The endings and philosophical themes in Cyberpunk

[northwold]

Ever since the game came out there's been a lot of discussion about whether the endings are satisfactory or, indeed, happy enough.

But I do think the mood you get from them varies depending on your engagement with the wider ideas presented by the game. If you explore, if you engage with a lot of the lore, a lot of the game's content is exploring questions about the nature of the soul and of consciousness (even the Delamain quest ends up as a conundrum on sentience and the nature of life).

In that context one of the themes that recurs repeatedly in the game is Buddhism. At a superficial level, walking around you will see monks from time to time, there is the temple, and so on.

More importantly, there are the meditation quests (which provide a neat bookend to the tarot quests, the one dealing with stepping beyond existence as interaction of the self with the material world, the other dealing with questions of predetermined destiny versus freedom of action).

The game, I suspect deliberately, but possibly by happy accident, skirts very close to exploring the Buddhist concept of the non-soul (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anattā ). Essentially (VERY essentially), there is no such thing as a soul, human consciousness is ephemeral and transient, the self is not a thing distinct from anything else, that there is no self as some kind of island but only the possibility of enlightenment that everything and everyone is part of the same machine.

Such themes do lead to a very different context in which to receive the endings than "I like this person why can't I be with them", including, as it happens, the shortest of all the endings.

I don't know if this is interesting to anyone but, well, it struck me as something to mull over. It's what makes me think much of Cyberpunk's storytelling is like almost nothing else I've seen in a videogame.

 

[LeKill3rFou]

If you explore, if you engage with a lot of the lore, a lot of the game's content is exploring questions about the nature of the soul and of consciousness (even the Delamain quest ends up as a conundrum on sentience and the nature of life).

Even in the weirdest quest in the game, at the very end of "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out", the little optional dialogue with Johnny.

Also when V asking to Goro if he really believes in ghosts on the roof... He said :
"The relic allows you to talk to the dead, so this question have no more sense"

That sound weird, but it made me think a little about the film The 6th Day. For those who haven't seen it, it's a (Hollywood) story about cloning and copying memory/consciousness into another body (a new one).

Beyond the simple "action" movie, it's kind of the same questions if we copy/insert someone's memory/consciousness into another/second body :
The copy is also "me" ?
Will the second think he's "me" ?
If there are two "me", does the "me" still really make sense ?

Pretty interesting... for me at least

I don't know if this is interesting to anyone but, well, it struck me as something to mull over. It's what makes me think much of Cyberpunk's storytelling is like almost nothing else I've seen in a videogame.

Yep that's also the case for me
(A UFO among the other games)

 

[Didacgomez]

Yes, the endings make much more sense if you engaged looking at lore and the themes that are presented during the game.
When I was in the rooftop I was "ok, but you are not really asking me who I want to call you are asking something else" and then the 2nd question in Mikoshi hits the transhumanism theme.
Is why all discussions based on "I didn´t want to leave NC" or romance basically skip all the themes that are touched in the game, when in my opinion all the story was written without romance in mind at all (the meanings of the endings are the same regardless if you romanced somebody or not).

 

[0248991]

The copy is also "me" ?
Will the second think he's "me" ?
If there are two "me", does the "me" still really make sense ?

Yeah, there are older versions of such questions, such as "If you replace 51% of the parts of the ship, is it still the same ship?"

To me, you can get very different impressions, if you e.g. think about the people and situations just as 100% equal...shells - and judge them only by the results or intentions; or the other way around - think about AIs as if they were "alive" and their "lives" were equal to the ones of humans..
I wonder how could/would e.g.: Panam be judged by such rules...

The conclusion there could be that V and probably all of his/her friends are horrible serial killers, thieves, arrogant, seeking only their own lives and prosperity, not respecting lives of the others...
E.g: If you won't help Maiko to lead the Clouds, some of the dolls will die.

If you take the Delamain quest as an example - you can either kill all of them, kill just the wild AIs (excluding Delamain), or merge them, creating...something...unstable/untrustworthy...
Can any of the endings be considered...good...or even worthy of pursuing?

There are millions of people/AIs in the city.
Isn't it just natural to not be able to help all of them, or to even know about them in a first place...?

