Cyberpunk 2077 - Truly WASTED Potential

very few games have captured the public's attention like cyberpunk 2077. it was hyped to the point of parody by youtubers and journalists alike truly it seemed as though cdpr could do no wrong and that this game would redefine the open world adventure genre forever now with the benefit of hindsight this seems absurd on its face especially since cd projekt red has burned all of its public cache in the recent weeks and months after repeated blunders take your pick denial over the state of the game releasing broken ports on last gen consoles releasing patches that actually introduce new game breaking bugs and many many more however at the time prior to launch the average gamer was likely to believe all these things that we now see as patently ridiculous this was because of several factors that came into play all at the same time so before we dive deep into the game let's briefly discuss the background and setup of this whole situation so you can truly appreciate the game that cd projekt red delivered for one you have to understand that cd projekt red's reputation was primarily boosted after the release of the witcher 3. the game was critically praised across the board because it was and still is i would argue phenomenal in the purest sense of the word but more than this the game also released at a time which would prove instrumental in its positioning as one of the greatest games of the generation you see the year was 2015. adele's hello was at the top of the charts a reality tv star was hinting at a possible move into a political career and gamers were getting hyped up for the newest release from one of the most highly respected and allotted studios in the world bethesda game studios these guys previously brought the world the elder scrolls 5 skyrim fallout 3 and ihra professional drag racing 2005. they were thought of as the developers in the industry on the level of rockstar literally every single game that they released was in the running for game of the year and would definitely sell millions gamers had been waiting four years for something from them and rumors had it that this would be the year furthermore people were hearing rumors that this would be a fallout year it seemed that gamers would finally see a return to the franchise that had been laying dormant since 2010's spin-off game that i'm sure nobody has heard of or cares about and amidst all of this excitement the witcher 3 released in may to great reviews and quickly became a contender for game of the year seemingly out of nowhere it wasn't that cd projekt red was a bad studio far from it they were just small and inexperienced the lengths of their experience in the industry leading up to the witcher 3 was the witcher and the witcher 2. that's it call me a pessimistic troglodyte but i think it was probably fair to expect the witcher 3 to be at best good but not great however the game turned out to be a phenomenon truly fantastic and i remember gamers at the time saying wow what a fantastic year to be a gamer first we have the witcher 3 and next we're gonna have fallout 4 that's gonna be so amazing it blows even that out of the water yeah that didn't happen fallout 4 was officially unveiled at e3 2015 with an announced release date just a few months later fans were predictably elated everything about the game seemed bigger better more detailed when gamers started to worry that this was too ambitious todd was there to quell our fears with a reassuring all of this just works say no more todd we believe you let's just wait until the game releases and blows us all away so the weeks and months went by the game launched and well reactions weren't what they wanted them to be fans of the classic fallout games thought that it felt shallow uninspired and that the story didn't make any god sense at all furthermore it was buggy i remember being so excited to play it that i actually spent all the savings i had to build a gaming pc for the game's release i bought the best hardware that i could afford pre-loaded the game and then on launch day i couldn't run it frame rates were choppy textures would randomly disappear and the game would crash roughly every 20 to 30 minutes on me i was quite disappointed and so were many other gamers but it was at the height of this disappointment that cd projekt red came in to show just how much better they were free dlc two huge expansions that will add 20 to 40 hours of gameplay refinements patches and all-around do-goodery and it was in this emotional turmoil surrounding bethesda's failure that cd projekt red positioned themselves as the industry's darling the company that cared about the consumer first and business second and that they could be trusted and all of this set them up for the titular game which we will be dissecting throughout the course of this gigantic video the game which players trusted would be polished refined and well complete at launch it was to be the game that got our hopes up and got them dashed in a flash the game that bizarrely makes fallout 4 look like a highly polished aaa extravaganza in comparison of course we're talking about cyberpunk 2077 so here we are i've included timestamps below so you can jump around at your convenience if you would like to watch the video ad free you can just head over to patreon even a single dollar will give you the ability to download the video watch it in its entirety without ads it helps out the channel it helps you out saves you time without having to sit through all these things everybody wins also special thank you to inarg zachary johnson blurryguy25 and mike holland for their fantastic and overwhelming support over on patreon furthermore thank you to everybody who supports me over on patreon who got to see this video early who's always supported me even when these videos take a long time you guys are the best but before we get into it i should stress this is a big video we're going to be spoiling absolutely everything in the game so don't expect anything to be left undiscussed not only are we going to break down all the gameplay elements but we're also going to go through the entire storyline from start to finish with all origin stories and go through every single ending that's possible to achieve understandably this took a long time to do so bear with me it's gonna take a little while to dissect but i think it's necessary after all this game is sold on its narrative and the quality of its writing so it should be able to hold up to a lot of criticism right i'm being catty it it doesn't it gets it it's bad it's bad it's bad but seriously thank you for watching in advance you guys are wonderful and i'll see you at the end of this whole thing face to face breaking all this down with a candid uncut conversation but until then pull out the popcorn have a snickers relax and enjoy cyberpunk 2077 the remarkable collapse of cyberpunk 2077 was partially caused by the immense amount of hype that the game received leading up to the launch now i love jumping on gaming media just as much as the next guy but i want to break this down a little more precisely because what happened with cd projekt red and cyberpunk 2077 is a little different than what you might see with something like fallout 76 or the last of us part two media reactions to both of those games were bizarre in their own right but in this case the media was fanning a flame that had already been established and that was being stoked by gamers themselves but we'll get to that firstly you should know that in public positions it's often beneficial to follow the zeitgeist and ride the waves of popularity instead of charting a new path with unique and possibly controversial opinions in this case we're talking about gaming journalists if you could call them that telling gamers what they want to hear instead of communicating what might be an unpopular opinion and this can take many different forms it could be for instance a journalist trying to appeal to their readership that's much more male oriented and that prefers characters in games that they played to be more scantily clad than delicately clothed so they write an article about how terrible it is that game development studios are taking steps to try and de-sexualize women in games or it could swing the complete opposite direction and you could end up with a journalist that's trying so hard to appeal completely and utterly woke that they write an article that gives you a migraine just as quickly as you open it the point is it's cowardly you're choosing not to stand for what you believe in just so that you can achieve some sort of immediate reward whether that's viewership clicks on ads or perhaps just feedback from your fans on social media but people will justify this cowardice by saying that they're simply giving the people what they want telling them that which they desire after all if the audience is satisfied having their pre-established beliefs affirmed why would someone fly in the face of what's working in many cases gamers and people alike are going to news sources that tell them what they want to hear if the news source that they go to tells them something they don't want to hear they'll simply go to a different one fundamentally it's a problem with modern digital media when there are so many options for consumption available the average consumer is going to consume that which they're already familiar with in the same way that you're unlikely to take a new and foreign route home from work or to order that strange looking dish from your favorite restaurant most people will read watch and believe news and commentary sources that confirm their biases whether it's something ingrained in our dna or something that we've developed since the advent of the internet is certainly an interesting question but not necessarily important to the discussion at hand or to the identification of this symptom of a sick media environment what is important to note is that this phenomenon is in no way new novel or relegated to niche communities it's evident all over our social media landscape which is why it should come as no surprise that cyberpunk 2077 brought out the worst in these people few titles launched with this level of excitement according to the developers there were over 8 million copies sold through pre-orders alone that's ridiculous because of this extreme hype public figures felt the need to placate the masses even in the face of a broken product after all if you know as the journalists that most reviewers and critics are probably going to give the game a 9 or a 10 because it's cyberpunk 2077 do you really want to be the guy that comes out swinging with a six probably not unless you're the type of person who enjoys seeing that type of internet hate come your way which there are people and youtubers for instance that actually do ride that wave and they make it work for them the point is for these people it doesn't matter if gamers will find out after the fact since 95 of review videos are watched on or before the day of the game's release so you ended up with what we got a bunch of reviewers that came out on the day before launch saying that the game was a 9 out of 10 on pc that it's possible the console version might be a little different but that the game itself was phenomenal and then you fast forward a month after all of this hate has been levied against the game and you hear these people discuss the very same topic again and all of a sudden they have tons of issues with the game the questing's broken they have issues with the narrative structure with this and with that in other words making it very clear that they didn't actually believe it was a 9 or 10 out of 10 they simply gave it that score because that's the score that their viewers wanted to see this type of behavior doesn't hurt that much when you have a game that actually is fantastic however when you end up with a game like cyberpunk 2077 it does immense damage because all it does is hype up gamers well before the fact to the point where they pre-order the game over playstation network or on xbox live so they pre-download it ready to play right at midnight and realize that the game is fundamentally broken it may seem like these people are just trying to follow the trend or give their viewers what they want but in many cases they are being incredibly irresponsible even financially hurting their viewers even financially hurting their viewers because they're encouraging them to buy a product that actually doesn't meet the standard that they are professing it as having met there's no way around it in my mind youtubers and gaming journalists had a large role to play in what happened with cyberpunk 2077. they hyped up the game to the point where it was beyond parody this was going to be grand theft auto 6 meets the witcher 3 meets deus ex machina and there was nothing anybody could say to change anybody's mind about it in many cases they actually bought the hype as well so they were just as deceived as the viewers that they were trying to entertain and hype up as well however in many of these cases where creators were receiving merch receiving copies of the game early got to attend gameplay demos months ahead of release these people should have known better they should have been able to see that this game was lacking many elements that were required of a game such as this at launch i've attended many preview events some six months to in some cases even a year before the game's launch i've seen what a game that far out from release looks like and considering how broken cyberpunk 2077 was at launch they had to have known that something was up they would have gotten into that demo started playing it and realized that everything was broken nothing was working right and they should have been able to say something or simply said nothing at all i've been in that situation where your added preview event they show you something and it's horrible and either you communicate to your audience that it's horrible or the developer politely asks you to hold off judgment until the game is finished which in many cases i think is fair the game hasn't come out yet it's not fair to bash it in front of the world if the developers don't think that that's a fair criticism however these people went out with the knowledge that this game was falling well short of where it should have been and just lied to everybody or lied to themselves or believe the developers lies that it was well ahead of schedule and that it wasn't actually that broken and they just have to adjust it and it's an old build or this or that i mean i'll tell you for one when i saw the game behind closed doors at e3 2019 i knew for a fact that that game that they showed us was massively underwhelming compared to what we had been hyped up to believe that the game would be and you can go back and look at the video that i made after e3 2019 and see me discuss my thoughts on the game in person from the dome based off of what i saw i didn't lie to you and say that it was amazing i said they played it incredibly safe it seemed fairly underwhelming and it didn't seem like it was that fantastic it just seemed like a first-person shooter with some interesting gameplay mechanics many of which were taken out of the game by launch and that's about it all of this to say the media did a lot of damage and to the extent that i was responsible for hyping people up i apologize however i hope this serves as a warning to everybody moving forward that when a game is hyped up to this crazy level you should take a second readjust resend to yourself and ask whether or not this is fair whether or not you should be this hyped because as always if it seems too good to be true it probably is now before we get into the gameplay let's discuss the elephant in the room the glitches they are even still game defining it's getting better though and on my pc my experience was really good however granted most people are not going to be playing a game like this on a 5950x and a 3080. so i admit that my experience is very very niche especially because my wife nikki has been playing through the game on console first on ps4 and then on the ps5 with the backwards compatibility and on that console it's it's a lot less good nikki's undetectable like you can do anything i just literally walked by every single person that's ridiculous but you see this video is not designed or meant to be a video breaking down every glitch that i encountered throughout my game time there are other videos i'm sure by the time this one releases that do a much better job of breaking that down you see this video is intended to break down the game not the glitches in six months hopefully all of these glitches and weird things that happen while playing will just be a distant memory that might not be the case but one can hope however because it's such a massive deal i figured i would run through some of the more interesting bugs and glitches that i came across then we'll move on and we won't dwell on it i forced myself to narrow this down to four of the most memorable glitches and bugs that i encountered while i played through this game multiple times to get this video done i could show you every t-pose and weird clipping texture and the pop-in and everything like that but these are the ones that stick in my mind the first time is actually a moment when i was going through a very serious narrative section with the voodoo boys and i had the same guitar loop play for a solid half hour while i went through some very serious cutscenes and what made this even more bizarre is that at first i thought that it was just a sort of loop that had been set up within the music track to build tension and it was some sort of analogy for the purgatory that v was caught in with johnny while trying to communicate with alt cunningham all characters that we'll go through in a bit but it seemed as though it might have been intentional so i went along with it but after a solid 20 minutes and once other music started playing in the background underneath the guitar loop i realized that this might not actually have been the intended effect no i'm well no why is it not like the guy don't trust him what are you going for [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] oh to give you a chance to pay me back get me out of our soccer tower it's a stupid glitch but it's one that actually almost ruined this entire sequence because the only way that you can fix this is with a hard reset of the game i had to close the whole thing and reopen it and the thing is in these cutscenes where this happened there is no way of stopping saving and then closing and reloading you have to finish the cutscene or you're gonna go all the way back to the previous checkpoint upon reboot so i just hunkered down and finished it out dealt with it and granted it's not a big deal but it's one that i will remember for a long time because it was so annoying the next one was all of the hard crashes i didn't actually encounter many of these however i did have an occasion on stream when we were actually playing the game prepping for this very video over on twitch by the way follow me over on twitch when my entire pc crashed as a result of trying to play the last secret ending in cyberpunk 2077 check it out dude don't you think i would have fixed it by now if i could have whatever you did like giving me crap let's make sure dude i'm dying did we just crashed i'm not i'm not joking it just fully like shut off the pc it just restarted wow so yeah the patch came out and uh it was supposed to fix a lot of major issues now i had a lot of crashes with the game where it just went back to the desktop of my pc however this is on another level this is when the game actually causes your pc to freeze up completely to the point where the only fix is a hard reboot of the entire system this is a freaky glitch i don't know how this happens somebody was telling me in the comments that it is because the graphics card gets overrun by information and there's a firmware issue and i'll be honest i don't really understand it all i know is that the game was trying to do something it wasn't allowed to do freaked to the computer out and the whole thing collapsed this one's a lot more major because depending on what you're doing elsewhere on your pc whether that's copying a file or maybe you have a backup that you're doing or you're reading and writing data all at the same time a crash like this could lead to very severe data loss and potentially hardware failure depending on when it happens so i take this very very seriously the next thing has to do with headshots during boss fights you see in almost every major boss fight throughout the course of the main story of the game i was able to land headshots with a sniper rifle and it would trigger a crit modifier and show you the damage readout in other words how many points of damage you did against the character but that damage is never applied to the enemy so you can headshot the boss but it doesn't actually do any damage at all and this happened all over the place in the boss fight against sendai oda against smasher against sasquatch you name it it probably happened it actually made me wonder whether or not this is a feature maybe these bosses you're not able to land headshots for some narrative reason that's never explained and that's why they don't actually take the damage but if that was the case i would say that you just shouldn't show the damage being calculated at all because when you show the damage it seems as though you landed the shot and it did damage because that's what a damaged display is all about it displays the damage but then again this could also just be a glitch maybe the sniper rifle that i was using was glitched in some way where it would land headshots but if the damage number was too high against an enemy with a health bar that was a certain level it just doesn't get applied all i know is that i was landing headshots against many bosses and it never counted really annoying and it got to the point where boss fights instead of being an interesting challenge to move around the arena and try to land headshots for a quick and easy victory just turned into a grudge match where i was using an lmg to unload every bullet known to man into the cranium and chest of a given enemy in other words if it's a bug fix it if it isn't a bug and it's actually a feature because they want to make boss fights harder it's stupid and you should undo it either way it's broken in my eyes the next one i actually only ever saw once it was when i had blue skin and all of the colors get completely warped during one of the endings to the game the arasaka ending specifically now a reload fixed it but i thought again that this was some sort of narrative element after all i had just gone through all of the alt cunningham stuff i had just been to hell and back so i thought perhaps my eyes were starting to fail me and it was part of the game that they were trying to say that my body was shutting down but it did get to a point where it was so annoying and ridiculously hard to look at that i forced a reset and it fixed itself this was really weird i don't know what caused it but i'm just glad that a reload fixed it and this last one that i want to talk about specifically is actually something that's representative of an issue that's all over the game and that is that they don't seem to have taken into account many of the design choices you could have made with v and you can also only make those alterations once what i mean is that during this ending you're wearing astronaut gloves and i happen to have very long fingernails on my v and they were poking out clipping through the mesh of the gloves it's really stupid but it makes this whole sequence seem really unpolished as though they didn't take into account the character creator that they designed so you're just poking out of your space man gloves like it it's so stupid and janky and looks as though it's a mistake that a double a studio would make and this isn't just a one-off thing this happened multiple times when i tested this ending with this particular design of v but don't worry we're going to discuss many more technical issues as we go throughout the entirety of the game so rest assured there will be more but i just wanted to quickly get some of the more memorable glitches and bugs that i had out of the way up front but now i want to discuss some of the key gameplay elements of the game what makes them tick how these particular elements work and i want to set everything up so when we go through the story we don't have to spend too much time breaking things like this down we're gonna go through the world design the combat and the narrative structure more generally firstly with the world design in my eyes the biggest issue has to do with npcs and the ai you see npcs are brain dead pathing is terrible reactions are unrealistic everyone cowers to everything there's also remnants of a watchdog's legion-esque population mechanic where every character that you run into has very unique names that are attached to every npc that you see they all have schedules they're going to and from certain places but it's so poorly done and broken that it doesn't go beyond random name generation and a sort of semi schedule where they're set to go between one point in the city and another but because like i said their pathing is so terrible these characters get caught behind walls end up walking in circles and can't actually go to the destination that they are told that they need to go to it's so delightfully stupid they tried so hard to have this system built up so that the game was living and breathing and all the characters were living their own lives and you could interact with them and it's a cool idea but it just goes to show that a cool idea is really hard to implement that's why it was so impressive with watchdog's legion that they actually did it and i honestly don't know whether it's cool or really depressing to see remnants of this system in the game now on the one hand it's cool to see that they were working on this system and they wanted to get it working the idea that npcs would have schedules individual names jobs duties everything however on the other hand it can be a little depressing because it makes you realize what this game could have been or rather what cd projekt red wanted it to be and i think that distinction is important because i don't think they would have ever gotten anywhere near their own expectations for the game ubisoft had a team of thousands working on watchdog's legions population dynamic and pc system and they barely got that running properly and bear in mind that was the centerpiece gameplay mechanic of that entire game so it's not really a surprise that cd projekt red wasn't able to get the same type of thing working in cyberpunk 2077 it's not surprising it's just kind of a bummer that they tried to make this happen it would have been cool if it happened then it failed now this ai affects everything in the game including combat the other main element that it affects are the cops seriously these cops are unbelievably bad the worst since crackdown 3 and i know that sounds like hyperbole it's not they are actually that horrible even if you're in the middle of nowhere and commit some arbitrary crime they will spawn in the middle of a mountain just to start shooting you and it's so unbelievably stupid i don't know how this got out of like a pre-alpha build it it's not even close to where it should be for release and the reason this is important is because it undermines the world itself and makes immersion in that world almost impossible because immersion is tied to consequence you cannot have one without the other you can't be immersed if there are no consequences to your actions because the world won't seem real and there can't be consequences to your actions true consequences if you aren't immersed in the world they are inextricably tied and for one element of this to be completely broken causes the whole house of cards to collapse and it's made all the worse because night city is supposed to be a thriving metropolis a hub of civilization of sin debauchery and humanity and i can't believe i have to say this but if the humans in this city don't behave in a human way you will cease to feel as though you need to treat them or feel about them the way you would expect someone to feel about a human being because they're not behaving that way now speaking of night city the world itself is more vertical i guess as far as gameplay and level design is concerned but it's far from the sprawling cityscape that we were promised there are skyscrapers all over the place but with the exception of a few buildings that you can take elevators very slowly up to the top of you are going to be running around on the ground and on street sides for the majority of the game you might go out into some big open spaces outside of night city where you have a little more room to move around but for the most part this is a very two-dimensional map now granted i cannot begin to imagine how difficult it is to design an entire city that has vertical elements for a player to explore in a way that you can maintain some level of control however when i saw night city and i saw the flying cars i immediately was given the impression especially once developers started talking about improved vertical level design that we were going to have the ability to drive flying cars that we were going to have access to vertical vehicles that could actually fly up around the city and give us the chance to explore every nook and cranny of this world that they had designed however that's just not the case so if you're stuck on a two-dimensional plane you would hope that there would be a lot of interesting enemies and loot that would encourage you to explore that two-dimensional plane however there are very few interesting enemies encounters and loot that you have pretty much no reason to go out and explore without a quest guiding you i mean you have to ask why do you explore in a video game usually it's because somebody's trying to find gear to meet interesting characters to discover cool landmarks or set pieces or just to immerse yourself in a world with which you're enthralled you see the latter of which is what motivated me through most of my runs of the witcher games the world was great and the immersion was phenomenal i wanted to explore those worlds because i was enthralled with them but you see why this all ties back into the ai issue and the difficulty with becoming immersed it's all connected if you can't be immersed within the world that they present you you're not gonna want to explore it because it will seem fake and your brain will shut it down well before you force yourself to explore this mediocre map if you want to hear me discuss all this a little bit more you can watch my video the witcher 2077 when i make the argument that the world design of night city is dangerously close to the world design in the witcher 3 even though night city and the maps of the witcher 3 are very very different and should be designed differently i won't reiterate everything now it would be beating a dead horse but if you're interested i'll have it linked below now also while we're speaking of immersion let's discuss your character briefly you can play as a male or female v and you can design them to look pretty much however you want now setting aside the fact that the game is first person and having the ability to design a character seems a little pointless we need to consider the fact that you have very limited options after this initial design screen to do almost anything with your character cosmetically you see in my eyes the game desperately needs a system where armor and cosmetics can be completely separated my character looked so stupid through all of my runs specifically because i was just swapping to the newest item that i had collected that had the best stats and i think that's the way most people will play this game they will get a new armor piece that is way better than the one they were using before and they'll equip it because they need to keep leveling up their characters and have better armor to take on harder enemies that are scaled much higher from mission to mission and they'll end up looking like some sort of bizarre ubereats delivery driver instead of like a badass night city legend it just doesn't make sense to me they put all of this trouble into designing different outfits and clothing elements that you could wear all to destroy the incentive of actually wearing these items on your character because in many cases the most attractive and cool looking outfit piece isn't actually the most effective or highest level and in my perhaps naive eyes this wouldn't actually be that difficult to implement at least i think you just have an armor that the character wears under their clothes or something and then you allow them to put on all the clothes that they collect in the world either as an armor piece and clothing combo or just as a cosmetic item this is something that assassin's creed did back with odyssey years ago at this point very quickly after launch when people asked for it i don't see why cd projekt red can't figure it out i also think you need the ability to edit your actual physical appearance in the game after the character creator my character's hair looked one way in the character creator with the red background and the lights that they have set up and it looked completely different in-game in this case for the worse it looks terrible in the game i would love to be able to go get a haircut or to a fixer or maybe a ripper and have a redesign done and again i think it would be relatively easy enough to implement you would just have a new option with fixers or rippers and it would pull up the same character creator that you did at the beginning of the game and you could completely change around your appearance for a set amount of money it could even be expensive it doesn't matter but in the world of night city it seems as though this is a huge oversight to not be able to alter your physical appearance at all now let's discuss combat briefly first body mods these are way too expensive most people will probably quit the game before they actually get to the point where they can afford a 45 000 credit body modification it's just the reality of the situation most people are playing through the main story and then giving up on the game so they're not going to be grinding side quests getting a ton of cash and getting to the point where they can buy these types of things and it really sucks because things like the double jump or the mantis blades are really cool and i would love to see more people actually experiencing them however the overwhelming majority of people that i've spoken to who have played cyberpunk 2077 in its entirety from start to finish seen the credits roll in everything gave up on the game before they actually tested any of these expensive body mods and it's a bummer because these are some of the most interesting gameplay tools that the player has at their disposal i get the desire to make them end game content but the thing is when your game sucks so bad that nobody wants to play the end game you need to adjust it so that people period get to try it now as for the gun play itself this is something that a lot of people will agree and perhaps disagree with me on all at the same time in general i think the gun play is relatively responsive and at least the word i would use serviceable you see i played through