Imaginary Keanu or no, Cyberpunk 2077 is a failure of character
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Note: This article contains spoilers for the end of Act 1 (and a bit of Act 2) of Cyberpunk 2077.
It takes Cyberpunk 2077 eight or so hours to introduce you to its main character. That might seem deceptive. After all, the very first thing you do in CD Projekt Red’s ambitious, misguided, massive, controversial, and ultimately unfathomable new action-RPG is design the person you’ll be playing as, the rookie mercenary V. But while you can customize V’s appearance, their skillset, and even, in rough strokes, their background, what you can’t do with Cyberpunk’s memetically cock-obsessed character creator is establish who they actually are. And the reason for that is very simple: They’re nobody.
Not just “nobody” in the sense that V is, at the start of the game, an untested entity in the ecosystem of Night City’s various killers, hired guns, and overly aggressive used car salesmen. (Seriously, Mr. Hands, no one wants to buy your old Hyundai.) What I mean to say is that V is nobody; as a character, they are fundamentally indescribable. Whether you pick a Corpo, Nomad, or Street Kid background, the character itself remains a cipher, a smarmy robot built out of dialogue choices that can turn on a dime from psychopathically aggressive to saccharine, depending on a player’s whims. Viewed only from first-person (or in the game’s already infamously buggy mirrors), V exists in the game as little more than a pair of hands that allow players to shoot or hack their hordes of largely faceless foes.
And even that base level of identification is constantly disrupted by the haphazard nature of the game’s spoken dialogue, which is just as likely to make you think, “Christ, this guy is such a prick,” as root for their success. (All of these impressions come courtesy of a play-through with the male-presenting voice provided by Gavin Drea, FYI.) Want to go off the grid and explore the game’s massive map or its trove of nigh-endless sidequests? Don’t expect V to say anything interesting. In fact, don’t wait for V to say anything interesting ever. For a game that’s ostensibly about the horrors of losing one’s identity—more on that in a second—Cyberpunk goes out of its way to make its “protagonist” nearly impossible to identify with.
What’s wild about this disconnect is that it arrives in the wake of The Witcher 3, the primary wellspring for the masses of hype surrounding CDPR’s latest, and whose Geralt of Rivia stands as one of gaming’s finest examples of a protagonist who somehow works both as his own person and as a robust expression of the player’s will. No two Geralts who make their way through the company’s widely celebrated 2015 epic are likely to make the exact same choices at every juncture in its widely branching plot—but all of them will still come out of it feeling like recognizable versions of the same man. Part of that is down to voice actor Doug Cockle, who never makes Geralt sound like anything less than himself in even the most extreme of circumstances. But it’s also a testament to how well CD Projekt Red wrote the character; you can have Geralt choose entirely contradictory answers to any of the game’s various moral conundrums, and the writing will always go out of its way to justify his stance—because Geralt is a firmly defined character with his own wants, needs, and fears, and everything he does in The Witcher 3 reflects that. For a more recent example of this, look to Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla: Eivor Wolf-Kissed might be a cipher, but at least they feel like a cipher with a consistent point of view.
V doesn’t have a point of view. (Or hair, any time I try looking in the mirror while wearing a baseball cap, which glitches it out of existence—but that’s neither here nor there.) Instead, Cyberpunk 2077 pawns that duty off on a far more bankable star: digital ghost Johnny Silverhand, played with undeniable charisma by bona fide, no fooling, actual movie star Keanu Reeves. After the high-tech heist that serves as the focus of the game’s first act inevitably goes pear-shaped (this is a cyberpunk story, after all), Johnny’s mind ends up getting shoved directly into V’s head, beginning a push-and-pull between the two of them that is A) the single most interesting thing to happen in Cyberpunk 2077 in my 20 or so buggy, crash-riddled hours with it, and B) cribbed pretty aggressively from the “Joker is your imaginary friend now ” bits of 2015’s Batman: Arkham Knight. And it’s interesting not just because, hey: Free Brain Keanu. No, it works because Johnny is an actual character. He has consistent opinions, he has goals he’s trying to achieve, and the things he does always make sense as a part of the whole. Sure, he’s an asshole about most of this stuff, and he needs you to do all the legwork, but at least he’s an asshole with an ethos.
Even once V and Johnny establish an uneasy truce with each other, trading invisible banter and buddy cop-ing things up, Cyberpunk continually posits Silverhand’s unstoppable overwrite of V’s mind as a terrible thing. But why? Seriously, what’s actually being lost: Some random wisecracks? My skill choices in the game’s (admittedly robust and fascinating) character development system? My terrible taste in armored basketball shorts? Like I said back up at the top, by the time it tries to make you care about V’s continued existence, Cyberpunk has already fundamentally bifurcated its main character duties; intentional or not, V is merely the platform that allows Johnny to progress the most interesting aspects of its story. Johnny is the one with the connection to the characters who matter. Johnny is the one whose resources you’re tapping to get things done. Johnny is the one who cares about what’s happening beyond the basest impetus of survival. Johnny is the main character. V is just meat.
If this was all intentional, it’d be tremendous, and tremendously subversive. If a game that’s all about the decay of the human spirit—which infuses Night City, from its pervasive stank of Grand Theft Auto-level cultural satire, to its omnipresent advertising, to the inescapable reminders of how many hours of real-life programmer and artist lifespans were sacrificed to make the whole thing sort of work—spent its time talking the player into giving themselves up so that a more glamorous digital avatar might live, that would be a stunning execution of the game’s core themes. But Cyberpunk feels a lot more like it thinks it’s on humanity’s side, even as the void that is its central “protagonist” threatens to drag the whole thing down into the abyss. Guns and genitals don’t help us identify with characters: Choices do. And Cyberpunk’s V consistently chooses to be inert.
152 Comments
“Cyberpunk goes out of its way to make its “protagonist” nearly impossible to identify with.”Eighteen hours in and I’m running around a city hacking gang members so they can’t see or move and then beating the shit out of them with a taser stick. If you can’t identify with that then I don’t know what to tell you other than you’re a broken person who is allergic to fun.
if you seriously can’t grasp why it’s cool to be in a green target, then your soul is profoundly rotten and you’ll never find the nourishing love your heart desires
I may be a broken person, but I’ll never be as broken as the programming in this busted-ass game you paid too much for.
If this game was third person I probably wouldn’t notice since I’d be able to create my own story for them through seeing the appearance I created. Also I get terrible motion sickness in first person games so this is essentially just wishing it was third person hehe, and also so I could live out my gay boy queer fantasy of being a cyberpunk blade runner-esque femme fatale.
A 3rd person option would be great, especially because you can make a great looking character and some of the outfits you end up cobbling together are very fun.
I’m still relatively early in the game, just hit the stakes part and met Johnny, but V is an interesting choice of a MC, especially after all the effort to give him/her three backgrounds. I think that a core problem is, and naturally I’m about to go in to spoilers, in the first hours in the game we are introduced to two characters, or maybe one and a half characters, who ground V and give them that outside world connection. And then they remove the central human connection from their life just before hitting V with Johnny, which while it was a beautiful scene, in retropect feels like an absurd like an absurd choice as I can already the story being that much more powerful if Jackie was there to anchor V.
This kind of brings me to my central issue with the game, which I actually do like, potentially because I’ve been lucky to avoid a lot of the bugs so far. I feel the game wants to say something and I sort of get what it wants to say, yet it really doesn’t feel like it succeeding at saying it. I don’t know if that makes sense, but it just feels thematically stumbling while really trying to be about something. And reading this, it hit me that it is weird to do a story about humanity with such a blank slate of a character as V.
About 18 hours in and I’m wondering when I’ll actually meet Cyber Keanu.
Of course I only just did The Heist and am mostly doing Gig jobs for street rep so I can get GORILLA ARMS!
Guessed as much reading the first sentence. I did the Heist 11 hours in after running those side hustles.
I’m a sucker for side stuff like that. I can absolutely see why they say you can get 200 hours out of a playthrough. I will wander all over the city for dozens of hours doing sidequests.They’re some of the best ones too. The monk and his brother and the ripper doc’s basement are two of my favorites so far:)
Oh, don’t get me wrong, they are absolutely fun and I too was shocked how much there was to do there. However, and I’m now going to the Heist spoiler stuff, I do think that having all that stuff to do kind of main story from a narrative structure view. While they are fun, none of them involve, for obvious reasons after the Heist, these core characters or allow building those relationships that would define V.Hence, when it comes to the Heist and struggle over V’s conciousness, there’s just nothing to really define him/her within the game world. I loved the Ripper-doc and that was such a beautful scene V had with him, but I just kept thinking how much stronger the aftermath would have been if Jackie had been there swearing that they were not quitting, that V wouldn’t fucking give up that fight. Instead we got that Misty scene which again was pretty nicely written, but there was just nothing that had established the kind of emotional context that it required.Still, I’m overall positive on the game. Somewhat amusingly, one of the reasons is that Valhalla’s story was so powerful to me that I find myself having much more understanding here as I already got that magnificent story and now am just having fun.
Honestly as long as I’m having fun I don’t care too much about where the story is going. I don’t have any attachment to the setting since I never played in it before, so just seeing it all is great. Now, if it was Shadowrun, I would probably have a different opinion.
Which is fair enough, but this particular post is about the story.
Yeah you can get lost in the prologue. And Act 1 and Act 2. I know a lot of people are hating on this game but I am loving getting lost in it. I don’t even use fast travel because I love driving around the city.
I’m using fast travel a bit but I run everywhere. A: gotta get that Athletics up and B: I run across all kinds of gang bangers that I can beat up with my taser stick! Run through all the alleys, rooftop parkour woo!Can’t wait for Gorilla Arms so I can rip doors off too, one more level of street rep for ‘em!
It’s a pity that they don’t allow appendanges from other animals (I assume; I don’t have the game). They should allow it from bears. After all, isn’t there a right to bear arms in the US?
Getting Gorilla Arms relatively early in the story legitimately broke the game for me for a while. I could just punch my way through most encounters at that stage.
I hope it does that for me! When I play a video game dude I WANT to feel like a super badass guy who can punch his way through anything without much of a problem.
To add to my comment, there more I thought on it, the more weird some of the choices the games makes in the first act feel. For example, it never truly allows you as a player to establish what V wants in the world or what are their ultimate goal. There would have just been such relatively choices and interactions to be had there to strengthen who V was before Johnny arrives.
“V is an interesting choice of a MC, especially after all the effort to give him/her three backgrounds.”They are meaningless, really. All those backgrounds change is they give you flavor text in several conversations, with very rare opportunities to resolve a quest easier every now and then. Your background, regardless of your choice, consists of 15 minutes of gameplay where you mostly really talk to a few characters.Corpo is particularly laughable, because it has absolutely no bearing on the story despite the corporate espionage that enters the plot later on. In Nomad and Street Kid you at least meet Jackie, but as a Corpo you’re already best buddies for years.
That’s actually what I meant and realized how badly I worded almost as soon as I wrote it.The game gives these three backgrounds, but doesn’t really do anything with it. I chose the Corpo background and while there are some dialogues, there are also really weird missing parts. Which, yeah I can make something up, but the game decides V’s actions to the degree that it is almost inevitable that they would be a clash.
TBH, the montage you see of the months V and Jackie spend together I do wonder if those were meant to be representative of Act 1 being longer, and all the missions you would have done with Jackie during it. Which would have strengthened the player’s connection with Jackie and match the way how V in-game feels about it.