 

[Guest 3847602]

Well said!
I found all of the endings to be fitting, consistent with the themes explored and there was enough foreshadowing. They absolutely don't deserve comparison to Mass Effect 3.
Having said that, I don't think having just one ending where V's life can be saved would harm the narrative too much. Story of Max Payne 2 as well as its tonal consistency wasn't ruined by the presence of the alternative ending where Mona Sax survives.

 

[northwold]

Well said!
I found all of the endings to be fitting, consistent with the themes explored and there was enough foreshadowing. They absolutely don't deserve comparison to Mass Effect 3.
Having said that, I don't think having just one ending where V's life can be saved would harm the narrative too much. Story of Max Payne 2 as well as its tonal consistency wasn't ruined by the presence of the alternative ending where Mona Sax survives.

Pffft. If you want him to live you've missed the point. V must achieve enlightenment. Life is for the little people.

 

[ya1]

Well... Cyberpunk and philosophical themes... it doesn't even try hard enough to call it pretentious. And bless them for that.

Cyberpunk's storytelling is like almost nothing else I've seen in a videogame.

Try Disco Elysium.

V must achieve enlightenment.

Lmao yeah after shooting 100,000 people to death.

 

[northwold]

Well... Cyberpunk and philosophical themes... it doesn't even try hard enough to call it pretentious. And bless them for that.



Try Disco Elysium.



Lmao yeah after shooting 100,000 people to death.

Disco Elysium is, to my mind, one of the worst games I have ever played. It THINKS it's clever, I'll give it that. (But that's a whole different discussion.)

 

[the.smerch]

Pffft. If you want him to live you've missed the point. V must achieve enlightenment. Life is for the little people.

Achieve enlightenment and go to other side of the rainbow.

 

[0248991]

Pffft. If you want him to live you've missed the point. V must achieve enlightenment. Life is for the little people.

Love the wording, but is it possible to achieve some sort of it in the game?
Does V really achieve anything to be considered a "big life"?
I see mostly just a thief who leaves everything behind him/her in flames...

 

[northwold]

Love the wording, but is it possible to achieve some sort of it in the game?
Does V really achieve anything to be considered a "big life"?
I see mostly just a thief who leaves everything behind him/her in flames...

I was taking the p*** but I don't think, if you're really going to look at it from an enlightenment angle, that that is what enlightenment is about. A certain character in the game wholly vanishes once they have fulfilled their purpose, for example.

Off topic but Yukio Mishima explored these tenets of Buddhism explicitly in a series of novels called the Sea of Fertility. The denouement involves the end of the self: "Perhaps there has been no I." That is where the concepts (not in Cyberpunk but in the philosophy more generally) end up.

Of course, Mishima then tried to reclaim samurai Japan and committed seppuku, so an eccentric source...

 

[Didacgomez]

One thing that is noteworthy is how the story writers managed to put all the themes in such a way that I think many players don´t even realize. The easy way to put all this stuff is the classical NPC lecturing you about something.
But in this game some people can play kind of Doom,finish the game and don´t get any of this. And is not only in the transhumanism themes, if you look at shards/Gigs you can find some political stuff, human rights...but is not thrown in the players face like is up to you whether you found this and track it.

 

[the.smerch]

One thing that is noteworthy is how the story writers managed to put all the themes in such a way that I think many players don´t even realize. The easy way to put all this stuff is the classical NPC lecturing you about something.
But in this game some people can play kind of Doom,finish the game and don´t get any of this. And is not only in the transhumanism themes, if you look at shards/Gigs you can find some political stuff, human rights...but is not thrown in the players face like is up to you whether you found this and track it.

It's more like cat-person vs dog-person kind of thing. The game will reward (in some ways) your effort to invest your time to investigate, to explore, dive into lore and other stuff. Otherwise it just can be like piu-piu looter-shooter not the game I want.

 

[Didacgomez]

It's more like cat-person vs dog-person kind of thing. The game will reward (in some ways) your effort to invest your time to investigate, to explore, dive into lore and other stuff. Otherwise it just can be like piu-piu looter-shooter not the game I want.

Did you ever saw a game doing that-I'm a bird-person myself-?, because I think is a interesting approach... although I think CDPR assumed more people was going to invest themselves (cat,dog,bird,iguana persona?) and all this endings "controversy" maybe caught them off-guard for expansion/DLC.

 

[gregski]

I suggest watching this if you have some spare time.

