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mysteriousgreenbean · 4 months

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Best Cyberpunk 2077 ending?

Recently I finished Cyberpunk 2077. Again. First time I finished it soon after it was released. Now I played through it again, to experience the DLC and see the whole system overhaul. After 230h in game and gathering all achievements, I finished it off by seeing the new main game ending introduced.

It of course left me emotionally devastated, as most Cyberpunk endings, but aside that it also got me thinking - which ending is the best?

More specifically: which ending is best for the characters involved?

It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway - heavy spoilers below for Cyberpunk 2077 with Phantom Liberty DLC.

We have variety of different endings with different results and judging which is best for specific characters may be a little problematic. So let's just focus on easiest way to approach that - on the base of who lives and who dies. As a general rule (with few exceptions which I'll explore later) - living is better than dying. So of course best scenario is where everyone of interest is alive, while everyone being dead would be the worst (...which, again, is not necessarily true).

Exploring that for every important NPC of the game would take a lot of time, so I'll disregard it. Especially that it would require judging who we want to live and who we want to die...

Now, the story is about V with Johnny Silverhand's engram, so that's who I'll focus on. So best ending for them is probably the one where they both get to live.

Now, given that a lot of themes are about thinning the line between life and death, we can't just always say for sure if someone is dead or not. So I'll be describing the status of each person with three possible values - dead, alive and edge. Edge for now is a catch-all for all the scenarios where it is not completely clear if someone is either alive or dead. We'll explore edges later if necessary.,

Path of least resistance

V puts a bullet through their head, ending her and Silverhand's life on the spot. It is quite peaceful actually, but reaction of their friends in the credits is heart-breaking.

V - dead

Silverhand - dead

That's easily not the ending we're looking for. Do not recommend.

The Devil

V sells themselves to Arasaka, helps to end Yorinobu's regime and is in the end treated on the space station. Let's trust what Arasaka says assume that Johnny is shredded. Probably true - it's not like they need him anymore. He proved plenty dangerous even after death, so probably that's better for them.

Unfortunately, changes to V's DNA were irreversible, so V gets a choice - return to Earth and live out the last 6 months before death or sign to Secure Your Soul programme and allow to be digitalized. So depending on the choice, the result is as follows:

V - dead/edge

Silverhand - dead

To be clear - I refuse "lives 6 more months" to be taken as alive. Yes, V is technically alive at the end of the game, but has probably less than half a year to enjoy life, before dying in pain. It's better than being dead immediately, but I still count it as dead. Being an engram is counted as edge. So technically this ending is better than path of least resistance, but only by tiny edge..

The Star/The Sun

Path to both endings is a little different, but in both Johhny ends up part of Alt beyond Blackwall. In The Star V leaves the city with Aldecados, while in The Sun, V stays as living legend in Night City. But in both scenarios V suffers from irreversible damage and is just living last six months of their life.

V - dead

Silverhand - edge

But hey, it's better than The Devil at least! I mean - you may be dead, but at least you didn't sell yourself to Arasaka!

Temperance

This is what happens if V decides to leave body to Silverhand. Johnny gets to live in V's body, while V joins Alt beyond the Blackwall. At this point body belongs to Johnny, so there's no doomsday clock above him.

V - edge

Johnny - alive? edge?

Let's stay here for a moment, because this is where it starts getting complicated. I'm using edge mark rather generously and it's time to figure out what it actually means.

Edge = unalive

For all intents and purposes you might claim that Johnny is alive in Temperance ending and you wouldn't be wrong, most likely. We met quite a lot of Silverhand's friends from the past and none of them had any doubt about talking to actual Johnny. So when he got actual body for himself, it is like he got a second life, right? From my perspective - yes. From your perspective - also yes. From perspective of any of his friends - yes as well.

But not from perspective of Johnny himself.

You see - we're dealing with engrams here. And it is fairly well explained how do they work. Engram is basically a digital copy of a person. "Copy" being a keyword here. It is not "uploading your psyche to computer", but rather "killing the original and creating a program that perfectly simulates it".

You know ChatGPT. You can instruct it to write like specific person - many people create chatbots based on ChatGPT, that act as fictional (or not) characters. But those are not living people. ChatGPT is basically just very advanced word prediction algorithm - similar to those you have on your own smartphone. But it is not a conscious being just because it simulates one.

That means, that all my use of edge up to now is completely invalid! There's no edge! If engram is just ChatGPT-esque algorithm, then V is always dead after interacting with Mikoshi! And Johnny is just always dead, as he starts the game as engram, there's no way to make him alive!

That's a bummer, because it would just mean that status for both Johnny and V in any ending we considered until now is just

V - dead

Johnny - dead

We can't really have it that way, so we should do something about it, but what exactly?

What is life?

We know that in Cyberpunk world there are actual, true, conscious AIs. Usually malicious, but so are many humans, so let's not hold that against them now. Is such conscious AI actually a person? How do you even now if AI is conscious?

Those questions are deeply philosophical, but thankfully - I do not have to answer them here! In Cyberpunk true AIs are assumed as a given, everyone just knows they exists, usually behind the Blackwall. How did anyone come to definite conclusion that those AI are actually conscious? I have no idea, but for the sake of this post - I'm just taking their word for it!

