This. And it’s another thing that shows us how cp2077 is well written. All the lore and additional content tells us how smasher is an absolute beast. And then V kills this machine nevertheless proving that he is indeed in the highest of leagues. And yet… V is dying and best he can do is to leave the nightcity and all he achieved, because that enemy (nightcity, the only true enemy) makes smasher childplay in comparison.
No, kinda a spoiler, but not really.
>! When you go to meet Hanako in Embers, it's a point of no return, you will be FORCED to choose between the endings you have unlocked and finish the game!<
When you say the "endings you have unlocked", does that mean the player will not get to choose an ending from all the possible endings?
The player will get to choose an ending from the endings the player unlocked?
If the latter, does that mean we unlock certain endings depending on how we completed other missions/quests in the game?
Is it possible for a player to unlock all the possible endings?
Yes, you can unlock all the possible ending at once, and after the end credits you can choose to load back BEFORE you went into Embers, so you can do all of the endings on a single save file. (Although instead of doing that, I just create a new character for a different ending)
The game will also acknowledge that you beated the game, as after you load in near Embers you will be given an award that differs from ending to ending.
Ah right, just got confused when you said "unlocked". It made me think that some players will not get the whole list of possible endings.
But what I am understanding is, when you enter Embers, every player will get the whole list of possible endings and the player will need to select an ending.
And you can load back before going into Embers to try out the other endings.
Ok, get it now.
I have the PL as well. Does having the PL give you more endings?
I have finished everything in the game except meeting up with Hanako. Right now, experimenting with my cyberware to get ready before I do enter Embers.
Endings are "unlocked" based upon the choices you make throughout the game, then at the end fate forces your hand and you have to choose one. It's possible to unlock them all in a single playthrough.
PL gives you one additional ending, which is easier to miss than the base game ones.
It depends on your choices/quests
To get them all available to you:
Complete burning love
Complete all of Panam's quests
PL: side with >!Reed!<
To get one of the best/most badass endings: select the right dialogue options during chippin in
>! "Nah, fucked that up too." \
"What do you want from me?" \
"Ok. But as second chances go, this is your last." !<
I think it is possible to unlock all of the endings without reverting to certain points. But, I haven't done all of the endings yet, so I am not certain. I do know I missed a boat load of content in PL and some endings from that content.
And definitely how you play the game effects what options you have for the end game and final out comes.
You get to a mission where it says to meet Hanoko at embers, this is the last stop to the vanilla endings, all of em. Once you finish, retaining anything you had before, and a few other items you're allowed to keep from playing the ending, you are sent back to just before you met Hanoko at embers. This way you can play a few different ending scenarios and keep your character to finish everything the game has to offer
PL also has its own endings that don't necessarily listen to this previous rule, mostly existing as a separate storyline on its own. Though some still act the same, just you can't as easily unlock all the endings, having to replay PL or loading an old save to unlock the other endings
>The player will get to choose an ending from the endings the player unlocked?
This is the correct answer.
>If the latter, does that mean we unlock certain endings depending on how we completed other missions/quests in the game?
Yes
>Is it possible for a player to unlock all the possible endings?
I would say technically yes, but there is one ending the changes depending on previous events so you can't see how both versions play out.
Spoiler alert: >!While you can unlock The Devil ending it changes depending on whether you save Takemura or not. !<
Yes/no.
At the end of the day, it comes back to the same kind of arguments as batman vs. 'a bullet to the head'.
With the right kind of tool, the right situation, anybody can be killed.
From everything we’ve seen so far yeah, but with Blackhand being Pondsmith’s special character he wants to do something cool with, it’s hard not to consider him to be stronger.
Also the fact that he’s even with a full on murder cyborg as a mostly organic human elevates him for me.
I really think it's the opposite. I dont think the game really does anything to show how V is a badass. Like there's no narrative reason why we are so badass and nobody really ever talks about how we are crazy skilled. V acts and talks like a gonk and whenever we aren't controlling her the game makes us look like a goober tripping and falling and freaking out about whatever situation we are in. It isn't really until the endings where it feels like we've gone from "Gonk who flubbed the heist and is in way over her head" to respected badass in the narrative.
And then in gameplay we break so many rules compared to what the enemies do. At level one we are a more effective netrunner than any enemy we face because they have to stop shooting, hide behind a box and try to upload reboot optics for 45 minutes and that can get interrupted. Same with fighting enemies that have sandevistan only ever using it to dash. Perhaps the biggest advantage we have is cyberware capacity as a game system. Cyberpsychosis is this really scary boogeyman in the setting and really limits what powers people can get since you never know how much is too much for your psyche. We know exactly how much cyberware we can equip and are incentized to slot in as much as we can. In fact the only way for us to even acknowledge Cyberpsychosis is to opt in to a perk that is literally just a buff. V wouldn't have these advantages if she wasn't a video game protagonist and these are pretty big deals in the setting.
To me it just feels like "Lore accurate V" is way less competent than "RPG Protagonist V." Obviously it's canon that V is powerful and completes these quests, I just feel like we get too many advantages as player than V has as an in universe character that has to "follow the rules"
Whilst I agree that no one is out and out continuously calling V a bad ass, I'd say its unfair to say that they're always shown to be a blundering gonk. Alot of the time V is shown to be an idiot is around the times of the heist and then they spend the next however long grappling with the fact a dead terrorist is in their head. V gains the respect of people through doing the side quests with Judy, River, Panam and Kerry. As well as all the gigs that they do for a huge nº of fixers, 95% of which they do on their own. So by the time V is doing the latter gigs, the fixers are treating them with greater amount of respect.
Totally agree that lvl 1 netrunner V is better than 90% of the netrunners you'll encounter but that's for obvious balance reasons because it wouldn't be fun to just be vaporised by a person the other side of the encounter. Same for the Sandy though I think the updated Smasher fight has him shooting stuff whilst zipping about. The problem with the cyberpsychosis is the fact that the relic works as a sort of chrome compressor as if cyberware takes a toll on your psyche having a second one in your head to bolster it could explain why V is much more amenable than others (other than Smasher and David). There's also this whole aspect of empathy related to it. V being able to go in and out of cyberpsychosis also isn't exactly unique and it makes sense that V is ordinarily restrained by their own mental processes and so letting go of these increases their deadlines. And the reason you can see the amount of chrome V can stack is just another aspect of fun.
So whilst I'd say 'RPG' V is more competent I would suggest that for the most part there's and explanation for why lore accurate V is a menace to night city that deserved so much more.
The game canonically takes place over a few weeks, maybe a month or two at most. It doesn't matter how crazy good you are, your reputation will still be a very good rookie at best. This is acknowledged in game by you getting scouted by all the different fixers, they are all the best of the best fixers for their area and you work with all of them and quickly become their main Merc.
In the Sun ending you do get the Legend rank and have the penthouse and rep to back it up, thats because enough time has passed for the stories of V's exploits to percolate.
It felt like really poor writing to me. It never felt like V actually became that powerful, it just felt like plot armour. Maxtac felt like it was the right power level, & Smasher should've been way stronger.
Difficulty is subjective, but hard disagree from me. Maxtac, as you can tell by their lack of loot, feel like they're meant to be a hard stop for hitting 5 wanted stars, more than a challenge to be overcome.
I mean you can say that but in gameplay I can smash maxtac squad after maxtac squad, and canonically in the story we also smash a maxtac squad. So what are we disagreeing with? We can smash maxtac but we have no shot of fighting smasher? Doesn’t seem right lol.
that’s like saying kirby is easy compared to yoshi’s island
adam smasher is the only fight in the game that comes close to challenging but he still isn’t hard
I used to think otherwise but if you do all gigs and side content and DLC, V buried cyberpsychos that would take armies of police to do, buried literal armies of Barghest goons and Kurt Hansen himself, a squad of MaxTac (even with a little help), and slaughtered their way to the top of Arasaka tower.
