[Spoiler Alert] About the endings

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Do you want more RPGs with happy endings?


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I second that. For 7 endings you really could put ONE DARN HAPPY ENDING.

One.

Seriously - ONE.
My ending felt kinda happy even a bit strange not gona mention much cuz spoilers but i ended up with two girls cruising down to what i hope is where the future DLC will take place !
 
I had not finished SRHK, so that's a mild spoiler to me :shrug:
I don't mind it though, it's ok. And it's another proof that cyberpunk stories can have happy endings...
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Btw, Blade Runner's ending is dark and gritty, just not "bad" per se...
I would not say dark, it is convoluted and mysterious.
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My ending felt kinda happy even a bit strange not gona mention much cuz spoilers but i ended up with two girls cruising down to what i hope is where the future DLC will take place !
Where you die after 6 months as maybe V or clone of V. When you think about it, it is probably one of the saddest one considering there is no continuation after it, that you go away with friends, with loved ones and then you die after 6 months leaving more broken hearts than before.
 
My ending felt kinda happy even a bit strange not gona mention much cuz spoilers but i ended up with two girls cruising down to what i hope is where the future DLC will take place !

Feel free to openly talk about Judy's and Panam ending, the whole topic is spoiler-ridden

Also, I've set my sig to the summary posts, if anyone is interested.
 
This whole thread started an interesting conversation about endings and about what people wanted/were expecting.

But at the same time it makes me curious.

How many of you were familiar with cyberpunk, and I don't mean just the game but the whole setting?

Whether it was Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, movies like Bladerunner and ghost in shell, maybe books like Neuromancer etc.
Because it seems to me people went into this game/story with their own ideas of what cyberpunk is...

I understand the need for a happy ending, I really do. But truly happy endings in this setting are always rare. There is always something stopping the main character form achieving it. (death, loss of a loved one, depression, merger with an AI ang I can go on and on. The point I'm trying to make is that in this kind of world you are a spec of dust, irrelevant and changing the world for the better is basically impossible. The best you can count on is to continue living in some fucked up way.)

Now to the endings,

This game has multiple endings and not a single one of them is outright bad or good. What do I mean by that is that they are all bitter sweet.

V's life ends the moment Dex shoots him/her in the head, that's a fact. (like it or not, it is what it is)

The game revolves around a man/woman franticly trying to save his/hers life while the the inevitable doom lurks around the corner. V is going to be erased, the chip made that sure the moment it brought you back to life.
It's up to you how you deal with it and whether you accept it or lash out.

Despite all of that being true you are still given an option to save yourself but in true cyberpunk fashion it's never that simple.

- V finally succumbs. The pain, the fear, loosing yourself it is too much. All that you were all that you could've been, all the dreams you had are gone but one thing remains. The final action, defiance to the fucked up situation you find yourself in. BANG, you take your life away and the pain is gone. Your life truly ended that day when everything went to shit in that hotel. (it is a sad ending but in a way beautiful. V was put against unbeatable odds and only way out was death)

-V realizes that his/her life is over, the biochip did so much damage and he/she is fading. But one thing remains. This man that has been with you since the beginning, this man that you hated for what he was doing to you, this man that you've seen change in front of your own eyes from an arrogant asshole to a caring prick that would take a bullet for you. And you decide that if I'm going to disappear at least some good can come out of it, you give Johnny a second chance at life or an opportunity for a payback against Arasaka.

-V fears for his/her life, he/she doesn't want to disappear, the life he/she lead, the dreams he/she had. V wants to chase them still. It is not know whether he/she would succeed but it's worth a try. And the only way to save your life is making a deal with the devil/Arasaka (in true cyberpunk fashion). For a chance at life, for a chance of a brighter future, that some day you might walk as a free man/woman, you take that deal. Who knows what the future brings, but maybe just maybe one day you'll be yourself again.

-V's life is at an end. He is loosing himself. The fear, the pain. (you can see this at Clouds, V fears being forgotten, V fears death...'Death is death is death'). But there is a way out, there is a person in your life that would throw it all away, climb the highest peak to be with you. Would walk through hell to see you safe. And so you call Panam even though you know you would be putting her in danger and her whole clan, but the fear of dying is to much.