 

[northwold]

Did you ever saw a game doing that-I'm a bird-person myself-?, because I think is a interesting approach... although I think CDPR assumed more people was going to invest themselves (cat,dog,bird,iguana persona?) and all this endings "controversy" maybe caught them off-guard for expansion/DLC.

I've written about this many times, including in an enormous Reddit review, but if anything feels obviously rushed about the game it strikes me that it's the systems designed to deliver content to the players, together with the misstep of injecting immediate urgency into the main quest (rather than saying "this may become urgent at some point and we will tell you when").

Prepopulating the map with quest markers, together with fast travel points too close together and that main quest urgency, serve up a game where it is possible to zoom through at a million miles an hour and ignore every detail of the world.

But that is not what Cyberpunk is actually impressive at. Yes, with the bug fixes, it is a serviceable action game. But there are many serviceable action games.

Where it excels (and, yes, to a certain kind of player is a masterpiece) is in the weaving of a sort of thematic tapestry throughout all its stories and design elements. It is extraordinarily coherent in that regard.

I'm not sure if the devs didn't realise that the game as released was selling that side of their work short -- that the big narrative themes had to be sought out for players to realise they were even there, or whether the devs were not confident that they could sell the game on that basis, or whether it simply got missed in playtesting that too much of that side of the experience could get entirely overlooked because people were too close to the project to see how it played to strangers.

But something went awry for so many, many people to think you're having a laugh when you say it's intelligent and thoughtful.

Just as one example, I was talking with someone online about it who commented that every ending is "V dies", therefore you lose. And I asked whether the game might be questioning what "losing" actually means. The response, in summary, was "dying is losing, duh." Which made me wonder if they'd managed to play the whole game without picking up even a smidgen of what the story is trying to say!

 

[Didacgomez]

I've written about this many times, including in an enormous Reddit review, but if anything feels obviously rushed about the game it strikes me that it's the systems designed to deliver content to the players, together with the misstep of injecting immediate urgency into the main quest (rather than saying "this may become urgent at some point and we will tell you when").

This I made the calculation (others also did in this forum), but the sense of urgency doesn´t prevent to get the content. If you rush into main quest is 30 hours aprox (some people speedrunning 15 I heard), that is 10 days in-game...if you explore and unlock all endings + gigs (not all by plenty) I hitted in 90 hours or so --> 30 days; its not by any means far from Vik prediction. Its mostly that world timescale is not properly told to the players.

Probably the biggest mistake is:

Prepopulating the map with quest markers, together with fast travel points too close together and that main quest urgency, serve up a game where it is possible to zoom through at a million miles an hour and ignore every detail of the world.

Because player mindset is : "platinum trophy!"...people see all the content,start cleaning districts (with NCPD stuff) and then said "hey,i was dying the narrative is broken".

I'm not sure if the devs didn't realise that the game as released was selling that side of their work short -- that the big narrative themes had to be sought out for players to realise they were even there, or whether the devs were not confident that they could sell the game on that basis, or whether it simply got missed in playtesting that too much of that side of the experience could get entirely overlooked because people were too close to the project to see how it played to strangers.

I think that they had an issue, which is common with new franchises that the lore,themes is unknown. I know the tabletop, I have my copy bought in 1996-and many of those themes can be found in the Cyberpunk franchise-...but I would bet that is not the majority of players that bought the game. Then you can do the old trick of the NPC that explains stuff (think about Vampire Bloodlines, there are NPCs always willing to explain the politics of Camarilla,Sabbat,Anarchs,Gehenna,Clans...which if you played tabletop was a little bit boring,but for new players is a must and makes sense for a new Vampire that doesn´t know anything) or distribute the themes in the "environment"(gigs,sidequests,shards).

Just as one example, I was talking with someone online about it who commented that every ending is "V dies", therefore you lose. And I asked whether the game might be questioning what "losing" actually means. The response, in summary, was "dying is losing, duh." Which made me wonder if they'd managed to play the whole game without picking up even a smidgen of what the story is trying to say!

I had that discussion also, is a side effect that media (not just videogames) have been delivering "win/happy" endings for decades so people is not used to other endings (Lovecraft ,Poe ,Huxley in Brave New World, or Orwell in 1984 would be "bad" authors for today standards)...I think long term, plays against customers because creators will be affraid to explore themes just because potential sales drop (they are not NGOs).

