Jacking In
If there’s one thing that screams Cyberpunk, it’s the concept of being able to “Jack In,” a term first coined by, you guessed it, William Gibson, in his novel Neuromancer. We’ve also seen it a bunch of other literature, film, and other forms of cyberpunkdom over the years —perhaps most notably, the Matrix. But I want to focus less on the fact that the whole “jacking in” thing has been included in Cyberpunk 2077, because I think that it was always a given we were going to have some sort of reference to it, and more on the way it’s being handled and how it’s being incorporated as a gameplay mechanic.
In Cyberpunk 2077, of course, we see NPCs “jacked in” as part of the background aesthetic to certain scenes, like when the heavily augmented thugs are selling V the Spider-bot device. But I’m much more interested in how it functions as a means to upgrade abilities, which is totally awesome. Visiting Ripper Doctors allows V to install and upgrade new cyberware, and the whole thing plays out like a visit to mad scientist, injecting wires into your arm in a real-time cutscene that’s so much cooler than the menus we’ve seen in games like Deus Ex Mankind Divided.
And it’s not just the operation of upgrading abilities or the tangential background goings-on of NPCs in which the concept of “jacking in” comes into play in the Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay demo. In the same scene I alluded to before, the deal for the spider-bot goes belly up after the cred-chip V hands over for the purchase turns out to contain a virus. True to another cyberpunk trope, everything is online and everything is connected in this dystopian future.
