Cyberpunk 2077 Photo Mode Dump

The popularity of open-world games has introduced the general public to Virtual Photography as a proper practice through game features that simulate the workings of a digital camera, providing ways to manipulate aperture, depth of field, film stock, and other photography-specific settings. Although photo modes can be traced back to 90s era games, virtual photography has gained prominence with the growing popularity of massive multiplayer online games and their increasingly more expansive and intricate open-worlds. For game developers, there is an added benefit of owning a vector of information that begins with the open-world simulation and expands through the crowd-sourced production of game photography by users and the ownership slash distribution of these images as promotional materials.

As a natively-digital medium, Virtual Photography can be a practice informed by the glitch art ethic. Glitch photography has always been colored by a dramatic irony where the manipulation of the file as a digital file becomes a more realistic depiction of the medium than the visual content of the photograph, the image becomes threated by an irrelevance borne out of its material conditions. With glitch in virtual photography, this dramatic irony is inverted, because the image retains the authority of truth. The virtual camera is now faithfully capturing the glitches that exist as such in the open-world. There is now a delicious matter-of-factness to the simulation of a virtual world.

Cyberpunk 2077 came out at the end of 2020 to monumental hype and mounting criticisms following a tumultuous a 8-year development run. The day zero release was an unpolished product that quickly became memed and mocked. In essence, Cyberpunk 2077 feels like an outdated game, from its writing style to its gender politics to some of its design details, this would have been a good game if it came out in 2012, but maybe the point is be the outdated projection of a Generation X fantasy world. Regardless, the game has cult potential for glitch artists because of its initial buggy release. Presented here are photographs captured in the Photo Mode of an early Cyberpunk 2077 release played on a PC with a GTX 1080 GPU, which falls on the lower end of the required specs. They include actual glitches to characters and the world, as well as images of intentional glitches, and some straight-up street photography. The motivation behind this photo dump is to trace the limits of the game world to the point where it breaks and collapses. Thankfully, it doesn't take much :)