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Tears of the Kingdom; or, The Sequel to Breath of the Wild

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is one of the most focused and restrained AAA games that I've ever played. After Skyward Sword and Twilight Princess, two games that pushed the long-standing franchise formula to its breaking point, Hidemaro Fujibiyashi and his team set out to build a new Zelda identity from the ground up. With a clean slate, every feature that they added built towards the game's central themes - the majesty of nature, player freedom, and systemic play. If something wouldn't contribute to that, it often didn't end up in the game at all, leading to a lot of players complaining about Breath being threadbare, quiet, and streamlined.

I say all of that because its sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, is most decidedly none of those things. Tears is a game defined by its maximalism, taking more or less everything from Breath and tacking stuff onto it for six years. Where Breath had one map, Tears has three, and they did their absolute best to fill every square inch of the new and returning playable space to the brim with characters, quests, systems, caves, dungeons, easter eggs, and collectables. Tears is a game with seven currencies that you can trade in at five types of vendor for various rewards, and that's excluding the new upgrade systems for the new abilities that you can get from completing the new temples.

When I say that it took more or less everything from Breath of the Wild, though, I did mean it. While ostensibly a sequel, Tears functions as something much closer to a remake or reimagining in practice. The overall story structure is almost identical, down to the minutiae of which characters inherit which responsibilities from which champions/sages. The memory system for storytelling is retained, much to the detriment of the now-linear story that it's conveying. You're going to be revisiting the same towns, doing similar shrines to unlock similarly-adjacent waypoints, and restoring things to the status quo by the time you say your goodbyes.

I'm really not sure that those two goals - massively expanding a game while also being slavishly devoted to recreating it - can coexist.

Breath of the Wild wasn't an accident, and while there are things in Tears that I would port back to its predecessor if given the opportunity, taking a game defined by its minimalism and grafting three new games' worth of capital-c Content onto it is going to fundamentally change the nature of the beast. By giving the player all of these new abilities (primarily Ultrahand - check out Postscript 1), we're left with a game with even fewer true puzzles and navigational challenges than Breath, requiring the audience to play along and role-play as someone with fewer tools in their belt than they do to have fun. The looser, more character-focused storytelling that Breath used allowed the memory system to flourish with each scene comfortably making sense on its own, and with Tears's pivot to a more traditional plot it becomes possible for the player to ruin a reveal for themselves simply through bad luck.

More than that, though, Tears effectively completely eliminated Breath's exploration loop without anything waiting in the wings as a replacement. With vehicles and man-cannon towers that can take you more or less anywhere on the map, traversal has been turned into selecting a point and more or less airdropping directly to it. Maybe that was a necessary change - you can't explore the same map twice, after all. Unfortunately, with the new additions, caves and wells, only being visible from up-close (in comparison to the bright and beaconesque shrines and towers from Breath), exploration in Tears asks you to do more than exactly that, combing the map and checking every crevice and crevasse in a way that Breath only rewarded with Korok seeds and ambiance.

I'm leading with all of this negativity because this is what I was left stewing in after I gave up Tears of the Kingdom two dungeons in and a few weeks after its launch last year. For about six months, give or take a few twenty-minute play sessions to see if I was feeling it yet, I simply couldn't believe that this is what Nintendo had released as their sequel to my favorite game of all time. I was frustrated, disappointed, and hyper-critical. I enjoyed a lot about Tears, but the problems were so fresh and my expectations were so high that the flaws were all I could feel. I spent a lot of time hashing out how I felt online (see Postscript 2), and it well and truly astonished me to see how few people could sympathize. Were we even playing the same game?

As my return to Tears of the Kingdom a few weeks ago suggested, maybe we weren't.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is one of the most systemically generous and aesthetically luxurious AAA games that I've ever played. After Breath of the Wild, a game that felt in many ways like a blank slate for the future of a legendary franchise, Hidemaro Fujibiyashi and his team set out to rediscover and reintegrate the Zelda identity of old into this new format. With a great foundation, every feature they added could bring something new and unique to the table, providing such a wealth of options and experiences that no two players would've truly played the same game. And once I opened myself up to that, picking and choosing which parts of the game I wanted to play more judiciously and holding back from "optimal" play in lieu of finding the fun, the game blossomed for me in a million dazzling ways.

The scripted, authored material in Tears is some of the best work that a Zelda team has ever done, full stop. There are more quests that are more engaging than any of their equivalents in Breath, with every town now brimming with unique activities and fun overarching progressions both in and outside of the main quest line. So-called "Side Adventures" have you fighting off groups of monsters with roaming squadrons of soldiers, rebuilding towns, plunging into the darkest corners of the Depths in search of enemies from past games, and solving map-spanning puzzles in search of ancient wisdom. You can't throw a rock twelve feet in Hyrule without hitting an NPC with a minigame on deck, it seems, and almost all of them are a blast. Characters from Breath are given new life as leads in game-long side quests covering anything from construction to journalism, and the modes of gameplay that you're asked to engage with are diverse and fun, recontextualizing existing spaces in interesting ways.

