[Spoilers] Very few of the quests have satisfying resolutions

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Something I've noticed about a lot of the narratives in this game is that not many of them actually feel like they have a proper resolution. Half the time, after finishing a quest, I was just left standing on the street thinking "...is that it?". Which is a real shame, because I think a lot of the quest storylines are so close to being great, and then they just fall short at the last minute.

To give some examples...

- Dream On: You uncover the big conspiracy and get the choice to either keep Jefferson in the dark or tell him the truth, and it seems like it's building up to be an important choice that could mean life-or-death for him and his wife... but then the quest just ends. The only thing your choice affects is the call you get from Jefferson in the credits, and even then there's no real resolution. I don't mind leaving some things ambiguous, but when you leave this many unanswered questions in one quest...

- Sinnerman (& associated quests): You spend the entire questline talking vague philosophy for a while with Joshua, and the game implies to you that your conversations with him might have some kind of an impact on his decision at the end. They don't. Either way, he gets crucified, and absolutely nothing happens afterward. This quest basically turns you into a passenger while the game tells the story it wants to tell, which would be tolerable if the story in question actually went somewhere. It doesn't, so it just ends up feeling like a huge waste of time.

Alternatively, If you carry out the hit job on Joshua as planned (which the game REALLY tries to force you not to - shouldn't it be encouraging player choice?), you get to make a pretty satisfying call to Wakako in which she congratulates you for your professionalism. At least here, you actually get an ending. But again, there are no real consequences here, and no matter what you do, the client can't be saved. Oh well, I guess?

- Happy Together: If you get the good ending, the cops reconcile with Barry. If you get the bad ending, he dies. Either way, he disappears from the game and you can never interact with him again.

- Violence: The definition of a zero-sum quest. Lizzy Wizzy murders her boyfriend and then NOTHING. HAPPENS. AFTERWARD. Literally just an excuse to put Grimes in the game.

- Heroes: Jackie's Ofrenda is sweet, but after it's done you get the option to talk to a few people (extremely briefly) and then the game just expects you to take the Irish Exit - you just leave early without saying goodbye to anyone. The same happens at the end of the Samurai gig in A Like Supreme, you talk to Kerry for a minute and then you just leave. No after party with the rest of the band or anything. These are only minor complaints but they still felt a little jarring.

- ALL the romances basically hit a dead end after their respective sex scenes. You can call in at Judy's, but only say the same two things to her. You can't do anything with River after his quests. I haven't done Kerry's but I hear it's much the same. Panam, admittedly, gets some extra content if you go for the Nomad ending, but otherwise you can't really spend any time with her.

- On the topic of Judy, the whole debacle with Clouds feels like a total waste of time and effort. Judy's plan backfires and Clouds goes to shit... fine, I didn't really expect it to all go peachy. But this is all relayed through dialogue with Judy and you never get to see any of it, or speak to the survivors, or get revenge on the Tiger Claws. The game kinda acts like sleeping with Judy is your reward for the quest and that you shouldn't care about Clouds anymore after that.

- The entirety of the main quest. I won't go into why the endings are so disappointing, since there's already an 800-page thread on that topic - which speaks for itself, really. All I'll say is that there is no point of offering multiple endings if they're all just going to effectively reach the same conclusion. Even the "secret" ending doesn't actually change anything!

Any other quests or plot threads that you felt didn't go anywhere?
 
One of the senior writers addressed this in a tweet, I’ll see if I can find it for you!

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Maybe it’s just me being salty, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
 
One of the senior writers addressed this in a tweet, I’ll see if I can find it for you!

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Maybe it’s just me being salty, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I saw this yesterday, and yeah, I felt like it's very hard to swallow "I like to frustrate players with ambiguity" when so much of this game is obviously incomplete. There is a huge difference between leaving your audience wanting more by "frustrating them with ambiguity" and leaving your audience sad and disappointed because it doesn't make sense that there isn't more.

