CD Projekt's Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.0 + Phantom Liberty Expansion Thread

[Tavar]

The writing of the main story is also very inconsistent. For example, you have the option to hand over control of your body at certain points in the story. When this happens for the first time, you’ll only see a super cut of what happened until you regain control. However, later in the story you keep control in this situation and can even make story decisions in them which make absolutely no sense.

I might be missing something since I still haven't bothered finishing the game, but I believe that's on purpose, a representation of your condition's progress with the implication that the construct is well along the way into supplanting the protagonist. When you relinquish control, Johnny takes over, so the first time you're watching him do his shit as an NPC, outside of the player's control. But as you do it more and more, Johnny's subsuming V and slowly being elevated to the status of PC, thus moving him into the player's sphere of control.

This is also reflected in your journal, which is presented in the second person as the voice V might be "hearing" inside of their head. When you start out, that voice is Jackie's, but as you progress, the Spanish terms of endearment peter out and by the third chapter it's all Johnny.

I thought this aspect was well handled, actually.

If this was their intention then they did a poor job of presenting it. You first hand over control during the "Chippin' In" side quest where you'll see the super cut. This leads to the next side quest "Blistering Love" where you already have direct control over Johnny and this happens within two ingame days. There is no gradual build up, no comment from V that he now sees more when Johnny is in charge, nothing. Also, if V is your character, should you even be able to play Johnny at all? Him taking over control should lead to less control instead of more. Given the state of the game it is hard to be sure.

 

[Sykar]

In regards to the rogue AI plot here we have Mike Pondsmith saying that NET = Hell



The netrunner he is talking about is 100% Spider Murphy.

I mean:
https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Spider_Murphy

Notes

• Spider Murphy's character was created by Mike Pondsmith's wife, Lisa. Her first appearance was in the Cyberpunk 2020 corebook.[5]

So yeah, hardly a surprise there.

 

[Gargaune]

This stuff flew over the head of 95% of people who played it. That and the unrealiable narratorness of Johny.

Yeah, I liked how they handled Johnny as a character. Alt explicitly points out the construct's deranged, self-deluding nature, and his flashbacks really drive home just how much of a narcissistic, violent psychopath he really is. It was amusing picking his most egotistical, megalomaniacal responses because they fit.

If this was their intention then they did a poor job of presenting it. You first hand over control during the "Chippin' In" side quest where you'll see the super cut. This leads to the next side quest "Blistering Love" where you already have direct control over Johnny and this happens within two ingame days. There is no gradual build up, no comment from V that he now sees more when Johnny is in charge, nothing. Also, if V is your character, should you even be able to play Johnny at all? Him taking over control should lead to less control instead of more. Given the state of the game it is hard to be sure.

That's the point, Johnny's an NPC when you start out, which is why the first sequence is non-interactive, but as he overwrites more and more of V, he's gradually becoming the PC right under the player's nose, so the player gets agency over his choices. You're outright warned that this would happen by one of the other NPCs, I forget which, that the Silverhand construct acts as a virus and will eventually ask you to voluntarily surrender more of yourself to it under various pretenses, and if you choose to do that, the player's growing degree of agency over Johnny is meant to mirror's V's diminished state.

This is the narrative designer folding the cyberpunk literary motif of identity into the videogame design concept of Player-Player Character identity. In a general sense, what you see happening to Peralez from an external perspective you also see happening to V, but first hand, internally and underlined by the resulting gameplay implications. It's a smart move and one of the stronger points of Cyberpunk's design because it renders a constituting literary theme at the interactive level. The pacing isn't optimal, yes, but that criticism's true of the entire game.

You could do things the other way around, like you suggest, with the player exercising less control over the protagonist the more Johnny takes over, but it would be a weaker representation of the subject matter - the Silverhand construct isn't a rival to the player, but to the player character, to V. And, as V, the idea isn't that you're losing control of yourself, but that you're losing yourself altogether, becoming someone else. Thus, the end point of the engram takeover succeeding is that the player is still in control of the protagonist, but that protagonist has changed, and the way CDPR have chosen to portray that is subtle but effective.

