It all felt like a waste of time

[anakin skywanker]

Yeah man i felt so cheated, i put a lot of time in side quests just to free roam after but the game just puts you before the Hanako meeting. Clearly because the game was rushed and many side quests involve Johnny and wouldn't be same w/o him. I often remember how awesome RDR2 was in that regard. Boy what a game that was, still one of the best i played, It's just... Rich. Unlike CP2077. RDR2 spoiler: And unlike in this one. world moves on after Arthur dies

Then the choices. I have that problem where you make the decisions in a story driven game and expect it to play out a certain way just to have a completely different outcome you never wanted nor it was a logical thing to happen. It might be a me thing but there is always a moment in every game that end up with a questionable outcome.

I had a lot of options for an ending. I had them all basically, but went with the Hanako ending. What do i get? Panam is mad for not getting her involved though i only wanted to protect her. Johnny is mad at me because i didn't let him go berserk even though he said he will accept my choice and was even madder when i tried to reaon with him at the very end. I went with the side to get the medical help for myself and what do i get? i will end up dead no matter what, no matter what ending i choose. Like. What the ♥♥♥♥ are those options?

Dude i feel cheated, i spent 40+ hours investing in a world and trying to fix my mistake just to hear at the end it's unfixable. bruh

And yea i could have just hopped in one of the existing topics but i want more opinions about what i said in particular, even though there are lots of similar things. Guys, how you felt? Let it all out!

[fauxpas]

Didn't care for either of the Red Dead games but I think part of the problem stems from the fact that apparently Johnny wasn't meant to be such a large part of the game but Reeves is such a cool person (and from what I hear he really is the nicest guy) the devs went all fan girl and shoved his character into the plot so they could spend more time hanging out with him.

But yeah, with very few exceptions I felt as if there were no real choices and the character I had the most connection with was Jackie.

[Zebedee]

Originally posted by interløper:

Dude i feel cheated, i spent 40+ hours investing in a world and trying to fix my mistake just to hear at the end it's unfixable. bruh

If that's your head canon to your V's ending then it is what it is. But... there's very few endings which don't allow for the possibility of V finding a cure, and even of those there's only the one where V dies for sure. The game does far more to set a tone for each ending, bringing forward some sort of loss into the foreground, but even that is open to personal interpretation even when not balanced by other elements.

Can totally understand why the endings are a bit offputting for some. There's a lot of leaning into going on a journey only to arrive back where you started to cyberpunk as a genre rather than there being a neat resolution and traditional 'happy ever after' ending. It's done really, really well when compared to what eventually became a parody within the genre. eg Case buys himself a new liver, a new cyberdeck, and a ticket back to the Sprawl etc etc.

[stingray87]

You asked, i answer. I think this is like saying ~Bruh we played bowling for 8 hours straight and in the end i lost... i feel cheated, everything i did was for nothin. See if only the endings of things would count i suggest not to get up in the mornings because life's ending is not thaaaat good actually.

[anakin skywanker]

Originally posted by fauxpas:

Didn't care for either of the Red Dead games but I think part of the problem stems from the fact that apparently Johnny wasn't meant to be such a large part of the game but Reeves is such a cool person (and from what I hear he really is the nicest guy) the devs went all fan girl and shoved his character into the plot so they could spend more time hanging out with him.

But yeah, with very few exceptions I felt as if there were no real choices and the character I had the most connection with was Jackie.

yea h heard that too, about making him more prominent. maybe they didn't have enough time to adjust. recording new lines form both Keanu and other actors, rewriting script etc....

[Vela Darney]

I mean, it becomes pretty clear pretty fast Johnny's raging, flaming ANTI-corpo and Arasaka's like his archenemy of archenemies (to a point where he might or might not have planted a nuke in their friggin' tower 50 years back and killed half a million people just to destroy Arasaka) and you're surprised he gets mad at you for going to friggin' 'SAKA, of all corporations, and get him shredded (read: killed)?

Yeah, of all the things that are surprising or unexpected in this game - this one really, really ain't.

[anakin skywanker]

Originally posted by Vela Darney:

I mean, it becomes pretty clear pretty fast Johnny's raging, flaming ANTI-corpo and Arasaka's like his archenemy of archenemies (to a point where he might or might not have planted a nuke in their friggin' tower 50 years back and killed half a million people just to destroy Arasaka) and you're surprised he gets mad at you for going to friggin' 'SAKA, of all corporations, and get him shredded (read: killed)?