I don’t know, might be.
My own theory, just based on how weird a lot of the narrative stuff in the game was, is that the story was written with the origin being the Street kid and there was a lot of stuff there that would have established V’s motivation and some of the themes. Then someone got enamored by the origins idea and stuff got messy. It would connect to your thought, as well, as in that case they could have devoted those resources for to that single origin and make it longer while also putting more work on the Jackie/V relationship.One of the weird things about this game, and I will repeat this a lot, is that it felt like it had had massive rewrites at a point when they were already pretty far in the process. There’s just text, plot holes and scenes that make very little sense after finishing it all.
Oh absolutely. Playing through the game, there is definitely a huge sense of rewrites mid production, game systems that while fine on their own, don’t really mesh well together.
Like a Frankenstein of multiple other games into one.
Not here to defend a game that isn’t on my radar from a company that has lost my esteem, but to defend blank slate characters in RPGs because I prefer full freedom of dialogue (and cohesion dependant on the roleplaying player) over pre-made player characters with pre-made personalities (even it makes for tighter, easier writing).
You’re 100% right though so far the dialog choices are few and far between.
I have found much of the “choice” in the game comes down to not answering at times or just not listening and doing shit. Not many dialog trees
Yeah so far I’ve only had a few conversations where there were different choices for moving forward. Slightly disappointing but not surprising, it’s pretty common for RPGs these days.
I’m one of those weirdos who’d kind of prefer we go back to voiceless protagonists. I’m basically just looking for an interesting world and interesting ways to interact with it. I’ll do the heavy lifting in terms of telling stories. (I’ve played Skyrim a lot, easily 1500 hours, and I’ve never finished the main story.)
/puts basket on Michael’s head, steals all his cheese
/checks infinite pockets for Honningbrew Mead, breathes sigh of relief.
my friend was complaining about the lack of character speech in Red Dead 2, but I thought it was okay…look no further than Bandersnatch for the irritation of being stuck with stupid decisions the “game” makers are trying to tell you say something about you.
I liked RDR2’s voiced protagonist, but I also wasn’t really expecting a ton of depth of character customization. It was either honorable or dishonorable, and you just picked whether you wanted to be a villain or an antihero. One of the main things that’s frustrating to me about voiced protagonists is the fact that I’m constantly being unpleasantly surprised by what’s actually said after picking an option that seemed to indicate a completely different response. Fallout 4 is the most egregious example of this that I can think of, but Bioware games have had issues with it, too, lately.
At least Mass Effect gave a clue as to whether you were being a jerk or not, but I agree that I don’t like the fact that the text I see and what is actually said are different. I don’t mean just different from how I expected it to be contextually, but completely different words in many cases.
I’ve heard that most people prefer the paraphrased clue that leads to an expanded response, but I also dislike it, especially when the paraphrased clue really doesn’t match what is to be said. I played Fallout 4 with a mod with full dialogue responses just because it frustrated me so much that Bethesda put like a quarter of all its player dialogue under “SARCASM” regardless of whether there was anything sarcastic about it.
L.A. Noire is pretty infamous for this. You choose an option that says, “I don’t believe you”, and instead, the character starts screaming, “You’re lying!”, cursing them out, and clawing over the table at them like an unhinged lunatic.
That was largely a problem of signposting- not really letting the player know what a dialogue option would entail you actually saying. (And perhaps the necessity of needing more options than believe-or-doubt- I never actually played L.A. Noire so I can’t speak to the interrogation system as a whole, just this one issue everyone brings up.)
What I was replying to is also about signposting, where one dialogue option suggests something, but you get a very different dialogue reaction. I think it’s essentially the same problem.
Well that’s because the buttons were relabeled at the last minute. It was originally coax, press, and accuse. For some reason someone thought truth, doubt and lie was better. The remaster that changed it to good cop, bad cop and accuse works a lot better.
Interesting about the remaster. I haven’t played the remaster. That sounds like a good change. I may have to look into other changes made for the remaster to see if that makes it worthwhile to play again.
Its not much change wise. Its not four disks like the last gen version and it has all the DLC. Also a few new unlockables and stuff. Best change is the button prompts. I mean one of the interrogations early on results in the guy just saying fuck you. In the original game the right choice was doubt… so I’m doubting he told me to piss off? Now the answer is bad cop which makes a hell of a lot more sense.
Yeah that makes sense. That change alone should improve playability of the game. I was really bummed that the interrogation system was so incoherent at times, considering it was a big selling point. I ended up loving the game mostly for the driving around, even though the driving was also a bit clunky on keyboard and mouse.
I couldn’t remember the prerelease options; “doubt” and “press” can be very different things
Okay correction it was Coax, Force and Accuse. Changed at the very last minute. https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-11-09-la-noire-remaster-changes-its-infamous-interrogation-scene-button-prompts.
I came looking for this! I thought L.A. Noire was phenomenal in a lot of ways, but that mechanic – something they hyped prior to release – nearly blew the game for me.You select: [Doubt] “Are you sure that’s all you can remember?”Cole says: “You filthy kiddie rapist, I’ll knock your teeth out your ass!”There was a slight disconnect, is what I’m saying.
Lol. Ah, I miss that game
It’s astonishing how often the tone is completely different to how you hoped your choice would come across. I tend to play as myself, and make the choices I’d make in The Real World. Gives me anxiety when something that seemed benign on the menu ends up having a spiteful edge, or sarcasm I couldn’t have foreseen. In those circumstances I wonder if having someone from the writing staff present for the dialogue sessions would help, it’s not like TV/film where you have the whole script for context, and the choices of the other performers too. I guess it’s a huge time suck.
Yeah at our present levels of tech/dev time/recording time etc. I don’t think you can have both a true blank slate protagonist and fully voiced dialogue. Fallout 4 ran into the same issue, every conversation had to have a max of 4 options.
Which is fine, except then you will always have reduced presence as a character in the world you are it. It is just the cost to pay for that character approach which is what hurts the story being told in this particular game. Which you probably would know you had played the game or were aware to implementation in it before making such a defense. Also I really don’t think it makes for easier writing, just allows for an improved narrative focus as the PC isn’t just some random peep walking by.
Also, and I apologize in advance for dragging this argument on but this is a particular pet peeve of mine, there is not a game where you have ‘full freedom of dialogue’. You have a list of choices in that particular situation that you have to choose from, all which have a pre-determined response.
Which is fine, except then you will always have reduced presence as a character in the world you are it.
But look at how some games have made the silent protagonist work.Cloud and Link come to mind. Mario is “silent” despite a few proclamations.You still get a sense for who they “are” but there’s also a rich cast surrounding them.
But Cloud, Link and Mario are predefined characters within that world with a set in stone personality and past as well as a cast characters that connect them to it. For example, having a Tifa like character in this game would help tremendously as it would ground V in a way that allows that emotional connection from the danger of losing that personality who became friends with Tifa.
Silent protagonist argument is a very different one than the undefined personality discussion here.
I consider Mario more ‘mascot’ than ‘character’, but Cloud is a good example. He doesn’t talk much, but when he does his personality comes through crystal clear with only a few words.
I dunno, I was perfectly fine with Skyrim’s protagonist being pretty much forgettable. It wasn’t as much about what he thought or wanted as it was about where he could go and what he could do. Or am I forgetting something since that was such a long time ago?
i don’t think they’re saying it’s bad in all cases, just especially bad in this particular case (though i haven’t played) without much to redeem it.i agree, though. i love being able to change my character on a whim or react to a situation how i want, as opposed to just ‘mean yes’ or ‘nice yes’.
I blow hot and cold on the blank-slate characters in general, but in this instance I’m really enjoying Cyberpunk 2o77 but bounced off the Witchers pretty hard because in none of the three could I manage to muster even a very small shit to give about Gerald of Trivia.
Blank slate characters are great. Link, Crono, Ness, Frisk, all iconic and memorable.The problem is that Cyberpunk’s lead V isn’t a blank slate. They have a personality, it’s just inconsistent and boring.
Hmm. Everytime I look in the mirror.. (and I swear to god it is the only way the game allows you live a moment of self realization, I end up naked and with a penis.) playing as a female with the normal accoutrements. It makes me immediately start laughing because it isn’t Johnny’s impressive member heh. I love how dickish he was in the beginning. Get me some cigarettes, bitch!
V-corpo-rat is someone I really pity, young women working for a complete psychopath, kinda like normal CEO’s. I wish they had given you the ability to just let Johnny win the battle. I mean nothing is flat-lining but her character. It would have been am interesting choice (made the game shorter too).
AV Club should really stop commenting on games because you clearly don’t know how they work. Not all games revolve around a single static character. This is escapist fantasy. You build the character. You define your actions. You define who you are as a character in this world. I mean, have you ever played an RPG before?
This is like playing a D&D campaign and then complaining that your character was unlikable and uninteresting. Bro, that’s all on you.
I never understand the criticism that if the game doesn’t tell you who your character is, there’s something wrong. YOU decide who your character is, why they act in certain ways, how they approach problems, whatever. This is an RPG, not a novel. I mean, the computer is stepping in for a DM. If you were playing a tabletop RPG, and the DM was constantly telling you how to play your character, it would mean you have a shit DM.
Except there is not a game that allows all that freedom and if they allow you complete freedom to decide who your character is, then that character is relatively meaningless within the context of the game. Don’t get me wrong, there are games that I like that don’t impose that character on it, but then it also means that those MCs are relatively meaningless as characters within the world itself as they cannot have any connections or meaning in it. Which has a cost to the game story itself as it can never have a personal component or connection. And you have to realize that DM comparison is absurd as computer games are different than table top games on a fundamental level, right?The difficulty here is that, as is pretty clearly written in the article, is that Cyberpunk 2077 tried be a game about humanity with a blank slate character at the heart of it, which causes it stumble at times. There are certain ways they could have improved it even with the current approach, but it is what it is. However, some stories require a more defined character and I think there is a fair criticism to be made that this story would have benefitted from that. It is a choice of the story told.
I’m not saying that a computer game can ever afford the freedom a tabletop game does, obviously. But when the game sets out the scenarios and runs the NPCs, I think it’s fair to say it’s acting as the DM. Computer games are going to be much more limited, but I don’t think it’s necessarily better to limit them even more by telling you exactly who your character is.You’re absolutely right some games benefit from a more defined character. Last of Us obviously wouldn’t have worked with a cipher main character. I haven’t felt like that here, though. And I’m probably just reflexively defending it because it seems like 100% of the these articles posit it’s always a bad thing not to have your character set out for you.
But my counter to that would be that it isn’t a binary situation where either you have a completely pre-determined character like Last of Us or a completely undefined character. You can have something between those two and I think that is what Cyberpunk would have benefitted from. I don’t know if you’ve played Cyberpunk, but the whole stake of the game is that something threatens to remove V’s conciousness, who s/he is. Yet when hit that point, the game has done very little to really flesh out V in that world or what even motives them. And at this point, it’s difficult to connect with the threat to V’s persona when they really feel like a cypher in that world. It doesn’t even work as a blank, because V is reacting to that situation with despair.
So I’m going to use Hawke from DA2 as an example here. S/He is a very defined character with a family and certain goals, but the player is still able to make a lot of choices within that framework. That I think would have benefitted here, or at least allow the player to express some of V’s dreams or goals within that world. V feels very much like a character without a future, so when there is a threat to that future, it lacks that certain impact.Don’t get me wrong, there are beautiful scenes, but the game really doesn’t do the work to make you care despite spending so much time getting V to that point.