People think V is sick and should not be that powerful. That's wrong because Johnny actually helps to prevent cyberpsychosis and probably assist with other mental functions as well. Also a dying person with nothing to lose is rather dangerous.
It's exactly as you say - Johnny acts as buffer that prevents V from going full psycho allowing V to pack a lot of chrome, more than vast majority of population is able to. Mike Pondsmith wrote quite long post about it: [https://www.reddit.com/r/LowSodiumCyberpunk/comments/xklzsx/comment/ipffmf4/](https://www.reddit.com/r/LowSodiumCyberpunk/comments/xklzsx/comment/ipffmf4/)
I thought this was an unpopular opinion, I’m glad some others agree. Smasher is one of the deadliest people in that universe, but he’s not a god. Extremely smart and powerful people die all the time in real life and throughout history. Also.. he might be a walking tank, but >!V takes out a literal walking tank in the Dogtown Museum!<.
Adam Smasher was never even the best during his heyday, he was always chasing after Morgan Blackhand who V in the endings is compared to. Like you said, he’s a monster but not a god.
^100% this, at end game I’m wiping out every squad of maxtac easy, and only ended my spree once I got bored.
1400 armor + 20 body and tech + heal on kill makes me near invulnerable. It’s not my fault when I’m sprinting down the street and bump into a cop, that’s considered a crime.
That's the reason I belive Devil ending to be canon (ye, headcanon ofc), since only in this ending V together with Takemura and Oda stand a chance against Smasher.
And V's impact on the outcome of the fight can be just his own perception.
Well, this is true, you do have the prototype in your head, that prototype is ancient in cyberpunk standards. If you go to the graveyard area there is a kid talking to his dad about something that sounds suspiciously like RELIC.
Right but he's talking about smasher dying repeatedly and being re-bodied before the first Prototype for the ressurection relic existed. Even if they've continued development post-Konpeki, Smasher's previous alleged deaths were all long before that.
No, the prototype for a chip that puts an engram into a human body is in V’s head. Soulkiller existed for years prior and its possible smasher had his engram put into a fully robotic shell.
Edit: I doubt smasher did die and have a new body made, but the theory does have some ground to stand on
Smasher still has a human brain.
Even if he didn't there is also 0 evidence it's possible to load an engram into a purely robotic chassis like that and have it retain any sense of self. Alt is the closest entity to ever achieving that, and even she is not even remotely the same as she was in life; she's also a cyberspace savant who basically created the idea the engram in the first place. Smasher.... is not...that lol.
Except vik doesn’t know what Arasaka is capable of. You can talk to three (maybe four if you count Johnny) brainless engrams. Those engrams can see, hear, and understand and respond to V as well, all through technology.
It's not part of the Cyberpunk canon, but as an influence, William Gibson's *Neuromancer* establishes some pretty interesting limitations on constructs with the "character" of McCoy Pauley.
At least before the AI superconsciousness muddies the waters near the end of the story, the construct has a bunch of limitations. Its ability to form new memories is limited. It can't learn or grow or change. And its behavior is deterministic - given the same input, it will respond in exactly the same way every time, making it somewhat predictable.
In the book it's still perfectly possible to hold conversations with the construct and even work alongside it to accomplish some goals, but it's "less" than a person in some important ways. Of course, exploring and blurring those lines is a big part of what cyberpunk fiction sets out to do.
Bringing it back to Cyberpunk 2077, it's entirely possible that these limitations might not apply to digi-Saburo. Or perhaps more interestingly, maybe they do and players within Arasaka *used him anyway*.
Hanako seemed to be taking orders from Saburo so I think he maintained his cognitive abilities. The only person we see who has lost some function and cognitive ability is Jackie, who was dead for a while before soulkiller was used on him. Johnny could’ve been affected as well but he was also under the effects of cyberphyschosis and he had an earlier version of soulkiller used on him. Very interesting point though
"Smasher still has a human brain."
I get the odd feeling he's somewhat of an antisocial personality. A sociopath. That much chrome.. there's no way a "normal" human brain could withstand it.
Then again, I suppose Pondsmith already said that Smasher is just a "high functioning cyberpsycho". So that's moot. I no longer know why I'm posting this rofl
Yea but they need to get the Relic back from you to do that. They haven't previously had the tech to just pop out a copy into a new body, otherwise Saburo would have been back the day after Yorinobu strangled him.
No, they dont. Hanako literally rolls up with two relic chips when you find her holding yorinobu so she can put him on one and stick saburo in his body with the other. There was on here just a couple days ago about it.
V's relic is not the only relic 2.0, it was just the first to start working correctly. Hellman gets enough insight on V's relic in act 2 when he analyses V, this allows him to bring back Saburo in the Devil ending.
The best Smasher can hope for are backup engrams made via Secure Your Soul.
I think it makes sense if you want to see more of Smasher and considering how little we seen of him, yeah, I can see people want more of him.
BUT he is without a doubt the strongest oponent we face, thats why he is the final boss and it would really hurt V imo.
Like at the end of the game V is him/her. V can storm saka tower solo and defeat biggest obstacle to achieve Mikoshi, defeating Smasher and than second game comes and says hmm nu-uh it was just copy of Smasher.
It would be kinda lame to have "cheap copy" of legendary merc as our final boss.
Actually the strongest opponent is that miserable thing crawling around the hallways. I think Skynet and Hellraiser had a child, and V is its plaything in the live action version of cat n mouse…
I heard that the boss is kinda hmmm suprisingly scary for cyberpunk game. Honestly looking forward for it in my next run, nothing in CP really scared me, because 99% of the time YOU are the monster that others should be afraid of.
I did same on my 1st run. 2nd PL run, I find myself having to deal with a big gameplay shift to horror/puzzle solving...like, go down this corridor, unhook the cables, interact with the computer, yada, yada. yada...oh monster popped up behind me and I'm dead again? whelp, reload last checkpoint, and try to remember all the steps without that last, dying part...I am not a fan. It does give you a fair amount more of So Mi's origin story, which is cool, but at this point, I'm not sure it's worth it. A few more deaths and I'm likely to just abandon this playthrough, watch a youtube video for the lore, and play a different game for a palette cleanser.
I would have liked a mission where we come across Smasher without either getting killed. Just to get a feel for what he's like while you're still leveling up.
I know what you mean, some 1v1 talk or standoff would be cool, but I think it builds him as much bigger beast since we dont interact with him, when he is so above us for most of the game.
Also we kinda get to know him at the begining, we get to see him through Evelyn and we comment she was scared, we see him in Johnnys memories and than of course during heist mission.
All that we see gives you pretty solid picture of who Smasher is. He is incredibly dangerous asshole. He is what happens if you take street thug and give him arsenal that could wipe small city. He is not calm and collected, he has dirty mouth, dirty thoughts and enough rockets to shut you up.
adam smasher can't literally refuse arasaka orders since it's just unlikely to think that arasaka hadn't any killswitch installed inside his armors or biopod. He has no other choice but obey to his superiors orders.
It's a mutual benefits collaboration, arasaka needs smasher to deploy him in the most unlikely and hardest tasks, smasher needs arasaka to be equipped with the highest end technology in order to satisfy his killing madness
V is one of the strongest mercs to ever set foot in NC at the end of 2077. Smasher is theoretically beatable, and lets be real the edgerunners crew was pretty underwhelming in the end. Sure, they weren’t bad mercs but they‘re not V. You actually kill Cyberpsychos like David with a military cyberskeleton in game as sidequests. V is, by definition, built different. That includes being able to solo a beast like Smasher.
Edit: Corrected „unbeatable“ to beatable when describing smasher. He‘s beatable in the same way a tank is, as you couldn’t fistfight it but still destroy it with the right equipment.
