[Spoiler Alert] About the endings

[BGM45]

I go to bed. I sleep for eight hours. I wake up with no conscious memory of those eight hours.

I make an engram of myself. I live eight hours and die. My engram is uploaded into a body. I wake up with no conscious memory of those eight hours.

Spot the difference.

Anyway, I loved all the endings. LOVED THEM. I was convinced Pyramid Song was the peak of storytelling in the game, but the endings gut punched the notion outta me, preem. I was expecting a mild letdown, Wither 3 style, but what I got was something that was well written and thematically consistent with both the game's narratives and the setting itself.

Kudos to the writing team.

good for you that you've enjoyed it. a lot of us didn't. and we aren't asking for the existing endings to be removed or rewritten, we are asking for something different. not "happy", not sappy, just something that makes the whole ordeal worth going through where our choices actually matter and V (not her copy) stays alive. for why many of us think the copy-paste scenario is so unnerving and just plain wrong you can check out previous pages or think of the SOMA's ending.

Nah. The game is written like a PnP RPG campaign would be. That's perfectly fine for a game in general and perfectly fine for a game that claims to be an RPG.

if it's a PnP RPG campaign, then it's one of those where GM thinks they're so smart the players should just follow along with their great plan and be happy. if I knew I was getting into that, I wouldn't be getting into that.

 

[Simuxas]

This is one of the biggest issues about this whole ordeal - By simply reducing V's life choices to "which ending you wanna see" dialogue, they essentially killed any replayability the game would have. You don't need to raise a character from the ground, fall in love with them, get under their skin and feel the very same they feel, just to see the other endings... Just reload your "Just one more gig" save-file (which the game already does for you, you don't even have to do it yourself), and pick a different choice when Johnny asks you.

There is absolutely no replayability on the game at the moment...

They might aswell give us the game without main story, just for sidequests and gigs. But that would just be like a banage on filling a hole in a chest

 

[mateus235]

All it take is add like 2 more quests and 1 ending and takemura can contact u by phone

 

[hismastersvoice]

whole story was about new relationships, decisions, gains loses but mainly about trying to survive.

I mean, the entire, seven hours or so prologue, and most of the rest of the game establishes that no, the story isn't about surviving, it's about how you live. Do you fade away, or do you blaze out? Is either choice correct?

Like, I get that people might think it's about saving V, because you can roleplay V like a survivalist, but that's just the game giving you the option of forming a character.

 

[MeinChurro]

Yet, this is not a PnP game... It's a voice-acted, visually-rich game where you can relate to the character you embody. Unless you fell in love with the piece of paper you wrote your stats onto, you don't get the same feeling on a pnp rpg...

I think that may be the crux of the issue. It was written like a pen and paper campaign.

 

[Vejsa]

Yet, this is not a PnP game... It's a voice-acted, visually-rich game where you can relate to the character you embody. Unless you fell in love with the piece of paper you wrote your stats onto, you don't get the same feeling on a pnp rpg...

Exactly. The difference between PnP and Video Games is that a video game is usually the fact you're able to visualise and immerse yourself in it without having to use your imagination. I shouldn't be dreaming of alternate endings for this game, I shouldn't have to do that.

Post automatically merged: Dec 15, 2020

I mean, the entire, seven hours or so prologue, and most of the rest of the game establishes that no, the story isn't about surviving, it's about how you live. Do you fade away, or do you blaze out? Is either choice correct?

Like, I get that people might think it's about saving V, because you can roleplay V like a survivalist, but that's just the game giving you the option of forming a character.

I disagree. The whole campaign is established as V wanting to survive. If it wasn't, we wouldn't bother with 90% of the hunt to get rid of it from our head and instead just storm Arasaka in a blaze of glory and explosions etc etc.

 

[Buckadoz]

There are a couple things that make me completely hopeless that there will be any DLC that could possibly change V's fate.

The first is how the game itself treats Soulkiller. It is made clear that the process to copy V to rewrite her to her body WILL KILL the original V. The only hope Alt gives V is to let a clone of her live out the rest of her life in her body -- but the story keeps going as if this is an answer. It never fully grapples with the fact that Soulkiller is the death of the person you've been playing as, and the story seems to think this isn't actually a very big deal.

Second, the story dismissing the impact of Soulkiller has meant the players dismiss the impact of Soulkiller. Most people here seem to think the Nomad ending is some bittersweet ending that leaves room for hope; it is not. Your V died at Mikoshi, and the Nomad ending is just watching what a construct that thinks it's V does with the time it has left in your body.