A lot of this is down to your overall design, I think, and just how your player can actually express their choices in the game world. Maybe it’s a cliché to bring up New Vegas but that game gives you a fairly decent variety of options to deal with a given mission, and that allows for a certain freedom of expression, which lets you decide more who your character is. Hell, Witcher 3 has some of that, even though you’re dealing with an established character- I feel like I have multiple options a lot of the time and that gets me to thinking about who Geralt is and how he’d handle this. That’s generally a big part of the fun of these single-character RPGs.It does mean a lot of work because for most stories/quests/etc. you have to think of multiple paths and program in multiple outcomes for the game to remember going forward. (The Bioware model tends to go for more binary choices which I’m not a huge fan of, but it can at least lead to some dramatic moments.)
I addressed this elsewhere, but since Kinja is a fucking nightmare I’ll just repeat myself here:Blank
slate doesn’t mean your character is a blank void, it means you can
project whatever you want into it. Since I’ve decided who I want my V to
be, I don’t want some terrorist from 2020 taking over her body. I mean,
if V was super well defined, you could just as easily say “There’s two
distinct personalities here, neither of which I came up with, so who
cares which of them ends up winning out?”I’m
certainly not saying that all characters in all games should be done
one way or another, and it might ultimately be a bad choice in this game. But with my 15-20 hours, I’m so far just fine with it.
Which is fair, but my counter to why care if there are two defined personalities neither which is yours would be that well, one of them is so likable that I don’t want them to be overwritten.As for the argument it not needing to be a blank space, that is such question preference that is in an impossible to ever truly address. Yeah, I can decide who V is in their background, but because it bears no meaning in the world itself, it’s then just my story, not Cyberpunk’s story. And before the inevitable ‘but it is your story’, not it isn’t. It’s a story crafted by the creators of the game with limited interactions. At the moment the game decides of V’s actions for me that either I have to do an insane amount of mental gymnastics to make it work or just accept that V’s is a semi-defined character who just feels a blank space.
The ironic thing is that CDPR have done better before…yet with a named character. They managed to give Geralt his own personality, but still the freedom to choose – he could tell a character to fuck off, for example, but do it in a way that would be true to Geralt’s personality, just as he could praise them and do it in a way that’s true to Geralt’s personality.In CP it’s a crap shoots. We have no idea if V’s gonna sound like a raving lunatic or a sensitive human being when we pick an option.
That is one of the things that utterly baffles me with CP as they are getting so many basic storytelling things wrong that they had already figured out with Witcher 3. I mean, I was over 10 hours in to the game before it suddenly revealed that V’s initial motivation was to become a legendary solo. Which I still have no idea how that works with the Corpo background, but it’s not like CDPR was worried about that.There are so many issues with the narrative choices in that game as I just really don’t get what the hell they were doing. Even after acknowledging that it felt like they had massively rewritten the story pretty far in to the process.
There’s rumours and rumblings that they mistreated the experienced adults who worked on TWIII – one of the highpoints of gaming, IMHO – and they immediately fucked off once they (finally) got their bonuses, which was after the last DLC shipped. And this game feels like it was cobbled together at the last minute, too, from bits and pieces. Yet lots of it is strangely polished (it’s just that the bits that are strangely polished aren’t core to the story or gameplay – the in-game ads, characters, clothes, graphics…ie, the superficial stuff, and that’s not including the uber-expensive Night City Wire show they ran on YouTube and Twitch etc.).There’s also a theory kicking around that Keanu came on late, as well. Remember, he was announced June 2019…about 9 months before the game was due to launch (April 2020). For a game that was in various stages of development since 2012 and was meant to be as big and complex as TWIII…that’s way too late in the game (puns!) to do anything major. I’m wondering if someone said “We’re refocusing the story to be Johnny-centric” that caused a lot of creatives who were working on the deeper, more complex stories and interactions to quit once they saw their work would be axed. It’s also telling that the the missions you do before Keanu rocks are the ones that haven’t changed from the trailers we saw – getting the Flathead and Sandra Dorsett’s rescue. Those have choices, scripted moments, and multiple paths – something missing from the main quests. It feels like they got a lot of new, inexperienced people in the last year or so, threw them the files and pieces of the game at them in 2019 and said “Here. We need to ship something by April.”I’m spitballing here, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Remember, too, character creation, especially backstory, was meant to look like this:Bits of the game are oddly truncated. Two of the main quests – Evelyn and Anders – genuinely (mis)lead the player into think these are viable routes to the end – they just go nowhere, narrative-wise. Anders says “Sorry, can’t help you” and that’s that. Evelyn unceremoniously offs herself off-screen. Yet, strangely, you have to complete complete the Anders and Evelyn red herrings before you can even continue with the Takemura one. (The game says you can “wait until Takemura calls”, but I dicked around for weeks in-game doing side missions only and he never does…only completing the Red Herrings triggers it.) These two other quests are listed as separate main missions in your journal. And, as we find out – there’s probably a reason for that. The Takemura quest is incredibly short – we get that boss fight with Oda, five minutes later we’re talking to Hanako (really, one of the most powerful people on the planet was that easy to kidnap?!?) and three seconds after that she agrees to help us completely. That’s it.It feels like they had to pick one story to be the main plot from the three proposed, realised even that was too short, and cobbled together the Anders/Evelyn missions to pad it out. Most of the “choices” railroad you, FO4-style. Actually, it’s worse than FO4 – FO4 was at least clever enough to try to hide the lack of choice through efficient dialogue writing by having one recorded line that could plausible fit the multiple dialogue “options” you were given. This time and money on writing and recording voice actors. CDPR spent a bunch of time and money recording different lines for different dialogue choices, but only to have the game give you the same outcome anyway. That’s emblematic of the sheer WOMBAT of the development, a bunch of effort and money spent in the least important areas. And yeah: V was definitely meant to be more of a blank slate (hey, that’s the name of the default pose in Photo Mode…), as evidence by the original character creation screen up there. You could shape V as you like, play V as you like. Maybe they stitched together the lines for this linear story from the selection you were meant to have in the original, open-ended, branching RPG CP was obviously meant to be. That’s why (s)he goes from arsehole to angel to ambivalent in three lines; V just says whatever’s needed to move their plot along as easily as possible. It’s as if they were shuffling through the multiple lines the VAs recorded, just find the right one to get to the next Johnny Moment.I don’t think I’ve played a game that’s so obviously ludologically or narratively incomplete. And for the doubters: I played both STALKER: SOC and New Vegas from launch. I’m no stranger to bugs, people. But those games had genuine, compelling, amazing gameplay baked right in – Cyberpunk doesn’t, at least not on anywhere near the same level. The bugs don’t rank as big a problem for me as it does for others. What does annoy me is that they’re smoke distracting from the game’s real problems, which is that it’s incomplete, barely more than an RPG than a Far Cry game, tonally all over the place, and lacking compelling story, characters, and gameplay.
To start from your final point, I agree completely with the bugs being a distraction at this point from the other large design issues with the game. It’s the reason I’m at the moment really fascinated what the discussion in two months when the focus is no longer on if the game works, but rather what the game actually is.
Also that’s a really good observation on how different the beginning feels. It was actually something baffled me a bit when it happened, but I was so confused after they spent so much time building up Dex and Evelyn as these mysterious characters only to off them instantly once the main story kicked in without really touching on those elements. Not just that, but the hacker just literally disappears and is not mentioned at all for the rest of the game, which isn’t good narrative design. Then there’s the TacMax boogey man established early that, again, not touched on not at all.When I spoke of the sense of massive rewrites, that the cobbled together nature was what made me think about it constantly as I don’t think I’ve ever seen it to the degree than here in a big game launch. It’s not even that they had to cut story elements, that happens all the time, but that there are so many scenes in the game that still build up for those elements. To give a counter-example, one of my favorite games of all time is Dragon Age 2, which was notoriously rushed which caused them to heavily condense Act 3 and remove a lot of storylines they didn’t have time to make. Yet, even there, the actual story and character arcs they did put in the game made sense and build on each other. This game had over times the developmental cycle of that and still resulted in this utter mish mash. I’m still struggling how to write about the endings as it was insane how imbalanced they were and how much they relied on these weird assumptions regarding choices leading up to them. And I can’t even begin on the sudden six months revelation.
I don’t know if you found this particular piece of text in the game, but there was something I read there that was first confounding and later illuminating. There was a news piece there about the Arasaka company and the power struggle there, with three factions named: Yurinobu, Hanako and Saburo’s grand daughter who led the reformist faction within the company. This implies that the power struggle within Arasaka was originally more central to the storyline, which is fine as changes in stories happen, but that it was determined to the degree that they were putting in assets to that in the game already relating to that storyline.There’s so much I could break down about the game, just discussing how insanely problematic the Evelyn/Judy/Dolls storyline was would be an essay in itself, I will instead end by noting two minor things that both drove me nuts. First, the mayoral race subplot. Again, I get if they had to rush and couldn’t do all the stories they wanted, but at least in that situation remove the whole quest chain. The fact that they left the first mission still in the game was infuriating as it just ended in such a mid-sentence kind of a way. Second, and this has irritated more as time went on, they never told us why Johnny Silverhand’s enegram was on the relic. Not only that, I can’t think of a single logical explanation for it. That was so absurd considering how central that story beat was for the game.
Thanks for replying, Hiemoth. Don’t ever contact me again. Just kidding. Figured I’d start out the post with how a lot of the missions just…end. That’s how the Mayoral one ended for me – a hint at a grand, deep brainwashing conspiracy that was even beyond the scope of the tech we’re introduced to in the game, and…CONTACT HAS BLOCKED YOU. To start from your final point, I agree completely with the bugs being a distraction at this point from the other large design issues with the game. It’s the reason I’m at the moment really fascinated what the discussion in two months when the focus is no longer on if the game works, but rather what the game actually is.I hope Jason Schreier is getting some good tips and info for an investigative piece. I think on a scale of effort-to-shitshow, this may very well be the biggest ever. Bugs will be fixed. Technical bugs, like the T-posing, are easy, compared to actually reinserting or creating compelling missions and gameplay and entering it into the game – as well as balancing the current mechanics (some things like armour are notoriously flawed, as are mods, and some perks). Just living up to its original promise is something that may well be impossible, and we have to ask: is CP 2077 worth fixing?