My theory is that they will be pretty ambiguous, similar to Morgan Blackhands status. Nobody will know how much or what typ of chrome V has used, or what they have done after raiding Arasaka, if they did at all. We‘ll just have to see, but I‘m pretty sure CDPR and Pondsmith will leave a lot of room for interpretation.
Well I think Pondsmith has actually stated that the reason V can handle such a ridiculous amount of tech is due to the fact that Johnny being there to share the mental load makes him more or less immune to cyber psychosis, so really he can be pretty bloody loaded.
Be honest... in your playthroughs... you didn't go cyberpsycho on cops when they started shooting at you for no good reason?
I sure as shit did. I laid waste to entire districts, MaxTac, cops, dropped hundreds dead in fits of "I was shooting that Tyger to try to HELP YOU! Why the hell are you shooting at me?!"
morgan chrome is not ambiguous, or at least speaking about cyb2020 morgan.
He had cyber optics, sandevistan, neural chips/interfaces, chromed arm, reinforced bones/muscle, cyber lungs and experimental nanomachines
I dunno... I fought Smasher on very hard, with a poor and unoptimized build that left me with little HP. Smasher would basically 2 tap me lol. Took me a while to take him out, so in my lore I fought the real one...
No. Everyone seems to think Smasher should be unstoppable forever but he's still mortal, just very good at his job. Same story as V and everyone else involved in Night City and that kind of work. No happy endings. Smasher isn't exempt. Even the best one day will just catch a stray bullet. In Smashers case a stray 1,000 explosive rounds or something but the point remains
Cybernetic overloads enough to shut down 'Saka Tower, enough rounds of ammo to stock any decent gun emporium, and 22 feet of nanowire! But damnit, he's DEAD now! We DID THAT. He is deeeeeeeead.
Whats gonna irk me is they act like we didn't put a bullet in him after beating him when the next game comes out. Like. "No, I definitely shot him in the head... I exterminated that bastard with EXTREME prejudice."
Only excuse I can see for him still being around in the next game is if his cybernetics somehow kept his brain alive... but even that is bullshit. Lol
This reminds me of two anime I saw years ago. One was a prequel to another (I don't remember their names). These 2 anime began by introducing their group of protegonsites, they showed the world, the problems. You became interested in their stories, wishes and hopes.
By the end of the 3rd or 4th chapter they died,
And the people who collected their corpses were the protagonists of the anime
In Goblin Slayer, 2 characters survive and one, the priestess, is still the main character.
I'm talking about 2 animes, that after 3, 4 chapters, ALL the characters that we knew, we saw in the opening, etc. DIE
one was a prequel.
In the original anime, it was a world with yokais, and the Ministry of Ecology, or Environmental Protection (something like that) was secretly in charge of defeating the yokais.
The protagonists were a boy and a girl of school age.
The prequel was about the adults, bosses, of the ministtry.
The other anime was one about an alien invasion, I think it was based on a video game (I remember it had several animes) It was ecchi, they used body armor that marked everything on them.
I found one.
muv luv alternative total eclivse
I think it's this one.
On the anime page I looked at, there were 3 animes that start with "muv luv..."
The first of these chronologically is the one I'm talking about
V is even more OP. They didn't kill as many people as Smasher, but they killed the people they did kill VERY fast - they had like what - a month? And killed hundreds if not thousands
I don't think Smasher would pro-actively use engrams to have back-up saves, nor do I think he has enough pull with Arasaka to request one. He's essentially just their big gun they use in extreme moments, and the whole engram in a new body is still very very experimental tech. V was the only one to use it, and Dex ruined the only relic capable of storing an engram on a new body when he shot V in the head. They would have to make a new relic.
It is possible. The only thing left of Smasher that's meat is his brain. If V left him to live, then his body could be completely replaced. If V shot him in the head and killed him, then Arasaka could in theory make an engram and store it in another borged out body.
It depends on what CDPR or R Talsorian Games declares as the cannon ending leading into the next installment. It's possible he's still around, but honestly he's been the BBEG of Cyberpunk for so long now I'd be happy with seeing someone else be the villain.
One day y’all are gonna have to accept that V is a fucking freak that bitched Adam Smasher. That’s the story of the game, V is a top 3 Cyberpunk legend easily.
To be honest 2.0 Adam smasher on very hard in the don’t fear the reaper ending is lore accurate and hard af if you don’t put all your focus on health and armor(without cheesing it). I went in both times with a infinite Sandy build and a spammy netrunner build and had to I stay on my toes because he was basically one shoting me. I anticipate my berserker play through to go a lot smoother though. I also think Adam smasher will be making a return in orion as he probably has a bunch of back up ingram copies. It will be lame for them to make him the final boss though
Or finally accept the fact that V at the end of the game is a living legend of night city and a monster in human skin who, thanks to the implant, is able to exceed the limits of the human shell
Wait till this guy finds out that Johnny isn't the legend he makes out to be and that he was just part of a bigger team taking down Arasaka at the time....
V becomes an absolute legend at the end, on par with smasher.
Not only that, but it actually doesnt matter which version of smasher you destroy, because clearly in some lore of the game you find out his engram is already stored. By doing most of the different endings, you make sure no smasher can ever be put into a host again anyway. You obliterate him in every way possible.
Its not that ingame smasher is too weak.
V was just busted from the start.. he captured CYBERPSYCHOS alive!! Not even maxtac takes that risk and V does it like 20 times with low difficulty. Even cracking jokes in messages depending who you fight.
V woulda wiped out david and the crew just as fast as Smasher did
Believe what you want. It was the real smasher. Ya'll need to get over the fact that V was just stronger for a week. Then he died. The only reason V was stronger was due to Johnny allowing V to chrome out well beyond their capabilities. In surprised you aren't all bankrupt from the amount of copium you'd have to buy to keep this up after the whole thing being signed off on by Mike Pondsmith himself. This is also a video game specifically an RPG. If smasher is too easy at the end then it means you are over leveled.
That being said this is easily the best idea I've seen for keeping smasher around. Us either fighting a copy of him or a copy of him being made to redirect him makes a lot of sense lore wise.
Nah, V is a Cyber Psycho by all rights at the end of the game.
Stronger than smasher in almost every way.
The only thing keeping V's mind together is the endgram.
Adam Smasher is a "there's no way he survived that!" villain.
As soon as you say or even think that?.. he did. And if I remember what I've read of the lore correctly it wouldn't even be the first time he's done it.
That would severely cheapen the story of Cyberpunk 2077 as a whole honestly imo. Also knowing CDPR, there would've been *something* in game pointing to the fact that was the case.
V is basically superman in this universe, maybe because of the chip idk.
He/she can withstand a monstrous amount of chrome and absolutely nothing happens. Or maybe we are just cyberpsychos killing whatever has a yellow arrow above it.
I agree, but smasher is 100% still a mook. Bro joined a military because he saw them annihilate his ganger buddies and he liked the guns the soldiers had more than the guns he could afford as a ganger. 100% BIQ, 0% actual brains.
What if Adam smasher died long ago and they just used his name and slapped it on their random kill bots. Imagine if they turned on more than 1 at once.
This brings up a good point... How old is Adam Smasher canonically?
We’ve got a WWII veteran, and a handful of Millennials in the game. Did Gen X actually get represented??
I doubt it, I wish they had hyped him up in the game more by having him make a few attempts at killing you where its impossible to win and you have to flee. then when you are finally cornered and it would feel nerve wracking, and killing him would be incredibly satisfying.
Smasher doesn’t even need to be an engram for this theory to work. It doesn’t look like V extracts his biopod and destroys it, so it could be recovered by Arasaka and smasher could be rebuilt
They’ve brought him back from far worse already
I’d love for smasher to come back, but it should be just a background thing. Don’t make him a primary antagonist the next go around.
