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?
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).