netwatch or VDB's?

[Magic Man]

ive played through a few times an wanna just hear peoples opinions on this choice in partiuclar because my stance is netwatch. the VDB's to my understanding are the worst type of traitors literally wanting to turn on humanity rather than use their incredible netrunning skills to help try to find a way to make a better defense than the blackwall which mind you is an A.I. itself making it a TENUIOUS defense against the rogue A.I. that want to enter the new net AT BEST. like whats worse is they keep poking holes to try to find the right way to enter the old net and thus join the side of the A.I. basically worhiping them and wanting to sell out to them as slaves perhaps even being willing to hand over their bodies to facilitate the A.I. who want to enter the worlds plans especially with their hyper insular community they made which serves as the perfect staging ground for the A.I. to enter the world. beyond all this the not only ♥♥♥♥♥♥ over evelyn with a suicide squad style bomb in her neck that put her in that coma that led to all that horrible ♥♥♥♥ from fingers and the tyger claws and especially the deaths head moth but they also put one in our necks and before someone tries saying 'but netwatch did the same thing!!!' no, they put a tracker in us that would hopefully lead them to alt so they could contain and or destroy her as she was the A.I.'s best route through the blackwall and back as much as they want and with her original human nature, granted the A.I. a ♥♥♥♥ ton of info on the human world perhaps even being one of the biggest traitors of them all especially when you consider she made soul killer. literally as i see it, netwatch is the one to go with and making sure you kill placide on your way out is a must rather than leaving any of the VDB's top brass who knew enough to even MAYBE make this horrid plan of theirs work.

[Coffee Addict]

voodoo boys are scum it was a no brainer for me to take em out

[Silverbane7]

just remember that the VooDoo Boys you meet up with in Pacifica, working for/with Mamon Brigitte are NOT the only faction of the VooDoo Boys.

there are other factions of them who are not the same.
granted, most of those are only interested in themselves, what they can gain from using their runner skills and how much money they can make from that..
but the rest of them... are not really interested in whats beyond the Blackwall, and seem to have a 'don't go near it, don't mess with it, or it will EAT YOUR SOUL...' kind of deal going with it, and the AI from beyond it

there is also a small faction of Maelstrom's who want to use their chrome to merge with or join the AI past the Blackwall, so it may not be just Brigitte's gang who are poking holes in it.

it was not a 'bomb' they put into Evelyn it was a homebrew malware.
what they put into V was more spyware, with a triggerable paylode embedded.
'he who swallows the light'
there is a guy out in the badlands who survived it, but he went psycho from what it did to his brain
i think they do that to EVERYONE that works for them (who isnt Pacifica born and raised.)

you also dont need to kill Brigitte's people... Alt will take them on a one way trip to meet their New Loa of the Net, some time after you leave the undercrypt.
(and Placide's coat isnt realy worth it for Valerie...it looks okay on Vincent tho lol)

[Tokenn]

I've played it both ways many times. Personally, I enjoy the fight with Brigitte and her crew in the crypt, so I am most likely to opt for that one. But as with many decisions you make in this game, they don't make a lot of difference to the overall story.

[Mati_Lublin]

Netwatch. At least that guy doesn't intend to kill you afterwards and is quite honest with his plans. VDB have no redeeming qualities and are turned into DodoBoys.

[Magic Man]

Originally posted by Silverbane7:

just remember that the VooDoo Boys you meet up with in Pacifica, working for/with Mamon Brigitte are NOT the only faction of the VooDoo Boys.

there are other factions of them who are not the same.
granted, most of those are only interested in themselves, what they can gain from using their runner skills and how much money they can make from that..
but the rest of them... are not really interested in whats beyond the Blackwall, and seem to have a 'don't go near it, don't mess with it, or it will EAT YOUR SOUL...' kind of deal going with it, and the AI from beyond it

there is also a small faction of Maelstrom's who want to use their chrome to merge with or join the AI past the Blackwall, so it may not be just Brigitte's gang who are poking holes in it.

it was not a 'bomb' they put into Evelyn it was a homebrew malware.
what they put into V was more spyware, with a triggerable paylode embedded.
'he who swallows the light'
there is a guy out in the badlands who survived it, but he went psycho from what it did to his brain
i think they do that to EVERYONE that works for them (who isnt Pacifica born and raised.)

you also dont need to kill Brigitte's people... Alt will take them on a one way trip to meet their New Loa of the Net, some time after you leave the undercrypt.
(and Placide's coat isnt realy worth it for Valerie...it looks okay on Vincent tho lol)

you do realize that when i say bomb i dont mean a literal bomb right? i mean they put something in ya that will kill or seriously maim you if you cross them or as we have seen with ev and us, at least maim you with evelyn only 'survived' likely becuase i bet netwatch had helped put SOME ice on her but her ♥♥♥♥ up to get the chip resulted in the ice they gave her being minimal and not enough that would force them to have to fight the VDB's if they found and went after evelyn in earnest and more importantly, their plan was to have us kick the bucket with the netwatch agents the second we uploaded the virus to them in the first place. beyond that if you side with the netwatch agent, alt full on just frys them and their specific subnet to cut of netwatches path to her which i still feel is the best choice because it leads to the deaths of brigettes branch of the VDB's which like you mentioned was the only or at least main one seaking to turncoat to the A.I.'s side and make it past the blackwall both protecting the blackwall from further meddling from them AND putting an end to them rather than letting them serve as pawns for the wild A.I. that wanna breach the blackwall.