the game multiple times without much headache but there are issues when you really get down to it and if you spend more than 20 to 25 hours playing you'll notice a lot of these things stacking up too especially once you get to higher enemies where you'll need to either have much better aim or you need to have a smart weapon that does all that for you don't actually need to be tactical or careful in any way shape or form you're just unloading but paired with this is another issue and that has to do with movement if you're somebody that really likes first person shooters or perhaps plays competitively or just likes a good game of war zone now and then you'll find very quickly that careful movement or speedy movement or playing in any sort of rush run and gun style is basically discouraged actively because sliding and slide canceling is actually glitched and causes this weird hitching thing to happen it's really weird and it's something that you would think they would have fixed pretty early on if they knew that they were going to have a first person shooter but anyway it's still there and the fact that if you try to slide cancel at all even just from muscle memory from other games you could potentially cause massive glitches to occur it's just unbelievable but also completely believable now to me and my play style the sniper rifles were far and away the best option for most encounters often it felt completely overpowered headshots with the right build can lead to crits at least 50 of the time making them one-shot kills which i like it's realistic but the fact that most enemies don't wear helmets or anything that actually protects their heads removes the chance for a lot of difficult encounters and it becomes much less about making tactical decisions and much more about just seeing how quickly you can pop off the heads of all of these enemies pistols are fine assault rifles are fine lmgs feel fine shotguns feel nice and work relatively well with the run and gun rush style gameplay that i really enjoy personally and smart weapons are also a really cool gimmick but to be honest i never found an instance where i had an enemy that i needed to take down using the smart weapons they were always just a cool way of shooting around cover but i didn't really find it that fun after the first two minutes of playing around with something such as skippy i don't know it feels cheap and cheap isn't fun to me it's too easy now beyond that within the combat system there's the quick hex and with my playstyle i'll be honest i almost never felt the need to use them in most of my runs but my wife nikki uses quick hacks all the time in her runs and these are actually the same things that enemies will use to overheat you especially early in the game where they do a quick hack causing you to overheat dealing damage slowly that ticks away at your health bar but that's basically the extent of the enemy use of quick hex there are some cool things you can do with these especially if you're a stealth focused build and you're trying to get through levels carefully and quietly but that's kind of the extent of it it works almost identically to the system in watchdogs where you are quick hacking items and different devices to distract enemies or deal damage to enemies by activating a drone and causing it to turn on them and that's one thing you'll notice repeatedly if you played watchdogs one or two you'll notice that a lot of the same gameplay elements especially when it comes to stealth are being used here i'm not saying they lifted them or did anything like that but what i am saying is that there's only so many ways that you can make a techie stealth sequence relatively interesting as far as gameplay is concerned now there's also a crafting system at play here which many people might not actually be aware of because the crafting system is so half fast in this game it's almost hilarious i say almost because it's more just sad than anything else now to be honest i only ever used the crafting system seriously to upgrade sniper rifles or weapons that i knew i wanted to continue using for one reason or another but needed some sort of damage boost or something else and as far as upgrading weapons goes it's serviceable it works you use items you find in the world while killing lots and lots of people and it improves the effectiveness of your weapon cool but i'll be honest i never felt the need to craft weapons even once i messed around with it but it just didn't seem as though it was offering me a noticeable enough difference over just using a gun that i picked up off the floor of which there will be many throughout your time with the game yes they have higher stats to entice you but like i said with snipers and headshots and a properly structured build an extra 30 dps on a sniper rifle really doesn't matter especially when you're already critting well over half the time i also want to say that i never felt the need to craft anything like grenades or any sort of consumable item these things were so numerous in the world that i literally never had to think about it i always had a stack of dozens of grenades dozens of healing items and it just wasn't a concern i don't know if it's just a balancing thing we did go through the game multiple times using the normal difficulty we didn't push it or pull it down any easier we use the normal well balanced difficulty setting that cd projekt red recommends players use and with that it was balanced so poorly that i basically didn't need to engage with one of the most major gameplay mechanics within the entirety of cyberpunk 2077. another big issue i have with the combat is the enemy variety there's very little especially when you compare it to something like the witcher 3 where you're fighting all sorts of different monsters and goblins and ghouls different creatures that sometimes move in hordes or sometimes they're just a big lumbering fool that comes at you with slow clearly telegraphed movements that enemy variety and that game caused the player to be much more attentive to their surroundings and move very carefully and in many cases to learn the move sets and different behavior of the enemies that they were taking on in cyberpunk 2077 that's basically not here at all there are big brutes there are small guys and there are sometimes drones and that's that's kind of it yes there are robots yes sometimes they're using sniper rifles versus shotguns versus assault rifles versus pistols i understand you could argue that that's enemy variety but really i consider those grunts across the board with different weapons simply put drones are stupid mechs are bullet sponges and all grunts feel incredibly similar across the game the one thing that stands out in a good way are the boss fights but unfortunately they aren't very common they are much more concentrated towards the end of the game and they also tend to be the most buggy as i said earlier with the headshot glitches not triggering damage and other issues that make the game feel generally unpolished but what about quick narrative thoughts well for one i think relationships with characters are primarily based on how far into a quest line you are not the choices within this is something you'll see time and again as we go through the main story you see relationships and romances are very stilted akin to stardew valleys you do stuff for people and they like you in return that's it if you don't do stuff for people they don't like you or they disappear from the story if you like panama want to be your friend you just do her quests that's kind of it you don't need to say anything too specific you don't need to go and behave in a particular way you just go help her do her stuff and you'll be her best friend that's it it's the same with judy it's the same with river it it's the same across the board there are a few consequences here and there but to be honest nothing anywhere near what we saw with the witcher 3 even to the point where in that game if you're trying to get with multiple women at the same time they can tell each other and then give you the business and the run around and you get none of them like there's so much detail in the witcher 3 when it comes to these relationships whereas in cyberpunk 2077 it's basically stardew valley now another and perhaps the most obvious narrative choice and decision that they seem to have made was giving the player in this game the first person perspective i've thought about this a lot and i actually spoke to three different developers over at cd projekt red after the game's launch to try and pick their brains about all of the issues and things that went on with the games launch and one of the things i asked them was why the studio chose to go first person and what all of them told me was that while it is a loss of a cinematic feel they felt as though they gained a level of immersion that they couldn't have received otherwise specifically in going third person so they felt as though it was a worthy trade they could make the player feel as though they were a part of night city and they felt that that would be worth the loss of the cinematics and systems they built for the witcher 3 surrounding that however again immersion is a huge issue in this game it doesn't happen so the first person perspective a huge change for cd projekt red coming off of their last game was made with the express intent of allowing the player to become immersed in the world which is something they will never do because of all the other issues which makes it a complete wash but don't worry we'll talk about all of this much more once we get into the main story here in just a few minutes now i think the performances are really good across the board i've actually played as male v and female v and i actually prefer the female i hear a lot of people prefer the male character but i just think that the female is slightly better they're both really good though the one exception to that though would be johnny we'll go through this a lot as we go through the main story as you would expect but his dialogue often feels as though it was written by an 80 year old catholic that was trying to sound like the hip kids out on the street i understand that this is standard in cyberpunk settings that they talk in sort of a weird way and they have slang that doesn't really make sense and is really outdated and feels very boomer-ish but even with that having been said it's it's weird he says some really weird stuff an impressive [ __ ] and while we're on it let's just make it known johnny's role is too big we'll discuss this a lot more at the very end of the video but he should not have been made the co-star of this game he just shouldn't have and if you disagree i ask that you watch this video and circle back with me at the very end because this performance is not that great but all of this is relatively forgivable it can be worked around you can still play the game and have a good time but it completely falls apart with my biggest issue that i have with the narrative and that is the forced pace again if you have any level of immersion which is cd projekt red's ultimate goal with this game you will immediately be pulled out of the world participating in the side quests everything becomes a distraction and you will find yourself sprinting through the main story trying to find a way to save your own life instead of engaging with all of these different things that the designers put in there to entertain you things such as the side quests the side quests are really where this game stands out which is why that forced paced issue which is what we're going to get into in just a second is so important there are really really funny side quests in this game ones that make you relate to the world feel as though it's alive breathing and that you want to be a part of it now because i had to draw the line somewhere we're not going to be going through every single side quest in the game maybe if you ask really nicely in the comments we'll do a separate 15-hour video on that but as of right now we're gonna stick to just going through the main story in detail however you can't talk about cyberpunk 2077 without discussing the side content so i thought i would throw out three of my favorite side quests that i found throughout my runs these range from hidden easter eggs to things that you can find marked on your map clear as day the first would be the skippy gun quest this is when you can get skippy the gun it's a smart pistol that you can use to shoot around corners and do all sorts of cool maneuvers with he tells you jokes and sings to you whenever you use him in combat it's awesome if you haven't gotten skippy yet and you're still playing through cyberpunk 2077 go get skippy right now it's fantastic i won't spoil everything that he does to you and for you but it's awesome you'll be glad you did the second of my three favorite side quests is actually riding the roller coaster in pacifica with johnny this is something that cami from press start my second channel actually told me about and said that i needed to try and boy am i glad i did it's really cute it's kind of janky but i'm glad that it's here and it's weird you would never think riding a roller coaster with johnny silverhand would be a wholesome experience but it is and the third is totally bizarre it's a side quest called burning desire it's actually just a really short escort mission but for one reason or another it was probably the most memorable side quest i played throughout the entire game and fun fact this character that you're dealing with who just got some sort of penile enhancement mechanism attached to him that's incredibly faulty he was actually played by jesse cox who i'm told is a youtuber which is kind of fun all of these quests are short they're punchy they're lean and they're fun and that's just what's so frustrating about the main story because it fails so consistently at that but at this point we've beat around the bush too long let's get into the main story go through the whole thing from start to finish a couple of quick notes just for your reference i played as a female v for the majority of my runs so you will hear me occasionally refer to v as she this is just a slip of the tongue and it's to help make the script and all of the dialogue flow a little better so if you played as a he i'm not trying to be woke or anything i just played as a female so in my mind v is female that's all it is i also played across ps5 xbox series x and pc the majority of the footage you'll be seeing is from my pc runs however you may see some sprinkled in from other platforms that's why but with all of that said let's get into it the game opens with the character creator and origin selector you build out your character's look but the primary selection here is gender and origin as many have pointed out previous to myself it is bizarre that within cyberpunk 2077 at least as of the time of the recording of this video there is no way to either alter your gender or appearance after this initial selection what you do here is what you're going to be stuck with for the entire length of the game which is kind of an issue because the way that your character appears in this character creator is likely not how they're going to appear within the game now i'm not saying that there's going to be a model swap or anything but more specifically things like hair makeup skin tone tattoos alterations anything really is going to appear different within the game world when the lighting hits it and it's actually seen in the context of gameplay for my street kid character i went through the randomization to find somebody that looked relatively human and once i found that i did a couple tweaks here and there and settled on this character she's a hot and juicy redhead that i will be calling wendy however this red hair although it appears reasonable in the character creator once you're in the world it looks like she's got a head made up entirely of twizzlers seriously i don't know what it is about the game's rendering engine but when it hits this hair it comes off as neon red whereas in the character creator it was red but it was not so freaking bright but the amazing thing is is that there's no way to change this now i've actually spoken to multiple developers at cd projekt red about this very issue and communicated that many gamers would like to see it addressed in some way shape or form i have to imagine it would be relatively easy to fix you just go to a fixer and then it enters the character creator screen once more and then that changes what the character's model is moving forward but i'm sure game development is much more complicated than i'm making it out to be however i do think this would be a huge addition and something that to be quite frank should have been in the game from the very beginning but after this we select what our origin story is now this is something that was talked up a lot in the lead up to the game that you could choose between nomad street kid and corpo for your origin story which would change how characters would react to you within the world over the course of the main story and to be honest it seemed pretty cool the fact that you could have a corporal background so people think that you're all talk and business and no play you're very serious and you're all about the money or you're a nomad and you care more about looking at sunsets and friendship and fraternizing with the people around you or even just being a street kid who is street smart has no problem with getting in fist fights in order to get what they want it seemed like a really cool concept however its execution leaves a lot to be desired you see no matter which of these three origin stories you choose after the first 30 minutes the game is going to be entirely the same for everybody you'll get the occasional dialogue choice here and there that's optional that is specific to your character but nothing beyond that in fact as i'm writing this script i can't actually think of a single time when i was thankful i had one origin story over another even something as obvious as having a corporal background and taking on arasaka or a nomad background and hanging out with pan am none of that really does anything to help you if you have a nomad background and you go and hang out with pan am you have a couple optional dialogue choices that you can make while talking with her about her clan and everything that's going on but nothing that's particularly unique i went through the same dialogue options as a street kid and there was no noticeable or discernible difference pan am doesn't give a crap and so neither should the player so what's the point of the origin story well it's just that if you're trying to roleplay really get into the mind of v it serves as a decent explanation of how the character that you're playing as got into the situation that they're going to be dealing with throughout the course of the game however all of the talk leading up to the game's release about this defining your journey throughout the entire main story that if you played a street kid and went through the main story you should go and try it on nomad or corpo to see what's different and all of the branching dialogue options and choices that could result from that change all of that is complete bs it has effectively no impact on the course of the story that you will be going through well for the nomad storyline you open your eyes staring at yourself in a mirror this is actually something that all of the origin stories will have in common to transition out of the character creator and into the game they're going to use a mirror you leave the bathroom and go and speak to a mechanic that's dealing with your car you're able to fix it but the radio doesn't work not a big deal the small town sheriff arrives who immediately gives off the vibe that he is untrustworthy and corrupt i like this it sets the tone that even in these small little areas outside of night city there's corruption that's rampant he tells you to leave town because he doesn't like nomads he doesn't like your type this also serves to set up the class warfare aspect that's going to play a major role throughout the main story and side missions within cyberpunk 2077. it's the rich versus the poor the peaceful versus the violent those in power versus those who are not night city is pure conflict and it seeps out of every nook and cranny even into the surrounding villages you tell the sheriff not to get his panties in a twist and drive off to a radio tower where you're able to speak with mccoy who's an old clan member of yours who tells you where to find your newest client this client needs help smuggling something and his name is jackie wells you go find jackie you put the contraband into v's car and head to the border once you get there you actually get to have this dialogue sequence play out in front of you between v and the border patrol agent it's actually really tense and i found myself really cautious moving through these options now it turns out no matter what you say to him he's not going to like you but will eventually let you through it has to happen in order for you to progress through this prologue section so it makes sense but i do think it is a testament to how well written the dialogue is such that even somebody as skeptical as i found myself so stressed out trying to answer these questions properly so that i could pass through so eventually he lets you through after a brief interrogation and you start to drive off into night city however because no prologue is complete without some sort of shootout sequence you get followed by a bunch of agents and the car shootout sequence that was shown all over the trailers in the lead up to the game's release plays out jackie takes the wheel you shoot a bunch of people to death and eventually find your way to safety once you're here v asks jackie for payment after all jackie hired veed to help him smuggle this contraband into night city it's a business transaction so she should get paid however jackie admits that he doesn't actually have the money he says he wasn't going to pay you at all and was likely going to jump you or just kill you in order to move on with his day but it turns out he likes you so he will pay you it's just gonna have to wait now for any other character this would be a good setup to make you hate them however jackie is so endearing that he's actually likable even though he's actively screwing you over really i think jackie is the most likable character that you're going to encounter throughout the entirety of cyberpunk 2077 which is why it's unfortunate that his role isn't bigger but we'll get to that in a bit you open up the trunk to see what the cargo actually is that was so important he had to hire a smuggler to get it into the city and it's an iguana like a real iguana now come to think of it this is i think the only iguana i ever saw throughout the entirety of the main story of cyberpunk 2077 i think i saw the occasional one in certain side quests but not in the main story it's a little weird because this is kind of cool and apparently it's a big deal within night city these little critters in fact there are tanks all over arasaka tower all over the hotels that you're going to different corporate structures these tanks are everywhere which is why it's so weird that you don't see iguanas throughout the main story because it seems like a match made in heaven for the iguanas to populate all of these tanks if it's such a big deal within the city but this is where the discussion of bugs comes back around perhaps they are supposed to spawn in those areas and they just didn't for me because of some bug this is why it can be tricky to criticize little elements such as this because it could be that that's actually just a small bug that only i encountered and it's not an issue at all now that it's been patched or fixed or it could be just a really weird asset that they designed they put together this iguana and never used it again i don't know but after this somewhat weird and tense introduction to jackie he asks you to come to night city with him and he's going to give you the grand tour which leads you into this intro video which is going to be shared across all of the origin stories and that's it that is the extent of the origin story now if you chose street kid as your origin story you're going to open your eyes to bruised knuckles and a broken nose v was jumped and has to set her nose right here at the table which is kind of gross but also sets the tone for a street kid way of life now you speak to the bartender pepe who tells you that he owes kirk a loan shark a bunch of money and that he needs to pay him by the next day otherwise he's going to be in serious trouble being the helpful street kid that you are you go over and speak to this loan shark and ask for more time he's not very accommodating and asks you to steal the most expensive car in the entirety of the game by doing this you'll repay pepe's debt and he can go about living his life just fine and this loan shark will have a brand new spanking hot ass car he gives you a skeleton key and tells you the club that the car will be at so you head out and while on the way you run into padre who drives you to the club where you tell them about your trip to atlanta it's all relatively chill and it serves mostly to show what the average day-to-day life of a street kid is like within night city it's doing favors for your friends and getting yourself in potentially a lot of trouble for something seemingly shallow now while on your way the car gets jumped by a gang member v and padre get threatened it's par for the chorus but this guy looks kind of cool so i'll let it go as you pull up to the club where the car is being held you take padre's number and head in padre won't really have a large role to play throughout the main story so this is going to be one of the single times you're going to see them other than during the intro cut scene that transitions between all of these origin stories and the core game itself you explore around a little bit eventually finding the car that you need to steal in order to fulfill this debt however this is when jackie shows up that's right baby jack he's going to show up randomly whenever you need to do anything in these origin stories so you have a reason to get to know him and form a relationship some people have given this crap like oh why is jackie doing all of this stuff he's a small time gang peddler like it doesn't make a lot of sense i don't actually have an issue with jackie showing up in all of the origin stories they have to unify them in some way and get you to the point where you are friends with jackie so that the rest of the story can start on decent footing so i don't have an issue with it however i can understand why some people might feel as though this is a little contrived because well it is you see jackie is here to steal the car as well he pulls a gun on v insisting that he's going to be taking the car for whatever reason he needs it however it's right at this point that the ncpd shows up out of nowhere very appropriate just like in the gameplay and v and jackie are pinned to the ground you have a quick conversation with stints power shows up and tells the cops just to throw these thieves into the sea you get knocked out and if night city were being consistent right about now we would have the credits rolling jackie and v would be executed and that would be that however because we need to set up the rest of the game they're just thrown into an alley and it's fine i will say out of all of the origin stories this was the one that just totally doesn't make sense they should have been killed here or at the very least seriously injured because they were trying to steal one of the most expensive things that you can buy within night city and we're just gonna roll over and say we're fine with it like it just doesn't make sense especially considering the people that you were trying to steal this car from however now that they've almost been killed together v and jackie have this bond they decide that they should be friends and they go out for lunch i'm not joking that's it and then the little intro video plays and that's it end of the origin story moving on corpo in the corporal origin story you open your eyes looking in a mirror in a snazzy outfit surrounded by marble and high-end toiletry that sexy devon air look is quickly shed when v starts vomiting excessively into the sink here you get a call from you guessed it jackie who wants to discuss v's corporal job basically saying that they should give it up go on to something that doesn't make them puke in a sink from stress he insists that the job's gonna kill you if you don't give it up but v is too stubborn to admit this at the moment even though it's pretty clear even to the player that this is probably true it's here that it's established v works for arasaka counter intel and that this particular organization is incredibly cutthroat doesn't give a crap about their employees and is very very dangerous v gets called into jenkins office who's b's boss and you're able to have an optional conversation with an old friend who also works at arasaka counter intel along the way to the office it's not important it just helps to set up the scene jenkins is watching an online meeting while you walk in out of nowhere he orders the death of everyone in the meeting and then gets a call from the director named abernathy they bicker a little bit back and forth he calls her a [ __ ] and pretends as though nothing happened whatsoever even though he just murdered well over a dozen people because they disagreed with him on a corporate decision jenkins then orders v to kill abernathy and tells v to get help from someone that they trust now in any other profession if your boss murdered well over a dozen people right in front of you and then asked you to go on and kill somebody else with the help of one of your friends you would probably draw the line pretty close to there however this is apparently so par for the course at arasaka and for v at this point in their career that this doesn't even really raise an eyebrow it's just another assignment that sucks there are some dialogue options that play out where v basically expresses that she's not happy about this and that she would much rather not kill abernathy but if she declines she's going to be the one that's killed so v goes and hops in jenkins av she's headed to lizzie's bar to meet with jackie and on the way has a really funny and random conversation with her life coach i'm not joking there's a life coach and you have this conversation about how you're too stressed working for this corporation and that's why you should give it up much less you know that you're about to go and kill somebody because your murderous psychopathic boss told you to but no the the stress is what you really need to consider anyway you land at lizzie's bar and meet jackie you ask him to help you with the hit however he refuses and he tells me that she should too this is well over the line jackie insists that v has sold their soul to arasaka and should work and live for themselves however right at this point arasaka agents show up demanding the chip that has all of the job details on it they remove all companies cybernetics and all of these money draining all of the accounts to v's name agents try to take v but jackie steps in preventing them jackie tells v that this is actually a good thing because v is now free to go and live her life the way she wants to at which point the transitional cutscene plays out the exact same one that we've seen in all of the other origin stories and the main story begins now it seems pretty obvious to me that this is incredibly contrived arasaka is a murderous and very corrupt organization that is also very vengeful and doesn't like leaving loose ends around this is something that's confirmed throughout the main story as well so the fact that they just caught one of their employees inside a plot to murder an executive of the company the fact that they wouldn't do anything about that whether that's reporting them to the authorities getting them arrested taking them into some sort of re-education center or just downright killing them it it just doesn't make sense to me but because v needs to be free and friends with jackie to get the rest of the main story set up we're supposed to just overlook it but you know what whatever let's overlook it and move into the main story now in this introductory cutscene we see a few major moments that are going to be referenced much later in the game it's not super important that you remember everything here but it is fun when it's mentioned later on jackie introduces you to his mom you guys start doing merc deals together you buy a new car showing that you're getting some relative success within this newfound career path you meet misty and vic you dance at a nightclub you get beat up you change some outfits you buy a bunch of guns you buy these apartment and then we're transitioned into what is the combat tutorial of the game you're sitting in a car with jackie roughly six months later about to pursue your first gig and if you watched any of the promotional materials leading into the game's release this will be very very familiar to you because this is actually the exact same mission that they shared shot for shot in its entirety way back when jackie hands you a training shard to get freshened up on your combat basics however you have the option to decline this i always declined it in fact i've never actually seen the tutorial section i just don't think it's particularly important the combat's pretty self-explanatory so you get in the elevator and get a call from t-bug for a gig run down this is something that's going to happen a lot throughout the game you'll accept a quest get to the location and then you'll get a call like this from whoever gave you the quest and they'll give you a brief rundown on what's going on in this case there's an individual named sandra dawson who they believe has been abducted she's in an unknown condition she might be dead she might be alive nobody knows because her biomon is down and they can't access it so you walk to the apartment you hack through a door scan a bunch of bodies to confirm it's not sandra and to have the option to either stealth your way through the level or fight full frontal do you like how i said full frontal because there's a bunch of like naked bodies around the apartment no it's not bad joke okay moving on after taking care of all of these enemies you find sandra in an ice bath v jackson to her biomon and removes a shard that's stopping her biomon from working the trauma evac team is dispatched now when i saw this trauma team come up i was actually pretty excited because i thought this would mean that we would have verticality in the exploration that we could use flying cars to get around the city because after all they had them for the trauma team why couldn't i have them as a player but that's not gonna be the case you can't actually fly around you're gonna be stuck on the ground for the length of the game except for in certain story based or side mission contexts where it's all scripted nonetheless after the trauma team takes sandra away you leave with jackie is a really cute request where he asks if you can lend him your car so that he can take misty on a date of course you allow him to and you call wakako to tell her that the gig went well she tells you that watts in the area you live has been put into