Keep in mind, too, that CP2077 is the most expensive game ever made. No, really. More so than RDR2, GTAV, or any other you care to name. It’s not a No Man’s Sky situation, where it was a bunch of indies over-promising on their first game from lack of experience – this was a large, reputable, established company with several previous games – hits, even – under their belt. CP2077 was $330 million to produce. GTAV was a mere $265 million. (Star Citizen will probably beat CP in a few months, but I don’t class that as an actual game…)It lead to open rebellion for the development staff – a rare thing, and a class-action law suit from investors, as well as getting pulled from both Xbox and PS stores. That’s…breathtaking.Some guy on reddit did a little research, going back to the 2018 48-minuted gameplay demo which was vastly, vastly different to what we got and pieced together some deductions: http://www.removeddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kozfc1/if_you_feel_like_the_main_story_is_rushed_very/In the original, your childhood hero (see that char sheet above) could have been Johnny Silverhand, among others. This is because V would still be in their twenties, but, as evidenced by the radio timestamp, Johnny didn’t die in 2020 – he went missing in 2076.Keanu comes onboard in June 2018 – ok, so earlier than I said, but then, as that comment down below the post mentions Keanu asked for even more lines and screentime, and CDPR obliged. Pictured: Keanu Reeves negotiating with CDPR for a greater role for Johnny (file photo)So they rejigged the game twice. Once to put Keanu in, and once more to accommodate his demands for more screen time. Methinks that possibly the “more screen time for Keanu” didn’t mean “we’ll make more time for him” but “we’ll cut time from everyone else”. You can definitely see a Hollywood agent make this play – not so much an X amount of screen time, but making sure he’s got the greatest percentage. Didn’t matter if he only got an hour’s worth of screen time, as long as no other single character got more than 59 minutes. This would also be why you don’t meet many interesting characters outside the Johnny plot, and why Johnny comments on every freaking thing – it’s all meant to be Johnny, Johnny, Johnny. There’s room for only one name on the marquee. V’s just a vessel for his snark.And lo, they squeezed as much Keanu in there as possible, in a time frame that would be barely long enough to develop a linear shooter story, let alone a sprawling RPG. Also that’s a really good observation on how different the beginning feels. You’ll not that these two missions are before Johnny rocks up. My guess is these were from the original game – when you were going to have deep, meaningful, morally ambiguous choices in missions, working with NPCs on missions, and with some scripting, too, like when Jackie tackles that scav, or when Trauma Team rocks up. The Flathead mission approaches the Witcher III’s level of choice and interactivity – work for Meredith, work for the other guy, pay with your own money, pay with Meredith’s money, pay with Meredith’s money (but get rid of the virus), blast your way out, save Brick, don’t save Brick…It’s also one of the few times I remember my Corpo V’s special dialogue actually gained something rather than simply being an observation on the world from the experience of a corpo, like most of the other Corpo dialogue options (“Yeah, choom, I ‘member goin’ to meetings…”). The other time was at the Konpeki reception desk – again, both these instances happen before the game goes linear.That’s what I was hoping for in Cyberpunk. These were written with the objective of creating engaging gameplay scenarios that reward different thinking, roleplay, and multiple playthroughs, not shoving Timothy McVeigh with tinnitus down your throat every five seconds. Not just that, but the hacker just literally disappears and is not mentioned at all for the rest of the game, which isn’t good narrative design.She gets fried by ‘Saka black ICE – but yeah, it’s just another unceremonious exit, stage left. But hey, she also showed up without an introduction, too. I slotted the Militech Training Shard and just went “Who the hell are you?!” Yet they act as if we – not just V, but the player – has met them before. OK, I thought, maybe she’s the hacker equivalent of Jackie – a friend of V’s that we’re just meant to assume they know – but get to the briefing with Dexter and she’s acting like she barely knows you or even likes you on anything other than a passing professional level. And if this Dorsett job requires such a badass hacker, why is said badass hacker working with a pair of no-name scrubs to rescue Sandra Dorsett? Yeah, yeah, Sandra has Trauma Team Platinum – but shouldn’t that warrant some mercs with more cred than V and Jackie?We know she’s an utter top-tier hacker because of the fact that Dexter tells us they need one for the ‘Saka run, yet again, it’s still lowly V and Jackie as the actual boots on the ground. And, interestingly, she tells us she’s never working again and going to have to leave Night City, because the job’s so dangerous. Yet, again, a pair of low-rent mercs is fine for the muscle – and we’re expected to be fine just sticking around in NC after.I’m wondering if these were meant to be later missions, but were shoehorned into the beginning to get Johnny into your head. To give a counter-example, one of my favorite games of all time is Dragon Age 2, which was notoriously rushed which caused them to heavily condense Act 3 and remove a lot of storylines they didn’t have time to make. Yet, even there, the actual story and character arcs they did put in the game made sense and build on each other. Never played it, but I understand where you’re coming from. New Vegas was similar – I believe Obsidian wanted to do more across on the other side of the Colorado – but what we do get is still deep, complex, comprehensive, branching, and just a good game. STALKER had glitches galore and bugs aplenty (I played it from launch – I’ve got a really high tolerance for bugs because of it) but the gameplay systems were solid.CP doesn’t feel like a beta – a beta being a game where all final content is in the game, but the game isn’t quite bug-free or polished enough to sell. It feels like an alpha, right down to the pink “PREFAB MISSING” cubes. I’ve never played a game that promised so much and delivered so little, compounded with the fact that it’s so obviously hacked and jerry-rigged together, where you can see the voids where the content was meant to go. You can really see the spackle. There was a news piece there about the Arasaka company and the power struggle there, with three factions named: Yurinobu, Hanako and Saburo’s grand daughter who led the reformist faction within the company. This implies that the power struggle within Arasaka was originally more central to the storyline, which is fine as changes in stories happen, but that it was determined to the degree that they were putting in assets to that in the game already relating to that storyline.Well, I guess it’s keeping in line with the rest of the game, where the corps don’t do or mean anything anywhere. We’re told they hold untold power of the lives of citizens at a day-to-day level, yet they’re…just another gang in the actual gameplay. They’re this huge, oppressive force, that doesn’t really do squat compared to the Animals or Tyger Claws. They’re important, they say, except…they’re not.We get so much tantalising info about the power struggles within Arasaka, and we’re even present for the biggest thing to happen to the company – the Strangling – and…pfft. Again, Johnny’s more important. And that would’ve let to the sort of intrigue we knew and loved from The Witcher. Second, and this has irritated more as time went on, they never told us why Johnny Silverhand’s enegram was on the relic. Not only that, I can’t think of a single logical explanation for it. That was so absurd considering how central that story beat was for the game.At first I thought it was because Johnny was the only engram they had. That his was the first and last engram to be captured by Soulkiller as a their first test. He was put on the relic because, welp, he was the only thing available to be put on the relic.Then they show you Alt Cunningham was the first. Then they mention that Mikoshi’s got hundreds of ‘em…and they choose Johnny?“Hey, fellow Pentagon scientist – we’ve got this tech that brings people back from the dead. Who should we bring back first?”“Osama bin Laden?”“Perfect!”It’s ridiculous. I’m still struggling how to write about the endings as it was insane how imbalanced they were and how much they relied on these weird assumptions regarding choices leading up to them. And I can’t even begin on the sudden six months revelation.You mean how the game shows you repeatedly your “choices” don’t change anything, except for the three or four that actually do (try to guess which!)?The game trains you to understand that your choices mean nothing, yet apparently there’s like eight for Johnny that let you get the “best” ending. None of these are intuitive, consistent with either the player’s, V’s, or Johnny’s actions or personality. You’re meant to get Johnny to “like” you, except the only way to reach the magical percentage is to go through a VERY specific set of dialogue choices in ONE specific conversation that are in no way lampshaded or indicated in the entire rest of the game: https://www.ign.com/wikis/cyberpunk-2077/How_to_Correctly_Respond_to_Johnny_in_the_Oil_FieldsThat’s your only chance.(No, the Johnny Friendship mechanic isn’t explained, either). Agree on the six months. After all that…you get a slightly reprieve. I don’t know why they made the Relic so insidious.One, it’s implied that the key use for this technology would be for rich people who, presumably, would undergo the procedure with a willing clone slug or donor – or, at least, in controlled circumstance where the poor bastard whose mind and body they overwrite is incapacitated. There’s no need for it to go so hard. Two, apparently it’s “rewriting your DNA”. Are you only able to do that to a body once? The new DNA is made the same way as the old DNA, from the same stuff, so why not just get someone from Biotechnica to rewrite your DNA back onto you (c’mon, I listened to their “Genes don’t fit?” ads all over Night City). Is genetic engineering in this universe like playing with Lego, except you have to superglue all the blocks together as soon as they connect?And, OK, fine: you do get multiple endings. But it’s literally a smorgasbord, not the sum total of choices you’ve made. You’re forced to work with Rogue, with Panam, and with Arasaka. Just pick one, ‘kay? There’s so much I could break down about the game, just discussing how insanely problematic the Evelyn/Judy/Dolls storyline was would be an essay in itself, What exactly (not disagreeing that that story line didn’t have problems, nosiree) did you find problematic about it?
Jesus Christ, I didn’t realize how far in to the process Reever came in. That is insane, that is such irresponsible game development management, especially if you are making the most expensive game in history. In that case, you don’t start pulling out stupid moves like this. Even if they weren’t completely fine with their current story being spectacular, you just don’t. Hell, once studio heads at Rockstar, Ubisoft and the likes learned of that move by CDPR, they must have been simply stunned.As for the rest, there’s a lot to speculate on the initial games content and I don’t want to go on that hole or start thinking that approach would have been better. I will admit there’s a clear difference in the narrative feel between the before and after of the hotel case, but even then I think it was probably pretty early in the game as the text file I mentioned indicated that the Arasaka power struggle would still have been a part of the game and I can imagine even pretty meaningful one.What I will say is that every game that’s character driven is ultimately pretty linear. I mean, if we look at Witcher 3, it’s as linear as you get from the perspective of the main storyline with only a couple of choices in the game affecting Geralt’s and Ciri’s fates. The myth of the grand ending that shifts by multiple in the game is actually harmful, from my perspective, as it always creates this perception of what it should be despite it being impossible. If the discussion is on the outcome of the longer missions, there I agree with you, but even that’s different from the ending as I don’t need that ending card for me to feel that the choice during the mission mattered.My issue with the endings is that none of them really feel like anything during the games themselves built for that. For example, if you take the Rogue path, then suddenly V’s the greatest solo in town, but didn’t tell anyone s/he was dying for… reasons? I mean, I get it is supposed to present how they are alone in a way a now, but it doesn’t connect with any of the story before that. I mean, to give another example, Valhalla is very linear and has a set ending, but the way it gives choices during the game for Eivor not only make him/her feel like a character, but they add to that journey and character arc that makes his/her final point feel like it matters. In Cyberpunk, all the endings just feel abrupt. Even worse, as I mentioned, the Nomad ending is objectively better than any of the other endings that it is ridiculous.On the Evelyn/Judy/Dolls plotline, I don’t even know where to start. It seems to try to hit on how hard life is for sex workers, but it goes so overboard with it that it almost feel gratitous and victimizing in itself. I mean, hell, Evelyn had to be sexually assaulted by three different parties before killing herself. And then, when you help Judy to take Cloud for the Dolls, the outcome is just Judy mentioning that Claws came back and killed everyone involved. Like that so damn unnecessary that I don’t- I just even can’t.
Thanks for replying, Hiemoth. Don’t ever contact me again. Just kidding. Figured I’d start out the post with how a lot of the missions just…end. That’s how the Mayoral one ended for me – a hint at a grand, deep brainwashing conspiracy that was even beyond the scope of the tech we’re introduced to in the game, and…CONTACT HAS BLOCKED YOU. To start from your final point, I agree completely with the bugs being a distraction at this point from the other large design issues with the game. It’s the reason I’m at the moment really fascinated what the discussion in two months when the focus is no longer on if the game works, but rather what the game actually is.I hope Jason Schreier is getting some good tips and info for an investigative piece. I think on a scale of effort-to-shitshow, this may very well be the biggest ever. Bugs will be fixed. Technical bugs, like the T-posing, are easy, compared to actually reinserting or creating compelling missions and gameplay and entering it into the game – as well as balancing the current mechanics (some things like armour are notoriously flawed, as are mods, and some perks). Just living up to its original promise is something that may well be impossible, and we have to ask: is CP 2077 worth fixing?
