I recently played Cyberpunk 2077 on a PS4, thanks to Chinyu for lending me the disc. Since I’d already watched someone play through the main storyline on YouTube years ago, this time I focused entirely on side quests.
The game is set in a future 2077, where people can swap their bodies for cyberware for all kinds of purposes, or get chips implanted. The whole world is controlled by a handful of corporations, like Arasaka and Militech.
The traditional way to describe this kind of cyberpunk setting is “high tech, low life.” I went into Night City with exactly that preconception.
Sure enough, the moment you step out your front door in Night City, you see police tape everywhere and cops working cases, gangs shaking down civilians, trash piled up everywhere, guns and violence visible on every corner, and homeless people scattered along the streets. There are people doing drugs too, though when the game was in development the studio probably hadn’t yet seen today’s even more horrifying “zombie drug” scenes (the game shipped in late 2020; the shocking fentanyl street scenes really took off around 2021).
Aside from a wider variety of food, body implants and gear are indeed made by just a handful of corporations.
Setting aside the people at the top, almost everyone you meet in Night City, while occasionally admiring the city’s beautiful views, mostly has nothing good to say about the place. They see plenty of problems — they’re either just barely scraping by, or actively wanting to leave. Aside from their personal circumstances, they don’t necessarily say the city itself has made their lives miserable, but as a player you can still sense the city is in some kind of hopeless state.
What started changing that impression for me was driving around. I noticed Night City’s roads are laid dead straight and smooth — you can speed around without ever hitting a pothole. The sidewalks even have nicely designed crosswalk signals for people staring at their phones. Cars on the road are well-behaved — they wait at red lights, yield to pedestrians. There’s no traffic congestion either. The sidewalks are way wider than in Tainan and almost entirely free of obstructions; what obstructions there are tend to be stuff citizens dumped there themselves, rather than poorly placed utility boxes or streetlights.
The next thing I noticed was prices. A box of nigiri sushi costs 25 eurodollars (everything’s priced in euros). An apartment is a one-time permanent rent payment, roughly three orders of magnitude more than that box of sushi; a car is similarly three orders of magnitude more. In the real world, the gap between a house price and a box of sushi is probably four to six orders of magnitude.
So maybe housing is too cheap, or food is too expensive. The protagonist’s job is a mercenary (Merc), doing all sorts of jobs that don’t see the light of day. Picking the most legal-adjacent, most routine, least violence-involved job — a cheating-spouse stakeout — the pay is roughly 2,000–3,000 eurodollars. We’d expect mercenary work to be high-risk, high-reward, so the protagonist’s pay skews high; but compared to that pay, food doesn’t seem that expensive, so food is probably priced normally and housing is just too cheap. From this angle, Night City looks like a utopia — you can casually hustle your way into housing. We haven’t even mentioned the place the protagonist starts out living in, which is bigger than plenty of rentals in Taipei. Granted, this isn’t a totally fair comparison — the game world doesn’t have a concept of mortgages either.
Also, if housing is that cheap, why are there still homeless people on the streets? My guess is there’s some barrier to getting housing that the game never mentions — maybe a credit requirement, or you need a connection to introduce you to get access — or maybe it’s precisely because housing is cheap that people flood into the city looking for opportunity in the first place.
Maybe comparing prices set within the game isn’t really a realistic way to evaluate Night City anyway. After all, the in-game economy is tuned so players have a smooth experience, not so players are meant to grind for 20 years. We can instead look at aspects unrelated to player experience.
Public safety is the most conspicuous one. The loading screens keep citing a shocking murder statistic (I don’t remember the exact number — it might not have been mentioned at all), and mention that the mayor cut Pacifica off as its own independent district specifically to “lower” the city’s crime rate by 3%, excluding Pacifica’s stats from the citywide numbers. Pacifica is the territory of the Voodoo Boys (coincidentally, I’ve been reading Babel recently, which mentions Haitian Creole — outsiders love associating Haitians with voodoo; the Voodoo Boys speak Haitian Creole, and in the story the protagonist even has to download extra translation software to parse it — “Voodoo Boys” is itself a name outsiders gave them). That district is full of abandoned big-box stores, burned-out cars everywhere, and various gangs squatting under the bridges.
A diner employee also mentioned that they used to offer delivery, but stopped after a delivery driver went out one day and met an unfortunate end. When murders happen, people don’t tend to bother calling the police, believing the cops will just shelve the case; yet if a player hits someone with a car on the street, the cops do get called and you get a GTA-style wanted star — though a single star clears itself if you just drive around the block for a bit, as if nothing had ever happened.
Even though some quests reference the existence of corrupt cops, the police you actually run into on the street all seem to be doing their jobs properly.
What surprised me most was freedom of speech — Night City appears to have a remarkably high degree of it. You can see someone who looks like a street preacher yelling loudly, telling everyone to rise up against Arasaka and Militech; even though he’s sleeping rough on the street, one shoe missing, nobody bothers him at all.
The media is heavily entertainment-driven, and your journalist friend constantly repeats that “the media is all lies” — but your journalist friend genuinely exists as a character, and even sends you a whole string of quests investigating a certain kind of psychosis.
Politicians take sponsorship from every big corporation imaginable. There’s also a politician who wants to break free of corporate funding, but due to plot circumstances or vote-chasing, still has to campaign holding a gun, invoking the Second Amendment to win support. Still, at least on the surface, the electoral mechanism itself seems to function normally.
On the political-events side, I recall a small town got flooded because the government wanted to build a dam there. Beyond that, people’s way of expressing political discontent doesn’t really seem to be organized protest marches — with weapons this easy to get, people just go straight to terrorism.
On healthcare, wealthy people use Trauma Team, a subscription-based emergency medical service — if you’re not paying or not insured, there’s no guarantee you’ll be saved. In the main quest “The Rescue,” someone who needs saving has a subscription, so an armed medical team arrives by aircraft to extract the patient. It’s a bit like America’s for-pay ambulances or medevac helicopters. “Ripperdocs” handle implants — the protagonist goes to one for any medical issue, though it’s unclear whether ordinary people also go to a Ripperdoc for regular medical problems. Ripperdocs seem to handle the circulatory, immune, and nervous systems all at once, so they’re presumably strong in both internal medicine and surgery. Ripperdocs also seem to be fairly dense across the city, with no waiting lines, and I never heard of anyone skipping the doctor because it was too expensive. It’s possible Night City’s death rate is just so high that when something goes wrong, most people don’t get the miraculous chance the protagonist does to crawl back to a doctor.
On the city’s outskirts sits a massive trash mountain, burying who knows how many fallen heroes. Nearby are a few ghost towns with a declining, rural feel, where the residents seem to live in a state of despair unto death; one quest’s detective grew up in exactly that kind of environment before moving to the city to become a cop. Out on the fringes, nomads ride motorcycles and live in tents, evoking something like Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland — but in reality they’re a terrifying armed faction; even the most peaceful of their groups won’t hesitate to disable a flying car and kidnap someone, or hijack an armored tank, if the job or their own survival demands it.
All told, Night City is America. Its cityscape borrows some Chinese aesthetic elements, but only the surface, not the spirit — a chaotic look without any of the underlying design and practice of actual psychological disorder. In terms of public safety, it evokes Mexico or Colombia. Its politics, media, and healthcare have some real problems, very American. But given its freedom of speech and infrastructure, it’s hard to imagine this is really a dystopia.