Spoilers for Phantom Liberty
Butch:
OK, met Idris, did some stuff. It takes a long time to do stuff when you have to sneak around literally everyone. Let me run to where I want to go, game!
I got some thoughts.
First, is it just me, or is Idris kind of phoning it in? Granted, I haven't done anything with him past that first conversation with the president, but still. Little flat, I thought. I was expecting more.
My real thoughts, though, come from a gig I did, specifically the one where you had to get into a church to free a doctor, and my thoughts are I both loved it and hated it.
I loved it because I wanted to kill the guy, but didn't because I didn't want to fail the gig. In that sense, the game did a great job of immersion. My V is a pretty moral person, but also a street kid merc. By watching all that play out, wanting to exert some sort of justice but NOT doing so so as to not piss off Mr. Hands, I was really put into my character. Cool.
That said, the game put too many restrictions on me, and that I hated. See, when I was looking for ways in, I found a conversation which implied that the doctor and the priest were giving drug addicts drugs for their cyberware. Then, when they got sick, they were charging them more. Thus, these were awful people, and I knew their secret. While the game gave me many options when the sister was confronting the doctor, the one I wanted was one to confront him, say "I know what you're doing!" I wasn't given that option, and I was annoyed. Why let me find out the truth then not let me do anything with it?
Really annoying, because being able to say that would've made that quest near perfect. Complicated, immersive, little missable pieces of information. It came THAT close.
And now I finished Lucretia My Reflection, did this weird thing where I was Hansen for a while, and now I'm trying to save crooked cops.
I'm trying here! How are you guys done????
There's a lot. I'm trying!
Feminina:
Dude, no one is done! Take your time. Putter around.
I also kind of wanted the option to do something with the information about that guy in the clinic. He was shady as hell, but we didn't seem to have any choice about it (as is so often the case with all the shady jobs we take)...I guess we could have just let her kill him? MAYBE she wouldn't have then turned on us too. Maybe.
Ah, the Deep Dive and being Hansen for a while. That was odd. I was amused by the way Johnny disapproved of you taking the drug. "Oh, V..." Like, Johnny, man, you're not in a position to hassle people about their bad habits, all right?
Loothound:
Yeah, no one is done, although I think I'm closing in on the endgame. Thankfully there are a few more Mr. Hands gigs on the board after my last story mission (very cool one, by the way—good blend of action and role playing challenges), and the one that I'm in the middle of is pretty substantial.
I really liked the whole Deep Dive mission with the two Barghest thugs (although, like Femmy, my reaction to Johnny's disapproval was WTF). On top of it being cool to play as someone else, and get a peek into Hansen's world, there was an "unreliable narrator" aspect where you're not sure how factual the guy's story is as you are experiencing it. Interesting twist, that.
So, you finally met the two dumbest cops in Night City. Yeah, that mission was messed up. Like, the way the two of them described everything going down had a very Pulp Fiction tragicomic vibe to it. I felt that it was another situation like you were talking about, Butch, where the game doesn't give you the option to have your V act in a way that is satisfying to you as a player. ESPECIALLY when you know stuff that makes you want to do a certain thing, for justice reasons. Felt the same way about the boxer gig. Maybe they want the message to be "you can only be as good as the world will let you," or maybe they didn't want the gameplay to vary that significantly depending on whether or not you had the extra information. Or, as we so often say, maybe a bit of both.
I didn't feel like Idris's performance was phoned in as much as they just told him to be a stoic badass. Being a stoic badass doesn't always allow for nuance.
Feminina:
Total unreliable narrator! We even had his friend Babs there interjecting from time to time, "he did NOT say that!" or whatever. I liked Babs. She knew the score.
My initial suggestion was "I'll call around, make some generators appear," but she said "or we could just get out of here!" and I thought, "yeah, good point, you know better than me," so I called Panam instead to get them smuggled out of the city.
This is better from my standpoint as well, since it takes away two of Hensen's soldiers WITHOUT my having to kill them!
Would 100% play the next Cyberpunk game as Babs.
Butch:
Ha! We remain the same person. I, too, called Panam. I thought about calling River, but then I thought "I don't think people here care about the NCPD and won't accept whatever frame job he does."
