So there i am on the Net and some mouth breathing gonk was all "Hur. Dur. if only it had magic then it would be shadowrun, Hur Dur."
My first response was "have you seen a dedicated quickhax build?"
And then went of an a rant which had no bearing on the discussion so I am putting it here.
You want magic? Have you seen what a dedicated Quickhack build can do? Its about as close as you get.
Of course there is the analogy for "Astral Space" to figure out and that is where the Breach Protocol stuff would have kicked in.
Buuut that was cut. For reasons.
Hold on to you seat, Choom. This is where i go off into the deep end ...
Those net runners in those recliners doing their thing? its a whole different world in there.
Or it was gonna be. And that was the problem.
Anyone that has played cp2020 or shadowrun as a tabletop rpg since the mid 1980's reached the same conclusion.
Every other class in the game is running and gunning with each other while dodging corpos and cops and gangers as you murder-hobo your way through the setting .
Except the Netrunners.
Everything they do from a game mechanic perspective was quite literally a second game within the first.
It all happens "off scene" from what the rest of the group is doing. And they can literally phone in their performance.
The Referee/Storyteller/DM has to create two separate instances of gameplay. One for the solos, rocker girls, medias, Fixers, et al in the meat space.
And one for the netrunner in cyberspace.
Which kind of sucks really because the net runner vs. the rest of the group each have to stop their action while the other catches up to what is going on.
As a result; what mostly happens is the Referee just "hand waves" the net action and lets everyone play "Anything but a Netunner" to save themselves some extra work.
Which is why there are 5 different printings of Chrome book and only one for Netrunners.
CDPR hit the same wall.
So what happens in "The Heist" is not really a surprise. The resident Netrunner in the group; T-Bug, is for all practical purposes an NPC you see exactly once otherwise you never interact with except through the phones. In spite of all the talk that Jackie says about saying she is part of the crew, too.
To be honest it is a fair representation of your expectations from a cyberpunk game. so yay immersion.
But it wasnt always like this. Devs in particular know a thing or three about coding in general (unlike your average Tabletop Referee) and were absoultely interested in making an imersive net running experience consistent with a 50 year jump into the future
As late as spring 2018, the devs had made a net running experience was something like what you see out of Ghost in the Shell.
BUUUUTTT the game mechanics were so completely different from ALL of the other "FirstPersonSHooter in an open world RPG sandbox" gameplay.
To the point that it is a separate game unto itself. Which was a problem considering the core game was having a hard time being playable on console.
I imagine that at this point Management stepped in and forced the devs to stop. Making the game consoie playable was ahigher priority problem.
so quickhaxs are streamlined into the (totally not VATS) system that the other "Wired Reflexes" uses (which was a good call to be honest)
and the BreachProtocols, ICE combat, and DataMining are lumped into a timed 2D puzzle mini-game game that uses less computer power than my watch.
More importantly that timed puzzle box allows you to not break the action and pace of the "FirstPersonSHooter in an open world RPG sandbox" gameplay.
It seems cheap
(it is)
and designed to force the player to do something else
(which it does)
Which is terrible if net running is your thing.
But in the end it was a good call.
(if the goal was to get a product that appeals to the lowest common denominator out the door ASAP. which it was)
For the most part everyone just stacked armadillo on any legendary stuff they could find and ran around slapping MaxTac and anything else in reach with a one shot rubber dildo for the lolz while all incoming damage is lullified. While minMaxing your chrome to stay in slomo time as much as one can.
or trying to find the one combo that makes for an ultimate max damage super attack weapon that will one-shot Atom Smasher 5 times over.
While dedicated netrunner builds were mostly ignored for the first month.
If i were to hazard a guess the devs were told to "Put a pin in Netrunnning" and work on other things( making consoles more playable).
With the option of having the entire "Johnny Mnemonic meets the Ghost in the Shell operating system" experience being released as a DLC.
Of course the Critics will go ham on the
"Hur Dur , where is muh First person shooter? this is a stupid puzzle game. 1/10"
"THis free dlc is worth what i paid for it."
