As flawed as Cyberpunk 2077 is, it still has glimpses of fun here and there. I am not quite ready to give up on the game just yet. In terms of aesthetic appeal, Cyberpunk 2077 is not pretty or pleasing on the eye, some of this is intentional and some of it is a result of the default early 00’s-esque stylstic settings they have turned on.
What I found surprising was I had my graphics set to ultra, with ray tracing enabled and DLSS set to balanced (I am using an Nvidia RTX 3070). I expected better graphics with these settings turned on than I got when I first opened up Cyberpunk 2077. Once again, maybe my monitor size, but the game looked anything but next-gen to me.
I notice some of these graphical nuisances because I am playing on an ultrawide monitor, for others playing at smaller resolutions, the game might look less jarring with the defaults. For me, the game looked like it was straight out of 2008 with some of these defaults.
Although full disclosure: I found even tweaking these aforementioned settings, the game still looks terrible in some parts. The NPC’s still look like poorly designed stock assets from a free Unity assets collection.
There are five settings which I highly recommend disabling to make the game a little more pleasing, especially if you’re on an ultrawide monitor like I am.
- Film grain
- Chromatic Aberration
- Depth of Field
- Lens flare (this one especially)
- Motion blur
I won’t bore you with the details, but these effects are understandably designed choices with the intent of giving the game that “Cyberpunk feel”, but I found they are all at odds with one another and the neon-lit skyline of Night City, it results in what I consider to be a bit of a mess. The lens flare effect is annoying, it ends up washing out parts of the sky, so you definitely want to turn that shit off.