lockdown so you need to head home stat you race your way back you get in a car shoot out with a bunch of scavs jackie charms his way through a border patrol checkpoint and you drive past a security or insurrection situation where you see a bunch of security guards coming and killing people who are trying to jump a car it is nice it's a small little detail i just wish these things happen more dynamically in the world because in this scripted sequence it serves the purpose of establishing the feeling within the world that you're never really alone everybody's always watching you and you can never get away with anything however once we're out of these scripted sequences that really is not the case regardless jackie drops v off at their place and v climbs into bed and i could make fun of the way he climbs into bed here because let's be honest nobody sleeps like this but that's been beat to death and i'm not gonna do it again so at this point we're done with the prologue and we're headed into the main story act one now already i have a lot of issues with how they've set this thing up and i think you probably would too or did if you played this none of these origin stories really have anything to do with the rest of the story moving forward and serve only to offer a little versatility and variability within second and third runs of the game but beyond that there's really no reason to choose one of these origin stories over the other furthermore we can also see that there are multiple instances where the writers are doing things that don't make sense within the context of the world or characters just to explain away something they need to happen because they've decided it has to happen a certain way this is something that's going to happen time and time again now as to why this type of thing happens i'm not entirely sure what i would guess is that this is an artifact of the game being in development for so long they wrote and rewrote the story so many times that eventually they had the broad idea of what was happening they had a bunch of dialogue written out a bunch of main story sections written out and then they realized that the origin stories couldn't be that customizable so in order to make sure that they could still use the stuff they had already written they jerry-rigged all of these origin stories in a way where they would play nicely with what they had already written down in other words because they knew the destination they were headed to they didn't have a lot of freedom in how to get there even if obstacles came up along the way to that destination narratively speaking they still needed to get to that destination because they had decided that's where they were going so they had to take all sorts of detours and do things that just frankly don't make sense in order to justify it like i said buckle up because there's gonna be a lot of that but with that said let's discuss act one these feeling pretty unwell after jacking into sondra that sounds weird but that's what happened v needs to see some sort of fixer to make sure that everything is in good working order so you decide to go and meet with vic who we saw in the opening introductory cutscene so v heads to pick up the car that jackie borrowed on the way you walk through a building this gives you your first real taste of what night city has to offer in its hubs of civilization it's a lot of npcs doing mindless busy work there's also a lot of conversations that can be had setting up future quest lines for instance there's an optional conversation here with coach fred he invites you to fight this robot that he's been training to box which will be the introduction to a whole suite of side quests featuring these types of boxing hand-to-hand melee combat fights now after you've worked your way through this area you meet jackie downstairs at a food stall and sit with him while he eats he explains to me that he has a job for them all lined up with dexter desean but he wants to meet v first so you go retrieve your car and then drive to vic at this point we don't know much about dexter shop but we do know that he is pretty hardcore and somebody that is good to have on your good side and very bad to have on your bad side once you get to vixx jack waits with misty his lady friend in the waiting room while you go down and have a bunch of augmentations installed you get your problem fixed and you get a new ballistic compressor in your hand with an optical sensor improvement allowing you to see certain things that you weren't able to see before and i actually really like this it's a cool introduction to what you will be able to do later in the game once you get some money which is to add all of these different abilities by way of these mod installations now as i already mentioned i think a lot of these augmentations are really cool but they're just too expensive for most players to get to see things like the double jump are super cool but will likely never be used by the vast majority of players because they simply won't have the money to do so but nonetheless after this you go back to jackie who tells you that dex is actually waiting outside for them in his car so you head up and talk with him once again this is a bit that was already shown to us in the press releases leading into the game's release there's nothing too crazy here or nothing that we didn't know before but nonetheless it is cool to see the small improvements they've made with regards to lighting and things like that at least on the pc version the key point of this conversation is that dex has one simple question for v he asks if v would rather live the quiet life or go out in a blaze of glory and it's at this point that the operative question of the game's main story starts to emerge as you go through the main story you will see that most of it revolves around v trying to determine what their legacy is going to be are you going to desperately search for a cure so that you can live a little bit longer or are you going to accept your fate early and simply go out a legend i think it's pretty cool that they signal that so early on here in this conversation regardless dex tells v about the job you simply have to steal a prototype biochip from arasaka in order to do this you're going to have to go on a big heist which will require a little bit of preparation first we have to meet the client who got the intel in the first place and secondly we have to solve the problem with maelstrom you see they have a combat bot called the flathead which will be needed to get into arasaka it's like a little spider robot thing and it's super cool and cute but it's also necessary in order to jack into the security systems to get through vents and all sorts of things that will make the heist actually possible you see dex bought this flathead robot from maelstrom leader brick but he has since been overthrown by royce who may or may not actually honor dex's deal after all the deal was made when royce was not actually in charge so it's understandable that he might not actually honor it now however just to throw another wrench in this situation militech's meredith stout is also interested in getting the flathead because she was likely the one that got it stolen from her originally this just goes to show you one of the strengths and weaknesses of cyberpunk 2077's writing there are often three four or five main players in any conflict they all have individualized motivations goals and obstacles to those goals and i consider this a real strength because these characters are interesting and real and believable however where i do think it can get caught in the weeds is just in that it's so complicated few people are going to be able to keep up to date with every single little facet of what's going on in fact i interviewed several of my friends who have played cyberpunk 2077 and have a long lengthy history of playing narrative rpgs i asked them to explain to me this very first quest with dex i wanted them to go into as much detail as possible breaking down exactly the motivations who was doing what and why and how and all of this was simply to try and get a grasp of how much people were actually retaining from these quests did people pick up and remember that dex bought this flathead robot from maelstrom leader brick who was overthrown so now he's concerned the deal won't be honored which is why he's going behind that person's back to try and steal it outright or did these people pick up on the fact that militech's meredith stout is a bumbling idiot and got this thing stolen when it was her one job to protect and what i found was that overwhelmingly people had an inkling as to a couple of these things for instance they may have heard that meredith was the one that lost the flathead originally because it came up in an optional dialogue sequence that they had when they met her before the big heist however usually that was the extent of it they might know one small facet or detail about the narrative at this particular point in the game but they weren't able to describe every single element of it and with respect to this issue i'm not actually convinced it's an issue cyberpunk just like real life has a lot of complexity in the narrative in the stories that are being told characters are all over the place doing their own thing for their own reasons you don't necessarily need to understand everybody's motivations to make an informed decision or perhaps even just to make any decision at all just as in real life a lot of people are going to go through cyberpunk 2077 just getting the spark notes version of a situation and then making a decision based on that others will go through speak with everybody perhaps even take notes as one person told me they did during cyberpunk's main story just to keep up to date on what's going on to make sure that they're making the most informed decision now obviously most people are not going to take notes while playing through the main story of a video game however there are people that play like that the point is there's a lot of depth with regards to these quests and main story lines that most players are probably not going to pick up or if they do they will quickly forget it and i don't actually think that's a major issue at the very end of the game it really doesn't matter why meredith stout was so interested in getting the flathead robot back it just doesn't matter that much but moving on you talk with jackie over the phone and give him the rundown you have a quick choice of what to do first that doesn't matter at all you can either meet with evelyn the client first or with maelstrom again doesn't matter what you do first as far as i can tell let's start with meeting the client you head back to lizzie's bar and after talking to a bunch of mox bouncers who are pretty cool and i wish were used more throughout the game you tell the barman that you're looking for evelyn he feigns ignorance but eventually evelyn shows up sitting next to you and interrupts you by saying that she's actually been waiting for you all along she leads you to a private room where she starts telling you more about the job at hand she also says that she only hired v because dex sung their praises which i found a little surprising considering i've never worked with him before and he has no reason to sing my praises which should bring up some red flags or at the very least a little bit of suspicion but the player and v at this point is most likely going to disregard it simply thinking well i'm the player character so of course i'm special evelyn explains that the chip that you're hunting down is called the relic it's from a little-known program at arasaka called the secure your soul program which is basically a personality transferring tech there isn't a lot of discussion at this point as to what that actually means you can kind of infer from the name personality transfer tech that it probably transfers somebody's personality and mind into a digital format but as far as i can tell the writers don't want you thinking about this too hard at this point to fixate on it would be to get completely lost in the weeds so to prevent the player from killing the pace of the game at this point they just blast through it and ask you to take their word for it that this is a very important piece of tech that you need to get the relic chip is in arisaka's kanpeki plaza hotel it's in the top floor suite which is currently occupied by your nobu arasaka this individual just so happens to be the heir to the arasaka empire he's incredibly powerful and even richer you see yorinobu stole the chip from the arasaka lab with the intention to sell it to netwatch because of this he has the chip in his suite and it's being kept in a specialized container this container is going to be important later because it's going to actually be the impetus 4v getting into the situation that will carry them through the entirety of the main story so after this quick little briefing you follow evelyn back through the club and she tells you that she recorded a brain dance from the inside of the suite that your nobu currently occupies she has a friend named judy who's going to help you navigate the brain dance you head down and after initially being very skeptical of v judy helps set v up in a brain dance tech helmet that basically is an epileptic nightmare this is the first time we try a brain dance and i'll be honest i freaking hate these things it reminds me of what rocksteady was able to do so well in the batman arkham games with the detective vision where you reconstruct crime scenes and are able to figure out where bullets came from by tracking the trajectory and different things it ricocheted off of but in this case i just think it's done so much worse there are multiple layers that you have to analyze such as heat sound or even just the visual spectrum in order to search for clues so that you can reconstruct the event that the braindance recorded however it's always just incredibly clunky and i just don't think it works well this thing needed a lot more time i don't find it fun i don't find it interesting i always dreaded when these things came up in the main story because you couldn't skip them or avoid them and if a side quest asked you to participate in one of these i avoided it at all costs maybe i'm being hyperbolic maybe i'm being dramatic but i really dislike the brain dances and it's too bad because the brain dances within the lore of cyberpunk is super cool it's something that could have been amazing but instead it's one of the least interesting and most annoying elements of the entire game okay enough bitching about brain dances moving on this first one just shows you a robbery that went wrong that serves as a tutorial after finishing that one you enter the brain dance surrounding your nobu and his sweet while you go through this v calls teabug to help her through this particular brain dance because tea bug is going to be participating in the heist so she might as well be involved in this particular portion of the preparation once again judy protests and is not particularly sold on trusting v or t bug in this case but eventually evelyn is able to persuade her to calm down and just continue on it's over the course of this brain dance that you find where the temperature controlled safe container is being held it's in the back corner of the suite which you're able to detect somehow and we're just gonna move on from this because it's stupid it doesn't make a lot of sense and it's not worth whining about it's also during this brain dance that you can actually look at the security panel and there's actually dialogue that confirms you will need the flat head in order to complete the heist so any hope of there being some sort of branching gameplay option to avoid using the flathead is just completely knocked out at this point you're gonna need it it's part of what this quest is designed around so get over it and just like that judy has changed her mind about v has decided to trust her and gives v the bd viewing tech v smiles and nods and follows evelyn out of judy's room at which point evelyn actually tells v that she should cut out dex completely unfortunately there's no choice here to actually cut him out you can say i'll think about it or you can say no i will not cut him out but there's no option to say yes let's just never talk to dex again let's do the heist and ignore him because again the game needs decks for what's going to transition from act one to act two to set up everything that's going to happen with johnny silverhand so there's no option to avoid working with decks moving forward again like we said in the early section during the origin stories the writers over at cd projekt red decided where this was going and they then went back and tried to make everything fit giving you the illusion of choice while forcing your hand into one direction that meets with what they need you to do this isn't a big deal in certain circumstances when it's not incredibly obvious that there's a choice or something missing however in this case a lot of players including myself are going to say hell yeah let's cut decks out of the middle so we can take more for ourselves after all we are role-playing as a mercenary i think that's a reasonable thing for a mercenary to think but sure enough it's not an option you can't cut them out there's no way to do it and that's it for our meeting with the client now we have to go meet maelstrom now we do have an option here to call meredith stout the corporate woman that lost the thing in the first place you don't have to meet her but if you do there's actually a funny romance section later on in the game where you can romance her and have a crazy night in the no-tell motel i i think it's kind of funny that that's a thing but i would actually recommend you go and meet meredith it can't hurt and it's interesting to meet more characters that's at least my opinion if you choose to do this basically you call meredith tell her that you know she misplaced the flathead and you offer her a meeting you go to meet her and when you reach out to shake her hand you get knocked down by the bodyguards she yells at me freaking out thinking that you're trying to blackmail her her bodyguard then jacks into your brain basically as a lie detector so that they can tell whatever you're saying whether it's true or a lie something that you would think they would do a lot more in the game if you could just easily determine truth or lies for instance later we go and meet with hanako and we're really confused as to whether or not she's telling us the truth about her motivations and what she's trying to do if we could easily just jack into her brain and tell that she's telling the truth that would solve all of these problems but we don't do that and we just are left questioning her motivations when seemingly this is relatively easy to fix now i'm sure there's some sort of narrative explanation like that she has some sort of tech installed that prevents this type of hacking because she's rich and is able to afford that type of thing but the point is it's never even brought up now after determining that v is being honest and that she doesn't actually have the flathead with her at that moment meredith pauses and then gives v an encrypted shard with the credits to buy the flathead this prompts the player with what is probably the least well explained element of this entire opening sequence you see you're able to breach these encrypted cards to find out more information however this is the only time it's really used in the main story as an optional gameplay element and basically what you can find out if you breach it is that meredith actually has a virus on this thing which is going to shut down their whole operation and cause all sorts of trouble if they try to use this chip to accept payment and that's kind of it it seems like a cool idea but it was something that was never really used again throughout the main story at least as far as i can tell or remember it's just a little thing that i think they intended to do more with but just got caught up in the rush and crunch of development and decided to ignore now after this meeting you likely have the encrypted shard with the credits to buy the flathead on it you don't have to use it at the meeting but you have the option you go and meet jackie and then head into the maelstrom stronghold now this is probably one of the most dynamic quests in the entirety of the main storyline because there are actually six different ways of handling this situation you see the first option is just to go in guns blazing shooting everybody taking the flat head by force and making enemies of maelstrom immediately now because there's no sort of relationship system i'll fall out new vegas within certain clans or tribes or gangs this doesn't actually matter that much moving forward if you choose to go in guns blazing the other option is to walk through the stronghold to meet dum-dum you tell him that you're here for the flathead you want to take a look at it to approve it make sure it's still fully functioning and what you need you tell dum dum that it's already prepaid and brick has the money but royce storms in the room right at the moment the brick's name is mentioned and tells you that whatever deal you had doesn't actually matter anymore because he's now in charge turns out dex's concern was well warranted it's here that you have a bunch of options so if we count the guns blazing approach as option one option two at this point is to tell royce that you work for decks then hit him you fight through maelstrom with the flathead and then you have a final boss fight with royce at the end the third option is that you tell him you work for dex and then you shoot him you fight through maelstrom with a flathead and leave basically option two but instead of a boss fight at the end you just leave because you shot him the fourth option is that you pay him out of your own pocket and leave without any bloodshed the fifth option is that you pay him with the wiped militech shard and warn him that militech is on to them you receive the flathead militech suddenly realizes that something is wrong and sends in enemies you then fight through them alongside maelstrom meet with meredith's prisoner who you met earlier at the meetup outside who thanks you for saving his life for option 6 you can pay him with the infected militech shard that you didn't breach and it blows all of their systems up and then a fight starts out you fight with maelstrom with the flathead and then you meet meredith outside who tells you that she would work with you again there's also the option to go and find brick while fighting through this area and you can free him but as far as i can tell that's not particularly important so all told this quest line is pretty cool sure a lot of the choices and approaches center around how you pay for the flathead whether you pay him or not you shoot him or punch him or you're using your money or a corrupted shard or an unencrypted chart they're all fairly similar and they center around the same moment of the quest however it is still really cool to me that there are that many choices to be had but don't get your hopes up because that's going to be pretty rare moving forward now after we've completed both of these meetings we are ready to head to the afterlife to prepare for the heist you have the chance to sit down have some drinks that are named after night city legends such as the silver hand which will actually be pretty important at the very very end depending on which ending you choose and then you're ushered into the room with dex and with tea bug you do your final briefing before the heist you show the flathead you get some outfits and costumes and prepare to head out basically the plan is that delamane a taxi sort of service will drive v and jackie to the hotel's front door t-bug will help crack security and then v and jackie will head to the penthouse and take the relic there's a little dialogue here to debate on payout and which cut you're going to get it changes from 30 to 40 depending on what choices you actually make but that's not going to have any impact on the compensation for this quest for obvious reasons that we'll get into in a minute so we hop into the domain taxi with jackie nexus paid for the excelsior package which activates giving the car the ability to enter combat mode health coverage delivery of bodies should passengers die it's all kind of funny and lighthearted right now but it's gonna be kind of a bummer later on your way to the hotel you have conversations with jackie about his dream to hit the big time to be a night city legend it's kind of fun and relaxing it's the calm before the storm once you arrive at the hotel you link up with tea bug on comms and you leave all of your weapons within the car because you're about to enter a very high security area you and jackie head into the hotel speak with security the receptionist and eventually just head straight up to your hotel room now once you're in the hotel jackie sets up the flathead you perform a little stunted robot control puzzle sort of thing it's really weird i'll be honest this section because you're not actually playing as the robot you're just telling it where to go sort of a point-and-click adventure type of mission at this point it's really underwhelming and i remember when i first played through this section i thought it was bizarre looking back on it it still seems bizarre i i don't know it just feels really out of place i'm not asking for much but i do think that you could do a watchdogs legion sort of spider android platforming section here that would be far more interesting but i digress eventually you find yourself all the way to a netrunner who's plugged into the mainframe you neutralize him and let the flathead plug in so that t-bug can crack the entire security system it's going to take a few hours to prepare so v and jackie get to relax after the time skip you then head up to the penthouse where you find the relic safe and sound tbug begins to breach it so that you can take it out of its container and leave however it's at this point that we run into the age-old issue of video game narratives that there has to be some sort of coincidence that causes a massive amount of damage you see right as you begin breaching this security system to take the relic out of its container avs start to arrive and soon enough your nobu begins heading straight to the penthouse just in time you're able to get the relic in its temperature controlled container out of this secure holding area but you need to hide and there isn't enough time to actually get out of the penthouse before yorinobu shows up so you end up hiding behind this weird sort of glass tv fireplace thing i don't know why this would be one-way glass but it is so that's a thing i mean again i would say it's it's pretty suspicious to have one-way glass in a penthouse that will most likely be holding at any given moment some of the most powerful people on the planet who have lots of secrets they don't want getting out so to have a spies wet dream hiding spot right in the center of the room just doesn't make a lot of sense to me but again i'll just ignore it for now it sets up a cool framing for what's about to happen but i just don't think it makes sense it would have made more sense if jack envy ran and hid under the bed once you're in your hiding spot your nobu enters with adam smasher somebody who's going to be important later on but that we're never going to actually get to see much of it's also at this point that saboru enters with takamura zi saburo is the head of this entire arasaka empire he's a big deal not somebody mess with however he tells his bodyguards to leave the premises immediately little strange but again it's because we need to set up what's about to happen even if it doesn't make a lot of sense you can say that it's a father son so perhaps he's more trusting he doesn't expect his son to do anything drastic or to be totally insane which is perhaps a fair assumption to make but nonetheless it does seem a little strange that he's so trusting at this moment immediately your nobu and suburu begin arguing about their different approaches to business and with the obvious generational gap there's a huge distinction and delineation between their approaches it then comes out the saburo knows that his son took the relic and he says that he can't forgive him for doing so furthermore he hits him with the hail mary grand daddy slam of father to son smackdown language and says that he's glad his mother is not alive to see this your nobu freaks out strangles the brew and the old man dies right in front of you again convenient that it's one-way glass here immediately panicking yorinobu puts the hotel into lockdown and tells takamura and adam smasher that subaru was poisoned nakamura doubts it but yornobu tells him immediately that his job is to protect the head of the arasaka family which is now him so he doesn't have much of a choice he has to do what his new boss tells him to do takamaru is conflicted about this but in the heat of the moment decides to placate his newfound boss and go along with it even though that won't stay the same for very long they immediately leave the penthouse leaving the body laying on the floor jack and v are understandably freaking out and decide to leave their hiding place v understandably panicked screams at t-bug to get them both out of there she doesn't know what to do because of course the building's been put on lockdown so she opens the back window door thing so that they can get out to the platform it's not really clear what their endgame is here but they're just trying to get out of the penthouse it's right at this moment that t-bug is killed somebody swarms where she's located and that's the end of t-bug we never really got to know her so it's not really like there's much feelings lost but it's still like oh crap she's dead so v and jackie leave through the window you begin walking along a ledge and understandably when a bunch of avs arrive there's nowhere to go they start to shoot at you and so you and jackie jump you crash through the glass ceiling and land very injured jackie is bleeding like crazy and the relics container is very damaged and the relic's condition is dropping as a result evelyn tells you that you need to put the biochip in either of your neural ports as it must be in a safe environment otherwise it will continue to deteriorate so jackie decides that he'll do it easy peasy lemon squeezy problem solved this is why that very delicate holding container was so important the second it's damaged somebody has to put it in their neural port otherwise the thing becomes useless it's just a chunk of silicon at that point so because it's damaged they have to put it in their skulls and deal with all of the damage that ensues as a result you fight your way back down through the hotel racing into your delamane you get in the car right as adam's smasher shows up but della mayne's able to avoid him just narrowly driving to the motel safe house that you established previously on the way you shoot a bunch of pursuing drones but all told you get away fairly easily i actually thought that this was going to lead into some sort of grand conspiracy a setup by arasaka that they wanted you to get the chip to punish your nobu and that was the whole plan all along which is why they let you get away so easily but no it's it's just that you got away pretty easily i mean again it's like if you read into these things and you start really applying pressure to the narrative and to the situations that are at hand you start to see some weaknesses and some holes forming but no story's perfect once you're out of the thick of it element tells v that jackie is in a very critical condition you have to support him and try to keep him awake for as long as possible it's pretty clear almost immediately though that jackie is not in a good spot he hands me the biochip who then takes it and places it inside their neural port so that it doesn't completely deteriorate and then jackie dies v then enters a haze and when you come back out of it philamene is asking you where to take jackie's body after all you paid for that premium package which comes with body delivery so you might as well choose and you can choose to send him to vix or to his mom doesn't really matter which as far as i can tell i don't think it ever comes up again i could have missed something though you also have the option to take a moment with jackie and it's here that i was kind of in disbelief jackie was one of the coolest characters i'd met up to that point and i was baffled that they had killed him off perhaps it was meant to motivate you to get revenge against arasaka but i didn't actually think of this at the time as some sort of crime committed against us by arasaka i consider this more of an accident because the injury happened after we climbed outside the penthouse window of a skyscraper and then jumped off i mean i i don't want to say that we could have seen this coming but it definitely was not unforeseeable so that leaves me in the precarious position of wondering why cd projekt red decided to kill off what was one of the most likable and intriguing characters that they had written in the entirety of the game and it's not going to change throughout the rest of the story even at the very end of the game jackie comes back up people remember him fondly and wish that he was there with them at these big moments in their lives but he's gone so maybe the reason for killing him off was just as simple as killing off somebody that was likable for the emotional impact i i don't know maybe that is the extent of it but that is the extent of it i think it's pretty lame in my opinion jackie could have been way more useful as a main character that went with you throughout the main story especially paired with johnny silverhand i think some cool stuff could have happened but if i had to put money on it my guess would be that jackie was originally the sidekick throughout the main story but once they got keanu involved and decided that he was going to be the sidekick through the main story they decided to dump jackie kill him off for some sort of emotional moment and then rely on johnny throughout the main story but total transparency that is complete speculation on my part the point is i really like jackie and i'm bummed that he was killed off because i think he could have been way cooler as a sidekick than johnny after taking a moment with jackie you head up into the motel and meet with dex dex is freaking out about the news coverage and all of the attention that this is going to bring on to him but he says they'll find some sort of solution and tells you to go clean yourself up in the bathroom once again this whole scene was shown in pre-launch trailers and cinematics so if you watched any of those this is all spoiled right as you walk out the bathroom dex's bodyguard gets the jump on you and knocks you to the ground dex takes a moment and tells you that he can't risk it it being all of the heat that's been brought on by your actions at the hotel and right as he finishes saying it he shoots you in the head you get a system error screen followed by the cyberpunk 2077 logo and this is effectively the setup for the entire game it's taken a few hours but we're here and besides the similarity to fallout new vegas's intro i'm actually kind of a fan of how they set this up i think with the goal of establishing some sort of relationship with johnny