I finally decided to dive deep into Night City, years after its controversial launch. I’m playing version 2.2, the so-called ‘definitive version’ of Cyberpunk 2077, and I’ve found myself wrestling with a fundamental question: Is this game a true role-playing game? Its Steam tags say ‘RPG’ and ‘Open World,’ yet my attempts to play ‘my way’ often feel constrained by the story the developers want to tell.
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The game forces me into the role of a killer and a thief, even when my own moral compass wants to steer me toward a more righteous path. The heist at the start of the game goes wrong, and my fixer, Dexter DeShawn, betrays me. I wanted to see it coming, to get my shot in first, but the narrative railroaded me towards a specific outcome. This feeling of being a doll-chipped but conscious observer has been a constant companion in my playthrough.
This dissonance led me to explore the nature of agency and choice in modern AAA RPGs. Is a game less of an RPG if it prioritizes a coherent narrative over complete player freedom? Or does the ‘role’ in role-playing mean accepting the limits of the character you inhabit?
🎬 On Rails in Night City
My core issue stemmed from the lack of agency in key story moments. I appreciate that the narrative requires my character, V, to end up in a landfill with a dead rockstar in their head. But I questioned whether the journey to that point needed to be so rigidly proscribed. Senior writer Lorne Nudel from Ubisoft argues that this is essential. He told me that Dexter’s betrayal is the ‘inciting incident’ of the story, and giving the player the choice to avoid it would destroy the entire narrative arc.
I see his point. A game with total player freedom is no longer a story but a sandbox. As he put it, ‘A role’s limits make it a role.’ However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that other games have handled this better. The Far Cry series, for example, often provides clever, non-standard ways to end the game early by choosing not to engage with the central conflict. Red Dead Redemption 2 forces Arthur Morgan down a tragic path, but it feels earned because his lack of agency is a core part of his character’s struggle against a changing world.
In Cyberpunk 2077, my role feels less defined. I’m largely limited to working for one corporation or another, or taking Johnny Silverhand’s dark path of mass murder. The game’s narrative seems to suggest that protest is futile in a world dominated by necro-capitalism. Perhaps that is the point—that in Night City, true agency is an illusion. This is a theme I also found in the classic RPG Planescape: Torment.
🤖 The Illusion of Choice
Dr. Ivan Girina, a senior lecturer in Game Studies, suggested to me that agency in games is a balance between constraints and affordances. The constraints create urgency and invisibly guide our choices. The ‘illusion of choice’ can be an aesthetic pleasure, a feeling of mastery within a system. My issue wasn’t that the choice was an illusion, but that the illusion wasn’t convincing enough. I could see the rails too clearly.
Kim Hutson, a former lead producer, believes this is often a function of budget and storytelling. In a game, you need both detailed main characters and believable background characters, and the player needs to feel their decisions impact the world. She noted that in games like Fallout 4 and Starfield, this feeling can sometimes be lacking.
Cyberpunk 2077 excels in its world-building. Night City is a triumph of art direction and graphical grunt. The side quests are industry-leading, often telling more compelling stories than the main plot. A quest involving a VR recreation of Christ’s Passion from a snuff film is pure, brilliant sci-fi. Yet, for all this detail, my ability to shape the world or my path through it feels surprisingly limited. The game’s structure reminds me of a different kind of epic journey, which I detailed in my history of the Civilization series.
🌆 A Mirror to Our Times
Ultimately, my 80 hours in Night City left me feeling something profound: sadness. The game is a stunningly realized world, but it’s a world that reflects the most juvenile and prurient aspects of our own society. It feels, as Lorne Nudel put it, ‘prescient.’ It mirrors contemporary anxieties about technology, corporate control, and the possibility of protest in an age of total surveillance.
The game’s narrative is coherent in its investment in the cyberpunk genre, which often depicts a world where the only revolution possible is a violent one. Perhaps offering a more pacifist or innovative path would have been a greater challenge, but it might have also felt less true to the world CDPR created.
So, is Cyberpunk 2077 a bad RPG? Absolutely not. It’s a phenomenal game with a powerful, if linear, story. But for me, it’s less of a role-playing game and more of a narrative-driven amusement park. It’s an incredible ride, but one where I am ultimately just along for the ride, a tourist in a beautiful, tragic city where my choices feel like they matter less than the story that was already written for me. This contrasts with the freeform chaos of games like those from Larian, which I covered in my interview with Swen Vincke.
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