(I consider this ending the best and yet I would call it bitter sweet. You are given control back, you are given your life back but with that comes a price. Now there are things implying that V's condition could be salvaged and that those six months aren't a sure death sentence but we will have to wait and see. If V is going to die and there is no 'cure' despite there being obvious implications that there is a way I find Panams messge at the end is out of character. But if they did find a 'cure' then okay.)

Like I said, the endings are bitter sweet (you wont find sunshine and rainbow in them lol. All of them demand some kind of sacrifice...your body/mind, freedom, glory in Nighy City etc.)
But I do think there should be an ending that gives you a happy/bitter sweet ending separate from Nomad/Panam one, because not everyone is going to be playing a male V romancing her.

An ending where V lives, but has to leave NC or finds and opportunity of fixing himself/herself in another part of the world.

It probablly is a fact the most people who play Cp2077 are not familiar with the cyberpunk genre in depth. Let's just be real Cyberpunk as a genre is not the most popular one because be it a book a movie or a game it is quite dark and as you say that the best one could hope for usually is a bittersweet conclusion. I personally was always fascinatd by cyberpunk as a genre but rarelly could stomach it because i use games books movies to entertain myself and feel good not to depress myself. Watching the news is depresssing enough. CP2077 is a game that was highly anticpated by millions of people around the world and giving it only bittersweet or bad endings might be in the spirit of the cyberpunk genre but as i said most people probablly are not familiar with that to know that up front.

And as some people already pointed out yes CP2077 is set in the cyberpuunk genre but that does not mean they have to stick to it by the letter. If i want to write a fantasy story where elves are green and orcs are beautiful i will do it not caring that in "normal" fantasy it's the other way round.
 
Well... this is just a kick in the nuggets... decided to check the possible endings online... the two BEST possible endings are eating a bullet or signing on with Arasaka's "Secure Your Soul" program (which is pretty much getting Soulkiller'd into a biochip like a certain rockerboy we all know.) The rest all kill you off either during the final run or sometime after selfsame.

Just... 100% emo-level endings... damn CDPR... ever heard of thinking outside the razor box?
Hell, at least give us the option to go Smasher's route and turn ourselves into a murder-toaster or something that at least pretends to be a semi-happy ending.
 
AKANexus my man. So what you're saying is that you understand that cyberpunk is dark but you want a cyberpunk game that isn't cyberpunk lol. I jest.

I can respect the opinion that differs from mine, and just for the record I am not against a happy ending in CP2077. I actually would like one. I was just curious as to see whether people were familiar with the trope.

I see people writing that gritty dark endings as a trope and and everything being bleak is a weak argument. What I do find funny is that darkness that defines the setting is part of it and that is a fact whether you like it or not. You can disagree and ask for a happy one but it won't change that is a part of a cyberpunk world. Yes there are happy ending as I already mentioned but there is something funny about saying something is shit just because it didn't play out the way you wanted.

I get it you are not happy, neither am I but what I'm saying is that it's not that surprising that they went with it.

So the question I want to ask is...

Would people been more happy if the ending/story was longer. Having V interact with friends/loved ones/world after the ending and getting some closure.

And brate Nemanja, I just mentioned saving the world as an example not that I think that people want to save the world as V (although some people on reddit do lol)

:D
 
AKANexus my man. So what you're saying is that you understand that cyberpunk is dark but you want a cyberpunk game that isn't cyberpunk lol. I jest.

I can respect the opinion that differs from mine, and just for the record I am not against a happy ending in CP2077. I actually would like one. I was just curious as to see whether people were familiar with the trope.

I see people writing that gritty dark endings as a trope and and everything being bleak is a weak argument. What I do find funny is that darkness that defines the setting is part of it and that is a fact whether you like it or not. You can disagree and ask for a happy one but it won't change that is a part of a cyberpunk world. Yes there are happy ending as I already mentioned but there is something funny about saying something is shit just because it didn't play out the way you wanted.

I get it you are not happy, neither am I but what I'm saying is that it's not that surprising that they went with it.

So the question I'm want to ask is...

Would people been more happy if the ending/story was longer. Having V interact with friends/loved ones/world after the ending and getting some closure.

And brate Nemanja, I just mentioned saving the world as an example not that I think that people want to save the world as V (although some people on reddit do lol)

:D
We never said to change the game, or the lore. Never said to remove current endings, just give a choice for people who wants a lighthearted ending. Nobody would object that I assure you. You still have your gritty choices but other people could go for nice ones.
 