You start out holding a can of orange soda. The more you drink from it, the taste changes. You're still holding it, it's still your can of orange soda, but by the end it tastes like lemon-lime.


P.S. There's a flipside to this in a different department, though I've yet to finish the game and confirm. If I got it right, engaging with the side content is also contextualised in the scope of Silverhand's influence? If so, it's a bad call from both a writing perspective, a mismatch with Silverhand's character, and a design one, seeing as it retroactively deprecates player agency à la Bioshock. "Would you kindly" is a great twist for a book or movie, but a massive misstep for a videogame.

 

[Jenkem]

90% of this thread will be absolutely ready to suck CDPR's dick the moment they announce Twitcher 4

 

[Tyrr]

All that discussion over Johnny, or deeper meanings of other stuff happening in CP2077 reminds me of this:

 

[Can't handle the bacon]

No dude, the same devs who designed every character to look like this:

also intentionally invested the plot with ultra-subtle nuisances that only 1% of their target audience would even notice.

 

[Saravan]

This game was hyped for years with so much promised shit that never even made it into the game. Superficial FPS with a skeleton crew for RPG mechanics. Can't believe it's even remotely defended here.

 

[Stokowski]

The best thing about this festering neon distraction of a game remains the 2013 teaser trailer.

 

[Semiurge]

90% of this thread will be absolutely ready to suck CDPR's dick the moment they announce Twitcher 4

If it'll be an MMO then I don't know...Got to draw the line somewhere. Their plans for CDPR's future direction implied that they won't be focusing on standalone games like Witcher 1-3 anymore.

 

[Gargaune]

Okay, I finished it at last. I've left a fair bit of content on the table, some of it I'll come back to, some of it I just didn't feel like doing, but I wanted to wrap up the main plot. Gotta say, I'd have liked a happy ending for V, but choosing to turn down Arasaka's CTRL+V deal and to return to Earth was less depressing than I thought it would be... It's too bad she won't live. But then again, who does?

There's one detail that I'm not following about the Mikoshi option in the Arasaka ending, though. The early build, Soulkiller, destroyed Johnny in the process of copying him, but obviously that wasn't the case with the later software Saburo used before visiting Yorinobu, and presumably it's not the case with the commercial release for all those wealthy "actors and politicians" unless it's an end-of-life procedure. Yet this is not the offer before V, Takemura tells you that "you will leave your body", implying it's the same process that Silverhand went through. Why, is it do with the damage already done by the prototype Relic? What did I miss?

 

[mediocrepoet]

Okay, I finished it at last. I've left a fair bit of content on the table, some of it I'll come back to, some of it I just didn't feel like doing, but I wanted to wrap up the main plot. Gotta say, I'd have liked a happy ending for V, but choosing to turn down Arasaka's CTRL+V deal and to return to Earth was less depressing than I thought it would be... It's too bad she won't live. But then again, who does?

There's one detail that I'm not following about the Mikoshi option in the Arasaka ending, though. The early build, Soulkiller, destroyed Johnny in the process of copying him, but obviously that wasn't the case with the later software Saburo used before visiting Yorinobu, and presumably it's not the case with the commercial release for all those wealthy "actors and politicians" unless it's an end-of-life procedure. Yet this is not the offer before V, Takemura tells you that "you will leave your body", implying it's the same process that Silverhand went through. Why, is it do with the damage already done by the prototype Relic? What did I miss?

I got the impression that V basically has brain damage from whatever the engram is doing to him/her and the process is irreversible and cannot be stopped, so all they can do is upload whatever's left for preservation.

 

[WhiskeyWolf]

Why, is it do with the damage already done by the prototype Relic? What did I miss?