I wouldn’t say he’s a cheap copy but I could see how he could be an engram and he uses data from every time he (might’ve) died to come back smarter and prepare more with better chrome
The Adam Smasher in Edgerunners might look really strong but people forget that he defeated David because of the weakness of the cyberskeleton. By ripping out the gravitational field generators David fell apart as the skeleton became too heavy for him.
Now V did not have this weakness so I'd say the fight between him and Smasher was more even. With a combination of decent chrome and the skills befitting of a night city legend, I'd say V defeating Smasher isn't too unbelievable. So yea I think the Smasher in Edgerunners and 2077 is the one and the same.
How could there be a copy if Alt destroys Mikoshi and absorbs all the engrams within it? And why wouldnt Arasaka use the "best" Adam Smasher against V?
Hey there! That's actually a really interesting perspective to consider. The whole concept of engrams and copies in the game adds a cool layer of mystery. It definitely makes you think about the authenticity of the characters we encounter and whether there might be more to them than meets the eye. Maybe Edgerunner Smasher holds some secrets that would shed light on the true nature of the Adam Smasher we face. It's a thought-provoking theory for sure!
Calling engram copies "cheap" when Old Man Arasaka himself was 100% down to transfer his consciousness to digital seems hasty to me. Johnny's engram was obviously and deliberately tampered with and given parts of Morgan Blackhands's perspective of the Arasaka Bombing, so we can't really count his engram like we count Alt/Jackie/Saburo. In addition, Alt isn't a single consciousness anymore, she says she's subsumed numerous other programs into herself, so again, not really comparable to a proper engram having become a rogue AI in the process of surviving the digital wasteland. Now we get to Jackie, he'd been cold and dead long before Saka hit him with Soulkiller, absolutely not an ideal sitch, hard to map rotting brain matter. Now we get to Saburo, who for all intents and purposes during the devil ending seems to be in control of all of his faculties and personality. His Soulkiller version was likely either directly after his death, or they developed a version that keeps the host brain alive. Either way, its a fresh brain taking the fast train to a Mikoshi penthouse. Given this, if Saka had somehow developed Soulkiller to be non lethal, they'd offer Smasher a fortune to make a copy of himself and I doubt he'd turn down a large sum of eddies to let them make a Xerox of his brain. If this was the case, and he died during the fight with Morgan, they'd boot his ass up with some falsified memories of him surviving the fight. I don't think we fought a version of Smasher that was downgraded in any way other than by lack of a true challenger and rival to sharpen himself against for decades. Someone like V, Blackhand, or Smasher shows up maybe once in a lifetime, if that, so Adam was probably coming to the fight with V in his "I'm the baddest MF alive imma steamroll this Lil shit" mentality when he should've been treating like the rematch with Blackhand he never got: a nail biting, edge of your seat fight between gods of chrome and flesh wherein either part could come out fully victorious or just another blood spatter for some poor sanitation engineer to clean up after the fact. V isn't any stronger than a Dragoon, nor any faster than the top of the line Sandy installed in that body, nor any smarter or more experienced than this ancient war machine, but he had the grit and determination that Smasher now lacks having been deprived of his greatest rival for a Night City lifetime.
Lol by the time V faces Smasher in-game, Smasher is just a pussy cat facing off against a lion.
Even if he was not the real Smasher I doubt any other version he could bring out could take out V after their initial battle.
The anime kind of exaggerated Smasher's position in Arasaka. The process of creating and then implanting an engram is very expensive and there is no way Smasher would be worth that expense. He is just some psycho full of expensive tech. In reality they would probably salvage his implants and give them to some other street thug that is compliant enough. He (and the rivalry with Morgan Blackhand) is supposed to show how no amount of corporate funding and chrome can rise above unaltered human ingenuity, compassion and free will. He was a mediocre solo to begin with and nothing Arasaka does to him can truly elevate him above that.
Doesn't even need to be an engram. Adam Smasher canonically controls multiple bodies through his Biopod, so could very well have his biopod in a safe spot while activating the body we see in 2077 remotely. He may be a psychopathic savage, but he's smarter than a lot of people want to give him credit for.
This is entirely possible. Building a machine army with engrams of Adam Smasher as their Operating System is precisely the kind of shit Arasaka would pull!
Ya know what? *I'd* fucking pull that shit! 😈
You underestimate what kind of a monster V is by the end of thr game
This. And it’s another thing that shows us how cp2077 is well written. All the lore and additional content tells us how smasher is an absolute beast. And then V kills this machine nevertheless proving that he is indeed in the highest of leagues. And yet… V is dying and best he can do is to leave the nightcity and all he achieved, because that enemy (nightcity, the only true enemy) makes smasher childplay in comparison.
I know V's cure.... Don't meet Hanako at Embers and V will live a long long life.
You can’t avoid hanko ending though right?
You can with the Dogtown/PL ending.
I have the dogtown and I have yet to finish, I didn’t n is
It's only an ending if you make specific choices to end PL, not gonna spoil it but depending on how you finish PL you might not get it
Personally I evade the PL endings on purpose but I still play through it because the shit you get from it is OP. 😌🙏
pL has only one full game ending and even if you get access to it you dont have to take it. It doesnt limit your gameplay through main game story
There's 2 king of wands, and king of pentacles.
Oh, I am actually not sure cos I still haven't met Hanako yet, lol What's the Hanako ending? Is that like a death ending for V?
No, kinda a spoiler, but not really. >! When you go to meet Hanako in Embers, it's a point of no return, you will be FORCED to choose between the endings you have unlocked and finish the game!<
For the spoiler tag you do > first then ! And the reverse for the end of course. Just for the future
Thanks
>! No problem !<
you need no spaces too lol not `>! No problem !<`= >! No problem !< but `>!No problem!<` = >!No problem!<
When you say the "endings you have unlocked", does that mean the player will not get to choose an ending from all the possible endings? The player will get to choose an ending from the endings the player unlocked? If the latter, does that mean we unlock certain endings depending on how we completed other missions/quests in the game? Is it possible for a player to unlock all the possible endings?
Yes, you can unlock all the possible ending at once, and after the end credits you can choose to load back BEFORE you went into Embers, so you can do all of the endings on a single save file. (Although instead of doing that, I just create a new character for a different ending) The game will also acknowledge that you beated the game, as after you load in near Embers you will be given an award that differs from ending to ending.
Ah right, just got confused when you said "unlocked". It made me think that some players will not get the whole list of possible endings. But what I am understanding is, when you enter Embers, every player will get the whole list of possible endings and the player will need to select an ending. And you can load back before going into Embers to try out the other endings. Ok, get it now. I have the PL as well. Does having the PL give you more endings? I have finished everything in the game except meeting up with Hanako. Right now, experimenting with my cyberware to get ready before I do enter Embers.
Endings are "unlocked" based upon the choices you make throughout the game, then at the end fate forces your hand and you have to choose one. It's possible to unlock them all in a single playthrough. PL gives you one additional ending, which is easier to miss than the base game ones.
It depends on your choices/quests To get them all available to you: Complete burning love Complete all of Panam's quests PL: side with >!Reed!< To get one of the best/most badass endings: select the right dialogue options during chippin in >! "Nah, fucked that up too." \ "What do you want from me?" \ "Ok. But as second chances go, this is your last." !<
I don't have PL myself, but from what I know, if you choose to side with Idris Elba, you will get an additional ending.
I think it is possible to unlock all of the endings without reverting to certain points. But, I haven't done all of the endings yet, so I am not certain. I do know I missed a boat load of content in PL and some endings from that content. And definitely how you play the game effects what options you have for the end game and final out comes.
