That afternoon, starting around one o'clock, players with the fastest internet connections finally began stepping into the world of Cyberpunk 2077. Naturally, streamers were among the first. It was not because they had any special treatment, but because streamers lived by their internet speed. A weak connection could ruin a stream, cost them viewers, and make them miss the perfect chance to jump into a new game while the hype was at its hottest.
So when Cyberpunk 2077 officially went live, many content creators were already waiting like hunters at the edge of a cliff, fingers hovering over the mouse, ready to dive in.
Among them was Ryan Silver.
Ryan had already experienced the trial version as one of the four hundred demo players, and after just three hours with that early build, he had become completely obsessed. He already knew the game had huge potential for videos. The only question left was whether it would also be as entertaining to watch live.
That mattered a lot.
Some games were incredible when you played them yourself, but boring to watch. Others were fun for viewers because of chaos, reactions, or competition, even if the gameplay itself was simple. Ryan wanted to know where Cyberpunk 2077 belonged.
The trial version had only shown a rough frame of the game. The combat was there, the systems were there, and the atmosphere had already begun to take shape, but much of the real appeal of a sandbox adventure came from something else entirely—freedom.
Freedom to explore.
Freedom to improvise.
Freedom to make bad decisions and somehow survive them.
That was what made sandbox games special. Not just the mechanics, but the feeling that the game belonged to you the moment you stepped inside it.
And after one hour of streaming the full release, after finishing the opening and finally entering Night City, Ryan Silver slowly tightened his fists and stared at the screen in silence.
The bullet comments in his stream suddenly dropped.
Not because people had left.
But because nobody had time to type.
The immersion was too strong.
It felt less like playing a game and more like walking through the center of a film—except this time the camera was his own eyes.
The Badlands section at the beginning was already powerful enough to leave a mark. Endless empty roads, rusted structures, half-dead machinery, distant fires burning in forgotten corners of the wasteland, and sandstorms rising without warning all created an unsettling mood. It felt abandoned, dry, and dangerous, like a broken western frontier where the world had already ended and only the desperate were left wandering through the dust.
The lawless gangs moving through that emptiness only made it worse.
Even before the game threw players into direct conflict with them, they were already terrifying.
The good news was that the opening did not force Ryan into a full war with the Badlands lunatics.
The bad news was obvious.
Later, there would definitely be blood.
Ryan tried to judge how dangerous the enemies were, but that was harder than he expected. He had played more games than he could count and was considered one of the top players in his field. Based on the trial, he had assumed the Badlands would function like a standard high-risk zone in an RPG—a place full of overpowered enemies.
But Cyberpunk 2077 did not think like a normal game.
That was the first shock.
In most games, the wilderness was the danger zone and the city was the safe zone.
Here, it was almost the opposite.
Ryan had watched Edgerunners, and he knew enough about the world to understand that the worst monsters were not hiding outside civilization.
They were inside it.
Scavengers.
Maelstrom.
Other chrome-crazed nightmares tucked away in alleys, warehouses, clubs, and concrete towers.
The most dangerous people did not avoid Night City.
They ran straight toward it.
Because that was where dreams went to either become real—or die screaming.
And the moment Ryan Silver officially entered Night City, both he and his audience went quiet again.
The city hit like a hammer.
The contrast between the Badlands and the city was so violent that it almost felt unreal. The outside world had been dead, hollow, and stripped bare. But Night City rose like a glowing beast from the dark, enormous and alive, filled with wealth, light, noise, greed, and violence.
Then came the second surprise.
Jackie did not lead Ryan into the polished towers and luxury districts first.
Instead, he brought him into the lower streets, into cramped urban spaces trapped under the shadows of skyscrapers. Roads twisted into roads, buildings leaned over each other, neon stacked on concrete, and every corner felt like it held three different stories at once.
Ryan slapped his desk.
"Art! This is art!"
That one moment alone made him feel the price of the game was worth it.
Because this was not just visual detail.
It was visual storytelling.
The rich districts were cold, sharp, clean, and distant. The poor districts were crowded and loud, full of color and decay. It looked like the people packed into those spaces had taken scraps of survival and built entire lives out of them. The city's poor were squeezed into tight corners, but instead of fading into gray, their streets burst outward with layered chaos—ads, cables, market stalls, food smoke, cheap lights, graffiti, noise, movement.
Messy.
Beautiful.
Trapped.
Like a giant artificial colony where human beings kept adapting no matter how hard the world pressed down on them.
Ryan could feel the symbolism even if he did not use that word aloud.
He understood the meaning.
And because he was an old streaming veteran with sharp instincts and a quick tongue, he knew how to turn that feeling into words his audience could follow. That talent was one of the reasons why people liked him so much in the first place.
And that day, there were many streamers just like him.
Because when a game's art direction reaches the highest level, the impact can be as powerful as its gameplay.
People are visual creatures. Beauty catches the eye before logic catches up. And Cyberpunk 2077 knew exactly how to use that.
Northstar Games' art team was terrifyingly good.
That same afternoon, far away from the excitement of ordinary players, another man sat in front of his computer with a much more complicated expression.
His name was Adrian Chase, head of Hot Wave Studio under Tencent.