Of course, the side material wasn't what drew me to the prior Zelda games (with the exception of Majora's Mask), and the main quest represents a bafflingly large step up from Breath of the Wild's. Each of the dungeon approach sequences is hours-long and absolutely jam-packed with memorable moments, providing a linear, focused progression that'll have you solving riddles, probing caves, and diving into storm heads. The dungeons themselves, while functionally similar to Breath's Divine Beasts, feel at once more unique and closer to the series's past by building out their own aesthetics. The bosses are more visually diverse and tactically demanding, and when you beat them you're rewarded with a fundamental shift to the area you're saving (with the exception of the Goron village, a part of the game that disappointed me enough to stop me playing for half a year). Even the approaches to the towns are reinvigorated, with interesting additions like an expanded extreme climate zone around the Gerudo Desert providing the kind of focused navigation challenges that only the Zora portion of Breath provided.

And this is all referring to the first dungeons you encounter, the stretch of the game that mirrors Breath so thoroughly that I genuinely found it concerning on my first go at it. What happens afterwards, from the "reveal" at Hyrule Castle to the moments that credits roll, is maybe my favorite sequence in Zelda history. It's deliriously smart, using the scope of the game's systems to deliver a part of the journey that feels epic, personal, global, and threatening. Their newfound freedom to create bespoke moments pays off in a finale so explosive that it's hard to believe it came from the studio that gave us Breath's Dark Beast Ganon fight, with everything from that last leap into the darkness on absolutely dripping with verve. And, my God, that last button prompt.

This is all accompanied, of course, by the best thing that a game could take from Breath of the Wild: its audiovisual presentation. While the primary overworld looks more or less like you'll remember it, the addition of the sky and Depths lets the team expand their palette to match. The sky reaches truly profound, sublime levels of beauty, while the Depths gets just about as close to horror as Zelda can handle - those two endpoints giving us something to fear and something to fight for, which in turn elevates the storytelling. The soundtrack pulls from a million influences to give us something new, but it isn't afraid to pull those old Zelda heartstrings when the time is right. One particular theme incorporation during a post-Spirit Temple cutscene had me hooting and hollering.

I do apologize if these last few paragraphs have felt closer to an exaltation than something meaningful and insightful - the best parts of this game just sort of did that to me. While Tears has problems, and I think they're worth examining, it also has a structure that lends itself to simply ignoring what you dislike and pursuing what you do. It took me approaching it from a completely different and unnatural angle to see that, though, and I'm hoping that the next Zelda is able to provide both the focus and bombast that only one of the last two excelled in. With this next blank slate, with this next fresh start - with a new map, a new style, and new ambitions - maybe they can combine the best of both worlds.

After Tears of the Kingdom came out, I found myself asking how my favorite game development team lost the magic touch and what it would take for me to get excited about their next project. The answer to that is in two parts: they didn't, and I already am.

Postscript 1: Ultrahand

Ultrahand doesn't have a place in the Zelda series. While it gives the player a lot of options, and I understand the fun that a lot of people had with it, it simultaneously breaks too many challenges and fails to introduce many more. The most interesting questions you can ask with Ultrahand are "how do you move this object" and "how do you climb over this thing", with the answer to both almost universally being "make something that can fly." While Ultrahand as-is is a technical marvel, you need to wilfully ignore most of its abilities if you want to have any fun with half of the game's puzzles, let alone traversal. It "fits" with Tears's everything-and-the-kitchen-sink vibe, but I had way more fun with the game when I refused to use it unless absolutely necessary, and I truly don't want to see it again.

Postscript 2: Apologies

In the half-year period where I was perpetually bummed about Tears of the Kingdom I let my disdain for it become a staple of my online personality. It dominated any conversation about the game that I joined, and I have the reasonable suspicion that I ruined at least a few good conversations with needless shit-flinging. To those of you that got hit by that: I apologize. The game kind of rules, actually. I was right about some things, wrong about others, but my face turn on this has well and truly wasted a lot of people's time. The least I could've done is waited until I beat it. I can't wait to intellectually learn this lesson and then never put it into practice. Oh, well.

Postscript 3: Cohost

This post is adapted from a post I made on my Cohost blog earlier this year. I will miss Cohost dearly, even if I wasn't tremendously active there.

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I Played Cyberpunk 2077

Ultimately, Cyberpunk 2077 is an excellent video game. It’s hard to talk about it without acknowledging the backlash that it received around its launch, but the backlash was directly proportional to the amount of marketing that it got. This happens to a lot of games – and frankly, a lot of my favorite games. If I were working at CD Projekt RED and I was responsible for the kind of marketing that resulted in the kind of expectations that they built for themselves, I’d have to take that sort of stuff into deep consideration. But, as someone who bought the game, enjoyed the game, and desperately wants to talk about the game, I’m not sure that it matters. So, to reiterate: Cyberpunk 2077 is good.

There’s so much game to Cyberpunk that it might be easier to start by talking about my favorite part of it that isn’t a game: the photo mode. I’ve joked before about my favorite gameplay loop in Star Citizen being “taking screenshots,” and that’s not my intent here, but some of my favorite games in recent memory have made it easy to look over the memories I made during their runtime. Interspersed within this review will be some of my favorite screenshots that I took – the inclusion of precise controls for things like depth of field, character posing/positioning, and stickers/frames helped to make my screenshot folder feel less like a collection of moments in a game and more like a scrapbook made during the wildest possible trip to the wildest possible city.

