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Jackie a little, but he is kind of dumb. Through him ever so slightly his mother/Misty, but not much. Alas, I do not believe him and Misty would have ever worked out in the long run but it is what it is and she is a nice person even if weird.
Panam, the one interesting female in the game imo and also a normal human being. Some of the best quests in the game, too, imo. At least so far... I've done two of her big quests. They feel the most immersive and genuine though sometimes her phrasing is a tad off and they really showcase at times just how bad V's voice acting freaking sucks in this game. I like that she isn't an easy catch trope like the others and their very awkward and other times warm interactions are interesting like at the barn, hotel, etc. The supporting cast adds some nice elements to it, too. It feels just a lot more real than much of the game.
The Jefferson / Elizabeth / River actually somewhat interests me even though I've only done the first quest (note I also looked online for a bit more info because I didn't fully agree with some of the dialogue options and it felt very off like there was a lot more going on here, and there actually is). I like River because the guy is legitimately a bonafide good guy cop which is too rare, especially in this city. He lives by integrity and justice, not strictly the law or what his superiors say and he doesn't take the easy way out. You can see a lot in your interactions with him on just the first mission, alone. Jefferson and his wife Elizabeth were surprisingly easy to talk to and seemed to be fairly honest, overall, despite being politicians. It was a surprising change of pace. I don't know for sure if there is more to them in the negative sense or behind hidden, but I did spoil myself a bit about the tail end of what is potentially going on and their situation and it is quite tragic, really, but also a rather interesting twist and I understand why people are mad the questline ends so abruptly considering what is going on (though that is also part of the likely mystery the devs intended). I've read River is actually one of the romantic interests btw, but I'm playing a male and I still find him a good character.
I think that Johnny has some interesting bits after the initial utterly obnoxious start, but my verdict remains to be seen.
The ripper doc friend is a real bud, but not much to say beyond that with what I've seen in the story so far.
Know who I hate? Claire. The lady from the bar. She has race missions and after the first mission with her she basically treats you like crap if you respond to her at the end of the race about the road you take not the destination option. I realize there are people like this in real life, too, sadly... but this kind of response has me ready to nope out of the rest of her missions permanently, even more so considering her background and prior partner. I think this was more of a writer fail than trying to be real though.
Overall, I don't care much for the characters, either. The writing in the game kind of sucks, V's voice acting really drags it down (he often comes off hyper flat at important emotional times that don't match the dialogue coming out and don't seem to be related to an emotional state/situation, and people thought Ada Wong's VA was bad...), and the game is full of some really bad padding quests (Sinnerman anyone? nah... River's quest is 100x better, there is nothing to Sinnerman's and the community's take on it being thought provoking and such has made me lose faith in the community's opinion. this quest is offensively bad, especially now that the dev has even crippled most play routes making them impossible. on the other hand the community's conclusion that simply not doing the quest and intentionally failing it from the start, losing the tail, is the best ending partially restores faith... the questline is that bad).
Honestly, I'm not sure if I will finish the game. It just has a ton of issues with the writing and quests. Only a few as mentioned have kept me moderately interested for now.
They start off an amazing idea. That gets ruined more and more anytime somebody whines "They should win because their mommy bought them better toys than you!" Multiply that times five whenever somebody cries their uncle at nintedo said it is smasher's turn to win less tham a pargraph away from declaring a tabletop, anime, or videogame protagonist is a power fantasy.
I want to imagine a smasher so hardcore that trying to ambush him during cyber surgery results in him headbutting you to death with his biopod spine and brain box like a horror movie monster.
Instead, we get "ooooh he should have had his megazord toy for that fight! no fair that he only had a missile launcher able to carpet bomb a whole zipcode!"
As for Jackie? Jackie has a lot more depth as a corpo start. But a lot of people try to brush that off as "You are a facsist if you don't take street kid or nomad!" and then get the dumbest "Who even is this guy?" jackie.
