Man this fucking game. I ran out of mods to install, then made some mods of my own, then hit him skill ceiling, so now I guess I gotta play it? This is all going to be 100% spoilers for this game
Hmm. Jackie and I are a couple of assholes who rolled in with the wind six months ago. This guy wants us to hit *checks notes* The LLC super power orientalist mega badass corporation. In fact he wants us to walk in to the son of god’s hotel room and nick his boxers. Nope, fuck that, I’m out. Walking away from… oh. Oh the walking away from an obvious disaster button is disabled. Fuck.
Hmm. Jackie’s dead and I barely made it out. Everyone else is dead or has already burned us. Dex just told me to go in to the bathroom, which has no windows, and wash up. Okay, so as soon as the door shuts I’m going to kick it back open, put half a clip in the sky by way of his bodyguard’s chin, unload whatever’s left in to dex, and book it for the badlands before the cast of Hulu’s Shogun in robot drag shows up to vivisect me… Wait shit no that button is disabled too.
And then they take me to doctor guy that everyone knows I’m buddies with, who hangs out with the ex-girlfriend of the guy that I shot up Arasaka’s shit with. And they know who I am, because everyone in the damned hotel got a good look at me shooting my way out. So obviously, at some point, Arasaka security forces are going to follow this giant very obvious trail of stupidity, kick the door in, shoot misty, shoot vic, and then drag me off to an arasaka lab where they’re going to vivisect me? Huh… I guess their “Do the extremely obvious narratively appropriate thing” button is disabled too.
Well, now Misty is taking me back to my apartment, which is probably registered in my name, and as soon as she wheels me in the walls are going to shimmer as 50 Arasaka security guys turn off their thermoptic camo, shoot misty in the head, and drag me off to an Arasaka lab to vivisect me…?
What now? Oh, I’ll just walk over to a diner with to meet the ex-bodyguard of the ex-CEO or Orientalism Inc, and we’ll just talk about the murder of the most important man in the world when we’re both known and wanted for that man’s murder.
O.O
I honestly don’t know what to make of this. This isn’t how you right a cyberpunk story - The characters immediately piss off, not just people above their weight class, but people in the highest weight class. God and his angels. A nuclear armed corporate state. And then kinda just walks away, goes home, hangs out with her friends?
There’s nothing about frantically burning all her ID cards and bank accounts, DoD formatting her phone and running in through a shredder, grabbing the wad of cash and the 3d printed glock she keeps under her pillow, and driving hard for Philadephia, or possibly the phillipines. No mention of getting her face, eyes, and fingerprints replaced while a doc cuts an inch off her height to fuck with gait analysis.
Just nothing. None of the shit a protagonist does when they realize how massively they have fucked up by stealing something important from real people who actually matter and have resources. It’s weird. This is a pretty well established thing, the “burn your life and go to the matresses” part of the story, and they just didn’t. Didn’t think about it, didn’t talk about it, didn’t acknowledge it. V is just wandering around, wearing her own face, driviung her own car, using her own credit accounts, hanging out with her own friends, like nothing happened. This is not how you tell a “heist gone wrong” story. It violates every law of narrative causality, and I don’t think they’re trying to do anythign clever with it, they just… didn’t? Fucking bizarre. Maybe they’res a great new twist coming around the corner but I kinda doubt it.
Also, dad-rock Gen X rebel without a clue showed up. Pro-tip, asshole. If you just go blowing things up with no working class movement and no theory of revolution you’re just an asshole. Fuck off to the digital 
you poser shit!
This is supposed to be “style over substance” but it’s neither stylish nor substantial. Just vaguely perplexing. Written by committee? Just plain bad writing? Corporate meddling with the writer’s room? Who knows?
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Don’t worry there will be twists later on that the dad-rock Gen X rebel doesn’t actually hold any Anti-Corporate beliefs but just did his little act of terrorism for revenge.
The whole game is a farce, your main characters sole motivation being “I wanna be the bestest self-made cyberpunk bounty hunter dude ever” is just the most thinly veiled self-insert for cdprojects corporate self-image. There’s really nothing deeper about it, cdproject made this game because they thought cyberpunk was cool™️ and making a cyberpunk game would show how cool and punk™️ they are. The whole game is nothing but some nerds having a wank over how they are suddenly the biggest and bestest developers in the world.
