CD Projekt Red knows that there’s no success without pain, no legend without compromise. And that’s part of what makes …
This article will contain top-level spoilers for all of Cyberpunk 2077’s various endings, including the new ending that can be unlocked via the Phantom Liberty DLC. You have been warned.
In Night City, there are no happy endings. Early on, this is posited as an absolute truth in this universe. Everything has a cost – and seldom is that cost cheap. In the menus of Cyberpunk 2077, one of three deliberately mysterious ‘completion percentages’ ticks up towards protagonist V’s goal of becoming a legend. But that goal is, in many ways, incompatible with life. From the earliest moments of this narrative, the choice is outlined plainly: for joy, there must be death.
Fixer Dexter DeShawn even says this out loud during the build-up to the heist that serves as the climax of Cyberpunk’s excellent, protracted prologue. “Would you rather live in peace as Miss Nobody – die ripe, old, and smellin’ slightly of urine? Or go down for all times in a blaze of glory, smellin’ near like posies, ’thout seein’ your thirtieth?”
This thread runs right through Cyberpunk 2077. It is its lifeblood, in fact. Many major and side quests focus on the concept that in Night City you can be somebody for a short time, or a nobody forever. For V, with the personality of one of Night City’s most infamous somebodies eating away at their brain, there isn’t much choice. Death is coming anyway. Which is all well and good – stalking the streets as a nobody wouldn’t make a very good video game. Nevertheless, there is a glorious contradiction in V’s desires.
For the lion’s share of Cyberpunk 2077’s run-time, V is driven by two desires. The first is as mentioned: to become a city legend through fanciful feats in its underworld. The second is a baser desire: to find a way to simply survive the inexorable march of Johnny Silverhand’s identity into their psyche. It won’t kill V’s physical form – but eventually Johnny will overtake them, erasing the person they once were, supplanting their mind – and perhaps even their soul, if such a thing exists – with that of the terrorist rocker.
This paradigm is arguably the thing that makes V one of the most compelling and successful choice-driven audience-insert characters in gaming history. Their desires are less complicated than, say, Mass Effect’s Shepard, who wants to save the galaxy but can also make some truly boneheaded decisions that work against their goals in order to ensure the player can be a space asshole. The stakes in Cyberpunk are more personal; will V be collaborative with Johnny as the two share a headspace, or combative? Both make sense, depending on how you envision the mindset of your V, and there’s next to none of that odd choice-related cognitive dissonance.
The contradiction, of course, is that V is repeatedly told that becoming a legend involves burning out.
