YOU NEED TO PLAY THE CENTURY’S BEST OPEN-WORLD GAME FOR FREE 2021
Is Cyberpunk 2077 The BEST OPEN-WORLD GAME?
THE EXPECTATIONS FOR CYBERPUNK 2077 COULD NOT HAVE BEEN HIGHER. Developer CD Projekt Red had fans on the edge of their seats in the build-up to the open-world game, creating expectations that were impossible to live up to. That led to a particularly messy fallout that left some fans blindly misdirecting their anger at reviews that didn’t declare it the greatest game of all time.
While the hype was perhaps unrealistic, it’s easy to see what sparked it. Just five years before the game’s launch, CD Projekt Red dropped what many consider to be one of the greatest action RPGs of all time, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. The game provides crucial context when it comes to understanding where fans find themselves today in Cyberpunk 2077’s aftermath.
In case you have yet to play, The Witcher three: Wild Hunt is currently available via Xbox Game Pass. Console and Ultimate subscribers are able to play the game for free on Xbox One, Series X, and Series S.
The Witcher three: Wild Hunt tells the story of a monster hunting bounty hunter named Geralt who embarks on a quest to obtain a powerful lost kid named Ciri. At a quick glance, it does not look very different than most open world RPGs. Geralt hacks enemies, loots everything in sight, and takes on more side quests than a desperate freelancer.
While the gameplay isn’t exactly groundbreaking, one element pushes the game to radical heights: storytelling. The Witcher 3’s world is incredibly dense, packed with rich lore, internal politics, and a cast of fantastic characters. Each mission builds on the game’s sprawling story, while side quests play like the best episodes of a “Monster of the Week” style TV show.
That strong narrative threads helped create one of the most fully realized RPG worlds since The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Whether or not the gameplay mechanics were not groundbreaking, it was hard not to be completely lost in Geralt’s journey, pit stops and all. Many quests involve a series of smaller decisions that have an immediate effect on what the outcome is like. If Geralt leans towards compassion or violence, that will influence the world around him in nuanced ways.
The strength placed CD Projekt Red on a particularly high pedestal going into Cyberpunk 2077. Within months of The Witcher 3’s release, the studio went from a niche RPG maker to a development powerhouse. If this’s how great one of their games was in 2015, imagine how much better the next project of theirs will be in 2020.
Reflecting on the ungraceful jump from The Witcher 3 to Cyberpunk 2077, I am reminded of HBO’s True Detective. The show’s first season was a huge hit with fans hailing it as the next great TV classic. But when director Cary Fukunaga left the show following the first season of its, the next season took a quality nosedive despite writer Nic Pizzolatto remaining on board. With one piece of the equation gone, it started to be apparent that Fukunaga’s contributions were inseparable from the first season’s quality.
The same feels true right here in a way. The Witcher 3 wasn’t carried by CD Projekt Red’s development chops alone. The source material played an enormous role in the game’s success, elevating a solid open world RPG and paving over several of its unflattering elements. Cyberpunk 2077 keeps a great deal of the very same gameplay ideas as The Witcher 3 intact, but the Geralt sized hole in its script is too big to cover the game’s flaws in the same way.
Luckily, Cyberpunk’s odd rollout doesn’t take away from The Witcher 3’s legacy. It remains an best open world game that other games in the genre aspire to emulate. It’s True Detective with Cary Fukunaga.
Cyberpunk 2077 Download can be obtained via its official site. For more info, check out the guides of ours Market 4 Games.