Sounds about right. The word “poser” hasn’t crossed my mind in 20 years, because what does poser even mean in post-post-modern post-irony post-new-sincerity society? But this game and everyone connected with it are all posers.
Iu was trying to figure out what was up with the difficulty and it turns out that even at the highest difficulty with “hard core” mods it’s just not very challenging as a shooter or an RPG. : | And somehow people have taken to the idea that if a game provides any challenge that makes it a “souls” game? Idk who taught gamers the term “power fantasy” but I wish they hadn’t. I see it get dragged out a lot now for games that give players a bunch of win buttons wtihout really thinking about a coherent game design loop or play experience.
I’ve heard people say that the heist was supposed to be much later in the game. Trying ot make it act one instead of the conclusion of act 2 or 3 would kind of make sense, they fucked up the whole progression of the story and nothing fits. Idk.
I’m honestly shocked how, under teh most superficial layer, this is a straight unreconstructed fantasy crpg. items give you random stat boosts, you get +1s to gear. Your “Quickhacks” are either magic or psy powers, I guess, but there’s nothing about them that reads hacking. For some reason every just has all their wifi ports open all the time and that means you can zap them or set them on fire. You’re just casting DoTs or status effects. Again, maybe later you’ll be able to yoinky someone’s visual feed, steal their phone book, hack in to their bank cards, buit right now it’s just lightning bolt, fireball, and stun.
Christ the movement is appalling. Like this game just does not control well. Looked down to figure out why i couldn’t move in to cover and the three foot gap between barrels was too narrow for V to navigate.
they fucked up the whole progression of the story and nothing fits
This is my personal pet thoery
I think CDPR didn’t realize how popular Keanu would be, and so when they revealed him at E3 they had to panic and rewrite the game
Until recent patches, the game clearly indicated that Keanu was supposed to show up later and was shoehorned into quests. The first quest you’re likely to do after being attacked by Silverhand in your apartment is to go get your car, which is crashed into. Until a very recent update, you and Keanu were buddy-buddy during that quest even if he just tried to kill you minutes before. In another instance, a character who you’re shown working for during the 6 month timeskip acts as if they’ve never met you when you enter their territory for the first time
The fact there’s about an hour long unskippable, barely interruptible segment between the No-Tell Motel and V getting turned loose on the open world, with a fakeout ending halfway through, really points to the heist being an end of act 2 shocking finale and all the Silverhand stuff would’ve been a late game act 3
There’s also the early demo footage showing that you’d get to choose one of three people who were your “personal hero” or something. Johnny was one, Morgan Blackhand was another, but I forget the third (maybe Rache Bartmoss?).
The actual CEO of Orientalism Inc., Saburo Arasaka, was the third one
The whole celebrity worship angle is another thing that seems really weird and offputting. I’ve never encountered a cyberpunk story where the protagonists want to become famous shadowrunners, become renowned and well known, make a lot of noise and attract a lot of attention. It seems completely orthogonal to the entire genre. You’re little people. Low life, high tech remember? If you make noise someone who matters will step on you. The motivation is usually extremely personal - Get enough money to get out of the life, buy new cyberkidneys for your mom, use your skills to convince the corporation not to kill your brother who fucked up, pay off an old debt to your body, stop some awful corporate villainy that’s going to fuck over everyone you know. A lot of the time it’s just “Survive to the next paycheck, buy some booze and drugs, pay rent, and get back to the grind”.
“Become a celebrity and die in a blaze of glory” seems so weirdly empty and indulgent. It’s just a bizarre motivation for anyone who isn’t an athlete or a prize fighter or I guess a rock star. And even for a rock star it’s a pretty outdated notion (dad rock Gen X poser Johnny). For a street level mercenary and troubleshooter it’s just weird. Why is Jackie so reverent to the DMPCs? What’s so legendary about them? They didn’t retire in comfort, they didn’t get out of the life, buy their mom a nice house in a heavily defended corporate enclave, send their niblings to good schools. They just killed a bunch of people and died. It’s extremely weird to me, both because it doesn’t make any sense to me, and because it’s not something I’d ever encountered in the genre before.