Keep in mind, too, that CP2077 is the most expensive game ever made. No, really. More so than RDR2, GTAV, or any other you care to name. It’s not a No Man’s Sky situation, where it was a bunch of indies over-promising on their first game from lack of experience – this was a large, reputable, established company with several previous games – hits, even – under their belt. CP2077 was $330 million to produce. GTAV was a mere $265 million. (Star Citizen will probably beat CP in a few months, but I don’t class that as an actual game…)It lead to open rebellion for the development staff – a rare thing, and a class-action law suit from investors, as well as getting pulled from both Xbox and PS stores. That’s…breathtaking.Some guy on reddit did a little research, going back to the 2018 48-minuted gameplay demo which was vastly, vastly different to what we got and pieced together some deductions: http://www.removeddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/kozfc1/if_you_feel_like_the_main_story_is_rushed_very/In the original, your childhood hero (see that char sheet above) could have been Johnny Silverhand, among others. This is because V would still be in their twenties, but, as evidenced by the radio timestamp, Johnny didn’t die in 2020 – he went missing in 2076.Keanu comes onboard in June 2018 – ok, so earlier than I said, but then, as that comment down below the post mentions Keanu asked for even more lines and screentime, and CDPR obliged. Pictured: Keanu Reeves negotiating with CDPR for a greater role for Johnny (file photo)So they rejigged the game twice. Once to put Keanu in, and once more to accommodate his demands for more screen time. Methinks that possibly the “more screen time for Keanu” didn’t mean “we’ll make more time for him” but “we’ll cut time from everyone else”. You can definitely see a Hollywood agent make this play – not so much an X amount of screen time, but making sure he’s got the greatest percentage. Didn’t matter if he only got an hour’s worth of screen time, as long as no other single character got more than 59 minutes. This would also be why you don’t meet many interesting characters outside the Johnny plot, and why Johnny comments on every freaking thing – it’s all meant to be Johnny, Johnny, Johnny. There’s room for only one name on the marquee. V’s just a vessel for his snark.And lo, they squeezed as much Keanu in there as possible, in a time frame that would be barely long enough to develop a linear shooter story, let alone a sprawling RPG. Also that’s a really good observation on how different the beginning feels. You’ll not that these two missions are before Johnny rocks up. My guess is these were from the original game – when you were going to have deep, meaningful, morally ambiguous choices in missions, working with NPCs on missions, and with some scripting, too, like when Jackie tackles that scav, or when Trauma Team rocks up. The Flathead mission approaches the Witcher III’s level of choice and interactivity – work for Meredith, work for the other guy, pay with your own money, pay with Meredith’s money, pay with Meredith’s money (but get rid of the virus), blast your way out, save Brick, don’t save Brick…It’s also one of the few times I remember my Corpo V’s special dialogue actually gained something rather than simply being an observation on the world from the experience of a corpo, like most of the other Corpo dialogue options (“Yeah, choom, I ‘member goin’ to meetings…”). The other time was at the Konpeki reception desk – again, both these instances happen before the game goes linear.That’s what I was hoping for in Cyberpunk. These were written with the objective of creating engaging gameplay scenarios that reward different thinking, roleplay, and multiple playthroughs, not shoving Timothy McVeigh with tinnitus down your throat every five seconds. Not just that, but the hacker just literally disappears and is not mentioned at all for the rest of the game, which isn’t good narrative design.She gets fried by ‘Saka black ICE – but yeah, it’s just another unceremonious exit, stage left. But hey, she also showed up without an introduction, too. I slotted the Militech Training Shard and just went “Who the hell are you?!” Yet they act as if we – not just V, but the player – has met them before. OK, I thought, maybe she’s the hacker equivalent of Jackie – a friend of V’s that we’re just meant to assume they know – but get to the briefing with Dexter and she’s acting like she barely knows you or even likes you on anything other than a passing professional level. And if this Dorsett job requires such a badass hacker, why is said badass hacker working with a pair of no-name scrubs to rescue Sandra Dorsett? Yeah, yeah, Sandra has Trauma Team Platinum – but shouldn’t that warrant some mercs with more cred than V and Jackie?We know she’s an utter top-tier hacker because of the fact that Dexter tells us they need one for the ‘Saka run, yet again, it’s still lowly V and Jackie as the actual boots on the ground. And, interestingly, she tells us she’s never working again and going to have to leave Night City, because the job’s so dangerous. Yet, again, a pair of low-rent mercs is fine for the muscle – and we’re expected to be fine just sticking around in NC after.I’m wondering if these were meant to be later missions, but were shoehorned into the beginning to get Johnny into your head. To give a counter-example, one of my favorite games of all time is Dragon Age 2, which was notoriously rushed which caused them to heavily condense Act 3 and remove a lot of storylines they didn’t have time to make. Yet, even there, the actual story and character arcs they did put in the game made sense and build on each other. Never played it, but I understand where you’re coming from. New Vegas was similar – I believe Obsidian wanted to do more across on the other side of the Colorado – but what we do get is still deep, complex, comprehensive, branching, and just a good game. STALKER had glitches galore and bugs aplenty (I played it from launch – I’ve got a really high tolerance for bugs because of it) but the gameplay systems were solid.CP doesn’t feel like a beta – a beta being a game where all final content is in the game, but the game isn’t quite bug-free or polished enough to sell. It feels like an alpha, right down to the pink “PREFAB MISSING” cubes. I’ve never played a game that promised so much and delivered so little, compounded with the fact that it’s so obviously hacked and jerry-rigged together, where you can see the voids where the content was meant to go. You can really see the spackle. There was a news piece there about the Arasaka company and the power struggle there, with three factions named: Yurinobu, Hanako and Saburo’s grand daughter who led the reformist faction within the company. This implies that the power struggle within Arasaka was originally more central to the storyline, which is fine as changes in stories happen, but that it was determined to the degree that they were putting in assets to that in the game already relating to that storyline.Well, I guess it’s keeping in line with the rest of the game, where the corps don’t do or mean anything anywhere. We’re told they hold untold power of the lives of citizens at a day-to-day level, yet they’re…just another gang in the actual gameplay. They’re this huge, oppressive force, that doesn’t really do squat compared to the Animals or Tyger Claws. They’re important, they say, except…they’re not.We get so much tantalising info about the power struggles within Arasaka, and we’re even present for the biggest thing to happen to the company – the Strangling – and…pfft. Again, Johnny’s more important. And that would’ve let to the sort of intrigue we knew and loved from The Witcher. Second, and this has irritated more as time went on, they never told us why Johnny Silverhand’s enegram was on the relic. Not only that, I can’t think of a single logical explanation for it. That was so absurd considering how central that story beat was for the game.At first I thought it was because Johnny was the only engram they had. That his was the first and last engram to be captured by Soulkiller as a their first test. He was put on the relic because, welp, he was the only thing available to be put on the relic.Then they show you Alt Cunningham was the first. Then they mention that Mikoshi’s got hundreds of ‘em…and they choose Johnny?“Hey, fellow Pentagon scientist – we’ve got this tech that brings people back from the dead. Who should we bring back first?”“Osama bin Laden?”“Perfect!”It’s ridiculous. I’m still struggling how to write about the endings as it was insane how imbalanced they were and how much they relied on these weird assumptions regarding choices leading up to them. And I can’t even begin on the sudden six months revelation.You mean how the game shows you repeatedly your “choices” don’t change anything, except for the three or four that actually do (try to guess which!)?The game trains you to understand that your choices mean nothing, yet apparently there’s like eight for Johnny that let you get the “best” ending. None of these are intuitive, consistent with either the player’s, V’s, or Johnny’s actions or personality. You’re meant to get Johnny to “like” you, except the only way to reach the magical percentage is to go through a VERY specific set of dialogue choices in ONE specific conversation that are in no way lampshaded or indicated in the entire rest of the game: https://www.ign.com/wikis/cyberpunk-2077/How_to_Correctly_Respond_to_Johnny_in_the_Oil_FieldsThat’s your only chance.(No, the Johnny Friendship mechanic isn’t explained, either). Agree on the six months. After all that…you get a slightly reprieve. I don’t know why they made the Relic so insidious.One, it’s implied that the key use for this technology would be for rich people who, presumably, would undergo the procedure with a willing clone slug or donor – or, at least, in controlled circumstance where the poor bastard whose mind and body they overwrite is incapacitated. There’s no need for it to go so hard. Two, apparently it’s “rewriting your DNA”. Are you only able to do that to a body once? The new DNA is made the same way as the old DNA, from the same stuff, so why not just get someone from Biotechnica to rewrite your DNA back onto you (c’mon, I listened to their “Genes don’t fit?” ads all over Night City). Is genetic engineering in this universe like playing with Lego, except you have to superglue all the blocks together as soon as they connect?And, OK, fine: you do get multiple endings. But it’s literally a smorgasbord, not the sum total of choices you’ve made. You’re forced to work with Rogue, with Panam, and with Arasaka. Just pick one, ‘kay? There’s so much I could break down about the game, just discussing how insanely problematic the Evelyn/Judy/Dolls storyline was would be an essay in itself, What exactly (not disagreeing that that story line didn’t have problems, nosiree) did you find problematic about it?
Exactly! This is the kind of game that is more enjoyable if you bring your imagination into the mix rather than just being a passive consumer of content.While roaming the world and doing the missions I’m coming up with motives and traits that shape my V and his actions. Cyberpunk is still a game about humanity because it is a human playing it, and the side characters are well drawn, scripted, and voiced. They provide the anchor, and V is a vehicle 😉 for me to live in that world and express my imagined character in it.So far (I’m about 25 hours in but doing lots of side missions) the stories still carry weight and feel compelling which makes it fine for V to mostly listen to their stories rather than be the one with a clear personality driving the whole thing, which would be much more likely to conflict with the character I’m shaping.
Either choice can be valid for a game, and I can understand why the Witcher 3 set certain expectations, but so far I’m having a blast and feel like Cyberpunk offers a great canvas for me to interact with and project onto.
There are plenty of games where the character isn’t “identifiable” or is just a blank slate. What I think the article is trying to critique is the whole “Johnny is in your head” plot only works if that character is more than a blank slate.
If the slate is, indeed, blank, then there really isn’t a “problem” posed by Johnny’s takeover.
Blank slate doesn’t mean your character is a blank void, it means you can project whatever you want into it. Since I’ve decided who I want my V to be, I don’t want some terrorist from 2020 taking over her body. I mean, if V was super well defined, you could just as easily say “There’s two distinct personalities here, neither of which I came up with, so who cares which of them ends up winning out?”I’m certainly not saying that all characters in all games should be done one or another, and it might ultimately be a bad choice in this game. But with my 15-20 hours, I’m so far just fine with it.
The key with “let the player project whoever they want onto the bank slate” is that this works best when the game provides ample negative space in order to project something. The classic way to do this is with dialog- you can have 8 different ways of saying “I agree to do the thing” that each mean something different about the person saying it. So if you’re going to do a “the character is whoever you want it to be” you have to give me ways of expressing that *in* the game, not just in my own head.