with the tech and the biochip and the relic and all this other crap that's going on it works well enough sure there are plot holes involved sure there are things that i would have done differently such as keeping jackie alive but all told i think it serves its purpose and it's functional and workable but it's at this point that the game starts to get kind of weird because it starts bouncing between johnny silverhand and v we don't really know what's going on but after being shot in the head we walk through some doors and say hi to a groupie we push a stage hand out of the way and against a mirror and see in the reflection that we're not actually in v's body anymore we're in johnny silverhands we then cross walk on stage grab the mic and say goodbye to the crowd with a gun in hand little weird we then get a time skip right after the concert we see carrie who asks johnny to change his mind but you insist saying no we leave the building and meet a young rogue somebody that we're going to spend a lot of time with towards the end of the story we then hop in a helicopter fly overnight city in what is a pretty impressive night skyline and we come up on arasaka tower once we arrive the gunman gets shot so johnny takes over killing a bunch of soldiers on the roof with this machine gun we jump off the helicopter and enter the tower with the help of the net runner named spider grog then checks that their attack will be broadcast as per johnny's manifesto you then shoot through soldiers to get to an elevator and plant a bomb in the elevator johnny then pulls back and shoots the cables allowing the bomb to fall all the way to the basement level johnny then tells rogue that he needs access to arasaka's subnet something that is a little strange and random and something that rogue is understandably pissed about considering that they just launched a nuke towards the basement of the building but she gives you four minutes which seems like four minutes too long you fight through more guards and eventually attach spider's icebreaker to an access point spider uploads a virus called liberator and shows johnny the live tv coverage and pressed at his work johnny leaves the access point room when smasher shows up out of nowhere it's not really clear what happens here but somehow johnny then ends up on the roof somehow once he's up there he tries jumping to the helicopter as rogue grabs johnny's hand however an error comes up on screen and johnny falls back down to the floor on the roof of the building smasher shows back up and reminds johnny that he had told him he would kill him eventually you then get shot presumably killing johnny silverhand i mean ignoring the weird double reveal of adam smasher this sequence just comes out of nowhere and seems very very random to be honest it seems pretty thrown together my guess would be this was something that was put together towards the end of development because it doesn't meet anywhere near the sort of standard of quality as far as a lot of these mini quests do later in the game's main story i don't know maybe it's just me though however this didn't actually kill johnny johnny wakes up on a stretcher being carried out of arasaka you then wake up again tied to a chair with a bunch of agents beating you up but johnny is just making snide remarks as you would expect and then saburo arasaka shows up this should tell you something very bad's about to happen there's a nice little detail here where a techie actually tells the player that her husband just died in johnny's attack on the arasaka tower it kind of humanizes all of these people that you are let's be honest terrorizing but johnny doesn't seem to care this is something that will come up time and time again johnny silverhand is a terrorist and we're supposed to like support him because the company he's fighting is bad but he's still a terrorist you know like i i feel like i'm taking crazy pills that this is a weird star to have in your game but whatever johnny asks why they don't just kill him a fair question to be honest but saburu then reminds him that there are fates that are worse than death saboro also talks about how the dead don't lie but rather speak very loudly very cryptic stuff and then he tells the techie to begin all of this will be very important at the end of the game as well depending on which option you choose to pursue if you choose the arasaka ending this is going to be important especially this line that saboru just delivered the techie hits the go button and the soulkiller and grim transfer comes on screen indicating that soul killer is being loaded into johnny's tech which is not good we then cut to black and enter act two we wake up in cyberspace walking towards a red hollow figure of johnny this cyberspace room is actually one that we're going to be seeing quite a lot throughout the course of the game whenever you have some sort of manic episode i kept waiting for there to be some big reveal as to why this specific room is what's captured within johnny's subconscious and in this cyber space specifically but as far as i can tell it's pretty much just a section and building from arasaka tower that had some sort of major importance to johnny because it's where he got jumped by adam smasher perhaps there is some sort of greater meaning or purpose to this space specifically being used repeatedly but if there is i didn't come across it if you know of it let me know in the comments pretty soon after we enter this space we get ripped out pretty harshly we wake up to a system reboot screen you remove a big sheet of metal that's covering you and begin crawling forward to get out of the dump it appears that you are in and no that's not a turn of phrase you're actually in a dump for me this had major detroit become human vibes after the huge dump sequence in that but maybe that's just me i don't know i thought they were similar i mean to be honest i prefer detroit become human section in the dump because i think it's much more moody and powerful given the music and the very carefully animated climbing and crawling that happens but maybe i'm just being picky anyway as you crawl your way out of the dump you see two people getting out of a car and you lose consciousness you wake up again with v being dragged dex walks around you having come back to find your body once again where he dumped it immediately this seemed very strange to me because dex is not somebody who does his own dirty work and so i instantly suspected that he was being forced to do this by somebody else and sure enough takamura shows up out of nowhere holding a gun to his head dex communicates that he's held up his end of the bargain and that he should be let go but takamura doesn't find this argument particularly compelling after takamura is done with dex he calls one of his buddies over arasaka he tells them that he's found the person that killed subaru he then proceeds to knock v out once again you fall into unconsciousness you wake up in the car again and takumar is driving you go unconscious again you wake up a bunch of times going back and forth with eventually takumar showing up to ask for help he hands you a hypo and you see a bunch of assassins coming at you and this crazy sequence plays out where you're helping this man that seems to have come to collect you raising you from the dead to enact revenge or something i mean to be honest it's really not clear why he's helping you at this point but you don't have much of a choice you just almost died and now you will die again if these assassins get a hold of you so you don't ask many questions and you help them get rid of them and this crazy elaborate sequence plays out and to be honest this was one of my favorite sections of the entire first 10 hours of the game for me it was polished it was refined and it also was very impressive it worked very well in transporting the player from one end to another and while having high stakes action sequences play out however granted a fair number of people played through this and had a lot of difficulty getting through with all of the bugs and glitches that have made themselves omnipresent with the game but that wasn't my experience eventually takumar crashes the car into a billboard once an assassin gets too close and is stuck on the hood he says that you both need medical attention probably the understatement of the century so you tell him about vic that he's somebody that can be trusted and you call a delamane to take you to it over the course of the car ride to vixx takamara seemingly saves your life with the guidance of delamane once you arrive vic shows up to help you out of the car and proceeds to fix both of you up now this is when we actually start to understand a little bit more about what's going on you see v tells vic about johnny's memory the one that you just relived obviously v thinks that this was just a dream some sort of weird flash of light before the end of the tunnel as it were however vic tells v that those weren't dreams but rather memories from the personality construct that's in the shard within v's head and to make things worse that personality is that of johnny silverhand a terrorist and rock star who died 50 years ago he tells v that the biochip is also killing them and that v only has a few weeks left tops now remember that plot point v only has a few weeks left before v dies that is going to lead to all sorts of problems with the gameplay and how the developers want you to experience the world now silverhand's construct is overriding v's consciousness and personality and it's going to continue doing so until v is nothing more than a body that johnny inhabits it is the ultimate parasitic relationship now vic says that he cannot fix it as it's well beyond his capabilities furthermore the chip didn't do anything until dex shot and killed v which is why jackie isn't somehow still alive or within the chip as a separated consciousness the way they explain this away is that when v was shot the nanites off of the chip started to fix all the damage and revive v but that's really all they know for more info v needs to ask the arisaka engineers who made the chip but the problem is vic knows that v is going to become more and more unsteady the longer this thing sits in her cranium and this is pretty simple because to the biochip these personality and neurology is just a tumor that needs to be removed while the body is just an empty shell that can house johnny's construct which the chip views as the priority so it's important to clarify that this is not johnny's doing he's not forcing his way into v's body it's just a matter of happenstance it's something that the chip is doing that he has no say in and this is crucial because we're going to have a lot of conversations with johnny and we're going to try to build up rapport with him over the course of the next 20 30 40 hours of gameplay if he were the one that was motivating all of these changes this hostile takeover of v's body it would be hard to sympathize or even root for him furthermore if you ever won him over to your side he would just stop doing it so the fact that it's well beyond his control i think is very important johnny's along for this ride just as v is and anybody thinking for two minutes will also wonder why v can't just remove the chip hell even v asks this very question and conveniently for the writers this is straight up impossible if the chip is removed v dies simple as that now vic is at least honest he has no clue what v should do here nor would most people this is a pretty difficult situation so he asks misty to take v home once you arrive misty gives v a few different medications something called an omega blocker which will keep johnny's construct quiet and pseudoendotrizine which will speed up the process it's a straight-up matrix red pill blue pill situation it's actually kind of hilarious how directly comparable these situations are i mean it's keanu reeves like come on and the last thing she does before leaving is she hands you the bullet that was found in your skull that should have killed you that she's fixed into a necklace of sorts she leaves and you curl up into bed in a really weird way then we get our first extended exposure to johnny somebody that most people are not going to feel particularly kind towards after this encounter you see we wake up to johnny telling v that he needs to get out and that he will kill anyone he needs to including v to achieve that end he keeps asking where smokes are he's insufferable in every sense of the word you trade some insults back and forth you try to leave johnny's freaking out v's freaking out and then they realize that their movements are in sync because they're technically in the same body so johnny uses this to try and pull the chip out this doesn't really end well and because v knows that if this is achieved it will kill her instantly there's a struggle that goes back and forth eventually ending with v popping some omega blockers to make johnny disappear we cut to these sitting in the shower wiping blood off of their hands we then get ready and leave the apartment now i want to take a break real quick here and just look at what's gone on so far what's the player thinking and what should they be thinking if they are truly immersed in v's story and well-being well for one we know that we are on a time crunch we only have a few weeks in game to figure all of this out otherwise v will die they've made this very very clear and they've also said that the longer we take to fix this problem the harder it will be to fix so what is the player going to take from this that they need to rush through the main story as quickly as they can to try and mitigate this issue when i first heard this and thought about it for two seconds i thought that maybe cd projekt red had done something with dynamic difficulty scaling where the longer you took to get through the main quest the harder it would become the higher level the enemies would be the stranger your movements would be perhaps your aim would get worse you'd get shaky similar to some of the stuff that they did in spoiler alert for red dead redemption 2 red dead redemption 2. arthur morgan became increasingly sicker throughout the course of his main story and there were really cool things that they did with it such as decreasing your stamina even though you had built it up over the course of the game up to this point it decreases slowly to the point where he becomes more and more feeble weaker and weaker and less and less capable as the game progresses i thought this seemed like such an obvious thing to do that surely cd projekt red would employ some sort of system like this but no there's nothing there if you want to go and just pull up the menu and pass time 30 times in a row passing forward a month nothing will happen to v her condition won't change nothing will change in the dialogue everything will remain static so while the story encourages you to chase a cure as quickly as possible the world has no repercussions to ground that reality for the character whatsoever there's nothing there so you have to ask yourself if the game doesn't take this threat of an impending doom seriously why should the player and the unfortunate answer i think is that they shouldn't the best way to play cd projekt red's latest game believe it or not is to ignore the main story enjoy the side content and take on the main story at the very very end pursuing the secret ending that's it and it's unfortunate because for a game that tries to be a narrative rpg in order to have the most fun with it you have to ignore most of the narrative at least for the overwhelming majority of your time as with most of these types of games the real stars are in the side missions it's not to say the main stories are bad but it is to say that the padding around it or perhaps in a better way the foundation that's laid that allows the main story to stand so strongly is what's truly phenomenal and what really sucks is that if the player is taking what's being told to them seriously and if they are truly role-playing in the position of this character that only has three weeks to live they're going to miss out on tons and tons of content now i know some people among you will surely say just get through the main story role play to your heart's content and then go back when it pushes you to a previous save after you finish the main story and go through all of the side content but that to me doesn't actually fix the issue because even once you do that you'll still get regular calls from main story characters asking you to find some sort of fix to your situation as quickly as possible and regardless you are still ignoring the main story it's just a matter of when in one case you're ignoring it up front so you can enjoy the side content living your best life and then you take on this final mission on the other hand you race through the main story you take on the final mission gets spat back to a previous save pretending as though that never happened and then you engage with the side content while ignoring the main quest in my mind it's the exact same thing in order to enjoy the side content you have to ignore this matter of life or death issue that the main story has made the pivotal question so in my mind it's pretty simple if you're going to have a plot point that has ultimately high stakes literally life and depth you need to think very carefully about how the player is going to be motivated to explore the world that you've built having such a high stake situation isn't unheard of in games and can be done very very well however in open world and narrative role-playing games this doesn't tend to work because it forces the player away from the other content that really will frame the world and make it believable i had the same issue with fallout 4 they set up a very hectic race to find your kidnapped son and so you race through the main story ignoring all of the side content that really lets the game shine only to realize at the end of that race that there really was no rush and you could have taken all that time to explore and do things your own way but the point is at this particular moment in the story the player is likely thinking that they need to rush through the main story or at least get to a point in the main story where there's some sort of resolution or at least until they've bought themselves some time at that point they can go and explore side content but until then they need to try and find some sort of cure for this illness now after this rough first encounter with johnny we go when we have lunch sort of with takamura over at tom's diner we stay with him and he tells us that he needs us to tell him where evelyn is because she will know how to get to your nobu so you admit that you want to talk to her anyway because she knows about the relic and takamura says that she's likely far away because she's a pretty smart cookie and she isn't going to sit close while all of these corpos are running around but then takamura tells us really what's going on because as of this point we really haven't heard clearly or concisely why he saved us and why all of these crazy ninja assassins are coming after us because he needs resolution regarding the patricide committed by your nobu he says he has allies but he needs definitive proof v naturally brings up the idea that most corpos are probably not going to believe the word of some random mercenary who was inside the penthouse suite witnessing it because they were trying to commit grand theft which again i would say is a very valid concern and i'll give the writers credit takamura straight up says yeah that's fair he doesn't even beat around the bush or have some sort of grand conspiracy or reason that they'll believe thee he just says well you're all i've got so if we're gonna even try to take down your nobu we're just gonna have to make the most of it what he does say is that he's going to get a hearing before a bunch of reasonable people who honestly care about the truth at arasaka now one of the things that first occurred to me was just hook v up to a lie detector just like they did when we met with meredith stout and that'll determine whether or not he's telling the truth but this is almost immediately dismissed so at the very least the writers thought of it and dismissed it as as an unreasonable option it wasn't super clear to me why this would be the case why a lie detector test is so far out of the question but i can at least explain it away relatively easily by just saying that somebody could quite easily alter some sort of software or hardware within an individual to make themselves able to get around lie detectors very very easily so i can understand why that would be dismissed even if it isn't clearly explained in the story i can explain it away myself now even casting all of this aside it's pretty clear v doesn't have a lot of options she's dying because of a chip that was installed and designed by arasaka a corporation that could potentially save v's life if they wanted to so it might not be a bad idea to get on their good side by proving that this individual that now helms the entire company is responsible for patricide which is how he got there i think that's understandable but also with this individual at the tippy top of the company and the corporate ladder with a very corrupt system underneath him that he's put in place it's gonna be tough to just waltz in and get them to be on your side it seems like a bit of a far stretch at least to me and i'm also not alone because v says this repeatedly over the course of the main story that this is a far stretch this doesn't make a lot of sense but it's the only chance you've got so might as well make the most of it now takamura brings up this guy by the name of anders helman who actually designed the relic apparently anders has actually escaped arasaka and is a quote-unquote free man right now however with all of this there's not a lot of clear and concise planning there's a bunch of ideas that have been thrown out but takamara doesn't have a clear idea or understanding of what we need to do at this point so he says he needs time to plan and just begs v not to leave night city once again the main story is asking you to stay fairly confined not go explore like crazy but to focus on the story at hand and v says this is fine there's actual dialogue where v says that they won't go exploring because evelyn and hellman are actually here within the city and they want to try their chances with them maybe they'll have an answer that could potentially cure you takamara loves that you're going to try and find some sort of answer within the city giving him time to plan so he gives you a little bitty hint he says that as of right now hellman is off the grid nobody really knows where he is but there is a hint that his disappearance points to the afterlife an underground bar and they meet up for less than reputable people specifically there's a fixer named rogue who runs the afterlife now takamara leaves but right as he does so johnny shows up out of nowhere and takes his seat a few things happen here for one he says that night city never changes he's glad that rogue is alive apparently they have some sort of history that we're gonna find out about later and he also stretches that v doesn't need to talk out loud when discussing things with him something that is a nice little detail because i'm sure it would look pretty insane for v to be sitting at a booth alone talking to an imaginary friend johnny's inside her brain after all so there's no reason for her to talk out loud she can just think and he'll be able to pick that up now here we see that johnny has actually done some thinking and has pulled a 180. he says that he's changed his mind and that he doesn't actually want v dead and he makes a good point here he says that it wasn't easy for him waking up in a stranger's head and body either it was just as shocking jarring and startling as it was for v he thinks that they can help each other and specifically he can help with rogue johnny tells v that he and rogue had a relationship way back in the day which means over 50 years ago now understandably i think the player and the character v are both going to be wondering how on earth you begin to breach the topic of a long since dead boyfriend that was also a terrorist and a rock star just happened to end up with his consciousness within your mind while talking to a complete stranger i i don't know how that works but johnny comforts me simply saying that she's heard weirder which i'm not sure if that's particularly comforting but again it's kind of the only shot we've got and this brings up an interesting point in a lot of stories there are long shots something that doesn't really make sense or shouldn't work on paper but that works out for the sake of the characters at play within the story i don't have an issue with that inherently i think there are ways to write using ploys and tactics such as that which are fine a lot of fantastic films novels everything have been crafted using long shots it's part of what makes things exciting the fact that this probably shouldn't work and the odds are not ever in their favor but that somehow they'll manage to pull it off that being said it does start to get on my nerves when it's repeatedly used without restraint in this case cyberpunk 2077 constantly and unapologetically uses long shots things that really don't make a lot of sense and shouldn't work to progress the story along there are very few quest lines and plot points within this story that follow naturally from one to the next and what's frustrating is that this isn't the case in the side content a lot of side missions have really interesting characters that do things that make sense for them but in the case of cyberpunk 2077's main story you're going to end up with characters doing strange things for somebody that died 50 years ago in a terrorist act while believing that that same individual is possessing some random mercenary from the middle of nowhere it just doesn't make a lot of sense and there's no reason anybody should be doing any of this but it works out time and time and time and time again again i don't have an issue with this inherently but it does start to try my patience and furthermore i think it starts to really push the limits of how much the player is willing to believe if you want this world to feel grounded and believable you need to treat it as grounded and believable that means crazy unlikely things don't happen that often because they're unlikely and crazy but i digress we now have three quest lines that we can follow we have one quest line which is centered around takamara and hanako this is in other words the arasaka quest line if you follow this all the way down to the end it'll take you to the arasaka ending we also have judy and evelyn's quest line this one is going to introduce us to alt cunningham who's going to be crucial for pretty much all of the story endings except for a couple but we'll get to that we also have a quest line centered around rogue and pan am this one is probably my favorite and that might just be because it shakes itself up so much from the rest of the samey sami city nights and and mission structures it's just way more interesting and it's different i i don't know we'll get to it i just really like the pan am quest lines to begin let's discuss takamura and hanako's questline this whole thing basically centers around takamura trying to get in front of hanako to explain what actually happened you see hanukko is saburu arasaka's daughter the sister of yornobu funnily enough she was actually conceived when her father was 80 years old and is by far his favorite child you see takamura believes that if he can get in front of hanukkah he can convince her of what happened and to take his side having an ally this high up in the company would be very useful it could be the operative tool that allows them to overthrow your nobu so to begin you arrange a meeting with oda this is hanako's bodyguard takamura knows them well and is hoping that if they can convince oda to help them introduce themselves to hanako they might be able to get an in to have this conversation the problem is oda is not too concerned his priority is to take care of hanukkah whatever the cost and there's this big parade that's coming up which he needs to focus on so understandably takamara decides after oda leaves that the parade is going to be the place where we're going to force ourselves into hanako's presence to discuss what happened so you prepare for this mini heist where we're going to break into the float that's carrying hanukkah during the parade itself we get some plans and a map of the parade from wakako and then we head to the location of the parade to prepare you have a few conversations you go and perform a small mission where you break into the industrial park where a bunch of the floats are being held all so that you can infect the float that's going to be carrying hanukkah during the parade with a virus that's going to eliminate the security system and i will say there's a lot of games where this type of thing happens where you have to disable a security system or do something well in advance of the grand event as it were i can't help but think that if there was some sort of multi-billion dollar potentially in this case multi-trillion dollar company that's trying to protect one individual during a parade they would likely have a checklist of security measures that they would go through on the day and you would think that a virus that disables the security system entirely for an entire float would be caught during that security check but we just kind of have to ignore it sure you can throw things up like maybe your novo actually wants you to meet hanukkah because he wants to eliminate her and he's hoping that something happens where she dies but all of that is just conjecture furthermore this is also a quest line that is greatly extended beyond which it really needs to be time and time again you're on a roll you're making progress you're working towards meeting with hanukkah and then takamura says he needs time to plan something and then you just have to go and make yourself busy for 24 in-game hours or worse an indefinite period of time until he reaches out to you now you could say that this is cd projekt's way of forcing you to engage inside content however i don't think it actually does that i think what most players are going to do if they are truly immersed in the story and what's going on with v they're just going to bounce to one of the other three quest lines that need to be completed before the end of the game that's at least what i did whenever takamura would need a day or two to continue planning something out i would just hop over to pan am continuing her quest but she doesn't actually need a ton of time to plan so if i wanted to bounce back to takamura i had to leave pan am in the middle of a pretty high-stakes situation so all it really did is made me engage with takamura get excited about that quest line and then get totally distracted finishing the other quest lines in their entirety before returning to his quest line and this sort of disjointed design made it so i had kind of forgotten what was going on specifically with the takamura heist on hanako's float because i hadn't seen it in like four five six gameplay hours to be honest i don't think it's some sort of master class in game design meant to give the player enough time to reflect on the situation at hand i think it's just their way of breaking up some pretty straightforward and simple quests to make it feel like you're doing a lot more than you actually are really all you're doing is performing a couple of small setup missions before you go and try to break into a float but either way we need to break into this industrial park so you're given the option to stealth through or just fight through guns ablazin because i am me and was on my street kid playthrough i just decided to go in guns ablazon now after my first playthrough i went through this sequence completely stealth so nobody really knew that i had hacked into this float and injected this virus so i was willing to forgive that they perhaps didn't catch that there was a security breach in the system but that changed on my second playthrough which is the one you're seeing now where i went in and just killed everyone i was hoping there would be some sort of difference some reaction on the part of arasaka when they found out that dozens upon dozens of their guards had been massacred and several of their floats that are due to take part in this massive parade had been tampered with i was kind of hoping that my actions would have a consequence that security would be heightened extremely on the day of the parade making the quest far far harder however at least for me nothing like that happened i mean maybe there is something like that that's programmed in to take place maybe it is supposed to be significantly harder as a result of running and gunning but i didn't see it and it begs the question whether that was intended overlooked or was just a bug and it didn't trigger when it was supposed to however after all of this and after yet another break for takamura to take some time and plan something you meet up with him it's pretty straightforward there's three snipers that we need to take out in a small stealth platforming section and once that's completed takamaru will jump down onto the float and meet hanukko pleading his case then we time skip into the middle of the parade and get to see actually what i think is probably one of the most beautiful shots in the entire game regardless the game is on takamura is heading to position and you need to start taking out the snipers you start taking them down and after you take down the first sniper takamara actually patches you into a phone call that he's on with oda yes that oda the bodyguard of hanako that we met with earlier oda is going on and on and on about how poor security is at the parade and he's complaining that hanako shouldn't be there the person on the other end of the phone says that he needs to follow yornobu's orders and demands that he'd do his job the way he's supposed to this basically implies that yoronobu is knowingly putting hanako in a dangerous situation like i mentioned earlier this could be a cool way of explaining a way why arasaka doesn't seem to respond to anything the player does in the hours leading up to this mission however i'm not really willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on that i think it's just a fun coincidence now right after the call ends you actually have the option to talk to johnny who is able to explain to you that the person on the other side of the phone called demanding that oda do his job and shut up was actually adam smasher this effectively proves that this endangerment of hanukkah goes all the way to the very top you take down the second sniper and otis starts freaking out presumably because he has lost communication with these snipers who he should have been or i would expect would be actively checking in with all of the snipers that are overlooking the parade with two of the three snipers down for the count and not responding to comms oda demands that hanako is extracted so we get another phone call to pop up and oda is demanding that hanukkah is extracted smasher says fine and then hangs up the phone at which point we move to the third sniper we take him out and then head to the netrunner who's overseeing all of the security and the movement of