah. And it’s odd because they think they did do it really well in The Witcher, like not specifically the ending, but like the end of Act Two in The Witcher, which is like a big siege on Kaer Morhen, revolves around like all these side characters who you thought were just side characters. You know, you thought you were just doing favours for like Caramets and whatever your dwarf friends called. I can’t remember any of their names. You earn the loyalty of lots of people and then at a time in need before the end of the story comes a big set piece where all these people like turn up for you. And it’s kind of like the Suicide Mission in that the more people you have, like the better the outcome of that particular fight. And it was really well done, but you also don’t see it coming until I spoiled it for you on this podcast. But you know, you’re like, oh right, there were like repercussions for all these things I did. That was cool. They all kind of came together and they can do it there because it isn’t tied to the ending. Then the third act is like a very personal kind of like stretch of the story just for Geralt. And that makes perfect sense. And like, I’d almost rather they did something here where they kind of pulled everyone together and then the end of the story is about you and Johnny Silverhand. Like as it is, you can kind of opt out of the story being about Johnny Silverhand for like three out of four endings, which feels wrong, given that that’s the entire thrust of the story is about you and this dude. It’s just very, it models its priorities, I think. Yeah, for sure. Quite sort of strange. There’s also like a bunch of choices I made throughout this game where I’d never really worked out what the significance of them was. So for example, when you are sent into, when you briefly work for the, was it the Voodoo Boys, is that what they’re called? Yeah. Yeah. When you work- And potentially, you briefly work for a lot of people. Yeah, yeah. It’s the bit they showed, I think, in the second press demo they did. Like when you’re in Pacifico and you go into that abandoned mall. Oh yeah. Yeah. And then like, I remember when that demo, they showed like you hacking the, the sort of like boxing robot to beat up that guy. And then I got there and realized I couldn’t do that. I was like, oh, that’s disappointing. I had no idea. I have no idea how you would even go about activating something like this because the game’s quite weird with how it encourages you to install cyberware and that it doesn’t really. And I was like, oh, that’s kind of a bummer. But there was the two parts that I found strange. You find some, I don’t know, I think he’s like a max tech government dude in a thing where he’s like, oh no, you should turn on the voodoo boys. I’ll give you information or whatever. And I decided to kill him. And then I decided to also kill the voodoo boys. And then there was no consequence from it. They didn’t come after me. When I went to Pacifica, there was no sense that, oh, there were people just out for blood. It was just this very self-contained moment of, oh, I killed loads of people. Took a nice jacket that V now wears and a few nice guns. And there’s no other repercussions from it. And I found that quite odd. You know what I mean? Those moments that should feel meaningful don’t end up being so. And there’s a couple of missions in this. That’s one. There’s one before The Heist as well. I think the early mission when you go into that sort of factory, there are lots of variables in it in the course of the mission that don’t really amount to anything. And if you do replay this game, and I was very meticulous with my saves and reloads because I really wanted to get into the guts of it and work out how the game was or wasn’t changing. If you actually do look at it all with a magnifying glass, it’s impressively unelastic in its central storyline. There’s a lot of stuff which looks like it’s important, but actually all it changes is very minor cameos later. But in the moment, it’s sold as a huge moral conundrum, which is a bit of a disappointment given that this is the studio who in The Witcher 2 changed the entire second act. There are bespoke second acts which are the meat of the game based on a single decision at the end of the first act. For all the big talk, I was expecting it to deliver, if not something as substantial as that, something closer. I mean, this was quite powerfully underwhelming in that sense. I don’t know. I’ve heard other people argue that actually, what’s important is that it’s not the consequence. It’s the drama of the choice. It’s the excitement of the moment. And like, who cares if, you know, who’s really going to sit there with paper and pen and work out if it actually amounted to anything. It’s more the thrill of the moment with all these people shouting kind of rival information at you. And I think that’s true to an extent, but there definitely comes a time when you feel like, is this all meaningless? You know, did this actually amount to anything? And it makes those moments much harder to land afterwards, because you’re like, well, this is a world where nothing really matters. So, you know, do I care? Yeah, I would also argue that the people who, you know, who are invested in, like, the sort of fallout of a moment and don’t necessarily just see it as all the matters as the drama of the moment, those people are RPG fans. Those are the people who do care about the permutations and would look at, like, a sort of, like, flow chart of how an ending would work in a particular RPG. Those are the people who care about it, and that is the heritage of CD Projekt RED. Like, whether that’s fair to, like, you know, stick that baggage on this game is maybe up for debate, but I would say that it does come across as slightly less satisfying than if it did, if it was more reactive. I think that could be, that would just be quite an exciting avenue to see. Yeah. But then, you know, the stuff that you were saying earlier that really did win me over and really did speak to me is stuff which isn’t reactive at all. Like, you know, going on a, like a weird dreamy date with Judy plays out one way and one way only, but it means they have total control and can give you the best version of that mission. And likewise, the scenes between