Cyberpunk has two endings, with flavor variants. In the first, V dies before Mikoshi, either at her own hand or in the one man assault on Arasaka. In the second, V dies in Mikoshi as Alt burns her out to make a construct V. After this point, the only thing you're choosing is which construct gets to use V's body for the rest of it's life after she's dead.

The only possible way a DLC can give V a happy ending is if it introduces some miracle MacGuffin that can do what Alt cannot. I don't know how this could be written well (but then again, a refusal to take Soulkiller seriously is also not written well), and people don't seem to think the fact that V dies unceremoniously while someone else gets to live out the rest of her life isn't so bad anyway, for some reason.

 

[hismastersvoice]

Yet, this is not a PnP game... It's a voice-acted, visually-rich game where you can relate to the character you embody. Unless you fell in love with the piece of paper you wrote your stats onto, you don't get the same feeling on a pnp rpg...

I played PnP RPGs, CP2020 included, with a fantastic GM and equally fantastic group of players. So yeah, I did get the same feeling from that...

And I fail to see how you're refuting my point here. There's no benchmark for how many choices and options an RPG has to offer to qualify for the term. Let's no try to gatekeep the genre.

Post automatically merged: Dec 15, 2020

I disagree. The whole campaign is established as V wanting to survive. If it wasn't, we wouldn't bother with 90% of the hunt to get rid of it from our head and instead just storm Arasaka in a blaze of glory and explosions etc etc.

You're confusing Cyberpunk's brand of punk with being suicidal.

Of course V wants to live. There wouldn't be any story otherwise. But what V might want is not the same as what the story is about.

 

[mateus235]

like u have no real choices in this game u can chose only when u gona die sooner or later and arasaka still be going to f people like giving a choice in the a.i taxi to put them bio chip from jakie in ur head or not that will make a whole diffrence but instead u are forced to die and u can only chose when that a bit to little for game that was made 8 f years

 

[Simuxas]

I mean, the entire, seven hours or so prologue, and most of the rest of the game establishes that no, the story isn't about surviving, it's about how you live. Do you fade away, or do you blaze out? Is either choice correct?

Like, I get that people might think it's about saving V, because you can roleplay V like a survivalist, but that's just the game giving you the option of forming a character.

So you either fade a way as nothing or turn into Johnny, aight, great game choices there. And you think, that out of all possible endings that we received, getting at least one nice one where V makes it and keeps living would have hurt the game more than it did now without it? Let people go for the goal they were expecting from the start of act 2, not just experience that everything is dark and bleak.

Like this game is really similar to movie Elysium, where main protagonist got deadly radiation doze so he kept pushing forward to save himself but he sacrificed himself for his friends daughter. Here you just die after hard fight and for what? Nothing at all. We don't get that feeling of acomplishment, that nice feeling that we saved someone (V) that we see a nice ending with a glimpse of continuation.

If you go through and try to save yourself but u can't, what's the bloody point? To suffer for nothing?

 

[BGM45]

I mean, the entire, seven hours or so prologue, and most of the rest of the game establishes that no, the story isn't about surviving, it's about how you live. Do you fade away, or do you blaze out? Is either choice correct?

Like, I get that people might think it's about saving V, because you can roleplay V like a survivalist, but that's just the game giving you the option of forming a character.

so what's the point of "forming a character" if in the end I get shoehorned into an ending I don't want and wouldn't ever pick if I had a real choice?

your assessment of V's struggle to survive not being the point is just your perspective. my V wants to survive, as a person, not a file. considering CDPR promised it was going to be our story, I feel it's only fair to expect to be able to achieve this result.

 

[hismastersvoice]

if it's a PnP RPG campaign, then it's one of those where GM thinks they're so smart the players should just follow along with their great plan and be happy. if I knew I was getting into that, I wouldn't be getting into that.

Those are generally the best campaigns. The players are there to roleplay their character. The GM is there to give them a storyline framework to do so. The less both step on each other's toes the better.

 

[Vejsa]

I played PnP RPGs, CP2020 included, with a fantastic GM and equally fantastic group of players. So yeah, I did get the same feeling from that...

And I fail to see how you're refuting my point here. There's no benchmark for how many choices and options an RPG has to offer to qualify for the term. Let's no try to gatekeep the genre.