And what a city it is. Night City is my favorite setting in a video game in recent memory. It’s not incredibly difficult to make a large environment, but to make a meaningful environment where every location feels lived-in and the streets are dense with things to see and do? That’s a challenge that very few studios have managed to step up to. More than that, Night City feels unique in the landscape of video game cities – whereas a city like Grand Theft Auto V’s Los Santos is rooted in a reality we’re familiar with, Cyberpunk’s retro-futuristic architecture (and overall aesthetic) help lend it a sensibility that we’re unfamiliar with. It really feels like stepping into another world - fully fleshed-out, fully envisioned.

The environment is obviously beautiful and unique, but I was surprised by just how ornate it was. The thought and consideration that went into details as minor as the UIs you’ll encounter in and on everything from car dashboards to PCs and menus both diegetic and otherwise helps the entire world feel diverse, detailed, and cohesive. While everything feels of a kind and everything is working towards the same design goals, the sheer amount of variety was shocking.

The biggest thing that stuck out to me about Night City itself within just a few hours of playing was how vertically oriented it was. Not just in the “there are tall buildings” sense, though there certainly are tall buildings – I’m talking about the way that Cyberpunk uses verticality to tell stories. The first time that you end up high enough above the skyline to see rooftops will inevitably be during one of your first encounters with Night City’s elite. The hustle and bustle of street life fading away as an elevator climbs up the side of a building and you emerge into a world you aren’t familiar with was astounding. That claustrophobic feeling of being surrounded by monoliths isn’t only alleviated by attending to the rich, though – for similar reasons, my first journey out of the city limits and into the “badlands” will stick with me. Cyberpunk successfully manages its mood and tone by controlling the kind of environments you’ll find yourself in, and while that may seem like a simple, sensible, universal design decision, its consistent application helped ground the world for me in a way that made it feel more real than most of its contemporaries.

Something else that makes Night City feel real is how Cyberpunk implements its setpieces. In a decision that reverberates throughout the rest of the game, CD Projekt was clearly all-in on the notion of immersion and seamless transitions. While it was consistently surprising and exciting to find bombastic moments embedded in the world’s side content (one standout involves Night City’s equivalent of SWAT descending from the sky to stop a robbery in an otherwise non-descript shop downtown), it never took me out of the world. And, on the other end of the experience, the number of memorable, exciting story moments that were located in parts of the city that you had wandered by before helped make the world feel almost fractal, this idea that every building and every corner could house new adventures or heartbreaks.

One thing that did take me out of the experience, unfortunately, were a few of the celebrity (or “celebrity”) cameos. While I think that the core cast was well-cast, with Keanu Reeves as Johnny Silverhand in particular being an inspired choice, the game, unfortunately, wasn’t immune to the tendency to include recognizable faces just because they were recognizable. Grimes plays a role in a forgettable side quest that felt dangerously like it only existed because she wanted to be in the game. There are also an almost concerning number of streamer cameos (“over 50 influencer and streamers from around the world,” according to CD Projekt), and while most of them completely went by me, the few that did hit for me only served to disrupt the world. The only perceived positive here is that most players won’t have any idea who these people are.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the only thing that broke immersion in the game. Due to what I can only assume are particularly harsh memory restrictions imposed by the game’s release on last-generation hardware, the game has some of the most aggressive NPC culling that I’ve ever seen. While NPCs don’t strictly only exist in screen space, it often feels like they do, as simply spinning the camera around can result in an entirely new crowd existing in place of the old one. This is obviously rough when it comes to maintaining immersion in crowded spaces on-foot, but it gets worse when you’re driving. Driving on an empty road, rotating the camera, and finding that three seconds later there was an entire legion of cars waiting for your camera to discover them, far too close to slow down, was always a deadly surprise. It doesn’t help that your cars take a while to slow down.

Cyberpunk’s approach towards cars in general is interesting. While I certainly had trouble with them when I began playing, I eventually began to get into their groove. If you want to learn how to drive effectively in Cyberpunk, you have to learn how to drift. After the game’s latest substantial patch, the team at CD Projekt finally fixed my largest problem with the game’s driving – the minimap was simply too zoomed-in, making it difficult to begin to make the right decisions on when and how to turn when traveling at speed. Now that that's resolved, however, whipping and spinning through the streets is fun, and the cars feel appropriately weighty. I’ll still occasionally boot up the game just to cruise around its streets and listen to the radio.

Speaking of the radio, did I mention that Cyberpunk 2077 has one of the greatest game soundtracks that I’ve ever heard? The radio is filled with great original songs from some pretty great musicians, but that’s not where the soundtrack’s beauty starts and it certainly isn’t where it ends. The original soundtrack (composed by P.T. Adamczyk, Marcin Przybylowicz, and Paul Leonard-Morgan) was consistently beautiful, moving, and intense. The world feels gritty and grimy but ultimately beautiful and worth saving, and a great deal of that emotion comes from the soundtrack. While the heavy use of industrial synths could’ve lent itself towards music that existed to set tone instead of form lasting memories with memorable melodies, the sparkling backing tones and inspired instrumentation helped keep me humming some of its tracks for months after last hearing them in-game. I’m no musical critic, I don’t know how much I can say about this soundtrack, so I’ll just reiterate: it’s genuinely incredible.