He had been told to play Cyberpunk 2077 carefully.
Not as a fan.
Not as a reviewer.
But as someone expected to "study" it.
Which, in plain language, meant one thing.
The executives wanted him to imitate it.
After three hours of play, after multiple missions with Jackie and after seeing more and more of Night City open up in front of him, Adrian Chase fell into a long and painful silence.
The people above him saw only numbers.
Nearly two hundred thousand pre-orders.
A price tag of 328 yuan.
A first-day sales forecast that could reach half a million copies or more.
To those executives, it all translated into one message:
This game is printing money.
And if it was printing money, they wanted their own version of it immediately.
Adrian found that idea so stupid it gave him a headache.
Those people did not understand games.
They understood monetization.
Packaging.
Traffic.
How to turn something mediocre into something sellable.
But players were changing now.
A few years ago, the domestic market had been starved enough to swallow almost anything. Back then, maybe shiny trash could still pass as a meal.
But not anymore.
Not after Northstar Games.
The rise of Ethan Reed and Vivian Frost had changed the entire mood of the industry. Players were no longer forced to settle. They had tasted good games now. Once people learned what quality felt like, they became far harder to fool.
Adrian knew that better than anyone.
He had joined Tencent for money and position, and that decision had cost him the respect of many old friends. They mocked him, cursed him, and called him part of the machine that smothered creativity in the domestic market.
At first, he told himself money was money.
But now, even he had to admit the truth.
Something had changed.
Northstar Games had broken the old rhythm.
As Adrian continued playing, his frustration only deepened.
The pace of the main story, the density of the world, the environmental detail, the side content, the visual identity, the city design, the polish—it all made the game feel monstrous.
"Imitate this?" he muttered at the screen. "If this kind of game could be copied so easily, would I still be sitting here?"
He almost laughed.
Even if Hot Wave Studio had more people, would Tencent really invest billions into a project like this? And even if they did, would they really allow three or four years—let alone more—to finish it properly?
No chance.
The more Adrian played, the more he felt real admiration.
What kind of monster was Ethan Reed?
A producer who had already won Best Game Producer twice in a row, and now somehow delivered this?
How was he good at every kind of game?
And how in the world had Northstar Games built Cyberpunk 2077 in only two years?
To Adrian, the concept alone should have taken years to refine. The actual production should have stretched toward a decade.
But Northstar did it in two.
That was the terrifying part.
That evening, while the gaming world continued to erupt with excitement, Ethan Reed and Vivian Frost sat together at home eating takeout.
Recently, Vivian had started staying over from time to time, especially when work ended late. With Sienna away at Tsinghua and boarding there now, the apartment had spare space, and her room was more than comfortable enough.
So the two of them sat in front of the television, tired from the day, half-paying attention while flipping through channels.
Then one report made both of them freeze.
The host announced, "The next song is dedicated by V to Mr. Jackie of Night City. He says, 'The stories we made in Night City, I will never forget. Brother, you are a true legend.'"
Then "I Really Want to Stay At Your House" began to play.
Ethan nearly choked on his food.
Vivian stared at him, stunned.
"They can do that?"
Ethan wiped his mouth and laughed. "Apparently, yes."
After the song ended, they changed the channel again.
This time it was Harbor City Guardian, running an evening news segment about the Cyberpunk advertisements covering local subway lines.
The reporter cheerfully explained that the game, adapted from Edgerunners, had become wildly popular among young audiences.
Then, smiling into the camera, he admitted, "To be honest, I was playing Cyberpunk 2077 at home just two hours ago. This is Victor Ward reporting."
Back in the studio, even the host grinned and said, "And for full honesty with our viewers—I'm a Cyberpunk 2077 player too."
Ethan and Vivian looked at each other.
Then both of them laughed.
Maybe this was what happened when younger generations started filling more media jobs. The atmosphere had changed.
They raised their glasses and clinked them lightly together.
On the first day of release, by 10 PM, Cyberpunk 2077 had already sold 390,000 copies—and the number was still climbing fast.
On Skybound, the game held a nearly absurd 9.9 rating.
On ReviewHub, it sat at 9.8.
Across Hupu, Tieba, NGA, and every major gaming space online, discussion of one thing dominated everything else.
In the game's forum alone, registered users quickly broke past six hundred thousand. Posts multiplied so fast they seemed to refresh by the dozen every second.
Some players asked where to buy cyberware.
Some asked for the best Braindance (BD) options.
Some begged for mission help.
Others debated whether Northstar Games was already the number one game company in the country.
One of the most liked comments put it perfectly:
"From the view of capital and size, Northstar Games may not even be in the top ten yet. But from the view of potential and player recognition, they are already number one. In the past two years, has any game company been brighter than them?"
On NGA, the discussions were even crazier.
The game had been out for only ten hours, and people were already testing character creation limits, experimenting with extreme stat builds, attempting full runs with no cyberware, and dying horribly after ignoring warnings and wandering into areas far beyond their level.
In short, the entire gaming world had become a single roaring conversation.
And every version of that conversation meant the same thing.
Cyberpunk 2077 was unbelievably fun.
Not just good. Not just successful.
The most fun game of the year.
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