#hfcb

lots of complaints on forums/reddit (derogatory) complain about Cyberpunk being railroad-y which is honestly the least of its sins (although they do need more ending variety: there's several endings, but they just change where you happen to be standing at the end and not any of the major events, consequences, nor gives you any agency over your character's behaviour in the interim between The End and the Epilogue). CB's issue isn't necessarily that it's railroading you towards a particular ending, but more or less that it's visible to the player that they're being asked to make choices purely to wake them up mid-dialogue.

generally (and esp in games with visuals) the player needs a lot of movement to make their way through the story. so sometimes you get dialogue options just to engage you so you're not mindlessly clicking: the problem is, it then becomes very obvious to the player if you're only asking them to click a 'wake-up' button. CB has a big problem with "no one even really acknowledges that you made a choice or said anything". It's not even like jerks go on game forums to complain about choices not changing things enough: it's literally that when V talks, nobody is listening.

and it's weird and something that should have been baked more in the game oven, as it were (one of cyberpunk's most prominent sins: underbaked in the middle), because like even something as rote as talking to Johnny while things happen around you (Johnny being the Keanu Reeves character, a person who only V can see and interact with) is enough of a wake up and doesn't have any real impact on even the immediate conversation, but frequently instead of doing that or instead of giving you options for how to speak to Johnny, they just have V talk or give you one option to respond. If you do get more than one option, it frequently might lead to identical dialogue as if you'd said nothing at all.

and while I love Keanu's performance as Johnny, I think CDPR almost shot themselves in the foot by making one of their most prominent characters an extremely expensive celebrity. How would they have ever been able to bring Johnny back for DLCs or bonus content, even assuming they had managed to finish the game before release? How could they have afforded that? Johnny isn't a side character. He isn't even a companion character: he's borderline a co-protagonist, so how did they expect to have him persist into the story? That isn't even taking into account the fact that the game just flat out isn't finished by any reasonable metric, so how are they supposed to finish it with a stagnant profit base? Sure they made their money before the returns started rolling in, but who's going to buy it now?

Nah it's fine I'll tag it as something and promise that if you don't want to see me dissect a video game then you don't have to. TAG TO BLOCK IS: hfcb. extremely specific so it won't hit anything else, stands for heartforge cyberpunk. also I'll go ahead and shove it under the cut.

And again, for people who are worried I'm just sitting around to dunk on this game, my impression is still: I understand why people would enjoy this, but I'm getting the impression that fan content will forever and ever be more nuanced and genre-savvy in a real way than the original material will ever be.