From interface issues and sound errors to broken skills and game crashes, it’s fair to say Cyberpunk 2077 is more than a bit of a glitchy mess. But even if the game ran perfectly as intended, it’d still have one major problem: the relationship between it’s two lead characters.
[This article contains major spoilers for Cyberpunk 2077.]
Cyberpunk 2077 is the story of a two-bit mercenary named V trying to make her (or his) way in the cyberpunk dystopia of Night City. After a heist gone wrong, V finds her brain invaded by a digital copy of infamous musician and terrorist Johnny Silverhand—a digital copy that’s slowly taking over her body (though not by choice).
Starting out more than a little bit antagonistic, the pair soon realize that they’ll need to work together if they want to achieve their goals: revenge in Johnny’s case and stopping Johnny from overwriting her personality in V’s. Over the course of dozens of hours and many more adventures, the pair slowly warm up to each other, forming a friendship in the face of their impending death/resurrection.
Or at least that’s what is supposed to happen.
While there are many dialogue trees throughout the game that allow you to somewhat control how V and Johnny react to each other, a large chunk of their dialogue is the same regardless of any previous choices or how far you are into the game.
For example, in the scene where Johnny and V first meet, Johnny tries to wrestle control of the body from V and kill her—basically causing her to fight for her life against herself. It’s a fight that leaves her not only exhausted but beaten and bruised. It also leaves her fearing and hating Johnny—wanting nothing more than for him to be erased from her mind.
At this point, the game gives you the option to continue the main plot or do any number of side missions. It even introduces you to a few key ones—like retrieving your car. As night city is huge and sprawling, I decided on my playthrough to go get my car first—only for it to be totaled in a hit and run, forcing me to buy a jalopy to replace it. In this sequence, Johnny appears and he and V partake in some playful banter—which is tonal whiplash considering the last thing that happened was him trying to kill her.
This is par for the course for the whole game. Sometimes V is a total ass to Johnny or vice versa. Sometimes they have a heartwarming moment. Sometimes they just playfully jab at each other. However, there is no logical progression—no real growth in their relationship. It simply jumps back and forth between hate and friendship, seemingly at random.
What’s worse is that the main story scenes between the two tend to default to the extreme hate interpretation with Johnny and V being antagonistic instead of two people working towards the same goal—completely ignoring any trust or understanding the two have realized over the numerous side missions. It makes both characters seem more than a bit psychotic.
Now, from a game design perspective, it’s easy to see why things turn out this way. There’s no guarantee that players will do anything more than the main missions—thus you have to write the main story missions under the assumption they won’t. Any side missions that develop V and Johnny’s relationship in one way or another need to be ignored—leaving their relationship at antagonistic levels.
Moreover, as the side missions can be played in any order (for the most part), there can’t be any type of logical progression in V and Johnny’s relationship there either. Each side mission/side mission chain is locked in its own little bubble—free to go where it wants in regards to the characters and ignoring all the others.
The big problem that comes from all this is that the relationship between Johnny and V is supposed to be the emotional core of the game. Hell, the game’s final decision (and thus the ending you get) is directly related to how you view their relationship. Yet, at that point, the relationship is a mess of mixed messages with the main storytelling you one thing and many of the side missions telling you something else.
Perhaps there is some mission play order out there where their relationship has some sort of logical progression. However, doing side missions randomly between main story missions isn’t it. And it’s a real shame because somewhere in that mess is the potential for a meaningful friendship built amongst great diversity leading to an excellent moral quandary at the game’s climax. But, in the end, that’s not what we get.
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