[SPOILERS] [IDEA] What to do with Vehicles?

[CS554]

I really liked the story of Cyberpunk 2077. Getting into world through characters, shards and environmental story telling. For me the most clever use of vehicles in this game was Delamain jobs. Last GTA game I played was GTA IV. I never finished it, most it had for me was driving physics. Later I found Saints Row III and IV stupidly fun, but I can't say I miss repetitive gang battles, for me it was parody aspects that got me.

We have cars, the city, streets and roads in game, but I don't think this was ever supposed to be a GTA. Driving doesn't contribute towards character, attribute or skill experience, nor it needs to. Adding driving as skill would just be creating a problem to be able to solve it.

Vehicles could however allow us to experience more of Night City. Perhaps we could drive a taxi.

From background material there are two relevant taxi companies besides Delamain. Red Cab Inc. and Combat Cabb. Latter has specified to deal with extremely hairy situations. Since Delamain is in the picture, they may be classified as budget Delamain in 2077.

Why would V drive a cab or should this character even be V? I don't know, but there's phone and wait function on game along with the rest.

For Red Cab customers could be corpos, Trauma team member, mercs having a party and chancing club, escorts, I don't know if common folks really can afford taxis but perhaps even Nomads after selling something to city. Taxi could enable certain kind of slices of life experiences.

• Corpo might be assassination attempt survivor, have a story about that and give more insight to battles between corps
• Trauma Team member might have been called to TT hospital, we could hear about their work a bit
• Mercs might go over their latest gig they are celebrating, turns out there were six, now there's only three or two. Bit more depth to life of merc groups like we see in the Afterlife
• Escort may be telling us about her rich life style, her expensive cyberware. She looks like close to thirty, is actually 55, tells us how she has been taken pills for ages as she, as anybody else, is just a body in this city, her fate despite her beauty, connections and wealth is like so many others, intellectually she doesn't exist.
• Nomads could be kids, player picks them up from club, head for badlands where their clan is preparing to leave. They made it big selling some stuff from crashed AV and went to adventure a bit. They might be a boy and girl and started realizing something, they play marry, fuck, kill with previous president of the US (Nomad education) and stuff like that while cab takes them through the night to their camp. (this could actually be really interesting, what could CDPR writers do with this?)

Problems are why would player character do this? How player gets skill experience? Perhaps there could be overarching plot. Someone is sabotaging taxis (6th. Street with their Combat Cabb can't take on Delamain, so they try to expand on Red Cabb by stealth strikes).

There's also possibility to play this from Combat Cabb perspective. In background material 6th. Street is involved with Combat Cabb which turned out to be pretty lifelike actually. From Wikipedia:

John C. Montana (born Giovanni Montana; July 1, 1893 – March 18, 1964) was a Buffalo, New York labor racketeer, political fixer, and elected politician who eventually became the underboss and/or consigliere of the Buffalo crime family.
...
In 1922, John Montana formed the Buffalo Taxi Company – his first stab at joining Buffalo's booming transportation industry. A few years later, he bought and merged with the Yellow Cab Company in an effort to consolidate cars and call centers as well as eliminate the taxi competition.

So Mike Pondsmith knew exactly what he was doing with tabletop game and that also shows up in Cyberpunk 2077, when we see 6th. Street gang riding Combat Cabb in Claire's storyline, it's not by coincidence.

Perhaps more could be done with this, playing with the strengths of studio. I don't care about GTA and I hardly ever come to play any DLC but anyway, perhaps something like this might cover multiple bases at once.

 

[the_ktt]

Personally, if there were taxis i would drive them. I have never skipped the driving during quest when you sit as passanger because I just like to look out from the window and enjoy the environment

Could be cool, not like I require this but I think it could be fun to have taxi missions, like some will pay you depending on how fast to get to the point some others will have you do some dirty stuff which you can either accept or not... But well, not sure this is most important feature, just thinking out loud

 

[CS554]

It's just a sketch how to use vehicles in a way that would make sense to me in this setting. Not to run taxi company, not to do cops and robbers for some convoluted reasons and play with strengths of studio. I was thinking that there's no mirrors in cars and something like this would require quite something from writing and voice cast and directing, while saving from visual assets.

I actually enjoyed to be able to sit as passanger too. Night City is quite something to take for pure visual aspects alone and it also offered some down time to process all things we encounter. Really liked it.