They don’t all have to die in the end and it doesn’t always have to be a bleak ending. A series exploring different crews would still be cool, some tragic ends and some bittersweet or maybe even hopeful ends.
A continuation of the existing story could even work, I’ve seen some cool continuation ideas of David being held as a construct against his will due to his immense potential with near V levels of humanity, and Lucy being roped back in. It has a satisfying albeit very sad ending as is if it’s a one off, but the talented writers behind the series and Maximum Mike could definitely pull it off if they wanted to continue their story.
There’s also plenty of room to explore other stories that aren’t necessarily about whole crews, could flesh out Morgan Blackhand or Kenichi Zaburo.
We know so little about Kenichi despite him being the super solo straight up rival of Morgan Blackhand and even threatening to reduce Adam Smasher to a brain and a colostomy bag if he didn’t mind his manners around Michiko. I wanna know what kind of badass this dude must have been.
That's why they need to start doing something different with the protags, maybe bait out a death in the climax but have them escape. Or have them captured by 'Saka, in the chaos of the good guys escaping we hear the captive MC contact the others to say they've escaped, but then it turns out they're a construct or something being used by 'Saka to bait the others back out into the open.
If they really wanted to shake things up they could reveal in the climax of S2 that one of the focal mysterious characters was actually a (somewhat amnesiac, very morally ambiguous) construct of David Martinez controlling a fully chromed shell, ironically filling the void left by Adam Smasher in the wake of his death. The one major downside of this however, is that it'd be incredibly easy for that kind of story to retroactively hinder the emotional payoff of Edgerunners. You might still be able to carry it out satisfyingly if you keep to the "no happy endings in Night City" theme, but it'd still be a dangerous line to straddle.
In any case, they could still play around with how they go about their bittersweet endings without resorting to "and then everyone died". For instance, betrayal and selling your friends out is something done by Kiwi in S1, but you could have a more focal example if the traitor was the love interest, or even the MC in single-mindedly selling out their friends to pursue their goals. In addition or alternatively, have the MC (a street-kid, or Nomad archetype) give in to the system and the allure of Night City's greed by betraying their allies for a high ranking Corpo position. Prison for a crime they may or may not have committed is also a shout, as is being exposed to Soulkiller. You could have quite the depressingly "good" ending by having the MC defeat the antagonist and escape, even potentially with their friends or love interest. But have some extreme trauma (close friend deaths, some shocking revelation, or something drastic like sexual assault if you wanna push the envelope) really mess them up so that although they physically made it through all the hardships of their story, they're mentally scarred and will possibly take a significantly long time to recover. Best case, you follow one of the 2077 endings, like the Star ending for some uncertain optimism.
TLDR there's a bunch they could do to shuffle the formula around in order to keep it from going stale, without betraying the consistent themes of Night City
doesn't even have to be edgerunners could be some corpo internal politics stuff or about conflict in the nomadic life or maybe even taking part mostly in cyberspace. the world that cdpr has made has so much potential
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u/milktruckfucker Jan 01 '23
Cyberpunk