Cyberpunk 2077 Grieving Thread

Miller said:
The Joshua Stephenson quest is really bad.
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One of the things I liked about that quest is it manages to incorporate a bunch of different ideas about religion and contrast them without telling the player which one is right, which is a much more nuanced take than what we'd normally see in game writing.

Joshua is a true believer who thinks he has to not only live up to his beliefs but that said beliefs require him to inform others about them. This raises the question of whether or not someone who found a spiritual truth is obligated to share it.

Rachel believes that spirituality is a very personal experience and that it's inappropriate to impose one's beliefs on others, very interesting considering what she's doing.

Johnny's is an atheist take, unsurprisingly.

Zuleika (victim's sister) believes in the transformative power of faith while her mother demonstrates that despite professing transformation some transgressions cannot be forgiven by society, regardless of any spiritual progress.

Officer Vasquez represents people affected by the disruption created when secular laws and due process are interrupted in deference to religious ideology.

Wakako's response to V asking questions about the gig, and her conversation with V if the player kills Joshua, demonstrate that there is a time and a place to seek out spiritual enlightenment, and a time and a place to act.

V's inquiries and going along with the whole quest after not killing Joshua has V as an agnostic seeking after answers.

Finally, there's also the statement on the self-destructive consequences of seeking vengeance over justice in the death of Bill Jablonksy. It's interesting how Bill's death can lead to V starting their own spiritual journey or to him just killing Joshua and Vasquez (I don't think you can actually kill Rachel).

I could be overthinking this but this always came across as an example of actually decent writing in the game.
 
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The Ghost of Kviv said:
  1. Shared multiverse. This is dumb, and I hope they don't do it.
  2. Nested universes. Kinda interesting, reminds me of Re:boot from my Saturday morning cartoon days. Essentially, Witcher 3 is a real game that was made in the Cyberpunk universe. And some NPCs in 2077 have figured out that they are not real, they are a part of a simulation. Which they take to mean the world of 2077 that they inhabit, is a game inside some other universe. I postulate CDPR's next IP will have Cyberpunk 2077 and it's sequels exist as games inside it's universe/history. This also brings more questions as to what the AIs beyond the Blackwall are up to. Do they know they're in a simulation? Do they communicate with whomever controls the simulation?
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Prefacing my post with this preemptive meme.

It's all an attempt to allude to Gnosticism and psychological/philosophical themes, at least that's my interpretation. Not some grand ARG that results in some physical reward. I just found out about this the other week after playing for the first time, and throughout the game I was picking up subtle Gnostic undertones throughout. This is going to get messy.

This is especially apparent with the hotel that V wakes up in after Johnny took control, the Pistis Sophia, which was symbolic of V and Johnny's lowest point, and rising up from it, there is also a reference to a Gnostic figure when Delamain calls V a different name at the start of his quest. Pistis Sophia is a Gnostic text that outlines the fall and restoration of the figure of Sophia, who is the Gnostic interpretation of the Holy Spirit. Basic rundown on Sophia since Gnostic stuff, by virtue of being occultism is extremely difficult to research, so I don't pretend to know as much as I could, she is an emanation of the true highest god, one of the Aeons, she fell from grace and as a result created a void which formed the Demiurge and as a result the material plane. Her fall lead into becoming the fragment of the divine that makes up the Human soul.

The goal of Gnosticism is to achieve Gnosis, which is the institutional knowledge required in order to shed the physical plane, the Prison created by the Demiurge, and to reunite the divine fragment of the soul with the rest of the divine, becoming one with God. The Gnostics believed Jesus was sent by God/Sophia in order to give man the knowledge required to achieve Gnosis, and then he returned to the divine with his death.

I see the game itself being the physical plane created by the Demiurge, perhaps even Night City being an allegory for it, no matter what people seem to be trapped by it. The whole theme of the main story is about the Soulkiller AI, in which provides immortality but at the cost of killing the Soul, the divine spark, thus keeping you trapped in the Prison for eternity, unable to achieve Gnosis as the Human soul itself, the fragment of God, is destroyed. This leads into my belief that Johnny himself represents the Jungian shadow, the opposite side of the Ego, and throughout the game V is experiencing Ego death in a way, as Johnny takes over his body. The shadow having opposite psychological archetypes to the Ego, which I think can fit Johnny without too much stretching, and I think the Ego can be aligned with V in a similar manner
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Johnny taking over is essentially Ego death, as defined as the loss of self identity, or what Jung calls Psychic Death. But the same term is also used for a transformative growth, as in the Hero's Journey, but I think in this case that is not what they mean. Johnny represents the opposite of V when the game starts, but throughout the game depending on your choices V's ego gets eroded and he becomes more and more like Johnny, and the Fear the Reaper ending the Ego is fully killed and Johnny the Shadow takes over. I think the Phantom Liberty ending represents the other form of Ego death, the one described in the Hero's Journey, throwing away the past and coming out on top stronger, healing.
Anyway, to get back on topic, the Ouroboros is a symbol that appears in Gnosticism. It represents how 'all is one', creation born from a single point, emanations from God in every single person as the soul, yin and yang, creation from nothing. It is also a symbol in alchemy, you probably know it as the Philosopher's Stone. Outside of just the Gnostic interpretation, the Ouroboros represents life and death, a cycle of renewal, rebirth. Nietzsche called this idea Eternal Recurrence, the idea that time will repeat itself eternally forever. The Ouroboros appearing in this ARG is important because it links together these separate ideas with its commonality, which I will get to later.

