The sci-fi world of Night City is a cruel, harsh one. It chews people up and spits them out, dead. Protagonist V loses one of their closest friends at the start of Cyberpunk 2077, but a lot of players, myself included, really don’t care.
When Jackie dies a couple of hours into the story, V is traumatized. He’s been their best friend for six months, but all we see of that is a brief montage of crime sprees and fast cars. It’s a cool moment that sets the tone of their relationship, but we as players don’t have any time to form our own opinions of him.
Reddit user protossvoid shared their disinterested feelings toward the choom, and many agreed. “Maybe if the heist happened more in the middle of the story, like at 50% or 60% of progress through the game, I would’ve connected more with him, like actually doing multiple missions with him would’ve been cooler than the Sandra Dorsett thing only,” Protossvoid wrote.
“He was killed off too early in the game, and those six months V spends with Jackie should have been playable missions instead of a cutscene,” BeaveVillage wrote. “They should have given us a whole chapter with him,” Juken added.
This sentiment echoes a larger criticism I have of Cyberpunk overall. V is terminal. They’re on a very tight deadline to get the Relic out of their head before they flatline, so why would any player spend hundreds of hours completing side quests that are, relative to the urgency of an imminent death, utterly pointless?
Rather than have the Relic installed right at the start of the game, it should be around the midpoint. That way, we have time to make a name for V, and the side quests we do are more about tying up loose ends than only just starting to make a name for the merc.
This isn’t just a Cyberpunk 2077 issue, a lot of open-world RPGs fall into this trap. Fallout 3 sees you pause searching for your dad to go and collect Nuka Cola Quantum and bobbleheads, or explore Vaults. Horizon Zero Dawn encourages you to delay the fight against the robot scourge in favor of helping out townies and collecting more armor. Hopefully, these issues will be fixed when the Phantom Liberty DLC launches.