AKANexus my man. So what you're saying is that you understand that cyberpunk is dark but you want a cyberpunk game that isn't cyberpunk lol. I jest.

I can respect the opinion that differs from mine, and just for the record I am not against a happy ending in CP2077. I actually would like one. I was just curious as to see whether people were familiar with the trope.

I see people writing that gritty dark endings as a trope and and everything being bleak is a weak argument. What I do find funny is that darkness that defines the setting is part of it and that is a fact whether you like it or not. You can disagree and ask for a happy one but it won't change that is a part of a cyberpunk world. Yes there are happy ending as I already mentioned but there is something funny about saying something is shit just because it didn't play out the way you wanted.

I get it you are not happy, neither am I but what I'm saying is that it's not that surprising that they went with it.

So the question I'm want to ask is...

Would people been more happy if the ending/story was longer. Having V interact with friends/loved ones/world after the ending and getting some closure.

And brate Nemanja, I just mentioned saving the world as an example not that I think that people want to save the world as V (although some people on reddit do lol)

:D

As @BlackHawkV said, a theme/genre does not dictate its content. That goes for books, games, music, arts, anything. Fantasy books can have nice or grim stories. PnP RPGs can have nice or grim endings. Metal music can be about uplifting someone into self-assurance as well as inducing them to suicide. Renaissance art could be about the salvation of the mankind as well as its damnation.

FYI I am familiar with cyberpunk themes. Take System Shock, for example, no matter what you do, SHODAN is still alive and left at large to convert our reality at her will.
I'm also familiar with hopelessness themes. Most if not all of Lovecraftian stories end up with their protagonist dead, insane or lost.

However that was not what was marketed. Paraphrasing the developers, they wanted to give us a revolutionary system where our choices would affect the main plot itself, and that we could steer the story to whatever we wanted through our actions, something "never achieved before". They wanted to give us a story that happens on a cyberpunk-themed universe.
 
We never said to change the game, or the lore. Never said to remove current endings, just give a choice for people who wants a lighthearted ending. Nobody would object that I assure you. You still have your gritty choices but other people could go for nice ones.

I can respect that and I with you when it comes to asking CDPR for more choices. I'm just a curious fuck and want to really see what are the problems that people are having with the story.
 
I can respect that and I'm with you when it comes to asking CDPR for more choices. I'm just a curious fuck and want to really see what are the problems that people are having with the story.

The problem is that choices don't matter, and we are steered into depressing endings with no conclusion at all. Totally contrary to what we all were led to believe. At least that's mine, but I believe more people here share that vision
 
I can respect that and I with you when it comes to asking CDPR for more choices. I'm just a curious fuck and want to really see what are the problems that people are having with the story.

The story is really not the problem. Its well written most of the characters are great voice acting is topnotch. It all just feels so pointless in the end when we learn that no matter what we do we die. Thats the whole point of this whole discussion. Nobody here wants to change the story or get rid of all the endings. we just want one where we do not die!
 
My ending felt kinda happy even a bit strange not gona mention much cuz spoilers but i ended up with two girls cruising down to what i hope is where the future DLC will take place !
Lol this is a spoiler thread. And see that ending is what people have the least annoyance with because you do get closure in it. My ending had 0 of that and pretty much told me that yeah you fucked up even though you kept true to your character despite what Jhonny judges you.
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I can respect that and I with you when it comes to asking CDPR for more choices. I'm just a curious fuck and want to really see what are the problems that people are having with the story.
My problem is that my ending had no closure in it at all. I don't know if the "hopeful" smile at the literal planet Earth from my V was meant to be that... but the voice mails afterwards killed any sense of hope.
 
This whole thread started an interesting conversation about endings and about what people wanted/were expecting.

But at the same time it makes me curious.

How many of you were familiar with cyberpunk, and I don't mean just the game but the whole setting?

Whether it was Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, movies like Bladerunner and ghost in shell, maybe books like Neuromancer etc.
Because it seems to me people went into this game/story with their own ideas of what cyberpunk is...

I understand the need for a happy ending, I really do. But truly happy endings in this setting are always rare. There is always something stopping the main character form achieving it. (death, loss of a loved one, depression, merger with an AI ang I can go on and on. The point I'm trying to make is that in this kind of world you are a spec of dust, irrelevant and changing the world for the better is basically impossible. The best you can count on is to continue living in some fucked up way.)