Yeah, of all the things that are surprising or unexpected in this game - this one really, really ain't.

i mean he understood that he might die, he comes to the terms, he wants a gig and a life of smasher from you, then he suddenly meets the daugter he wants to go berserk again and is mad at you when you don't. Acted as if he wanted my body all along. That's a difficult situation and he essentially backed down at the wery end

[Vela Darney]

Originally posted by interløper:

Originally posted by Vela Darney:

I mean, it becomes pretty clear pretty fast Johnny's raging, flaming ANTI-corpo and Arasaka's like his archenemy of archenemies (to a point where he might or might not have planted a nuke in their friggin' tower 50 years back and killed half a million people just to destroy Arasaka) and you're surprised he gets mad at you for going to friggin' 'SAKA, of all corporations, and get him shredded (read: killed)?

Yeah, of all the things that are surprising or unexpected in this game - this one really, really ain't.

i mean he understood that he might die, he comes to the terms, he wants a gig and a life of smasher from you, then he suddenly meets the daugter he wants to go berserk again and is mad at you when you don't. Acted as if he wanted my body all along. That's a difficult situation and he essentially backed down at the wery end

Well, but in the 'Saka end - you don't give him Smasher. And just because he's ready to die that doesn't mean he's ready to get shredded by Arasaka. It's important to him HOW he dies. You "selling out" to Arasaka is the ultimate betrayal in his eyes. He trusted you, he's ready to take that bullet for you - and you go and betray him. And, as he views it, yourself. Of course he's mad. I'd be mad, too.

As for wanting your body all along - if you do any of the other endings and actually get to Mikoshi, you'll see that, when you decide to give him your body, he actually does try to stop you from crossing the bridge into cyberspace a couple of times.

[anakin skywanker]

As for wanting your body all along - if you do any of the other endings and actually get to Mikoshi, you'll see that, when you decide to give him your body, he actually does try to stop you from crossing the bridge into cyberspace a couple of times.

so does V, when you play as Johnny and Alt lays it all out for them. which is a cool moment in itself

I mean... Was I a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to trust Arasaka or did he overreact to my decision? Thoughts?

[Vela Darney]

Personally, I'd trust Arasaka as far as I can throw their tower ... :P

[Grobut]

Originally posted by fauxpas:

Didn't care for either of the Red Dead games but I think part of the problem stems from the fact that apparently Johnny wasn't meant to be such a large part of the game but Reeves is such a cool person (and from what I hear he really is the nicest guy) the devs went all fan girl and shoved his character into the plot so they could spend more time hanging out with him.

There's a ton of misinformation floating around about this, for whatever reason there are some people out there who are desperate to blame all the game's problems on Keanu Reeves, and they have been putting out a lot of crazy theories about this whole thing that people end up echoing, often without even realizing it.

In truth Keanu doesen't seem to have had any impact on the story. We know he asked if he could get some more voice lines, because it seemed strange that Johnny would only ever talk to V durring story missions, and CDPR agreed, which is why Johnny now pops up in a few of the non-story Gigs and side missions, and has a few lines of dialog.

That seems to be all he did though, those few lines of dialog, in those very few side-gigs that has them. That was the entirety of Keanu's creative contribution from the information we have (and it's a good contribution if you ask me, because it would indeed seem strange if Johnny only ever spoke durring main missions).


How we ended up with the very Johnny and Chip focused story seems to be entirely down to crunch. We know this game went through development hell, that throughout it's development life it has had several different story ideas, that the entire game has been scrapped and started completely over multiple times. Feature-creep seems to have been the big killer here, as it often is in videogame development, you have all these creative people working on the project, all these cool ideas floating around, and that became the problem, trying to bite off more than they could chew.

As the investors and shareholders grew more and more impatient, CDPR finally realized that they would never get this game released unless they focused the project down to something more managable, something they could actually chew and get done, and that seems to be the real reason why Cyberpunk ended up such a story driven game (and even that wasen't quite enough, as evidenced by the rough state of the game at release).


