Too much Johnny

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I've mentioned this in other threads but I guess it fits better here.

The entire Heist/biochip sequence should not have happened so early in the story. It would make more sense to push that to the end as its separate epilogue sequence or third act or since JS is a "rockerboy" title it "Encore"

Here's the gist of it
Heist mission carries on as it currently does including the Dex meeting (with T-Bug still alive like the E3 trailer because it just looks better) V wakes up in landfill - THEN Johnny introduces himself just like the same E3 trailer - roll credits

This way the ending of the story directly segues into DLC that would focus on JS and his arc while leaving V and company the screen time they deserve and also because I want to be the one to shoot Dex damnit.​

I totally agree with you on that sense, sadly they marketed Keanu Reeves (don't get me wrong, He seems to be having a blast playing Johny and is imo one of his best perfomances in recent years aside from John Wick) I wouldn't even go as far as making the biochip DLC, but just have it as the entry point for act 3 or halfway through the game let's say act 2 (and make it longer), like I said. If only we had a 6-10 hour main quest with and another 5-6 hours of side quest for the prologue (act 1 in my version) it would work like a charm because now you truly have connected with V, Jackie, T-bug, the fixers and other characters, following V's dream of becoming the top dog in NC. Then boom the proverbial ice cold water splash with Johny. Hell the first hypothetical act would start hinting at Arasaka, what Johny did on the 2010s and early 2020's etc.
 
If you can handle that this game changes from a Openworld-RPG to an Actionadventure/Looter Shooter with linear Storyline then everything is fine.

I think at one point, they changed the whole direction of the game, making it "Johnny Silverhand in Night City".
That would explain almost every problem this game has.
 
Unpopular opinion: I'm sure Keanu Reeves is the kindest, gentlest celebrity there is, but he never resonated with me as an actor. He's flat, emotionless and monotone. Johnny Silverhand strikes me as a character with a rage-filled intensity that transitions into cosmic sorrow and loss that Keanu's line reads just don't capture. Whenever I listen to Johnny, all I hear is Keanu "phoning it in."
 
Don't mind him, although his dialogue is kinda slow at times, makes him sound like he's drunk or he's having trouble wrapping his tongue around the lines. Still it doesn't bother me. I think he talks more in this game than any film he's ever done.

I'm more annoyed at the fact that there seems to be a time limit to get him out of your head. Yeah yeah I know you can do all the side missions before lighting the blue touch paper on the main quests, but time limits (even ones you can delay) are a major bugbear of mine, especially in a game with so much exploration. Time limits force me to hurry even managable ones, I've never liked them and I like taking my sweet damn time.

/rant
 
This game doesnt know what it wants to be. They started amazing. Open world RPG and end up linear action-adventure where open world wasnt needed to be honest. 1st act was cut. Hell even the map is linear and doesnt allow you to travel a lot..It is cut because its gonna involve choices which this games really tries to take them away from you. Did they make Jonny role way bigger? Yes, they did...And it changed everything. This is an expansion story at best. Love the actor, ok story,hated linearity of it. It was horrible. One example. First mission we need to get the car from the garage and we got destroyed by the taxi and V who just started his life with jonny AND HATES HIM asks Jonny if he saw that....That crap shouldnt happen cuz before we got down to the garage- the same nighhhhhhttt.... Jonny said he would take over our body,bashed our head against the window and we told him that we gonna take the pills and kill him. The writters must have had a stroke...The story is cut, remade...tried to piece it together just to make a little sense...made a super linear thing where nothing matters really. Second example...im doing side quests randomly but me and Jonny are awesome because i tried to be right with him and i had 70%...sooo im getting this quest and Jonny cuz scripted is horrible towards me and tells someone that we dont click at all. WHAT?? lol....Very, very linear and with that a horrible experience. We were suppose to be night city legend and yet this game struggles with its indenitity...Am i an open world rpg game or a linear storyline which has urgency to it to be fast paced and finish faster...You are dying in 3 weeks which btw no body cares lol and im here trying to be a fist champion or buy a 200k car...Why?...Act One was cut so badly i cried a bit...that thing should have had 4-5 mission with jackie before arasaka...i wanted to get to know jackie and t bug...i wanted to kill dex...You took out everything that made us choose and qe had plenty of it...
 
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After I finished it occurred to me that perhaps, given Reeves celebrity, the Silverhand storyline was originally intended as a side story or DLC.
This is a popular thought. Yet it isn't supported by the evidence available, either out of game (there is an old video where they talk about looking to hire someone to play Johnny and eventually got Reeves) or in the game.

In the game the first mention of the Relic is when you first get into the lift in your home building - the TV spot that plays (only then) is about the Relic and gives you foreshadowing about the story. There are many, many other parts of the story where there is information like this about the Relic and tied to your situation that have no mention of Johnny. (There is a DJ spot on Morro Rock where Mike talks about the Relic in a way that is implied by the flash back where Johnny talks to Saburo.)

Johnny himself serves 3 roles when he appears - he delivers more setting context to what you are doing (from Johnny's PoV of course) and he provides warnings (sometimes about content difficulty and sometimes related to likely overloads on the Relic). The more the side quest relates to V or the Relic situation the more likely you are to see Johnny. The third role is his role in the main story of the game, where he does context and warnings, but he also pushes his own agenda (which could use some polish about befriending him, there are a number of early points after he says he wants to save you that you only have degrees of negative responses to him that don't make sense if your V has decided to believe Johnny).

I also think that the Johnny story is not the be all and end all of the game and it wasn't intended to be that way. In the available game, the conflict between open world (seeded for future use) and purely narrative creates the perception that Johnny isn't integral (especially as you can do a lot of content and never really see him at all), but that doesn't mean he wasn't key to the story before Reeves was hired.
 