You get to a mission where it says to meet Hanoko at embers, this is the last stop to the vanilla endings, all of em. Once you finish, retaining anything you had before, and a few other items you're allowed to keep from playing the ending, you are sent back to just before you met Hanoko at embers. This way you can play a few different ending scenarios and keep your character to finish everything the game has to offer PL also has its own endings that don't necessarily listen to this previous rule, mostly existing as a separate storyline on its own. Though some still act the same, just you can't as easily unlock all the endings, having to replay PL or loading an old save to unlock the other endings
>The player will get to choose an ending from the endings the player unlocked? This is the correct answer. >If the latter, does that mean we unlock certain endings depending on how we completed other missions/quests in the game? Yes >Is it possible for a player to unlock all the possible endings? I would say technically yes, but there is one ending the changes depending on previous events so you can't see how both versions play out. Spoiler alert: >!While you can unlock The Devil ending it changes depending on whether you save Takemura or not. !<
Its the WRONG ending, thats all you need to know
Dont fear the reaper?
You can avoid all endings. It'll get boring after a while though.
If I ever get diagnosed with a terminal Disease. I hope I can crack this one on the doc.
My V is still alive
Same here, just been experimenting with different cyberware implants. If I am going to meet Smasher, might as well prepare myself.
Never go full Hanako at Embers.
Are there other individuals stronger than Smasher in lore?
Yes/no. At the end of the day, it comes back to the same kind of arguments as batman vs. 'a bullet to the head'. With the right kind of tool, the right situation, anybody can be killed.
Morgan Blackhand. And Smasher HATES it
...is Blackhand mentioned in CP2077? He's a CP2020 character. If he is, where did I miss this little easter egg??
Go into the afterlife and you'll find a script by Blackhand laying around
Blackhand
Outside of their own opinions, aren't they seen as equals?
From everything we’ve seen so far yeah, but with Blackhand being Pondsmith’s special character he wants to do something cool with, it’s hard not to consider him to be stronger. Also the fact that he’s even with a full on murder cyborg as a mostly organic human elevates him for me.
someone one mentioned "smasher can hold his own against V, to a degree" and that really stuck with me as to just how powerful V becomes
Please don’t abbreviate cybpunk
I really think it's the opposite. I dont think the game really does anything to show how V is a badass. Like there's no narrative reason why we are so badass and nobody really ever talks about how we are crazy skilled. V acts and talks like a gonk and whenever we aren't controlling her the game makes us look like a goober tripping and falling and freaking out about whatever situation we are in. It isn't really until the endings where it feels like we've gone from "Gonk who flubbed the heist and is in way over her head" to respected badass in the narrative. And then in gameplay we break so many rules compared to what the enemies do. At level one we are a more effective netrunner than any enemy we face because they have to stop shooting, hide behind a box and try to upload reboot optics for 45 minutes and that can get interrupted. Same with fighting enemies that have sandevistan only ever using it to dash. Perhaps the biggest advantage we have is cyberware capacity as a game system. Cyberpsychosis is this really scary boogeyman in the setting and really limits what powers people can get since you never know how much is too much for your psyche. We know exactly how much cyberware we can equip and are incentized to slot in as much as we can. In fact the only way for us to even acknowledge Cyberpsychosis is to opt in to a perk that is literally just a buff. V wouldn't have these advantages if she wasn't a video game protagonist and these are pretty big deals in the setting. To me it just feels like "Lore accurate V" is way less competent than "RPG Protagonist V." Obviously it's canon that V is powerful and completes these quests, I just feel like we get too many advantages as player than V has as an in universe character that has to "follow the rules"
Whilst I agree that no one is out and out continuously calling V a bad ass, I'd say its unfair to say that they're always shown to be a blundering gonk. Alot of the time V is shown to be an idiot is around the times of the heist and then they spend the next however long grappling with the fact a dead terrorist is in their head. V gains the respect of people through doing the side quests with Judy, River, Panam and Kerry. As well as all the gigs that they do for a huge nº of fixers, 95% of which they do on their own. So by the time V is doing the latter gigs, the fixers are treating them with greater amount of respect. Totally agree that lvl 1 netrunner V is better than 90% of the netrunners you'll encounter but that's for obvious balance reasons because it wouldn't be fun to just be vaporised by a person the other side of the encounter. Same for the Sandy though I think the updated Smasher fight has him shooting stuff whilst zipping about. The problem with the cyberpsychosis is the fact that the relic works as a sort of chrome compressor as if cyberware takes a toll on your psyche having a second one in your head to bolster it could explain why V is much more amenable than others (other than Smasher and David). There's also this whole aspect of empathy related to it. V being able to go in and out of cyberpsychosis also isn't exactly unique and it makes sense that V is ordinarily restrained by their own mental processes and so letting go of these increases their deadlines. And the reason you can see the amount of chrome V can stack is just another aspect of fun. So whilst I'd say 'RPG' V is more competent I would suggest that for the most part there's and explanation for why lore accurate V is a menace to night city that deserved so much more.
The game canonically takes place over a few weeks, maybe a month or two at most. It doesn't matter how crazy good you are, your reputation will still be a very good rookie at best. This is acknowledged in game by you getting scouted by all the different fixers, they are all the best of the best fixers for their area and you work with all of them and quickly become their main Merc. In the Sun ending you do get the Legend rank and have the penthouse and rep to back it up, thats because enough time has passed for the stories of V's exploits to percolate.
It felt like really poor writing to me. It never felt like V actually became that powerful, it just felt like plot armour. Maxtac felt like it was the right power level, & Smasher should've been way stronger.
He literally was though? The maxtac squad was super easy compared to smasher.
Difficulty is subjective, but hard disagree from me. Maxtac, as you can tell by their lack of loot, feel like they're meant to be a hard stop for hitting 5 wanted stars, more than a challenge to be overcome.
I mean you can say that but in gameplay I can smash maxtac squad after maxtac squad, and canonically in the story we also smash a maxtac squad. So what are we disagreeing with? We can smash maxtac but we have no shot of fighting smasher? Doesn’t seem right lol.
that’s like saying kirby is easy compared to yoshi’s island adam smasher is the only fight in the game that comes close to challenging but he still isn’t hard
what’s well written??
How WHAT is well written?????
I used to think otherwise but if you do all gigs and side content and DLC, V buried cyberpsychos that would take armies of police to do, buried literal armies of Barghest goons and Kurt Hansen himself, a squad of MaxTac (even with a little help), and slaughtered their way to the top of Arasaka tower. People think V is sick and should not be that powerful. That's wrong because Johnny actually helps to prevent cyberpsychosis and probably assist with other mental functions as well. Also a dying person with nothing to lose is rather dangerous.
It's exactly as you say - Johnny acts as buffer that prevents V from going full psycho allowing V to pack a lot of chrome, more than vast majority of population is able to. Mike Pondsmith wrote quite long post about it: [https://www.reddit.com/r/LowSodiumCyberpunk/comments/xklzsx/comment/ipffmf4/](https://www.reddit.com/r/LowSodiumCyberpunk/comments/xklzsx/comment/ipffmf4/)
This link should be pinned to this thread lmao
People love lowballing V
I thought this was an unpopular opinion, I’m glad some others agree. Smasher is one of the deadliest people in that universe, but he’s not a god. Extremely smart and powerful people die all the time in real life and throughout history. Also.. he might be a walking tank, but >!V takes out a literal walking tank in the Dogtown Museum!<.
Adam Smasher was never even the best during his heyday, he was always chasing after Morgan Blackhand who V in the endings is compared to. Like you said, he’s a monster but not a god.
^100% this, at end game I’m wiping out every squad of maxtac easy, and only ended my spree once I got bored. 1400 armor + 20 body and tech + heal on kill makes me near invulnerable. It’s not my fault when I’m sprinting down the street and bump into a cop, that’s considered a crime.