Now to the endings,

This game has multiple endings and not a single one of them is outright bad or good. What do I mean by that is that they are all bitter sweet.

V's life ends the moment Dex shoots him/her in the head, that's a fact. (like it or not, it is what it is)

The game revolves around a man/woman franticly trying to save his/hers life while the the inevitable doom lurks around the corner. V is going to be erased, the chip made that sure the moment it brought you back to life.
It's up to you how you deal with it and whether you accept it or lash out.

Despite all of that being true you are still given an option to save yourself but in true cyberpunk fashion it's never that simple.

- V finally succumbs. The pain, the fear, loosing yourself it is too much. All that you were all that you could've been, all the dreams you had are gone but one thing remains. The final action, defiance to the fucked up situation you find yourself in. BANG, you take your life away and the pain is gone. Your life truly ended that day when everything went to shit in that hotel. (it is a sad ending but in a way beautiful. V was put against unbeatable odds and only way out was death)

-V realizes that his/her life is over, the biochip did so much damage and he/she is fading. But one thing remains. This man that has been with you since the beginning, this man that you hated for what he was doing to you, this man that you've seen change in front of your own eyes from an arrogant asshole to a caring prick that would take a bullet for you. And you decide that if I'm going to disappear at least some good can come out of it, you give Johnny a second chance at life or an opportunity for a payback against Arasaka.

-V fears for his/her life, he/she doesn't want to disappear, the life he/she lead, the dreams he/she had. V wants to chase them still. It is not know whether he/she would succeed but it's worth a try. And the only way to save your life is making a deal with the devil/Arasaka (in true cyberpunk fashion). For a chance at life, for a chance of a brighter future, that some day you might walk as a free man/woman, you take that deal. Who knows what the future brings, but maybe just maybe one day you'll be yourself again.

-V's life is at an end. He is loosing himself. The fear, the pain. (you can see this at Clouds, V fears being forgotten, V fears death...'Death is death is death'). But there is a way out, there is a person in your life that would throw it all away, climb the highest peak to be with you. Would walk through hell to see you safe. And so you call Panam even though you know you would be putting her in danger and her whole clan, but the fear of dying is to much.

(I consider this ending the best and yet I would call it bitter sweet. You are given control back, you are given your life back but with that comes a price. Now there are things implying that V's condition could be salvaged and that those six months aren't a sure death sentence but we will have to wait and see. If V is going to die and there is no 'cure' despite there being obvious implications that there is a way I find Panams messge at the end is out of character. But if they did find a 'cure' then okay.)

Like I said, the endings are bitter sweet (you wont find sunshine and rainbow in them lol. All of them demand some kind of sacrifice...your body/mind, freedom, glory in Nighy City etc.)
But I do think there should be an ending that gives you a happy/bitter sweet ending separate from Nomad/Panam one, because not everyone is going to be playing a male V romancing her.

An ending where V lives, but has to leave NC or finds and opportunity of fixing himself/herself in another part of the world.

I am very familiar with Cyberpunk and only to take very few examples that come quickly to my mind like Blade Runner or Ghost in the Shell, in both the main characters (Rick Deckard) and (Motoko Kusanagi) get to live, they both have good endings.
 
So the chip releases nanites that start rebuilding V's brain, in essence replacing V's brain with Johnny's brain, cell by cell. I assume the 'blueprint' the nanites are using is based on Johnny's engram. So why then would Ctrl+V be dying at the end if Johnny's engram is removed from the chip and replaced with Ctrl+V's engram? Wouldn't that change the blueprint that the nanites are using, causing them to instead repair the damage they've done and restore the brain?
 
Paweł Sasko - Lead Quest Designer said:
The player in Cyberpunk 2077 can create a custom character that has one of three origin stories, that we call lifepaths: you can be Nomad, Corpo, or Street Kid. Each of that Lifepaths has a different starting location and story background that are strongly connected with the origin story. Anything more I say can reveal too much from the story, so I will leave it like this.

That didn't age well....

Philipp Weber - Senior Quest Designer said:
Each of the three Lifepath options allowed the development team to explore nonlinear narrative options in myriad ways. As such, the roleplay possibilities for players are numerous, and will hopefully encourage fans to play Cyberpunk 2077 more than once.

