Ludonarrative dissonance

[alebersam]

Unfortunately you can skip time 24 hours again and again and again and nothing happens to you. I think Ive gone more than 6 moths (in game) just screwing around and refreshing shop inventories but my V is still alive. When I realised theres no consequence for pushing time forward by months it really made the story feel flat

This is very absurd, you are mixing a game mechanism (and exploit it) make for qol with the history plot.

By the same logic you could discuss how V can carry 50 weapons, 200 inhalers and their entire weardrove at the same time. Or how they never need to sleep, eat, drink...

All these things are game mechanics, that all

 

[OnyxCore]

Freedom and player agency in an open world RPG?!

MADNESS!

Ah... If only it was...

 

[Barsenthor]

Skyrim done this perfectly, with MQ being pretty much unintrusive, yet if someone wants to play it along the other story arcs it also fits.
FO4 with “find you son” was a step backwards, but still you could do everything after the MQ, which even fits the whole story better in some extents (like minutemen vs BoS).
And now for the elephant in the room.

CP77 has a great world with great side quests and romances. It looks like a team put a lot of hard work and love to make it.
Then someone came and said - we have Johnny/Keanu now so add it to the game and this is when the crush comes.

i know that Keanu insists on having more lines for Johnny I don’t know if this wasn’t the moment when plot went from Biochip/Arasaka to the Dying from the Biochip.

For me MQ and rest of the game completely don’t fit together.

 

[alebersam]

Skyrim done this perfectly, with MQ being pretty much unintrusive, yet if someone wants to play it along the other story arcs it also fits.
FO4 with “find you son” was a step backwards, but still you could do everything after the MQ, which even fits the whole story better in some extents (like minutemen vs BoS).

How can skyrim or fallout do it better?
Skyrim: alduim is going to destroy the whole world, this means that not only you is going to die, also everyone else.
Fallout: I assume you dont have children's, 99% of parents in the world would put my children was kidnapped above Im going to die in a priority list.

As I said before, this is a common issue in any game that have similar mechanics

 

[Ouroboros612]

Any narrative that makes the player feel like they have to rush through it is unenjoyable, and they found the worst way to do it by making you terminally ill from the get-go with no cure. No choices or player agency matters, the endings are all the same. I mean... how they managed to fuck this up this badly is beyond me. It makes me not care about the game, story and characters. Made it really hard to even bother playing through it again. I truly resent it.

I love bad and depressing endings being possible. But if there's no player agency that matters to steer towards a different outcome there's just... no reason to care. About V, the story, the endings, anything. It's all just "whatever" as it is.

 

[Techno_Core]

How can skyrim or fallout do it better?
Skyrim: alduim is going to destroy the whole world, this means that not only you is going to die, also everyone else.
Fallout: I assume you dont have children's, 99% of parents in the world would put my children was kidnapped above Im going to die in a priority list.

As I said before, this is a common issue in any game that have similar mechanics

I would think the difference is, at least in Skyrim, if I recall, you can ignore all that stuff if you want, whereas with Johnny in your head and the coughing and optics glitching, CP2077 doesn't let you ignore the main storyline.

 

[Barsenthor]

How can skyrim or fallout do it better?
Skyrim: alduim is going to destroy the whole world, this means that not only you is going to die, also everyone else.
Fallout: I assume you font have children's, 99% of parents in the world would put my children was kidnapped above Im going to die in a priority list.

As I said before, this is a common issue in any game that have similar nechanics

But you didn’t know about Alduin at least to the mid part of the MQ. To this moment you could go and be killing dragons and doing your things. Story wise it had explanation since he was awakening other dragons.
This was also the thing why I don’t like FO4 because it force you to play in specific order. Even mods couldn’t change this.

and about the mods - Skyrim has a godsend- Live another life mode that fixed everything in story

CP77 is worst since you are dying and game says this in capital letters. Vic at the beginning of Act 2 says that you don’t have much time, weeks at max. Later over and over you have biochip malfunctions, animations showing how V is suffering. During few short missions (in game time terms) you have few major malfunction on the verge of flatlining.
After act 2 even Johnny says that you should see Hanako first and this is a point of no return.

MQ would fit perfectly Mass Effect linear story where you fly from planets to planet, with some irrelevant variations. Yet even here players were not pleased with ME2 and collectors.