Better to scoot.
The doctor job made me think of something else....
Do we have a problem with how race is presented in Dogtown? I feel like we're meeting more jive talking, stereotypical portrayals of race here in the poor part of town. Jacob. The former track star who got abandoned by his parents and is now selling stuff who "knows the scene, right baby girl?" Even Paco...is Paco. He isn't El Capitan, or Padre. He's much more a "Heeeey mang, I'm gonna terl you a stooory, OK? OK?" fast talking, exaggerating doofus. Add to that the helpers, exploiters, fixers, people in power, Hansen, the doctor, Mr. Hands (who, OK, I haven't seen but certainly doesn't talk like El Capitan) are white. Even Jacob's white friend looks at himself as Jacob's guardian, without whom Jacob would be fucked.
Are they trying to make some point about racial/economic inequality? Is it a Polish company not being aware that this might be insensitive? Is it just plain stereotyping (poor people look/talk like that)? Am I overreading it?
Loothound:
I, apparently, am not the same person. I went the other way and got some generators for them. I have no real confidence that it will come up in-game, but I liked the idea of having an in with some Barghest people who owed me a favor.
Yes, Butch, I had a similar thought about some of the racial portrayals we're seeing in Phantom Liberty content, especially with Paco. Mostly I just felt it was kind of lazy on their part, especially since they did a much better job of that sort of thing in the main game. Even some of the gig storylines lean into pretty stock narratives from our world. It's definitely disappointing, and I really do hope it's just laziness and some ignorance on the developer's part, considering some of what's going on politically in Poland.
Also, Mr. Hands is definitely white. So white. Practically clear, even.
Feminina:
That is a good point...maybe there would be a place somewhere along the way where you'll be able to say "hey, Paco, let me through" while if they aren't there, we'll have to fight, or something.
We shall see!
I have winced slightly at some of the portrayals, but I really don't have any memory of how this was handled in the main game, so it's hard for me to compare. Maybe they're going to try to go somewhere with it? Something about the way the same old white elites hang onto power? (Although Arasaka is extremely powerful and it's a Japanese company...or at least a company of Japanese descent, I don't know where their headquarters are based.)
Myers is certainly white, in addition to Hands and Hansen, but then we have Reed, and Alex, and Songbird...all the people in the shadows doing the dirty work and taking the blame?
Butch:
Yeah but Reed and Songbird (and, apparently, Alex who I haven't yet met) aren't really residents of Dogtown, which makes me even more inclined to think these portrayals are on purpose. Dogtown is capital P poor. The ethnic minorities (in our world) that aren't poor are portayed with some degree of nuance. We even see a game that notices that not all Latino people are the same, or Asian people. Goro and Arasaka? Different. Padre and El Capitan? Different. Even Judy! Nuanced.
Until we get to the poor people in the poor part of town.
Hmm.
Loothound:
I hadn't thought about it that way before, but you're right. Dogtown seems to be populated by people who were mostly eager to escape the game of Night City, which has been thoroughly rigged by Corpos. That doesn't explain why they would slide into completely stereotypical ways of talking and acting, though.
We need to return to the conversation about rigged games after you two have finished a couple more story missions…
Butch:
Also, seems Dontnod seems to have gone back to the Vampyr days with an action RPG called Banishers that's out today. Looks kind of interesting. Has ghosts.
Johnathan: Are you saying.......I'm a ghost?
Elizabeth: No, dipshit, you're a vampire.
Johnathan: Are you saying......I'm a vampire?
Elizabeth: YES!
Johnathan: Are you saying.....I'm a ghost vampire?
Elizabeth: Man, why don't they stick to Life is Strange?
Feminina:
THEY CANNOT. The lure of the uncanny is too strong.
I liked Vampyr. Would put a ghost thing on a potential list for sure.
And it's true that the main characters we're meeting are not OF Dogtown, and, a lot of the time, can't say enough about what a dump Dogtown is, even though I feel like honestly, your odds of getting mowed down on the street (not NECESSARILY by me) are about the same in Night City proper.
Poverty, and the slightly less impoverished looking down on poverty, indeed.
