The phantom liberty expansion is out now, and something to note is just how many roads and cars are in the game considering… well… how are they still burning fossil fuels in 2077?
Something interesting about it is how the game now reads like Grand Theft Auto in the dystopian future. Cars exist so you must be able to drive and shoot out of them and there must be cops and there must be traffic and… all of that is sort of meaningless in that universe. So much of the marketing is set around cars, but if they got rid of the cars, if cars weren’t there, then maybe they would have put more effort into the other systems.
Maybe the broken systems just wouldn’t need to be built, because so many of them are shoehorned in around cars.
EDIT: wanted to address the comments here as they are all very similarly themed:
I am not talking about the fiction, I am talking about the game design. Yes it’s a dystopia but that’s not why the game is buggy or boring. Having cars in the fiction means the game must add mechanics to drive and get new cars and vehicular combat. Once there’s so much car stuff, the game feels like GTA, which prompts people to make comparisons, which means CDPR needs even more GTA-like mechanics. That’s time which could have gone into more RPG mechanics, better missions, etc.
The only time I was talking about the fiction was in reference to how much would cost to own a car, including roads and so on. Why isn’t every road pay per use? Why isn’t biofuel like $20 a litre? But that would be oppressive to drive in, and because it’s a power fantasy, all of that goes by the wayside.
Overall my point was that just as cars dominate the city scape of the present, so they dominate the game design of everything where cars are present.
Bear in mind that there’s a whole series of Train Simulator games, so I can pretty much guarantee you’re not the only fan of an in-game train ride :)
I build rail networks and cities in most of the games I play. There’s something cathartic about building that’s different from the catharsis of destroying or stealing.
As for CP2077, I actually like that they included cars because it’s a dystopia. If cars, stroads and limited access motorways are the worst transport system ever, which they very much are, use them exclusively in dystopian future worlds and you’ve basically driven home the point easily. Of course, the fact that there’s a metro system in Night City would cut into that, but clearly the people there have bought into carbrain like nothing we see in real life, judging by the disdain going on a date by train gets and the description of how the saying in Cyberpunk’s world is de facto “Bread, Circuses and Automobiles” since the 1950s.
If anything, their over reliance on cars is a very anti-car artistic statement.