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I love the ‘Tower’ (DLC) ending to Cyberpunk 2077. (Spoilers etc)
I don’t think Cyberpunk 2077 is a particularly great game. I don’t think it’s a bad game, especially now, and there are aspects of the world (especially the now functioning metro system) that are immersive, and the fashion is fun and I like that they put effort into it (although I would have preferred the ability to dye clothes) but the combat and stealth are fine, the story is quite linear in an often frustrating way (versus a linear game that doesn’t create the expectation of player choice), there’s a lot of dull busywork, the animations outside of some motion-captured key cutscenes are surprisingly bad for AAA, and I think large parts of the open world lack the detail of a true marquee Rockstar production or even, really, a premier Ubisoft open world. By that I mean things like props, clutter, pedestrian detail (not just density), building detail, interior detail which is often weirdly bad etc.
The writing is also often bad. Not in the terminally annoying Baldur’s Gate 3 way but in the sense that a lot of the second-to-second dialogue, despite some great VA, is just a bit cringe, stilted, unrealistic, clumsy and generally doesn’t feel real. My theory for why the writing is so much worse than The Witcher 2/3 is that those games were predominantly written in Polish and then translated by professional fiction translators who actually understand good writing because they mainly do novels, movies etc. So they approach the game the same way. Cyberpunk, though was written by a combination of English-speaking video game writers (not a group who, by and large, should be allowed any involvement in published writing of any kind) and Polish writers writing in their second (or third) language - so the game has a lot of weird dialogue that makes clear it wasn’t written by Americans or native English speakers even though it’s set in the US. Weird vibe.
Still, with all those caveats, I love this ‘new’ ending to the game. After a hundred hours in first person, you die, come back to life after two years, all your friends forget about you, you lose all your power and can never get it back, and you get beaten up by some nobody thugs. Then, in something that is at the same time cheesy and kitsch and bold and wonderful, your character says their final line of dialogue and then the game switches - do the first time - to third-person as your character literally walks away from you, the player, out of the screen and into the world, and becomes another faceless NPC in the crowd, stilted walking animation, bad pedestrian collision AI, the whole thing. They disappear into the crowd. And then it ends.
Even a couple of years later I can’t get this out of my head. It may be one of my favorite game endings of all time. It’s perfectly congruent with the setting and theme of the story. It feels like the thing that should happen. It’s shot - maybe unintentionally - beautifully, because it’s not a high quality cutscene but instead literally you becoming a third-person NPC, zooming out of your own head and then watching yourself walk away. It is the dumbest, funniest, and therefore most Cyberpunk ending. No, you don’t cede your body to a rockstar or corporation. You don’t die in a blaze of glory robbing the space casino. You don’t flame out and enjoy a short retirement in the desert. You just go back to being a nobody, so the whole thing was pointless.
Great game developers seem to spend, I would guess, a lot of time thinking about how they introduce the player to a playable character. Far fewer seem to spend as much time thinking about how the player leaves a character. Most games have no finality in this sense, you leave your character and it feels like the story isn’t over, that you’ve left a party that’s still going on, even if the protagonist dies or something in the narrative but especially if they don’t. Cyberpunk has a finality with this ending - we join V’s story, and we decouple ourselves from it, vividly and silently. Whatever they do next isn’t - as in most RPGs - something for the head canon, or ending slideshow, of fanfiction. The story is simply over. I like that.
Cyberpunk is one of those games that my friends always try to convince me to play. I finally got it after years of pressure, played like 20 hrs, and just got super bored. I'm not sure why exactly as it seems like a game I'd like on the surface, but it just felt... soulless. I didn't care about any of the characters. The plot felt kind of dumb. The world and the gangs and such all seemed super fake. I don't know exactly what the problem was.
That ending does sound cool though!
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