Twenty five years ago Deus Ex came out. Twenty five years later people are still talking about it. A remaster is being discussed. The audience never went away.
Cyberpunk 2077 came close to being the immersive sim that audience has been waiting for. It failed. Not because the mechanics are absent but because the world is scripted not simulated. There is a precise difference between a game that has systems and a game that is built as a system. 2077 has systems. It is not built as a system. The stealth is a joke not because the mechanic is missing but because the stealth simulation is missing.
Here is the part nobody has said clearly yet. Every pure immersive sim ever made has been a contained space. A dungeon. A space station. A set of mission maps. An open world immersive sim has never existed. Not once. Cyberpunk 2077 was the first attempt at full scale and it failed on the simulation side. Project Orion has the opportunity to be not just the best cyberpunk game ever made but the first open world immersive sim in history. That is an entirely unclaimed genre space.
This document is a fifteen section forensic analysis of what went wrong in 2077 and what Project Orion could be if CDPR commits to building a cyberpunk world the way Thief built a medieval city and Deus Ex built a near future thriller. Not decorated. Not scripted. Simulated.
Written by a fan of the genre. No agenda. No name. Just someone who has been playing these games since 2000 and wants to see the open world immersive sim that the genre has been waiting for.