It certainly helps that the encounters that so many of those tunes are backing up are exciting as well. I was expecting middling combat from the company that brought us The Witcher 3, and while the experience wasn’t perfect, it was competitive with (and, in many ways, better than) the closest games to it than I can point to, Eidos Montreal’s recent Deus Ex titles. Gunplay feels tight, shotguns feel explosive, and encounter spaces are diverse and full of alternate paths and interesting cover. My first playthrough was spent primarily as a stealth-focused gunslinger, using my silenced pistol to cover up the mistakes that my feet made when trying to avoid getting caught. Trying to sneak into, around, and through environments helped emphasize how complex the environments actually were. While it’d be easy to run into a wealth of the game’s content with your guns loaded and ready to fire, that may contribute to a perceived lack of depth in the game’s world design. I’m trying to write this without considering what other people have said about the game, but this particular point has been something of a sticking point for me – there are individual, completely optional buildings in Cyberpunk that have more interesting, considered level design than some entire video games, and the experience of evaluating and utilizing them was consistently mechanically engaging and exciting.

The sheer number of abilities that the player has can be almost overwhelming. While leveling does encourage the player to specialize into certain traits, especially when said traits can also serve as skill checks for the dialogue system and some traversal opportunities, every trait houses a bundle of skills that each house a sprawling leveling tree. Far from the kind of “three-path EXP dump” that you’ll find in a great number of AAA titles, Cyberpunk’s leveling experience can be legitimately intimidating. It’s difficult to plan the kind of character you want to play as when you’re trying to project eighty or a hundred hours forward for a character that will be constantly encountering new kinds of challenges. I certainly didn’t begin my playthrough by wanting to be a stealth-focused gunslinger – in fact, I was originally aiming for a melee-focused hacker build. While I was drawn to what I was drawn to, hearing stories from other players about the kind of builds that they ultimately considered to be overpowered made one thing exceedingly clear: Cyberpunk is a game that rewards every kind of play, possibly to its own detriment.

Cyberpunk’s main story is notably short. I wouldn’t consider this to be a problem, considering the sheer amount of engaging, exciting, heartfelt side content, but it might be the core of the difficulty scaling plateauing so early on. As you progress deeper into the game you’ll find that almost every build, as long as you are willing to commit to something, is more than viable. Look around long enough and you’ll find people saying that every single build is overpowered. For me, that fed into the central power fantasy in an exciting way. By the time that I rolled credits a hundred hours in I was more or less unstoppable, walking into rooms and popping every enemy almost instantly. For others, this was a problem – it can be frustrating to feel like all of your work to become stronger wasn’t met with an appropriate challenge when the time came to put it into practice. This is a difficult problem to solve, and I don’t have a solution. I’ll fondly remember my revolver-toting, enemy-obliterating V, though, so I can’t complain.

Regardless of the scaling, however, the content you play through to arrive at that pinnacle of power was consistently, surprisingly robust. While the differentiation between “gigs” and “side quests” is confusing (word for the wise: gigs are generally shorter and more gameplay-centric missions that are designed by CD Projekt’s “open world” team while the side quests are made by the same team that made the main quests and are generally longer and more narrative-centric), both kinds of side content are lovingly crafted and meaningful. Of the 86 gigs in the game, every single one of them takes place in a unique location with a hand-crafted backstory and (almost always) a wealth of different approaches. These don’t exist separately from the rest of the game’s design philosophy, even if they are made by a separate team, and you’ll often find that decisions made outside of gigs will reverberate into them (and, sometimes, the other way around). I’ve played a great deal of open world games, and never before has the “icon-clearing content” felt this lovingly-crafted and interesting. While the main quests will take you traveling across the map, the side content is what really makes it feel dense and real. You’ll be constantly meeting different kinds of people who are facing different kinds of problems – and, hey, occasionally you’ll be meeting someone who has no problem at all, someone who just wants to make your world a little bit brighter.

It’s surprising, then, that one of the most obvious ways to integrate that kind of content in Cyberpunk is so sparsely-utilized. “Braindances,” sensory playback devices used to replicate experiences as disparate as sex, meditation, and murder, play a critical role in some of the game’s larger quests, but they almost never show up in the side content. You would imagine that the ability to freely transport the player into any kind of situation in a lore-friendly way would’ve been a goldmine for side content, but its use is limited. This isn’t even a complaint, really, I’m just genuinely surprised – I wouldn’t be surprised if they used them more heavily in 2077’s expansions or sequels, because they feel like an untapped goldmine.

Another thing that the game surprisingly lacks is the inclusion of more granular subtitle options. While the game does let you choose the important stuff – whether or not you want CD Projekt’s trademark over-the-head subtitles for random NPCs, what language you want the subtitles to be in, what language you want the audio to be in – it doesn’t include something that I’ve grown to consider a standard: the ability to turn on subtitles for foreign languages only. As the kind of player who avoids subtitles when possible, I went through most of Cyberpunk with them off. Unfortunately, a tremendous number of important cutscenes in the game take place in languages other than English, and I didn’t know that I was supposed to understand what these characters were saying until I was embarrassingly far into one of the prologue’s most important scenes.

NOTE: I was pleasantly surprised to discover after replaying the ending of the game earlier today that they've fixed this issue in a patch. Nice!