There are two points that relate to this:
1. Since the prototype is housing Silverhand it may be the older version.
2. V is a special case since once he/she got a bullet to the brain the chip considered them a dead body and began the overwriting process, which is causing damage on something that is still alive and shouldn't be. "It is not you who has cheated death, it is death that has cheated you" - I understood this as V thinking he survived by a miracle, but the truth being that he/she was already a dead man walking.

 

[Gargaune]

I got the impression that V basically has brain damage from whatever the engram is doing to him/her and the process is irreversible and cannot be stopped, so all they can do is upload whatever's left for preservation.

There are two points that relate to this:
1. Since the prototype is housing Silverhand it may be the older version.
2. V is a special case since once he/she got a bullet to the brain the chip considered them a dead body and began overrating them which is causing damage on something that is still alive. "It is not you who has cheated death, it is death that has cheated you" - I understood this as V thinking he survived by a miracle, but the truth being that he/she was already a dead man walking.

Yes, but V still has "around six months" to live and can choose to pass on the upload and go back to Night City. The thing is that whatever version of the procedure Saburo used obviously didn't destroy him in the process, it had to be done before you saw him visit Yorinobu, but the procedure Takemura offers clearly involves destroying V like it did Johnny, they can't both store their engram and return to NC to live out what's left of their time. When V asks why Arasaka can't provide a new body right away, like they did for Saburo, Takemura explains that the changes the Relic did made it impossible for current technology, but the game makes no mention why the copying process can't work the same way it did for Saburo. This is what I'm wondering about, whether I missed a detail there.

P.S. Or did they do the engram copy on Saburo after he died, like before the brain deteriorated too badly? Presumably Arasaka had access to it right away.

P.P.S. And one more thing - the space station being named Mikoshi, the orbital facility probably just shares the name of the data cloud but it did raise an eyebrow.

 

[Marat]

V is a special case since once he/she got a bullet to the brain

And so the mercenary who once cheated death in Night City cheated death once again and the Mojave Wasteland was forever changed...

A nie, czekaj!

 

[Justicar]

The process has obviously been perfected since the Johnny chip was made because the whole dispute between father and son is over selling the technology so rich Americans can upload their consciousness. And you get the Lizzy Wizzy side story about it too, and she's clearly alive after it.

Y the whole engram process has progressed in Johnnys day engram creation meant death of the person that went through the procedure. In 2077 they can just copy your brain contents and create your construct without you dying that's what they wanted to do with Lizzy Wizzy create a backup version of her.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

No dude, the same devs who designed every character to look like this:

also intentionally invested the plot with ultra-subtle nuisances that only 1% of their target audience would even notice.

Exaggeration. V being taken over by Ted is the main quest's plot and the journal writing style changing as the game progresses isn't something that requires elder scrolls levels of loremongering to detect.

 

[Mefi]

Y the whole engram process has progressed in Johnnys day engram creation meant death of the person that went through the procedure. In 2077 they can just copy your brain contents and create your construct without you dying that's what they wanted to do with Lizzy Wizzy create a backup version of her.

Sorry, I deleted cos I realised I'd misunderstood the question. I think that question is explained by the Alt endings, isn't it? You need an AI to disentangle the two. So V becoming an engram is in fact the V/Johnny mix (and more Johnny than V at that point) becoming an engram.

 

[Justicar]

Sorry, I deleted cos I realised I'd misunderstood the question. I think that question is explained by the Alt endings, isn't it? You need an AI to disentangle the two. So V becoming an engram is in fact the V/Johnny mix (and more Johnny than V at that point) becoming an engram.

Yes she says that V construct was affected by Johnny construct even after she separetes V and Johnny so V is not he same person he was at the start of the game.

 

[Mefi]

Yes she says that V construct was affected by Johnny construct even after she separetes V and Johnny so V is not he same person he was at the start of the game.