[Silverbane7]

netwatch didnt know who she was, or what she was talking about (Evelyn)

poke about in the Netwatch agents laptop and you will find 3 files, one is a poem in Hatian (about dancing. google translate provided)
and one is a conversation between Evelyn and netwatch.
they respond to her that they have no idea what she is talking about (when she is telling them she has what they want and she can get it to them, for a price)

however, Yorinobu has a similar conversation with 'netwatch' in one of his computers.
where 'netwatch' tell him they want a Relic, specifically with the engram of Johnny Silverhand on it, or no deal.

what they did to Evelyn was hack her doll chip remotely to burn out the register.
if you talk to Woodman and have high enough in ether Int or Tech (its been a while lol) you can offer to help him make sure the same thing that happened to her, does not happen again to any other doll...as the price for him giving you the information as to where she is.
V will tell Woodman to get a specific security program to protect the dollhouse network from hackers/netrunners.

it's what woodman did after she was hit by the malware, that sent her catatonic.
he had her for 4 days before sending her to Fingers. and Fingers replaced the burned out register.

Placide didnt recognise the relic in Vs head. and V didnt (at least when i play V lol) tell him what exactly it was (dosen't matter...busted anyway)
so he treated V like he would any other 'ranyon' slap a spyware program into V to watch what V did.
when V connected up, he hit the 'frying tonight' button. V was only supposed to connect so that the VDBs could connect
when you connect to the van in the GIM courtyard, V can ask 'can't you just roast em remotely?' and he will tell V that they cant get thru.
a direct connection between V and Bryce was the only way they could get to him.
the fact that 'he who swallows the light' would fry V along with the netwatch agents was just extra. collateral damage that benefited him (Placide)
he gets a telling off for putting V (the relic) in danger like that in the first place...but then, Mamon Brigitte should have maybe let him in on what the relic looked like.

thing is, if you flatline the whole lot of them after getting out of the icebath, while V gets thier loot and exp...later on, if you are playing thru the expansion, you will be recognised by the VDBs you need to get thru, when you and Reed go there to talk to the blind netrunner.
if you walked away, they will let you pass inside to talk to him.
they die anyway. and i don't think any of them can pass back thru the Blackwall.
so whatever mischief they get up to is going to be on the outside of the wall.

also, i dont think Evelyn even had ICE. hardware or software based.
she may have been smart (smart enough to figure out what they wanted, that Yori had a deal with netwatch, and to get Dex to take her job....)
but not smart enough to realise that the netwatch who had contacted Yori were actually the VDBs themselves. so they would never have 'paid' Yorinobu in any case, nor her.
once they had the layout of the suite (her job in the heist, to record the layout so they could find the safe) they would have done the same thing V and Jackie did (only better lol, probably) and kleped the thing themselves.
Evelyn would have been fried exactly the same way. sure, they might have deposited her payment in her account...but then it would vanish, once they slipped into the dollhouse network and fried her.
they never planned to pay anyone.

[Zebedee]

I'm far less convinced than the OP that the choice is quite so binary. There's only hints in the old lore about Netwatch's possible motivations - they were trying to get Alt to work with them to find old knowledge lost in the crash (see also Lucy's backstory in Edgerunners for Arasaka trying that), and before that it's hinted that they may have worked with rogue AI to create the Blackwall in the first place. With what we know from Phantom Liberty, got to wonder what they were intending.

Kill them all, let god sort them out etc.

[rzL]

while nw isn't exactly all sunshine and unicorns, at least they don't actively plan to flatline you after you're no longer useful, so the choice is fairly easy imo

[Punished Rusty Shackleford]

Netwatch.

[Sin]

when ever I am thinking about this I end up like this:
Corps need a somewhat controlled and stable enviroment to exploit people, so ultimately they will provide some ♥♥♥♥♥♥ form of stability for everyone.
The VDB sees the end of the world coming and thinks: ♥♥♥♥ it, we are doing it live!

... I don't share their believe that they could ally with the AIs - it's just a suicide cult, no reason to join up even before the narrative of Cyberpunk 2077. WIth their operations and how they effected you and those around you? *Loads monowire with malicious intent.*

[mistahbungle]

Zero all the VDBs + that Netwatch bozo in the cinema...

[Tokenn]

Originally posted by mistahbungle:

Zero all the VDBs + that Netwatch bozo in the cinema...

Note that if you take out the Netwatch agent, there's some interesting and revealing stuff to read on his computer...

[不良ヌルポインタ]

lol what if you kill netwatch and voodoo I say it's the best

[EricHVela]

If the choice is only one or the other and not both, I'll take out the doomsday cult, VBs.

Otherwise if both are an option to be zeroed, I'd consider the risk of both getting out of the game, but Netwatch isn't just in Pacifica. They're all over, and removing them opens a lot of unguarded doors. So, the VDBs still lose when weighing the risks of both being options to eliminate.

If I'm willing to risk the chance that someone better will come along to replace the vacuum left by Netwatch, I'd take them both out, but the risk is based on a lot of faith when the historical evidence seems contrary.

[Actalo]

I view the world of Cyberpunk through the anti-human (AI) vs trans-human (corpo) vs human (civilians/nomads) struggle. The (Pacifica) VDBs are essentially anti-human - they wish to usher-in the downfall of humanity via AI takeover, which they see as inevitable anyway.

I think the trans-humanists and the AI-worshipers are both pretty terrible groups to align with so I guess it's up to the player and what kind of V they want to make. But I usually side with Netwatch since I figure V would as well, if only to spite Johnny.