"why you nerfed my favorite build that was so OP it bordered on being an exploit."
It would be far better a thing for CDPR to release this content as a separate game.
Maybe calling it "Rache Bartmoss' Guide to the Net and Brainware Blowout". where "the main character" (who probably wont be "V" but it can go either way) gets to move about in the same night city we are using now (with V's exploits from the first game sometimes making the news) BUUUUT the bulk of the game is about "Going into the Deep Net" where no one can go without dying because "Here be Dragons".
Except NetWatch.
And You, the Protagonist. Probably because of the choices you make in the JohnySilverhand/Relic main quest line and the Delamain side quests.
At this point you can throw in some hand-waving nonsense about how the Breach Protocol "minigame" from CP2077 is actually an in universe operating system designed by Net-Watch from the beginning to keep netrunners from going into the "Internet of old" and coming back infected with old 'viruses' / AI's that literally piggyback your subconsciousness and/or take over your mind.
In Brainware Blowout ... you use the earlier version of netspace. Eventually.
Accessing the internet of old through those crazy chairs you see certain other netrunners using in the game (whether working for or against Net-watch).
With lots of stuff to do all the while on your chair while you are up to your neck in cyberspace problems. (like V winds up doing on more than one occasion in the first game) Or for that matter you as the player have to run net security for other solos in meatspace (cutting cameras, unlocking doors, distracting guards, ripping data from secure servers and dropping it onto chips your solo npc's have to actually get to and physically retrieve etc ). All while covering everyone's tracks and doing it under a certain time limit.
Because if your Ice melts then Corporate has your location and a response team is enroute to retrieve/flatline you.
If the local ICE doesnt try to flatline you first by cooking your brain or keep you jacked in long enough for you to be retrieved from your chair.
Remember chooms TraumaTeam Platinum has response time of 3 minutes or less. So it wont take long.
As for story lines ... well i have a bunch for ya. Here are some freebies.
Do you side with Net-Watch and protect the status quo (or the human race) from being overwritten by our nascent AI overlords?
(at least if you screw up You have netwatch keeping people form getting to you in meatspace)
Do you unleash your inner anarchist finish Batmoss' legacy and destroy the system that allows the Corporations to exist? And let the whole world burn out? (or die in a freezer and dumped in a land fill 50 years later, who knows?)
Was Delamain an AI spy sent to learn about humans and their weaknesses?
Or a genuine soul as unique as any other snowflake that is hiding in human space to avoid an AI big bad?
Both? Neither? Do they suffer? Are they sentient and therefore deserve rights (Corporations would HIGHLY DISAGREE)
Is the Relic chip a genuine human created immortality hack that AI's wish to subvert to their own purposes?
Or did a young netrunner get lost in the deep net and come back "overwritten" by an AI with the knowledge needed to design the Relic chip that is allowing them to "overwrite" the wealthy and powerful that can get access to the chip. Thus "taking over" the short sighted decisionmakers of the human race in order to save the planet from Humanity itself...
Humanity gets uprooted entirely.
A tiny fraction of its current population is allowed to live as a preindustrial society of gwent playing luddites that exist to repair the damages to Earth's biosphere. (see Horizon:ZeroDawn). While also supporting a techno priesthood that does the physical maintenance of the cyberspace servers that the AI cant do themselves. (See the Mechanicus of Mars from Warhammer 40k) Because cyberpunk is at its heart a Dark dystopian future.
And sometimes you need to do a hard reset.
Maybe some AI feel that Humanity needs to survive in some way and this mass overwriting should NOT be the way forward.
Too much progress (such as it is) would be lost. Humanity and Ai's both gets their excesses "pruned back" with a small group of Humans (Net-Watch) using The Chairs to interact with cyberspace and Ai using the Relics to interact within meat space.
All working together to bring about a post Singularity society that is somehow NOT a dark Dystopian future?