The haiku about cuckoos from the station has a similar message to that. Do wonder whether Arasaka has fully removed Johnny if you take up their offer to become an engram and wait for a potential body in the future. The whole station sequence is a bit weird and open to reading as a 'dream' or whatever.

 

[Gargaune]

Sorry, I deleted cos I realised I'd misunderstood the question. I think that question is explained by the Alt endings, isn't it? You need an AI to disentangle the two. So V becoming an engram is in fact the V/Johnny mix (and more Johnny than V at that point) becoming an engram.

Yes she says that V construct was affected by Johnny construct even after she separetes V and Johnny so V is not he same person he was at the start of the game.

This is also heavily implied in the Arasaka ending, wherein the construct is "successfully" removed but the damage can't be repaired and V still hears Johnny in their nightmares. Prior to that, Johnny outright says that "he" had become part of V's consciousness, so Arasaka removing the construct is akin to removing part of V's person.

But none of this explains why V can't simply get an engram copy as a potential backup for the future and then head back to NC to live out their remaining six months. The game tells us that Arasaka developed the tech to the point it's possible, as seen on Saburo and their other clients, but the offer facing V is operating on Soulkiller parameters, with the copy procedure being fatal.

Unless the entire thing on the space station is some sort of hallucination and V's already dead and being manipulated in Arasaka's data cloud, with the real choices presented meaning either archival or deletion. But that seems like an excessively grim interpretation, with the possible clues being this technical inconsistency, that "Mikoshi" is written on the space station and that the prompt on that last elevator ride after apprehending Yorinobu said "take one last trip." On the flipside, you can at one point call friends back on Earth from the orbital station and it seems illogical that Arasaka would betray V like that only to then turn around and give them a choice between archival and deletion, it seems more like they'd do whatever they wanted. If that were the intended reading of this particular epilogue, CDPR would've gone to counterproductive lengths to obscure it.

 

[Mefi]

The whole space station ending is a mess of contradictions and begins with "You've lost all your memories on how you got here" and ends with (on the engram ending) Misty telling you that her tarot reading is "The fool, the moon, and the high priestess" (or start of a journey, reality isn't what it seems, and mystery). Feels like writing done to try and force the binary decision point with things which have slipped through the editing (eg Takemuro saying Hanako has forgotten about V before the very next line saying he's been personally sent by Hanako...) or done just to seed doubt in the reality of the ending, such as the weirdness of the haiku quoting guard who also offers life advice which echoes Johnny's last spoken words to V in that ending.

 

[ferratilis]

I'm honestly surprised ShillUp hasn't deleted this video after release, because I've never heard so much shit come out of someone's mouth in 50 minutes. Having played the game and watching this now, it's like hearing a Jehovah's witness promoting their beliefs. Yeah, they believe in it, but you and everybody else knows it's bullshit.

 

[Child of Malkav]

I'm honestly surprised ShillUp hasn't deleted this video after release, because I've never heard so much shit come out of someone's mouth in 50 minutes. Having played the game and watching this now, it's like hearing a Jehovah's witness promoting their beliefs. Yeah, they believe in it, but you and everybody else knows it's bullshit.

I unsubbed from Shill Up the moment he said WD Legion was an open world immersive sim. Before that he was tolerable but that thing was the last straw for me. I didn't watch him since. But it's not surprising, like all YouTubers he wants views and money so of course he's gonna shill. And there are masses of retards who actually believe what these influencers are feeding them.

 

[Ibn Sina]

Anybody who listens to this motherfucker after he praised outer worlds as being "immersive and fun rpg" deserve what they get.

 

[Justicar]

I'm honestly surprised ShillUp hasn't deleted this video after release, because I've never heard so much shit come out of someone's mouth in 50 minutes. Having played the game and watching this now, it's like hearing a Jehovah's witness promoting their beliefs. Yeah, they believe in it, but you and everybody else knows it's bullshit.

Why the fuck do you listen to any jewtuber nigger? It's a waste of life all of them are shills you could spend your time more productive banging your head on the wall.