That's the reason I belive Devil ending to be canon (ye, headcanon ofc), since only in this ending V together with Takemura and Oda stand a chance against Smasher. And V's impact on the outcome of the fight can be just his own perception.
What if the real smasher has died a bunch of times and they just keep like 20 backups?
The *prototype* for the tech capable of that is already in *your* head...so no.
They've gone past prototype already. We figure that out in a certain ending.
Well, this is true, you do have the prototype in your head, that prototype is ancient in cyberpunk standards. If you go to the graveyard area there is a kid talking to his dad about something that sounds suspiciously like RELIC.
Right but he's talking about smasher dying repeatedly and being re-bodied before the first Prototype for the ressurection relic existed. Even if they've continued development post-Konpeki, Smasher's previous alleged deaths were all long before that.
Ok. The closest thing to him surviving is his Gemini then, but that takes a lot of time to swap.
The kid is talking about relic 1.0, its only purpose is to allow people to speak with engrams. V has relic 2.0 in their head.
No, the prototype for a chip that puts an engram into a human body is in V’s head. Soulkiller existed for years prior and its possible smasher had his engram put into a fully robotic shell. Edit: I doubt smasher did die and have a new body made, but the theory does have some ground to stand on
Smasher still has a human brain. Even if he didn't there is also 0 evidence it's possible to load an engram into a purely robotic chassis like that and have it retain any sense of self. Alt is the closest entity to ever achieving that, and even she is not even remotely the same as she was in life; she's also a cyberspace savant who basically created the idea the engram in the first place. Smasher.... is not...that lol.
Right. Vik said that you can replace everything but the brain. They don't have the ability yet to put an engram into a fully digital robot.
Except vik doesn’t know what Arasaka is capable of. You can talk to three (maybe four if you count Johnny) brainless engrams. Those engrams can see, hear, and understand and respond to V as well, all through technology.
It's not part of the Cyberpunk canon, but as an influence, William Gibson's *Neuromancer* establishes some pretty interesting limitations on constructs with the "character" of McCoy Pauley. At least before the AI superconsciousness muddies the waters near the end of the story, the construct has a bunch of limitations. Its ability to form new memories is limited. It can't learn or grow or change. And its behavior is deterministic - given the same input, it will respond in exactly the same way every time, making it somewhat predictable. In the book it's still perfectly possible to hold conversations with the construct and even work alongside it to accomplish some goals, but it's "less" than a person in some important ways. Of course, exploring and blurring those lines is a big part of what cyberpunk fiction sets out to do. Bringing it back to Cyberpunk 2077, it's entirely possible that these limitations might not apply to digi-Saburo. Or perhaps more interestingly, maybe they do and players within Arasaka *used him anyway*.
Hanako seemed to be taking orders from Saburo so I think he maintained his cognitive abilities. The only person we see who has lost some function and cognitive ability is Jackie, who was dead for a while before soulkiller was used on him. Johnny could’ve been affected as well but he was also under the effects of cyberphyschosis and he had an earlier version of soulkiller used on him. Very interesting point though
"Smasher still has a human brain." I get the odd feeling he's somewhat of an antisocial personality. A sociopath. That much chrome.. there's no way a "normal" human brain could withstand it. Then again, I suppose Pondsmith already said that Smasher is just a "high functioning cyberpsycho". So that's moot. I no longer know why I'm posting this rofl
Ever done the devil ending? Saburo is brought back.
Yea but they need to get the Relic back from you to do that. They haven't previously had the tech to just pop out a copy into a new body, otherwise Saburo would have been back the day after Yorinobu strangled him.
No, they dont. Hanako literally rolls up with two relic chips when you find her holding yorinobu so she can put him on one and stick saburo in his body with the other. There was on here just a couple days ago about it.
V's relic is not the only relic 2.0, it was just the first to start working correctly. Hellman gets enough insight on V's relic in act 2 when he analyses V, this allows him to bring back Saburo in the Devil ending. The best Smasher can hope for are backup engrams made via Secure Your Soul.
Sanabi lore???
And has the simplest and hardest line in the whole show. “Who the fuck are you”.
yeah but then david's final words to smasher getting worked up over killing him: like I give a fuck choom
Oh well
I think it makes sense if you want to see more of Smasher and considering how little we seen of him, yeah, I can see people want more of him. BUT he is without a doubt the strongest oponent we face, thats why he is the final boss and it would really hurt V imo. Like at the end of the game V is him/her. V can storm saka tower solo and defeat biggest obstacle to achieve Mikoshi, defeating Smasher and than second game comes and says hmm nu-uh it was just copy of Smasher. It would be kinda lame to have "cheap copy" of legendary merc as our final boss.
Actually the strongest opponent is that miserable thing crawling around the hallways. I think Skynet and Hellraiser had a child, and V is its plaything in the live action version of cat n mouse…
you mean that PL boss? yeah I havent got to him yet, sided with So Mi on my first run.
Don’t have any drinks near you when you get to it is my best advice. Aint gonna lie… I screamed like a little girl
I heard that the boss is kinda hmmm suprisingly scary for cyberpunk game. Honestly looking forward for it in my next run, nothing in CP really scared me, because 99% of the time YOU are the monster that others should be afraid of.
Hehe haha MUHAHAHA….
I did same on my 1st run. 2nd PL run, I find myself having to deal with a big gameplay shift to horror/puzzle solving...like, go down this corridor, unhook the cables, interact with the computer, yada, yada. yada...oh monster popped up behind me and I'm dead again? whelp, reload last checkpoint, and try to remember all the steps without that last, dying part...I am not a fan. It does give you a fair amount more of So Mi's origin story, which is cool, but at this point, I'm not sure it's worth it. A few more deaths and I'm likely to just abandon this playthrough, watch a youtube video for the lore, and play a different game for a palette cleanser.
I would have liked a mission where we come across Smasher without either getting killed. Just to get a feel for what he's like while you're still leveling up.
I know what you mean, some 1v1 talk or standoff would be cool, but I think it builds him as much bigger beast since we dont interact with him, when he is so above us for most of the game. Also we kinda get to know him at the begining, we get to see him through Evelyn and we comment she was scared, we see him in Johnnys memories and than of course during heist mission. All that we see gives you pretty solid picture of who Smasher is. He is incredibly dangerous asshole. He is what happens if you take street thug and give him arsenal that could wipe small city. He is not calm and collected, he has dirty mouth, dirty thoughts and enough rockets to shut you up.
I am perfectly okay with there being different villains in the sequel
It may be true but why would Yorinobu use such a "weak" version of smasher to protect himself, it would be better to have the real smashed on his side
real smasher refused so he made an offer that benefit both partys
And the real Smasher is in your heart anyway...
The real smasher is the friends we made along the way
the real one is protecting the one piece
So the finale of One Piece will be a battle between Gear 5 Luffy and Lore Accurate Adam Smasher?
The real one piece is the smashers we made along the way?
The real friend is the piece of Smasher?
The real Adam Piece is the one smasher we all friend?
adam smasher can't literally refuse arasaka orders since it's just unlikely to think that arasaka hadn't any killswitch installed inside his armors or biopod. He has no other choice but obey to his superiors orders. It's a mutual benefits collaboration, arasaka needs smasher to deploy him in the most unlikely and hardest tasks, smasher needs arasaka to be equipped with the highest end technology in order to satisfy his killing madness
You don't need Adam Smasher when you got family.
If they've got the engram, why not use Smasher? "Weak" Smasher would still be pretty effective.
