It’s a well-established meme how players gravitate to the “stealth archer” build in games.

I was thinking about this as I passed the 25-hour mark in my new playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 and its Phantom Liberty expansion. The original game’s Perk trees were a disaster of bad design, but even then there was a skeleton of optimization one could take towards different playstyles. In my original playthrough, I was… a stealth archer, basically. My build ended up being horribly inefficient though, as my Perks boosted damage using sniper rifles and also Netrunner hacks. As it turns out, there isn’t much of a point dealing with weapon sway while aiming and bullet drop when you can digitally one-shot enemies from an equal distance away via Quickhacks.

I vowed that my next playthrough of Cyberpunk would be different. I’d focus on a bullet-time abusing katana wielder that kicks down the front door and decapitates everyone!

As it turns out, pushing less buttons and having fewer decisions isn’t all that fun.

I really did give it the old college try. Funneled all my Attribute points into Reflexes so I could Dash and double-jump my way across the map. That bit? Super fun. In fact, I don’t even bother with cars unless my destination is more than 2 km away. When you equip the Sandevistan (aka bullet-time) cyberdeck though, it is mutually exclusive to more “normal” cyberdecks that allow you to do simple things like disable a security camera or upload Ping on an enemy to see where his friends might be hiding. Losing those options significantly reduced the fun I was having.

Also? Bullet-time + melee weapon just isn’t all that engaging. Using a combination of Dash + Leap Attack to sail through the air is cool. Once you land next to your target though, you just hold down left-click as you cut them to ribbons. There’s no finesse, there’s no real engagement – Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance this ain’t. Indeed, the sort of penultimate Perks of the Reflex tree unlocks Finisher moves intended to, well, finish off wounded enemies. The problem is that enemies kept dying to left-click before I could even see the F-key prompt.

So, I’m back to my more familiar stealth archer ways. Mostly. One tweak that I’m making is to focus on Throwing Knives and Pistols to make things a bit more interesting than just outright sniping. More ninja than archer, basically. I may have to use my one Respec opportunity to shift Attributes around to make this more viable, but its working well-enough for now.

But what I’ve come to understand is that the stealth archer archetype may have less to do with its inherit power (Sneak Attack bonuses, little risk) and more with, well, the satisfaction of pushing buttons. Quickhacking foes to death requires like two buttons; slowing time and killing with a katana requires maybe two more buttons; Sniping is one trigger pull, but requires some decisions on where to set up and the skill of aiming the headshot; infiltrating an enemy base and dispatching foes while distracting their buddies requires dozens of micro-decisions and improvisations.

That last one is preferable to me – the Tenchu series is one of my all-time favorites from the PS1 era – but it’s not always possible with the way some devs set up (or disregard) stealth gameplay. Luckily, Cyberpunk 2077 does support stealth gameplay and actually neatly avoids the stealth trivialization problem by making all endgame approaches overpowered. Which is certainly a way to solve things.