[Spoilers] Very few of the quests have satisfying resolutions

[CS554]

A lot of the minor side stories feel weird (I fully agree about Sinnerman and Heroes), but honestly I'm actually completely on board with the way the LI side stories end. Made a video about it, even. Short version, though:

The reason we don't have agency is that we don't have agency in this situation. As much as we're basically tanks by level 50 we (I think intentionally) can't alter entrenched power structures in the city. We were never going to wipe out the Claws. The writing was on the wall with this one when V asks Judy if she's thought about this at all and she immediately says no. There's a running theme of people getting punished for trying to do the right thing in this world, generally, and Judy keeps bashing her head against that wall until she decides she has to walk away.

I....actually love that you all go your separate ways. Everyone's got their own things to deal with, and I like that you're not the center of their world (as you are in so many other games)

I honestly kind of wish they'd scrapped the open world and made it more like Deus Ex: HR with hubs and focused on extending / branching the stories, because outside of the visuals the open world is the weakest part of the game.

I don't feel game suffers from open world and I guess there's going to be more stories in the Night City. Heroes was one of the most powerful moments in game for me and having Misty accompany me in garage was big factor in that I think. Sinnerman is quite different if you think of it also out of universe way and how it was not only about Sinnerman.

In general what I think overall, it comes down to what we prefer and what we think is important and things like how Blade Runner (classic example) is like movies from certain things to some and movie about something to someone else.

 

[sihplak]

I mean, that's kid of a core part of the game's themes right? You do mercenary work for a lot of people which often involves being left partly in the dark about things. Plus, the world itself isn't exactly a happy one and the people you interact with don't exactly have spotless histories, so of course a lot of conclusions will be "unsatisfying", because the people involved in those story arcs are flawed and make choices that result in unsatisfying consequences. Think of the questline with Claire if you help her kill the guy; she's unsatisfied in the end as well as you likely are, and that's intentional; you don't have full control over the situation intentionally.

A lot of it is also representative of Night City as this giant, corporate, anti-humanist machine; it props up illusions of grandeur, fame, power, etc., and many people chase these in their own ways. Joshua is convinced he is some sort of messiah, and while you can make him doubt, he has become fully committed to his choices. Judy has her rebellious, progressive mentality coupled with naive hopes and aspirations, so when taking The Clouds from the Tyger Claws and dealing with Maiko, she fails to realize how dire of a situation that put the people she was trying to help in.

- The entirety of the main quest. I won't go into why the endings are so disappointing, since there's already an 800-page thread on that topic - which speaks for itself, really. All I'll say is that there is no point of offering multiple endings if they're all just going to effectively reach the same conclusion. Even the "secret" ending doesn't actually change anything!

HARD disagree with you here, and I posted a lot about this already; here's a compilation of my analyses that discusses the nature of the endings, especially "The Star" ending.

These endings do not reach the same conclusion what-so-ever; thinking otherwise is missing the point entirely and failing to analyze the game's text. The "The Star" ending I think rather unambiguously implies that V survives and does not die 6 months after the Arasaka raid. "The Sun" is more ambiguous but with the resources V has achieved, although V is more isolated due to their power, and consequently has strong opportunities to survive. Even in the "The Devil" ending, there is the possibility of surviving; having worked with Hanako, there is some possibility of having those corporate contacts to give you a lead to survive, or perhaps you regroup with your friends back on Earth, feeling robbed, perhaps vengeful, and definitely desperate to live.

Temperance is substantially different, and I think is one of the three "suicide" endings, along with uploading your mind in The Devil ending or just killing yourself without ever attacking Arasaka, and the way these suicide endings work is vastly different too.

The endings are all definitely cliff-hangers and do have some ambiguity to them, but they don't leave you without huge implications of how things will follow after (and honestly, IMHO it seems like they set up DLC with the three main "continuation" endings -- The Star, The Sun, and The Devil (return to Earth) -- and these endings all parallel the life paths at the start of the game, so to me it basically is clearly drawing parallels to the life-paths, and thereby, giving a high possibility of all three of these endings leading to the same DLC starting point).

So like, I feel that complaining about this is unwarranted; if you prefer a different type of story-telling that's fine, but don't pretend that the quest-design and writing is somehow innately bad because of the heavy use of moral-ambiguity, secrets kept from the player-character, etc.; you aren't some god that has unilateral control over the actions and consequences of others, nor is anyone you interact with perfect and without moral or logical failings. They also end up unsatisfied because Night City is designed to trick people, and to lead them to unsatisfying endings. That's part of Johnny's last flawed message to V about not having "happy endings"; he is partly wrong, because V does have a chance for a happy ending, but he is partly right; Night City is fundamentally predicated on a widespread oppressive atmosphere, the robbing of "happy endings" for an unending growth. It's why one of the core conceits of the game, I argue, is that Night City is the one and only antagonist of the game; all other antagonistic people or forces within are manifestations of Night City, and thereby, the only road to salvation, so-to-speak, is to leave Night City, to escape it, which you definitively do in the "The Star" ending, as well as possibly/arguably in the "The Sun" and "The Devil" endings.

