I first bought Cyberpunk about a week after the release. I hadn't really kept up with the hype for the game, all I knew was that it was an open world first person shooter and it had Keanu in it. For me not knowing much, it sounded promising.
The computer I had at the time was an MSI gaming laptop with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060. That's not the most important detail, but it's important to me I say it. I picked the corpo lifepath, made my V, and was immediately met with a mass of visual bugs and frame rate drops. I managed to get past the mission where you meet Takemura in the diner before the visual bugs got too much for me to handle. I thought "Okay, I'm gonna give the devs some time to fix this and come back to it."
And for the longest time, I didn't. For nearly 2 years, I never touched the game, even after I upgraded to a much more powerful desktop. I suppose I was afraid that somehow, even after nearly 2 years, it wouldn't be fixed enough, that not even my new pc wouldn't be able to run it, that maybe I should keep waiting. I thought that until the start of November, 2022.
And then I watched Edgerunners.
The day after I binged it all, once I managed to stop crying, I instantly redownloaded the game and booted it up. To my genuine surprise, there were hardly any bugs left to be seen. It was fixed. I picked up where I left off and finished my first playthrough, deciding on the Panam ending. And I cried my eyes out at that, too.
I wanted to give it another, uninterrupted playthrough, picking the streetkid lifepath this time and trying to get the "secret" ending. I just finished that playthrough a couple days ago, and while I didn't like the secret ending as much as the Panam one, it was still good.
Before coming back to this game, I'd heard that CDPR was working on an expansion and a sequel. I was...apprehensive. But now, I'm honestly very excited for both. And I'm unashamed to say that this is actually one of my favorite games. This story is amazing.
A bit of a tangent, I've been dealing with depression and suicidal thoughts for about 6 years. I guess I always kinda thought that eventually, there'd come a time where I'd just end it all. But, going back to see all the endings after finishing my first playthrough, watching the suicide ending and the voicemails people leave afterwards, I think it helped me realize "Maybe that's not the answer I should be looking for." Maybe this game genuinely saved my life. So, thanks for that, CDPR.