Night City Was Always the Lie We Wanted

The world is broken. MegaCorps own everything—from the top floors of their tower fortresses they manage every corner of daily life, while below, on streets that smell of fry oil and ozone, drug dealers and illegal tech runners fill the gaps. Decadence and violence layered so thick you can’t locate the floor.

That was the pitch for Cyberpunk 2077, and in 2018 it was more than enough. CD Projekt Red had just delivered The Witcher: Wild Hunt—an open world so dense and alive it made most other RPGs feel like staging areas. Geralt’s grim northern Europe, the logic of a world that didn’t bend to accommodate you, writing that treated you as an adult. If they could build that with swords and alchemy, what could they do with chrome and neon?

The answer, delivered December 2020 after delays that stretched years past the window being whispered about at the time, was: eventually, a great deal. Not at launch. At launch it was a genuine catastrophe—pulled from the PlayStation Store, a class-action lawsuit, AI that forgot how to drive, bugs that would have been funny if you hadn’t been waiting since 2013. The cyberpunk setting, which had been exhausted in every other medium, sat underneath a pile of broken systems like a very expensive ruin.

What saved it was that the city CD Projekt Red built was actually worth saving. Night City holds up—the density of it, the way its districts feel like different cities compressed into one geography, the ambient life that persists even when the mechanics misfire. V and Johnny Silverhand, Keanu Reeves occupying the exact territory between icon and irritant the role demanded, gave the narrative something the bugs couldn’t reach.

I finished it properly in 2022, after the patches, on a machine that could handle it. It’s a good game. Not the religious experience the hype had built, but something real. The hype train, as usual, promised a destination that didn’t exist—but the ride turned out to be worth taking. Eventually.