I’ll keep it brief:
I wasn’t familiar with the Cyberpunk® franchise until the video game was released. I heard about it, and seen the trailers, but that was it. When the game released, I had just gotten my hands on a brand-new gaming laptop, and was looking for something good to test the hardware. After hearing all the good things about the game from my friends, I decided to give it a try myself and purchased the game. As soon as I booted it up, created my V, and saw him fix his broken nose in the mirror of the El Coyote Cojo bar, I knew I was in for something special.
I was immediately captivated by the density and detail of Night City. The people and characters didn’t feel like NPCs, they felt like real people! I felt real connections with the characters, and even shed a few real tears for some of them. I wasn’t playing as V, I was V! The story gripped me harder than anything I had experienced in a long time. I was hooked.
I played every single day till completion. I didn’t touch it again until Phantom Liberty came out, mostly due to real life stuff getting in the way, but also because I knew that new content and updates were coming. I honestly didn’t think they could top what was accomplished with the main story, but boy, was I wrong. I was hooked, yet again, to the complexity of the world and characters. It was then, that I decided to look deeper into the lore, and I saw just how deep the rabbit-hole goes.
This, obviously, got me to find that the game was based on a tabletop RPG, which I had very little experience in. It also got me to watch the Edgerunners series on Netflix, and that’s when things turned from curiosity, into obsession.
The fact that the entire show was just a blip in the overall timeline of the world, made me see the true story-telling potential this universe holds. This has more potential than Star Wars, which has been tearing holes in it’s source material for quite some time now. I now have new, gigantic goal to work towards…