I can only complain about the game’s language support so much, because there’s something important that lies between the player and the story they’re there to experience: a fucking incredible English localization. Ironically, it’s so good that I can’t help but imagine that most players won’t even think about it. It’s easy to notice and talk about an excellent localization when it’s from something like a JRPG, something with a clearly different style from what you’d expect from a work made in English, but never once in my entire playthrough did I even briefly consider the idea that it was natively written in anything other than English. I knew that CD Projekt was a Polish studio, but I just assumed that they wrote in English and localized it backwards. The language is constantly bright and surprising, the jokes land, the characters have memorable quirks, everything feels natural, and the voice acting is legitimately some of the best that I’ve ever heard in a video game. Both versions of the main character’s voice were damn-near instantly iconic for me, landing up there with Commander Shepard in the upper echelon of protagonist VO. I can’t praise it enough.

That said, even if the localization was incredible, it’d be hard to appreciate if the meat of the story wasn’t up-to-snuff. I was ecstatic to discover, then, that Cyberpunk 2077 has an incredible story. Every great story starts with a great cast of characters, and Cyberpunk hit it out of the park with that. The core cast of side characters are some of my favorite characters in years. Judy, Panam, River, and Kerry are all memorable, full, charming people. Kerry Eurodyne in particular is responsible for my favorite scene in a game since the finale of Final Fantasy XV. The quest “Boat Drinks,” the finale of Kerry’s quest line, is quietly emotional and intensely beautiful. He, and the other characters like him, are more than the setting they’re in, and the way that the game slowly chews away at the harsh and bitter exterior that the world has given them as it reaches to their emotional, empathetic core consistently astounds. Night City is a city full of noise, violence, destruction, and decay, but you don’t have to participate in it. You don’t have to make it worse. You can be different, and you can be better. You don’t get there alone, you can’t get there alone, and Cyberpunk is a game that revels in how beautiful the world can be if we are willing to find the light and excitement in the people around us.

Of course, Cyberpunk is a video game, it’s an RPG, and the story is more than a linear progression of memorable moments. Something that struck me while making my way through Cyberpunk’s story was how expertly and tastefully it implemented choice. I’m used to games that give you flashing notifications and blaring alarms whenever you're able to make a decision that matters, so I was initially confused by how Cyberpunk didn’t seem reactive to the things I said and did. The game would give me a few options in conversations, I’d select one of them, and then the story would progress naturally. However, as I continued, I began to notice small things. One character would remember me here, a specific thing I said twenty hours before would be brought up by someone there, an action that I didn’t even know I had the choice to not take was rewarded. The game slowly but surely established a credibility to its choices, a weight to your words, this sense that everything that you were saying, even beyond the tense setpiece moments that you’d expect to matter, would matter. It was only after going online after completing the game that I realized just how different my playthrough could’ve been. While nothing ever reached the level of the kind of divergent choices that The Witcher 2 allowed, there were still large chunks of the game that are entirely missable. Three of the game’s endings can only be unlocked through the completion of (and, in one case, specific actions in) specific quests, and multiple memorable quests were similarly locked behind considerate play. This isn’t really a game that will stop you from doing one thing because you chose to do something else, most of the choice-recognition is simply unlocking new options for the player to take, but it always feels natural and never feels like a game providing you an arbitrary fork in the road just for the sake of making it feel artificially replayable. CD Projekt has already said that they made the choices too subtle in Cyberpunk, but I deeply appreciate the game as it is now – more games should make choices feel more real.

It helps that the dialogue system backing up some of those choices is dynamic and the cutscene direction backing those scenes up is consistently thrilling. The decision to lock you in first-person for the entire game was an inspired one, and it resulted in a bevy of memorable scenes made possible by those interlocking systems. There are the obvious ones – being locked in a smoky car with a skeptical fixer, getting held at gunpoint by a mechanical gangster with his red eyes inches away from your own and a pistol’s barrel just barely visible as it presses against your forehead, having to choose between firing your weapon and talking down someone with a hostage when in a tense, escalating situation. There are also a million smaller ones, situations where the scale of the world becomes part of the magic. The first time that I sat down in a diner and talked with someone I had to meet or the first time that I rode along through the bustling downtown of Night City as a politician sized me up will stick with me because the perspective of the camera and the pacing of the real-time dialogue interface combine to make almost everything more powerful. There’s so much effort put into it – so many custom animations, so many small touches that you’d only see if you were staring intensely at every frame. All of that effort paid off, and the controversial decision to strip third-person out of the game was ultimately proven to be one of the smartest decisions that CD Projekt has ever made.

Another decision that helped power an exciting, engaging story was how the game freely manipulates the time and weather during key story moments. It’s a small touch, it’s one that you won’t notice unless you’re looking for it, but every once in a while you’ll walk into a place during a crystal-clear day and come out five minutes later to discover that it’s a cold, windy, rainy night and you have a city to burn. Along with the first-person limitation, this initially feels like something that could only harm immersion, but when it’s backed up by a story that motivating and scenes that thrilling you’d be hard-pressed to notice it outside of the flashes of telling yourself that this scene or that scene is the best that you’ve played in a long time. This also helps avoid a problem that games like the Grand Theft Auto series consistently face – instead of letting scenes happen at any time, compromising direction, or doing something like a timelapse, sacrificing immersion, Cyberpunk manages to always keep you in the action while also presenting the action in its most beautiful and appropriate form. There are moments where it truly feels like it’s meshing the kind of scene direction that’d be at home in a Naughty Dog game, the gameplay of Deus Ex, and the storytelling of the WRPG greats, and in those moments there is nothing else on the market that feels quite like it.