I know that Patrick Mills wrote both Dream On and I Fought the Law, and I think they're good examples of what I'm talking about...I can accept that we don't have a definitive ending to Dream On, because we're fighting a powerful, shadowy organization, and at least one of the people we're trying to help doesn't want us to interfere any further. With I Fought the Law, however, it doesn't really make sense that we just drop the investigation at that point, River seems like he wants to take it further, I'm sure that the Peralezes would be happy if you brought down Holt, and just ending there it feels like yet another example of cut content.

I actually do like ambiguous endings in some instances, but sometimes the story ends too soon or in an unsatisfying way, and just telling us "it's ART" doesn't work for me. If your purpose is to be provocative, ending your art with a tepid, confusing finale isn't daring, it just makes us think that you ran out of time or couldn't think of anything better. And with Cyberpunk 2077, knowing how much is still unfinished in this game, ambiguity just seems like another excuse.
 
- On the topic of Judy, the whole debacle with Clouds feels like a total waste of time and effort. Judy's plan backfires and Clouds goes to shit... fine, I didn't really expect it to all go peachy. But this is all relayed through dialogue with Judy and you never get to see any of it, or speak to the survivors, or get revenge on the Tiger Claws. The game kinda acts like sleeping with Judy is your reward for the quest and that you shouldn't care about Clouds anymore after that.

I'm glad you mentioned this because Judy's attitude after the Clouds failed uprising is the only reason why I didn't finish her romance. She avoided thinking/talking about the consequences of her actions and didn't seem to learn anything from it outside of "NC is toxic", while there were multiple reasons for the plan failing (no one defending Clouds, no support from other gangs, she removed the fighting program from the dolls leaving them vulnerable, etc).
V's line when romancing her is to "let it go" :confused:
 
One of the senior writers addressed this in a tweet, I’ll see if I can find it for you!

View attachment 11164694
Maybe it’s just me being salty, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
To be as fair as possible, he followed that tweet up with one saying "or maybe I just don't know how to stick landings." It's less adversarial to just assume Hanlon's razor. These tweets also explains why the main story simply stops rather than ends.

Though I do think it's funny that he also said "people assume stuff was cut but this was intentional". Your out was right there my man.
 
One of the senior writers addressed this in a tweet, I’ll see if I can find it for you!

View attachment 11164694
Maybe it’s just me being salty, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Wow, that's... not a great attitude to take. I totally understand and am a fan of ambiguity in stories - hell, I like the fact that the mysterious string-pullers in the Peralez questline are never revealed. What I don't like about that quest is that it just ends, right when it starts to get good. "Unfinished" is the word that springs to mind more than "ambiguous".

And on top of that... it's not really a matter of ambiguity that none of the quests have any lasting impact on the game world, is it? To give an example, after completing Violence, you get a text from Lizzy Wizzy saying she's released a new braindance (implied to be that of her boyfriend's murder)... AFAIK, this is never mentioned by any NPCs, nor does it make the news. Ambiguous, or just half-assed?
 
Wow, that's... not a great attitude to take. I totally understand and am a fan of ambiguity in stories - hell, I like the fact that the mysterious string-pullers in the Peralez questline are never revealed. What I don't like about that quest is that it just ends, right when it starts to get good. "Unfinished" is the word that springs to mind more than "ambiguous".

And on top of that... it's not really a matter of ambiguity that none of the quests have any lasting impact on the game world, is it? To give an example, after completing Violence, you get a text from Lizzy Wizzy saying she's released a new braindance (implied to be that of her boyfriend's murder)... AFAIK, this is never mentioned by any NPCs, nor does it make the news. Ambiguous, or just half-assed?
There is a fine line between:
1. This game is V's story, and as a merc in NC, it makes sense that she only gets tangential information about massive plots that, in the context of the world outside of V, do not get resolved from V's perspective. This is a good way of showing the scale of things in NC, the sheer momentum of a city that doesn't need you or care about you.
2. I'm bored of this and don't know how to write a good ending so I will simply stop and pretend I did 1
 
A long post deserves a long reply :)

SINNERMAN: A while after the BD release phone call, I noticed there were ads for the BD on signs around town, featuring the name of the star and producer, but not “V”. I guess she signed away the right to credit when she accepted her pay :)

HAPPY TOGETHER: Definitely feels like you should be able to interact with Barry after Happy Together. He’s your neighbor and you took the time to introduce yourself and get to know him. I feel like there could surely have been follow-up quests, or calls, or something. Generally the entire building/neighborhood was wasted as a potential plot and environment, especially for a street kid.