like Johnny and Rogue and Johnny and his ex-bandmate, Kerry, where you just go and sort of hang out with these people and they get to like air grievances from sort of 30 years ago or whatever, that only ever goes out one way. There’s no changing that. And that’s the stuff I actually really remember. It’s almost like they doubled down on like, let’s make sure the stuff everyone sees will be absolutely splendid to hell with the, literally to hell with the consequences. Yeah, very good. This, yeah, it’s also the sense of like, are you wasting too much cash when like, you know, you lock a hole. If you were to lock like massive amounts of content behind a wall, is it too much work to like make all those permutations relative to the returns? Like, there was a legitimately fair argument to make around that, I think, when a game is this meticulous and how those cutscenes are presented, so. I asked the creators of Dying Like Two about this, because they were giving it all the big talk about consequences and echoing. And, you know, he was saying like, yes, that is the case, you know, like, it is a really, it’s a huge swing and it’s a hugely expensive investment, but also like the sheer audacity of those swings is the stuff people remember forever. Like, I will always remember the second act of The Witcher 2, because it’s such a bold move. Like, what a huge gamble. Admittedly, the way they did it there is by the whole game being about 20 hours, which I would rather have a 20-hour game that is incredibly flexible than a 100-hour game that isn’t very flexible. So, sometimes you just gotta have a cojones to do it. Well, I know you sound like a Cyberpunk character, Matthew. Oh, yeah, sorry. Cojones, that will be translated by your UI and say balls. Yeah, that UI is really impressive. I was like, thank you. That’s got to be at least two people’s jobs to have fucking made all that for this game. Just the subtitles alone looked really expensive. Cool. All right. Well, I think we kind of covered it there, Matthew. I still very much like this game. I just wanted to have a nice chewy chat about it. I think we did that here. It was good. Yeah, when we talked about it originally, I didn’t really want to spoil it for you. We didn’t really want to spoil it for people who hadn’t had a chance to play. So we kind of tiptoed around it a bit. But yeah, I feel like I’ve said my piece. Yeah, it’s nice to talk about it outside of the shadow of the release, which was just not a good time for anyone. No, absolutely not. Yeah. Okay, good. Well, in which case, Matthew, I think we’re about done here. So next week is two giant men play God of War Ragnarok. So you had a little teaser there of what me and Matthew think of the game. I’ve got a long way to go with it, though. So I’m excited to continue. It feels long, Ragnarok. Interesting. How many hours in do you reckon? Like 12, but I just, you know, you can tell from like skill tree progression and things like that. And you’re like, hmm. I feel like I’m like a third, you know, I’m basing it on interface here, but I’m getting that kind of, you know, I feel like I’m only about a third through it. Oh shit, I’ve got fucking miles to go then. Better get cracking, better like hang up from this podcast recording and go play it immediately. Yeah, that’s good. I’m looking forward to discussing that in depth, Matthew. So yeah, this was really fun. If you’d like to back the podcast, sorry, support the podcast, it’s patreon.com/backpagepod. We’ve just added a new stretch goal actually, which is a bit of a daft one, but me and Matthew thought that if we hit three grand on Patreon, which would never happen, we’re on about 2,000 at the moment, which we’re, to be clear, we’re very, very happy with. We will basically go to six different escape rooms and document our experience in audio form, and it’s called Escape From The Back Page:. What did you think of all that, Matthew? My idea, I came up with half 11 on a Sunday. Yeah, I got that. I think I read that at midnight. Yeah, good, good idea. Yeah, no, I think that would be great. I think we could record secret audio in the escape room for some live on the ground reporting. Yeah, that could be really fun. So that’s a good dream for us at some point. If somehow we ever hit that amount, we don’t think we will. But then, yeah, you never know. So that’s on there. Later this month, we’re doing the James Bond movies ranked on the XXL tier episode. So there’s plenty going on on the Patreon. If you’d like to join the Discord, you can find a link to that in our profile on Twitter. So twitter.com/backpagepod. You’ll see a link to the Discord there if you’d like to join our very pleasant community. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? I am at MrBattle UnderscorePesto, and my mastodon is, no, I’m joking. I sort of like, I felt a bit like Johnny Silverhand when one of the listeners found my mastodon and followed me. I felt like Johnny Silverhand trapped in the fucking Arasaka mainframe thing, and then some rando just came and found me. It’s like, oh, so you found me, huh? Kind of like that vibes. Mastodon emails me every time someone follows me, and it’s like, oh, I’m just not on there. I just did it once when Twitter was having a fucking wobble. I’m not on there. I wouldn’t know what server to join. I’m happier to be, I think I’m happier to be scattered to the wind and to never be found again. Like the original ending of Dexter, Matthew. I might just go and be like a lumberjack somewhere and then like start a new life. So yeah. And then come back for a surprisingly all right mini-series. Yeah, I think that’d be a good pivot for me. Okay, good. We’re done. Let’s go. Bye bye. Bye bye. Oh, look, I didn’t even finish the fucking sentence of the first sentence of this plan. Going great. This episode plan is as fucked as the launch version of Cyberpunk. I’ve played through Cyberpunk 2077, a game Matthew competed in Disgust on, and then there’s no more information. Amazing, all right. It’s good Cyberpunk, chat. It’s not like LOL City. As opposed to Night City. But that’s because we save all the best material for this gap in between. You should put all the best of all the gaps in right at the end if you can, Matthew. Yes. You know, the real heads, the real podheads will be up for that.