The Non-Player Quests of Cyberpunk 2077

you ever think about all the ways that video games can tell a story level based games are typically a pretty simple story structure but don't let that deceive you they're still capable of telling compelling narratives despite that simpler structure with that said though it's when we start talking open world games that I feel that we really start to see what the video game medium is capable of when it comes to the scope and depth of Storytelling so much so to the fact that we've had to invent all sorts of little terms to classify what level of significance story falls into so we end up with things like the term main quest for the core identity and idea that a game is built around but also things like side quests stories of consequence that nonetheless don't necessarily matter as much to the whole overarching narrative from there though we start looking at smaller and smaller instances things that don't really tell you story at all things like the radiant quests from Skyrim which despite their illustrious sounding name pretty much just exists to maintain an illusion an idea that something is still active or happening in this world that there's still something for you to do with the Dark Brotherhood once you finished the Dark Brotherhood side quest storyline and these are chill Good Vibes but what really gets me going is environmental storytelling a story told with no characters present only things for you to pick through and find that story for yourself a fun example of this is the shack of Lucky Loren in the East march region of Skyrim Len has some good stuff going on from an environmental storytelling perspective both from the joke perspective that despite his lucky nom cature he's had a tree fall directly on top of him in his home but also that he appears to have been crushed while reading a book called The Lusty Argonian maid compounding the humor he's got an icon to debella the Elder Scrolls god of beauty and love that has been left untouched by the falling foliage but what means the most to me is that this area isn't marked on your map at all there's no reason to go to lorenz's Shack to see his story there's nothing here that actually involves you in any way it's something that got put into the game just to give depth to the world 10 out of of 10 and I love to see this stuff in my open world games because I feel like it's this sort of thing that really contributes to a world feeling real and lived in and alive in the general sense I fully admit that I suspect I'm something of the weird one for feeling this way but as long as there's things for me to do actively in a game then filling the open world with stories that do not involve me is the number one thing that gets me immersed in a world and it's partially for this reason that cyberpunk 2077 night City remains my favorite open world because the environmental storytelling present in that world is so strong that I understand it not as environmental storytelling but rather as non-player quests stories that have nothing to do with the player but exist anyways for the player to stumble upon to give feeling that this world is busy and active and has things happening even if they don't concern you in any way if you pick the street kid background for your V for example the game will drop you in the coyote coo bar owned by one Mama Wells you'll chatter with with a barkeep while you set your own broken nose and that barkeep will admit that he needs a bit of a favor he owes some money to a guy upstairs named Kurt and he can't pay and because V is a solid upstanding person they'll offer to talk to Kurt and see if they can't work out some kind of deal long story short the deal is that V will go CLP a special car for Kurt and that'll wipe away our friend's debt on our way to where the car is parked however we'll run into an old friend named Padre who welcomes us back to the city after our time spent away in Atlanta he offers to give us a ride to the garage where the car is kept but on the way there the car is pulled over by some members of The Sixth Street gang who attempt a strong armm Padre into accepting a rough deal the attempt falls short and despite some tension everyone walks away breathing V however is distraught that someone would pull a gun on Padre to which Padre replies that he will pay for doing so and then we go our own way and nothing happens the event despite being a founding moment to a playthrough is never remarked on again as as far as I'm aware Padre will never mention or acknowledge the Sixth Street ganger or your ride to the parking garage and this has always sort of confused me because my time spent playing video games tells me that Padre should at some point call me back and ask me to take care of that guy Padre should hit me up and tell me that he found where the dude was and offer me a job to go zero him but instead nothing we just get out of the car and that's the end of it kind of because if you come here to this part of the map you can find a little back alley area in the same Sixth Street ganger dead there's a data short in the area that's got a recording of the final conversation between the ganger Named Sam Carter and Padre and it even mentions U as V and we can read through it to figure out the events that happened here Padre said this guy would pay and he did Padre saw to that himself and what I love so much about this is the fact that all of this happened without us that someone from the Valentinos went and found this guy beat the out of him stuffed him in a trunk brought him here and Padre offed him and like we could have done that this game has the Mechanics for us to pick up bodies and at least one Mission sees us throwing a person in a trunk literally all of the mechanics needed to fulfill this Quest are in the game but instead Padre kept it inhouse dealt with it himself this was a fullon quest and it didn't involve us at all and thanks to that the game feels more alive to me it's easier for me to Envision that this world has things going on in the background that do not involve me and I love that not everything has to events that even relate to us though if you drive out into the Badlands there's more than a few things to discover there's a small time Clinic that's seemingly been attacked but with enough digging around you'll be able to put together that some ganger from night City came out here to get help for a buddy that had had explosives implanted into him the doctor out here attempted to phone a friend to try and get some help but I mean come on the environment tells the story here what's more out by the canyon there's this pool of blood full of corpses at least that's what it looks like on first impression but really it's just a pool full of water with some coloring at it in and the figures in the water are buoyant mannequins and it's absolutely wild to stumble across this kind of thing in the wild I imagine coming here at night for your first time seeing it would be a great bit of genuine horror before you fully realize what you're looking at and to help you fully realize what you're looking at there's a data Shard to help spell it all out this was a set piece for a movie called hell Lake 3 that was being shot by a company called 24 frames per second Studios despite a seemingly successful backlog of cinematic content this shoot was canned due to their main sponsor constitutional arms suddenly pulling their funding as a result 24 FPS told all of the cast and crew that due to our current Financial insolvency all salaries have been suspended until further notice and that the crew was just instructed to leave all of the equipment on set eventually someone will be around to pick it all up but of course when you suspend everyone's salaries I imagine it's hard to convince someone to drive a truck