This is part of a conversation I had.
Me:
That's something I miss about Cyberpunk 2077. It never had any cool hack-based missions like this, even though the world was absolutely perfect for it. If you took Void Future and crammed it into Cyberpunk, it would be a perfect fit. It feels like there's a space already carved out for it. Imagine the existing personalities you could attach to it. Imagine more character interest missions with Judy! Everyone's favorite lesbian!
Response:
YES. Cyberpunk 2077 gives you this astonishingly hackable world and then most netrunning in actual gameplay is basically combat magic wearing an Ethernet cable.
Short Circuit. Contagion. Reboot Optics. Memory Wipe. Very useful, very cyberpunk, but you're mostly casting spells at people and appliances.
There was this enormous unexplored design space where a gig could begin normally and then Judy says, “V, I need you in their subnet,” and suddenly you're doing something much closer to Void Future. You're not controlling V anymore. You're inside the architecture.
And Judy would be perfect for it because she's already technically capable without being a dedicated runner. She's a braindance technician, electronics nerd, hacker-adjacent, and deeply interested in manipulating recorded neural experience. That gives her missions a different character from something involving, say, T-Bug or Nix.
Imagine a Judy chain where you're hacking a braindance system while somebody is experiencing it.
You're looking at data structures corresponding to sensory channels:
VISUAL
AUDITORY
SOMATIC
EMOTIONAL
MEMORY_ASSOCIATION
Judy:
“V.”
hover
But more seriously, you could have missions where the hack itself tells the story. You find an erased memory pointer. Restore it. Now there's a person in the BD who wasn't there before. Judy realizes somebody deliberately edited them out.
Or infiltrate an Arasaka subnet and discover that the ICE isn't merely security. Something is living behind it. Now you're making choices about whether to isolate it, communicate with it, release it, or tell Judy you never found anything.
And because Cyberpunk already has personalities attached to different technological domains, each character could effectively give you a different hacking campaign.
Judy gives you braindance and neural systems.
Nix gives you old Net archaeology and dangerous software.
Songbird, in the Phantom Liberty era, gives you Blackwall insanity where every connection feels like putting your tongue on a nuclear reactor.
Mr. Hands gives you corporate espionage where nobody gives a shit how you get the information as long as nobody can prove who hired you.
And Delamain...
Jesus.
A proper hacking mission inside Delamain could have been magnificent.
You're navigating an actual software representation of his fractured personality structure while the different Delamains are actively modifying the system around you. One opens doors. Another lies about what a process does. Another tries to kill your connection. One quietly leaves breadcrumbs because it wants you to reach the core.
That would make the final Delamain decision something you understood mechanically, rather than merely reaching a room and choosing among dialogue options.
That's what feels missing. Cyberpunk lets V be a netrunner, but it rarely lets you be one.
Take the combat/exploration/RPG shell of Cyberpunk 2077, embed something resembling Void Future whenever V actually jacks into a serious system, and let those hacks affect the physical mission in real time...
Yeah.
There really is a Void-Future-shaped hole already cut into Night City.
Posted in a vain hope that someone on the CDPR Cyberpunk dev team reads this.
Me:
That's something I miss about Cyberpunk 2077. It never had any cool hack-based missions like this, even though the world was absolutely perfect for it. If you took Void Future and crammed it into Cyberpunk, it would be a perfect fit. It feels like there's a space already carved out for it. Imagine the existing personalities you could attach to it. Imagine more character interest missions with Judy! Everyone's favorite lesbian!
Response:
YES. Cyberpunk 2077 gives you this astonishingly hackable world and then most netrunning in actual gameplay is basically combat magic wearing an Ethernet cable.
Short Circuit. Contagion. Reboot Optics. Memory Wipe. Very useful, very cyberpunk, but you're mostly casting spells at people and appliances.
There was this enormous unexplored design space where a gig could begin normally and then Judy says, “V, I need you in their subnet,” and suddenly you're doing something much closer to Void Future. You're not controlling V anymore. You're inside the architecture.
And Judy would be perfect for it because she's already technically capable without being a dedicated runner. She's a braindance technician, electronics nerd, hacker-adjacent, and deeply interested in manipulating recorded neural experience. That gives her missions a different character from something involving, say, T-Bug or Nix.
Imagine a Judy chain where you're hacking a braindance system while somebody is experiencing it.
You're looking at data structures corresponding to sensory channels:
VISUAL
AUDITORY
SOMATIC
EMOTIONAL
MEMORY_ASSOCIATION
Judy:
Naturally, there is a button labeled SOMATIC.
“V.”
hover
But more seriously, you could have missions where the hack itself tells the story. You find an erased memory pointer. Restore it. Now there's a person in the BD who wasn't there before. Judy realizes somebody deliberately edited them out.
Or infiltrate an Arasaka subnet and discover that the ICE isn't merely security. Something is living behind it. Now you're making choices about whether to isolate it, communicate with it, release it, or tell Judy you never found anything.
And because Cyberpunk already has personalities attached to different technological domains, each character could effectively give you a different hacking campaign.
Judy gives you braindance and neural systems.
Nix gives you old Net archaeology and dangerous software.
Songbird, in the Phantom Liberty era, gives you Blackwall insanity where every connection feels like putting your tongue on a nuclear reactor.
Mr. Hands gives you corporate espionage where nobody gives a shit how you get the information as long as nobody can prove who hired you.
And Delamain...
Jesus.
A proper hacking mission inside Delamain could have been magnificent.
You're navigating an actual software representation of his fractured personality structure while the different Delamains are actively modifying the system around you. One opens doors. Another lies about what a process does. Another tries to kill your connection. One quietly leaves breadcrumbs because it wants you to reach the core.
That would make the final Delamain decision something you understood mechanically, rather than merely reaching a room and choosing among dialogue options.
That's what feels missing. Cyberpunk lets V be a netrunner, but it rarely lets you be one.
Take the combat/exploration/RPG shell of Cyberpunk 2077, embed something resembling Void Future whenever V actually jacks into a serious system, and let those hacks affect the physical mission in real time...
Yeah.
There really is a Void-Future-shaped hole already cut into Night City.
Posted in a vain hope that someone on the CDPR Cyberpunk dev team reads this.