Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
- 102
- 5
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Finally finished Cyberpunk 2077. Had a hard time choosing an ending - they all made sense! - and when I did choose I couldn't bring myself to go through with it because it seemed no better than the others. Picked it up again, couldn't play because all my mods were outdated, stoically updated them one by one, got it to run again and finally finished that thing.
Damn. That was nice. I watched some videos showcasing the other endings, and yea, I do have to say this was a good game. Faulty, sure. Coming up short relative to the expectations raised by its marketing. Inconsistent and mis-paced even in its storytelling. Trivially easy. But the actual story was, I think, the best and cleverest I've seen in any game so far, and a very good choice for a narrative game with branching storylines and endings. In other games that ran along similar structures, the preferred path usually seems clear from start to finish, and choices are foregone conclusions. Some games are narratively so bad I just pick the most destructive options to get them over with, or more likely just quit. But C77 actually made me question my choices, and revise them, and in the end I was unsatisfied with them not because they were bad or suboptimal, but because each path offered trade-offs and each seemed valid.
I'll lay out my rough progression of impressions:
What makes it so difficult to choose between letting Johnny have the body and keeping it for yourself is the following: It's been altered so that if you keep it, it's going to die soon. You get a little more time to live your life, but it'll be a short one. Johnny would get the full lifespan out of it. Early on the in the game, with me still hating his guts, that'd have been an easy choice to kill him and take what's left of mine - but a lot of interactions later, I may still not want to be him, but I'd seriously consider giving up a few months of dying to grant a new friend a new lease on life.
There's also the other choice to make, which is how you'd want to spend your last months. Kill yourself immediately? Try to save yourself by getting the highest-tech treatment available? Go out in a blaze of glory? Or wander out into the desert and die under an open sky, surrounded by friends? I chose the latter because it suits my temperament (honestly how I hope to die IRL, unlikely as it is), but each of the other choices had sound reasons working in their favor as well.
Media usually fails to get me on board with such plots. This one managed. Nicely done. Maybe it's just because its themes of identity and death are relevant to my mid-life crisis, but even then I think it did a good job of it.
Gameplay's still too easy though.
Here's a comfy song from the game: https://youtube.com/watch?v=P39hce9IMiw
Had they not promised the moon, I think the game would have been received much better. Also, it was broken on consoles at launch, so there's that. Most of the discussion not being about the game's writing frustrated me, because it's really quite something.
Honestly, as fine as the main story is, a few of the smaller side quests in the game have writing that haunted me for long after the game was over. Dream On in particular actually stopped me in my tracks near its resolution and had me thinking about the right course of action in a way I haven't been challenged by any piece of media in years.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link