YOU decide who your character is, why they act in certain ways, how they approach problems, whatever.This particular game doesn’t do that. You have very little control of V’s personality, morals or choices. It’s very predefined in the same way as Geralt in The Witcher series was, only worse written.The problem was that it was easier to get to like Geralt because you’ve had plenty of info about him established early on. You knew where he was coming from whenever an issue popped up and it made sense that he’s talking the way he does or has the choices he has. V doesn’t have that – you can make them look a certain way you want, you technically choose three different life paths (that amount to 15 minutes of nothing), but regardless of any of that and however you play you are basically an asshole. There are hints of a backstory, but they are left unexplored.They’ve basically made a predefined character that they pretend is a blank slate, only they don’t comit to making it blank enough to project yourself on or defined enough that you could empathize with them. It’s badly written.
Yea but an RPG character is still a character. I haven’t played much DnD, but most people don’t just play themselves, right? They’re stepping into another character’s shoes and acting like them. So there’s a level of consistency that comes with a person thinking like another person, rather than thinking like a list of pre-written, catch-all options.
I would recommend playing the game before posting.
I agree. While we are linked to a straight forward storyline in 2077, I still find myself mentally creating my character even with the limitations and dialogue. Take the imagination and run with it for a much better experience instead of always having to rely on companies spoon feeding the playerbase.
I can’t comment on Cyberpunk specifically, but that sorta blank-slate character is a basic-ass trope for “Western” RPGs. You can level exactly the same criticism at Elder Scrolls, Fallout or pretty much any tabletop-inspired RPG.If you were writing about RPGs in general, there’s a conversation to be had about it (and I would even agree with you). In the context of one specific game, with no acknowledgement of the fact it’s an ubiquitous convention? It just reads like you don’t know the subject very well.
I kind of hate being a defender here, but genuinely, this is a pretty specific criticsm to the game itself as, as written in article, it is trying to tell a story about humanity with a main character that is allowed relatively little room, at least in the first part of the story, to establish that humanity. Largely because of that blankness and the choice they make with Jackie.It is very much about the story the game is trying to tell and the components that affect it. For example, you couldn’t make the similar kind of a criticism about the Elder Scrolls games because they never try to make the story about the main character in the manner Cyberpunk does. The whole stake of the game is that V’s personality is going to be overwritten, which inherently relies on connecting with V as a person instead of a blank space.
I’ll defer to you then since you know the game better.Don’t feel bad about defending the writer either, it’s not like he shot my dog or anything, he just wrote an article 😛
Did you even read the article you dumb fuck?
I’m just here to say this Cyberpunk hot take-osphere has me exhausted. All this posturing over the politics of the Polish studio, the total misunderstanding of how open-world games operate from people like Hughes above or Riley MacLeod, I’m just not that interested in what your opinions are.
You know you don’t have to read their opinions, though, right? You can choose to disengage from this discourse at any time, and as a bonus not reward them with clicks. Seems strange to cross the street, just to tell someone you don’t like being on the same side of the street as them.
And you’re only amplifying the discourse you don’t like, buddy. Complaining about complaints you don’t like is the lowest form of discourse, and if you don’t like it you can afford to follow your own advice and toddle off.
Someone needs either more or less coffee yet today.Yeah, “I don’t care” isn’t discourse. Thanks for playing!
Thanks buddy, feel free to gripe as much as you want- I’m going to keep doing the same, and if it makes you feel good, then at least you accomplished one thing.
You dont see the irony of your comments at all. Not surprising.
I mean, I hear you, but there’s a world of difference between posting “I don’t care” and “here are two/three examples of things that have led me to no longer care.”
I think this hits me. Me thought at yet another headline was just… Utter exhaustion. Also this is quite the article for a 50 hour game or whatevs that came out five days ago.
I don’t really engage in the idiotic gamergate levels of observation, but now and again it’s pretty apparent that there’s a trend from certain publications regarding how they talk of certain games, and it is very apparent that feelings towards studios and their behaviour informs what articles they choose to write, or how consistently they’ll bring up their complaints that may not pertain to the article’s topic (eg. Polygon currently stickies a list of the ethical issues they have with CDPR on every Cyberpunk article).That said, there’s not much time I want to invest to complaining about this in the comments- it’s a typical behaviour on these sites, and I’m not going about and castigating the sites until they change their MO, I just want to say my piece and continue on.
I think it’s a bit disingenuous of polygon to hype Cyberpunk and write about it as much as they were but sticking on their sidebar. There are issues surrounding Cyberpunk that can and should be discussed. It’s the biggest game of the year with a debacle of a launch. Polygon could choose to demonstrate its ethics by… not writing about it so much? I don’t know. All fine. But like you said it’s just HOT TAKE after another. And sometimes feeding into the horrible behavior of gamers, amplifying their shitty behavior. It’s just a mess. I think this is the last cyberpunk article I’m gonna click on.But this one here… I’m so skeptical of the author being able to truly gauge this storyline and give it such a deep analysis at this juncture.
I’m so hesitant to really dive into this issue, because there’s such a risk of getting into the arguments you see from the typical geriatric FaceBook user, ie. “THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA SELLING YOU FAKE NEWS!!!”, but even so, I do think there’s publications like GO Media, or Vox Media, that are either knowingly or unknowingly setting a moral standard in its editorial choices. Judging from pieces like Kotaku’s John Walker’s, there’s realization that there’s a lot of negative reception to their editorial choices (some of it depressingly caustic, to be sure), but as is the ancient ways of Gizmodo/Gawker tradition, it’s better to paint themselves as victim to the times than allow nuance and fix the errors in their editorial.But yeah, like you said, it’s better to leave this style of blogging for those that like it and continue on with our lives.
it’s fucked up that they keep putting guns to your head and forcing you to read them then
Damn, that’s the most half-assed hot take I’ll see for a minute.
that’s weird, the most half-assed take i’ve ever seen was “🥺🥺woe is me i’m just not intewested in youw opinions about cybewpunk🥺🥺🥺”
Does AV Club even review games usually? Or is every site ever just striking while the anvil is hot right now?
And yet, here you are. Commenting. Hot take bro.
I don’t know how relevant this is, but this article kind of puts me in mind of what I always found to be the key difference between Fallout 3 and Fallout 4, and why I managed to finish the former but not the latter.
Fallout 3 was completely voiceless and reliant on silent dialogue, but in a way I think this actually helped, because I was able to mentally “adjust”, for want of a better word, the character to suit the current needs. Character does a side-quest instead of looking for her father? She just happened to stumble across it while trying to find her dad’s trail and got distracted by the need to help out. Character makes a sarcastic comment instead of the usual friendly one? Hey, she’s had a rough day, cut her some slack, and besides, the sarcasm was understated. And none of it felt wrong because the character was entirely mine to create and inhabit, and the gameplay mechanics never actually contradicted me on that.Yet along comes Fallout 4, and while there’s still this kind of freedom in terms of choice and dialogue, the fact that my player character now has animations and spoken dialogue means that some of this freedom to create, adjust and inhabit the character is taken away from me, which makes it more glaring when I make her do something that seems to contradict the character that the developers are building, and vice versa. My otherwise pleasant character says something sarcastic, just to shake things up?Okay, but it’s delivered in an incredibly mean fashion which is completely at odds with the character I’d been playing and developing so far. And why’s my character dicking around as the Silver Shroud when every cutscene I’ve seen her in has had her utterly obsessed with getting her son back? Focus, character, focus! I ended up never finishing the game, and I think it was partly because I found this gap between what I wanted to do, what the game could let me do and the limits that the developers put on me through the choices they made in terms of acting, directing, etc. too frustrating.Anyway. Haven’t played Cyberpunk 77 and probably won’t for a while at least, if ever. But it kinda sorta sounds like the problem here is something similar; on one hand, the developers want to give the player a character they can develop for themselves, but on the other they’d felt the need to add in dialogue and acting and all those flashy things, but end up doing so in a way that makes the character feel frustratingly inconsistent and limiting in a similar way to Fallout 4.
Well to be fair the main story of FO4 is both bad and stupid. Three isn’t much better.
“You have to go die in the radiation booth.”“But, I’ve got a robot and a super-mutant with me. The radiation won’t hurt them. They should do it.”“. . . you have to go die in the radiation booth.”
lol seriously!From 4: “We scientists have created androids and will replace all life on Earth with them, thus saving people from the horrible conditions they’re living in. Like the Super Mutants that we released up there, boy that sucks! SCIENCE!”Also: SEAN!
Gods, I STILL don’t understand why they were replacing wastelanders with synths. The whole goal of the institute made ZERO sense.“Your synths say they’re unhappy and want independence.”“No, no. That can’t be right. They’re just machines.”“They’re running away, and lobotomizing themselves just to get away from you.”“JUST MACHINES!”“Okay, but maybe use the gen-2’s for your garbage collectors in the meantime?”
There is that, admittedly.
There are honestly quite a few games that I think would do better without the drive for Fully Voiced Dialogue and something like Fallout 4’s a good example- having to do that also meant that practically they had to limit the number of dialogue choices.
does it look a little like they merged Keanu with Michel Huisman?
Semi-related, on the subject of blank slate protagonists: I remember Half-Life’s completely mute Freeman getting praised/defended in a “It’s immersive, YOU are the character!” which made some sense in the first game, which was basically about survival/escape and no one knew what the fuck was going on and there were no other non-generic characters. I *hated* it in the sequel. As a story device it makes no sense that your character would be literally mute, especially when you’re thrust into the middle of a world where every other character knows everything and you know almost nothing. If *I’m* Freeman, then I’m asking a lot of questions, which I don’t have the ability to do. Some unvoiced dialogue tree options would have been more immersive.
Say what you like about Johnny Silverhand Dude, at least it’s an ethos
I don’t really see the problem here. It’s probably because I’ve played Cyberpunk decades before now. It was a pencil and paper RPG where you built the character and you were responsible for coming up with how your character feels about it. I guess I just transitioned that to this game. Much like a GM running a campaign, he chooses the story/characters/McGuffins. I’m there to respond to those things the way I want to. I get to decide if my character is more of a solo or a netrunner. I get to decide if I want to attend Jackie’s wake or blow it off. I don’t need a programmer to develop my character.
Couldn’t CDPR saved a ton of time and convoluted storytelling by just making Johnny Silverhand the protagonist and letting us play him?
You do at least twice, probably more as the game goes on. Kind of like the Ciri levels in Witcher 3.
No, because talking to Johnny, as played by Keanu, is actually some of the best parts of the game and story.
They would’ve had to include a “shoot self in head” button, then. My primary investment in the main storyline is waiting for my opportunity to press the DELETE button on Johnny Stupidhand.
Because that wouldn’t be Cyberpunk enough
I just hope the PS5 build of Cyberpunk 2077 works when it’s released (as opposed to playing the PS4 build on PS5, since CDPR has said they’re releasing the next-gen game separately, and not as a “next-gen patch” like so many other developers have committed to…unless refund-gate causes them to walk that back).
Love the game, hasn’t crashed once for me, runs smooth. Yes, V is a blank slate, which I like as it doesn’t push me in any specific direction. They could definitely expand some of the side storylines related to specific fixers, but generally I’m very happy with the game.