There is another concept that I think is important to all of this, the idea of the Collective Unconcious as outlined by Jung. The idea is that there exists a shared collective unconscious of humanity in which stem shared mental concepts. This is where his ideas of Archetypes come from, but there is also a Gnostic interpretation to this, as a lot of Jung's work was inspired by his study of the Gnostics. I believe that the Net as accessed by the Netrunners is an interpretation of this concept, an invisible reality in which all of humanity is connected, and the Black Wall which keeps out the AIs is perhaps the Prison itself, as created by the Demiurge. Perhaps the Black Wall is not keeping something out but instead keeping something in, that thing being kept in would be the souls of Humanity, preventing them from achieving Gnosis and escaping the Prison.

The issue with this interpretation is the whole of the AIs beyond the wall, with this that would mean that they are Angelic beings, divine entities of a collective primordial soup of divine soul. But based on the story of the rest of the game it seems implied that using Soulkiller and killing your divine spark is not a good thing, but AI do not have souls, so perhaps this is a dead end and simply just me reading in to things and connecting dots that don't exist. Although in Phantom Liberty when you find So Mi in the Akira vault and have the introspection inside her memories, she says that the AI from beyond the wall are taking her memories from her, so in a way that is a form of Ego death, but perhaps this is just meant to be a mirror to V since that is a theme of the DLC's story. You also get messages from the AI beyond the Wall inside the bunker, text appears on terminals talking about how Human senses are easily tricked and that reality can be faked or something along those lines, which leads into my next point.

The game is a simulation, obviously since its a video game, but I think they actually mean it in that amount of meta. If you follow the FF mystery and do the sequence with the floating cubes you get a vision of some meta stuff, the life path flavour text flashes across the screen and a number appears that changes. I believe that number is a constant of the universe that is theorized to result in a vastly different universe if it was even the slightest bit changed, and in the sequence it changes forever. The Ouroboros appears with symbols for the next ARG puzzle, then at the end a monster truck spawns called the Demiurge, which is what caused me to finally connect all these dots in this absolute schizo post. If you read the computer that appears next to the truck you get notes from the character that has been on this same puzzle hunt as the player. What he describes is finding the player themselves, then finding himself in a room watching someone sit at a screen hooked to a computer or console depending on what you are playing the game on, watching himself through his own eyes. He calls this person the Watcher, which I will circle back to. This whole description feels exactly like what CHIM is in Elder Scrolls, an NPC becoming aware of their own existence as a fictional character created by the Dreamer, the Player. This paradox of their own existence can either lead to CHIM, in which they are aware they are in a dream and can control it like a lucid dreamer, or a Zero Sum, in which the paradox of their own existence causes them to cease to exist. I think this sequence is possibly an Elder Scrolls reference to this concept, as you can find his clothes in a pile, but he himself is missing and vanished.

Now, the Watcher, this is where my previous ramblings start to come together into a coherent idea, and is possibly just my own delusions and not intentional. Watchers are a type of angel as described in the apocryphal book of Enoch. I don't think the use of Watcher is really important to the Biblical stories, but instead is there to relate the player themselves as in the form of a holy being to the characters of the game. There is one specific Biblical connection I do want to bring up however, Watchers were angels that were dispatched to Earth in order to watch over Humanity, and there is a character that is similar to this in the game, Mr. Blue Eyes. From what I can gather, since despite this wall of text my understanding of Cyberpunk lore is non existent beyond a single playthrough, Blue Eyes is thought to be controlled by an AI from the Moon. Blue eyes may have significance beyond the whole Joytoy thing, since Blue Blood is a slang term to refer to nobility, as they were thought to be closer to God and thus had blue blood. If this is following the idea that the AI are actually this world's version of angels, then that would imply that the glowing blue eyes would make him a Watcher, an angel sent from the heavens (the Moon). Following this idea that AI are in a way divine, that would make the Black Wall more closely match the Gnostic interpretation of Gnosis and the Prison, as instead of demons beyond the wall, the other side is divine beings of the greater whole.

So basically to sum up this schizopost, I think the FF mystery is instead a cookie trail to the deeper metaphysics of the Cyberpunk world. The Witcher 3 link I think is not a connected universe, as in the corpo start there is a magazine of the Witcher 3 in a drawer, and the FF mystery leads to a '60 year old game', which is probably talking about the Witcher 3 since that would be over 60 years old in 2077, and not the Arasaka Tower 3d game as that was made after 2023 in the game timeline, which is not 60 years old. To add credence to my ramblings, the game already explicitly has direct Gnostic references as I explained in the first paragraph, and there is an overarching theme of whether reality is real much like The Matrix, even with red and blue pills and Keanu Reeves. Phantom Liberty has AI talking to you from beyond the wall straight up saying that your reality is a false simulation created by them, and the whole game is filled with twisted Tarot cards, which are also linked to Gnosticism and Jungian psychology, but I know next to nothing about them so I left them out of this.

