That shit pisses me off. Either make a stand or don't.
I took that advice to heart and started a more stone cold killer V playthrough. Everybody's got to go at some time, am I right?
I got recomendations of Josh Strife Hayes videos and in one of them he is talking about the difference between sandbox and theme park video games. Theme Park games are where you boot the game and have the option to go for Ride A, Ride B, Ride C, etc. Specific content that is self contained. Sandbox games are where you are given all the tools you want and then make your own fun. Cyberpunk falls clearly into this category and I decided to make another playthrough using the only playing style I liked: netrunning and netrunning only.
I made a femV this time, max int, max tech and max cool. Stayed with 3 body and 3 reflex on very hard. I also refrained from getting any cyber implants that were not eyes or brain implants. I also refrained from using guns because 3 body means her wrists would probably snap in half from the recoil alone. Since I'm maxing tech I allowed myself using grenades in case I'm found out to blind my enemies and run to a new cover location. I fucked off from doing the boxing quests (maybe I'll justify it later as Johny influencing her decisions, I don't know if I want to deal with the boxing quests with no body, no gorilla arms, etc).
Those were my rules for having fun and I actualy had fun. The game gave me the tools to enjoy it on it's own and that was what I did so I guess it is a good sandbox.
An example that comes to mind: in the BD editors/child murder quests if you walk around the compound, to the right looking north, without entering there is a door in the building to the right. You need a little tech to open it and then some parkour (without double jump, it's a bitch) and you can bypass the entirety of the area. It's something that I noticed, there's a million different way to enter any compound, steal or murder so props to the level designers for that.
Another example was the gun for hire mission where I have to kill Vic Vega (a Pinkerton type). I loaded up my spells, sat 200 meters from the building, legendary ping to highlight all hackable devices (through walls), the guy was in his office in front of his laptop, hack into the laptop through the walls, I can see him through the camera, change my spells to have sonic shock and suicide, sonic shock him so he's invisible in the network, make him blow his brains out.
One thing I saw in the forums is that people bitch a lt about not being able to run a stealthy netrunner because the moment they try to use a demon on an enemy they launch a trace on them. These people never read that sonic shock exists for that exact purpose, to isolate enemies from the network. The idea is to plan your route ahead of time and the get on murdering. I remove sonic shock from my spell load, cast breach to lower the RAM requirement and buff myself, then hack a camera, load sonic shock, cast ping; ping counts as a debuff so automatically all enemies get loaded with cripple and sonic shock, they are on alert but not combat; since I have so many buffs on me and the cyberdeck that cuts cd's as well as upload time I have turned the single target spell into an aoe. I go one by one so fast their model animation doesn't even notice when they die (insert "you're already dead" meme).
And even being OP as all hell, I still fuck up from time to time if I don't account for enemies seeing me, turrets, cameras, etc. Little details that blow my cover and I'm sniped from 500 meters by a handgun.
tl;dr, I play the game to have fun and I am having fun, the same way I did with Borderlands so many years ago. Is it an unfinished buggy mess that didn't live to the hype? Absolutely!
But in the end, it's still a game I bought on sale after 1 year of patches after the consooomers suffered through the worst of the launch.
Maybe one day I'll do a "Media" V, where I collect all the data shards from all the side quests to put the puzzle together how all the missions are related. Apparently Jotaro was buying his bd slaves from a Korean guy (that you also kill), this Korean boyo had full protection from the police (it is in a datashard in the downtown district), the investigator that confronted the bent cop (he was supplying people that are detained across the border by millitech) she is sent to an insane asylum and you break her out by a quest from the fixer Capitan Reyes. Jotaro was also in bed with the father/son duo that scrolled the BD's - the father/son duo that edited the BD's got footage from Hal Cantos; Hal Cantos is the employer in an SOS gig from regina where you have to save him from a Mox that went crazy when he tried to roll an XBD (from the father son duo) on her. And that's how the Mox put 2 and 2 together and ordered the hit on Jotaro.
And the final nail (pun very much intended), when you finish the quest with the Cruciffixion and walk back through the studio you can hear 2 NPC's talking about the XBD where the preacher's son gets murdered. They were the ones who ordered the hit on the son in the first place, because the preacher worked for that very same studio "4th wall entertainment".