The people you should have been most concerned about in the early game are your neighbors. Stopping gangers from bothering people, helping the shop owners out with problems in exchange for favors in the neighborhood economy.

VIOLENCE: I can’t recall if there was an option to just refuse to help Lizzy get rid of the body, tell her to clean up her own twisted mess.

HEROES: I *really* wanted there to be some kind of connection or potential effect with the Valentinos gang based on your relationship with Jackie. Instead I spent the whole game gunning them down. Relationships with the different gangs was a missed opportunity in the design. Some gangs could have been friendly to you, while their rivals or enemies hated you. Of course all the gangs were into some bad stuff so maybe you choose to befriend none of them.

CLOUDS: Yeah, the stuff that happened after the showdown at Clouds could have all been their own quests. The Dolls needed V to step up and protect them after she brought the anger of the Tyger Claws down on them. The whole idea of blowing the room away was to send the message “If the Tyger Claws don’t leave the dolls alone, I’ll come back and kill more of your leaders.” But the game didn’t give V the chance to make good on that threat/promise.

ROMANCE: The dead end on the romances after sex was weird. I figured Judy would get a *larger* role in the story once she became my love interest, but it was the opposite.

ENDINGS: My big problem with the endings is the Legendary Merc ending arbitrarily ripping your romance away from you after you spent significant time in the game building it. You “win” and then your partner just leaves, no option to go with them, nothing you can do to stop it. That sucked.

With six months to live, a romantic partner who loves her, and an enormous fortune, V decides (with no input from player) that merc missions are the thing she wants to do with her last six months of life. Why? Yes, this was what V wanted at the *beginning* of the story sitting in the limo with Jackie, but the point of character arcs is change. This was the point that V has learned what's really important, and that she wants love and friendship more than glory. (Or at least that choice should have been ours to make.)

All that said, I really enjoyed the game and think it was overall a huge achievement. I’m looking forward to updates eagerly. I hope Patrick Mills takes some of the player reaction to heart and gives greater consideration to the endings of quest lines, and their follow-ups.
 
SINNERMAN: A while after the BD release phone call, I noticed there were ads for the BD on signs around town, featuring the name of the star and producer, but not “V”. I guess she signed away the right to credit when she accepted her pay :)

These billboards and advertisements appear from the start of the game anyway, regardless of whether you've completed Sinnerman or not. Even if you kill Joshua before he can be crucified, the BD continues to be advertised. So unfortunately, there's no real impact there.

All that said, I really enjoyed the game and think it was overall a huge achievement. I’m looking forward to updates eagerly. I hope Patrick Mills takes some of the player reaction to heart and gives greater consideration to the endings of quest lines, and their follow-ups.

I hope he takes it to heart too, I know it must be bitter and demoralizing to have to put up with all the backlash the game has received, but I really hope Patrick doesn't feel like the players are his enemy and they simply didn't "get" his writing style. Here's hoping there will be story DLC content down the line that expands upon some of the plotlines, especially the main quest.
 
Yes, that's what I did but it just makes you fail the quest. You don't hear anything about Lizzy again.
I did that too but I don't understand why there should be anything else? I refused because I didn't wanted to get involved and got exactly what I wanted.
 
The problem is that most quests past Act 1 are like this. The choice is between continuing in a very specific way or failing the quest and missing out content, there's no branching out.
Most stuff I remember, we are merc, we either do the job or we don't.

Then there's other things, at least one with three different outcomes, in context where that makes sense.
 
