Cyberpunk 2077, The Outer Worlds, and Mainstream Sci-fi Games’ Lack of Imagination

Violence is always difficult to avoid, and when you enter the belly of the beast—the rich Terra 2 district of Byzantium—easy to fall into by quickly falling out of favor with the Board. In this way, the game does allude to the violent nature of revolution, and the way that real struggle requires real sacrifice. In The Outer Worlds, the player does end up getting to choose Phineas Welles and a loose conglomerate of people-over-profits organizations to lead a collaborative effort to save the Halcyon colony. However, at the end of the day the player’s agency is in choosing one of two options: maintain and uphold the status quo by siding with the Board or brave into the wild unknown by siding with the mad scientist and alleged anarchist Phineas Welles. The latter is the more altruistic, humanistic, and world-changing. It just so happens that the path to get there is in line with what you would do in any other action-RPG.

It comes down to a lack of imagination that stems in part from investment requiring that games are made in a way that focuses on gameplay styles that do not mesh with radical action. A budgetary emphasis on developing combat systems means you’re not necessarily developing a complex dialogue and character-interaction system that can help you in, say, community organizing, even if the dialog system does allow for branching paths and multiple solutions to problems (usually somewhere on the talk-kill-bribe-intimidate continuum). The player is also not talking to every NPC to learn what they want for their community, rather talking to whoever in the community has already developed a level of importance and acquired resources, then doing errands for them.

In The Outer Worlds, the protagonist character (“The Stranger” or “The Captain”) are helping a mad scientist consistently referred to as a terrorist with his plan to liberate the colony, but of course you have the option to sign with the corporate elites instead, and in the meantime you interact with what amounts to local chieftains of various outposts led by Board-affiliated companies, people that have already left those companies, or upstart pirate companies. While the player can help a dock worker waiting on a package, model clothes for a designer, act in a film, or intervene on either side of a work stoppage (through conversation with the strike leader), the plot is motivated by engaging with the powerful-acting upon or defying their wishes.

In Cyberpunk 2077, there is a tendency toward a pseudo-nihilistic “radical centrism.” By adopting the aesthetic of cyberpunk, CD Projekt RED can make critiques of capitalism and a dystopian late-capitalist trajectory which, while canonically diverging from our timeline somewhere in the 20th century, is not altogether unimaginable from our current course. Nonetheless, your character’s choices are hardly revolutionary. The protagonist, V, doesn’t have the option to take down the governing corporations, or even to develop alliances among the street-level gangs that might be empowered and incentivized to do so. The player mostly operates as a freelance corporate/police lackey. It’s like GTA without the ability to acquire territory, or any manner of RPGs without getting to be the chosen one. Your character is simultaneously anonymous and a catalyst for all sorts of chaos.

In Cyberpunk 2077, the more egregious dissonance comes in part from being a larger release while mimicking the confines of the cyberpunk genre as it has been expressed to mass media—the game’s narrative thrives off overlapping neo noir tropes. And it’s not that it isn’t fun; for all the game’s many problems, I’m almost embarrassed to admit how much I’m enjoying it. But your protagonist, V, never really escapes the clutches of corporations—whether you start as a nomad, a street kid, or a corpo that is quickly dishonored and disavowed.

The intensified privatization of society in an independent city that is essentially a corporate colony like Halcyon leads to the violent freelancing that is inherent to the structure of RPGs. It makes for fun gameplay and an engaging story but also requires you to become a gunman for the police or for corporate infighting. It’s noir, it’s cyberpunk: the protagonist is operating within the confines of a cynical world, trying to make do. But, for all the problems pointed-out about specific corporations, militarized emergency forces, and the general effects of hyper-capitalism (the corpo life path starts working in counterintelligence at a weapons contractor) there’s no option in the violent power fantasy to lead the people in mass struggle.

The critique here is not that these games offer inadequate options for their medium as videogames, but that art made by major corporate entities can’t take down the systems they’re part of. That becomes more obvious with games like these; role-playing games purport to give the player power to affect their surroundings, sci-fi dystopias show their audiences the need for change, but mainstream games as they are made today can’t seriously critique the capitalist structures they exist within.

It’s hard for CD Projekt RED to say that society would be better if corporations were torn down into worker-owned co-ops; it’s hard for Obsidian not to imagine the best path is somewhere between anarchy and despotism. In a critical moment of late capitalism in real life, art here is too closely imitating life without offering a genuinely radical alternative. This doesn’t mean the games are failures (there are other reasons to make that argument, but I think they’re both fun). It just means they’re constrained because of what players have been conditioned to expect from mainstream videogames—power fantasies that don’t conflict too strongly with capitalist ideology, even when they want to look like they’re critiquing it.