There seems to be a lot of things that just never made it into the final product. The sub plot involving the murder of Lucius Ryhne didn’t really go anywhere and the cyberpsycho missions just ended rather abruptly with no satisfactory conclusion. And if you look at previews of the game from previous years there were a lot more features that were promised that just never made it into the game at all.
I purchased the game on day one, last played it on February 11, and I put in quite a few hours and certainly got my money’s worth. But I remain slightly disappointed in it just because I expected more. I usually don’t purchase games on day one but I bought into the hype.
I think, fairly early on, I walked near a car and a prompt popped up saying that I could steal it with a Tech skill of 4 (or whatever). In fact, I think it was in the parking lot of the Mox Club because I remember jacking cars better than I could afford just for the fun of driving them around. I never put a single point into strength though so the only occupied cars I could carjack were low-end beaters driven by 95lb women and the infirm. Agreed though that car theft was mainly a “for laughs” thing; even later in game sometimes I’d steal a big truck or try to sneak in and steal the cop car out of a crime scene just to be a nuisance.
I liked Johnny. I mean, I didn’t like him character to character but that was intended. And I warmed up a bit by the end which was also intended. So overall I’d call it a success.
I find that the best Johnny bits for me, still on Act 2, are in the sidequests.
Honestly, the best EVERYTHING is in the sidequests.
I’ll spoil this, but the sidequest Sinnerman is essential if you want to see one of the weirdest, but most interesting ones. Johnny and you end up having:
A deep discussion about God, faith, and pretty must if any of that exists. You end up crucifying a guy on a cross for a Braindance(“The Passion” one you see posters around town for) and the whole quest is one of the weirdest in the game. It was better than anything I’ve seen in the main game.
And the thing is, you can’t know it will be great because you just get this quest from a phone call that asks you to kill a guy. I mean…it doesn’t stand out until you accept and begin the quest.
Actually, out of all the stuff you mention, that is the only one which does go somewhere.
First, Rhyne is killed. Then Peralez hires you, and there are several subsequent missions, but no matter what (real or imagined) dirt you get on Holt, and what you do or do not choose to tell Peralez and/or his wife about their personalities being edited, and no matter what the final mayoral election results, it all wraps up with you receiving an anonymous telephone call from a (real) power broker telling you, quite accurately, that nothing you did made any difference. Canonical cyberpunk ending!
I got a kick out of the radio news guy (if you leak the info): Mind control? Is this really what it’s come to, Night City? Remember when politicians were controlled through good, old-fashioned bribery?
To me, that wasn’t a satisfactory conclusion to the story. Come to think of it, I really didn’t think of it as a conclusion at all. It feels to me like it’s incomplete.
In this particularly case, there is a possibility that it may be a hook for later DLC. There are some things in-game that link the “events” to other quests. That said, I believe the lack of a big conclusion is deliberate and intentional on the part of the creators.
As with many things in the game, the ultimate point is not whether you can change the outcome, but how you, or others, reacts to it. Johnny has a couple theories, and the player can, if they are careful, even spot one of the individuals behind it. But by the time you get involved it’s too late to change anything.
It’s more complicated than that - Johnny used to be one of the idealists. It’s one of the reasons he possesses such magnetic charisma. He’s sort of an antiheroic Captain America, he tends to warp the world just by sheer force of will. Except Night City is such an awful place that about all he could ever do is rally people against the worst of the worst. Much of his awful behavior comes stems from the fact that nothing he does ever seems to matter.
He’s a complicated character but that doesn’t make him any less of an asshole. He’s a flawed character but isn’t totally lacking in redeeming traits. Johnny admits that even those closest to him couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. He feels bad for treating Rogue like shit and wants to make amends, he’s genuinely worried about Eurodyne’s welfare when he hears about the suicide attempt and wants to help, and when he makes peace with V he makes it clear that he’s willing to vacate the body when the time comes. He’s still an asshole though. I do appreciate that at times Johnny reads the situation wrong and other times he’s right. He was totally right about how taking over Clouds would end and totally made the wrong call when that Netwatch agent tried to tell V the Voodoo Boys infected him with a virus. Johnny’s one of the best parts of the game.
And I actually liked the characterization of Mr. and Mrs. Peralez quite a bit. They were consummate politicians who made V feel at ease, trusted in his abilities, and didn’t appear to be blowing smoke up his ass or trying to get him killed.
