Spoilers forward for Cyberpunk 2077.

If you’ve ever wished to expertise throwing Elon Musk down a rubbish chute, there may be, to my data, no less than one choice: a aspect quest in Cyberpunk 2077.

For a online game about dystopian wealth disparity, AI-driven automobiles, and downloading your consciousness into different our bodies, Cyberpunk 2077 is oddly brief on Musk references. The one it does comprise comes from the “Violence” side quest. In it, you meet chrome-skinned pop famous person Lizzy Wizzy, voiced by real-life singer-songwriter Grimes, who was nonetheless in a relationship with Musk on the time of the online game’s launch in 2020. 

Here, Lizzy Wizzy hires the protagonist, V, to surveil her boyfriend, whom she suspects of dishonest. It’s a fairly cold job — heck, downright lawful in comparison with the opposite hijinks you’re getting as much as — and V appears greatly surprised by how low the stakes are. Why not simply ask him?

“Imagine this — we’re never alone, not really. Always surrounded by assistants, PR reps, makeup artists,” she says. “I stop smiling at him for one millisecond, it’ll be all over every screamsheet in this town … Millions of eyes, trained on you, constantly.” 

The suspected cheater is Liam Northom, who Grimes / Lizzy describes as “Forty-ish. Sensitive. Guy who never wanted for anything.” Then, in a twist that doesn’t fairly match with the remainder of the dialogue, she explains that Liam is her supervisor.

Why would a pop star have hassle securing a non-public dialog together with her supervisor when she apparently has no hassle sneaking off to a seedy motel so as to rent a mercenary? Why would tabloids even care about whether or not she’s smiling at her supervisor? And what does “guy who never wanted for anything” imply, precisely? Are emerald mines implicated? 

But inconsistent character constructing and weak dialogue are fairly par for the course in Cyberpunk 2077, so let’s transfer on. 

The gameplay ingredient within the quest is easy. You sneak right into a nightclub, hack their cameras, and file a dialog between Liam and a mysterious girl. It seems that he’s not dishonest — he’s surreptitiously backed up a digital model of her consciousness as insurance coverage simply in case her profession ends prematurely. “Can you tweak [her digitized personality] to remove undesirable traits?” he asks the not-Neuralink company rep that he’s assembly secretly within the membership. “Ever since her conversion, she hasn’t been herself.”

At this level, V logs off from the surveillance system. His fixed companion Johnny, voiced by Keanu Reeves, is horrified and encourages him to inform Lizzy the complete reality. If you “do the right thing” and provides her the recording of Liam’s dialog, she hangs up in shock and dismay. Some time later, she calls you once more, asking you to satisfy her on the identical motel. You can discover her there having a full meltdown with Liam’s corpse mendacity on the bottom subsequent to her. If you select to assist her once more, you choose up Elon / Liam, stroll down a corridor, and discard him in a rubbish chute. 

And that’s form of it! You get some unhinged texts from Lizzy Wizzy afterward about how impressed she is to make a brand new album. Presumably, it’ll be Lemonade however full-sensory — and as a substitute of forgiving her dishonest accomplice, she murders him and pays some man to toss him within the trash. 

It’s doable that the “Violence” aspect quest was meant to be for much longer however needed to be truncated resulting from Cyberpunk’s infamous manufacturing points. It actually feels truncated. But the actual sin is that it’s not even all that humorous. The console-breakingly dangerous bugs that plagued its launch have since been addressed, and all in all, Cyberpunk 2077 is a genuinely entertaining online game that I’ve performed for a very embarrassing variety of hours. However, it’s a lot more durable to repair the weak writing in subsequent patches — and this sport’s writing is so weak that a quest the place you throw Musk down a rubbish chute is usually unmemorable. 

Musk was in a fairly completely different place within the cultural consciousness on the time of the sport’s launch. For most players then, he was the man who makes Cybertrucks, which seem like they’re straight out of Cyberpunk 2077; now, he’s the man who thinks iPhone strategy games are superior to chess and has the worst Elden Ring build you’ve ever seen. Also, he and Grimes are damaged up. 

Between the varied rumors of infidelity to Grimes and his general flagging reputation for the reason that acquisition of Twitter, perhaps the “Violence” aspect quest was simply too forward of its time. If it had been written right this moment, Liam Northom might have change into a way more specific nod to the billionaire and the entire arc would have been a lot funnier. Maybe Liam’s physique can be unbelievably heavy resulting from carrying two shields. Maybe you’d get rewarded with a Cybertruck that’s supposed to indicate up in your stock later and by no means does.

But underwhelming or not, so far as I do know, it’s nonetheless the one online game the place you can throw Musk down a rubbish chute. Put it within the subsequent anime, cowards.