Who knows if any of this is intentional beyond some basic references and allusions, maybe this will open someone's mind or something. A lot of the Gnostic stuff I outlined probably sounds familiar if you have seen/played any Japanese media, Bhuddism is similar to Gnosticism in a certain way, and Gnosticism was used as the basis for Evangelion's Instrumentality, and the Xeno series just straight up retells Gnosticism and Jungian psychology and don't even pretend to hide it.

For my review of the game, its mediocre and carried by its characters hard. The story itself when not digging into literature analysis is very basic. The gunplay is extremely stiff and clunky, my inputs got eaten quite often and its easy to get stuck on stuff when using the mobility perks. I liked the Phantom Liberty ending the best, its bitter sweet and is against the anti-Christ transhumanism that is forced upon you, and I like how it circles back on the theme of living as a nobody. Probably won't play it again, but I like the schizo conspiracy ARG stuff, that's why I wrote an entire novella about it.

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The Ghost of Kviv said:
So there's this puzzle in 2077, and a piece of it was patched into the next-gen version of Witcher 3. You may have heard of it as the FF:06:B5 mystery. The 2.0 patch added a bunch of things behind-the-scenes and there's been a hunt to solve it and see what the unearthed messages have to say.

I'm not sure how popular a breakdown would be here, so for now I'll just throw my TL;DR interpretation of what the solution means. If you want to learn more, here are two videos that do a good job breaking down what players know so far:

All games made by CDPR are now connected. Exactly how that connection works is still unknown. From what I gather there are two major possibilities:
  1. Shared multiverse. This is dumb, and I hope they don't do it.
  2. Nested universes. Kinda interesting, reminds me of Re:boot from my Saturday morning cartoon days. Essentially, Witcher 3 is a real game that was made in the Cyberpunk universe. And some NPCs in 2077 have figured out that they are not real, they are a part of a simulation. Which they take to mean the world of 2077 that they inhabit, is a game inside some other universe. I postulate CDPR's next IP will have Cyberpunk 2077 and it's sequels exist as games inside it's universe/history. This also brings more questions as to what the AIs beyond the Blackwall are up to. Do they know they're in a simulation? Do they communicate with whomever controls the simulation?
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Ciri says she traveled to a universe where people had 'metal in their heads' so it always seemed pretty clear to me that they were tangentially connected in that rather superfluous way all multiverse shit is.
 
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Ashkenazi Porn Actress said:
I find it quite fitting that trusting Futuristic Hillary Clinton and the glow-in-the-dark CIA FIA nigger is barely less devastating than blowing your fucking brains out on the roof.
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You're better off trusting Arasaka if your only goal is make V live anyway. They're clearly lying to you in their ending to turn you into a servant of the corp, but they removed Johnny and have likely healed V. Why would Hanako ask for you to be her merc in the ending where you walk away if that wasn't the case?
 
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Mega Black said:
You're better off trusting Arasaka
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You're never better off trusting a corp. Look at how even relatively low level ones like Zetatech will fuck over Vik after buying him out.

NUSA/Militech's evil is in their ability to lie to themselves that they're doing good. At no throughout the entirety of PL does Reed ever do something morally good and is just a battered wife that believes it is doing good despite it only ever resulting in the death of everyone around him and every contact he establishes. It never benefits anyone but NUSA and Militech. You are getting fucked by every single person in mission. And they all also believe the shit they tell you because they break at any moment they deal with the weight of their action. Even the presidential cheeks I you wanted to clap at first actually believes the shit she says.

Why any version of suicide or suicide mission is the "good" ending is because it's a death on your own terms. You're denying a corp the ability to choose how you die and your place on one of their spreadsheets. You never lost your agency to make the choice for yourself. The new PL ending is a bad ending not because you lost your friends, your former occupation and its associated freedoms, your ability to use implants, and your edgerunner status at all. You can't live apart from society but must be a full on slave to it. It's all you can do: keep your nose down and accept the abuse as a shell of who you were.
 
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@Sniperwoof As resident Cyberpunk tranny, the accountant in the mission to replace the colonel, dialogue calls it a he and the model is male, but the voice is clearly a testosterone wrecked woman, right? I can't find who the VA is online. So there's another tranny that isn't the bartender/monster truck enthusiast.
 
11 Herbs and Spices said:
@Sniperwoof As resident Cyberpunk tranny, the accountant in the mission to replace the colonel, dialogue calls it a he and the model is male, but the voice is clearly a testosterone wrecked woman, right? I can't find who the VA is online. So there's another tranny that isn't the bartender/monster truck enthusiast.
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Idk, can you kill them? If not it's probably a Youtube troon like Sphere Hunter. All the influencer/streamer cameo NPCS are marked as essential because of fucking course they are.
 
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