this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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[–] KobaCumTribute@hexbear.net 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There was an entire side mission series that was both helping the cops

There are only two questlines vaguely like that that I remember: the one with River who gets fired after the first one because of his investigation into the mayor's assassination which the NCPD was involved in, and one from the DLC where a small group of crooked cops from one of the most desperately impoverished and contaminated with industrial pollution neighborhoods find their consciences and start stealing from corporations to help that community and ultimately die for their trouble. Like there's a pretty clear "the system by its nature does not allow police to be good, and if a person with a conscience becomes a cop they either quit or get forced out" theme running through all of those quests.

featured the extraordinary line associated with it, said by the protagonist character, of "not all cops are bastards"

V is an absolute dumbass with no political education and an incredibly incoherent worldview who says cringe shit constantly. It's kind of a big structural flaw in the narrative, that they're at once trying to make a customizable RPG but also tell a tight narrative story with this one specific character who's enough of a dipshit to stumble into and facilitate that story.

I'm sure it does, but it wallows in the "everyone's an asshole" ambiguity there the way Bioshock Infinite did with the Vox versus Columbia's old ruling class.

It really doesn't. You choose between the FIA and Songbird and while I have no idea what the FIA route entails the Songbird route had none of the dumbass "fighting the system is as bad as the system, actually" shit that Bioshock did. Like it's clear cut enough that even V manages to chew the feds out for being empty pieces of shit doing horrible things for bad and empty reasons.

You also set up a straw effigy of YA protagonists defeating everything with love and friendship as the conjured up (only?) alternative

Reread the initial point I made: I drew that up as being the sort of cliched standard storytelling that contemporary commentary was judging the first Witcher game against and why they found it shocking and celebrated it. It had nothing to do with you at all and I'm sorry for not being clear enough with how I phrased and laid things out.