The fact there’s about an hour long unskippable, barely interruptible segment between the No-Tell Motel and V getting turned loose on the open world, with a fakeout ending halfway through, really points to the heist being an end of act 2 shocking finale and all the Silverhand stuff would’ve been a late game act 3
I was very explicitly whining that kind of semi-interactive visual novel sequence is only cute when Kojima does it. I was so annoyed near the end. Like it took me several minutes to figure out you’re not allowed to shoot the Arasaka cyborg assassins, you’re only allowed to shoot their bikes.
really points to the heist being an end of act 2 shocking finale and all the Silverhand stuff would’ve been a late game act 3
“He is starting to suspect Terry Pratchett fucked him over personally with his narrative causality theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Plot Structure. Instead of building suspension of disbelief, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous story.”
I think CDPR didn’t realize how popular Keanu would be, and so when they revealed him at E3 they had to panic and rewrite the game
Nah, that’d be too stupid even for CDPR. The game definitely suffered from tons of rewrites but there’s no way these didn’t happen way earlier when they realized they had to get the game out of the door at some point. Cutting the two other personal heroes from the game and focusing more on Keanu seems like an obvious choice, Keanu being popular was probably just a happy coincidence.
It’s basically a mirrorshades Cyberpunk/Shadowrun TTRPG game, and concepts like Shadowrunners don’t wear masks are core conventions of that style. It’s crazy action movie shit where you don’t worry about consequences except when the story wants them, because roleplaying future opsec and having no ties to the world at all makes for unfun gameplay for most people. It’s not a novel or a film where you can close the walls in on the protagonist and have them stewing in misery and isolation while walking down what is narratively a narrow path that’s the only option left to them, because that’s a spectacle to be observed instead of a role to be played.
And they know who I am, because everyone in the damned hotel got a good look at me shooting my way out.
Narratively you have an effectively magical “your cybereyes autohack every camera to blur your face” feature, which is a concept that also showed up in at least one Shadowrun supplement so I’m assuming it came from some earlier piece of fiction. You can even see this in action if you hack a camera and look through it at yourself, you just have a square noise censor over your face. This is introduced matter-of-factly enough that it should be a common privacy feature, it just doesn’t show up for anyone else AFAIK. So even if they have a description, they don’t have any pictures and they can’t just have a bunch of surveillance cameras doing facial recognition.
You also have to keep in mind that cyberpunk as a genre has turned into “what if real life, but you have agency” and that entails both silly tech that lets individuals punch above their weight and the lack of existing tech that ensures complete corporate hegemony. That’s why they can’t just use biometric traces to track you down in a city of seven million people, or even old-school legwork to pick up and squeeze known contacts: it’s a genre/subgenre-style requirement that they lack these sorts of inconvenient powers and that their hold on power is much more tenuous than it should be.
Okay but with Shadowrun, unless the game has changed since I last checked, Shadowrunners are sinless, cash only, and generally live in places where there are no records to trace. That’s why they can be shadowrunners - They’re explicitly outside teh system. V has a car, apartment, and credit accounts in her own name. She’s explicitly got a record and is on a first name basis with an NCPD inspector in the street kid start.
And hiding your face is as much of a genre convention as not doing that. Cruise gets new eyes (from a Japanese business man, I’m much more aware of all the orientalism since someone sent me some good articles last week) in Minority Report. Ahnold has to pull that tracker out of his nose and wear a robotic mask through customs in Total Recall. The rebels in the Matrix can operate because they’re disconnected from the system, meaning the Machines can’t just do a lookup on them and overwrite them. Neo asserting his identity outside the system of government names and identities is the culmination of his character arc. Armitage’s team in Neuromancer is constantly skipping around the globe while being protected by the Wintermute AI. JC in Deus Ex is a top of the line infiltrator and commando whose allies include a pilot with a bleeding edge stealth helicopter, and evading government surveillance is a major plot point in Hong Kong. GitS is all about tracking down the puppetmaster who doesn’t seem to exist in databases the way they should. SAC deals with the Individual Eleven, which are likewise very difficult to track down even for the government’s Wizard level hackers. Moxie-land, one of my fave neo-cyberpunk or post-cyberpunk stories, is all about how your phone is your entire identity and ability to buy the things you need to survive and the government/corps can bring you to heel at any time by simply turning it off. Rainbows End, another neo or post cyberpunk, likewise deals extensively with identity and surveillance.
