Sounds about right. The word "poser" hasn't crossed my mind in 20 years, because what does poser even mean in post-post-modern post-irony post-new-sincerity society? But this game and everyone connected with it are all posers.

Iu was trying to figure out what was up with the difficulty and it turns out that even at the highest difficulty with "hard core" mods it's just not very challenging as a shooter or an RPG. : | And somehow people have taken to the idea that if a game provides any challenge that makes it a "souls" game? Idk who taught gamers the term "power fantasy" but I wish they hadn't. I see it get dragged out a lot now for games that give players a bunch of win buttons wtihout really thinking about a coherent game design loop or play experience.

they fucked up the whole progression of the story and nothing fits

This is my personal pet thoery

I think CDPR didn't realize how popular Keanu would be, and so when they revealed him at E3 they had to panic and rewrite the game

Until recent patches, the game clearly indicated that Keanu was supposed to show up later and was shoehorned into quests. The first quest you're likely to do after being attacked by Silverhand in your apartment is to go get your car, which is crashed into. Until a very recent update, you and Keanu were buddy-buddy during that quest even if he just tried to kill you minutes before. In another instance, a character who you're shown working for during the 6 month timeskip acts as if they've never met you when you enter their territory for the first time

The fact there's about an hour long unskippable, barely interruptible segment between the No-Tell Motel and V getting turned loose on the open world, with a fakeout ending halfway through, really points to the heist being an end of act 2 shocking finale and all the Silverhand stuff would've been a late game act 3

Okay but with Shadowrun, unless the game has changed since I last checked, Shadowrunners are sinless, cash only, and generally live in places where there are no records to trace. That's why they can be shadowrunners - They're explicitly outside teh system. V has a car, apartment, and credit accounts in her own name. She's explicitly got a record and is on a first name basis with an NCPD inspector in the street kid start.

And hiding your face is as much of a genre convention as not doing that. Cruise gets new eyes (from a Japanese business man, I'm much more aware of all the orientalism since someone sent me some good articles last week) in Minority Report. Ahnold has to pull that tracker out of his nose and wear a robotic mask through customs in Total Recall. The rebels in the Matrix can operate because they're disconnected from the system, meaning the Machines can't just do a lookup on them and overwrite them. Neo asserting his identity outside the system of government names and identities is the culmination of his character arc. Armitage's team in Neuromancer is constantly skipping around the globe while being protected by the Wintermute AI. JC in Deus Ex is a top of the line infiltrator and commando whose allies include a pilot with a bleeding edge stealth helicopter, and evading government surveillance is a major plot point in Hong Kong. GitS is all about tracking down the puppetmaster who doesn't seem to exist in databases the way they should. SAC deals with the Individual Eleven, which are likewise very difficult to track down even for the government's Wizard level hackers. Moxie-land, one of my fave neo-cyberpunk or post-cyberpunk stories, is all about how your phone is your entire identity and ability to buy the things you need to survive and the government/corps can bring you to heel at any time by simply turning it off. Rainbows End, another neo or post cyberpunk, likewise deals extensively with identity and surveillance.

If I remember my Shadowrun, and it has admittedly be years, but not making too much noise was an important part of surviving a shadowrun. If you went too loud and someone with a "crush rats" line item noticed you then you'd have a Knight or Lone Star kill team kick your door in and slaughter you and everyone you know. The post you linked even says it;

The Man doesn't even need to know who you are to end you.

This is the final, and largest bit of the puzzle. The evidence left was a complete mess, and finally name was gotten, but that was all wasted time, effort and money. If a corp wants someone done in, they don't bother with assembly of evidence on their own dime. They hire a professional, deniable, disposable operative to do it.

They don't need to know much about you and they don't care. They give your face, name, and surveillance footage to a professional and a week or a month later the professional comes back a pair of eyes, a thumb, and a enough of an implant to pull a MAC address in neatly labelled ziploc bags. This is the antagonist of Johnny Mnemonic; The Yakuza knows who has their paydata. They send one professional to deal with it. He tracks them relentlessly. Molly and the assassin fight to the death under the Altanta Dome, Johnny says "We've got your stuff, leave us alone and we won't broadband it and everyone is happy", and that's that. Likewise, Blade Runner is all about the guy they send to get rid of you when you become annoying enough to notice.

Ultimately, what I view as a laziness, lack of interest, lack of thought put in to the plot and story typifies what I've come to extremely dislike about CP2077 and CP2013/Red/2020 in general. Mike's "Style over Substance" motto means the game has neither. Like, Shadrow? Huge developed world, lots of megacorps with their own identities and agendas, pretty deep history, some decent diegetic reasons for why things happen the way they do. Cyberpunk, on the other hand, seems very shallow on purpose. it engages with core themes and tropes of the genre in a very superficial way. It isn't interested in asking questions, not just because it doesn't want to, but I think really because it didn't occur to anyone that there were questions to ask.

Like you said, the genre has inclined towards completely empty, indulgent power fantasy. At max level V can casually slaughter infinite max-tac troops, something that makes no thematic or diegetic sense at all. It doesn't fit. At that point it's a super-villain story with barely a superficial vestige of cyberpunk left.

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open-world FPS power fantasy.

word. It's exactly the wrong genre for that. You can be a hyper-competent violence person, but there always has to be someone much bigger than you, who maybe doesn't even really understand you exist, who can make one phone call and crush you.

Right? It's so goddamn obvious! That scene, where the guy rips the towel rack off the wall and beats the living shit out of whoever told him to go to the restroom, is in every badass action movie. The character is wiping their ass or washing their face, then the scene cuts to the people outside, with the door in frame. And the people outside all have their guns ready. The people say something like "He's been in there a while", and there's a beat, and then the door explodes and the guy comes out and just starts wrecking people.

Like, protagonist picks up the idiot ball so the plot can advance, fine, you have to have a plot. But the whole first act was just idiot ball after idiot ball after idiot ball to the point it became really grating. This is my reward for reading massive amounts of sci fi and doing media analysis my whole life. i can't enjoy things anymore.

That's okay. My being a curmudgeonly bastard who can't suspend disbelief anymore is my problem. I'm glad you enjoy the game. If you like the action aspects and have strong FPS fundamentals you should give Necromunda; Hired Gun a try. It's a (pretty hardcore) FPS RPG where you start out pretty weak but gradually become a cybernetic war god running up walls, grappling across the map, and vaporizing armored underhive gangers with massive weapons and powerful augments.

The Ascent is a more conventional ARPG. You're a maintenance guy working for a megacorp when the corp very suddenly, very inexplicably goes dark. Now there's a huge goddamn power vacuum and all your fellow employees are legally non-people. You and some of your buddies and supervisors try to keep the lights on, other corps at bay, and figure out what the hell happened.

Prey and System Shock are hybrid FPS/RPGs. Less character development but both are quite good.

If you're more on the story side of things Red Strings Club and VA-11 Hall-A are story and character focused low-fi cyberpunk VNs.

Have fun, enjoy the game. Don't let miserable grognards like me ruin it for you.