Keanu had no hand in any of that development, and he probably wasen't even as expensive to hire as people might assume, because CDPR clearly cut a deal with him to put Arch Motorcycles into the game as product placement (Keanu is the co-owner of the real life Arch Motorcycle company). If you didn't know why Jackie drives and Arch and why the game goes out of it's way to call attention to that fact, well, now you do.

[TGC> The Games Collector]

Choices don't matter much when you rush a game like this.

Just like with that Occupational Hazard gig.
Whether you kill or knock out the cyberpsycho, dialogue choices always result in saying you killed the psycho. Which is... weird.
Also would've expected Regina to have more interest in the cyberpsycho from that gig.

There's also a gig where you need to retrieve stuff from someone who "skipped town" but after finding their body in the basement, there's no way to inform the fixer about that either.

Another oversight is the fancy new Kiroshi optics you get at the start of the game. Apparently it has an ammo counter and stuff!
Except... you already have all that with the Sandra Dorsett mission you did before that. There is zero difference in HUD before or after you go to Vic.

Might not be related to the ending, but these things do kinda bug me.

[anakin skywanker]

Originally posted by TGC> The Games Collector:

Choices don't matter much when you rush a game like this.

Just like with that Occupational Hazard gig.
Whether you kill or knock out the cyberpsycho, dialogue choices always result in saying you killed the psycho. Which is... weird.
Also would've expected Regina to have more interest in the cyberpsycho from that gig.

There's also a gig where you need to retrieve stuff from someone who "skipped town" but after finding their body in the basement, there's no way to inform the fixer about that either.

Another oversight is the fancy new Kiroshi optics you get at the start of the game. Apparently it has an ammo counter and stuff!
Except... you already have all that with the Sandra Dorsett mission you did before that. There is zero difference in HUD before or after you go to Vic.

Might not be related to the ending, but these things do kinda bug me.

i didn't skip stuff tho. I had every choice avalible and apparently i chose the worst and Johnny all of the sudden thinks i am a ♥♥♥♥, and i died. And a choice between that and "Johnny doesn't hate me but i die anyway" is my gripe. Or you go with Panam's crew and in the end you diee anyway. Or you go with Rogue and... die in the end anyway. I mean the build up doesn't really match the payoff.

Not to mention the gameplay aspect that just throws in a bin all your progress and comes to a abrupt end and the best thing it offers to avoid that is to go back to the "before endgame" save

[Zebedee]

The ending is just not the traditional resolution. Noone comes onto the stage to tidy up all the corpses and set the kingdom to rights again. It's left ambiguous and for you to decide what happens next.

Here's some key parts of the beginning and ending of Neuromancer, the classic of this genre, to show the convention the game is following instead.

THE JAPANESE HAD already forgotten more neurosurgery than the Chinese had ever known. The black clinics of Chiba were the cutting edge, whole bodies of technique supplanted monthly, and still they couldn’t repair the damage he’d suffered in that Memphis hotel.

A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void. . . . The Sprawl was a long strange way home over the Pacific now, and he was no console man, no cyberspace cowboy. Just another hustler, trying to make it through. But the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he’d cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, his hands clawed into the bedslab, temperfoam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn’t there.

Epic heist later.

HE SPENT THE bulk of his Swiss account on a new pancreas and liver, the rest
on a new Ono-Sendai and a ticket back to the Sprawl.

He found work.

He found a girl who called herself Michael.

Best characters in cyberpunk can hope for is to save (define as you please) themselves or at least have a new beginning of some sort. Whether as a construct wandering cyberspace, or with people they've formed relationships with, or failing that even (as in Pondsmith's world) go out in flames to be remembered as the best at what they did. Can understand if people find it unsatisfying, personally I enjoy it being left to me to finish the story in the way I please if I choose to. Or I can leave cyberpunk characters where the author does, frozen in those final moment. Molly spitting on the pavement. V leaving everything behind to join Alt's communities of constructs and AI the other side of the wall.

[TGC> The Games Collector]

Originally posted by interløper:

i didn't skip stuff tho.

I mean development skipped some important story-related details there.

It's kinda silly there's no non-lethal dialogue for that rescue mission. How could they have missed stuff like that!?

[セーラーマーズ]

Things in life don't always go your way. I think the game does a nice job telling this.