Either way you go with urgency or not. If you go with urgency go it the fashion that will give logical option to play after urgency is resolved.
CP77 went the immersion wrecking route. I can only hope that this will be fixed with post-MQ dlc (hopefully by “disabling” Johnny in any sidequest that he would appear otherwise)

 

[Puhctek]

What OP clains isn't something unique to the game. You can't find the same in every game that follows a main plot/secondary quest structure. Main plot usually have a sense of urgency for narrative purposes and side things always seens weird if you stop to think at that. For example:

Fallout 4: "I need to rescue my baby... Wait, a heist in the mayor vault you said, sounds good I can buy Shaun one of those two hundreds years old radioactive teddy bears with the money. Can we stop at this settlement on the way? Preston said they have problems, run off of toyler paper... "

Witcher 3:"I'm going to find ciri, she's in danger... Look at this board! I gwent tourney. Well if ciri is old enough to tattoo a rose in her p**** she's old enough to deal with the wild hunt by herself"

DOS2: "we need to go to the ship before the hammer chase us" "wait a moment, we return to Fort Joy to kill all the remaining magisters then we take everything that isn't nailed down, dawn the game has a lot of interactity, we'll take some nailed things too. Then we sold then to the merchants and then we kill the merchants too"

ME: "the collectors kidnap the entire crew" "yes I'm on my way, but let throw another probe on uranus, it's funny".

This game in fact isn't one of the worst at these. For various things:
- V is a predefined character despite you can customize apparence. Not fall easy into desperationis part of V's character. You can clearly even see it in one of the six months ends.

-V is a merc, being in constant dead thread is part of the job.

-The game have several moments of wait until tomorrow for X search info or whatever. This gaps was make short, usually a day or less, for gamey purposes some people will want to only follow the main quest. But usually are in fact unrealistically short how npcs does so much in so short time. So nobody's prevent to create in your mind a more realistic gap of several days to do other shit

This dissonance exists to some degree in most open world games. However, Cyberpunk 2077 does a few things that worsen it:

• Gives a deadline to complete the main quest before the entire world opens up. Vic initially says you have a matter of weeks. It's trivial to skip ahead a month and see that the gameplay will have no impact on the narrative.
• Constantly remind the player about the main quest. The screen glitches and Johnny's yammering heighten the sense of urgency.
• Doesn't let you play after completing the game. In most modern games, you can complete the main quest then explore the world dissonance free. I imagine we were meant to be able to do this in Cyberpunk, but CDPR crammed Johnny into so many scenes that they couldn't remove him for post-credits play.

 

[Barsenthor]

Or maybe they didn’t remove him since there was no time left and sirens in the “console department” were howling “all hands on deck” xD

truth is i hope that game will be fixed in the way that Johnny will be gone along with biochip and imminent death and we can go back to play the game like it was meant to be played.

 

[lyin321]

This is very absurd, you are mixing a game mechanism (and exploit it) make for qol with the history plot.

By the same logic you could discuss how V can carry 50 weapons, 200 inhalers and their entire weardrove at the same time. Or how they never need to sleep, eat, drink...

All these things are game mechanics, that all

No, the way the main quest was handled is worse imo. The inventory could be explained with V keeping them in his/her's
car trunk or something. Furthermore, that is something that has been in RPGs forever, so it's easy to forgive.

 

[v2micca]

I agree with the OP on this. I wanted to enjoy all the side missions, and sandbox elements of the game. But, in the back of my head I was always thinking, V's life is on the clock. Would he really be wasting time running all these side gigs for money when his life is slipping away.
The worse was when it came to the romances. I generally enjoyed the limited romance options in the game, but at the same time I was thinking, dude, what are you doing. You are dying. Why are you screwing with this poor girls emotions when you are checking out soon.

 

[Xen40k]

I agree with the OP on this. I wanted to enjoy all the side missions, and sandbox elements of the game. But, in the back of my head I was always thinking, V's life is on the clock. Would he really be wasting time running all these side gigs for money when his life is slipping away.
The worse was when it came to the romances. I generally enjoyed the limited romance options in the game, but at the same time I was thinking, dude, what are you doing. You are dying. Why are you screwing with this poor girls emotions when you are checking out soon.

Even worse; after each interaction with one of the relationship characters V gets those relic malfunctions reminding you that you should hurry up with the main quest. (This also happens sometimes when you wait i.e. skip time. "There ain't no rest for the wicked" I guess...)

This kind of story-telling reminds me a bit of Bioshock 1 & 2. Basically you are playing a preset story.

 

[WELCHiMUSiC]

Its possible that like the real RPG alot of details are left to the audience to shade in. Despite the insane amount of detail in the environment. It's also possible that with as much as there is here everyone always wants "more". I for one am grateful there is as much as there is. Can there be more? always! -w

 

[DrIggyC]

I think it's less of a case of narrative dissonance and more of a case of players getting hooked on the main story. The thing is - the game opens up very early on and waaay before you even get to the point of having Johnny stuck in your head. Personally, I spent a couple dozen hours just doing side-gigs and other optional activites before I did anything related to the Heist storyline. So, in that sense, there was no narrative pressure of "oh shit, I'm dying, why am I doing all this side stuff?" and by the time I got to Johnny, mixing side gigs and main stuff came a lot more naturally to my V.