Did anyone else do this sidequest with River Ward, the police officer? This is a perfect example of what people mean when they say that the sidequests are the whole game.
You hunt down a child predator using his dreams via brain dance. It’s honestly pretty intense if you let yourself get into it. Not all the kids make it, but you rescue some. He pumps them full of hormones at an old cattle farm. It’s worse than it sounds.
Combine “The Hunt” with the crucifixion quest and you can tell that really…only the sidequests were fully done. I mean, they worked so hard on those.
I’ll be advancing the main game soon again, but there are some awesome things out there in the world.
Indeed, at the beginning V. is (probably?) a person who will do anything for money, consistent with the milieu, but continuing, or not continuing, to do that kind of stuff does not seem to affect anything except maybe the stat for how much Johnny likes you, which is not implemented in any great detail. I remember Judy or someone telling V., “You’re a good person,” and me thinking she obviously does not know her very well.
For that matter, choosing to go through every mission ultraviolently, versus with consummate stealth, or whatever, let alone which missions you accept, does not seem to meaningfully affect the nature of the street cred you are building and how people and factions in the game treat you.
Well, it’s a video game. By the standards of video game writing I think Johnny’s pretty good. Video games still have a ways to go when it comes to dialogue, characterization, and plot.
I wondered the same thing.
I used to play the old Cyberpunk 2020 TTRPG back in the 1990s before ever reading anything by Gibson. And, wow, once I read his sprawl trilogy was a bit shocked by how different the game was from Gibson’s seminal work. You can see the influence but the TTRPG is a bit more shallow than the books that influenced it. But then D&D is rather shallow compared to Lord of the Rings, Dying Earth, or Three Hearts and Three Lions.
Yeah, I remember when the game first came out and some people blazed through the main story in 20 hours and said “I finished this game and there was nothing to it”. I mean, technically you finished it, but you managed to skip all the best stuff.
Yeah we used to play Cyberpunk 2020 too. I think this NPR review captures what’s wrong with the game.
“ Cyberpunk 2077 is about … nothing. There’s a plot of sorts. A kind of threaded narrative about a heist gone wrong in such a way that V ends up with Keanu Reeves permanently stuck living in his head. But it isn’t about anything. You run around collecting guns and meeting people and (mostly) killing them and (occasionally) just talking to them, and both options are terrible because the killing is almost always pointless and the talking, somehow, is even worse because the writing is so, so bad.”
Yeah, I would legit say that you could have an equally great experience not playing the main story.
I thought that during development, they said the sidequests would be so deep and worthwhile, you could reach an “ending” with the credits without even finishing the main campaign. Is that true in the final game? Can you skip the main storyline and reach a closing credit scene that has nothing to do with the main storyline?
I agree with many of Sheehan’s criticisms, but I think I have such low expectations for video game plots and dialogue that 2077 still comes out as pretty good by the standards of the industry. I tend to view most stories as thin veneers justifying the action in the game. Perhaps I should be more discerning?
No. The only endings come from finishing the whole “Johnny in the Brain” plot that makes up the main story.
I have low standards for video game stories and find most of the games people laud as amazing story-telling devices to be… average, at best? The best story games tend to be maybe as good as an average television episode or film in terms of narrative. And I don’t think CP2077 is any exception here; it has a few high points and a lot of filler that moves along and gives you plausible reasons for shootin’ dudes and that’s basically fine with me. I have no attachment to the source material and don’t really care if it’s a faithful reconstruction of Gibson’s vision because I’m playing it to entertain myself and it succeeded in being entertaining.
Reading the NPR review, I felt like the author didn’t finish the game if he honestly believed that “Worlds and fortunes hang in the balance of everything V does” and laughed at the idea of sticking it to mega-corps by refusing to play as though CDPR is a “mega-corp”.
It’s rapidly becoming clear to me that this game grows on you as you play it. It’s actually really excellent in many ways, but it makes a bad first impression and if you get glitches, which I did, it is easy to condemn it pretty quickly.
Once things smooth out and the game opens up and moves along well, it is a really great game. I do think it was stripped a bit down from an even bigger experience, but what we get is pretty vast.
I heard a guy 100% cleared the map of all gigs, sidequests, and other stuff and he said it took him 47 hours(including the main story as well). I find that short. I am at about 23-25 hours and it easily would have 40+ more hours if I did everything. I won’t, but it looks pretty long.