These billboards and advertisements appear from the start of the game anyway, regardless of whether you've completed Sinnerman or not. Even if you kill Joshua before he can be crucified, the BD continues to be advertised. So unfortunately, there's no real impact there.



I hope he takes it to heart too, I know it must be bitter and demoralizing to have to put up with all the backlash the game has received, but I really hope Patrick doesn't feel like the players are his enemy and they simply didn't "get" his writing style. Here's hoping there will be story DLC content down the line that expands upon some of the plotlines, especially the main quest.

At this rate nobody will care the game is WAI by 2022. Gamers move on, look what happened to Biowares Andromeda, they just dropped it like a pissed off Snake and sacked/closed the studio.
 
I'm glad you mentioned this because Judy's attitude after the Clouds failed uprising is the only reason why I didn't finish her romance. She avoided thinking/talking about the consequences of her actions and didn't seem to learn anything from it outside of "NC is toxic", while there were multiple reasons for the plan failing (no one defending Clouds, no support from other gangs, she removed the fighting program from the dolls leaving them vulnerable, etc).
V's line when romancing her is to "let it go" :confused:

I feel like the game assumes that most player's only motivation for helping Judy out is... to get in her pants, really. Almost like it doesn't actually expect anyone to be invested in the fate of Clouds itself. It just makes the entire quest feel somewhat superficial.

And yes, it hadn't really dawned on me until you pointed it out, but Judy's response to it all is really unhealthy. She just decides to give up and ditch NC after the first setback. In the end, neither she or V actually care all that much about Clouds, they just care about each other. I guess that's sweet, if only Tom didn't have to get killed to make them realize it.
 
- Sinnerman (& associated quests): You spend the entire questline talking vague philosophy for a while with Joshua, and the game implies to you that your conversations with him might have some kind of an impact on his decision at the end. They don't. Either way, he gets crucified, and absolutely nothing happens afterward. This quest basically turns you into a passenger while the game tells the story it wants to tell, which would be tolerable if the story in question actually went somewhere. It doesn't, so it just ends up feeling like a huge waste of time.

Alternatively, If you carry out the hit job on Joshua as planned (which the game REALLY tries to force you not to - shouldn't it be encouraging player choice?), you get to make a pretty satisfying call to Wakako in which she congratulates you for your professionalism. At least here, you actually get an ending. But again, there are no real consequences here, and no matter what you do, the client can't be saved. Oh well, I guess?
I agree with the general topic but this part particularily.
One thing that I find kinda dumb in Cyberpunk is how the game gives you choices...Just to scream at you to pick one of the option rather than the other.

I mean, the decisions you make in this game already have very few impacts on what's gonna happen, if on top of that you can't think outside the box without being called "A piece of sh***" by Johnny, it really reduce the freedom the player has throughout the game.

I don't even get it, the lack of impact on the world is understandable because it would take an insane amount of time to create all the branchings but strongly encouraging the player to follow one way over another kinda makes no sense to me.
 
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Most stuff I remember, we are merc, we either do the job or we don't.

Then there's other things, at least one with three different outcomes, in context where that makes sense.
I'm not talking about gigs, for regular merc jobs this is fine. It's very restricting in the main quest and side quests though, considering that the main quest isn't that long.

Branching content doesn't have to be perfectly balanced, but there aren't enough LIs and major quest givers to make losing an entire quest chain for a minor decision satisfying. Mostly thinking about:
- Panam's quest chain (ratting her out to Saul just gives you a lousy car and locks you out of the nomad ending, no support from Saul or Biotechnica leads)
- Judy's quest chain outside of the Maiko choice (just refusing to go diving locks you out of the romance)
- Sinnerman like OP mentioned
- River's quest (you either tell him to forget revenge or he dies and you miss his last quest)
- After the rooftop choice, all the endings are incredibly railroaded

The quests with multiple branches that I can remember are just:
- The Pickup in Act 1 (most complex quest in the whole game)
- Delamain's final choice (though you don't see the outcome)
- Dream On (same as above outside of the voicemail from Peralez)
 
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