While corpo jackie? Already your friend. Already has his ♥♥♥♥ together. Has saved your ass on some kid of job in the past already. Has more meaningful conversations. Actually, has something to risk helping you out in the life path intro, done just because he cares instead of because he is basically stuck with you.
While street kid and nomad is "Hey now that we ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up stealing a car/smuggling a lizard... wanna move in together?" writers shrugging and needing to rush to the same end point as usual.
I thought Evelyn was interesting until she wasn't
If you have a hate boner for any characters you can always pick the mean lines in dialogues and try to disrupt their interests and/or drop their calls, that's the beauty of an "RPG" (I know it isn't really but you know what I mean).
Most other characters are anoying at best and flat at worst but even the most flat side character in this game seemed to have some thought put into it, and that goes a long way, how many characters you can say were good in [openworldgame]?
GTA 5 - only the main characters are worth their salt tbh, and maybe one or two side characters such as Lamar. Everyone else is hate bait.
Skyrim - Flat character land, most memorable NPCs are the ones with meme lines
Haven't played The Geraldo games so I can't compare.
RDR2 - Is a western, so they had to make the story and characters incredible to make people interested in playing the game, so there's a lot of interesting characters, but plenty of boring ones as well.
GTA 4 had plenty of boring characters with an interesting story, kind of like Cyberpunk.
All in all, I would say Cyberpunk has it serviceable but could be better and I'm optimist for the sequel considering the developers listened to the community and all the trajectory so far.
The true curse of fallout 4 was forcing me to accept NV wasn't as deep as we thought it was, when everyone having slapfights about the factions in NV and bragging the NV brotherhood are the best because they are the most mean and gritty were the same people crying "Fo4 BoS are both weak babies AND fascists! Also the institute literally feeding kittens to supermutants isn't evil and if you disagree with me you love fascism!"
2077 has the more generic curse of every franchise ever where all of the impressive lore figures they dangle in front of your face are all incompetent when it counts, because there would be no plot a player character could fit in if anybody could live up to their hype except to pat eachother on the back.
"You just hate gritty endings in a gritty setting-"
"Sorry, too busy laughing my ass off that Tall AI NPC is too stupid to do the job but trying very hard to act like it isn't a failing on their part. Wow, I expected the end result but the excuse for it really sucks the drama out."
It isn't a bittersweet story in a gritty setting, it is a clown car pile up as your eyes widen in morbid curiosity at how often everyone drops the ball so hard it shakes the entire ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ setting, repeatedly, with you getting a front row seat.
spoiler checklist for people who don't want to know the overall plot beats.
1; "Behold our master heist prepared by people who know better than you!... oh no it ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up because of purely bad luck.
2; "Behold, corpo god king arasaka himself "I don't need a bodyguard lol"... strangled by his own kid great job idiot.
3; Behold the voodoo boys! So cool, so clever. Or maybe netwatch is the most clever?... Nah they are all useless ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ it is Alt's turn to play with the nintendo
4; Hey rogue wanna find smasher for me?... Are you seriously just bringing a liberty pistol for operation 'kill smasher'?... Not even here? Why are you mad at ME you are the ♥♥♥♥ up. The NPC on the boat is literally laughing at you for ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this up, jesus.
5; Standard/don't fear the reaper endings. "I pushed the self destruct on the server that you had to do 120% of all the work letting me connect to. Oh also I am too stupid to actually fix you, totally not my fault though who could have foreseen the results of a chip I have already scanned and you have a copy of the blueprints of. Not like I am a god tier AI being or anything.
So much of the plot is trying to teach you and Johnny "Wow, J man was kind of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ huh?" when in reality he is one of the most competent people in the setting, just because even a drunken drug addled rocker boy lunatic can't ♥♥♥♥ up worse than everyone else even if he tried. No wonder I laugh at the idea of taking the new DLC ending. J man deserves closure for putting up with everyone else.
FNV and even Morrowind, if you're going to cherry pick like that, were products of their circumstances.