the float we unplug her from all of the systems she's hooked into and then oda appears out of nowhere and we get a little boss fight yet another chance for me to complain a little bit this boss fight could have been really really cool however my character was primarily built around sniping people with headshots to get cook damage and then move around the arena to reload call it a phase build basically snipe move snipe move reload snipe moves knight move etc the problem is that every time i landed a head shot on oda it would show damage being calculated however it wouldn't apply to his health bar now maybe this is just something as simple as he has a helmet that completely negates head damage and so i was just wasting my time trying to snipe him in the head anyways however i don't think that's the case because it was still calculating the damage numbers which pop up on screen when you hit somebody like this with a critical furthermore my regular gun that was a straight-up assault rifle was dealing damage when it hit his head just fine so it seems as though there was some issue where the sniper rifle round was hitting his head dealing massive amounts of damage but the game wasn't able to apply it as a modified damage number to his health bar so it would always sit where it was prior to the headshot and not move but when i used a regular assault rifle it would move and its health would decrease again like i said maybe this is a feature maybe he just has a helmet on that negates headshot damage but if that's the case i think it's communicated pretty poorly and it's the classic debate of bug or feature when things are communicated so poorly and the general quality of the thing being discussed is so low the lines get really blurry and when you can't tell what's a feature and what's a bug you should realize there's a big issue nonetheless after the boss fight you have the option to allow oda to live at takamura's request for honor or something or you can kill oda as far as i know there's no real consequence here it doesn't matter which you choose as far as i know you don't see oda again but once again maybe that's just a bug maybe you are supposed to see him if you let him live again but i didn't at least not that i can remember i don't know i did have some margaritas while playing this game towards the end of my uh second and third runs so who knows once oda is eliminated you connect to the access point and disable hanukkah security you watch her talk to your nobu who is pressing her to continue with the parade again he seems very insistent on trying to put her in a dangerous situation right at this time takamaru shows up and tries to talk to her but she runs when he tries to speak to her he shoots her which causes a freak out however i think most people will assume that this was some sort of round that knocks her out or it's just a taser something non-lethal but either way he just screwed up and now we need to get out of here so you escape the parade area you do some platforming race to an outside location in a safe house and then talk to takamura telling him that all of arasaka is looking for them he's freaking out v's freaking out and yet hanukkah is fairly calm likely because she knows what's going to happen in just a minute even so you tried to convince hanako of what happened you tell her about her father's murder but she insists that that couldn't have happened and she doesn't believe you however right as you feel you're making progress you hear a bunch of ruckus going on downstairs and go to check however right as this happens arasaka launches an attack which causes the entire floor to give out but upon waking up johnny is screaming at you to get out v says something about takamura is saying that she needs to save him or something and johnny just says that he's toast and you need to run however here you can actually go upstairs and save takamara but i think most people are just going to say screw it and run so you fight through all of the soldiers and escape the safe house we then get a quick cut to a motel on the outskirts of night city a car approaches and johnny tells v to get the gun ready understandably johnny and v are very on edge they just did something to really piss off probably the most powerful corporation on the planet a corporation mind you that doesn't have a problem with killing its enemies however a proxy shows up just some innocent looking girl and she says that she is going to have another transmit a message through her which is why she's a proxy if that wasn't clear all of a sudden hanukkah shows up projected through this proxy she talks telling you that she actually believes you and she kind of suspected that something happened between your nobu and suburu you see this is why she was kind of calm and yet also very withdrawn when we were speaking to her at the safe house she knew that adam smasher and all of his goonies were going to show up out of nowhere in just a second and that she shouldn't make it clear that she believes these insurgents she needed to keep everything controlled everything maintained and then be honest when the stakes weren't as high after hanukkah expresses that she believes you about suburu arasaka's murder she says that you have to help her basically to overthrow her brother however v and johnny know that this is not a one-way road and they need help as well otherwise v is toast so you ask about mikoshi and she says that she will not help you at all without knowledge of the relic and its construction because she can't now here depending on which of the other three quest lines you've completed you can share certain information with her depending on what you know if you haven't gathered enough information to trigger the final quest of the game hanukko simply tells you to go and find out more and then to call her when you're ready but if you have completed everything else at this point or at least the bare minimum she'll tell you that you need to meet in person and she'll reach out with details but at this point the proxy leaves and everything goes back to normal an important note johnny hates corpos he hates arasaka and he does not trust hanukko at all if you choose to work with them in any capacity or work with hanukkah in any capacity he will make it very clear that he's pissed off at you and in some cases that will lead to a different ending compared to another but don't worry we'll get to all of that next let's discuss rogue and pan am's quest line like i said earlier this is one that you can pursue at the same time or instead of the takamura quest line here we go into the afterlife to talk to rogue it's actually pretty cute because johnny's all excited and nervous to see her again it it's adorable you tell rogue straight up you need to find hellman the guy that designed the relic however rogue is well seasoned to put it nicely i guess she's not gonna help a nobody for no reason so you pay her fifteen thousand eddies and she tells you to come back the next day when she'll provide you more information when you return she makes a few remarks about your determination and how admirable it is and then orders you both drinks your hand did a shard with some intel on it and then you take a look you see hellman has showed up in some confidential data belonging to a king tau subsidiary which masks their sensitive operations basically he's hiding from arasaka coincidentally because there's always a coincidence in these stories he's about to be moved from one location to another with an av that's going to be masked the vehicle will travel through jackson plains which is outside night city and king tao's reach but in order to get to him you'll need a native to get around the area rogue recommends some chick named pan am who's a nomad who can't count on her clan anymore because she screwed up a few times and basically we'll have no option but to help all you're told about her is that she moves merch and her last job went really wrong losing all of her goods and her car so at this point she'll do anything to get those things back row tells you where you can find these things for pan am and then she sends you pan am's info for you to connect after a quick call when pan am expresses that she's pretty skeptical of you understandably so you go to a meeting spot the agreement that's been reached is that v will help pan am find her car and all of her stuff if pan am agrees to help v with her acquisition of hellman panam agrees to this but only if you help her get all of her stuff back first so you tell her the location of her car and she flips out as she works out that her partner actually double-crossed her so she decides that she's gonna need backup and calls the client of the merch to persuade him to work with her not her partner now already things are way more complicated than you might have expected it's the classic video game trope you help me and i'll help you but i won't help you with your much more urgent life or death situation until you help me get my car back i could complain about it that it ruins immersion and everything but to be honest i think it's okay it kind of comes with the territory sure i would like some more dialogue that expresses that this is life or death and then pan am says i don't know if you're telling the truth you might be lying to me let's get my car first you've got a day but to be honest i don't think it's making or breaking any game of the year nominations that that isn't here so all told i'll look the other way so you go with pan am to the aldocardo camp which is her clan that she's currently in a tussle with pan am greets mitch and scorpion asking them for help but they refuse to come back as they have orders from their leader saul who doesn't want them working with her however because they are still friends they do offer to provide gear which can help you guys in your mission to get everything collected so you load up pan am's car with all of the goods you head to the location where you're going to intercept the convoy that's transporting all of your stuff you set up a couple traps have a couple nice conversations with pan am and then you fight everybody again my play style in the footage that you're seeing is just run and gun pure and simple that being said there are ways to stealth through this section although i'll be honest i don't really know why you would need to but you know you do you once you've taken care of all of the enemies or stealthed your way through stolen the car keys and then driven the car away pannan tells you that she also wants revenge against her partner and this is actually an option you can choose to help her get revenge or not if you choose to help her and get revenge you just have a quick little shootout and it's pretty simple and straightforward once all this has happened you meet pan am's client at a motel and watch as she exchanges all of the goods and sorts everything out once and for all you head back to the bar you have the option to flirt a little and then pan am says that she's going to come up with a plan and then sleep on it in the motel room now at this point i think for a lot of people pan am is going to be their favorite character that they've encountered thus far except for maybe jackie she's very likable she's understanding and she also had a real guard up when she first met you playing hard to get in a way and this relationship is only going to grow stronger because you're about to go through some pretty tough moments with her you wake up the next morning and pan am explains the plan that she's come up with to you she wants to use an emp to take down the av that's carrying hellman now you can be as skeptical as you want with these plans and in the dialogue sections but it's going to happen either way there's no multiple options of doing this this is what you're doing now you drive to an overlook where you can see where you're going to be creating the emp burst on the way you have a tutorial section where you learn how to operate the turret that's going to be important later on in this quest line but as of right now it's basically just a quick tutorial and then you head to this location everything's set up to go off with a detonator so you just chat with pan am until the av shows up at which point you pull the detonator however because it's never that simple the explosion is delayed and the av continues to fly well past the point where the av would have any sort of significant effect on it so pan am just quickly shoots it down begging the question why they didn't just do that before but i guess they wanted to be more subtle you know with a massive explosion but nonetheless you drive after it but over here mitch and scorpion on comms going to help with the situation that they don't actually need to help with you try to warn them that this is not going to be as simple as it appears and that they should stay away but you can't get through because that emp blast that you just launched and set off on a delay it interrupted all of the communications so great job now you fight your way to the location of the wreck and you fight through a ton of drones and turrets once you arrive and open up the av you see that mitch is actually still okay although scorpion probably isn't however mitch is being held at gunpoint and here we have two options the first one is that if we ask all of the correct questions the guy is going to tell you where hellman went then panam is just going to kill him mitch is okay and he says that scorpion is dead and then you can choose to either be sorry for her or berate her for killing the guard at the end of the day but it really doesn't matter and then you head to the next location the second option is if we screw it up asking all of the wrong questions and learning nothing pan am is still going to kill the guy once again we have the option to either tell panam that you're sorry for her loss of scorpion or you can just berate her for killing the guard which in this case makes a lot more sense because at this point we don't know where hellman went so at this point we don't know where hellman went whereas if we ask the correct questions we do however there really isn't that much of an impact on this because you can just ask mitch where hellman went and then he says he was taken in an alder carter car at which point you just followed the tracks killing more enemies on the way to the location so either way you find out where hellman ends up it doesn't actually matter once you're at the location you fight to get to hellman pretty straightforward once you get there you knock him out then you call takamura to say that you have helmet because if you remember to like 10 hours ago in game takamura asked you to contact him when you had hellman because he wanted to interrogate him as well so after a quick argument and goodbye to pan am and the aldecado gang you head to a motel room here you've got hellman all tied up and he wakes up after a hearty slap you explain everything that's going on you tell him that you have johnny silverhand's construct in your head and he explains that the relic is unique because it was meant to be put in a new body and was only in the trial phase when he left arasaka so he has to look at it in order to know what to do so he does so and then he tells you that your neural network is deteriorating and cannot function without the chip whatsoever basically confirming everything that vic told us he says that the only thing that he can do is to give you the details of a clinic in sweden to end your life painlessly which is like the worst thing he could possibly tell us but he does ask you what it's like and you tell him as much or as little as you like it really doesn't matter this is more group therapy he does start to ask some questions that are more from the developer and less from hellmann such as asking questions like whether johnny is affecting your decision making if johnny says that he's manipulating you and how much effect he actually has on the things that you're doing right now however right after this happens takamaru shows up thanks you and then asks that you leave them to it this is one of those cases where sometimes it's just better not to know here you talk to johnny a little bit about life and struggling with living in somebody else's mind etc vice versa bloody blue blah blah you basically build your relationship a little bit here and then you move on now at this point if you've completed the other of the three missions you move on to the last mission of the game however if you haven't done anything with judy or evelyn you need to do that now speaking of which let's discuss judy and evelyn's quest line the final of the three that are mandatory to lead you into the end of the game now i think for most people this is going to be one of the first quest lines that they complete at least for me and for my wife nikki this is the questline that we finished first i think it's probably because in the introductory hours of the game you spend a lot more time with judy and evelyn whereas you haven't met rogue or takamura in a meaningful way at that point so it just feels natural to continue on with judy and evelyn because you've just spent a few hours with them learning how to do brain dances and other things so in this questline you show up at lizzie's bar and head to judy's room where she's having an argument with her boss you tell judy that you need to find evelyn and she questions why but you tell her you don't want anything bad only some information judy explains that evelyn's actually a doll who used to work at clouds and that if you want to find her you should take her cigarette case that has the address of clouds on it and bring it to evelyn to prove that you came from judy as you leave judy asks you to tell her how evelyn is actually doing and you can respond with a yes or a no promises or just a downright no however if you want to build the relationship up naturally you should say yes here we have a few options such as having a conversation with johnny about evelyn or talking with judy's boss that she was just arguing with but regardless we end up in the clouds building you take the elevator all the way up to the top it is called clouds after all and johnny throws out one of the best one-liners i think in the entire game way i see the only thing waiting for you here is getting off or getting off place your bets johnny also expresses a skepticism surrounding judy he thinks something's up and that she's hiding something bearing that in mind we enter clouds and a receptionist tells you to jack into their terminal and she explains that events may take a turn but to try to stick with it even if you're uncomfortable she asks you to pick a safe word something that was really weird but also exciting like i was really excited to see where they went with this and it is a bummer because it ends up being super underwhelming you'll see what i mean but nonetheless you have to choose a safe word the terminal scans you to find compatible dolls it narrows it to a female and a male doll and you actually have the option to question whether or not that's normal to have a male and a female present it as viable options at which point the receptionist asks you what normal even is which let's be honest there's no good explanation or response to that so you just have to choose a doll you have the option to ask if evelyn can give you the brain dance or whatever the hell is about to happen to you instead but the receptionist tells you that she's unavailable but the dolls that were chosen for you will be the best fit now maybe i'm just spoiled but one of the reasons i found this underwhelming is just because i thought that this was a world where you could just go in and do whatever you want be dirty and grimy and gross but you don't actually have that option you have the option between like two people in clouds and then like four dolls throughout the world that you can interact with and that's about it it's a little underwhelming for a city that's meant to be totally debauched there's not a lot of debauchery should that be the title of this review i know this is a total non-sequitur but like instead of not enough water from ign it's from luke stevens and it's not enough debauchery i don't know let me know what you think so disappointedly you select one of the two dolls you pay and then you disconnect from the terminal you're forced to drop off all of your weapons which will make any combat in the upcoming moments really really difficult because you'll have to stealth somebody and then take their weapons and it's all under leveled and blah blah so you might as well just stealth your way through it you walk into the booth where your doll is waiting and you have a really strange conversation about the meaning of life and the fear of dying and wanting to reach the top of night city what comes after you die what you want to be remembered for and it's really bizarre you have the option to use your safe word at any time during the conversation to end it and jump straight to the end of your conversation with the doll but it's still really weird eventually you run out of dialogue options and you're forced to say the safe word the doll is super upset and worried that they did something wrong likely because when they do screw up with a client they get in trouble however after this happens you ask the doll about evelyn but you don't actually get any information they say that they're all in their separate booths and they don't interact with each other and so they don't know you can either beg for help or threaten the doll or you can just straight up bribe them and depending on what you say the doll says that they've heard that a customer did something to her and that you should ask another doll called tom who's friends with evelyn and is in the vip area if you engage in some optional prompts you can find out that she was actually attacked within her own booth and furthermore that the customer didn't attack evelyn but rather seem to have an attack caused by a net runner hack it's a small distinction but still an important one so you go to the vip area enter by either breaking through the staff entrance or eliminating a guard to get an access pass like i said i think stealthing is the way to go here if you screw this up you're gonna get caught in all sorts of save states that totally screw you with the randomly spawning enemies so just don't bother with it just stealth your way through you go in the booth and you find tom who's really confused as to why you're there because he doesn't have any information on you and he thinks you're a client that he's not going to be able to help since he didn't get the download on you however you tell him that you're looking for evelyn and he tells you that he hasn't been able to get into contact with her and she's at a special clinic after the accident you asked me how he found all of this out and he tells you that you should speak with a man named woodman who runs the whole bar i guess barr is kind of generous the the institution that you are currently a customer within once again you have the option to fight or stealth your way into woodman's office there's two ways of dealing with them they both kind of end up the same way you either deal with him peacefully which is pretty tough you have to make some really really careful decisions and dialogue choices here or you can screw it up or just immediately fight him either lethal or non-lethal it doesn't really matter because if you do that way you're gonna have to get the info that you need off of his computer either way you get it from him or his computer you find out that she was taken to a ripper called fingers a delightful name don't worry this guy looks exactly as you imagine him so you leave clouds you take your weapons and you have the option to talk with johnny about how the mission went as you're doing this and riding the elevator down johnny actually gets really pissed off at you and he thinks that it's ridiculous the situation they're in because he's convinced that v's going to die before they figure out any solution to the relic he stresses that he wants v alive because he wants to use their body to settle his score with arasaka and he says he knows people who will save v's life and aims to kill two birds with one stone so they just need to keep her held together for a little while longer until they can get the info that they need we also get some more exposition surrounding what soul killer and mikoshi are soul killer is an ai that can create an engram of the psyche of someone who is using the net while killing their body which is exactly what happened to johnny mikoshi is where soul killer operates and where the engrams are stored and it's possibly the first and possibly only place where operations like this are performed you have the option to ask johnny how he's going to destroy arasaka this time if he doesn't have a nuke and he says that he's going to use someone named alt but he doesn't go into any more information at this point he'll explain more later on in the game though now this is also why i think that this quest line is meant to be the first one you engage with because there's a lot of exposition here that you won't get in the other quest lines they just assume that you know it in those other quest lines they're throwing out words like soul killer and mikoshi assuming you know what they are if you haven't gotten to this point in the quest line you're going to have no clue but regardless here you have the option to call judy to give her an update on what's going on with evelyn because as we said earlier you can tell her that you'll keep judy in the loop and let her know what you find out or you can say no i'm not going to tell you in which case you don't have to call her so here we make our way to jig jig street which is where fingers office is you find your way in you meet judy who's actually in the waiting room and expresses that she's worried about evelyn as you would expect but you're locked out apparently fingers is a very busy man you make your way in either by persuading or paying off the other waiting patients to let you in first or you can just wait or you can just straight up barge into his office and force your way in this guy is so gross and yet so funny all at the same time like the way that he talks to you while casually moisturizing his hand with lotion he keeps on his belt it's just so weird i love it and yeah you might think that that's like hand sanitizer or something i don't think so i'm gonna go with like lotion or lube or something i just think that's way funnier so that's what i'm going with and here we can be diplomatic and just talk with fingers or we can beat the living crap out of him that's what i chose to do i think i made the right choice you find out that fingers couldn't help evelyn because he didn't actually know what was wrong with her he said that her chip was burnt out and when he replaced it nothing happened she was still highly damaged he says based on what he saw a very skilled netrunner probably targeted her and caused the damage he claims he doesn't know where she is now but that two larger men from a bd studio took her saying that she'd be a good virtuous for us with the death head whatever the hell that means so you leave fingers and you talk to judy who feels bad for letting evelyn go back to clouds you discuss the leads of xpds and death heads but you decide that you need a death head virtue that could give a clue as to their whereabouts and here we actually have a few options you can ask wakako about the expedies and she will tell you that she trusts you and leaves the bd at a drop point the second option is that you can go to an internet point and find the xpd dealer's location or just buy it off of him once you get this you head back to judy's van you enter the brain dance examine it and work out the location once you arrive there judy tells you that you have to find a way in while she looks for the blueprints in the net you fight or stealth your way down to the bottom of the building where you find evelyn collapsed on the floor she's collapsed next to a bloody bed you remove a cable from evelyn and then carry her out of the building you then cut to judy's apartment looking at evelyn's cigarette case that you've been carrying all this time you walk in and talk to judy and find out that evelyn's sleeping and slowly recovering here you view the first brain dance and find out that evelyn was hired to film the yorinobu brain dance by a group in pacifica called the voodoo boys all these conversations with judy though are really tough because she's constantly beating herself up over what happened to evelyn so we view the second braindance and here we find out that evelyn was smoking and overheard a conversation between voodoo boys saying that silverhand will lead them to alt this for me was the first time i had really heard anybody other than johnny mention alt so naturally i was very curious you do have the option to engage in a dialogue sequence where you're talking with johnny and trying to find out why they know about alt and what that means johnny says he doesn't know but everything does lead back to her because she was also a netrunner the best among them in her time and he says that he suspects that she knows a lot about the chip and could help again slowly revealing more information about her so you tell judy that you're going to go find the voodoo boys because obviously they know something about alt and you need to find them so you set up a meeting with the voodoo boys leader bridget a lot of time will likely pass between when you set this meeting up and when you go and actually complete the meeting so just be warned that there is another blank period of time when they say they'll be in touch i don't know when it happens if it's set for one in-game day or if it's set for five in-game hours i don't know all i know is it took mine a long time to trigger when you show up for the meeting you walk into what seems to be an old chapel and at the chapel a beggar will touch you on the shoulder at which point you can ask for a meeting with bridget assuming he knows what's going on and he says no but he does say that you should head to the butcher shop and ask for placide at the shop you ask the vendor four placeed and he tells you to look in the scanner you do so and then he tells you to go through the back once you go back you find him carving poultry in a pretty cool setting i don't know what it is i just think that this shot is kind of cool you tell him that you've been sent for merc work and he tells you to follow him pretty nonchalantly he gives you a brief background of pacifica and then he points to the grand imperial mall or gim which has been taken over by a rival gang called the animals and along the way to the office where you're headed he also drops off the meat that he was just chopping off at a cellar which i thought added a nice little touch of detail to immerse you in the world a little bit further sure he's taking you to meet his boss but he also needs to drop off and perform the errands that he was going to do anyways once you get to the location blased actually sits down at the desk and you realize that you're meeting with him he grabs your hand and jacks you into his computer you can pull away at any point but either way you're gonna end up getting jacked into his computer so you might as well just deal with it he has a pretty straightforward mission for you but when you ask why he isn't just sending in his own men he claims it isn't their way which is even less of an answer than it sounds like he performs a system scan of you and realizes that you have some sort of chip in your head that doesn't seem particularly good but he doesn't recognize how important it is so he dismisses it he tells you that your mission is that you need to reach a van with the advanced netrunner tech that's being closely monitored that they need in the middle of this briefing a runner does interrupt placide saying that her heart rate is dropping but placeed ushers him away doesn't consider this very important at all but we will figure out what this means later lucy then links you into their subnet so that he can see through you and see everything that you are doing he then tells you to go meet some of his men outside of the mall his men show you the entrance to the mall and how to get to the van but at this point it's mostly up to you this was actually pretty cool because this is the same sequence that i saw behind closed doors at e3 2019 so to actually get to play through it now was kind of cool but i will say back then it seemed much cooler than it does in the final version of the game there was a lot more customization there was a lot more of a unique path that you could design they actually went back and went through the same mission like four times during the demo to show and to prove to us that there were so many different ways that you can handle these quests whereas in its current state you pretty much have stealth and going in guns blazing and there's very little middle ground to be had but regardless you fight your way through all of these crazy monster animal people and you eventually get to the van you jack into it to see a data flow map of pacifica revealing the netrunner who's a netwatch agent's location they're actually in the cinema of the gim so blissey tells you to go after him you continue to fight through and right as you get to the cinema entrance you have a fight with sasquatch which was actually the final boss fight of that e3 2019 demo but here it's just kind of a bullet sponge boss fight it is cool though i do like the setting i wish there were more boss fights like this in the game but you know beggars can't be choosers i guess after you take care of this boss fight you enter the cinema which is showing one-eyed jacks which i thought was kind of funny you explore a little bit more and then you find the projection room and right as you enter this agent that's set up there is actually going to sever your connection with placeed so that you can talk one-on-one in private and here we've got a couple options option one is to incapacitate the agent immediately or at any point in the conversation jack into his body and see a breaching screen then you black out in pain pretty fun after that you see a system reboot screen and then johnny glitches in and asks if you're okay you get up you ask him what happened he tells you that the voodoo boy stooped you and turned you into a kamikaze drone to leave and to settle the situation with placide at which point you do so and you go outside where all of these voodoo boys are hanging out and they are stunned that you're still alive so you go to see placebo who simply tells you he thought you were dead you flip out and scream at him and he doesn't care brushes it off at which point bridget shows up and then you continue on the quest the second option is to listen to the entirety of the agent's argument he will offer to pay you more than the voodoo boys at which point you tell him that you don't want money but rather a meeting with bridget he says that she's actually been frozen because netwatch who he represents has shrouded their subnet with ice and that v was sent to set her free he tells you that placee didn't tell v everything because v was supposed to be their ranion who's basically an outsider that's brought in to do a job and then be killed you can ask him to prove it at which point he'll tell you that they slipped in a virus when v linked into their subnet and the agent asks you to run a diagnostic