Short answer: it was supposed to be Cyberpunk, wasn’t it? The last vestige of that great ‘I’m going to buy a new graphics card for this!’ tradition lay in CD Projekt’s hands, along with the collective expectations of several million unreasonably excited RPG fans, and it fumbled it. It’s a wonderful experience now, of course, but at the time V’s arrival felt like a slow-mo slap in the cheek with an unnecessarily reflective glove.

But asking that question—the last game that felt like one of those moments where we all went out and upgraded our PCs to meet its specs and experience it at its best—reveals something deeper about how our culture’s changed. Or been changed. Because it’s not generally about the games any more, is it? It’s about the arrival of the graphics cards themselves. That’s what lights a fire under us to buy one, and that represents a complete inversion of the relationship, which began with us being so excited about how a new piece of software utilized the advantages of new graphics chips that we went and bought the chip. Slowly that flipped, and now we’re so wowed by abstract specs and benchmarks that we make an upgrade purely for the theoretical benefits it’ll bestow on us across all the games we play.

Can we blame that on Cyberpunk 2077’s botched launch? Some particularly unforgiving ray tracing enthusiasts probably do. But in truth the inversion had already taken place before we took to the streets of medium settings Night City at 18fps. Many factors have conspired against the must-upgrade new PC game.

LAW BREAKERS