This is what got me. It makes the otherwise logical theory about his fate sort of untenable. Unless you go the route of assuming they were not able to interrogate him because of, well, reasons, or something.
Yes, they should have explained that, hole in the logic.
Yeah, it’s heavily implied that they wanted to torture him in digital hell for an eternity, they mention a fate worse than death.
.
Speaking of Johnny, and continuing with my impressions of the story and how some scenes seem rushed, how Johnny start interacting with you suffer the same issue.
First scene, he surprises you by appearing, he says “I’m going to kill you!” etc, in your flat.
Second scene, a brief one in the cafe where he says he changed his opinion, V replies by sending him to hell (in fact the two dialog options were variations of the same feeling).
And from that moment onward you have Keanu appearing from time to time in different quests and you talk with him as you were old buddies or at least, as if you had reached some kind of agreement. Which you didn’t.
It’s weird as hell.
To be honest, all these omissions and the general derivative plot elements are being ‘the’ flaw of the game for me, more than some cosmetic bugs or the gameplaly or rpg progression. So a bit the opposite of The Witcher 3.
My take on Johnny–and I agree it doesn’t really work like it should–is that he grows more accepting of you as you grow to be more like him. There’s a level of fatalism at work in the story I think, as well. No matter what choices you make, everything is fixed, and you can’t change it, at least not the big picture. Night City is all about the illusion of freedom, when in reality it is just a neon cage.
I think it would probably take playing the game twice to really figure out how many choices have real consequences. From CDPR’s work on the Witcher 2 in particular, I suspect they do.
I’m not so sure, given that the set-up is pretty deterministic. And the world is dystopian, so fatalism fits better than any chance of a happy ending. But as you say, repeated playing may well tell the tale.
I ran out of stuff to do. So I finished the game.
I kept waiting for Rogue to call me. She never did. I kept waiting for Nancy to become available. I kept waiting for that “big job” Panam said she was prepping for. She never called me. I slept in my bed, I skipped time, nothing happened.
Turns out the Rogue questline was integral to opening up a new avenue in the finale. So. That blows.
I sided with Arasaka, simply because I didn’t want my babe Panam to die. Or any of her family. Of course, I found out only AFTER telling the wonderful Judy that it was just a fun, one night stand and she ditched me – that Panam doesn’t go for girls. Despite the fact that she’s been pretty receptive to my flirting all this time. FFS.
So Johnny’s all pissed at me. Misty is pissed at me. And I’m like, look, I just don’t want any of my friends to die? But of course I couldn’t say that to anyone. For some reason.
In fact, V tended to say a lot of things differently than the way I intended them. She was generally a bigger bitch than I wanted her to be in everything she said. And there was plenty I wanted her to say that she never had the option to say. In fact it happens a lot throughout the game that my dialog choices lead to places I did not intend or want… but especially during the finale.
I’m not sure if I got a “good” or a “bad” ending, but it was altogether unsatisfactory. I spent an hour of my real life on that fucking space station and it was all a waste of time.
And yeah, none of it really made a whole lot of sense.
Anyway, I’m back in the game and I guess I’ll keep trying to get Rogue to fucking call me.
E - looks like she’ll never call me because I already took the pill to “turn off” Johnny and I don’t have a save from before then. Nice. No, the game saves it for you before going into Ember and you take the pill afterward. WTF Rogue.
I played the Aldecaldo ending as well. Besides most of them dying, it’s a much better ending. It would have been infinitely better if Panam was romantically interested. Sigh.
I’m guessing CD Projekt’s hard on for killing the player after six months must be for DLC tie-in.
Yeah, I did the Aldecaldo ending. Had to do the fight at the Militech site twice because the first time it bugged out and the last guy I needed to kill disappeared.
The stuff in cyberspace was wildly underwhelming. My choices sucked, my dialog options sucked, and there was no feeling of control or power at all. Maybe that was their goal, and if so, they succeeded, but bleh.
So now back in Night City at the Embers save, where I guess I’ll go and do side gigs etc. I wonder, does the game still make you frizz out and puke all the time still? We’ll see.
All in all I think the ending really was a let down, and kind of sucked. It also doesn’t make a good set up for continued exploration, which is wicked stupid, because there is no way in hell you can explore a fraction of the city before finishing the final quest. And some of the things you want to do you will do in every single playthrough, because the loot is that good. So, a lot of repetition on replay I’m betting.