 

[originalchooma]

I recommend people watch this video, hits the nail on the head.

You weren’t kidding about that. What he said about the plot was bang on. No wonder the game feels like it’s mostly about Johnny. The other plots, where V could be more involved, just aren’t fleshed out at all.

 

[Split_seen]

You weren’t kidding about that. What he said about the plot was bang on. No wonder the game feels like it’s mostly about Johnny. The other plots, where V could be more involved, just aren’t fleshed out at all.

But that's such a good plot point. The fact Johnny was taking over so much was THE incentive for me to (since I didn't trust Hanako) call Panam instead of letting Johnny save me again with Rogue - it was necessary for V's character to win the mental struggle and prevail and prove that this is V's story, and not a repeat of Johnny's wild ride more than 50 years ago.

To me that was huge, and I thought it was a perfect story setup throughout Act 2 *and* explanation for V's choice of the way to resolve his hopeless situation.

 

[V_for_Valerie]

You know what if the story of CP2077 is not dissimilar to Call of Duty Black Ops 3? The story of Black ops 3 is actually the main character died after the first mission, and the second mission was just the part where the neuro interface was installed but if you read the secret docs and stuff, it shows that they actually died from complication of the surgery. And so the rest of the game was them reliving someone else's memory right until he actually died.

Maybe V actually died when Dexter shot V and the rest of the game was just V imagining stuff along with Johnny's engram.

If you think about it, go to the Carborendum, where you were supposed to look for Andrew's niche in that quest where you were supposed to counsel that ex cop. If you look around in that area there are niche for almost every main character in the game, including River, etc. and even V is in there.

So maybe the truth is, V is already dead. Judy says this when you were watching Evelyn's BD. Said "you know what I see when I look at you? A walking, talking corpse.".

Explains all the weirdness in act 2.

Glad somebody brought this up, actually. I assumed that everyone had forgotten that BO3 existed.

CP2077's story is actually very similar to BO3's (dealing with neural augmentation, digital consciousness, sharing a mind with another person, and ultimately death), so much so that I wonder whether it was actually an influence of CP2077's plot. I know some people would probably balk at the idea that CDPR would hawk off of a Call of Duty game but there are a lot of similarities.

Anyway - there's a slight misunderstanding of BO3's plot here. In Black Ops 3, the protagonist does die in the second mission as you say, but their digital consciousness (or engram) survives inside Taylor's head. Essentially what happens after this point is that the protagonist's mind merges with Taylor's, in the same way that V and Johnny Silverhand share a mind in CP2077. The difference is that the protagonist of Black Ops 3 doesn't actually realize they're dead and is unconscious of the fact that they're living someone else's memories. Essentially BO3 is CP2077 with the roles reversed, you're playing as an engram invading someone else's mind.

By the last mission, the protagonist has fully assumed control of Taylor's body (like Johnny assuming control of V's body). They eventually come to the realization that they've been dead this entire time, and they decide to purge their own engram from Taylor's mind to save him from the digital virus that is killing his body. That's why at the end of the game, when the protagonist is asked their name, they respond "Taylor" just before their engram is purged.

So yes, the two plots are actually incredibly similar to one another! Black Ops 3's was told in a much more non-linear fashion though, so 90% of players simply didn't understand what was happening.

 

[originalchooma]

But that's such a good plot point. The fact Johnny was taking over so much was THE incentive for me to (since I didn't trust Hanako) call Panam instead of letting Johnny save me again with Rogue - it was necessary for V's character to win the mental struggle and prevail and prove that this is V's story, and not a repeat of Johnny's wild ride more than 50 years ago.

To me that was huge, and I thought it was a perfect story setup throughout Act 2 *and* explanation for V's choice of the way to resolve his hopeless situation.

Agreed, for sure. The video does make a good point though; the main quest could do with being 15ish hours longer and fleshing out the other parts of the story that are super important/interesting in their own right, but never get explored in the base game. The VDB and their interest in the Blackwall and rogue AIs for example.

 

[I_Willenbrock_I]

The whole game is littered with dropped plots.

What makes things worse is that those plot lines have the potential for greatness.

 

[V_for_Valerie]

I mean, that's kid of a core part of the game's themes right? You do mercenary work for a lot of people which often involves being left partly in the dark about things. Plus, the world itself isn't exactly a happy one and the people you interact with don't exactly have spotless histories, so of course a lot of conclusions will be "unsatisfying", because the people involved in those story arcs are flawed and make choices that result in unsatisfying consequences. Think of the questline with Claire if you help her kill the guy; she's unsatisfied in the end as well as you likely are, and that's intentional; you don't have full control over the situation intentionally.