to night City outskirts to load up a bunch of heavy equipment and I love this sort of thing again because I can imagine so many different quests that this could have been a part of getting some call from some member of the night City Screen Actors Guild to help secure final paychecks or digging in to find out what happened with constitutional arms and why they pulled their funding but instead it's just a reminder that in this world sometimes stuff just happens and that stuff isn't always going to involve you these stories these quests aren't for you they're for the rest of the world of course poke around enough and some of these non-player quests might just pull you into their own world the first thing I ever learned about bad was here at this bunker area out in the Badlands I was prowling the area for some b-roll for a different video late in the night City night and I think that contributed so much to why this felt like an incredible encounter like lorenzza Shack this area was totally unmarked on the map designated only by these smoldering wreckages of burnt out drones and mangled bodies it's an area that feels distinctly dangerous like You' just stumbled across something sinister something that people aren't supposed to just stumble into which of course they aren't this is or rather was now that it's been abandoned now that its location has been blown the lair of bad a mysterious Netrunner who fulfills a similar Niche to us they run all sorts of jobs for fixers but also seemingly run a few different jobs for themselves if you climb this Tower outside Judy's apartment you'll find this gonk with a fried out nervous system rifle through his pockets for the things he won't be needing anymore and you'll find a data Shard containing a ation between himself and bad this kid named Watcher is up in the tower because bad needed someone to upload a little program so that they could jailbreak the system in Kabuki what's most interesting about The Shard though is that bad mentions that they need Watcher to do it because bad can't physically upload it themselves of course The Shard doesn't say why which leaves my mind racing about who this person could be and all we ever get is little bits of information on them that we can find scattered around the world there's an NCP PD hustle in the north side of Watson where you can find two different conversations a dead gang's last words can be found a conversation between himself and a buddy asking for backup saying that someone set them up for a trap that they're currently bleeding out in the sewers the second convo is between two other guys a person named Grizzle letting Ryder know that the job is all done that Maelstrom had no idea they were coming that the only guy who survived their attack fled into the sewers but he's just going to bleed out down there that everything worked out because the Intel they got from bad was good of course drizzle and Ryder are both wraiths members of the RAF and shiv who we recognize as pretty wretched dudes and this might give us a bad impression of bad especially since we actually work against them at a point during the gig flying drugs we're hired by Dakota Smith to figure out why a Smugglers drones keep going missing all that we really need to do is head to the Union railroad station spot the antenna on the roof and make the connection that this Tech is the piece Downing the drones if we poke around the union railroad's computer system we can find a message sent to a person named Manny Quaid assumably a member of the rats and also the person responsible for setting up the Drone killer Hardware with an attached file for the Drone killer software coded by bad now bad won't care if you tear down the antenna the software they coded was just business after all but also because bad doesn't seem to have any true allegiance to the wraiths because at some point their working relationship falls apart the wraiths hire a second Netrunner to find bad's location and that leads us back to where this all started for me to the bunker in the Badlands the wraiths found bad's Lair sure but bad was always one step ahead of them and all of this environmental storytelling all of this massive non-player questing all leads to one small little gig where Regina Jones contacts you with a job to upload some code to the h11 mega building in the gig catch a tiger toe we're hired by none other than bad themselves to do the same kind of gig they once hired Watcher for and what I love so much about all of this is that we can get an incredible impression of bad through their work and their connections but I can't even tell you what gender this character is because we never meet them so much effort went into to building this character and their skill set their motivations and it's 100% told through the environmental storytelling through all of these quests that are not for the player and it entirely blows me away how well it's done how all of this works to make the world of night City feel alive and active in ways that do not concern us you don't have to know anything about bad when you go to H 11 but if you dig around enough you'll still find so much information on them a fully fleshed out character who barely exists in relation to us and the reason I think that this all works so well is because the world of night city is still filled to the brim with things for us to do because balancing something like environmental storytelling to this level also requires a very careful hand not enough of it and it feels like the world only exists for us to interact with which can feel artificial fake gamey too much of it and the world feels Hollow like there's no point in us even being in the world because there's nothing for us to interact with but if you get it just right you can tell incredible stories that have nothing to do with the player you can wonderfully mimic a world that lives and breathes and is full of other people like us doing all sorts of things around the city a city that feels alive like no other world I've played through I really feel like CD project red did such a cool thing with how heavy they leaned into their environmental storytelling with this game a thing they were only able to make work this well because of how well they were able to design the rest of the city and how well they were able to fill the city with things to keep the players occupied that they were able to paint such a good full background and that they were able to balance it perfectly with how full the player-based foreground is because to me that's key to making a world feel alive all right so obviously this was a bit of a shorter essay it's been an idea I've had in the rainy day folder for a few months and I'm finally putting it together because as I'm writing the script it's like 5 days from when I'm supposed to be unplugging and getting away for a break from basically everything but if everything ends up working out you guys won't even notice a change in schedule ideally and more specifically neither will the YouTube algorithm as always this work was made with the support from my funders over on patreon the people that make the jump to directly back the content I make are doing the most anyone can do to help me produce this content and each one of them is helping me take the next step towards making this whole video essay thing a realtime thing if you want to help support the content you like watching and get a whole bunch of bonus stuff for doing so then consider on over to my patreon page and seeing if there's a spot for you thank [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Thane Bishop

Views: 181,456

Keywords: Open World Games, Cyberpunk 2077, Cyberpunk 2.0, Environmental Storytelling

Id: fBp4I2JGk1A

Length: 14min 0sec (840 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 03 2023