If I remember my Shadowrun, and it has admittedly be years, but not making too much noise was an important part of surviving a shadowrun. If you went too loud and someone with a “crush rats” line item noticed you then you’d have a Knight or Lone Star kill team kick your door in and slaughter you and everyone you know. The post you linked even says it;
The Man doesn’t even need to know who you are to end you.
This is the final, and largest bit of the puzzle. The evidence left was a complete mess, and finally name was gotten, but that was all wasted time, effort and money. If a corp wants someone done in, they don’t bother with assembly of evidence on their own dime. They hire a professional, deniable, disposable operative to do it.
They don’t need to know much about you and they don’t care. They give your face, name, and surveillance footage to a professional and a week or a month later the professional comes back a pair of eyes, a thumb, and a enough of an implant to pull a MAC address in neatly labelled ziploc bags. This is the antagonist of Johnny Mnemonic; The Yakuza knows who has their paydata. They send one professional to deal with it. He tracks them relentlessly. Molly and the assassin fight to the death under the Altanta Dome, Johnny says “We’ve got your stuff, leave us alone and we won’t broadband it and everyone is happy”, and that’s that. Likewise, Blade Runner is all about the guy they send to get rid of you when you become annoying enough to notice.
Ultimately, what I view as a laziness, lack of interest, lack of thought put in to the plot and story typifies what I’ve come to extremely dislike about CP2077 and CP2013/Red/2020 in general. Mike’s “Style over Substance” motto means the game has neither. Like, Shadrow? Huge developed world, lots of megacorps with their own identities and agendas, pretty deep history, some decent diegetic reasons for why things happen the way they do. Cyberpunk, on the other hand, seems very shallow on purpose. it engages with core themes and tropes of the genre in a very superficial way. It isn’t interested in asking questions, not just because it doesn’t want to, but I think really because it didn’t occur to anyone that there were questions to ask.
Like you said, the genre has inclined towards completely empty, indulgent power fantasy. At max level V can casually slaughter infinite max-tac troops, something that makes no thematic or diegetic sense at all. It doesn’t fit. At that point it’s a super-villain story with barely a superficial vestige of cyberpunk left.
And hiding your face is as much of a genre convention as not doing that.
A lot genre media is way more black trenchcoat than how most people approach running or playing these sorts of games, though. That style lends itself well to something that’s structured and planned out by an author instead of having to deal with the chaos of players with varying interest levels and levels of commitment to the bit. When I GMed Shadowrun the games tended towards the exact opposite (pink mohawk, where it’s all silly bullshit and there’s no pretense of opsec or deniability) just because of how my players engaged with the world, and I leaned into that and gave them the sorts of content they responded the best to and ultimately learned to make runs by just riffing off bits with them until we got a usable story seed out of it.
Cyberpunk 2077 is the middleground between those extremes, generally called “mirrorshades”: there’s a token effort given towards creating plausible secrecy, but it’s not allowed to get in the way of players doing cool or silly things. So V has the magic high-tech permanent mask, and there are occasional nods to security forces tracking you down and torching the building you were in with a combined arms gunship/shock troop attack, but that’s not going to get in the way of the player centerlaning a two lane residential road past an Arasaka compound in an IFV going 140 mph while blasting the radio on full and they’re never gonna bother going scorched earth on all your known contacts or setting a trap for you even though literally everyone knows you did it.
Cyberpunk, on the other hand, seems very shallow on purpose. it engages with core themes and tropes of the genre in a very superficial way. It isn’t interested in asking questions, not just because it doesn’t want to, but I think really because it didn’t occur to anyone that there were questions to ask.
It does a good job with some of the side stuff, but yeah the main story is kind of a barebones trainwreck with serious pacing and consistency problems throughout it. They kind of tried to structure it like The Witcher 3 with branching leads to pursue in any order, but it didn’t work half as well or feel half as impactful. The entirely optional side quests with the Aldecaldos have nearly as much to them as the main story and are meaningfully better than it, and Phantom Liberty has its highlights too even if Idris Elba’s performance in it was disappointing (I was expecting the level of charisma he had in The Wire, but instead his character was just completely flat).