A lot of it is also representative of Night City as this giant, corporate, anti-humanist machine; it props up illusions of grandeur, fame, power, etc., and many people chase these in their own ways. Joshua is convinced he is some sort of messiah, and while you can make him doubt, he has become fully committed to his choices. Judy has her rebellious, progressive mentality coupled with naive hopes and aspirations, so when taking The Clouds from the Tyger Claws and dealing with Maiko, she fails to realize how dire of a situation that put the people she was trying to help in.

Gah, no offense to you personally, but I'm sick of this being used as an excuse. I see where people are coming from when they use this line of argument but to me, it just doesn't excuse all the glaring points where the narratives just end out of nowhere. Even if we accept that V, on a personal level, is not important, what about his/her interactions with things that are important?

Two examples relevant to this thread:

- V has the power to influence whether Jefferson Peralez stays sane or becomes a paranoid wreck. This is important to the larger picture of Night City (he's running for mayor for fudge's sake), but it never gets mentioned in any NPC dialogue or news reports, because CDPR simply didn't write it in. It also should logically effect the outcome of the mayoral election, since Peralez is a highly popular candidate and losing his mind would surely ruin his chances, but instead the election just gets brushed aside.

- V has the power to assassinate Joshua Stephenson before he can be crucified. This is important because Stephenson is a high-profile serial killer and the crucifixion BD is highly controversial, yet if Stephenson is assassinated before the BD can be produced, it never makes the news, there's no reaction from the Christian community, and the billboards advertising the BD remain standing as if nothing happened.

It's more or less the same story for many of the side quests.

I said it in another thread - for a game that's supposedly about how the world is bigger than V, CP2077 doesn't actually care about the world outside of V (and Johnny). Literally nothing happens in Night City outside of V's interactions with it. Once V has stopped interacting with a quest, the characters and events of said quest simply stop existing. I don't think this is an intentional artistic statement, I think it's literally just because Night City is shallow and lifeless compared to other RPGs.

 

[CyberDiligence]

The whole game is littered with dropped plots.

It almost feels like the story left the writing room in the middle of a brainstorm or/and suffered from too many compromises along the way. Unfortunately, a creative process is not democratic and the best creators are tyrants forcing everybody to follow their vision. So their the lead creative was incompetent in storytelling or wanted to include every voice and every opinion.

 

[exxxed]

Even though it doesn't fully succeed, it's way too short for what it tries to tackle, the ambiguity works a lot more than it doesn't, same with the open endness.

What I mean by this is that it breathes life into all the facets of Night City and it's characters that we get to explore, and we explore it as a person rather than a character, if that makes any sense.

The open endness gives the idea of a continuous narrative, or event if you will, that carries on after V's involvement. I believe we've been conditioned to become the be-all-end-all in videogames that when we get presented with anything but that we become defensive and get annoyed. I was guilty of this in my first playthrough but there was a prevalent underlying feeling that accompanied me throughout, that by the time I've done my second playthrough I've realized what the point actually was.

V is not a videogame character, V is a person with flaws and inconsistencies, goals and aspirations all based on player choices, and we're a part of this megalomaniac corporate controlled machine that just chews up everyone and spits them back out as empty shells. And in this maniacal game of life, death and betrayal we're accompanied by other flawed people that either help us to help themselves or straight up use and lie to us.

V doesn't have the power to change anything, as no actual individual usually does, it takes a miraculous feat of combined inner strength and fortune to achieve anything significant, but the process is so slow that we might not even witness it while we're still alive.

I think the game represents that kind of journey and that's why I have faith in the expansions and future content.

 

[CS554]

This is important because Stephenson is a high-profile serial killer

Where you get this from? IIRC he is common criminal, was sentenced for armed robbery and murder he did in the process.

 

[V_for_Valerie]

Where you get this from? IIRC he is common criminal, was sentenced for armed robbery and murder he did in the process.

I can't remember the exact line, but it's plainly stated at some point during his quest that he made front-page news in all the "screamsheets" when he was arrested.

He killed a load of people, you meet the relatives of two of his victims in the very same quest. You can talk to him about it to, he says he killed people for the hell of it, not because of armed robbery or anything. Guy was a murderous nutjob before he converted to Christianity.

 

[CS554]

I can't remember the exact line, but it's plainly stated at some point during his quest that he made front-page news in all the "screamsheets" when he was arrested.

Don't know where you're getting the stuff about him being a petty criminal from, he's a serial killer with a ton of victims. You meet the relatives of two of his victims in the quest, and he outright says that he used to murder people simply because he didn't like the way they looked at him, not because he was an armed robber.