I sure have talked a lot about this game’s story, considering the fact that I have barely brought up its central hook. The early twist (unfortunately spoiled by the game’s marketing), the placement of a rockstar-turned-terrorist-turned-AI-construct firmly in your brain after a heist goes wrong and your best friend dies, helps establish a tone that the rest of the game commits to. Johnny Silverhand starts as an annoying, self-centered asshole with no real appreciation for how dire your situation is, but by the end of the game he had more than won me over. Reeves’s performance was really stellar, and the relationship between him and V is incredibly well-written. More than that, his introduction helps spur on a shift in the way that you engage with the world. The first act is full of hope, aspiration, the belief that you can get to the top if you hustle hard enough and believe. After you hold your dying friend in your arms and are forced to look your own death in the eyes, though, things begin to turn. Maybe the world is fucked up, maybe it’s fucked up beyond belief. But there Johnny is, telling you to fight. Why? Every time you fight, things get worse.

But the game continues to ruminate on this, it continues to put you in situations where fighting not only fails to fix the problem, but it makes it worse. Despite that, it’s positive. For me, at least, Cyberpunk’s worldview slowly came into alignment, and it’s one that I can’t help but love. Cyberpunk 2077 is a game about how important the fight is, how important believing in something is, even if you’re facing impossible odds, even if there’s no happy ending. It’s a story that posits that giving up is the worst ending of all, that your only responsibility is to what’s right and to the ideals that you and the people you love want to live up to. The game uses every story it can tell, every character it can introduce you to, and every encounter it can spin into a narrative to drive that home. And, when the ending comes, it was phenomenal. All of the endings were powerful, effective, and meaningful to me, but I’m more than happy that I went with what I did.

Cyberpunk 2077 is an excellent video game. It’s not flawless, but no game is, and at its core it's one of the most fun, beautiful, narratively engaging, and heart-filled games that I’ve ever played. I couldn’t recommend it highly enough, and I sincerely hope that everyone who has skipped out on it because of what they’ve heard is able to give it a shot someday. Maybe they’ll love it as much as I do. Wouldn’t that be something?

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Privatization in the Administration: A Path Forward for NASA

Even though the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has a storied history of pushing the world forward with landmark achievements in technology and science, criticisms of its methodologies are an important component in maintaining its position at the forefront of human development. While the first manned moon landing in 1969 remains an important part of world history, both as a species and a nation, saying that their progress since has been relatively stagnant would be putting it lightly. That is not to say that they’ve done nothing with this time—a series of successful automated Mars landings and heavy investments in the International Space Station should not be understated. However, compared to their past accomplishments, these seem practically meaningless. We do not live in a world populated solely by national space programs, though, and private entities like SpaceX and Blue Origin have shown that creativity is still bursting out in all directions if one is willing to harness it. It should not be NASA’s position, then, to plan their creativity and industry around government bureaucratic limitations. The most direct and promising way forward is to discard their current, bloated programs and to embrace partnerships with private entities to tackle goals that only an entity with the effective legislative security of NASA could attempt.

When NASA was established from the remains of the NACA (or National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) in 1958, it had a nebulous goal. The field of rocketry was largely established in the midst of World War II by German scientists—scientists that would, notably, go on to form the first ranks of NASA scientists through Operation Paperclip (Huddleston). Rocketry was a complex field in its own right, but NASA was to work on the field of aerospace as a whole, leaving them to focus on everything from plane flight to moon landings. When John F. Kennedy delivered his now-legendary Rice Stadium moon speech, their goal was made immediately apparent: NASA was to enable the first manned mission to the moon before the close of the decade. At this time, both NASA and Roscosmos (the Soviet Union’s space administration) had collectively sent less than a dozen men into space. The technological leap that they were to reach for within a decade is unparalleled, even today. NASA wouldn’t be able to undertake this project alone.

By the time that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969, NASA had partnered with a wealth of private companies to enable the Apollo program. Boeing, North American Aviation, and the Douglas Aircraft Company (DAC) all helped engineer and manufacture the Saturn V rocket. The command and service modules were designed by DAC, the lunar module itself was designed and manufactured by the Grumman Aircraft Company, and the launch escape system was built by the Lockheed Propulsion Company. By pulling in the best and brightest from around the nation, NASA was able to achieve its lofty goals and achieve something that many viewed as an impossibility when first announced. Unfortunately, this forward-thinking attitude to spacecraft and mission design wouldn’t last.