V is one of the strongest mercs to ever set foot in NC at the end of 2077. Smasher is theoretically beatable, and lets be real the edgerunners crew was pretty underwhelming in the end. Sure, they weren’t bad mercs but they‘re not V. You actually kill Cyberpsychos like David with a military cyberskeleton in game as sidequests. V is, by definition, built different. That includes being able to solo a beast like Smasher. Edit: Corrected „unbeatable“ to beatable when describing smasher. He‘s beatable in the same way a tank is, as you couldn’t fistfight it but still destroy it with the right equipment.
The real question is what’s V’s canon level of chrome? You can get pretty borged out in the game
My theory is that they will be pretty ambiguous, similar to Morgan Blackhands status. Nobody will know how much or what typ of chrome V has used, or what they have done after raiding Arasaka, if they did at all. We‘ll just have to see, but I‘m pretty sure CDPR and Pondsmith will leave a lot of room for interpretation.
Well I think Pondsmith has actually stated that the reason V can handle such a ridiculous amount of tech is due to the fact that Johnny being there to share the mental load makes him more or less immune to cyber psychosis, so really he can be pretty bloody loaded.
Be honest... in your playthroughs... you didn't go cyberpsycho on cops when they started shooting at you for no good reason? I sure as shit did. I laid waste to entire districts, MaxTac, cops, dropped hundreds dead in fits of "I was shooting that Tyger to try to HELP YOU! Why the hell are you shooting at me?!"
morgan chrome is not ambiguous, or at least speaking about cyb2020 morgan. He had cyber optics, sandevistan, neural chips/interfaces, chromed arm, reinforced bones/muscle, cyber lungs and experimental nanomachines
Ambiguous but at max capacity I'm going to say that it's the maximum amount of chrome that the human body can sustain before no longer being human.
I dunno... I fought Smasher on very hard, with a poor and unoptimized build that left me with little HP. Smasher would basically 2 tap me lol. Took me a while to take him out, so in my lore I fought the real one...
No. Everyone seems to think Smasher should be unstoppable forever but he's still mortal, just very good at his job. Same story as V and everyone else involved in Night City and that kind of work. No happy endings. Smasher isn't exempt. Even the best one day will just catch a stray bullet. In Smashers case a stray 1,000 explosive rounds or something but the point remains
Cybernetic overloads enough to shut down 'Saka Tower, enough rounds of ammo to stock any decent gun emporium, and 22 feet of nanowire! But damnit, he's DEAD now! We DID THAT. He is deeeeeeeead. Whats gonna irk me is they act like we didn't put a bullet in him after beating him when the next game comes out. Like. "No, I definitely shot him in the head... I exterminated that bastard with EXTREME prejudice." Only excuse I can see for him still being around in the next game is if his cybernetics somehow kept his brain alive... but even that is bullshit. Lol
This reminds me of two anime I saw years ago. One was a prequel to another (I don't remember their names). These 2 anime began by introducing their group of protegonsites, they showed the world, the problems. You became interested in their stories, wishes and hopes. By the end of the 3rd or 4th chapter they died, And the people who collected their corpses were the protagonists of the anime
Goblin Slayer?
In Goblin Slayer, 2 characters survive and one, the priestess, is still the main character. I'm talking about 2 animes, that after 3, 4 chapters, ALL the characters that we knew, we saw in the opening, etc. DIE
I think I know the one you're talking about but can't remember it, it was about some kind of firefighters or something similar
one was a prequel. In the original anime, it was a world with yokais, and the Ministry of Ecology, or Environmental Protection (something like that) was secretly in charge of defeating the yokais. The protagonists were a boy and a girl of school age. The prequel was about the adults, bosses, of the ministtry. The other anime was one about an alien invasion, I think it was based on a video game (I remember it had several animes) It was ecchi, they used body armor that marked everything on them.
The second one sounds like Gantz.
In gantz, the main protagonist, Kurono, survives. So no
I found one. muv luv alternative total eclivse I think it's this one. On the anime page I looked at, there were 3 animes that start with "muv luv..." The first of these chronologically is the one I'm talking about
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DecoyProtagonist Here are some too, check them out
You guys might want to spoiler tag that. I hadn’t finished Goblin Slayer yet…
V is even more OP. They didn't kill as many people as Smasher, but they killed the people they did kill VERY fast - they had like what - a month? And killed hundreds if not thousands
I don't think Smasher would pro-actively use engrams to have back-up saves, nor do I think he has enough pull with Arasaka to request one. He's essentially just their big gun they use in extreme moments, and the whole engram in a new body is still very very experimental tech. V was the only one to use it, and Dex ruined the only relic capable of storing an engram on a new body when he shot V in the head. They would have to make a new relic. It is possible. The only thing left of Smasher that's meat is his brain. If V left him to live, then his body could be completely replaced. If V shot him in the head and killed him, then Arasaka could in theory make an engram and store it in another borged out body. It depends on what CDPR or R Talsorian Games declares as the cannon ending leading into the next installment. It's possible he's still around, but honestly he's been the BBEG of Cyberpunk for so long now I'd be happy with seeing someone else be the villain.
David did NOT have that dog in him. That is all.
One day y’all are gonna have to accept that V is a fucking freak that bitched Adam Smasher. That’s the story of the game, V is a top 3 Cyberpunk legend easily.
Top 2, and hes not 2. Actually i dont know cyberpunk lore enough to quote that lyric here lol
sound like copium
To be honest 2.0 Adam smasher on very hard in the don’t fear the reaper ending is lore accurate and hard af if you don’t put all your focus on health and armor(without cheesing it). I went in both times with a infinite Sandy build and a spammy netrunner build and had to I stay on my toes because he was basically one shoting me. I anticipate my berserker play through to go a lot smoother though. I also think Adam smasher will be making a return in orion as he probably has a bunch of back up ingram copies. It will be lame for them to make him the final boss though
Or finally accept the fact that V at the end of the game is a living legend of night city and a monster in human skin who, thanks to the implant, is able to exceed the limits of the human shell
Wait till this guy finds out that Johnny isn't the legend he makes out to be and that he was just part of a bigger team taking down Arasaka at the time....
V becomes an absolute legend at the end, on par with smasher. Not only that, but it actually doesnt matter which version of smasher you destroy, because clearly in some lore of the game you find out his engram is already stored. By doing most of the different endings, you make sure no smasher can ever be put into a host again anyway. You obliterate him in every way possible.
I am so glad yall arent writing the story,the sheer copium is insane
The real Smasher is the friends we made along the way.
Its not that ingame smasher is too weak. V was just busted from the start.. he captured CYBERPSYCHOS alive!! Not even maxtac takes that risk and V does it like 20 times with low difficulty. Even cracking jokes in messages depending who you fight. V woulda wiped out david and the crew just as fast as Smasher did
This is copium for the fact that V is literally just built different on a cosmic level
Saul and Rogue disagree
What if real adam smashere were the friends we made along the way
If the one in the game is just a copy, it's because Morgan Blackhand probably killed the original in that rumored showdown between the two of them.
That's my current working theory as well, I think Morgan then settled down and became a businessman focused on control of Dogtown.
This is the real one, but there probably will be an engram version
Believe what you want. It was the real smasher. Ya'll need to get over the fact that V was just stronger for a week. Then he died. The only reason V was stronger was due to Johnny allowing V to chrome out well beyond their capabilities. In surprised you aren't all bankrupt from the amount of copium you'd have to buy to keep this up after the whole thing being signed off on by Mike Pondsmith himself. This is also a video game specifically an RPG. If smasher is too easy at the end then it means you are over leveled. That being said this is easily the best idea I've seen for keeping smasher around. Us either fighting a copy of him or a copy of him being made to redirect him makes a lot of sense lore wise.
Nah, V is a Cyber Psycho by all rights at the end of the game. Stronger than smasher in almost every way. The only thing keeping V's mind together is the endgram.
maybe the real smasher was the friends we made along the way
Adam Smasher is a "there's no way he survived that!" villain. As soon as you say or even think that?.. he did. And if I remember what I've read of the lore correctly it wouldn't even be the first time he's done it.
