Cyberpunk 2077 gives you a lot of options on how to approach combat. You can run in guns blazing. You can run in sword blazing. You can hack your enemies’s brains and make them catch fire. You can run sneak in, silently stabbing everyone before leaving without being noticed. You can sneak in, hiding from everyone, and doing only what the gig needs you to do, leaving everyone else alive. You can ram a car up against the wall, use it to climb onto the roof, and safely chuck grenades at the enemies below.
Like I said, options. (Whether or not the encounters in Cyberpunk 2077 make good use of those options is beside the point). My current build has me being fairly stealthy, and for most gigs I follow the same approach: Hack cameras, sneak past most guards, grab what I need, sneak out, trying my best to not kill anyone on the way. It’s a fun challenge in its own way and scratches that latent Metal Gear Solid itch I have. It’s also very unrewarding.
You get experience for completing gigs, but you also level up skills by using them, be they hacking, shooting, slicing, thwacking, or grenading. When you take the approach of minimal violence, you don’t level up those useful skills. Nor are you able to loot bodies for weapons and money, things you might want to buy new cars or upgrade your kit. Though a pure-stealth option does exist in Cyberpunk 2077, it’s not the most viable option.
Stealth is a hard mechanic to nail down in games and it’s been done often (and poorly) enough that TV Tropes has a handy list of them. It’s by design a slower way of playing a game, one where patience is prioritized over quick reflexes with a virtual gun; so how do you make stealth not just interesting, but something incentivized?
The Last of Us makes combat a gamble, one where you can easily be overpowered and ammo and healing items are scarce. You probably could fight that clicker in open combat, but your pistol might not have ammunition for whatever’s waiting down the line. Killing that group of soldiers might make things easier, but if I use up my health kits I might be in danger for the next battle. Fighting is a costly endeavor, and many encounters, especially in the second, can be avoided altogether by sneaking. Stealth becomes a choice the player has to make.
The other route is to make the game all about stealth. In Metal Gear Solid an all-out assault is simply not tenable. Firefights in the game usually end poorly for the player so the best approach is to sneak around and, if you’re found, run and hide until the alarm quiets. Granted, the MGS games are, unlike The Last of Us or Cyberpunk, built around stealth, so the difficulty of all-out combat is there to push players into a sneaking approach. All the same, the games make it fun in a way that a lot of games don’t.
Ironically, stealth in Cyberpunk is actually a lot of fun, it’s just not as rewarding as other approaches. Neither The Last of Us nor Metal Gear Solid are RPGs, so avoiding combat doesn’t see the player missing out on progression as it does in Cyberpunk. In a tabletop RPG, the game master can reward the players for taking a different approach in a way that games can’t. So how then does a digital RPG incentivize stealthy or nonviolent play? Removing experience could be an option, as is more narrative incentives (something done by, say, Dishonored or, again, Metal Gear Solid). Alternately, it could also mean looking at games in a different way, where there are more ways to interact with a world besides shooting things. Cyberpunk 2077 is set in a violent world and its violent delights are part of the game, but, in playing it, I can’t help but to ask why and wonder what a different sort of game would look like.
Essays, Not Rants! 