Comparing Witcher 3 Geralt to the V in Cyberpunk seems unfair. Not only is Geralt a fully formed character, he had books and several games of personality built into him. V is the V you make and because we don’t have Cyberpunk 2077 level computing power we are limited to how much personality we can invoke into him. I think V also grows as you get through the second act of the game. At least maybe they do, or maybe I am projecting. I fell in love with the Nomad way of life(and Panam) so I see my V as a former corpo who found what he was looking for when he left the damn city. Sure my V will never be as deep as Geralt but I also feel like Geralt could never give up being a Witcher and go be a nomadic horse farmer. On a side note, CDPR seemed to keep a lot of who Johnny Silverhand was hidden until the game launch. Getting loveable Keanu to play such an asshole is kinda brilliant.
I don’t know if I would enjoy a Cyberpunk adaptation if I were forced into a specific POV and character. Like, I want to be let loose on the city and see what all I can do there, y’know? I wasn’t expecting an Assassin’s Creed approach. In games like that, I’m playing as Ezio or Kassandra. I don’t feel like I’m roleplaying. I don’t slot myself into the role of these characters. In games like Red Dead Redemption 2, I can gussy up and give Arthur my own interpretation of who he is, but I’m not Arthur. With this game (and games like Fallout), I want to feel like I’m the character, or, if I end up creating someone who’s not just me, like I’m creating the character, who they are and how they’d react, as I play. That said, I’m hoping the options to play quests how I like aren’t so closed, though. Witcher 3 was great because of how it allowed for several endings to each quest, and how they all culminated at the end. But I never expected a character-created protag to be Geralt, who had a fully formed personality and goal even before the first game was created.
I had to restart the game because I found the male voice delivery so infuriatingly douchy. No disrespect to Gavin, I’m sure he was just following direction.Once I started over as a female (voiced by Cherami Leigh) I enjoyed myself so much more. Her deliveries are very good, and by extension made the world more interesting and rich.
So grateful to everybody reading and engaging with this piece, there are some really strong points being made (both for and against its central thesis) down here. One thing I wish I’d made a little clearer in my text, though: I don’t object to V because they’re a blank player avatar—I like a blank player avatar just fine, although I’d argue that you shouldn’t force them to stand right next to a far more dynamic one for vast swathes of your game.
What bugs me is that V is a written character; there’s a distinct tone and vibe that comes through the dialogue choices, and the huge amounts of their dialogue that you simply don’t get to pick. And that character is thinly written and generally inconsistent, in ways that hampers my ability to identify with them. We end up in an unhappy medium – a character I can’t see as an expression of myself, because there’s too much personality there, and a character I can’t try to role-play as, because that personality isn’t well-enough defined.
I think you have to go all in one way or another: either a very blank slate character or a well defined one. Chell from Portal works because she’s basically just you solving puzzles and the game doesn’t require much character interaction. Most of the playable characters from the Assassin’s Creed games work because they are very specific and fleshed out. One the other hand the lead protagonist of Jedi: Fallen Order was too much in that middle ground that they were just boring (especially surrounded by more interesting characters).
I think KOTOR from years ago did it well, leaving you a cipher to the end, wrapping you up with friends who are strong personalities in one direction or another and if you hang with them long enough they either accept your own choices or not. But you’re always doing it on your terms. This sounds like they realized that making a no personality avatar was bad and what was probably meant to be a fun side character turned into the game’s main progression mechanic.
Well we do know that Chell is fat and adopted. /s
And that jumpsuit she’s wearing looks stupid. Or says the engineer with a medical degree in fashion from France.
I’m a tabletop rpg veteran of the 4th Corporate War, I MEAN CYBERPUNK 2020. The rpg itself had a life generation system, called Lifepath, but was affectionately known as The Strifepath.They’ve got random generators that you can find online, but here’s the Strifepath I built for a character named Eggsalad:Origins & Personal Style
Clothes Blue Jeans
Hairstyle Mohawk
Affections Spiked Gloves
Ethnicity JapaneseFamily Background
Rank Arcology Family.
Parents Parents are both living.
Family Status Family status is okay.
Childhood In a Pirate Pack.
Siblings (4) Older brother hates you.
Younger brother hates you.
Older sister hero worships you.
Younger sister feels neutral.Motivations
Traits Moody, rash and headstrong
Person Valued Most A parent
Valued Most Knowledge
Valued Possession A piece of clothing
Feeling about most people People are obstacles to be destroyed if they cross me.Life Events
Age 16 You were imprisoned for 7 months
Age 17 Happy Love Affair
Yadda Yadda Yadda…
Fully agree with the take, and it came through loud and clear for me. I often find myself looking at the dialogue choices I’m presented with and not liking any of them, especially since the most interesting ones that speak to how I’d like my character to behave are rarely the mandated “Choose this response or this response to move the conversation forward” options. Doubly confusing since sometimes the option that leads as less aggressive/more empathetic turns out to be a blistering tirade when voiced by V. I’m loving the gameplay and exploring the world, but the narrative throughline is a mess.
Exactly this. There is no branching dialogue, which has been a staple of western RPGs for ages. It’s just a list of options, that sometimes swing wildly in tone, that are meaningless because you have to hit the top option to move the conversation forward. It’s archaic, frankly.
The “Condensed dialogue” needs to die. It was a horrid trend popularised by Mass Effect, and one of the worst design decisions we’re stuck with.
After a bit over 20 hours, the reason you’re feeling the way you do (and I do), is because the conversation system is just bad. It isn’t branching like you’d expect from a good RPG. Every conversation requires the top choice, sometimes second, to move the conversation forward and the rest is just a way to get some background. Nothing you say matters. If I choose to tell someone to Fuck Off then conversation choices should change. Instead it just stays being the same list of options, that can swing tonality to a ridiculous extent, until I choose the top option to push the quest forward. I mean, that’s less complex than ancient RPG’s. So you can’t even role play anything. Being a saint or being a sarcastic asshole results in the same conversation. There’s no consequence so there’s no sense of personality you can create for your own character.
To be fair, very few RPGs are actually have that kind of a branching system, especially majority what are considered the golden ones. Seriously, if you go and play, while there might be a slightly different response to your dialogue choice, it usually always flows to that same next point of dialogue.Actually, the more I think about it, the dialogue structure itself is very traditional and there are discussions in sidequests where you get different results from your choices.
For me, it is really interesting to compare V to Eivor from Valhalla, having just finished that game. Similarly to V, Eivor has a ton of set dialogue and limited amount of input from the player to choose his/her reactions, but there, again for me, it managed to hit this consistent nature that those choices really felt meaningful and told us of the character and their values. Thus that character and their journey feels meaningful within the moments of the game even if there are large parts of it beyond the players control. Ultimately it is extremely similar to Cyberpunk’s approach, but with a character that suits that approach better.
I keep thinking, that while I like the game, it would have benefitted a lot from having a character like Eivor, Shepard or Hawke, just as a couple of examples, driving it as those allow that room to choose within the story while being well-defined enough to feel like something would be lost with the arrival of Johnny Silverhand.
It is definitely a shame that we know that CDPR can – or at least could – do better. I say could, because apparently most of the staff who did Witcher 3 left after they (finally) got their bonuses. It’s a shame; I was hoping CDPR would not devolve into a typical game company, where it’s not the people who craft these things that make them great, but simply the fact that they’ve got the IP (look at Bioware, for example. Or Eidos Montreal. Or…look, one of the greatest triumphs in gaming is that IOI got to keep the Hitman licence, because that’s their baby and you really can tell when you play it. It shows that it’s made by people who both understand and care about the Hitman games, not simply “Whatever. People’ll buy it on brand alone”.)It’s becoming quite painfully clear that there’s a lot of content cut – not just systems or gameplay mechanics (of which there are dozens), but whole swathes of story and narrative choice, as well. I’ve read a theory that the game was more or less good to go in 2019, but then Keanu got on board and, welp, they had to rewrite the entire game around him. I’m not begrudging Keanu, or CDPR for having him (he’s doing better than poor Sean Bean or Liam Neeson in the Bethesda games, or Martin Sheen in ME2, all three of which you can nearly hear dial tones when they speak because they’re phoning it in so much).I wish they sat down and had a respectful conversation with Keanu and said “Look. We really can’t bring you on board at this stage, because that would involve a massive rewrite and remaking of the game. But we’d love to have you on board for the DLC or the sequel, and we’d like to work with you for those right from the start.”
Instead, V is now there to do whatever serves the story as it fits Johnny. Geralt, as you said, is amazing for being a character who’s both defined and a blank slate, at the same time. What it means is that you could have a dialogue option where you get to be a prick or a saint…but no matter what option you chose as a player, it still felt like Geralt being a prick/a saint. He’d be a prick in a Geralt-y way, or a saint in a Geralt-y way.This really made Geralt feel deep and more real than a typical RPG protagonists, because, like every person, there’d be times he’d want to be nice and times when he’d want to be nasty, rather than just a perfect, standard-issue RPG hero all the time. Bethesda really fails at that with their Fallout games – they’re fundamentally unable to write an evil storyline – whereas guys like Obsidian excell.It didn’t feel incongruous, not like “Hey. Geralt would never do that”, or “Ugh. I feel completely at odds with this dialogue”. You get to have a character who’s both well-defined, yet still lets you play the role you choose. That, to me, speaks a lot about the development of CP: it was now all about Johnny, sane gameplay be damned. You’re a side character in your own damn game. You’re reduced to saying whatever needs to be said to get Johnny to his next plot point, consistency be buggered. And the Fallout 4 dialogue “choice” – heavy sarcasm on that one – system doesn’t help, where, like Fallout 4, there’s no impact to what you say, since the writers have only written one way for the game to proceed from where you, so it doesn’t matter. Like Fallout 4, the male/female Vs don’t help either, because that doubles the dialogue writers’ and recorders’ workloads, so it’s well within the budget’s interests to minimise the amount of dialogue they have to write – if you want to do a quest with three options to it based on dialogue, that’s not three lines you have to record, but six. And it only gets exponentially worse from there if you add in more choices.
I’m very angry at you, Mr. Hughes, because you didn’t use this cyberplatform to argue that this game was a waste of cyberdevelopment cybertime in the first place that should have gone toward making a direct cybersequel to the first “Deus Ex.”Seriously, everything I cyber-read about this cybergame, and I’ll play it eventually and that might change my mind, but it just seems . . . like, I’d cyber-expect more from a country with a very rich and recent history of oppression and that produced Kieślowski.
Don’t worry, Cherami Leigh is just as one-note as girl V. She’s a great actress overall with some damn good roles under her belt (like Makoto Nishima from Persona 5 and A2 in NieR Automata), but this ain’t the one. She’s not even miscast – her perma-raging A2 was great – just very poorly directed.The problem with V’s characterization probably comes from the fact that the game got rewritten at some point. The way they talk fits the Street Kid persona – it’s likely this was supposed to be the actual origin, but they added two additional pointless ones in lieu of a prologue (we already know they changed their origin idea – initially you were supposed to choose a celebrity you idolize and a traumatic event from your past). Instead of a character that’s an asshole that you know the origins of, V is basically “just” an asshole. My skill choices in the game’s (admittedly robust and fascinating) character development system?It’s anything but robust and fascinating, really. While there’s variety in builds, it’s very skin-deep because most of the skills and perks only make your numbers rise. At the end of the day, I don’t even need that many points in Cool to sneak effectively – I just hack the cameras and turrets off and then take off in melee every idiot. Cyberware is just as lame, with only the arm and leg implants giving you any actual gameplay change (and 2 out of the 4 arm weapons you can get are goddamn lame).The game is basically Fallout 3, only it’s way prettier and the world is somehow even more shallow.