Idris Elba’s performance in it was disappointing
Aww. I was looking forward to that. He’s one of my top ten "I could listen to this guy read wikipedia’ guys.
Yeah, I don’t know if he phoned it in or got too into the character being a tired old spy who’s been so guarded for so long that he no longer really expresses anything. It fits the character, but it’s not what I was expecting from him. I think Phantom Liberty is still pretty good once you get into the meat of it, and the ending where you turn against the NUSA and FIA was decent at least (I didn’t play the other path, but I’ve heard the ending from it is bad).
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hahahahaha there literally was a point where V comes out of the bathroom, beats the crap out of the bodyguard, and Dex just barely manages to shoot V before V can shoot Dex. Even the devs “get” it, they just didn’t implment it.
This is one of the biggest issues with the game as an open-world FPS power fantasy. They want you to feel powerful, which goes directly against the core of cyberpunk. Yes it is just bad writing. No it does not get better.
Also lol while I was more willing to go along with the ride in general, I had that exact same reaction to the scene with Dex.
open-world FPS power fantasy.
word. It’s exactly the wrong genre for that. You can be a hyper-competent violence person, but there always has to be someone much bigger than you, who maybe doesn’t even really understand you exist, who can make one phone call and crush you.
Right? It’s so goddamn obvious! That scene, where the guy rips the towel rack off the wall and beats the living shit out of whoever told him to go to the restroom, is in every badass action movie. The character is wiping their ass or washing their face, then the scene cuts to the people outside, with the door in frame. And the people outside all have their guns ready. The people say something like “He’s been in there a while”, and there’s a beat, and then the door explodes and the guy comes out and just starts wrecking people.
Like, protagonist picks up the idiot ball so the plot can advance, fine, you have to have a plot. But the whole first act was just idiot ball after idiot ball after idiot ball to the point it became really grating. This is my reward for reading massive amounts of sci fi and doing media analysis my whole life. i can’t enjoy things anymore.
Game sucks, gottem. Cyberpunk moment.
I love this game though :(
That’s okay. My being a curmudgeonly bastard who can’t suspend disbelief anymore is my problem. I’m glad you enjoy the game. If you like the action aspects and have strong FPS fundamentals you should give Necromunda; Hired Gun a try. It’s a (pretty hardcore) FPS RPG where you start out pretty weak but gradually become a cybernetic war god running up walls, grappling across the map, and vaporizing armored underhive gangers with massive weapons and powerful augments.
The Ascent is a more conventional ARPG. You’re a maintenance guy working for a megacorp when the corp very suddenly, very inexplicably goes dark. Now there’s a huge goddamn power vacuum and all your fellow employees are legally non-people. You and some of your buddies and supervisors try to keep the lights on, other corps at bay, and figure out what the hell happened.
Prey and System Shock are hybrid FPS/RPGs. Less character development but both are quite good.
If you’re more on the story side of things Red Strings Club and VA-11 Hall-A are story and character focused low-fi cyberpunk VNs.
Have fun, enjoy the game. Don’t let miserable grognards like me ruin it for you.Prey is amazing. It’s such a good game. Almost no one I know has played or heard of it either, it reminds me a bit of Metroid prime in some ways. There is a good amount of sequence breaking, and special dialogue you can get from doing things in “the wrong order”.
And System Shock? That remake was awesome. The 2nd one is great too, those monkeys always scared me.
hahha. I was playing Prey, got through the intro. Good times, cool ideas, bit creepy. Then I turn a corner and all the officer furniture starts scurrying around and I’m like “You know what, fuck this, it is too late at night for this, I’m out.” I really need to go back and finish it. : )
I think It’s got a good amount of horror. I typically don’t like horror games outside of things like resident evil. Something about them doesn’t grab my attention. But Prey starts off kinda scary and then calms and ramps back up the fear and then calm again, all when you least expect it.
The roguelike (rougelite?) expansion, mooncrash is great too if that’s more your thing.
I didn’t know there was an expansion. I’ll check it out. : )
https://www.nexusmods.com/cyberpunk2077/mods/8711
CUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURSED!
“AI” integration. gd
I can see a case for using generative language bs in games if you train it on, essentially, the lore bible and create strong constraints. But it’s more like zork back in the day, when you could ask natural language questions as long as you used the right keywords.
