Creating a believable world means that these kind of events should be seamlessly incorporated.
i am a firm believer that interesting stories are the results of the implications of things, and not the construction of a cool results. the why is important.
i think this is a feature of the way Pondsmith wrote Cyberpunk and how cyberpunk fiction as a genre is written: it's a predictive forecast of the future based on recent history, current events and how populations move. it's about the implication of things, not just a collection of cool results.
i feel similarly about TW3 in that it was closer to a collection of cool places/results that were inspired by cool places/results. but i feel like most medieval fantasy fiction suffers this problem. fantasy fiction
is stuck in time and never really seems to progress. for example the conjunction of the spheres happened and now they're just dealing with those consequences forever (even Ciri is a product of the conjunction). like in 1 500 years y'all still look like that?
Pondsmith's
Cyberpunk was written at the end of the Cold War, the most tense time in history at that point not just because it was current but people really didn't know what to do with all of this new (nuclear) tech except threaten each other with it. and thus everyone else is hella on edge. so the story kinda goes,
'what's the worst that can happen while resulting in the cool things we think the future will have?' i remember Pondsmith said something along the lines of 'i had to end the world without ending the world.' which is much more interesting than just writing about a near future where everyone has guns and chrome prosthetics, y'know? the why is important. the why lets the world end without ending, while providing a method for ensuring it doesn't have to end. like, the Middle East and China are basically gone by 2020. not only is that an incredibly bold thing to write into your world building, but the implications of that are enormous and freaking fascinating
i really love the immigrant stories of Night City. the west coast today has enormous populations of Asian, Latinx, and Black people, immigrant and citizen, so it makes sense that in 57 years those communities would still have effects on the layout of the city. especially Pacifica with the immigration of Haitian people after climate disaster on the island. it's implications of things that lead to implications of things. it feels like human (fiction future, of course) history instead of, 'well here's where the Black/Latinx/Asian people live.' the why is important.