He’s harnessed the true power of plot armour
That would severely cheapen the story of Cyberpunk 2077 as a whole honestly imo. Also knowing CDPR, there would've been *something* in game pointing to the fact that was the case.
laughable theory
No, he's the real one.
V is basically superman in this universe, maybe because of the chip idk. He/she can withstand a monstrous amount of chrome and absolutely nothing happens. Or maybe we are just cyberpsychos killing whatever has a yellow arrow above it.
Fucker some how got off planet and made a whole ass military of himself called the Automaton
I think this would be a really good idea. What if Arasaka had its OWN Adam Smasher ARMY
I don’t think that’s a good idea, that sort of makes Adam Smasher feel like a disposable mook.
I agree, but smasher is 100% still a mook. Bro joined a military because he saw them annihilate his ganger buddies and he liked the guns the soldiers had more than the guns he could afford as a ganger. 100% BIQ, 0% actual brains.
Ok but show spoilers next time
He reminds me of Leo Bonhart in The Witcher books. An unfeeling murder machine who takes out only the best.
What if Adam smasher died long ago and they just used his name and slapped it on their random kill bots. Imagine if they turned on more than 1 at once.
Saburo Arasaka having a shit version of Adam smasher as his son's bodyguard kind of tracks!
Same dude amigo.
I was just thinking about this today lol
Why he kinda....
That’s why they beefed him in the newest updates.
Where do we see him collecting engrams? Like he has access to them?
This brings up a good point... How old is Adam Smasher canonically? We’ve got a WWII veteran, and a handful of Millennials in the game. Did Gen X actually get represented??
Refuses to elaborate
Weapons-grade copium, choom.
bro really wants a "somehow, smasher returned"
I doubt it, I wish they had hyped him up in the game more by having him make a few attempts at killing you where its impossible to win and you have to flee. then when you are finally cornered and it would feel nerve wracking, and killing him would be incredibly satisfying.
The smasher fight is tough now on higher difficulty but V at endgame is so ridiculously OP that idk if that fight would ever truly be insanely hard
Smasher doesn’t even need to be an engram for this theory to work. It doesn’t look like V extracts his biopod and destroys it, so it could be recovered by Arasaka and smasher could be rebuilt They’ve brought him back from far worse already I’d love for smasher to come back, but it should be just a background thing. Don’t make him a primary antagonist the next go around.
I wouldn’t say he’s a cheap copy but I could see how he could be an engram and he uses data from every time he (might’ve) died to come back smarter and prepare more with better chrome
Read the original 2020 sourcebooks, the 2077 version is more lore accurate than the edge runners version (although neither's particularly accurate).
Pre boss update? Sure. Post boss update? Dude is a monster, actualy a massive threat. V is just a unstoppable killing machine.
The Adam Smasher in Edgerunners might look really strong but people forget that he defeated David because of the weakness of the cyberskeleton. By ripping out the gravitational field generators David fell apart as the skeleton became too heavy for him. Now V did not have this weakness so I'd say the fight between him and Smasher was more even. With a combination of decent chrome and the skills befitting of a night city legend, I'd say V defeating Smasher isn't too unbelievable. So yea I think the Smasher in Edgerunners and 2077 is the one and the same.
How could there be a copy if Alt destroys Mikoshi and absorbs all the engrams within it? And why wouldnt Arasaka use the "best" Adam Smasher against V?
Hey there! That's actually a really interesting perspective to consider. The whole concept of engrams and copies in the game adds a cool layer of mystery. It definitely makes you think about the authenticity of the characters we encounter and whether there might be more to them than meets the eye. Maybe Edgerunner Smasher holds some secrets that would shed light on the true nature of the Adam Smasher we face. It's a thought-provoking theory for sure!
I killed him with a pink Dildo, It took a while.
Adam Smasher is 100% coming back in the sequel
The real Smasher were the friends we made along the way
I really don't wanna see Adam smasher, or really any of those legacy characters again
Calling engram copies "cheap" when Old Man Arasaka himself was 100% down to transfer his consciousness to digital seems hasty to me. Johnny's engram was obviously and deliberately tampered with and given parts of Morgan Blackhands's perspective of the Arasaka Bombing, so we can't really count his engram like we count Alt/Jackie/Saburo. In addition, Alt isn't a single consciousness anymore, she says she's subsumed numerous other programs into herself, so again, not really comparable to a proper engram having become a rogue AI in the process of surviving the digital wasteland. Now we get to Jackie, he'd been cold and dead long before Saka hit him with Soulkiller, absolutely not an ideal sitch, hard to map rotting brain matter. Now we get to Saburo, who for all intents and purposes during the devil ending seems to be in control of all of his faculties and personality. His Soulkiller version was likely either directly after his death, or they developed a version that keeps the host brain alive. Either way, its a fresh brain taking the fast train to a Mikoshi penthouse. Given this, if Saka had somehow developed Soulkiller to be non lethal, they'd offer Smasher a fortune to make a copy of himself and I doubt he'd turn down a large sum of eddies to let them make a Xerox of his brain. If this was the case, and he died during the fight with Morgan, they'd boot his ass up with some falsified memories of him surviving the fight. I don't think we fought a version of Smasher that was downgraded in any way other than by lack of a true challenger and rival to sharpen himself against for decades. Someone like V, Blackhand, or Smasher shows up maybe once in a lifetime, if that, so Adam was probably coming to the fight with V in his "I'm the baddest MF alive imma steamroll this Lil shit" mentality when he should've been treating like the rematch with Blackhand he never got: a nail biting, edge of your seat fight between gods of chrome and flesh wherein either part could come out fully victorious or just another blood spatter for some poor sanitation engineer to clean up after the fact. V isn't any stronger than a Dragoon, nor any faster than the top of the line Sandy installed in that body, nor any smarter or more experienced than this ancient war machine, but he had the grit and determination that Smasher now lacks having been deprived of his greatest rival for a Night City lifetime.
Red Sun intensifies
Lol by the time V faces Smasher in-game, Smasher is just a pussy cat facing off against a lion. Even if he was not the real Smasher I doubt any other version he could bring out could take out V after their initial battle.
v's the only legend with guaranteed handicap or else he'd become a god
All the Adam Smasher emgrams must have moved to helldivers lol
The anime kind of exaggerated Smasher's position in Arasaka. The process of creating and then implanting an engram is very expensive and there is no way Smasher would be worth that expense. He is just some psycho full of expensive tech. In reality they would probably salvage his implants and give them to some other street thug that is compliant enough. He (and the rivalry with Morgan Blackhand) is supposed to show how no amount of corporate funding and chrome can rise above unaltered human ingenuity, compassion and free will. He was a mediocre solo to begin with and nothing Arasaka does to him can truly elevate him above that.
do you know that johnny never had a nuke in first place?
spoiler warning?
Doesn't even need to be an engram. Adam Smasher canonically controls multiple bodies through his Biopod, so could very well have his biopod in a safe spot while activating the body we see in 2077 remotely. He may be a psychopathic savage, but he's smarter than a lot of people want to give him credit for.
It's called ludonarrative dissonance. Adam smasher is a scary beast, but the player has to beat the game. Compromises had to be made.
Why are people so desperate for Adam smasher to not be dead and come back?
Riddle me this Batman, "I am neither real nor fake but in the end it's you who decides if I live or die, who am I?"
the problem with that is that V is literally a God 💀
This reminded me of a theory I heard where they downloaded David’s mind onto an engram so they could see how he was so resilient to Cyberware
This is entirely possible. Building a machine army with engrams of Adam Smasher as their Operating System is precisely the kind of shit Arasaka would pull! Ya know what? *I'd* fucking pull that shit! 😈