Playing “Cyberpunk 2077”, How It’s “Meant” To Be Played Changes Your Life

Yesterday I got a new PC from PowerGPU after my old one died last week. I could have fixed it, and probably will again, but figured it was time to upgrade it anyway.

The first game I installed after setting it up? Cyberpunk 2077. Not because I’m dying to go back and talk to Hanako for the twelfth time, but because I wanted to see what it looked like on my new machine. And what I found was further proof of how CDPR messed up this launch, and how things could have gone in a whole different direction.

I’ve played Cyberpunk 2077 about two and a half times now. My first part was on my Xbox Series X running an Xbox One X version of the game. My second part was on PC, running the game on my 2060, which was enough to make it look definitely better than the last generation console version, and yet my version was not powerful enough to activate ray tracing without the images becoming unplayable.

So here we are almost a year later. I now have a 3080, playing a brand new $ 3000 machine. We had 10 months of fixes and performance fixes.

And finally, finally, Cyberpunk looks like the transformative game it could have been if it had resisted the temptation to come out too early and adapt to the next-gen consoles.

With my PC now I can play on maximum settings and enable ray tracing up to Psycho levels. It’s literally the name of the set, Psycho. This translates into a dramatic transformation in in-game lighting, especially at night, where you can now see things like reflections from neon traffic signs in puddles and car windows.

Overall the game looks absolutely amazing now, and I had fun walking around, taking the screenshots you see here. And it does all of this without dropping pictures at all, while still running smoothly.

The problem, of course, is obvious. I am on a computer that costs $ 3,000. It’s not the first game to perform much better on an expensive machine, and yet the gap between not only an ultra PC and PS4 / Xbox One, but also the current versions of the X series and PS5, or even a lesser PC, is huge. . And what percentage of the player base has experienced a game that looks and plays like this? 1%? 0.1%? If this.

Cyberpunk 2077 should never have been released on the latest generation consoles. This may be incorrect from a sales standpoint, as the game has moved over 15 million units, many of them to these consoles, and yet from a reputation standpoint, if CDPR had waited and produced a Series X / PS5 version which was close at this level of visual fidelity, the whole narrative around the game would have changed. And yet, here we are a year later and we are still not sure that this version will be released this year.

I’ve never experienced a transformation quite like this, at least in terms of visuals. The main issues of Cyberpunk 2077 of course remain and are not PC dependent (enemy AI, game difficulty), but it could easily have been highly appreciated for a host of other reasons if it hadn’t been released on consoles where it looked terrible and barely ran at all at launch.

My advice remains not to take Cyberpunk if you haven’t already before the Series X and PS5 versions are released, as if they are close to that it will be a transformative experience. Everyone should experience the game like this, but only a tiny fraction will.

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