FNV specifically already had everything else built around it (to put it bluntly, FNV is a huge expansion to FO3; they didn't have to build the game from scratch in terms of gameplay concepts, etc. - they had the luxury to focus on the writing). Now CDPR has an opportunity to do the same with Cyberpunk 2 or whatever they want to call the sequel to this game.
About players wanting to kill everything, that's the result of appealing to the broadest possible audience - kids and those who want to treat the game like a punching bag are going to act that way. And notice the reactions to any posts or threads that ask for more interaction options with NPCs besides just murder - those asking for more depth are usually dismissed as "weirdos" or "loners".
I love the characters, I just like everything else.
Might want to look into a couple of mods.
There were a couple that modified just the boss fights (back in 1.6) that rebalanced them, one that altered all fights generally. (Worth checking if they updated to work with 2.0+)
Another one was the 'Lifepath bonuses and gang corp traits' mod (think that's what it was called)
It changed how V gained exp/difficulty in comparison to which lifepath you chose. Streetkid Vs were familiar with the various gangs, so you gained less rep from fighting them, but also you had lower difficulty fighting them (you know their weaknesses)
Fighting against 'unknown' groups (cops, wraiths and Corpo's in the case of the streetkid) gave you greater rep for beating them, but came with increased difficulty since you don't know them as well.
Add into that the fact all the factions get buffs/debuffs to make it no longer easy to just keep using the same exact tactics on em, and the difficulty goes up when the game difficulty does, and you might have a Smasher you can call your own monster.
(They all have immunities to at least one type of damage or quickhack, from memory.)
You'd have to change up your attack style, weapons and quickhack depending on the gang, corp and so on.
Yeah, I know 'I shouldn't have to mod' but we have to, to get things how we want, most of the time.
I want all the gear I see on the NPC's lol. But I have to use Equipment EX, TweekXL and ArchiveXL to get it lol.
To the second part there, you're implying correlation to causation. You can appeal to a broader audience without sacrificing your writing. But in the case of many games and my actual point, people also react that way when the characters are so boring and annoying they just want to blow past them to get away from it.
There’s bound to be a large number of random one-off quest NPCs in games that you meet and never see again after finishing the quest. It’s not really uncommon nor surprising if you don’t give a flock about them.
I actually wished we saw more of the characters in the prologue ie Jackie, T-Bug, Dex, Evelyn, etc. The first two we supposedly worked with for at least a few months so I would have loved to have been given at least one Act so I could actually feel attached to them instead of being shown a slideshow after the Lifepath part of the prologue ends.
you can be an ahole and ruin everybodys life and still finish the game. maybe not the way you expected, but it is doable...
funfact, nobody give a f*ck about you 2 at the end, if you handle the game that way...
I guess you are being sarcastic. But you literally picked the one game that has good characters and decent enough open world sandbox, and that's an old game built upon an existing game.
The closest example of a modern game with interesting plot and characters is RDR2 but even that has its flaws and has a 60% of it's developed content into cutting room floor.
I agree with your sentiment that writing is getting worse overall and it's not just with Cyberpunk. And that CDPR have developed some cookie cutter checklist npcs to appeal to the "current mood" let's put it like that.
But picking FNV of all things is definetly cherry picking, it's the exception, not the rule/standard (unfortunately).
And even new vegas could be tear apart if you would compare apples and oranges. I mean, I love Vice City, it's my favourite GTA game, but I don't pretend it has more budget and effort put into it than any entry that came after it because that's simply is not true.
Wanting every other open world game to be FNV is simply not realistic from triple A developers. I mean look at bethesda, they developed Daggerfall, Morrowind, Skyrim...will they make a game with the scope and depth of Daggerfall, the writring and setting of Morrowind and the graphics of skyrim? Not likely. Just look at Starfield, that game still sold horrors in comparison to how boring and shallow it is. People still defend Starfield to this day.
All that drama in Delamain driving to No-tell motel never clicked. Same with Ofrenda.