I completely agree. It feels like there I'd a tension in Cyberpunk and Witcher where they want to be basically Uncharted but also remembered that there an RPG and side quests are a thing. So, they have to add some. Some are really good but they do come into conflict with the story.
3 months ago
| 4
Omg exactly. It's the ludo narrative dissonance that really bugs me. I love the game 2 but I hope the sequel allows you to live out your life more normally.
3 months ago
| 2
This is also a ludonarrative dissonance I felt with the Witcher 3 (which I love overall), because Geralt is meant to be on a time crunch to save Ciri and get involved in a bunch of (apparently) time-sensitive political intrigues, but he/the player is constantly getting sidetracked with side quests. A lot of them are excellent to play divorced from the story, but I often found myself thinking why Geralt would be doing these things given his overall motivation.
2 months ago
| 1
I thought they did a good job making it pretty clear that V has no clearcut path to saving their life and basically every lead they follow ends with "sorry, you're basically fucked". V still wants to make a name for themselves, and the more connections they make the more chances of finding a new potential solution. Could CDPR have done a better job of justifying V taking on other odd jobs? Definitely. But I don't think they full-on contradicted themselves either.
3 months ago
| 1
Echo Bizarre
New Patreon Mini-Essay about Cyberpunk 2077 just went up. Here's the first one and a half paragraphs for a preview:
"This is another mini-essay I’m going to spend fixating on a criticism I have for a game that I otherwise really liked. Five years after its disastrous launch and two years after its 2.0/Phantom Liberty redemption, Cyberpunk 2077 is very much worth playing. One of my favorite things is that most missions play out like miniature immersive sim levels, making the whole experience (especially as a primarily stealth-built character) feel like an open world Dishonored game. Bouncing between a succession of mini-Mankind Divided levels with interesting setups while the radio was playing the Jazz station and the cyberpunk megacity was rainy was some of the most fun I’ve had this year. But something kept nagging me at the back of my mind: would V really be doing this right now? After all, once Act Two begins and Johnny Silverhand is implanted in V’s head, the ripperdoc Viktor Vektor tells them they have “a few weeks, tops” to live before the Silverhand engram completely overwrites their mind. Not years, not months, a few weeks. This one line may be one of the worst writing choices in any game I’ve played in recent memory.
Make no mistake, the game has a lot of good writing, especially the relationship with Johnny Silverhand and the Phantom Liberty expansion as a whole. But this is a game bursting with fun side quests unrelated to the main plot and this line, innocuous by itself, destroys any non-metagaming reason for V to engage with any of it."
Full post here: www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-mini-essay-137762918
3 months ago (edited) | [YT] | 21