Don't get me wrong, I wish Johnny wasn't there at all. The storyline sucks the way it is, mushed together. And I really don't even like him. But as a living person in the game (not so much Johnny the construct) I would rather have been playing Johnny's story.
V's only real motivation is to survive. Yeah, there's a little tiny bit about becoming a legend, which I suppose is why he's running around doing all those fixer jobs (I have no idea why he'd be doing them otherwise, since he should be concentrating on trying to get Johnny out of his head). That's pretty much all V gets to do. There's a little romance, and he can pick up a bottle and have a drink from time to time, but that's about it. V's either doing things because he has to to survive, or because he's getting paid to.
In a lot of ways, I think fixers were a bad idea. There should have been opportunities to steal, hack, rob, sabotage, rescue, blow things up, car jack, reveal the truth, that would benefit V's reputation and his pockets, and show his morale compass. Could've bribed people for information, ruffed them up, found clues, whatever. So he wasn't just a two bit mercenary going from job to job rapid fire.
Yeah, Johnny sucks. But he battles with the corpos because he wants to. He's in a band. He sleeps with who he wants, gets wasted when he wants, punches people who annoy him. V can't even zero a drunk who throws a going away party for himself that kills about a dozen women. Not allowed (why isn't "Mission failed" a thing?) When Johnny finally gets control of V's body, he has more fun in one night (or however long it was) than V has the whole game. By far. Johnny has the coolest gun, too, or at least one different from all the rest.
I just don't think of V having a personality at all. There was certainly no way I could find to give him one, play wise. He seems lightweight with no motivation of his own, like some cardboard cutout supporting character who usually gets offed in the third scene, and certainly not strong enough as designed to be the main protagonist. He kind of deserves to be overwritten.
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I gotta admit, I was netrunning and found an interesting article that has me thinking about V as a character, and maybe what the designers were doing. I think I may have missed the point, Gonna have to take another look at him. Excerpt from the article:
"Just getting by in Night City counts as a win, and I think Cyberpunk 2077’s characters understand that well. Even when you let someone down or make them angry with the decisions you make, they get it on some level. You had to do what you had to do, and ultimately the biggest sin is letting yourself trust someone else too much.
Everyone is in the process of realising this: that we’re all disempowered and alienated by the total control the corpos exert over Night City. Everyone and everything has been commodified and atomised, and moments of real connection with another person are ephemeral and fleeting.
It’s rare for a videogame to do this – to put you in a role where you’re not really a hero, and for other characters to recognise the fact that you’re probably just another disappointment waiting to happen. There are hints of this in The Witcher, but in the end, Geralt is a relatively traditional knight in shining armour, even if he grumbles and rolls his eyes about it a lot.
Like Case in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, V is “just another hustler, trying to make it through.” I think role-playing games have trained us for years to understand that we’re the solution to every problem, and it falls to Night City’s cast of supporting characters to show us that in Cyberpunk, we really aren’t. In all their brokenness and exhaustion and loneliness, I think they do a truly admirable job of that."
Though I may not have enjoyed it, maybe V was never meant to be more than he is; just another loser trying in vain to be more. Makes him more interesting at least.
V's only real motivation is to survive. Yeah, there's a little tiny bit about becoming a legend, which I suppose is why he's running around doing all those fixer jobs (I have no idea why he'd be doing them otherwise, since he should be concentrating on trying to get Johnny out of his head). That's pretty much all V gets to do. There's a little romance, and he can pick up a bottle and have a drink from time to time, but that's about it. V's either doing things because he has to to survive, or because he's getting paid to.
In a lot of ways, I think fixers were a bad idea. There should have been opportunities to steal, hack, rob, sabotage, rescue, blow things up, car jack, reveal the truth, that would benefit V's reputation and his pockets, and show his morale compass. Could've bribed people for information, ruffed them up, found clues, whatever. So he wasn't just a two bit mercenary going from job to job rapid fire.
Yeah, Johnny sucks. But he battles with the corpos because he wants to. He's in a band. He sleeps with who he wants, gets wasted when he wants, punches people who annoy him. V can't even zero a drunk who throws a going away party for himself that kills about a dozen women. Not allowed (why isn't "Mission failed" a thing?) When Johnny finally gets control of V's body, he has more fun in one night (or however long it was) than V has the whole game. By far. Johnny has the coolest gun, too, or at least one different from all the rest.
I just don't think of V having a personality at all. There was certainly no way I could find to give him one, play wise. He seems lightweight with no motivation of his own, like some cardboard cutout supporting character who usually gets offed in the third scene, and certainly not strong enough as designed to be the main protagonist. He kind of deserves to be overwritten.
EDIT **********************************************************************************************************************************************************************
I gotta admit, I was netrunning and found an interesting article that has me thinking about V as a character, and maybe what the designers were doing. I think I may have missed the point, Gonna have to take another look at him. Excerpt from the article:
"Just getting by in Night City counts as a win, and I think Cyberpunk 2077’s characters understand that well. Even when you let someone down or make them angry with the decisions you make, they get it on some level. You had to do what you had to do, and ultimately the biggest sin is letting yourself trust someone else too much.
Everyone is in the process of realising this: that we’re all disempowered and alienated by the total control the corpos exert over Night City. Everyone and everything has been commodified and atomised, and moments of real connection with another person are ephemeral and fleeting.
It’s rare for a videogame to do this – to put you in a role where you’re not really a hero, and for other characters to recognise the fact that you’re probably just another disappointment waiting to happen. There are hints of this in The Witcher, but in the end, Geralt is a relatively traditional knight in shining armour, even if he grumbles and rolls his eyes about it a lot.
Like Case in William Gibson’s Neuromancer, V is “just another hustler, trying to make it through.” I think role-playing games have trained us for years to understand that we’re the solution to every problem, and it falls to Night City’s cast of supporting characters to show us that in Cyberpunk, we really aren’t. In all their brokenness and exhaustion and loneliness, I think they do a truly admirable job of that."
Though I may not have enjoyed it, maybe V was never meant to be more than he is; just another loser trying in vain to be more. Makes him more interesting at least.
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