I’m going to try to be positive about this game as my husband is loving it, but eh, I’m not impressed so far. Hoping to meet Cyber Keanu soon!
“Male-presenting voice”. Are you for real?
Probably what’s helping me enjoying the story and character of V, is that I’m fine with the game as a solid single player experience and less as a full role playing one. Like, despite making my own V, she’s very much her own character. And honestly? I’ve been enjoying it. Particularly because I think the female version’s performance is actually pretty cool, suggesting that there’s more to the character than edginess.
This article and the addendum to it, described perfectly what I’ve been trying to explain to some of my friends about what I dislike concerning the game’s character and V. Like you said, and other people said too, this isn’t about being against blank characters, hell, one of my favorite games of all time is Fallout New Vegas, and apart of the “mailman” beginning, you pretty much have a blank slate, and I think it works for F:NV because of two factors:First, the silent protagonist – It gives you the freedom to give your own imagined voice to your character and second, the writing – the dialog choices in F:NV gives (My opinion) an abundance of choice to cover for almost any player’s experience, want to be a cold-hearted killer? There’s a dialog option for it, empathetic? Got it, sarcastic? A mix? It covers most bases.In Cyberpunk, V has his own voice, which I get the appeal of it and it’s very hard to let go of it because it does bring a lot more presence to your character but I found myself getting annoyed sometimes when V’s voice actor talked in a certain way that I didn’t like for my character, and cringed as some of the limited dialog lines that you do have. That’s why I agree that V is NOT a blank slate character, he’s somewhere in between and that somewhere just isn’t doing it for some people including me. I think we’ve reached a point in gaming where if you’d like to have a true voiced blank-slate protagonist for big RPG games, you’d have to invent some kind of dynamic voice acting method to play out different play-styles and changes throughout your choices in-game which is pretty impossible and would require hours of work on all parts.
Just another virtue signaling article about how bad Kotaku thinks Cyberpunk is despite widespread acclaim if you don’t live on social media.
I’m not really seeing this in my playthrough outside of a few choices where it falls into the same trap as a lot of voiced protagonist games. That being inconsistent prompts to speech and not knowing *how* it’ll be delivered sometimes.V: “Ma’am, I recovered that priceless heirloom you said you misplaced.”Old lady “Oh, you returned that item I’ve been searching for! Thank you so much!”Me to myself: I found that item in a heavily fortified building and had to take out 20 guys to get to it. I think I deserve more than a thanks probably.Answers: Me: ::Chooses ask for recompense::V: Hey, old hag joytoy. I ain’t in this for the feels. Give me some eurobucks or I kick in the teeth you have left!Me to myself: Uhh…… what?There’s whiplash sometimes there. But outside of those situations, I’ve felt like I’ve had ample opportunity to take V’s origins (Corpo in my case) and build a fairly cohesive personal story about his growth thusfar. He’s been kicked out of the way of life he lived, fell in with Jackie and was never *too* gung-ho about this whole blaze of glory thing, and is just trying to get by in this screwed up corpo-hellscape, using his inside knowledge of company tactics to carve a lucrative niche. He’s been dealt a really rough hand after that Dex incident, and he’s trying to not only pick up the pieces, but SURVIVE given the circumstances while not compromising the scruples he still has.It could be that I’m just kind of taking one of the designer preferred paths “on accident” so it’s all working out as a story, but it doesn’t really feel that way? I dunno. I’m connecting to V WAAAAAAY more than Keanu Reeves playing Tom Cruise playing Stacey Jaxx from ‘Rock of Ages’. V just wants that a-hole Johnny gone so he can get back to rebuilding, again, and I’m right there with him.
once they fix the game, hopefully cdpr will make a dlc expansion where one of your selectable classes is a cop so i can play out my bladerunner/ad police fan fic.
Edit
I’m really enjoying my character and truly loving the side characters. I thought introducing Keanu several hours in was brilliant. Really having a great time with Cyberpunk. It’s surpassed my expectations (but I’m not playing it on an Xbox One) and I’m just taking my time to savor everything.Can young woke bloggers get enjoyment from ANYTHING? I feel bad for the troll that wrote this post. Probably should just install the game and set up a Zoom appointment with his/her/their therapist.
I’ve said before that cyberpunk is generally tough to criticize, because part of its dystopian vision is a world where art and life have already imitated and eaten each other to the point where both are just hollowed-out husks. If there’s any sense of true personhood left, it’s something that the highest-level corpos indulge in as a luxury.
I am leaning towards Hughes’s point of view, however, that CDPR didn’t nail the balance between “saying something” along those lines, and just passively dumping us into that world. Ironically, it’s because of Silverhand. Silverhand is a raging, selfish asshole with a strong point of view who lived 50-ish years before V, and that *could* set up a great contrast with V… but not with a V that has the opportunity to act like a decent, compassionate, involved person (who, yes, also can have a body count in the hundreds, easily.) When V puts her heart on the line and is altruistic or idealistic (though not Silverhand’s ideals, obviously) over and over again, Silverhand comes off as too petty and paranoid. It’s great that he’s not always right and not always honest, but again, those are tightrope acts that rely on some kind of anchor. If V wasn’t going to have another angel/demon consistently on her other shoulder – like Jackie, or perhaps a choice of a few post-prologue relationships – then she herself needed to be it, and consistently. That latter option would certainly limit the sense of player agency, but it might’ve paid major dividends in the end if CDPR had committed to making V a bitter commentary on what humanity has become by 2077.
Again, this is hard to pin down. The ending I chose is open to significant interpretation just because of the setting.****************************SPOILERS:*****************************How much of V has “infected” Johnny at the end? To what extent has Johnny given up who he is by giving up all his fights and leaving Night City? The epilogue is portrayed as serene, but what does serenity say about a person living in a dystopian hellscape?On a totally unrelated note, I also thought it was cheaply manipulative (and actually a little plot-holey) for so many of the end-credit messages to strongly, strongly imply that nobody knew what the fuck had happened to V. People were acting like she’d ghosted, when instead, in my playthrough, she’d very clearly told (and shown) many people that she was dying, that another personality was overwriting/killing her, and that she was looking for a Hail Mary. Both Silverhand and Panam were available to give those people some closure, too – to let them know that V didn’t really die in the absolute sense, but hadn’t actually managed to save her own meatspace life.
It seems to me like CDPR made Silverhand’s epilogue in my ending choice a fitting, hands-off portrayal of cyberpunk’s themes, open to some real argument as to whether it was “good” or “bad” for Silverhand and the world – but they cheated to make the end-credits “V’s ending” really shitty and sad, strongly implying that the “good” choice for V was to come back to meatspace with a very minor reprieve before dying for real.Frankly, Misty’s end message felt 100% wrong for her role in the story up to that point. Transcending the physical plane and changing into something new seems like it would be one of the “best” decisions from her perspective. Now granted, there’s some friction here because she also wasn’t told what actually happened due to said shitty writing decisions, but still.
I totally disagree with this – it was all intentional and you are supposed to see Johnny as all these things. That becomes more clear in Act 2 and Act 3.
Honestly, not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m not sure you and I played the same game.
V isn’t entirely a blank avatar, nor is it a reflection of Johnny. It’s both, and that’s the crux of the matter that I don’t think you connected with. Johnny has 1 mindset, sometimes to the point of nihilistic numbskullness. V has another, one that is defined by a player carving their own path through the game. But V doesn’t have total control, and neither does the player, and that’s the Johnny-shaped problem.
A good portion of the central theme of the game is V vs. Johnny, and Johnny *has* to be so blisteringly one-note because Johnny needs to stake out his territory. As you progress in the game, you’re staking your own, whether that be to eschew to the wanton self-destruction that Johnny wants to head down, or a different path, one decided by you, the player.
But the core narrative that’s driven home is that Johnny is bleeding INTO V, and V’s got to figure out what to do with that. That means a lot of the time, V’s going to seem slightly schizophrenic, because they ARE. Is the player leaning into the Johnny-shaped swerve? Away from it? Are you delving into nihilism? Optimism? Did you connect with River? Panam? Lenny? Judy? The decisions you make as a player have actual impact on the narrative thrust, and if you aren’t seeing that, well, you’re just not paying attention.
Decisions you make as you play have wild impact on the story, but I think maybe you’re expecting them to always be conversation trees, whereas Cyberpunk’s going beyond that. Are you always going in guns blazing, or approaching things with stealth? You will get different narrative threads spooling out of that. Have you gone out of your way to do side stuff, or are you simply plot forward and not letting anything breathe?
Having spent 50+ hours with the game (and had the option of the final mission available for a good 15 of them, never once having taken it), I’m a little surprised that you don’t see the actual conflict going on, see the three forces (the player, V the character and Johnny) all jockeying for the driver’s seat.
I expected V to sometimes have conversation dialogue I don’t completely agree with, and V even seems aware of that – because it’s Johnny’s influence. I’ve struggled with how much of the driver’s seat to let Johnny have, making sure to give him some space and room for dignity without letting him subsume V. And I feel that struggle in every conversation V’s had in the game.
But I’m on V’s side, and I think you’re on Johnny’s.
Meanwhile, I’m having tons of fun with it, V is blank enough to let the people you meet shine, and written enough to make sense of the story.
The game is gorgeous, haven’t had a game breaking bug, and only a couple little funny glitches, side missions I’ve done have all either been quick and dirty, or really interesting, story so far is really good and keeps me wanting more which hasn’t happened in a long time with a big game like this…You guys coverage is just cementing the idea that y’all game journalists have now joined the ranks of movie critics in the list of people completely out of touch with at the very least me, but probably most people, and who I’ll absolutely not listen to when it comes to choosing content.
Yeah it is sloppy, but I love that about my inconsistent character. My V really doesn’t know what her
motivations are. I love the mirror, sometimes I am bald, other times it’s Johnny nude with a vagina and pink landing strip. I hit the mirrors just for those reasons.
I am not sure that you can ask her/him to be anything other than a Tabula Rasa character to play off as a JS straight man.
It doesn’t seem that the function is to develop a character from the beginning but let you imbue the personality with your own interpretation before the end of the game. By the end you will appreciate this strange confluence of characters.
I am on my second play through as a Corpo-rat.
Having waited decades for a decent video game version of CP2020 which involved technology finally catching up to do it justice, Projekt Red has done us proud. CP2077 is awesome. ITS BEEN WORTH THE 33 YEAR WAIT!!
Sure there are some glitches – there always have been in videogames – hey isn’t that very thing what put Skyrim on the map to such extent it’s still got a massive fan base of mod-creators over a decade later? CP2077 needs to open its source-code and give us a multiplayer option. What are SONY so afraid of? This franchise does not need killing, it needs expansion.
The original CyberPunk generation are loving it.
freedom of action and diversity in gameplay will be delivered thanks to the sandbox nature of the game and mechanics inspired by the “cyberpunk 2020” pen-and-paper system, fine-tuned to meet the requirements of a modern rpg. gameplay will pump adrenaline through players’ veins and be consistent with the celebrated cyberpunk spirit – rebellion, style, edge, uncertainty. and of course, a cyberpunk reality cannot be deprived of murderous steel – guns, rifles, implants, dozens of gadgets and other varied pieces of equipment needed to survive on the streets of night city.
I liked the game but by the end I had come to realise that it was never really V’s story it’s was Johnny’s story of redemption for me