but it comes out clean he then asks you to re-run the test and cross-reference them and when you do so the results will be identical because the results are fake he offers to remove the voodoo boy's virus and release bridget in exchange for letting him go free with the data that they've collected if you choose to do this placebo call you question you demand to know what's going on then tell you to meet his people out front who will take you to him he'll be super pissed at you pin you against the wall and you can either hit him or try to get him to see some sense all until bridget shows up and interrupts everything telling [ __ ] to leave at which point the quest continues on so really it doesn't matter what you choose it's going to end up the same way with bridget showing up and placid leaving but nonetheless there is the option there now bridget's an interesting character she's a pretty smart cookie which is something that i don't think a lot of people get from the name voodoo boys they kind of assume that it's a gang that just wants to beat people up but that's not actually the case these guys are pretty sophisticated you see bridget says that she knows that you have the chip and she wants access to it you tell her that you have not found anyone that's able to remove the chip and that you went to her as she commissioned the heist and hired evelyn she then explains that she can help but you need to go to the crypt with her in order for her to show you and explain how this will work so you follow her and on the way she tells you to go into cyberspace at this jack in station that they have and speak with johnny's construct you can ask why she wants johnny but she'll just explain that he's merely a way to get to alt cunningham who they really are after her plan is to cut a piece of johnny's engram or consciousness from the biochip as alt will recognize it and should answer from beyond the black wall which basically serves as the deep deep deep deep web that these constructs are living and trapped within you do have the option to ask johnny how he feels about all of this at which point he'll just tell you that he's fine and wants to get all this over with it because they don't have much of a choice at this point which is nice to hear and you can ask bridget more about the plan but it's pretty straightforward so you get into this tub full of ice because they want to make sure that your body doesn't overheat while you're in this crazy high intensity cyber space area and while you're in cyberspace bridgette will show up and explain that they must enhance v or johnny's link in order to grab the data so here you pretty much fully embody johnny silverhand to experience all of his memories of alt so we zip to a flashback to 2003. as johnny silverhand you walk out onto stage and you cut to alt then you cut to playing with carrie cut to the crowd cut to leaving the stage with carrie yelling at you you push him aside and tell him that you're the only one with a vision and that he can go screw himself you know pretty standard rock star stuff you go into the dressing room and then there's a very hot and steamy scene with alt cunningham which is why johnny seems to have been so tight-lipped about her and no that's not a pun get your brains out of the gutter god however afterwards johnny and alt begin fighting it seems as though that wasn't actually a very loving session of intercourse it was actually a goodbye as alt puts it so she leaves and as johnny chases all out to the back alley she says that she is somewhere else to be you ask if you can meet up with her tomorrow but right as you ask this you get interrupted by some thugs a gunfight breaks out but quickly stops as johnny gets impaled with mantis blades something that i think a lot of players will have forgotten even exists at this point and then alt is kidnapped and disappears a stranger named thompson shows up and brings you to a ripper dock you sit up after you're all fixed up and ask where alt is turns out this thompson guy is just media and he was chasing alt for a story and that's why he happened to be in the alley to save johnny's life bit of a stretch but you know what weirder things have happened i suppose johnny the unending narcissist is convinced that he's the reason that all was kidnapped however that's not actually the case because alt is actually one of the best net runners in all of night city and that's actually why arasaka kidnapped her you see arasaka is after soul killer and alt cunningham is the one that wrote the program so all of this is starting to make sense as to why johnny wants alt cunningham because she is now in this digitized state beyond the black wall and she's the one that wrote all of these programs that are causing so much trouble so you set up a heist with rogue as johnny to get alt cunningham back rogue understandably is pissed off that johnny is constantly sleeping with other women behind her back and there's not much to be said about that it's kind of a fair a fair frustration to have i think and then the whole flashback starts to get really chaotic you get in a car chase which turns into a shootout and then you cut to a gig where johnny's playing that turns into a riot and then you're in an elevator while a riot is happening and thompson's filming the entire thing rogue saying that he's bad news and that she doesn't like that he's filming everything and then you show up at arasaka tower and start fighting through crowds of people all to find alt in a netrunner chair and an arasaka agent that says he's put her to work johnny shoots the arasaka agent that has put her to work but apparently she's already dead so johnny breaks down and sees thompson filming her and punches him until rogue stops and it like the whole thing is just kind of crazy and comes out of nowhere and isn't explained very well but basically alt cunningham was taken to arasaka tower hooked up to a bunch of computers where she was going to be put to work for the sake of arasaka doing something and after johnny recruits a bunch of people to help him storm arasaka tower to save her he gets in there and finds that she's dead as a result of being hooked up to this system rogue obviously caught as a monkey in the middle doesn't really know what to do here but says that they need to leave because once again they've just stormed a multi potentially trillion dollar companies headquarters and killed a lot of people but then we're pulled back into cyberspace in v's body all to see johnny pacing back and forth freaking out he's obviously distraught says that alt didn't die but actually just fled into the net she transferred her consciousness into the net and is now hiding behind the black wall after you find out all of this information you pull back and begin speaking with bridget within the database she says that she worked it out and now must dive deeper into the net beyond the black wall and then you demand that they remove the chip from your cranium before they do however then bridgette informs us that they're not actually going to be going beyond the black wall but rather we are and you have to agree because you don't really have much of a choice you're currently sitting in an ice bath hooked up to a bunch of computers and you are not exactly the one in control here but here is actually where what you did with that agent back in the movie theater matters you see if you chose option one which was to incapacitate the agent you go through the black wall voluntarily alt appears and takes all three of you to a safe place within the net but if you chose option two which was just to make a deal with the agent alt appears and says that you must get out because netwatch appears and kills the voodoo boys while alt takes herself you and johnny to a safe place within the net v understandably feels pretty bad that they brought netwatch over and that she didn't think through or realized that the agent replaced placeed's virus with his very own virus and that v brought it killing the entire subnet and everybody hooked up to it one of those situations where i can't blame her for feeling a little guilty either way you end up in a safe place within the subnet johnny asks if he and alt are okay and she says that she recognized johnny's code but doesn't know why they're actually there johnny says that he's there to give alt a chance to pay him back for bombing arasaka and he introduces v and alt together which point he tells all that she needs to save v's life v is a good egg and deserves this however alt isn't going to have that easy of a time with it she says that she needs access to better tech johnny asks if mikoshi is advanced enough and she says that if she had access to mikoshi she would destroy it so you decide to make a deal to get alt into mikoshi where soul killer resides she'll make a construct of v then disentangle v's neural network from johnny's then put that construct back into v's body and i also feel like i should just throw this out when i played through this section there was actually a glitch you remember that whole crazy flashback sequence that we were just talking about yeah there was a guitar loop that just played over and over and over again for like 30 minutes throughout this entire sequence and the only way i could get it to stop was by reloading but i couldn't do that in these cut scenes so i had to wait through this whole very important narrative revelation section of the story with this really annoying guitar riff going over and over and over again i mean like for real it was really bad just like listen to this [Applause] see what i mean it's really bad anyway moving on so while v and johnny are tasked with getting alt into arasaka tower and hooked up to mikoshi alt's going to work on making a program that will help v navigate mikoshi in a meaningful way and will also establish a secure communication channel for them so that they can all communicate my wife just stormed in here is eating a cookie and complaining that she's been lonely while i've been recording this do you have anything to say to the youtube audience nikki i was watching videos and it was light out and it looked up and it wasn't light out anymore it was dark well i i can relate to that i've been recording this into his light out too he came to visit you and you still don't want to hang out with me i do i so for those of you listening right now i have like three more bullet points before i was gonna stop and send this to my editor to work on so i i'm gonna finish these bullet points while nikki stares at me and then we'll be we'll be good but you won't be able to tell the difference it'll all stitch together so yeah yeah so okay okay finishing this up now how we exit this quest actually once again depends on how we dealt with that agent in the movie theater if option one was chosen and we just immediately incapacitated the agent we wake up out of the net tell bridget that she won't be able to con alt like she cons everybody else and you leave the crypt and that's it that's it for the voodoo boys you don't have to worry about it anymore but if option 2 was chosen when you made a deal with the agent you wake up out of the net and you find that bridget and all of the other voodoo netrunners were dead understandably all of the voodoo boys are pretty upset about this and blame you because you are the one that killed them purposefully or not so you have to fight your way out of the crypt and at the very end you have a boss fight against placeed before you're allowed out the second you exit the chapel there's a little bit of a struggle once again the relic is breaking down even further you have the option to talk to johnny about being scared of death then merging into one individual or you can just take omega blockers and move on with the rest of the game doesn't really matter but once all of this is completed we've finished all three quests that are required to lead into the final mission once you've finished all three of these quest lines v will blackout having the worst malfunction to date you wake up in pacifica in a small motel room it looks like clutching a bunch of pills johnny is looking out over the sea and tells v to take a look too it's a weirdly serene moment and it's one that's also confusing for v as well as the player how did you get here what's going on are you about to die it's weirdly ominous once you get up johnny tells you that you almost flatlined and he took over control of the body so as to not leave you there furthermore you can also engage in a discussion about your friendship that is completely optional and this is going to be critical if you want to pursue the quote-unquote secret ending where you need a relationship with johnny of at least 60 to 70 percent based on which report you look at after talking for a bit johnny shares with you a few items chief among them being his dog tags you ask him why he's giving these to you and he replies asking v to imagine that they're at war together and he asks you point blank whether or not you would take a bullet for him and here you have the option to answer yes or no now you would think that this would have a major impact on your relationship with johnny but it actually doesn't mainly this is going to change the tone of the final quest line but it's not actually going to have a major impact on that quest line if this doesn't make sense don't worry it will once we get to it johnny insists that he will do v no wrong and will give his life 4v this means that he's willing to be wiped and have his consciousness go beyond the black wall with alt cunningham in exchange for v being reconstructed and put back into her body it's like giving your life for somebody but it's almost more dramatic than that because you're not actually giving your life you're giving your eternal consciousness for that person it's much more dark and i think more meaningful now here you can say one of two things you can say that you will give your life for his or you can say that your body has always been yours and you're going to keep it but like i said this doesn't have an actual impact on which way the cookie's gonna grumble this will change how johnny reacts to you or v reacts to johnny in the final dialogue selections but you can still make whatever option and choice you want to make in those sections so it doesn't actually have that big of an impact in other words it alters the tone but it doesn't alter any of the substance once you've made your selection johnny will ask you whether or not you're considering hanako's offer he doesn't actually care what you think because he's still going to insist that he wants you to give him control so that he can take over kill smasher taking rogue with him all so that he can get to alt cunningham and handle things himself now when i got to this point in my first run i actually didn't trust johnny at all i would not say i had a good relationship with him and so when i heard that he was saying he was going to give his life for me i thought he was full of it after all i have really no reason to trust johnny silverhand he hasn't been looking out for me he's a terrorist he's somebody that died 50 years ago and all of a sudden has a second chance at living life there's no real reason for him to have these warm goo gaga feelings towards v but weirdly enough he seems to and at the time i thought that this was just poor writing on the part of cd projekt red but after much more consideration and a lot more hours after going back through the game a couple times i can say that i think this is more an issue with how i played the first time around like i've said a few times i tried to role play as intensely as i could i played the role of somebody that thought they were going to die and that my only option was to hurry through the quest lines to get an answer and save my life and then i would go back through and explore night city and have a great time the problem is that this meant that i missed out on a lot of chances to get to know johnny to relate to him to build our relationship to make him trust me and me trust him and because of this once we got to the end of this story and johnny is saying that he trusts me and wants to give his eternal soul for me it seemed remarkably out of character because we hadn't had that many major incidents with each other to the point where we would build a relationship that intense and i think it's exacerbated by the fact that johnny doesn't say that this is because he's just had a change of heart and he wants to be a good guy and he wants to make amends for all of the harm he did in his personal life but rather he says that all of this is based on your relationship that he get to know you and he wants to help you and this is about v and johnny together this is about their relationship the friendship that they've built and harbored for me there wasn't really a friendship at all so what he was saying seemed completely out of left field which led to me doubting him and not trusting him whereas if i had taken a lot more time engaged in a lot more side quests and missions based around johnny followed his quest line all the way through this would have made a lot more sense but unfortunately the game's writing doesn't actually have a difference in states based on how far into johnny's questline you've gotten he'll respond the same way during this dialogue sequence no matter what to be fair johnny's relationship with you does matter towards the end of the game when you're making your final selection as to which path you're gonna go down which is something we're gonna get to in just a minute but in this very important conversation it doesn't actually matter what you did with johnny or how well you know him he's still going to talk like your best friends and you've been to hell and back together which in a way you have been but you get my drift this relationship is nowhere near as robust as he seems to be making it out to be and because of my relationship with him or lack thereof this made me feel very unsettled and nervous about this final selection i didn't trust the guy that the writers want me to trust and that's a big issue because going into this final chapter of the game you need to trust johnny no matter what otherwise you're going to end up screwing yourself getting a terrible ending which is what we're going to talk about now as you wrap up in the hotel with johnny you're prompted to give an answer to his question whether or not you're going to consider hanukko's offer or go and let him do his own thing if you select to let him take over control go kill adam smasher and take rogue with him to handle everything he just says thanks and this boosts your relationship slightly which will help if you want to pursue the secret ending however if you disagree and say that you want to think on it more because it's your life that he's playing with he says fine and then you move on it actually doesn't matter what you say here other than the chance to boost your relationship with johnny just a little bit but to be fair at this point you probably have the relationship with johnny that you were trying to get whether that's amazing or fairly low because you don't give a crap so really it doesn't matter these questions are mainly about getting the player to think about what's going on by forcing these rhetorical questions on them yes you're prompted to answer but it doesn't actually matter what you answer so really the only reason they're being prompted is so the writers can have a reason to get all of this out on the table so that it doesn't seem like it came out of left field a little later on but now we enter act three depending on which of the aforementioned three quests you did first and last you might get a call from hanako if your last quest wasn't takamura's asking you to show up at embers and meet with her and this is the point of no return and to be honest this came way sooner than i expected it i think this was only 16 or 17 hours into my first run it felt way too short and too soon to be prompted with a point of no return marker i mean sure i had heard that cyberpunk 2077 was shorter than the witcher 3 but this seemed excessively shorter it seemed bizarrely shorter but i said screw it and just continued on my way at least in my first run through in my second run through i took this opportunity to go divert my attention to other side quests trying to build relationships with side characters build romances etc however in these critiques and commentary videos i usually try to look at a game from the perspective of most players and the reality is that most players play a game from start to finish and don't return to it sure there's lots of people that go in platinum games play through it four or five six times i get that but the overwhelming majority of players don't do it so my perspective is usually most impacted based on what my first run through was like and again in this case i was role-playing my life was on the line and i was closer than i had ever been to a cure to v's condition so i said screw it the side content will come later i'm gonna get saved so you enter the elevator headed up to embers which is a fancy exclusive restaurant above the city you get into the club elevator and head up while johnny keeps going on and on and on about how he has a really bad feeling about this i mean he doesn't exactly get along with arasaka so this doesn't come as much of a surprise regardless you arrive at embers and you go and greet hanukkah who's playing a piano which i gotta say is the most bond villainesque thing you could possibly be doing when a character is introduced like this for a major scene i love it she gets straight to the point she says that she knew her dad was killed by her brother from the beginning and that no one on the board of directors believed that it was a poisoning from some foreign actor they just simply didn't have proof that they could use to overthrow subaru she says that her father was a flawed man but always valued her family she says that no one on the board of directors believed that it was a poisoning from some outside actor and that they simply didn't have any proof to prove that yornobu had killed saburu she says her father was a flawed man but always valued his family above everything else which is reflected in that final monologue that he has right before he's killed and this is where the strange dynamic starts to rear its ugly head she says that her brother did kill saboru and she knows that but that he's family and opposing him is difficult because they value family above everything else even if somebody commits patricide it doesn't matter they're still family so you can't just go in and shoot him in the head to be done with it however she gives the vague statement that he needs to be taken down that he needs to pay for his crime whatever that means it's much more dark and scary than it seems at this particular moment but we'll get to that in just a minute she asks you if you have access to soul killer which you don't she does say that she can lead you to mikoshi because it's actually got an access point just below arasaka tower and johnny says that he wants to leave but you insist that you need to hear hanukkah out because she seems to have a lot of information that's helpful and a lot of resources that could be useful in you know saving your freaking life she wants to make your nobu face justice but right as she's starting to get to the nitty-gritty of this hanukkah's bodyguard interrupts her telling her that she's expected elsewhere it's not super clear what this is it seems to be the board meeting that was just called and she tells you about which is apparently the perfect time for v to tell everybody what she saw and the deal is pretty simple v goes testifies in front of the board of directors what happened and then hanukkah will help you remove the relic the and the player are probably unsure of what's going on and what exactly they should decide so you give a non-committal answer and rush out of embers and it's right at this point when v starts bleeding out of her nose a little scary loses vision collapses in the elevator and johnny ever focused starts talking to you as you're freaking out and your body is shutting down trying to convince you to let him take control of the body using rogue's help to handle everything doesn't matter what happens here you collapse and wake up at vick's clinic you have a little conversation with vic here which is a little daunting and eerie vic knows that v is on the brink of death and he's trying to figure out how to tell her and break this news to her but also push her to go and find an answer fix this come up with some solution it's very very unsettling because he knows what's going on you know what's going on johnny knows what's going on and there's no clear answer as to what you should do however it basically settles down to vic telling v that you have a couple of options left he gestures to a table which has the last few doses of both kinds of pills you get up and go over to the table to take the pills and the gun that's resting there as well and as you do so johnny makes a statement however v verbalizes this as well which is the first time that johnny has actually leaked through v's body that sounds super gross but you know what i mean vic actually hears this and says that v is losing control and needs to get a hold of everything that's going on i actually really like this small detail that johnny and v have become connected so inextricably that now they're crossing over control of the body itself so that their discussions and verbalizations are getting crossed so occasionally johnny will speak and it comes out of v's mouth but then v will speak and it comes out and then other times it doesn't it's a really cool detail and i think it's unsettling just enough to the point where the player realizes that this is hardcore this is real and it even freaks v out which i think is the main point you thank vic and go talk to misty she takes you up to the rooftop where she actually spoke with jackie when he was unsure about what to do with his life you sit down overlooking a portion of the city and she leaves you with some time to think she leaves and you're left with johnny sitting across from you he says that you should call anybody that you want to say goodbye to because this is the last hurrah and it's at this point that you have the option to call your romantic partner if you have one if you don't v will just say that goodbyes aren't in her wheelhouse and that she might as well just get this over with johnny then gives a little spiel about how far you've come and that he wants to save your life if you'll let him and then you go through your options here there's a few different choices one that we're going to call the path of least resistance the second which is trusting hanako and arasaka and going through that ending the third being that you go with pan am and the el de cardos to go and find a solution and bust your way into arasaka tower and the fourth being that you let johnny go with rogue and handle things themselves there's also a secret ending but we'll get to that at the very end after we've gone through the others and so it's decision time firstly let's go through the simplest option which we will affectionately call the path of least resistance here you're basically saying that you don't want to drag anybody else down with you that you're doomed you're going to die and you might as well just put all of this to rest before anybody else gets hurt v tosses the pills and johnny asks why after everything that you've been through to get to this point you're just gonna throw it all away and end it v simply replies that it's the cleanest option with the least bloodshed and she's not wrong lots of people will die whether that's people you know or just other guards and individuals that are just doing their jobs all of those people are at risk of dying if v goes on this murderous rampage to try and find some cure so in many ways i think this could be considered to be a fairly noble ending however far and away it's the least satisfying johnny says the people die all of the time and this isn't that crazy and they both remark on how this might actually be a good thing because at the very end they will both be aware of exactly what's happening so johnny sits next to v and says that you still managed to surprise him even after all of this time you say you learnt it from him he asks if you're sure you say as long as he is he says that it's not what he would have done but it's okay they then determined that it's time v then remarks on how the city is strangely beautiful even though it's a hub of chaos evil and violence it's calming in this final moment you look over some final images of night city and then the gunshot is heard and that's the ending v kills themself just to save all of the other people that might have been dragged down with them if they had gone about some other means of trying to find a solution it's i think fairly noble after all we're often so desensitized to the mass murder that we're committing when we go about a main quest line in a game like this and we forget that all of the people that we are just murdering and massacring as we go through these levels all supposedly have families of their own people that love them friends and family it's pretty messed up that we just go massacring all of these people to achieve some selfish end sure you could say that this is trying to save your own life so in a way it's self-defense but i would say that these people didn't do anything wrong just because you might have cancer doesn't give you the right to go and shoot up a hospital to get the medications that you need and in the same vein just because mikoshi might hold the answers for everything that you need going through and killing dozens or hundreds of people to get to that point just to find out that it can't actually save you i think makes you a worse person not a better person but this is one of those problems with rpgs like this if you're really role playing this option i think like i said is fairly noble it's admirable that you're taking yourself out of the picture before you drag more people down with you i don't think there's anything wrong with this ending inherently however in the post-credits scene when you hear all of your friends talking to you leaving you voicemails you would get it pretty clearly pushed into your head that you made a terrible decision everybody hates you is upset with you judy's bawling her eyes out pan am says that she wishes she never met you and part of it is the anger and frustration with this decision they didn't want you to die at all so to see you dead in such a self-inflicted way is upsetting but i think it makes it pretty clear that the developers want you to feel as though this is a bad ending even though i think it should be rewarded but i admit this could just be me maybe i'm looking into it too much maybe i'm reading into these frustrated reactions from your friends and inferring from that information that all of this means that you had a bad ending and that this is something that you should avoid so it could all just be me but i do think that this ending does not give you any sort of clarity or even a pat on the back for saving all of these people that you could have gotten killed or put in danger but that's the first ending pretty abrupt but i think makes sense if you are role playing in this way where you want to avoid killing more people and more bloodshed i'll also say that it's a little bizarre that johnny just goes along with this so willingly i mean sure he knows that if you go with his plan he's probably spending all of eternity trapped beyond the black wall in some sort of strange purgatory so this could actually be seen as a better option for johnny that he'll just get everything to be over with and it'll be done however once again it brings up the issue that if you didn't build a strong relationship with johnny or if you don't trust johnny this whole thing feels really weird he's with you in your final moments gazing over the city and he's going to help you commit suicide to save your friends it's a strange moment if you aren't actually close to johnny and this is going to happen a lot throughout all of the branches of these endings if you don't have a strong relationship with johnny the developers will simply assume that you do and write all of the dialogue and all of the options as though you're actually very close with each other it leads to this really disjointed feeling where you felt as though you understood v and you understood johnny and you were both on the same page but all of a sudden in the endings over the course of an hour or two depending on which one you choose you could find yourself feeling completely disconnected from the character that you've been trying to role play within don't get me wrong i can't even imagine how difficult it is to write all of these branching endings for a game like this it must be a total nightmare and incredibly difficult and in the case of the writers for this game they had one job and that's to make sure that every option that you have presented to you feels grounded and legitimate but that's enough about that let's move on to the arasaka ending so while sitting on the rooftop if you choose to trust hanako and take the blockers johnny tells you straight up this is a huge mistake he doesn't trust arasaka he doesn't trust hanako and he thinks that you're going to regret this decision which ends up being a fairly accurate prediction so you call hanako and it turns out that yoronobu has actually locked her in his home so this sets up the first step of this ending which is that you need to break into your nobu's home and get hanukkah out she tells you over the phone which she's able to access somehow even though she's under home arrest and they also don't pick up on the signal to come and preemptively take you out before you can kidnap this woman it it's a little weird it asks a lot of you to just ignore some of these plot holes which are all over the place in the arasaka questline but you know what we've come this far let's just move past it now in most of these endings you're going to have the option to have misty read your tarot cards basically she does this little prediction this spiel that tells you what you can roughly expect in the case of there a sock ending her prediction is pretty dark and gloomy she says that this looks as though you might have just made a mistake and at that very moment arasaka arrives and misty is not happy that you are working with them at all now who shows up here actually depends it will be either takamura and hellman or just hellman depending on if you saved takumar earlier remember when i said it doesn't matter that much he shows up a little bit later but not really this is that moment now i've been told that if you save takamura and you go to the mansion to break hanako out he will actually help you stealth your way through all of these guards and fight people however on my playthrough he didn't spawn so i don't actually know if that happens or not because a bug i'm assuming it's a bug triggered and he never showed up so i don't know if this means that he never shows up for anybody or if i just got some weird glitch where it thought that he was dead even though i saved him i i don't know honestly let me know in the comments down below if he actually does fight with you i'm honestly not sure at this point google seems to say so but i don't know so you fight your way through the mansion you save