Yeah he can get rather overbearing but I love some of the more subtle moments of him doing something stupid in the background while V is talking to someone or otherwise occupied, I noticed a few of them and most of them got a chuckle out me.
 
I actually like Silverhand's character, and I like Keanu Reeves as an actor. What I dislike is how overly pervasive his character is throughout the game. I wish you could eliminate all his random commentary and appearances where you didn't even interact with him directly.

Disagree Johnny makes the game Cooler and without him its a boring game, the city is already quiet,specially in ps4 not much people in the streets, not so different weather changing.no 3rd person on foot to have better view of city etc.. And its like a dead city, only thing that change that,is Silverhand.
 
I'll quote what I've said in another thread about Johnny :

I love the character of Johnny, and I really like the performance of Keanu Reeves, but I understand why many players feel cheated (I don't, not by a long shot) whenever he enters the frame and takes the spotlight away from them. I don't mind because I wanted to know more about his story, which is a very important part of the CP pen and paper original setting.

But I think it might have made unvoluntarily the game scope "smaller" than what people expected, in trying to make an overarching story in which the players would have a role to play, and which would connect all the dots neatly from the old pen and paper game. The story of Johnny isn't new, and CP2077 tries to tie all the hanging threads let by M. Pondsmith in the game.

Some players expected freedom, and they feel they don't have this freedom because of the overall plot which is about Silverhand and Arasaka. They feel like they're being put on some invisible tracks. I somehow had this feeling while playing too because I remember waiting avidly for side quests to give me their follow up while postponing the story about Arasaka/Johnny because I wasn't as invested in it as in the side characters. I wanted more of those characters stories, I wanted to experience more of their slices of life.

Kind of the same thing happened in the Witcher 3 though, if you remember correctly, because Eredin and the Wild Hunt were kind of always coming in the way and were definitely not satisfying as an overarching plot.
And just as in the Witcher 3, it was the side stories and the side characters who ended up being the most satisfying.
That's why I consider Hearts of Stones and Blood and Wine vastly superior to the base W3 game story wise. It doesn't have this overarching huge story and focus on more personal and rather "small" matters.

I have hope that they'll be able to pull it off the same way with CP2077 and its expansion packs.
 
Meh I liked Johnny's role in my story and I literally have zero negative things to say about it...
 
Yeah, ngl Johnny's presence is a bit overwhelming, but it makes sense. There were times when I was like "Get out of my head, and go away man!", but then I forgot he's stuck in there lmao
 
Disagree Johnny makes the game Cooler and without him its a boring game, the city is already quiet,specially in ps4 not much people in the streets, not so different weather changing.no 3rd person on foot to have better view of city etc.. And its like a dead city, only thing that change that,is Silverhand.
Well, I start to wonder, whether the reason the game falls short beside the main quest is actually Keanu aka Johnny Silverhand. Remember, they hired him in Summer 2018. Just two years ago. I can imagine, the concept they had for the game before went right into the dust bin just to rush a story about Johnny Silverhand.
Don't get me wrong, I like the story. IMHO the Johnny Silverhand story would have been a great story for an expansion. But for the base game they should have invested more time in fleshing out the city and their factions. Build in a faction reputation system and make decisions more relevant. And make the 6-month montage with Jackie playable content.
 
As someone who like many thought that Johnny would of been a mere cameo. Also as someone who dislikes having celebrities in games anyway, I agree there is waaay too much Johnny, so much so I never really did get immersed into the game.

It like mentioned before should of stayed as dlc, it would of been cheaper too. Instead, CDPRs obsession with Keanu Reeves ended up being their downfall.
 
Terrible human being (Johnny, of course, not Keanu), wonderful character, imho.

His presence is fine to me: he's quite charismatic and makes sense with the story - as most of people already said.

The problem with the game is its gameplay, not Johnny. And the problem with the story are the endings/linearity. Sadly, this game without Silverhand would be kinda empty.
 
I basically said in another thread that they could fix the bugs, hammer out the broken stuff, and then rename this game "The SilverHand Chronicles" and call it a day.

RPGs are supposed to be about developing the story of YOUR avatar. Instead, we have this glaringly obvious, painfully linear, main story where you're basically just a shell of a person carrying out the will of a long dead local anti-corporate activist. The lifepath you choose is utterly disconnected from the rest of the game (except for some dialogue) 15 minutes into it, making the initial lifepath choice completely irrelevant once you get into what should be the meat of the game when it should matter the most.

ALL of your character's development is to serve a purpose NOT your own, but that of a virtual NPC. What happened to YOUR aspiration of becoming a Night City legend? Well, quite simply, it CEASED to exist the second Jackie stuck that shard in your head. Ultimately, you finish the game feeling completely disconnected from your avatar, and you ultimately realize it's because you never really got the opportunity to know and develop it.
This. What happened to " I Want to become a legend " ? I finished the game wondering what my character finally accomplished ? What did he really live except running against Time to survive ? What did he have Time to enjoy in night City ? What good he has done for NC ? How many Real Friends out of work ? It's like he almost lived nothing since the beginning of the game.

Let alone that it doesn't make sense wasting time with side quests, and jobs.

That's just not glorious at all.
 
i will have to disagree here ,i really think they used him as a companion way more effectively than most games where they are either nothing but a blank wall who will follow you and add little to nothing to the journey or annoying fucks who shoehorn themselves into everything ,i think Silverhand is in the perfect middle where he chimes in from time to time sometimes even forgot that he was there ,i love the dynamic between him and V and how their relationship develop through out the game even though it was short as fuck ,i also enjoy his dialogues which is one of Cdprs biggest strenghts ,there are many and i mean MANY problems with the game but i dont think sivlerhand as a companion is one of them imo
 
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