 

[tru3story]

First of - awesome topic. Really enjoyed reading/watching related content.
Would like to touch just briefly on consciousness and death themes in the game. Something that is not new, but exciting every.single.time. because there is still so much we don't know, but it all seems like a step away from understanding it every.single.time. It only seems like we are missing the right measurements and tools, but we're almost there.

Put simply, you are your consciousness - the way you perceive and are aware of things and the way you respond, and what consequences attract, hence it is your soul. So when put into another vessel - human, or not - conflicts are inevitable and the game presents it very well! It is in a way adaptation and adoption. Certainty of some things are made to simplify it and it's good! Otherwise - it'd be a never ending convoluted story nobody wants to be entertained with. xD (but if not for adoption, I think Johnny would have taken over V and that would be the end of it for V). Goes back to survival of the fittest? Stronger genes? How/are genes are carried over?

The thing is, if we never try - we'll never know. Personally I cannot wait for an immortality project. Which brings me to Death. An inevitability . Hot topic throughout centuries. And come to think of it - all the best stories end in protagonist's death. Why? Have no fucking idea. But ideally you have possibly done everything in your life cycle there is to be done. No regrets, eh? You have found/met the best condition for your desires and those were met. And maybe, just maybe it's not the case of you not knowing what you're meant to do next, but rather - I've done everything there is to be done in my lifetime, within my power. And nothing is accidental.

sorry, super long ramble there, don't even know what was the point in the end DD

 

[northwold]

This I made the calculation (others also did in this forum), but the sense of urgency doesn´t prevent to get the content. If you rush into main quest is 30 hours aprox (some people speedrunning 15 I heard), that is 10 days in-game...if you explore and unlock all endings + gigs (not all by plenty) I hitted in 90 hours or so --> 30 days; its not by any means far from Vik prediction. Its mostly that world timescale is not properly told to the players.

Probably the biggest mistake is:

Because player mindset is : "platinum trophy!"...people see all the content,start cleaning districts (with NCPD stuff) and then said "hey,i was dying the narrative is broken".

I think that they had an issue, which is common with new franchises that the lore,themes is unknown. I know the tabletop, I have my copy bought in 1996-and many of those themes can be found in the Cyberpunk franchise-...but I would bet that is not the majority of players that bought the game. Then you can do the old trick of the NPC that explains stuff (think about Vampire Bloodlines, there are NPCs always willing to explain the politics of Camarilla,Sabbat,Anarchs,Gehenna,Clans...which if you played tabletop was a little bit boring,but for new players is a must and makes sense for a new Vampire that doesn´t know anything) or distribute the themes in the "environment"(gigs,sidequests,shards).

I had that discussion also, is a side effect that media (not just videogames) have been delivering "win/happy" endings for decades so people is not used to other endings (Lovecraft ,Poe ,Huxley in Brave New World, or Orwell in 1984 would be "bad" authors for today standards)...I think long term, plays against customers because creators will be affraid to explore themes just because potential sales drop (they are not NGOs).

Lovecraft?? Horror penguins, prawns and miscellaneous seafood Lovecraft?? :-D (I love him really.)

 

[ya1]

Disco Elysium is, to my mind, one of the worst games I have ever played. It THINKS it's clever, I'll give it that. (But that's a whole different discussion.)

To each his own. But I've yet to see CP receiving any serious (or any at all) critical acclaim and awards. DE is work of art, sir. Compared to it, CP is a botched cookie cutter product for mass consumption - its only value counted in the millions of dollars that went into and out of it.

consciousness and death

soul

immortality project.

Except CP doesn't really "touch on" any of it. These concepts - they are just there. They are not accompanied by any discussion or reflection on the nature or the essence of it all. Johny Silverhand's engram is shown as a fully fledged human being, and this is taken for granted, there is no mystery or science or philosophy behind it. The immortality tech is just a magical artifact here - it just works and nobody cares how or why or what's next. In this aspect, CP is more fantasy than hard SF.

It could have been a serious discussion on humanity entering an era when it's ruled not by itself but by digital reflection of itself, by engrams of the ruling class - mere copies, not real human beings. The name Soulkiller kinda suggest that - coping the mind supposedly kills the soul and deprives humans from the essence of what they are. But there is no such discussion.