Keanu confirmed that he was hired in 2018 and that he asked for a bigger role. It's obvious the rpg they were making was scrapped and they changed the story to accommodate their celebrity. Because the focus was now on keanu they had to make the story linear so he could get the spotlight and prevent the player from deviating.

Well, I guess I just give up now because it looks like I have unique perspective on what RPG is all about.

For me it is more like theater actor play - you pretend to be someone else, despite your actual ability to act differently. And CP2077 has that ability build in already and a potential to make it even better in near future.
Yet for majority of people RPG seems to be more like playing with dolls - try to make you doll better and better to the point of being perfect. Collect stuff, improve stats, customize look and feel, etc. In that aspect CP2077 is of course limited and that was my point about source of disappointment.

As for world impact - I have already said that - that is not what Cyberpunk is all about.
With each purchase they give a CP2020 handbook. Open it please on page 25 and read short part about "Cinematic" character creation process. For me it was always understood as "you should avoid making a super-hero like characters".
Now if you saw from CDPR advertisements that you will be a witcher-like person, altering world scale reality around you, you have full right to be disappointed because that is not what Cyberpunk ever was in its core.

Two final thoughts before I close the doors behind me:
- glass half full vs glass half empty. For me CP2077 is half full and I see it can be better. Yet for many it is half empty and they keep trying to spill the rest of it.
- it is about the journey not the destination - final outcome may be the same, but ability to get there in totally different ways is what I value. CP2077 has a lot of just that.

And now thank you. I'm off to play this not-an-rpg.
I will make my 3rd character, which will play completely different then previous two. After Corp Tech and Punk Netrunner this time it will be pure brute castaway from nomad clan. And I will try hard to finish game in yet another possible way fitting the character build.

I still wish you all that some day you could understand what I'm talking about and discover new way of enjoining RPG games.
Happy new year everyone!

After seeing Keanu in this game and the impact it has, I am a strong proponent of NOT using celebrities in game, unless the game is based on a movie (and even then it really needs to be done carefully). It's just fine and more fitting to have a rendered character or have it rendered after an unknown actor / model.

I thoroughly enjoyed the opposite, where the protagonist for the Witcher Netflix series was chosen to look like the in-game Geralt.

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To be fair it's not Keanu's fault CDPR changed the game for him. They could have kept their focus instead of turning into celebrity worshiping simps.

Better question is probably who his dungeon masters were, because regardless of the game system, it sure sounds like they either hated his guts or just plain sucked at their job. Or both.

Since you asked, it was CP2020, Call of Cthulhu, some variations of typical D&D and hell of a lot local flavors (most memorable one was placed in Aliens movie reality). As for GM's you won't rather know them as it was local group of friends and their friends. I was even GMing myself for some time.
When we started it was back in the "dice rolls rules" days but we quickly transitioned to "dice when you really must, otherwise follow story telling narration" before it become popular.

Each game was of course played very different but for what you seem to refer to - and disrespect it too as I feel - was our CP2020 sessions.
They were build on a canvas I already mentioned - here is a group of punks with diff background. They are either familiar or meet just now. Driven by accidental chain of events or intentional plot of higher powers (be it powerful fixer, a corp agent or some mighty runner spy) they are now faced with an adventure, which will either just let them stay alive or if successful will make their reputation increase and bring a lot of EDs for new outfits, implants or what have you.
Yet most of the time it did not go well. Usually at least one died during the course of adventure because of either pure recklessness of the characters (role played that way) or by human desire to accomplish near impossible tricks and failing all last hope checks for luck.

Normally a single adventure took a few days over a course of some weeks. Whoever survived got a chance to increase power of the character (sort of level up) and those that died were "punished" by the need to create new char with a background that would let them tag along or they have to wait for next adventure.

I specifically remember one friend of mine (who passed away few years back - may he rest in peace) who played a quite clever techie. He always pick save and slow approach and somehow manage to survive over the course of multiple adventures. It has made his character so powerful at one point, that he himself decided t is time to retire this character. And so it become a strong back ground character for our future adventures. A kind of a fixer nomad leaving in his armored RV with access to impossible tech and some very edge resources.
Some really great stories come from this retirement - starting or turning point in many adventures were build on that.