hanukkah and you escort her to the av and you head to arasaka tower now this is when things start to get really weird once you get to arasaka tower you head down to a secret room that's next to mikoshi and out of nowhere saburu arasaka shows up as a hologram and it turns out that he is an engram within mikoshi the same exact thing that happened to johnny he's copied over his consciousness which effectively makes him immortal quick fun little detail if you chose to send johnny's body to vic instead of his family and it gets stolen by arisaka which can happen you'll actually see jackie's body here which is insane and a really cool detail although i doubt very many people are going to actually see this because most people will have the common decency to send jackie's body to his family but nonetheless i thought it was a cool detail so you head to the board of directors meeting once again i ran into some glitches here i did save takumar in one of my runs and i've been told that if you do so he'll show up at this meeting with you however he didn't i'm starting to think that there was probably some glitch where the game thought that i didn't save him and that he died and so he just never showed up again but i could only assume furthermore if you left oda alive at the end of that little boss fight at the parade he'll also be here at the meeting it's a small detail doesn't really matter but still at this meeting hanukkah moves to remove her brother from his position because he killed their father she then kicks a board member out of his seat so that v can sit next to her establishing that she actually trusts you and seemingly thinks that you should have a major position in this or it could just be that she's using you for this particular moment which i think is actually more likely hanukkah declares that yornobu killed her father and that the board members knew she prompts you to testify as a witness which you do and then hanukkah presents her father as a hologram because he's an engram after all who then proves that he's real by recalling a private meeting with a board member this freaks all of the board members out because they realize that this guy saboro who they were already terrified of is now immortal and they will likely never be able to escape his presence after proving that he was real he says that everybody should follow hanukkah's orders and they say that they will however at this very moment the ai sends the place into lockdown and a ton of shots are fired you are prompted to kill the attackers and hanako sends you to get her brother she does tell you however that you need to keep him alive in order for your deal to stand so you fight your way through the tower eventually culminating in a boss fight with adam smasher near your nobu's office after a pretty chaotic boss fight with adam smasher you are prompted to either save him and spare his life or to just kill him and be done with it you then push into your nobu's office and you see him laying alone eventually hanukkah shows up and your nobu continues a monologue about how he didn't actually want power for the sake of power but that he rather wanted to overthrow his father's way of doing things his father ruled by fear and he thought that he could run things better and spare the world this dictatorship and i'm honestly not sure if this was intended to try and redeem your nobu in some way or if it was just some weird last-ditch effort on your nobu's part to be spared as some sort of punishment on the part of the player or hanukkah it's not really clear if it's meant to redeem him in the eyes of v and the player i don't think it does a very good job because if your nobu was actually trying to overthrow the ways that saburo did things by ruling with fear and control and anger and hatred and violence he didn't actually do things that differently i mean he locked his sister up in dangerous situations multiple times just to get what he wants and if that's what he was doing with his family members i would say it's pretty likely that he probably did things very similarly to people that he wasn't related to if not acting in a much more egregious way towards them but regardless once hanukkah shows up she starts cradling her brother and asks v to leave with hellman it's a little bizarre but it reminds the player of the moment when hanukkah was saying that your nobu was family and it wasn't as simple as just putting a bullet in his head so you leave thinking that everything's been handled v leaves to an elevator where she blacks out you wake up within cyberspace you cross the bridge and climb the pyramid where you see johnny and here's where the first bit of disjointed crap begins he says that you haven't changed and that you remind him of himself years ago that you've abandoned yourself and what's truly important you phase to a cyberspace version of tom's diner and sit with johnny as he says the line between you and him has blurred he says that he carries the heavy conscience that v used to have and questions who you are basically implying that you are much more like johnny silverhand and he's much more like v than they were at the beginning of all of this you tell him that arasaka is removing the chip right now as they speak and johnny says that they're cutting a hole that they'll never be able to close in other words they might gut the chip but it's going to do irreversible damage while they do so but the lecturing doesn't stop here johnny continues after you spawn into a version of the pacifica hotel room where you had that meaningful conversation with each other where you decided whether or not you were going to give him the body or keep it for yourself he tells you that you've sold a part of yourself and that it's about the principle of the thing the principle that johnny picked up from the old v he repeatedly tells you that you chose wrong he then asks you if you remember what dex said about living the quiet life or going out in a blaze of glory and he says that you chose wrong so you leave cyberspace and johnny behind we then launch into an epilogue we wake up in an arisaka hospital we hear hanukkah congratulate the professor on her success and you are told that some memories will come back to you while some you'll never be able to recover you ask who you are and no one answers you turns out johnny might have been right about drilling that hole that will never heal you hear johnny's voice after you pass out you get up you walk over to the door where there's just space instead of a corridor it's a little weird apparently we're on some sort of orbital hospital for some reason you turn and you see the news playing and it turns out that saburo is now living in the body of his son apparently he used the soul killer program to actually put his engram within his son's body so now saburo has been reincarnated and his son has been wiped out a doctor then enters to do a bunch of tests you scan text on a screen you try to solve a rubik's cube you do a word association with a ton of super weird and concerning choices you then do an empathy test you run on a treadmill which you fall off of because you're so weak and then you pass out again and this is where the groundhog day starts it's really disorienting for v but it's even more perhaps frustrating for the player they just went through this crazy ending they feel as though they accomplished something and now they're in some sort of weird space hotel they found out that the bad guy is actually doing better than ever and now you can't function properly and they're going to force you to go through the same exact sequence multiple times to prove the point that you chose wrong like i said we go through this groundhog day sequence again and again and again we pass out after trying to walk on the treadmill then we wake up to johnny's voice we go to the door walk down the hallway and in one particular instance we see jackie's corpse he gives us the relic and then we swap back and we see the news and it's showing protests over saburo's resurrection he gives a speech in his defense the sequence repeats but this time on the news we see that arasaka and militech are having problems and that a small war is likely to break out the doctor enters again and then we have a montage of us doing these tests repeatedly and getting more and more frustrated about them you trash your room and then go to sleep we wake up to either hellman or takamura if you happened to save him back then again i've been told that he'll show up here but i couldn't get it to work again likely just a bug but it is important to note that he can show up here and have this conversation with you instead of helmet what they'll tell you is that the surgery did not help you at all it served only arasaka's interests and the icing on the cake is that you will be dead before winter sure it bought you a little bit of time but not much and then you're prompted with basically two options that you can either leave your body and have your soul and consciousness stored within mikoshi until tech advances wherein you can be put into a new body or you can just go home live out the rest of the life that you have so we have a final option to either go home or sign ourselves over to arasaka if we choose to go home we just take our bags say goodbye walk down the corridor singing never fade away by samurai and then we walk through the door and look out the window to earth we slowly and dramatically take off the bullet necklace and that's it and if you choose to sign your soul over tarasaki you just go back to the room and lay down on the bed and then it goes white and the game's over my capture card wasn't working when i captured this ending so forgive me for not having footage but it's literally 15 seconds so i think you could probably just imagine it literally you just turn around walk to the bed lay down and then the screen goes white that's it now it's pretty clear that the game wants you to think that this is the wrong ending that you made a major mistake after all johnny rants at you repeatedly for like 10 minutes about how you changed and how you're actually much more like him when he was young and that you made all of these horrible choices and now everything's screwed up which based on the new sequences you see at the end of the game does certainly seem to be the case after all saburo arasaka was reincarnated and has come back stronger than ever and is potentially going to start a massive war however i don't think that the players should be blamed that much for making these choices they're actually pretty reasonable as far as i'm concerned you need to get in and get access to mikoshi in order to have any chance of solving your issue so to partner with the head of the arasaka family or rather soon to be head of the arasaka family seems like a reasonable choice to make sure you can say that you shouldn't trust hanukkah or that there was probably something else going on that there could be some double crossing going on behind the scenes but i don't think that that's reasonable because after all any other choice you make in this situation could potentially lead to more death more carnage or to your friends potentially double-crossing you to save their own skin i mean sure hopefully they won't do that because they're your friends but the point is that this is always a possibility yes arasaka is probably more prone to double-crossing people like you but either way this is a matter of life and death and going straight to the top to the most powerful company in the world the one that has the direct access to the software to the programming to the engineers that know how this thing works that's killing you seems reasonable to me so while it's good that the game does have this option available to you because it does seem to make sense i find it frustrating that johnny gets so pissed off at you just because you made this seemingly reasonable decision i get it he doesn't like arasaka and he basically gave his life fighting them but even so it doesn't seem very reasonable for him to dismiss you so wholeheartedly and completely simply because you chose to trust hanako to find some solution to this problem but that's enough about that ending let's talk about pan ams now naturally in order to participate in this ending you have to have completed all of the pan am side quests once you've done this on the rooftop you have the option to select pan am as the person that's going to help you you take the blockers and johnny says that you're making a big mistake but that he hopes you're right you call pan am and tell her that you're going to need her help getting into mikoshi she tells you to wait and then she'll come over and get you right away once again you go downstairs you could have missed you read your tarot card reading which is less draconian and dramatic as the other one but still not fantastic pan am arrives misty's fine with this and you leave with her we cut to pan am's car parked at the camp mitch says that you passed out on the ride which is understandable you're dying of course you then follow mitch to pan am and saul who are going over the plan basically they want to dig a tunnel to mikoshi underneath arasaka tower using the equipment from a building site nearby which is protected by militech it's a pretty dramatic plan i mean literally tunneling underneath a city to get to an end destination but you know what crazier stuff has happened after you go over the plan saul goes to talk with samantha cardos while pan am goes to talk with mitch so that leaves v time to go over to dakota and get in touch with alt cunningham you hop in the ice bath and enter cyberspace alt immediately observes that you've pushed johnny over to the side all in an effort to defend yourself and alt says that observing you and johnny has been informative but she questions what death really means an ominous question but one that's going to be important in just a few minutes when we enter into cyberspace with her once more all then says she's programming a shard to give you that's going to destroy mikoshi and give her access to all of the software in the mainframe that you need now i don't know about you guys but i don't actually trust alt cunningham that much in this instance yes she's an ai but she seems to have her own motivations and her own things that she's trying to achieve she never really made me feel confident in her ability to help us weirdly it always just seemed as though she wanted to get johnny trapped with her for all eternity behind the black wall which is fine i suppose like i said i don't actually like johnny as a character that much but still it seems a little weird to go through all of these hoops just to get him regardless you hop out of the ice bath and realize that all of dakota's tech has been totally destroyed all came through and just surged all of it but nonetheless you were able to get the shard she was able to write it to one that was connected to this whole system so dakota gives you the shard totally repulsed by it as though she's touching something incredibly radioactive and here you have a bunch of optional activities that you can partake in you can explore the party talk to a bunch of nomads or even test the basilisk that you're going to be using on the assault but after all of that's done you go up and meet panam you talk about the plan and the eldocardos and then you sleep next to each other over this ledge the next morning you go over the plan once more with saul you look at a bunch of drone footage to see which locations you're going to be going at where you need to be what the basilisk needs to accomplish blah blah blah and then it's go time you hop in the basilisk with pan am and you rush your way to the site along the way there's a few power outages forcing you out of the basilisk to shoot some drones with a sniper rifle it's kind of underwhelming but as you push your way forward you get to use the basilisk as a massive tank and it's somewhat fun but it's actually really glitchy there's a bunch of times when you'll shoot drones or cars that are driving up that don't despawn properly or don't take damage for instance so this whole sequence feels incredibly clunky when it should feel pretty dramatic and fun once you've broken in and rammed the gate down the basilisk begins to power down pan am works on fixing it while the el docados fight a bunch of militech operators and over the course of the next 10 to 15 minutes you fight waves of enemies and help mitch and carol get to the drill terminal we then go and actually hop inside the drill housing whatever you would call this that's partly into a hill at this moment and this is when you activate the drill forcing it presumably all the way to the base of arasaka tower which is pretty cool oh yeah it's probably also important to mention that mitch was along with you and saul as you headed into the drill but he finds out that a bunch of other members of the clan have been cut off and he needs to go help them with the basilisk so mitch disappears with the basilisk and you continue along your way once you're at arasaka tower you stealth or fight your way through to the security room where you connect alt cunningham shard which allows her to gain access to the whole network from there she's able to override their systems somehow and is able to basically just remotely kill a ton of different people using the turrets and security systems but also just straight up frying their brains somehow this is something we get a hint of using the quick hacks within the combat system but nobody you ever encounter is anywhere near as talented or as powerful it seems at doing this as alt which i can actually understand and forgive she's supposed to be this crazy super powered ai even for cyberpunk standards so it's understandable that she would have some extra abilities that the player wouldn't have being just a street kid or a corporal or a nomad so once this has happened the pathway is pretty well cleared for pan am v and saul to push in to mikoshi however right after you go through one of the big doors leading into an open area adam smasher appears out of nowhere he pushes saul around a little bit and then stomps his head to the point where it looks like blood oatmeal props to anybody who gets that reference and then we have another version of the adam smasher boss fight still just as chaotic and it's in this arena where all of the other atom smasher boss fights are going to take place so if you're going through multiple endings get familiar with this space it's not really a tough boss fight i would say especially if you have the appropriate gear that you are likely to have at this point in the game if you did any side content or even if you just blasted through the main story and have been actively upgrading one specific path on the skill trees but even so it mainly just takes a crap ton of ammo and explosives i mean really this guy is just a grenade sponge if you just unload tons of grenades on him you'll take him out pretty quickly but you gotta have that inventory built up i will say like i've mentioned before my play style was mainly to upgrade all of my rifle ability so that my damage was maxed out especially using sniper rifles and getting headshots unfortunately adam smasher as far as i can tell doesn't have any sort of headshot multiplier sure you can get a crit but it still will be limited to four 500 damage in any given moment whereas other characters and enemies that you'll fight in this very boss fight that spawn to help him if you shoot their head you could get as much as 12 000 damage because it crits it's frustrating and i understand they could explain it away as well he's an android and it's not as simple as having head damage multiplied by 2.5 or five times whatever it may be so he's more difficult that's kind of the point of a cyborg but even so it was a little frustrating for me because it felt as though i wasn't being rewarded for taking more difficult shots aiming for the head and hitting it there and that i would be better off just unloading with a machine gun which is what inevitably ended up happening simply in this boss fight and in many others throughout the game it doesn't actually reward you for higher skill gameplay such as taking headshots off the cuff it just wants you to throw as many bullets at the enemy as you can as quickly as possible and as far as i can tell this is mainly because they want boss fights to take longer boss fights to be more difficult and if you're just head shotting the boss and they can get downed in five headshots it feels much less exciting and difficult than if they're requiring much more effort on your part lots of bullets lots of grenades all sorts of swapping of different weapons and crap i get it they want it to take a long time and be difficult but still it's frustrating for me regardless after this boss fight you again have the option to either spare him or kill him once you make your choice you continue on to mikoshi with the option to talk to pan am before you do so and once you get up there you jack in and fall into the water we then appear in cyberspace we cross the bridge go up the same pyramid and talk to johnny he congratulates you turns out you were right and then phases to once again a version of tom's diner where you sit with him and talk a little bit more however he breaks it to you that the moment you entered cyberspace alt turned you into a construct turns out you're an engram at this point just like johnny is halt then appears and you can ask her what happened but basically she tells you that she didn't consider that the dna reconfiguration that the relic has been doing has gone too far meaning that v will die anyway if they return to their body after roughly six months she says that the body will see v as an intruder as it's now johnny's body effectively at least that's what the body thinks johnny then asks alt for a moment to themselves and she disappears even though let's be honest this is cyberspace so i'm sure she's still listening doesn't really work that way but either way you then sit and have a conversation one-on-one with johnny and all of the dialogue here will depend on what you said back at the pacifica hotel when you determined whether or not you would be sharing your body with him or i guess not sharing more giving but still you get what i mean basically the option just comes down to whether you want v to take back the body or johnny to take the body if johnny takes the body it's his and he can live out the rest of his life living in vee's body which is a little weird if you play as a female like i did but i guess it's cyberpunk and gender and sex isn't really a thing anymore so i guess it doesn't matter that much but i still thought it was a little weird and almost invasive for johnny to go from being like this 40 50 year old dude to being reincarnated as a 20-something chick it's just a little weird i don't know maybe i'm overly sensitive however like i said if v takes over the body she's gonna be dead within six months maybe he can find another cure in that time but it's unlikely so here there's effectively two options to either have v take it or johnny take it if you have v take it you tell cunningham this and then you cut to the epilogue that's appropriate to that option which we'll go over now if v takes over the body you wake up to a bird on a car door you're passed down in the passenger seat and you watch it fly off peacefully you get out and talk to pan am who's looking over night city and you talk about leaving the city to go to arizona where you'll find a new future a new life and potentially a cure no specifics are given but she does say that you will likely get some help from connections that she has again these are nondescript connections there's no indication that these are actually going to be able to give a cure or help you whatsoever but you can hope you then pack up and head out of night city once and for all you drop by a camp where all of the aldocardos have prepared to leave and many of them have already taken off and you leave night city heading to an old smuggling tunnel as a meeting point and then pushing through once you're through this you hop on top of the basilisk as you drive across what looks to be some sort of lake or salt field or something you take off the bullet necklace look at it as pan am joins you and then you let the necklace go into the wind as you look off into the horizon it's peaceful it feels good you're letting go of your past and of this crazy thing that happened to you in night city in the form of releasing the necklace into the wind and you're moving on to hopefully a better future ahead however long or short it may be it's also important to note that if you romanced anyone other than pan am throughout the course of the game they'll be here at this final meeting place if you chose judy she'll actually come with you and if you chose river to romance he'll actually show up and say goodbye to you and it's very sad and touching but obviously he's got roots here he can't just up and leave with you to go off to arizona so it makes sense however if we choose to let johnny take the body we actually clip away and johnny wakes up in v's body in an unrecognizable apartment with johnny having strange conversations with a non-existent v as he walks around the flat you walk around you pick up some items such as the samurai jacket what looks to be rogue's gun which will be a point of contention and note in a few minutes trust me it'll make sense you grab a bag and a bus ticket and then you head outside of your apartment you talk to a young neighbor named steve and ask him for a ride you have a couple errands to run this bid is a little bit weird because as you're leaving this kid steve says that he'll give you a ride because you're going to pay him of course and as he leaves his dad actually starts hitting him and says that he's worthless and blah blah blah it's really bizarre and weird and makes you hate this dad but also feel bad for steve but it also comes out of nowhere it makes you feel like wait what game are we playing now what are we doing i don't know it's it's just it feels tonally off but in the car you have some conversations johnny tells steve that being strong and hurting people isn't worth it being strong is different you talk about carrie the member of johnny's band and you give steve advice on becoming a musician you then go to a music store to buy a good guitar you pick one and play a johnny silverhand song which apparently is very difficult to play which is why so many people don't bother you have a couple more heartwarming moments but at the end of the day you buy the guitar that's very expensive and fancy and there's an antique that apparently belonged to johnny back in the day and then you go back to the car your next errand is to run to the cemetery on the way you talk about the tension between the corpos and the possibility of another war and johnny bizarrely and strangely out of character says that he doesn't care anymore that he's not interested in violence whatsoever you then walk through the cemetery alone with the option to put rogue's gun into her little niche you then put v's bullet necklace in her niche and say goodbye once and for all johnny says that he's wiser now and that he's not going to waste this chance you leave the cemetery you also have the again kind of tonally strange option to see steve smoking and smack the cigarette out of his hand again it's just tonally a little strange i don't really know what to make of it you tell steve to go home steve then asks about v and johnny and steve share a little exchange on loss and death and moving on and that it gets easier over time but then a bus pulls up you get on the bus and as you're about to leave steve runs up screaming that he realizes johnny forgot his guitar in the car the one that he just bought for a ton of money however johnny says that he hasn't forgotten anything and that he never will then you leave the kid got this new guitar that's all fancy it's a touching moment it's really sweet and as the bus drives off leaving night city once and for all johnny takes off his glasses and reflects on everything that's happened now i get it it's supposed to feel really intense and sad and you're supposed to be reflecting on this crazy journey you've had but i'll be honest it's really weird for johnny to take over the body of who was until very recently a complete stranger especially because i was playing as a very feminine female v so for johnny silverhand to take over her body it's just kind of weird we'll talk about it in a few minutes but i can't help but feel as though cd projekt red was so dedicated to having johnny be the center of attention for this whole story after the big e3 breathtaking reveal that they forced him into every plot point even the ones that didn't make any sense at all simply because they wanted him to take part as frequently as possible even when it's really uncomfortable but that's it that's that ending so so okay what happens though if we let johnny and rogue take over and go storm arasaka tower well as you can imagine you must have completed all of rogue's side quests and once you've done this on the roof you tell johnny that you want him to go with rogue you take a handful of pseudo-entertrising johnny thanks you for trusting him and from here on out you're going to be playing with johnny in v's body you go to the afterlife and meet with rogue you tell her that it's johnny and you bring up the old days having one of those conversations she understands what needs to be done so you follow her out of the booth as she closes down the afterlife you tell her that you know she sold out she says that she worked under the same people as smasher for a bit you tell her that the past is gone and that they need to save v that's what's most important she says that you were never selfless and then it seems as though you've changed because the old johnny silverhand would never help somebody in the case like this you mentioned that you've already contacted alt but that you need to get access to mikoshi in order to actually save v so you continue to talk a little bit going back and forth eventually trying to convince rogue that she buried the real her as she climbed to the top giving up her old life for this new one you then share a drink kiss and then it fades to black i mean again like it's just really weird when you're taking over somebody else's body and then going making out and like having sex with people that the person you've taken over doesn't know or is attracted to or wants to get jiggy wit like it's just weird you know man it's weird you wake up after being passed out for 20 hours for some reason and wayland says that the boss awaits this is a guy that's going to help you on this quest take a bunch of gear as you get loaded up including some anti-gravity boots that are a fun little addition to your loadout this is really the only ending that gives you a unique tactical advantage or different approach than you would be using otherwise you then go over the plan basically you're going to fly in on a tactical bomber shoot the air defenses breach the wall on the 76th floor and jump using the anti-gravity boots landing in their mock jungle that's within the tower you'll then go to a shaft that runs all the way up the building land on the lab floor push your way to mikoshi and then you'll use all to get access to mikoshi and blah blah however before all of this happens you're going to need alt to destroy a satellite so that comms can go down this reminded me of that quest with pan am when you try to use the emp blast to take down communications and the ship that's transporting helmand it's a little dramatic and probably over the top but you know what we'll let it go sometimes a video game plot point is just that a video game plot point it's something that's cool that adds something fun to the story it's not that serious after you've been briefed on the plan you hop into a netrunner chair in the back of the restaurant you get hooked up to speak with alt where she gives you a shard that you can use just like in the pan am ending and then it's go time you go with rogue you hop in the av on your way to the tower the engine actually gets hit by some defensive missile thing and then it's go time alt cunningham takes down the satellite you then hop in the av you fly to the tower and on the way the engine actually gets shot out by some defensive missile shot crap so you crash and actually end up in the same force that you intended to be in so it's not actually a big loss and here you have the option to save weyland i chose to save him doesn't change a lot he basically just follows you along for the rest of the mission but i don't think it would actually matter that much here everything plays out basically the same you fight your way all the way down to mikoshi through a bunch of guards you ride the shaft all the way down to the bottom once you get there you plug everything in that alt cunningham gave you she takes over and clears the rest of the path for you you then push into the same area where the last boss fight happened with adam smasher and once again he shows up and in this particular instance it kills rogue this comes out of nowhere and actually kind of got me i really like rogue as a character so i was bummed to see her die and this made killing adam smasher all the sweeter so you go through the same boss fight as before like literally identical you kill him or you spare him but at the end of the fight you have the option to pick up rogue's gun which is left on the floor you then push through to mikoshi and jack in the same way you did in the pan am ending and now you're back in cyberspace and everything will play out pretty much identically as before except for one difference which is that if you choose v has the body at the end of all of this you'll go to a different ending whereas if you choose that johnny will keep the body you'll actually go to the same ending that we just discussed where johnny wakes up in a foreign apartment and buys a guitar and then disappears however there was an issue that i myself and cami huddlestone who works with me over on the prestart youtube channel subscribe over there if you haven't it's fantastic we have a great time we both ran into this issue basically what happens here in this particular ending at least as of right now it hasn't been patched both v and johnny will have some bizarre dialogue options pop up where both of their names will show up as johnny because it's johnny's body and v's body but johnny is inside v's body but also not really because we're in cyberspace it's super confusing and bizarre and hard to keep track of who's saying what and who is who and that's kind of a big deal because you're determining who's going to enter the body again and continue to live a life it's not a small thing and the fact that it's so needlessly confusing as to who has the body and who doesn't and who's talking at which point it just reeks of oversight to me regardless you do have two endings that are possible here like i said if you choose to let johnny take the body you'll get the same exact ending as before except this time it'll make more sense because rogue actually died in front of you so you putting the gun in her niche actually makes sense now however if you choose v to take the body you go to this kind of bizarre ending that we're going to talk about now once v re-enters the body you wake up in a penthouse apartment you're either alone or you're with your romance partner if you