Cyberpunk 2077 Story Layers
One of the things I love about this game, and one of the things I don’t think gets much appreciation are the layers of story. It’s common to skip dialogue, skip reading all the little story chonklets on the chips you find around, and when that happens, a bunch of the story gets totally missed. There are a bunch of little subplots going on in Night City that don’t involve V directly and make the city feel more alive.
To list just a few:
The chief of the Night City Police Department is super duper corrupt! Among other things, he pays off some Scavs to murder an entire homeless camp and sets up some of his own officers to be killed by Maelstrom because they’re getting too big for their britches (read: they’re actually decent people and questioning his orders).
There’s a new drug around the city: Glitter! It’s being manufactured by the Tiger Claws and, during the course of the story, is trafficked by a corp and results in the death of the son of the CEO of a different corp.
Jotaro, a guy you go after in Kabuki pretty early on at his club, has his fingers in just about every questionable pie in the Night City underworld. You find his associates and references to his operations all over the city.
It’s really interesting to me to see what’s going on and the world turning where V isn’t involved. In some ways it’s kind of appropriate that a lot of players miss that stuff - V has a lot on their mind, like survival. They probably wouldn’t be reading every little bit of information that comes their way either.
This’ll probably be a multi-part ramble. Next time I’ll probably go on about what the hell the Arasakas are doing, because the whole situation around them doesn’t make a lot of sense on its surface.