Post automatically merged: Dec 15, 2020

You're confusing Cyberpunk's brand of punk with being suicidal.

Of course V wants to live. There wouldn't be any story otherwise. But what V might want is not the same as what the story is about.

No, I am not confusing that. You're told by developers that your choices matter, and what you do in the game affects the outcome. In the end, it doesn't. You might as well make this a linear, chapter-based game. That's where this story would work. V should want what we as a player want, as was suggested by CDPR. I get that they wanted to create a game where we are just another person and that's fine, but they didn't. We became too important to the story and the people around us, and the stuff we did affected the game world, but we're treated at the end like we did nothing of importance and the best option we have is a different way of ending our life.

 

[BGM45]

Those are generally the best campaigns. The players are there to roleplay their character. The GM is there to give them a storyline framework to do so. The less both step on each other's toes the better.

in this case, the GM has rolled over our toes with a tractor. and not only toes.

 

[AKANexus]

I played PnP RPGs, CP2020 included, with a fantastic GM and equally fantastic group of players. So yeah, I did get the same feeling from that...

And I fail to see how you're refuting my point here. There's no benchmark for how many choices and options an RPG has to offer to qualify for the term. Let's no try to gatekeep the genre.

I am a GM myself, and I have lead a Call of Cthulhu adventure that ended up in two PC's going insane. They accepted and created other characters and tried to do different stuff to prevent that from happening. They ended the campaign alive and somewhat sane.

I'm also on a Tormenta (a Brazilian dnd-based system) table, and I had another character that died early because their race was shunned and disliked on the realm the first adventure took place, so I made another character with a different race, so I knew that wouldn't happen. Still going strong with my new triton bard.

In PnP games you can do that, because you learn from your actions and try and do different choices to get different outcomes. In CP2077 you can't. Any character you create will not matter, just the four-way dialogue at the end.
PnP stories don't belong in video-games. Have you ever noticed how hard is to make believable branching stories on video-games based on PnP systems? The only two ones I know that managed to do that are Neverwinter and Pathfinder. And Neverwinter itself is a bit restrictive as well.

Video-games stories don't belong in pnp systems either. You don't see SWKOTOR, Witcher 3, System Shock, Dragon Age and Mass Effect being made into successful pnp systems... (And those I mentioned are all RPG, and apart from System Shock, your choices during the game mattered more than Cyberpunk's 2077).

 

[xxSkyy]

I mean, the entire, seven hours or so prologue, and most of the rest of the game establishes that no, the story isn't about surviving, it's about how you live. Do you fade away, or do you blaze out? Is either choice correct?

Like, I get that people might think it's about saving V, because you can roleplay V like a survivalist, but that's just the game giving you the option of forming a character.

And after all no matter what you have 2 choices - die now or later.
Theres nothing after ending thats the worst. Nothing you can do, game just moving time back like nothing happened,

 

[hismastersvoice]

So you either fade a way as nothing or turn into Johnny, aight, great game choices there.

There's an ending where V becomes a living legend, the big boss of Afterlife and is in the process of doing a job so cosmically difficult, it takes place in space. Like, literally in space.

And then there's an ending where V's tired of fighting for meaningless recognition from a city that will never care about him and wants to leave it all behind.

How can you possibly say the endings are all the same?

 

[xxSkyy]

Exactly. The difference between PnP and Video Games is that a video game is usually the fact you're able to visualise and immerse yourself in it without having to use your imagination. I shouldn't be dreaming of alternate endings for this game, I shouldn't have to do that.

Post automatically merged: Dec 15, 2020

I disagree. The whole campaign is established as V wanting to survive. If it wasn't, we wouldn't bother with 90% of the hunt to get rid of it from our head and instead just storm Arasaka in a blaze of glory and explosions etc etc.

The more we talk about it the better. CDPR listening to their fan base so there are probability that even in janurary update we'll get it.
If it would be other company like EA i'd just want refund and forget but not with them.

 

[hismastersvoice]

PnP stories don't belong in video-games.

That's just, like, your opinion. Man.

 

[AKANexus]

There's an ending where V becomes a living legend, the big boss of Afterlife and is in the process of doing a job so cosmically difficult, it takes place in space. Like, literally in space.

And then there's an ending where V's tired of fighting for meaningless recognition from a city that will never care about him and wants to leave it all behind.

How can you possibly say the endings are all the same?

Those are the "die later" endings.

That's just, like, your opinion. Man.

That I can back with data.