Maybe both are right somehow and its up to you the protagonist to determine
Decisions, decisions, decisions ...
My first response was "have you seen a dedicated quickhax build?"
And then went of an a rant which had no bearing on the discussion so I am putting it here.
You want magic? Have you seen what a dedicated Quickhack build can do? Its about as close as you get.
Of course there is the analogy for "Astral Space" to figure out and that is where the Breach Protocol stuff would have kicked in.
Buuut that was cut. For reasons.
Hold on to you seat, Choom. This is where i go off into the deep end ...
Those net runners in those recliners doing their thing? its a whole different world in there.
Or it was gonna be. And that was the problem.
Anyone that has played cp2020 or shadowrun as a tabletop rpg since the mid 1980's reached the same conclusion.
Every other class in the game is running and gunning with each other while dodging corpos and cops and gangers as you murder-hobo your way through the setting .
Except the Netrunners.
Everything they do from a game mechanic perspective was quite literally a second game within the first.
It all happens "off scene" from what the rest of the group is doing. And they can literally phone in their performance.
The Referee/Storyteller/DM has to create two separate instances of gameplay. One for the solos, rocker girls, medias, Fixers, et al in the meat space.
And one for the netrunner in cyberspace.
Which kind of sucks really because the net runner vs. the rest of the group each have to stop their action while the other catches up to what is going on.
As a result; what mostly happens is the Referee just "hand waves" the net action and lets everyone play "Anything but a Netunner" to save themselves some extra work.
Which is why there are 5 different printings of Chrome book and only one for Netrunners.
CDPR hit the same wall.
So what happens in "The Heist" is not really a surprise. The resident Netrunner in the group; T-Bug, is for all practical purposes an NPC you see exactly once otherwise you never interact with except through the phones. In spite of all the talk that Jackie says about saying she is part of the crew, too.
To be honest it is a fair representation of your expectations from a cyberpunk game. so yay immersion.
But it wasnt always like this. Devs in particular know a thing or three about coding in general (unlike your average Tabletop Referee) and were absoultely interested in making an imersive net running experience consistent with a 50 year jump into the future
As late as spring 2018, the devs had made a net running experience was something like what you see out of Ghost in the Shell.
BUUUUTTT the game mechanics were so completely different from ALL of the other "FirstPersonSHooter in an open world RPG sandbox" gameplay.
To the point that it is a separate game unto itself. Which was a problem considering the core game was having a hard time being playable on console.
I imagine that at this point Management stepped in and forced the devs to stop. Making the game consoie playable was ahigher priority problem.
so quickhaxs are streamlined into the (totally not VATS) system that the other "Wired Reflexes" uses (which was a good call to be honest)
and the BreachProtocols, ICE combat, and DataMining are lumped into a timed 2D puzzle mini-game game that uses less computer power than my watch.
More importantly that timed puzzle box allows you to not break the action and pace of the "FirstPersonSHooter in an open world RPG sandbox" gameplay.
It seems cheap
(it is)
and designed to force the player to do something else
(which it does)
Which is terrible if net running is your thing.
But in the end it was a good call.
(if the goal was to get a product that appeals to the lowest common denominator out the door ASAP. which it was)
For the most part everyone just stacked armadillo on any legendary stuff they could find and ran around slapping MaxTac and anything else in reach with a one shot rubber dildo for the lolz while all incoming damage is lullified. While minMaxing your chrome to stay in slomo time as much as one can.
or trying to find the one combo that makes for an ultimate max damage super attack weapon that will one-shot Atom Smasher 5 times over.
While dedicated netrunner builds were mostly ignored for the first month.
If i were to hazard a guess the devs were told to "Put a pin in Netrunnning" and work on other things( making consoles more playable).
With the option of having the entire "Johnny Mnemonic meets the Ghost in the Shell operating system" experience being released as a DLC.
Of course the Critics will go ham on the
"Hur Dur , where is muh First person shooter? this is a stupid puzzle game. 1/10"
"THis free dlc is worth what i paid for it."
