People can say what they want about Cyberpunk 2077 and how it plays on release whether positive or negative, but the world is very pretty (when it runs well on PC). That said, those people are absolutely justified in their complaints because wow, does this game have a lot of issues. Even the new hotfix, while attempting to help, is actually adding more bugs into the mix as well.
That said, when Night City looks good, it looks very good, and when it looks bad, it looks like something from the last generation, but admit it, this game was never going to look as good as people thought it would in their minds. Still, there are some standout & some awful-looking areas, so let’s take a look at both extremes.
10 Graphics: The City Center District
Night City absolutely looks its best when the environmental team could play around with verticality and different types of buildings. And, The City Center district as a whole looks great, whether it’s Downtown, Corpo Plaza, or even just the interior of Delamain HQ. This part of the city is simply a fantastic example of how to make a dystopian concrete jungle correctly, with tons of architectural hints at how messed up this world is, and even more distractions to keep the sheeple happy.
9 Dated: The Massive Landfill Area’s
There’s no avoiding the Landfills outside Night City, especially since V wakes up in one after the events of the Konpeki Plaza. But, fans have to wonder why CD Projekt forces the player here, considering all the visual bugs these towers of trash have. For those who want to head back here, it’s the dump directly south of the Edgewood Farm Fast Travel point. It’s like CD Projekt intricately designed hundreds of different random pieces of trash but then poorly copy+pasted them into gigantic piles with no regard for clipping. Plus, getting around this gigantic pile of trash is awful since it’s so prone to collision bugs, a constant annoyance in this game, and players constantly can see underneath the world because there’s literally no ground underneath parts of this garbage mountain.
8 Graphics: Outside Night City
Funnily enough, Cyberpunk 2077 has some really incredible graphical moments in the areas outside of Night City. In particular, the sidequest where V and Panam have to stay in a random house overnight has an amazing moment where the door opens, V walks out to a bright new morning, and the light passes through all the dry grass and bushes perfectly to show just what this game has to offer. It just looks so good! Though, non-PC players probably didn’t get as beautiful as a view due to the lack of Ray Tracing, but still. The more time V spends outside of Night City, the clearer it becomes that complexity doesn’t always equal better. Plus, the sandstorms that happen out here from time to time are also very atmospheric and tend to remind people of that Mad Max game published by Warner Bros. that came out a few years back.
7 Dated: Laguna Bend
There’s not a lot of Cyberpunk that takes place underwater, even though there’s a lot of water to be found. And, thank goodness for that, because it doesn’t look great under the sea in Night City. It’s clear the aquatic design got the short end of the stick what with all eh stretched textures and random objects strewn about. Plus, there’s almost no aquatic life to speak of, and very little plant life either.
Compared to something amazing like Rapture in the Bioshock series (an unfair comparison, sure), the sidequest where V explores what used to be Laguna Bend with Judy just looks like something from a much older game. None of the houses feel like they’re underwater, everything’s just stapled to the seafloor and nothing moves around to create little dirt clouds, and there’s almost no color to speak of. It’s a great sidequest, but a very lackluster area visually.
6 Graphics: Japantown
Right next to Corpo Plaza is what players quickly discover to be Japantown. And, it just might just be the fan-favorite location of Cyberpunk 2077, because it just has so much going on! In particular, there’s a story mission called Play It Safe (which we have a guide for) where a parade takes place through Japantown, and this whole sequence is incredible. This area just has the best blend of color, complexity, history, design, and lighting in the entire game.
5 Dated: The Oil Fields
There’s almost nothing to do in the Oil Fields found at the far northern point of Cyberpunks map (right above Northside), and that’s probably why this area feels so underdesigned. If someone posted a screenshot of this area on the Bethesda forums and said it was from Fallout 3 & 4, it’s very likely a good portion of people would believe them. It just looks so “wasteland-ish”, with very little color or architectural variety. Which, would be fine in any other game, but going from the chaotic melting pot that is Night City to a bunch of cloned Roughnecks stamped across the landscape, just doesn’t leave much of an impression.
4 Graphics: Megabuilding H10 & Little China
Obviously, the area right outside V’s Megabuilding would be picturesque, since it’s been shown off the most in trailers. And, while a lot of Cyberpunk 2077 hasn’t lived up to the hype (hopefully with a roadmap it eventually will), this little hub actually looks pretty similar to the early trailers. More than that, all of Watson looks pretty great. Wakako Okada’s little plaza in Kabui is incredible, Little China has a lot going on stylistically, and Northside has most of the factories and industrial design for the game.
3 Dated: The Amusement Park In Coastview
Now, to be fair, Pacifica is a very cool district that has a lot more unique stuff going on than some other areas of Night City. It has the Animals, a gang pumped full of steroid abusing battle junkies. It has the Voodoo Boys, a Haitian Netrunner gang with great style and equally ruthless tactics. But, it also has an amusement park! That said, while it’s neat that V can ride the rollercoaster and spin the Ferris wheel here, the visuals of this park leave a lot to be desired.
This was a perfect chance to overwhelm the player with tons of different neon lights or show them how a theme park could look in a cyberpunk future. But, instead, most of the lights are off, everything is run down, and it looks exactly like a closed-down theme park people could see in the present day.
2 Graphics: The Bars Of Night City, Particularly Afterlife
Fans have been discovering that Cyberpunk has a lot fewer buildings players can actually go into than they thought, but that doesn’t mean the ones that are explorable are badly designed by any sense of the word. For example, all the bars/clubs in Night City feel so unique and look amazing. There’s Lizzie’s Bar, which is full of Mox flair, then there’s Riot which is a bar where the Corpo elites let loose, and finally, there’s El Coyote Cojo where Streetkids start out and is owned by Mama Welles. But, the bar that looks the best and makes the most impact is Afterlife, home to the most well-known fixer in Night City, Rogue. This bar just screams style and is where all the best mercs gather, and it’s also where V meets Claire, Panam, and even Dexter Deshawn.
1 Dated: The Biotechnica Flats
And finally, there’s the Biotechnica Flats, a gigantic area in the south-western part of the map that quite frankly takes up way more room than it should. Almost no quests take place around here, and it just screams like a filler district. They literally just took the same building and cloned it over and over until it took up more room than the entirety of Pacifica. As a decent comparison (though Cyberpunk is actually get compared to Fallout 76 more often nowadays), this area is sort of similar to Caesar’s camp in Fallout New Vegas, but that was a hub with plenty of NPC’s and sidequests spread throughout it.
NEXT: 10 Things That Make No Sense In Cyberpunk 2077
