We’re back with Sci-Gaming! Our aim is to cover a few interesting science or sci-fi related gaming titles throughout the year with our new section called ‘Sci-Gaming Sci-Fi recommendations’. As we will only be able to do a few of these each year we chose only to cover games that might be worth your time. Today we start off with Cyberpunk 2077.

This review may contain minor spoilers and adult language from the game Cyberpunk 2077. Reader discretion is advised.

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My car is a liberated AI taxi. And I think he might be falling in love with me.

This is far from the strangest thing that can happen in CD Projekt Red’s newest open-world sci-fi RPG, ‘Cyberpunk 2077’. Every situation, no matter how innocent it looks, can quickly escalate. Love, violence, politics, and virtual reality are all on the menu. Even on a quick Sunday drive.

Right now I’m in my Delamain cab, heading across the giant expanse that is ‘Night City’, the setting for our adventures. But don’t think that pavement is the only thing that dominates the forty-six square kilometer map… far from it. The densely packed urban landscape at the center gives way to dystopian suburbs and wild deserts. I’m just returning from a mountainside jaunt myself, heading back into the multi-layered heart of the city.

Tonight I’m going to see an old friend. Not my friend, mind you. A friend of the long-dead rock star who shares a body with me. A resident inside my mind.

But before I tell the ghost in my head how I plan to get the old band back together, let’s talk tech.

The Old Cyberpunk 2077 System Requirements Were a Joke.

Remember when CD Projekt Red released the Cyberpunk 2077 system requirements, and they insisted that the average PC with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 590 would be great?

Yeah. They were just kidding!

It turns out that those are minimum and recommended Cyberpunk 2077 system requirements. Mid-December 2020, CDPR released an ‘updated’ spec list. Now there are seven columns and a lot of complexity.

The new list included massively inflated requirements for higher settings and Ray Tracing. AMD cards were gone. SSD was required for just about everything. 1440p Ultra Ray Tracing and Standard 4K Ultra require a GTX 3070+ to stay above 45 FPS.

As it happens, I’m one of the rare people who bothered with the 20xx series cards. So I get to show you how realistic the ‘RT Medium’ settings really are. This is what my machine looks like:

CPU: Core i7 47770k - GPU RTX 2070 SUPER - RAM: 16GB DDR3

A quick note: This game is a memory hog. Shut everything else down before you launch it. Besides, you’re going to be neck-deep in Night City, you won’t have time to Tweet anyone.

Letting the game determine my fate, it came up with ‘RT Ultra’ settings as optimal for my hardware. I have no idea why. I ticked it down to ‘RT Medium’ as suggested, and the game was far more fluid.

Here are the typical framerates on this setup at RT Medium:

● Standing still: 65 FPS

● Walking around: 55 FPS

● Combat: 50 FPS

● Driving: 45 FPS

● Complex lighting in crowds: 40 FPS

(We also tested the game with a core i7 8700k/GTX1080ti, framerates were slightly higher as the GTX doesn’t support hardware-accelerated raytracing, rendering the RT option ‘greyed out')

Prior to changing my settings, I was getting between 30 and 45 FPS with any motion at all. The rumor is that the CDPR spec sheet above is targeting around 40 FPS. My experiments with RT Ultra seem to confirm this. Looks like Cyberpunk 2077 system requirements ain’t what they used to be.

But damn. Is this game pretty…

What Does Cyberpunk 2077 Gameplay Look Like?

We’re all hoping for more optimizations, of course. But will we get them? And if so, when? Nobody knows.

Sometimes the games looks like rock and roll.

But more often than not, it looks like chaos.

Family Feud - Image Credit: CD Projekt Red

And I’m not just talking about designed chaos like you see above. A combination of bugs, unintended AI interactions, and player ingenuity (driving tall vehicles to the right place, creative use of your cyberdeck, etc.) can cause insane, physics bending things to happen.

imperfect-physics -Image Credit: CD Projekt Red

To say Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay is imperfect is an understatement. The game is riddled with bugs. Sometimes your car will arrive when you remotely call it… but it’s on fire. Vehicles might be fused together in the middle of a street, causing a hellacious traffic jam. That highly anticipated boss fight might end when he gets stuck in an elevator, unable to fire a single shot.

But personally, I still love it. It’s a blast, even with all of its faults. I suggest manually saving often, with at least four rotating save files. The bottom manual save on the list is the oldest, so overwriting it will pop that file to the top. Then you can overwrite the next oldest at the very bottom, and so on.

And how does the plot look? The storyline in Cyberpunk is as deep as you want it to be. You can completely ignore the hundreds of thousands of words of lore scattered all over the map. You can ignore the hundreds of side missions, some of which intertwine with the lives of the characters all around you.

Or you can delve into the minutia. You can find friends and lovers. You can explore the lore of long dead heroes, or crusade for your own personal cause. In the long term, the plot is on rails somewhat, and you’ll be railroaded back into making a select number of pivotal choices. If you like, you can stave off the hard decisions with random violence, drinking, ladies and men of the night, and pure exploration.

But for now, let’s get back to the sweet tale of a sentient car and the man who loved him.

Spoiler: The Car Doesn’t Love Me.

But the fact that I thought that the Delamain AI might be falling for me speaks volumes. I didn’t question it, because if it was meant to happen, the nature of Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay makes it possible. In a world with virtual reality, ‘dolls’ that act as surrogate companions, and braindances that allow one to feel what others have felt, I had no doubt that automotive love could find a way.

This is what CD Projekt Red did well: The player suspends their disbelief almost immediately. The entire game is built around the manipulation of energy inside the player-character’s mind. And because of that, funky things are possible. So you walk through this world understanding that the entire day might have been a hallucination. Or that control of your consciousness might be torn away from you at any moment. Or that those little sparks in the distance might not be bullets. They might be a decker trying to take control of something. Or a malfunctioning invisibility cloak of some sort. Or it might all be in your damaged head.

Complain all you want about the bugs; I certainly do from time to time. And go ahead and bemoan the insane Cyberpunk 2077 system requirements. They deserve a moan or two.

But if you can suspend your disbelief for a while and just become one with the detailed tapestry that has been woven for your entertainment, you might agree with me on this point: Once you work through the foibles and get into the groove of Night City, it is the Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay that takes center stage.

The bug fixes and optimizations are coming, or so we all hope. But if you can live for the moments when you lose yourself. Let yourself feel like anything is possible. You won’t regret it… Night City won’t let you.

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