Rogue finally called me and I was able to do the Johnny and Rogue ending. In the end I let Johnny take V’s body. It was… Ok. I think the Aldecaldo ending was the best, even without the Panam romance.
There’s a “secret” ending where Johnny can choose to go in solo without Rogue, but apparently I didn’t unlock it. I guess I was too much of a dick towards him at the beginning, maybe? I mean, the guy’s the biggest terrorist in history. Makes Osama Bin Laden look like a choir boy. Takes a while to warm up to him, you know?
My percentages at the end were 90 / 60 / 40. I’m guessing that “60” number should have been higher to unlock the secret ending.
I hear it’s like 70 to get it, something like that. The last number no one seems to know much about, and I haven’t heard of anyone maxing it.
Yeah it needs to be 70… It actually all comes down to the discussion you have with Johnny in the oil field, after the “chippin in” mission. If you have a save file from there, you can go back and answer the questions “correctly”. That’s what i did when i realized it was a requirement.
I’ve done the rogue ending, with V being the one who lives… Then i just did the arasaka ending, and checked out both endings there (sign the contract, or go back to earth). The arasaka mission was a lot cooler than i had expected, I’d recommend fills check it out.
I’ve given the “secret” ending a few tries… it’s hard as crap, not the least because you can’t save at all in it. If you die, it’s game over and you have to go back to the balcony with Misty, at the latest.
Dude, it also doesn’t let you heal in the secret ending.
Ah, you can heal, but what’s happening is that you constantly bleed out, and once you have lost health from bleeding out, you can’t recover that portion. This is rough… i think i may need to boost up some of my stats before i can handle this.
I’m sure I’ve seen immunity to bleeding available as a mod. Maybe check what the name of the mod is, and do a trip to clothing stores.
(Or is this a separate kind of bleeding vs. the status effect?)
Yeah, this isn’t actually bleeding, it’s that every minute or so you get a “relic malfunction” alert, and your health goes down by 3, permanently.
Essentially, the relic is finally killing you, and are trying to get to the server before it does… While fighting your way through the entire building, alone.
Actually, it’s really cool because you aren’t exactly alone… Where the other endings involve you either taking the blue pill and doing the mission with Johnny in control, or taking the red pill and doing it with V in control, in the secret ending you are doing it as V, but you didn’t take the pill so Johnny is there the whole time talking to you.
So it’s like the options are
V/Goro (kind of separate from all the others though, as here you are actually working with arasaka instead of against it)
Johnny/Rogue
V/Panam
V/Johnny
Which is kind of cool… I’m interested to see how things pan out, so it’s worth the fact that i need to keep seeing over.
I think i need to boost my health more.
I really enjoyed the game, and I liked the ending I deserved.
All in all a great adventure.
Will return to the game wen is more polished and have more content.
I got the kid/gitar ending.
They wanted to torture him for a ethernity and in this shape they can extract all secrets, and Johnny hold a lot of these.
I think engramming Johnny has dual purposes.
-
it was punitive, in that turning Johnny into essentially corporate property was pretty much the worst thing arasaka could have done to him. (His resentment of this process is expanded on a bit more if you go down the devil ending path)
-
he was a test of the soul killer system that was still in early development at that point in the timeline.
I’m also not certain the label “terrorist” is very meaningful in this context, either. Hell, it’s not terribly meaningful in our own place and time, when it has come to pretty much mean “someone who uses force for causes we don’t like.” Johnny set off a nuke to wipe out a power that, call it what you want, is effectively a future-modern form of fascism. Yes, lots of innocents died, as did when we bombed German and Japanese cities in WWII even before the atomic bombs. As do, today, in all too many drone or air strikes. Arasaka doesn’t even have the thin fig leaf of national sovereignty to cover its naughty bits; it’s a bald-faced power monger ruling by might makes right. “Legitimacy” is a very complex question in the sort of world the game posits. No one is truly legitimate, and therefore, everyone is, might be one way to think of it. That means the corps, in a sort of mandate of heaven tradition, are the proper rulers until they are shown to be incapable. Another way might be to reduce the whole shebang to a masses vs. elites, and assign legitimacy to the one and culpability to the other. Then, of course, you have to deal with the fact that the “masses,” through their unrestrained consumption, have made the corps into what they are. Etc.
Dude. You are giving far too much credit to an angsty anti-corporate dumbass murdering thousands of people people because his girlfriend got put in a refrigerator. If anything CD Projekt took some really juvenile lore from a tabletop RPG and made it even dumber.
-Tom