While Richard Nixon’s positive influence on the Apollo program should not be undermined, his ambitions were considerably less impressive when it came to the creation of a successor program. During the Apollo program’s peak, NASA was already looking towards alternatives. With a moon landing complete, the logical next step was a manned mission to Mars. Ideas were constructed for massive launch vehicles that built off of mastered technologies, intended to take us back to the moon and beyond (Portree). Those moonshot-esque ambitious were shut down, though, in favor of a considerably more conservative goal. A reusable shuttle that would allow for low-Earth orbit missions was conceived. Slowly but surely, bureaucracy began to affect the design process, with the Air Force stepping in at multiple occasions and asking for design alterations to fit their goals (Heppenheimer). While a single-purpose shuttle was already relatively unambitious, the design changed continually until it was we know today: largely expendable, incredibly expensive, incapable of lifting heavy payloads into orbit, and worryingly dangerous. Within its 30-year lifespan, the Shuttle program directly caused 14 deaths across two catastrophic mission failures. The lifespan of this program is of particular note—after going from low-Earth orbit to successful moon landings in just under seven years, NASA spent over three decades only occasionally mulling over the idea of even attempting to go back to the moon. The state of the industry surrounding these programs didn’t help.

The once-revolutionary and inspirational choice to turn to the nation’s most successful private partners to help enable the missions NASA wanted to embark on had turned sour. The Shuttle program had indeed pulled in corporations like North American Rockwell, Morton Thiokol, and Rocketdyne to help design and manufacture the Shuttle. At this point, though, these business contracts were no longer competitive or inspired, they were par for the course. The vast majority of contracts were cost-plus, allowing monolithic corporations to effectively spend as much money and time as they would need. Unfortunately, NASA’s golden days of budgetary freedom were behind it, with an effective allowance of only 0.5% of the national budget compared to the 2% they had operated with during the Apollo program. This meant that the process was necessarily poorly-managed, poorly-structured, and took a colossal amount of time and money to do less impressive things.

Of course, many would argue that inefficient private partnerships are better than none at all by citing the stagnation of Roscosmos (McClintock). While the Soviet Union’s space program was a force to be reckoned with during the Cold War, their weak attempts at any sort of privatization have proven to be damaging in the long run. Their current operational rocket, Soyuz-FG, has been in use since 1966. While some would argue that this is simply an example of efficient spending, a closer analysis of the history of Roscosmos would suggest something entirely different. The Soyuz is the only rocket Russia is using because it is the only one they can use. The only active private space companies within Russia are all subsidiaries of Roscosmos and suffer from the same bureaucratic issues. The Angares rocket, Soyuz’s successor, has been in development since 1992, with no clear end date in sight. Other rockets, like the fully-conceived and launched N-1, were unreliable and swiftly decommissioned. While a national space program entirely designing its own systems may seem more efficient in the short-term, it will inevitably lead to stagnation that can, at best, lead to swiftly playing catch-up with other nations. That is not a position that NASA, the world’s leader in space exploration technologies, wants to be in.

The cancellation of the Bush-era Constellation program in early 2010 caused an uproar within the space enthusiast community. While very few elements of the Constellation program were in active construction, including the Ares rockets, the designs had been finalized for a considerable amount of time (Thomas). Despite the enthusiasm surrounding the Shuttle program, it was finally retired in July of 2011 due to its costly nature compared to other equivalent rockets. These cancellations left the United States with no human-rated rockets of their own. A month after the Shuttle program’s cancellation, a new rocket design was announced: the Space Launch System, a rocket powered by proven Shuttle-era engines carrying the Orion capsule, would be NASA’s future vehicle to reach to the moon and beyond. Its inaugural launch would take place in the seemingly distant 2017. It was to be more cost-efficient and powerful than the Shuttle ever was, taking lessons from the Apollo program to prove the value of powerful, expendable rocket. Unfortunately, things didn’t go quite as NASA had initially envisioned.

Designed and manufactured using the previously-maligned cost-plus contracts, the Space Launch System was to be a joint venture between Boeing, United Launch Alliance (a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing that designed and builds multiple rockets for NASA, including the Atlas V, the current primary satellite-carrier), Orbital ATK, and Aerojet Rocketdyne. Despite the promise of relatively low launch costs, large payload masses, and a precise launch date, the SLS has continually slipped in every regard. As of December of 2017, the SLS’s first launch has a nebulous planned launch date at some point in 2020, an operational cost of over three billion dollars per year, and a planned launch cadence of just two annual launches. At three billion dollars per year for two launches and a maximum payload capacity of 130,000 kg to low Earth orbit (LEO), the SLS will cost the United States $11,538 per kg into LEO, making it the least cost-efficient rocket ever constructed. In addition to that, the SLS still has no clear use case. A myriad of plans have been drawn up for manned Mars missions in the 2030s or 2040s, but nothing concrete has been established. Even worse, this lack of a concrete plan doesn’t seem to be a pressing concern to today’s NASA. After Donald Trump’s election, plans for the SLS shifted towards a return to the moon at some unstated point in the future. If there is no defined use case for a wildly over-budget and under-scaled program, why is NASA seemingly so intent on continuing this instead of finding new opportunities?