On a purely personal note, I've never really had a problem of doing side stuff in any game that introduces a narratively time-cirtical element, because at the end of the day - it's just a game, a non-linear game that allows me to roam around and have fun.

 

[Puhctek]

I think it's less of a case of narrative dissonance and more of a case of players getting hooked on the main story. The thing is - the game opens up very early on and waaay before you even get to the point of having Johnny stuck in your head. Personally, I spent a couple dozen hours just doing side-gigs and other optional activites before I did anything related to the Heist storyline. So, in that sense, there was no narrative pressure of "oh shit, I'm dying, why am I doing all this side stuff?" and by the time I got to Johnny, mixing side gigs and main stuff came a lot more naturally to my V.

Only Watson is open early on. The rest of the world is closed off until The Heist mission is complete. So less than a fifth of the gigs and activities can be done before V starts dying.

 

[lyin321]

I think it's less of a case of narrative dissonance and more of a case of players getting hooked on the main story. The thing is - the game opens up very early on and waaay before you even get to the point of having Johnny stuck in your head. Personally, I spent a couple dozen hours just doing side-gigs and other optional activites before I did anything related to the Heist storyline. So, in that sense, there was no narrative pressure of "oh shit, I'm dying, why am I doing all this side stuff?" and by the time I got to Johnny, mixing side gigs and main stuff came a lot more naturally to my V.

On a purely personal note, I've never really had a problem of doing side stuff in any game that introduces a narratively time-cirtical element, because at the end of the day - it's just a game, a non-linear game that allows me to roam around and have fun.

Noo...that just means you don't care about the story?
...or in a weird way agree with the OP...
...anyway even in the early part ( tho not as much ofcourse) you still wake up with a virus and a headache that you go to Vik to remove/see what's up with it. Then immediately Jacky sends you to Dex, who is already waiting for you. I mean, to a point you can take your time after that talk (I personally like to sleep in my apartment/do some side missions), but still even that part of the game could use some better pacing

 

[Ziffa]

Even if V was going to die, it would have been ok if Night City actually acknowledge your existence, in the end, you are still a nobody, and all the "burn the city" and all that nonsense talk, were just empty words.

Even fallout had npcs coming at you when you do certain things, like killing to many innocent, in many ways, karma actually matter there.
Here, doesn't matter if you finish a mission by killing innocent guards or going stealth. The world just doesn't give a damn, not even a single poster of your face arround, no corpo going after you, nothing.

It is a big, empty, open world.

The more you look at it, the more you realize this game as VERY little to offer, and everyone is just hoping to get more from devs, at this point, it really would have been better to just launch in early access.I don't see any other words that would fit better for this game, yeah the story is good, everyone knows that, yeah the city looks good, other than that?you have nothing.

 

[DrIggyC]

Noo...that just means you don't care about the story?

I do care about it, I just don't let myself rush into it. In this case in particular, the one thing I heard was - do the side stuff for better endings! Now, granted, those who said that didn't really refer to side-gigs, but the more meaningful and substantial side-quests. However, I didn't know that at the time and besides I wanted to see what the game has to offer, how does street cred impact the playthrough, etc. And, well, I wanted to level up and unlock some stuff before getting to Johnny, so I don't really regret not rushing to meet Dexter and do the Heist questline right off the bat. It's a big open world and I wanted to experience it.

 

[lyin321]

I do care about it, I just don't let myself rush into it. In this case in particular, the one thing I heard was - do the side stuff for better endings! Now, granted, those who said that didn't really refer to side-gigs, but the more meaningful and substantial side-quests. However, I didn't know that at the time and besides I wanted to see what the game has to offer, how does street cred impact the playthrough, etc. And, well, I wanted to level up and unlock some stuff before getting to Johnny, so I don't really regret not rushing to meet Dexter and do the Heist questline right off the bat. It's a big open world and I wanted to experience it.

And that is perfectly ok, it's just...well...should have been better

 

[warner11]

It’s poor writing/pacing.

red dead 2 builds to a climax and drip feeds you the signs of what’s to come.

Spoiler

Arthur is also doomed

but by the time that is made clear - you’re attached to your character, the cast and the world. You’re invested in the story.
CP77 barely lets you explore a fraction of the city before you find that out.

the pacing of the story is shockingly bad, made my worse by the forced sense of urgency in the MQ.