I think I'm starting to get into the groove of Cyberpunk 2077. I think the game could do a little better job at tutorializing things, but I think I've more or less gotten the sense of how to upgrade my character. I still sometimes run into a Cyberpsycho that tears me apart super-quick, but I had a moment where I truly felt like I had "gotten" my character.
Focusing largely on Intelligence (though I'm not sure if I should be spreading my stats more widely or actually refunding everything to just go straight to the top with Int) my primary combat strategy is Quickhacks. Now that I've managed to purchase and upgrade some of these hacks (and upgrade my operating system, which is a piece of cybernetics that requires you to see a Ripperdoc) I've been able to pull off some super nasty things.
When on a mission to rescue a friend/associate from a place that makes "XBDs" (think the movie Strange Days, in which people make recordings of individuals' experiences to be able to live through them - normally this is something like fun sexy times. These are called "Braindances," or "BDs," but the black-market, real horrifying shit is referred to as either Black BDs or XBDs, which is stuff like snuff films and the like... kind of like in that movie, whose mere trailer gave me nightmares as a kid) I hopped up into a damaged building across from the one where the friend was being held, and took out the single guard sitting watching TV next to a computer console. Taking that guy out silently from behind, I hacked into the security system via the console, which gave me access to the security cameras. And from the vantage of the cameras, I was able to hack various other objects around the facility, drawing guards to various explosive objects with "Distract Enemies" and then detonating them with another quickhack. Those who weren't near any such objects, I simply hacked their cyberware directly, taking them down with Overheat and Short Circuit. With, I think, a single exception, none of this was with my own eyes, simply doing it via the cameras. Once the place was cleared out, I simply walked around and looted everyone.
It really made me feel like a legendary hacker, and while things were a bit messier down in the basement, it was one of those really satisfying times when everything felt like it was working as my character build was meant to.
I have an admittedly weird aversion to Cyberpunk as a genre. Maybe it's that the world it portrays is too much like the one that I live in. I mean, we're in a world where megacorp tech companies have absurd degrees of power and influence. I find it less fun that the genre depicts a world in which corporations and gangs are the biggest powers, with governments kind of hanging on as weak vestigial structures. The latter element in particular feels darkly relevant today, with the cheapening of America's government under the helm of the most unabashedly corrupt president in the country's history.
I guess when I think about stories built around betrayal and mistrust in a dark and grimy world, I gravitate more toward Cold War-era spy stories, where the big powers are the governments, and a lot of the darkness comes from the fact that both sides are so in the weeds about the tactical game of spycraft that they lose sight of the ideals that brought them into conflict in the first place.
Another thing that's kind of odd is that the characterization of the high-ranking "Corpos" is built very much around this kind of stoic Japanese honor, and also a focus on legacy. The real world's corporate overlords don't seem to be interested in building lasting institutions so much as getting while the getting's good. They're also much more strangely ideological, believing in weird science-fiction-y ideas without seeming to grasp that they'd be the villains in such stories.
Anyway, I'm curious to see how the game maps to the TTRPG system. Naturally, we've had plenty of games that are based on or at least inspired by TTRPGs. Baldur's Gate III works remarkably similarly to D&D 5E (with a few tweaks here and there). I believe the most recent edition of Cyberpunk is Cyberpunk RED, which is set between the eras of 2020 (the version from the 80s) and 2077 (not sure if there's a tabletop version of that or if it's just this game).
Funnily enough, having run a Ravnica-based D&D campaign for over six years now, I could for sure see a reimagining of the setting as a Cyberpunk one - just turn the Guilds into Megacorps and you're about 90% there. And hey, there's even precedent for Cyberpunk fantasy with Shadowrun. House Dimir is now an information technology corporation, the Orzhov Syndicate focuses on "corporate solutions." The Simic Combine is full-on biotech.
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