Loothound:
Well, walking around Dogtown I can say that it seems like fully HALF the population of Dogtown is in Barghest, so that's a lot of security. Also, economic inequality is most definitely still a thing in Dogtown. The other half lives quite nicely, as Mr. Hand could tell you.
Butch:
Oh, indeed. I saw the little fixer icon on the map and went to try to meet Mr. Hands (only to find out that you can't at this time) and that was a nice bar, that's for sure. Interesting that it was surrounded by filth outside.
Rather amusingly, I got spotted right before I went in. I was being chased by cops and the bouncer was all "OK, you can go in, but don't bring any trouble." I guess four cop cars aren't "trouble," so it was all good.
I danced for a while and the cops went back to whatever it is they do. As one does.
Loothound:
Wait until you get to go up and see it. There's also a story mission in a little bit that is REALLY a glimpse of the glitterati. Were you being chased by actual cops, or was it Barghest? I didn't think that there were any actual cops in Dogtown. Anyway, it's funny how the game sometimes lets you leave trouble at the door like that.
Seriously, though, there are so many people in Barghest. I definitely want to see if I can take down the Dogtown checkpoint single-handedly once everything is over.
Butch:
Oh, right, Barghest. I keep forgetting they aren't cops. I think of them as cops.
Loothound:
Yeah, I do too, since they pretty much act like cops. Although, honestly, they seem to have more on the ball than most NCPD officers (especially the two knuckle-heads from that one gig). They also have mechs and armed vehicles, which makes them scarier by a mile. Bought my first weaponized vehicle from El Capitan's AutoTrader dealie. Chain gun, missiles, and all around armor plating.
Try to fuck with my commute now, Night City.
Butch:
That would be handy. I just worry if I go all guns blazing on them it'll make things worse.
I'm sneaky, I am.
Feminina:
I was successfully sneaky one time! Remember that gig from the main game, where you have to sneak into a marina to get sex tapes from a city councilor or someone? I guess I hadn't done that yet on this timeline, so I went off to do it, and vaguely recalled that I'd tried to approach over the docks and not been successful at sneaking, but that swimming was more effective, so I swam up, crept past some inattentive guards, hacked the cameras, hacked the computers, and crept away again with no one even noticing I was there.
It can happen!
It's just not a good way to bet, for people wanting to hire me.
Butch:
Oh I've gotten totally sneaky. I love taking over all the cameras then using cameras to shut other cameras down.
Or to turn on turrets. That's the best.
Feminina:
I DO love turning on turrets and having them attack people. It's a beautiful thing. And the line-of-sight hacking through cameras is so extremely handy, although I'm even sketchier than usual on the details of exactly how it would work.
A techwizard did it, all right?
Butch:
I kind of love turning on turrets, having them shoot dudes, having them leave some dudes alive, then have said living dudes just go back to standing there.
"Whelp, sucks to be Kevin. But what are the odds that happens twice? I'm good."
Feminina:
And yet, they're very, very good at finding bodies when I'm trying to be sneaky.
I guess they know exactly where the bodies come from if it's a malfunctioning turret, and that's just one of the hazards of the job, whereas bodies that show up for no apparent reason? Oh, that's a mystery that must be investigated.
Butch:
Hey, they're very thorough. Malfunctioning AC unit? Gotta stare at that for at least ten minutes.
Feminina:
Vending machine spitting out items? Let's stare at it, maybe it will dump out some more!
I liked the one where you could make a grill malfunction, and it caught on fire. That's some nice realism there, game. I'll stand and stare at that for a while.
Loothound:
Well, yeah! I imagine it gets very hot in Night City. Turrets to friendly mode is a fave play, for sure. I guess I've got assassining too much in my blood. I am sneaky, but it's usually so I can kill people quietly. Sometimes it's an all-quiet bloodbath, sometimes it's just delaying the bloodbath, but it's almost always a bloodbath. I guess if you want not-bloodbath you have to hire a different V.
Some of the world hacks are pretty cool. I still don't get how we can make fire extinguishers blow up, though.
Feminina:
That does seem like a quality one wouldn't want in something you use to put out fires. But what do we know?
Butch:
Really, how do those vending machine companies stay in business? Pretty much everyone has cyberware. Who actually pays for anything? I mean, just hit "distract enemies" and boom. Free Funyuns.
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