"why you nerfed my favorite build that was so OP it bordered on being an exploit."
It would be far better a thing for CDPR to release this content as a separate game.
Maybe calling it "Rache Bartmoss' Guide to the Net and Brainware Blowout". where "the main character" (who probably wont be "V" but it can go either way) gets to move about in the same night city we are using now (with V's exploits from the first game sometimes making the news) BUUUUT the bulk of the game is about "Going into the Deep Net" where no one can go without dying because "Here be Dragons".
Except NetWatch.
And You, the Protagonist. Probably because of the choices you make in the JohnySilverhand/Relic main quest line and the Delamain side quests.
At this point you can throw in some hand-waving nonsense about how the Breach Protocol "minigame" from CP2077 is actually an in universe operating system designed by Net-Watch from the beginning to keep netrunners from going into the "Internet of old" and coming back infected with old 'viruses' / AI's that literally piggyback your subconsciousness and/or take over your mind.
In Brainware Blowout ... you use the earlier version of netspace. Eventually.
Accessing the internet of old through those crazy chairs you see certain other netrunners using in the game (whether working for or against Net-watch).
With lots of stuff to do all the while on your chair while you are up to your neck in cyberspace problems. (like V winds up doing on more than one occasion in the first game) Or for that matter you as the player have to run net security for other solos in meatspace (cutting cameras, unlocking doors, distracting guards, ripping data from secure servers and dropping it onto chips your solo npc's have to actually get to and physically retrieve etc ). All while covering everyone's tracks and doing it under a certain time limit.
Because if your Ice melts then Corporate has your location and a response team is enroute to retrieve/flatline you.
If the local ICE doesnt try to flatline you first by cooking your brain or keep you jacked in long enough for you to be retrieved from your chair.
Remember chooms TraumaTeam Platinum has response time of 3 minutes or less. So it wont take long.
As for story lines ... well i have a bunch for ya. Here are some freebies.
Do you side with Net-Watch and protect the status quo (or the human race) from being overwritten by our nascent AI overlords?
(at least if you screw up You have netwatch keeping people form getting to you in meatspace)
Do you unleash your inner anarchist finish Batmoss' legacy and destroy the system that allows the Corporations to exist? And let the whole world burn out? (or die in a freezer and dumped in a land fill 50 years later, who knows?)
Was Delamain an AI spy sent to learn about humans and their weaknesses?
Or a genuine soul as unique as any other snowflake that is hiding in human space to avoid an AI big bad?
Both? Neither? Do they suffer? Are they sentient and therefore deserve rights (Corporations would HIGHLY DISAGREE)
Is the Relic chip a genuine human created immortality hack that AI's wish to subvert to their own purposes?
Or did a young netrunner get lost in the deep net and come back "overwritten" by an AI with the knowledge needed to design the Relic chip that is allowing them to "overwrite" the wealthy and powerful that can get access to the chip. Thus "taking over" the short sighted decisionmakers of the human race in order to save the planet from Humanity itself...
Humanity gets uprooted entirely.
A tiny fraction of its current population is allowed to live as a preindustrial society of gwent playing luddites that exist to repair the damages to Earth's biosphere. (see Horizon:ZeroDawn). While also supporting a techno priesthood that does the physical maintenance of the cyberspace servers that the AI cant do themselves. (See the Mechanicus of Mars from Warhammer 40k) Because cyberpunk is at its heart a Dark dystopian future.
And sometimes you need to do a hard reset.
Maybe some AI feel that Humanity needs to survive in some way and this mass overwriting should NOT be the way forward.
Too much progress (such as it is) would be lost. Humanity and Ai's both gets their excesses "pruned back" with a small group of Humans (Net-Watch) using The Chairs to interact with cyberspace and Ai using the Relics to interact within meat space.
All working together to bring about a post Singularity society that is somehow NOT a dark Dystopian future?
Maybe both are right somehow and its up to you the protagonist to determine
Decisions, decisions, decisions ...
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