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?
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;
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.
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.
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).
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).