This is mainly a thread to rant about Cyberpunk story spoilers so if you're actually interested in this story don't bother looking at this thread. Even then though I think it's fair to post a lot of fellow cynics here are pretty fed up of the state of RPG storywriting these days.
I feel like Cyberpunk 2077 is Mass Effect 3 all over again and even on steam people are making comparisons to what Baldur's Gate 3 are doing with the story with Bioware. I took my own advice this time round and watched the no commentary gameplay and honestly yet again I was not impressed lol.
Even when you do your best to take the woke element out of the story, you quickly realise why they shove the woke elements of the games in so hard and it's to cover up the fact that ultimately the 'choices matter' marketing is pretty fraudulent in some cases. Allegedly Baldur's Gate 3 doesn't even have proper epilogues for the choices you make according to posters among other things though to be fair and not spread bullshit I don't know if they have plans to patch that in.
V's story is pretty self-fulfilling at the end of the day maybe or maybe I'm being unfair on the writers because perhaps their intention was to make some 'dark' ending for V no matter what. However if that's the case then really he's not the MC of this cyberpunk universe he's just some generic NPC who's going to die no matter what in this case and even the implied good endings seem to have him be miserable because he's a greedy fuck that wanted to have it all instead of live his life happily.
Perhaps I'm not giving the writers enough credit and this is supposed to be a social commentary on the consequences of greed in a cyberpunk universe however I don't think these woke writers are capable of that much subtlety. It feels like the choice matter games are all fake, at the end of the day you can't just say no and walk or fight out of a situation which would hugely impress me.
To posit a scenario that I would have written for a story like this. I would have given the player an entire option to ditch the chip and not insert it into your brain. That would have been really interesting, you could even make it the way more difficult option to survive through because of all the factions wanting you dead. However, you'd still have the chip generally on hand and you wouldn't need to worry about terminal illness. Carrying the chip around would be like having a live grenade in your pocket.
At the end of the day though it seems a lot of RPG writers don't want the PC having a happy ending or being all powerful for some bizarre reason. I'm going to always be checking for that shit now if I ever see an RPG pop up I like the look of and yes it does bother me a lot. Just another cautionary tail of don't buy a new game within a month of release.
Main Rant: If writers want to start killing off the protagonists of game stories, then they should have the balls to make new protagonists to continue the story overall rather than milking the same story endlessly that just isn't that interesting. Honestly fuck these people, if they want to go on strike I'll be thrilled, I could write better RPGs than they can and I realise that's very ballsy of me to post but I'm pretty confident in my writing skills. My only issue would be funding for voice actors but I wonder if I could make a multi-choice RPG with writing alone.
The blaze of glory part was the entire Arasaka run. Taking on an outlandishly dangerous mission against the most dangerous corporation in the game universe as an amateur seeking not just a payday, but legend status in Night City.
Slotting the chip wasn't even dangerous. They even lay that out. The chip really does nothing, except presumably on some level you might be able to converse with who is on it, but it was only because of the bullet in the head that the chip began rebuilding your brain, but modeling it after Johnny.
The decision to slot the chip was desperation to save the payday. If you left with nothing you'd be a nobody. If you stole Arasaka's most precious secret, you'd be a legend.
Even when Jackie is first shot, the reaction of both of you is the save the chip, because it was the glory you both wanted. Every single starting scenario has you starting as a complete nobody in a city of nobodies (yes even the corporate one, because you're basically cancelled and erased). You were never going to survive Night City and were doomed to struggle and die amongst all the other schlubs. The best to hope for was to leap at a chance, like a promise of a fat payday.
That's like, basically what everything motivating characters in cyberpunk games is about.
The concept of live to fight another day still exists though, at the end of the day is the potential danger of the foreign object in your chip worth it? Yes I'm being a massive pedant, but to me. I would always pick the option of backing off because there are too many variables, you could still carve your own path without the stupid chip and this whole scenario ignores the fact that CD Projekt Red were trying to bill the games as "The big open world RPG where you can do whatever you want". It plays like a fucking CoD campaign.
Did they actually bill it that way or was that player hype? I kind of recall actually not hearing a lot of anything about the game except for one video which I don't think sold anything the game wasn't.
I feel the same way about Star Citizen, I'm pretty sure most of the hype I saw was invented by the players when the whole game is a money-laundering Radiant Quest simulator.
I remember people in forums being like "I'm going to be the captain of a cruise liner, and other players will ride around onboard and go to the casino and watch movies and converse!"
Like yeah that's what people want to do in a fucking space game, you retard, sit on your ship and "converse".
That's real shit people were saying, no kidding.
So you're a pussy who wouldn't have even started the heist in the first place?
Dude, the character you're "role-playing as" is a cold blooded killer who is shown killing random people for a payday. Yeah, he's gonna balk at slotting a chip that his buddy just slotted and had nothing happen to him.
I'm starting to think you didn't really pay much attention to what was happening in the beginning of the game.