Checked video from youtube. He was sentenced 12 years ago for armed robbery and he tells he shot and killed several other people in cold blood, which fits into pretty standard gang mentality in the Night City.

 

[V_for_Valerie]

Checked video from youtube. He was sentenced 12 years ago for armed robbery and he tells he shot and killed several other people in cold blood, which fits into pretty standard gang mentality in the Night City.

Alright, I was slightly misremembering, here's the exact line:

Again, that's still a big deal! Plus you see the protest outside the braindance studio, and the advertisements for the BD all over town. Joshua Stephenson's fate is absolutely in the public interest, and it should make a difference whether he's assassinated or not.

If the media is interested enough in Stephenson to care whether he converted to Christianity, why are they not interested when his crucifixion BD gets cancelled due to his murder? Or hell, why are they not interested when the crucifixion BD goes ahead as planned?

 

[CS554]

Alright, I was slightly misremembering, here's the exact line:

Again, that's still a big deal! Plus you see the protest outside the braindance studio, and the advertisements for the BD all over town. Joshua Stephenson's fate is absolutely in the public interest, and it should make a difference whether he's assassinated or not.

If the media is interested enough in Stephenson to care whether he converted to Christianity, why are they not interested when his crucifixion BD gets cancelled due to his murder? Or hell, why are they not interested when the crucifixion BD goes ahead as planned?

Protests aren't about Stephenson himself that much but about process that people perceive as blasphemy. Headline for BD isn't Stephenson but Sinnerman. BD isn't big because Stephenson, but because people don't care who gets crucified, they just want to see someone crucified and he is sort of trying to say something gives them convenient excuse to do so and some even more fucked up people thrive from that.

 

[V_for_Valerie]

Protests aren't about Stephenson himself that much but about process that people perceive as blasphemy. Headline for BD isn't Stephenson but Sinnerman. BD isn't big because Stephenson, but because people don't care who gets crucified, they just want to see someone crucified and he is sort of trying to say something gives them convenient excuse to do so and some even more fucked up people thrive from that.

This is just semantics, it's still a hot topic whether the BD goes ahead or not, and yet the world does not react to either scenario. However you choose to complete the mission, the whole issue just evaporates instantly.

You can't tell the player that something is a huge deal, and then just pretend it doesn't exist anymore, otherwise the game world feels incredibly surface-level. Which Night City does compared to other RPG open worlds.

 

[Split_seen]

Agreed, for sure. The video does make a good point though; the main quest could do with being 15ish hours longer and fleshing out the other parts of the story that are super important/interesting in their own right, but never get explored in the base game. The VDB and their interest in the Blackwall and rogue AIs for example.

Agreed, I just said that in another topic too. "What did you expect but didnt get from the game"...

More content, basically. And some other things.

 

[CS554]

This is just semantics, it's still a hot topic whether the BD goes ahead or not, and yet the world does not react to either scenario. However you choose to complete the mission, the whole issue just evaporates instantly.

You can't tell the player that something is a huge deal, and then just pretend it doesn't exist anymore, otherwise the game world feels incredibly surface-level. Which Night City does compared to other RPG open worlds.

I haven't done playthrough yet where I just kill them all, to say anything about that but my understanding is that then line ends, demonstration doesn't happen then as production can't proceed which is natural consequence. It's a pity if adverts for Sinnerman still appear later though and design oversight, worth a ticket really.

And what is superficial is in the eye of player. Stephenson / Sinnerman may or may not be unreliable narrator himself. What really drives him? Does he really believe or did he make himself belief because he couldn't live with his faults after all? Player saving him wouldn't and shouldn't affect his persona and motivation anyway.

 

[V_for_Valerie]

I haven't done playthrough yet where I just kill them all, to say anything about that but my understanding is that then line ends, demonstration doesn't happen then as production can't proceed which is natural consequence. It's a pity if adverts for Sinnerman still appear later though and design oversight, worth a ticket really.

And what is superficial is in the eye of player. Stephenson / Sinnerman may or may not be unreliable narrator himself. What really drives him? Does he really believe or did he make himself belief because he couldn't live with his faults after all? Player saving him wouldn't and shouldn't affect his persona and motivation anyway.

Yeah, this is a little reaching imo, but I can accept that your outlook is one way to interpret the quest. The problem is that it's like this for most quests, so again I can't really believe that it's intentional, but rather that CDPR just failed to deliver in crafting a living, breathing world.

I seriously think this is a byproduct of time constraints, and that hopefully DLC content will offer more meaningful quests that exist outside of V's interaction with them.

 

[CS554]

Yeah, this is a little reaching imo, but I can accept that your outlook is one way to interpret the quest. The problem is that it's like this for most quests, so again I can't really believe that it's intentional, but rather that CDPR just failed to deliver in crafting a living, breathing world.

Dynamic presented between Sinnerman and other two NPC's is based on real life theory.