But I saw a guy eating a real burger behind Takemura at Tom’s Diner!
He ate it only halfway and before I even argued, he was looking out the window at somebody coming in.
I hear ya! There’s no reason for food stores to exist other than to give us a quick little animation of eating so we can pretend to live the cyberpunk life. I’m drowning in food that’s laying around all the time.
I would have settled for the current-day ticket/token-vending option used in Japan.
Yes, nothing says immersive gameplay and cyberpunk authenticity like an inventory overflowing with bad food pastes, cheap booze, and energy drinks that glow in the dark.
I wanted to answer that don’t worry, that game doesn’t like the cyberpunk genre too so you should be right at home. Then I thought about corporations and how in his review Tom mentions those are not evil.
Like do we see anything bad coming from corporations? Some of the few positive entities in the games are good private businesses, like Delamain taxi service. And Arasaka itself is not so bad when it’s ruled by a wise old man. Militech is almost absent from the game. I guess corps put out shitty ads everywhere?.. is that what Johnny fights against?
I don’t think Cyberpunk as a genre has any position on a mom and pop shop like Delamain. (Which is a small taxi company run out of a basement, not Uber). The genre staple are megacorps. Companies so powerful that they control everything. They are outside the law, unaccountable, and effectively sovereign entities. I don’t think “evil” is what the genre goes for though. More like “amoral”, with them being totally oblivious to any human cost while maximizing profit and/or power.
CP 2077 does, IMO, get the amoral part down but doesn’t do a convincing job on showing how all-powerful their control is. The game will frequently tell you how going up against a megacorp will be suicide, but in practice they’re just bumbling fools. Militech might as well be a charity organization donating advanced weapons to anybody who needs them, and is willing to hijack one of their basically undefended convoys.
(As for bad things coming out of the megacorps in the game, let’s see… Arasaka develop a device to destructively transfer the human mind and test it on non-volunteers, killing them. And they’re also able of doing the reverse operation of overwriting your mind with somebody else’s. It’s like organ harvesting your entire body in one go. Used on non-volunteers, of course. The media megacorp literally has a person tortured to death for entertainment. The megacorps bribe politicians, run private armies as effectively death squads with no due process, and shielding their employees from legal consequences if they commit crimes.)
The thing about the chip and human mind transfer is there, true. But it happens 50 years before the events of the game. Both non-volunteers you see are criminals, one of them is captured right after detonating a nuke in a middle of a city. You have 2 cases of mind replacement but one was accidental and the other was a punishment for murder (maybe even voluntary repentance). Which doesn’t make it right but it’s something you expect an anti-hero do, not a villainous soulless company. In fact, the Arasaka company is very much soulful. It changes its course depending on who’s in charge.
Also all those company sins is what our hero learns just before the final mission. Normal people don’t seem to do that well but the world at large doesn’t seem so bad. You have Alex Jones wannabe talking about corporations turning people psycho. But that’s kinda it?.. The problem of the town is gangs everywhere and even cops are mostly fine people, just not having enough resources to fight crime.
Now I’m imagining a version of this game where there are no food items at all, and you have to eat at a food vendor for the temporary status effects. Not to mention going to sleep…
Coming to CP 2077 as DLC: Survival Mode!
The game gives you a fair bit of backstory on the corps, but it’s buried in the flood of craptacular shards you pick up along the way, you know, the ones about cybersex or excerpts from really bad “literature.” Off the top of my head, Arasaka uses war as a tool for corporate restructuring, has execution teams to terminate disloyal employees, hands out weaponry to encourage insurgencies around the world to destabilize areas controlled by its foes, and presides over vast slums where it recruits child soldiers. Militech uses war to justify its existence, has pretty much usurped the position of what passes for the New USA’s armed forces, and peddles high-tech but outdated weaponry to backwaters where it can continue wars and conflicts. BioTechnica has all sorts of genetic programs using women as brood mares, and uses lethal force to prevent them from leaving. It also is hinted that their food products are less than healthy, perhaps on purpose. The other corps don’t get that much coverage, but they all seem knee-deep in arms manufacturing and distribution, with little to no concern about where there stuff goes. They all also treat their employees more like serfs, bound to the corp instead of the land. And there is a ton of ancillary background stuff that points to how the corporations are the only power that really matters, and that shows that they use that power solely for self-aggrandizement.
So, yeah, corps are bad in this game world. You are right though that a lot of the evil is masked by a façade of stability and order, like all good authoritarian regimes.
The cops are pretty consistently portrayed as at best amoral and often corrupt in fairly heinous ways, and I don’t think you get to justify farming out a lot of law enforcement to violent mercenaries by saying you “don’t have the resources” to do it yourself. Mercs are more expensive than employees, not less. (Although apparently the mere existence of an actual police force is a retcon by CDPR.)
Some moments in Cyberpunk do feel like this:
Also this:
I wish game design could solve the OCD Trash Scrounger Simulator 2077 meta.
A lot of open world activity is helping the police. I remember only 2 quests involving the police. In one you sympathyze with a traumatized cop. And in another quest one is corrupt and the other is one of the most morally upstanding characters. The other one is corrupt but not even in a big way. In several dialogues I remember an option to say that police work is hard and they are good guys.
So yeah, I imagine somewhere the backstory explains how bad cops are. But gameplay tells me that police wants me to help fight crime and there’s no real big noticeable corruption.
The cop with the hit on her later murders the two cops that arranged it in follow-up radio news + shard info. So there is some side mission consequence but it’s easy to miss. I don’t think she can be saved unless you have a nomad background to tell her to leave the city.
The stuff with River goes into how basically the cops are owned by the corps, which is kind of expected.
The cop is traumatized primarily by the corruption and moral callousness of the police department. As I said, you’re a violent mercenary, so “helping the cops” is demonstrating that they’re abandoning their duty and farming it out to people with mantis blades in their arms, to mantis blade them. (Or at least, that’s what I’m doing with those jobs.) And, for example, I just did an “organized crime activity” side job where I found a datashard indicating that a police officer, “acting as a private citizen” sent the criminals in to get rid of some homeless people. And then, guess what, organized crime activity was reported and they got wiped out. How convenient.
Seems legit.
I was Corpo and told her to leave the city and she did.
But not before killing those other bad cops it seems.
At first the whole taking missions from the cops thing was odd, but as I thought about it, it makes sense. You are a merc, a gun/deck for hire. You are more or less anti-corp oriented. You have little respect for the law as it is administered in Night City, but you don’t hate the police largely because they are generally ineffective corpo tools. As a street survivor, regardless of origin story, you can appreciate that individual NCPD people can be fine, can even be pals to an extent, even as you view the institution itself with contempt.
What the game doesn’t let you do is eradicate bad cops on your own, without a story beat/gig setup. Probably for the best.