If they are conscious, capable of change and learning, then I believe it's more than enough to rule, that such AI is alive. By the same token - engrams created from the Soulkiller are probably alive as well. If it is actually possible to store human psyche on a shard, then it should be possible to say, that psyche is alive. Then I think we can treat engram as a person. Same person, as the one from which engram was created, but not THE same. It's the same prerogative as cloning somebody - you have duplicate of that person, but when you perform that, you have a clone and an original.

So if we care about V, then we probably care also about V's engram.

Engram is a person, just not necessarily human

Let's try to look at those endings with above assumptions then! Johnny is always dead, V never met actual Johnny, so let's focus on his engram then!

Path of least resistance

V - dead

Silverhand's engram - dead

Nothing changes here, still just death.

The Devil

Now, depending on last choice, V either dies, or V's engram persists. Johnny's engram is shredded anyway, so status is as follows:

V - dead

V's engram - dead/alive

Silverhand's engram - dead

Same as above, if you go back to earth, V's engram is dead as "never born". If you create it, it is alive. It is a living in captivity in Arasaka's databanks though...

The Star/The Sun

V - dead

V's engram - dead

Silverhand's engram - edge

V dies at the moment of being extracted by Alt. V's engram goes back to V's body and dies few months later. Silverhand's engram stays on edge, as here it is truly hard to discern if it is alive. Technically - it becomes part of Alt. But then to what capacity does he stay himself? He probably is not fully himself, but he also is not dead, so edge seems like perfect classification.

Temperance

V - dead

V's engram - edge

Silverhand's engram - alive

Similar to Start/Sun ending, but V's and Silverhand's engram switch places. Because body's DNA was adjusted for Silverhand, the engram stays alive.

V is not too lucky, as stays dead in every scenario now... but at least their engram has a chance to live on! We could try changing it to numbers to get some context!

Let's assume dead has value of 0, edge is 1 and alive is 2.

With that scale Path of least resistance gets 0 points (as all three relevant people are dead). The Devil gets 2 points if V participates in Secure Your Soul programme. The Star/The Sun gets only 1 point, while Temperance gets whole 3 points!

Which would suggest Temperance being best endings for concerned parties... And this is saying something, if "best" ending gives you 3 points out of 6 possible...

Though it is important to note, that you never actually expect both engram and its source to exists at the same time. Soulkiller kills the body and creates a copy of the mind. So expecting both V and V's engram to exist at the same time is kind of pointless. So actually achievable maximum amount of points is 4 (which would mean that both V or V's engram and Silverhand's engram are alive). And 3 out of 4? Sounds much better.

Let's have a look at the ending that inspired me to write all that, shall we?

The Tower

V - alive

Silverhand's engram - dead

You go with FIA, they wipe Silverhand out, V lives. So it's just 2 points out of 4 on our scale.

So Temperance is best, case closed!

...no, not really.

Because of course this scale counts only how many people live. Which is of course some way of measuring it, but there's one, another, tiny important aspect of that.

We're playing as V. V doesn't want to die. Unless your V is fine with death (which is completely valid approach by the end of the game), then probably V tries anything possible, to actually get out alive. And I mean ALIVE alive. If I were V put before all those endings (knowing their results) - I really wouldn't like any of those from the base game. Why? Because I would be DEAD in all of them. Yeah, engram of me gets to live in some of them and that's cool, but it's not what I'm after. I don't want a copy of me alive, I want ME to be alive.

So going by this logic, unless your V came to the conclusion, that they are able to sacrifice their life for Johnny's engram, then V has only one ending to choose from - The Tower from Phantom Liberty.

Now, to live V needs to sacrifice Johnny. Needs to basically sacrifice So Mi - because to achieve this ending, you need to give her out to FIA, when she is basically consumed by Blackwall. Stripped of her own consciousness, she still is "operational", but she described this fate as "worse than death". I guess if we count her in, then in this ending she is on edge, but if what she expected is true - this edge would probably be counted as -1. She literally begs V to kill her, instead of being sentenced to that fate.

And V's life also changes after this! Spends two years in a coma, romantic interest moves on, friends move on, basically everyone assumes her dead (and given V's occupation and situation - I really don't blame them). Then V learns, that any combat cyberware is out of a question! V is alive, but merc V is dead. It is a transformation, not dissimilar to creation of an engram - the difference being that it is the same V here always, but to some extent they need to die and be reborn for it. So price for it is pretty steep.

So there's no best ending?

That's one of the things I really love about this game. There's no "good" ending. All ending are bitter-sweet to some extent, though proportions and intensity of bitter and sweet may differ. Cyberpunk shows us late-capitalistic dystopia, that sucks for everybody. There's no "really good" endings. It's always a mess and everyone can look at it differently. And that's a horrifying beauty of this setting. And life, I suppose.

#cyberpunk 2077 #cp2077 #phantom liberty #johnny silverhand #so mi song #cp2077 spoilers #rpg #endings #chatgpt

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