In the midst of this political and economic quagmire, a new type of space agency emerged. Companies like Space Explorations Technologies (SpaceX) and Blue Origin emerged near the dawn of the new millennium with plans to change the way that space agencies worked, created, and grew. A traditional central space agency would contract work out to separate companies who would individually design components of a larger whole, a process which would cost taxpayers billions of dollars and cause plenty of administrative friction. Instead, these new companies would design their own rockets, source their own materials, and contract out their own payloads. They would work on their own schedules with their own goals, basing their fundamental growth on the demands on the free market instead of goals set by policymakers and boards of directors. This fundamental paradigm shift in the way that private space companies worked earned them the colloquial name “New Space,” with older ventures like the United Launch Alliance swiftly garnering the name “Old Space.” While phrases like “disrupting the market” are often used to describe internet-connected juicing machines out of Silicon Valley, New Space truly changed the way that the public thought about what was possible within the space program.

In 2008, SpaceX successfully launched the first privately-funded liquid-propellant rocket to reach orbit, the Falcon 1. By 2010, SpaceX had launched, orbited, and retrieved the Falcon 9 rocket. They launched and landed their Grasshopper test vehicle successfully in 2012 and successfully landed an orbital-class rocket’s first stage in 2015 before going on to reuse one in 2017. The speed of their accomplishments in unparalleled in the industry. Large parts of this were made possible by NASA funding. However, instead of the traditional cost-plus contracts, SpaceX was working on competitive, benchmark-based contracts that forced them (and their competitors) to keep costs down and deadlines strict. Despite creating rockets that are more capable than any other rockets on the market in terms of payload capacity and cost, SpaceX is also continually pushing the boundaries of what is possible in spaceflight through smart recruitment strategies and a clearly-developed goal that all of their developments directly contribute towards (a privately-funded manned mission to Mars) (Harper). That is not to say that they are the only company operating in this space.

Most notably, the aforementioned Blue Origin is also pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Founded in 2000 by Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon and (as of the time of writing) richest man in the world, Blue Origin has taken a marginally slower approach to similarly lofty goals. In November of 2015, Blue Origin’s New Shepard spacecraft became the first rocket to travel beyond the Karman line (the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and outer space) and be returned. In late 2016, Blue Origin announced a plan for New Glenn, a reusable orbital-class rocket that would surpass SpaceX’s planned Falcon Heavy, to launch before 2020. In the same announcement, there was also a passing mention of New Armstrong, a rocket intended for space colonization efforts. Blue Origin’s motto is “Gradatim Ferociter,” Latin for “Step by Step, Ferociously.” As Blue Origin is entirely self-funded by Jeff Bezos, they can afford to take their time—despite that, NASA’s current and prior plans pale in comparison to Blue Origin’s, even when taking production and development time into account.

In light of New Space’s rapid advances and innovations, NASA’s current structure seems woefully inadequate. The Space Launch System seems like a drain of resources, the rough and constantly-shifting goals seem almost quaint, and the contract structures seem horribly inefficient and dangerous. NASA’s current relationship with Old Space private companies rightfully appears to hinder progress. What, then, can be done to fix this? Moreover, what steps have already been taken to prove that “fixing this” really is a viable strategy?

As previously mentioned, SpaceX’s relationship with NASA has been an extremely valuable one for both entities (Harrison). The benchmark-based contract structure is primarily being used for NASA’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Program. Boeing, traditionally viewed as an Old Space company, is also participating in this program, and the benefits have been clear. SpaceX and Boeing (along with other companies that did not make the cut) have been competing for NASA-backed funding in order to develop a launch solution to take Americans to destinations in low Earth orbit like the International Space Station. SpaceX’s plan involves the Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon 2 capsule, while Boeing is relying on the Atlas V rocket and its new CST-100 Starliner capsule. This competition structure has shown that it is possible for older companies to adjust to this new structure in a way that ensures quality designs and efficient pricing structures are naturally selected.

The path forward for NASA, then, is to take this spirit of competition and apply it to all of their targets and goals. NASA’s legislative and financial security means that it is able to aim for targets that private entities would not have the ability to attempt, but the current partnership structure means that huge amounts of time and money are spent to, ultimately, accomplish very little. NASA needs to take advantage of New Space, force Old Space to catch up by getting rid of the cost-plus contract methodology, and begin to focus again on ambitious targets to create an exciting and inspiring future. This will require canning programs like SLS and Orion (or, at the very least, no longer focusing on them in any real capacity), but the long-term payoff, both in terms of finances and ideology, will be immense (Huddleston). NASA will be able to make its return to the days of achieving the seemingly-impossible and the world will be a better place.

Citations:

Harper, Graeme. "Outer Space: A Very Creative Business." Creative Industries Journal, vol. 7, no. 2, July 2014, pp. 79-80.

Harrison, Todd. “NASA in the Second Space Age: Exploration, Partnering, and Security.” Strategic Studies Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 4, 12 Jan. 2016, pp. 2–13.

Heppenheimer, T. A. The space shuttle decision: NASAs search for a reusable space vehicle. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA History Office, Office of Policy and Plans, 1999.

Huddleston, Robert. "Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America." Air Power History, no. 1, 2015, p. 52.

McClintock, Bruce. "The Russian Space Sector: Adaptation, Retrenchment, and Stagnation." Space & Defense, vol. 10, no. 1, Spring 2017, pp. 3-8.

Portree, David S. F. “The Last Manned Mars Plan (1971).” Wired, Conde Nast, 3 June 2017.

Thomas, L. Dale, et al. "NASA's Constellation Program: The Final Word." Systems Engineering, vol. 16, no. 1, Mar. 2013, pp. 71-86.