But what is critical here is that as much as it was fun to watch how this characters builds up his legend, it was very clear to everyone, including the player playing that character, that after certain power was achieved it is not fun to play anymore. There was no challenge in normal situations and only way to scale it up would irreversibly change the world.
But for it to happen it had to move out from Night City. We all understand that back then, almost a quarter of century ago and feels like yesterday, that Night City is a scene for the play. You can decorate it, you can play whatever but the scene always has to be there.
For the same reason despite the fact that Johnny bombed Arasaka tower in 2023, Arasaka is still standing strong in Night City. And the same reason you can kill thousands of Maelstorms or other ganggers and yet they are still there on the streets, holding a district and making their business.

Anyway... this has now become a huge off topic and place of memories.

But also a realization for me that perhaps my perspective on CP2077 feels so different then what masses feel for that particular reason of having very strong and personal relation with Cyberpunk 2020.
Thanks for, even if unintended, letting me discover that. Hope you can respect that a bit more now.

Now I'm off for sure.

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Way back in the 90s we used to have a Smoke and play Shadow run on the floor, We all had some crazy character Ideas.

I didn't expect the same sort of Variation or depth to be in CP2077, I do however Expect the Cop Ai reactions and player interaction with police be fixed.

That's how the setting works. Maelstrom isn't an organisation, it's a poser gang. They're not exactly a united front. Cops are largely the same, it's Night City PD; they're more of a protection racket than an actual police force. They're not going to put a whole lot of effort into chasing you down unless someone pays them to do so.

I suspect the source of a lot of complaints is because people are expecting some kind of heroic RPG akin to D&D or Shadowrun. Cyberpunk's central tenets since CP2013 are the antithesis of that; there's no such thing as a hero in Cyberpunk. One of the central themes is apathy, you can't change the world because the world simply doesn't give a shit, the best you can hope for is to make things slightly less worse for yourself. Kill a few thousand Maelstrom gangers and nobody is going to care, if you're really lucky you might get some minor side story spot on local news between whatever the latest Rockerboy gossip is.

Individuals no, but if a boostergang rolls your neighbourhood and not mine I don't go out and hunt down that boostergang, I just give thanks they hit your neighbourhood and not mine - after of course rolling over to your neighbourhood to check they didn't leave behind anything valuable I could take. A poseurgang isn't so much a gang as a subculture. The closest real world example would probably be Anon or similar groups that emerged from 4Chan. There isn't one over-arching Maelstrom, Maelstrom is just a bunch of people (and in a city of 10 million, that bunch numbers in the hundreds of thousands) who happen to share similar tastes and views. Some of them form gangs, because that's what you do in the bad parts of Night City. There's no unifying organisation there though; a Maelstrom gang will usually attack other gangs for much the same reason mods fought rockers, but they're just as likely to be feuding with the Maelstrom gang in the next neighbourhood for saying blue LEDs are better than red LEDs.
In terms of the 'response' you talk about, if you could hang around Maelstrom bars or view their chatrooms you'd probably find you were the subject of a few hundred conspiracy theories ranging from being a deluded serial killer to being an inside job, corpo stooge or even fake, depending on the particular politics of whoever is making the assertion. Undoubtedly some Maelstrom would want to hunt you down to demonstrate their strength or similar, but it's equally likely others would want to use you to improve their own position, or simply go to ground and hope to escape your notice. You wouldn't be the first serial killer or vigilante to target a specific poseurgang, you won't be the last. I'm going from the sourcebooks. While there's a few things that could be pointed at as a departure from how it 'should' work, the way the gangs are presented isn't one of them, at least in the generic sense. They could of course have had you dealing with specific gangs within the various poseurgangs and had you build or lose reputation with them, but that's getting into the narrative as much as the systemic elements, and my assumption would be they didn't go down that route because it simply didn't fit with the story they wanted to tell. Missions where someone paid a fixer for something to happen, that ultimately boil down to you murdering someone for money. Not entirely sure how that contradicts anything; if anything it would pretty much demonstrate it. If the cops wanted to arrest you for murder, they'd only need to call one of the fixers and ask for a copy of their receipts. So you're saying cyberpsychosis is real and Max Tac are simply protecting the public? How incredibly .. trusting of you :P

Cyberpsychos are a tool by the elite to remove those that could undermine them.

Werewolves Vampires and reptiles oh my!!.

It's really annoying that the police become hostile if you get close to them and that the police will also become hostile if you have your weapon out. It's like they hate V.

Was just hiding out inside the road killing max tac and cops with sniper, Cops are bothering me been running them down for last hour and bit the Ai is so rubbish