As quest designers we were already used to tell nonlinear stories, so having a character like V gave us more of what we already like to do. The lifepaths are actually one of my favorite features, because they just give us more roleplaying opportunities. A nomad can of course solve some problems much better than a corpo, but put him into a board room and he might not really have the best way to lead a conversation the way he wants to.

So when we come up with challenges, we also like to think how different lifepaths could solve them effectively. This will hopefully give players lots of motivation to play the game multiple times, because they can have a completely new experience.
The new gameplay options thanks to our fluid class system essentially give us more opportunities to make our quests even more nonlinear. It’s a lot of fun to work with our level and encounter designers on locations for our quests, because there are always so many different options we can come up with. And sometimes, these options can then also change the story, so just like the lifepath, these gameplay abilities just make it easier for us to make the quest more nonlinear than ever.

Neither that...

Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz - Narrative and Mission Designer said:
[There] are many ways to complete missions based on how you’ve created your character, [the] tools you use, etc. And I think this is something that makes our game different from The Witcher. Because in The Witcher we had a basic loop in the gameplay, finding non-linearity in the missions section. This time the gameplay will also have a non-linear character. I think this is where the big difference lies in terms of the complexity of our missions.

It was not only based on dialogue decisions since you also had the things that were on the map and its different points of entry that allowed you to get into buildings, as well as elements that opened different paths in history.

:shrug:
 
Now that I think about it, the endings do have some parallels to ending of Ghost in the Shell movie.
Major merges with digital construct and leaves to the net leaving biological brain behind.

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I see people writing that gritty dark endings as a trope and and everything being bleak is a weak argument. What I do find funny is that darkness that defines the setting is part of it and that is a fact whether you like it or not. You can disagree and ask for a happy one but it won't change that is a part of a cyberpunk world. Yes there are happy ending as I already mentioned but there is something funny about saying something is shit just because it didn't play out the way you wanted.
I think that regardless of how anyone feels about the cyberpunk genre I think we can all agree that in an open-world action-RPG NOT being able to continue world-exploration after the end is a major bummer from a gameplay perspective. For that reason alone I think CDPR deserve a slap behind the ears, endings be damned.

Also - I'm pretty freaking sure you can have dark, gritty, unsettling and mysterious (and any combination of such attributes) without flat out killing off the player character.

To hark back to the game's roots - think of a tabletop RPG where the GM flat out kills the party at the end stripping the players of agency, no less. While a select few players might enjoy the shock, that's not why you're playing. PC deaths are either the result of a) very stupid decisions on part of the players (but good GMs usually warn of dire consequences) or b) a GM from D&D 3.5, where min-maxing was the norm and things were HARD or c) an incompetent DM being incompetent. In this comparison CP77 is, sadly, c).
 
Ha! CDPR really made a mess of this game.

Honestly the biggest problem I see when it comes to this games story (like with gameplay which is a shit show)
is that they had no ide where to take it 100%.

The game was in development of 8 years and It's pretty obvious that the game/story we got is not the one they initially marketed/promised. I still remember when there was an option to pick V's childhood hero, one of them being Johnny Silverhand. (ha! that turned out well, the whole game revolves around him)

Plans change, the story changes and they were transparent with some of those changes but the problem arises with that, that they decide to hide multiple things and just go with the hype.

I mean why go with the story you have when you have Keanu lol.
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I am very familiar with Cyberpunk and only to take very few examples that come quickly to my mind like Blade Runner or Ghost in the Shell, in both the main characters (Rick Deckard) and (Motoko Kusanagi) get to live, they both have good endings.

Deckard is left alone with the woman he loved being dead and his child taken away and Motoko fuses with an Ai, not really happy is it ;)
 
Would people been more happy if the ending/story was longer. Having V interact with friends/loved ones/world after the ending and getting some closure.
What people want is an ending that puts V back on the streets, alive, to justify being able to freely run around and experience NC without feeling like you're playing a character whose remaining life can realistically be measured in double digit hours.

An ending where V goes back to being a mercenary in a city run by corrupt cops and omnipotent corporations -- that's too bright and shiny?
 
I have said previously, and it is just my opinion, but CP2077 multiplayer for me would struggle not to be just a futuristic, neon lit GTA
if that was the case it be better off they cut off MP but too late now they made their bed and they gotta lay in it.
 
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