had one if you have a romance partner you talk a little bit here you argue over finding a cure they're upset that you're leaving night city and it's dramatic but if you're alone you talk with one of your employees quote unquote who's saying that he will be on time and that the gear is ready it's all very nondescript and very non-specific basically though it seems as though v is preparing some sort of big job which is going to blow her into the stratosphere you hop in an av and go to the afterlife with the option to talk to delamane who's controlling the av about the state of night city basically getting filled in on everything that's going on with arasaka with militech with the political climate and with your reputation writ large simply you seem to be a night city legend at this point you're very successful everyone seems to love you and you have more money than you know what to do with once you're at the afterlife you have a meeting with somebody named mr blue eyes who calls you a night city legend this kind of brings everything full circle because it reminds you of the time you were here with jackie and jackie kept going on about how he wanted to be a night city legend except now you actually are mr blue eyes continues and tells you that airsoft is actually testing a new security system on that particular day when they're talking meaning that it'll be down for a while which will be the perfect window for v to perform this risky job that's non-descript and that's never specified in exchange for you doing this job mr blue eyes then says that he's going to keep his end of the bargain as he hands you a leaflet for the crystal palace which is like this crazy outer space hotel thing we then have a cool transition to the leaflet floating v is changing a bunch of settings on a spaceship which you're in for some reason and then you hear that all of the satellites have gone down and you have one chance at this high risk and low chance of survival but if it works you'll gain more than you can possibly imagine or at least that's what mr bluewise tells you you then take a gun put on a space helmet enter the airlock and step out into space and and then the game ends i'm not kidding it i i don't know i don't know what this means i don't know what this is it's like really weird and kind of stupid like i can't even spin it i i don't know what this this is i don't are they setting up some sort of dlc here that's what it seemed to me at least at first like oh this is going to be the canon ending and then the dlc will be this crazy space mission and we'll save our lives but i don't like i don't know for the end of a game that's supposed to be all about the narrative this ending sucks it doesn't mean anything and no it's not like one of those endings to a play like a bright new boise where the ending being non-specific and not clear adds to the story actually forces you to think about things in a way you didn't before those endings are awesome because they work this ending is just really freaking weird and made me think that the game glitched out in the middle of the final cut scene so that i never found out what happened but no straight up this is the end of the game and it's it's just over i guess it's just supposed to mean that you are a night city legend and you're such a night city legend that now you're performing outer space heists and missions but like you're really far away from that hotel floating orbital thing when you hop out of this spaceship and you grab a gun for some reason which is never made clear it it just doesn't like what's she gonna do is she gonna shoot the hotel or is she going in there to assassinate somebody like what's going on it doesn't make any sense at all and that's it for that ending and uh i know what you're thinking let's hope that this secret ending the last one we have to go through is really kick ass and saves all this because so far all of these endings except maybe the pan am one when you leave for arizona all of them suck ass so hopefully the secret ending is great right nope now let me just set this up real quick before we go through it you have to have at least a 70 plus relationship with johnny in order to trigger the option to engage with this ending even then you might not get it because you might die in the middle of the ending quest because if you die at any point during the final mission the credits will roll and it will be over so you aren't even guaranteed if you're role-playing and doing like a no-death run but still you have to have a 70 relationship and you can't die furthermore let me stress that the characters and enemies that you'll encounter throughout this secret ending are balanced roughly for level 50 characters basically max level realistically if you wanted to go through the secret ending you would need to play through the main story for around 20 hours and then you would need to grind out another 20 to 30 hours of gameplay to level up to the point where you could realistically take on this ending without dying once so just bear that in mind for a lot of people they will play the game get to this point and if they google that there's a secret ending and they decide that's the one they want they will have to go grind for 30 hours to be able to play it and see it actually play out so bear that in mind as we go through this now we actually did this on stream so i do have some fun footage for this oh i almost forgot you also have to have made five very specific dialogue choices roughly 10 hours before this point of no return so if you got to this point in the game and you decided that you've played through the other endings you want to get the secret one as i did you would have to go back 10 hours of gameplay make those very specific dialogue choices when you're with johnny at the dump sitting at what seems to be his grave site and then play through the rest of the game forward back to the point of no return realize that you need to level up 30 levels add another 30 hours of grinding to that potentially stuff that you've already done and then you're ready to go and take this on okay we have the stage set understand that's what you need to do to get to the secret ending the super exclusive special ending here we go when you're sitting on the roof johnny will ask you what decision you want to make which way you want to go this is the same selection as choosing whether you want johnny to go with rogue working with pan am taking the easy way out or trusting arisaka you make any decision and then johnny will ask you if you're sure at this point you wait for four and a half real life minutes after you've done that johnny says it's hard to decide who will die because you're picking between friends so presumably one of them will die which is fair because regardless of which option you choose people will die who are innocent and then he basically pitches you that you're gonna go on a suicide run you ask him the plan and he basically says that you just need to grab your best weapons run through the front door and start shooting so this is basically the suicide ending where you choose not to get anybody else involved to save them but you are going in solo and actually being violent so it's not really as admirable in my mind because you're killing a ton of guards who presumably didn't do anything wrong but still it i guess saves your friends from potentially risky business so i guess it's good however i want you to just look at a couple clips of when we first tried this secret ending look how well this went jeez no no that one lasted longer now like i said we were on stream when we were trying to get the secret ending and a few people had mentioned in chat that this was going to be more difficult than my level 30 or whatever it was character could handle and turns out that was true now i had already on stream gone back 10 hours to make the right decisions and then played back forward and gotten to this point only to realize my character was nowhere near as high enough level to actually get through this so i said screw it we downloaded a mod and enabled one bullet kills and infinite health because these guys will one shot you if you are not the proper level so we fought our way through arasaka tower we get down to mikoshi we fight adam smasher we kill him and then we push through jack in and meet all cunningham share the same dialogue sequences as before in the other endings and we can choose to either have v take over the body or johnny take over the body and again bear in mind most people who are not playing on pc and don't have access to mods that can make this mission very easy to get through if you don't have the proper level character they will likely have grinded out an extra 30 or 40 hours of gameplay just to see these endings and you know what they are the same thing not kidding if you choose to let v take the body you get the same ending where she wakes up in a penthouse apartment and then goes on a spaceship and steps out in front of the crazy hotel with a gun like it that doesn't make any sense it's the same exact ending same thing the only difference is is that because rogue isn't dead in this one you'll actually go to the afterlife and see rogue sitting at the bar just fine you can talk with her a little bit other than that there's no difference and if you choose to let johnny take the body you end up with the same ending where he wakes up in the apartment goes to the cemetery buys a nice guitar and then leaves on a bus it's the exact same thing i can't even tell you how pissed i would be if i grinded out an extra 30 40 50 hours of gameplay of something that i already finished just to see the secret ending and find out that it's the same as all of the others and that i wasted all this time i mean i only spent 10 hours grinding this out realistically to get to this secret ending because i installed the mods and was able to bypass the 30 plus hours of grinding needed to get the character to the proper level and with just 10 hours of my life wasted i was livid when i saw this and i was on stream thankfully so i guess the reaction was recorded for all eternity but still i was pissed off for the same reason that glitches piss me off this pisses me off because it's the developer thinking as though they can waste my time when a game is released in a glitchy state they're effectively saying ah it's good enough they'll figure it out it doesn't matter if the game crashes doesn't matter if this thing they've been waiting for for years is broken and they can't enjoy it the way that they need to so they try playing it for 10 hours and then they give up and move on and shift motivations and focuses it doesn't matter they'll figure it out it's the same thing in my mind as a crappy written ending or an ending like this where you need to grind out 20 30 hours of gameplay time just to see it it's so stupid it pisses me off to no end and i'll stop ranting now and that's it that's the story of cyberpunk 2077 that's the whole thing kind of underwhelming yeah we did it we did it you said we couldn't do it i said we could and we did it we finished the cyberpunk critique you've watched it i've made it i have a mark a glass of water and you might as well it's all over it's all over honestly thank you for for watching everything so far um i like to do this at the end of the really big videos where you know we've spent so much time scripting and outlining and editing and crap that sometimes it's nice just to talk one-on-one unfiltered un cut pure you know and that's what this is i want to go through my closing thoughts on the project on cyberpunk 2077 and kind of wrap all of this up in a nice bow because whenever a video is this massive and we discussed as many things as we have in this video so far it can actually be kind of confusing like what i actually think of the game you know because we're we're nitpicking so many things but then we're also discussing so many things that we like it gets really confusing so i want to just get it out there my opinion of cyberpunk 2077 has changed while i've played it initially i thought uh while playing it on console on my xbox uh 1x and siriusx i thought the game was rushed i thought the game was unfinished everything you've heard before but i thought it was like a phenomenal fallout game that's kind of what it felt like with great writing quirky characters a fun world that you want to explore and decent enough i use and the gameplay serviceable but the world itself is really well defined and it's a place that you would like to see more of if the game let you however the more i played the game the more i realized that the game doesn't have as much there as i was hoping you know there are side quests and things but a lot of them are very short very lean and i appreciate there's not a lot of fluff there's not a lot of fetch quests and things like that but one of the things i loved about the witcher 3 was that you could do a side quest that doesn't feel busy that just turns into a massive ordeal and i loved that you know whether it's you know in in the um in tucson where you're just walking around and then you find a sculptor who's upset because somebody stole the genitalia off of a statue he was working on um and then you have to go find the guy that stole that and it's because he's got e.d and he thinks it's going to make him virile again you know it's little things like that that make the world feel alive it's like this is a living breathing world characters and people that are weird would do that and it makes it feel real and it takes up your time you get lost in it and i i don't know if it's strictly due to the technical issues or if it's something i'm doing wrong but i've really struggled getting lost in night city and part of it i think goes back to the ai discussion we had at the beginning of the video where it's hard to become immersed in a world that doesn't seem to take itself seriously it's hard to be immersed in a story that's artificially rushed you know it it's just hard to drown yourself in something that doesn't want to drown you in it you know so while the witcher 3 you can just spend 300 hours wandering around and you'll find all sorts of crazy people to interact with in cyberpunk you'll find crazy things to interact with but on the way you're going to be dealing with glitches if you stumble and bump into a car it could trigger like a two or three star crime and then police spawn out of nowhere and there's no real system in place for dealing with that so you just end up getting chased down and shot by a bunch of really stupid police officers that don't have ai that makes them feel believable and real so you're constantly pulled out of the world and you know i talked a lot in the video about trying to be immersed trying to role play in a role-playing game and it seemed as though the game didn't want me to do that you know when we talk about the forced pace where they're like hey v's dying and it's getting worse by the minute you need to find a cure that to somebody who's role-playing would encourage them to do all of the main story first and then worry about side content second but all of the endings are definitive as you've seen they aren't endings that open it up for you to continue exploring so you go back to a previous save to a version of v that's still dying and you just have to ignore the main story and that's something i hated about fallout 4 where it seemed like if you really wanted to enjoy the game you had to ignore the main story it seemed so stupid to me i'm like then why have a main story you know and i think that's what bethesda thought too and then we ended up with fallout 76 so maybe i'm i don't know what i'm asking for but i just in general was really frustrated with the games i guess disdain for role play or intolerance of it if you really try to play this as a role-playing game it's not going to work and they updated a lot of the marketing materials to reflect that they took role-playing game out of a lot of the marketing materials and started pitching it as a first-person action-adventure game which is much more accurate i think but part of the difficulty with cyberpunk is that this game had been discussed and hyped for so many years that along the way you know back in 2014 and 1516 there were interviews that the developers gave where they said this was going to be a mature a gritty narrative experience something that would offer branching narratives and would be more immersive than anything gamers had seen up to that point and we believed them because they said that you know and i they really don't have an excuse for saying all of those things because this is this is not their first rodeo i think it's the first time they've had this much attention you know they aren't used to the rock star treatment i guess that's a pun a play on words because it has a double meaning you know uh rockstar the studio and you know actual rock star so i don't think they're used to the rockstar treatment where everybody expects a 10 out of 10 every single time i don't think they're used to that you got to remember the witcher 3 was not expected to be the phenomenon that it was it's part of what helped it become a phenomenon and so when it turned out to be fantastic people like that's great that's wonderful but i guarantee you if the level of hype behind cyberpunk were around for the witcher 3 it would have had an also very negative reaction because that game also was incredibly glitchy and had a lot of issues at launch so i i think it's an artifact of their inexperience in this realm and i think they let it get to their heads which is a really sad part of this whole discussion there's a lot of people that poured years of hard work passion love sweat tears drama everything for in some cases some of these people eight years of their life that's a long time for some people that i maybe even for the average person that could be over a tenth of their life they've been working monday through friday some weekends all day on this one thing and it gets released and it's just a garbled mess and it's too bad you know i really feel for those people i've spoken to some of them on linkedin of course they've requested to remain anonymous for obvious reasons but a good number of them have been very forthright and they're frustrated with the way things went and some of the higher up people i've spoken to had um interesting reactions as well basically they like nobody wanted this to happen is the point nobody wanted the game to come out on these consoles broken but that's just kind of where it landed um and i think it's important to note that i think the game has a lot of issues outside of technical errors and mistakes made in the design process the game has some fundamental flaws with the overall structure one of the main narrative plot points i don't think the trade-off for first person versus third person for the way cyber or cd projekt red makes their games i don't think that was worth it i think the game would have been better served as a third person shooter um where they could have cinematic elements that's cd projekt reds and a bread and butter they did that very well with the witcher 3 and it just doesn't work as well in cyberpunk it just doesn't um that's my opinion i admit that that's something that's more subjective but that's my opinion i don't think the first person um perspective was worth the trade-off i just don't think so but kind of the elephant in the room has to be keanu at e3 2019 i remember we were watching the event the microsoft event from this airbnb that we had rented it was an old movie theater in la really cool place i think it was like the grouch or the grinch or something like that um if you're ever in la check it out it's in kind of a sketchy neighborhood near echo park but it was pretty solid jack in the box right next door we called it the box so every day we got up we're like okay what are we getting from the box today it was because that's all we like we were actually scared to walk multiple blocks somewhere to get food so we we just went to the box uh that's beside the point but i remember us watching the live streamed event and they they're showing off all this cool stuff and uh you know we're we're there and we're gonna go on to the showroom floor we're gonna go do all of that we just couldn't get into the actual presentation so we're watching it live and when keanu comes out everybody just freaks out and i don't really know why like he's cool i like keanu as a person i think he's a great guy he's done wonderful things for his community but he's not known for being a good actor like that's that's i know it's weird to say and nobody really wants to say it because he might see these videos and it's it's like well i this is his job okay i can criticize professionally an individual he's known for very flat performances that work when you're playing like a dude within a computer but it doesn't work so well when you're trying to play an actual rock star like his take on johnny is johnny silverhand 40 years outside of his prime in his 70s with all of these health ailments and partially brain dead because of all the drugs he did like he's endgame johnny silverhand he's not prime time johnny silverhand which is what johnny's supposed to be and it makes me wonder you know what johnny silverhand would have looked like if they had given it to like a troy baker type of performer you know somebody who could just bring all the energy it needs to go crazy and i i also you know as i said i i think johnny's role is way too big sorry i'm playing with my watch it's kind of my fidget thing while i think um i i think what happened is they saw the reaction to johnny after the press event and the breathtaking meme and everything and they said you're right it's fantastic we landed keanu reeves let's make him the co-star of the game and so they did they rewrote tons of stuff they rewrote dialogue sections they did this and did that and even got to the point where there are multiple endings almost half the endings where johnny is the only survivor like if that's not a co-star i don't know what is and he just doesn't really do it for me i know that's going to be me now like luke stevens johnny silverman doesn't do it for me um but really like i i just think that he video games are a different medium and he doesn't have the chops or the energy to carry that experience all the way every time johnny came on screen we were supposed to be like yes more johnny kind of like you were when the joker popped up in arkham night where you were excited to see what he said next and what he did because it was always entertaining the high energy the crazy writing it worked but with johnny all of the dialogue is really weird and he brings this really low energy flat performance that's just confusing and lands flat and uh i i don't really understand what they saw other than like a long-haired keanu reeves i don't know why he was like the one to carry this this game basically which is what it inevitably became it became keanu reeves featuring cyberpunk 2077 and it's frustrating because i just don't think johnny also as a character um is somebody that's easy to empathize with you can you can start to feel for him by the end of the story but like i discussed my first run through when i'm really trying to roleplay i of course i don't trust johnny silverhand he's an actual terrorist who killed many innocent people because he doesn't like this big corporation that's doing things where it's like scanning brains and stuff it's like bombing tesla headquarters because you don't like that elon owns neural link like it doesn't make any sense it's crazy and to expect me to just all of a sudden be perfectly okay with this guy that perpetrated this is i think pretty rich so there's just this is kind of what i mean there are foundational issues with the game there are things in the original planning process that should have been ironed out the great thing about the witcher 3 was that it seemed like from original concept to execution everything they did was cohesive fluid and worked and part of it was because they had spent three games trying different things to get it refined and then they nailed it but cyberpunk is just all over the place so i don't know if they need a cyberpunk 2099 and then a cyberpunk 2014 like i don't know what it needs if it needs two more games to get itself figured out i hope that's not the case especially considering this one took so long but that might very well be the case you know it's unfortunate to say but it could be the case yeah it's like we always said where people like oh i'm sure it's going to be fine with um cd projekt red going from third person fantasy to first person shooter i was like yeah you remember fallout 3 that game was known for having really bad combat and perspectives and things and it it did well it scored well um and for the time it was it was good it was good i grant you i don't think it's aged well but still um all of this to say like i'm just frustrated as i think most of us are i really wanted to have a new obsession i really wanted a new witcher game basically i wanted that new experience that i just couldn't get enough of when i say that i mean it like to this day if i pull up the witcher 3 and i start playing i become engrossed and i just want more i want to get lost maybe i'm weird let me know if you have that too where there's a game that you can just lose yourself to that's the witcher 3 for me and i wanted another game like that i wanted that to be the witcher 3 because why wouldn't you it didn't didn't do it it was a big swing and a miss and i think their end game now is to polish the game get it running well on all platforms and then hopefully they just knock it out of the park with the dlc and blow us all away and from there you know it's going to take some time it's going to take some work to win back public trust because what they did was pretty obviously messed up you know we don't talk about it a lot in the opening of the video but they pretty clearly in my opinion withheld console copies of the game from reviewers to inflate the scores to boost pre-order sales on all platforms knowing full well the condition of those console ports because is it just a coincidence that they didn't send them and that reviewers who requested those specific codes were not granted them i don't know if i'm allowed to say this but i'm going to anyways so if this portion of the video gets blocked or something let me you'll know um it it actually might so i'm treading on water right now but i'm gonna say i'm gonna say it anyways so i was contacted by a member of the cd project red press team out of los angeles this was back in the weeks leading up to the game's launch it's pretty normal you know like i have contacts at ubisoft contacts at sony and um zenimax and people that i speak to and usually they reach out in the weeks leading up to a game's launch to ask you if you want you know they might be sending out merch they might be sending out collectors editions or like what do you think all these statues are from that's that's basically what happens um and uh they'll ask you if you want to review code um and of course i said yes to cyberpunk they said we're looking at sending out review codes about a week out from launch i said great and at the time that i sent that yeah at the time that i sent that i requested a xbox code because i didn't have my new pc that i've been playing and recording on for this whole critique i didn't have a ps5 so i said well i have a series x that i was able to land on launch day so i'll take an xbox code and i'll play it with ford's compatibility and it'll be cool and uh so she said great great do you want a pc code too and i was like yeah but priority should be xbox like that should be the priority because as of right now that's the only thing that's going to be able to reasonably play this it's funny looking back at it now but i i thought the xbox would provide the best experience compared to my like 1070 that's you know hobbling and ended up smoking and uh that's a story for another time the computer almost like actually lit fire while i was using it so that's why i had to get the new one that being said she took down my information and she said we'll be in touch soon and i never heard from them again i sent two follow-up emails and never heard back and then like the day after my last follow-up email which i think was the day before the embargo lifted i was like maybe they're actually going to wait to send out review codes till the day before that's weird but okay maybe it's happened before and still no response and after talking with some other youtubers and friends of mine what looks to have happened is any creator that requested a console code it's like they filtered the excel spreadsheet if they requested a console code remove them if they only requested pc they get a code and the thing is most people who have high-end pcs that could take advantage of ray tracing and all that who would like to experience the game first and foremost on pc most of those people are bigger youtubers who are more successful have more money to spend on better computer parts so the smaller guys who are playing on console were kind of pushed out and then the big guys got copies of the game and they released their reviews and they they're giving it nines out of 10 and 10 out of 10 on pc and they give a little caveat they're like i didn't play on consoles so we'll see what that's like i had some glitches but it really was phenomenal game of the generation material and then a couple days go by people see what those versions are like and they do a full 180 and they start saying that the game is terrible that there are major design issues and you know we can talk about the hypocrisy of a lot of these content creators uh ad nauseam it's not really what this video is about i mean a little bit but it's not really the priority um and it's it's frustrating because i think those people they were excited for the game and they partially lied to themselves um but it's also not a new thing you know we saw this back with fallout 4 we saw this with red dead we saw this with the last of us part two we've seen it with all sorts of games where the sycophantic fans probably death stranding's the best example the sycophantic fans will think the game's perfect an hour into it they don't need to play the whole thing to make up their mind they don't need to evaluate it critically they just believe it's phenomenal and that's what it is now obviously that's not really how i operate which is why i mean this video exists but that's how a lot of these content creators work because you gotta remember a lot of us youtubers are fans of of these games which is why we talk about them so much so you shouldn't expect everybody to be completely impartial you know like if they announced they're doing another assassin's creed game set in actual ancient egypt and not like polymath egypt and greek influence egypt uh i straight up i won't be reliable okay i will be full of it because i love that time setting i love it so don't trust me if they ever do that for the record uh but i just it bums me out man it really does cyberpunk had so much potential they spent so much time on it and i think it got caught in development hell where they couldn't make up their mind as to what the game was really gonna be until they got to the point where they're like this is ridiculous get it out release it um and we'll just roll with the punches i don't think they ever imagined the punches would be so heavy but you know they they were playing with fire and that's what happened so hopefully they learn from this hopefully they take all of this criticism they pour it into the next project which hopefully will be like a witcher game on steroids just like create your own witcher and it's like cyberpunk sort of structuring but in a witcher setting that would be fantastic i would love to see that um but they they've got a rough road ahead because they have to regain a lot of public trust that they have completely squandered and it's not going to take a free dlc it's not going to take a few patches that take eight months because your company was hacked because it had poor security you know bear in mind this this is not the first time cd projekt red has been hacked so it seems to be a consistent thing uh they're doing something wrong you know there's other studios why is no one hacking into rockstar like i'm sure people have tried but they seem to be doing something right so why do they keep getting into cd projekt red i don't i don't know maybe i'm not a hacker i don't know todd what's going on i don't know i bought that impulsively while on live like live stream on twitch follow me by the way because then you can see me waste my money on cutouts like this all told guys i don't plan on returning to cyberpunk 2077 anytime soon i might do a look and break down at the dlc which is going to be end of this year early next year when we get it i don't know let me know if you'd like to see that before i commit to it but i'm done with the game i'm ready to be done with it this video has taken a long time to make it's been exhausting we've spent a lot of time a lot of money getting this thing working and functional it's been like a mini microcosm of cyberpunk but hopefully this is well received and i'm ready to move on i won't be playing the game again i look forward to deleting it off of my computer and moving on to something that i actually enjoy such as replaying red dead redemption 2. no joke that's what i've been doing to decompress from all of this so let me know your thoughts on the game it's hard to succinctly put into words all of this stuff that is going on in in my head but hopefully this was somewhat helpful hopefully the video was interesting hopefully you got something from it and if you really enjoyed it share it with your friends that probably is the most important thing word of mouth does wonders it truly truly does but from here we're gonna start working on the next video the next big uh critique won't be anywhere near as big as this one we're gonna take it a little easy but we're gonna start work on that guy we're gonna finish out the uncharted series and continue moving on from there it's going to be a pretty great year i think um chugging along at this new job my marriage is wonderful my wife is pregnant with our first child we don't know if it's a boy or a girl yet we will know like seven or eight weeks after this comes out so maybe a little boy maybe a little girl i don't know i'm excited there's so many things going on in my life it's all going very very well and a big portion of it is thanks to people like you for watching this video for supporting this dream for helping make this weird obsession something that is validated because if nobody was watching this would be really weird but because you're watching i guess it's okay is that is that how i justify it i think so i think i just did but that's it from me i'll stop blabbering your ear off i'll stop rambling it's really hot in here the lights are super bright and very warm ville my bearded dragon is stunning himself he's out of broomination and he's feeling good so here we are thank you for watching guys honestly and truly i love you more than you could possibly know and i'll see you in the next video peace out

Channel: Luke Stephens

Views: 662,206

Rating: 4.8128681 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: fV7dVtMwnTM

Length: 295min 11sec (17711 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 08 2021