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Warning: Spoilers for Cyberpunk 2077 lie ahead.
Even if you’ve elected to become Night City’s Johnny-no-mates, Cyberpunk 2077‘s main story always has at least a couple of ending options to chuck at you when you end up sitting on that rooftop at its main story’s climax. That’s not stopped one fan from deciding to throw another one into the mix, having devised an extra adventure for their V and Johnny Silverhand to have in an hour-long Machinima film.
This project is the work of a cosplayer and virtual photographer who goes by the handle Valerie Silverhand – just in case you were wondering which of the game’s characters they like – who’s long been a staple of the Cyberpunk community. With this creation, they’ve even managed to earn a congratulations from the associate game director currently working on Cyberpunk’s sequel at CD Projekt.
Their fan film, entitled Black Dog, was teased via a cool trailer late last year, and has now been released in full on YouTube. It’s about an hour long, and has been put together via Machinima using assets from Cyberpunk, augemented using some mods and custom cinematics used to convey its original story.
It’s also important to note that the film seemingly uses some AI voices to give lines to the various characters from the base game it includes – the likes of Silverhand, Judy, Viktor Vektor, you get the idea. Valerie Silverhand writes in a disclaimer at the beginning of the video – which also emphasises that the project isn’t associated with or endorsed by CD Projekt itself – that “AI voice tools were used for fan content purposes only, and not used for profit or with intent to exploit voice actors.”
That might well put you off the fan film, but at least they’re being up front of it so folks can make that call for themselves, given this kind of AI use is arguably more of a moral grey area than it being used to mimic VAs’ voices for commercial projects, which is definitely an issue with the potential to impact actors’ livelihoods.
Anyway, to avoid spoliers in case you do go ahead and watch, here’s a bit of the setup for the film’s plot given early on in it: “A year has passed since V breached Arasaka corporation’s data fortress of Digital Souls known as Mikoshi. Upon rejecting the dicotomy offered by the rogue AI, Alt Cunningham, V and Johnny Silverhand leave Mikoshi together in hopes of finding another solution.” Things then kick off with V having learned of “a secret Arasaka cryo vault” that’s “rumoured to store Saburo Arasaka’s most private collection”.
As alluded to earlier Cyberpunk sequel associate game director Paweł Sasko appears to have gotten a kick out of the movie, having tweeted “Incredibly ambitious and complex project, very proud of you! Congratulations.” in response to Valerie Silverhand’s post about it.
If you’re after more fan-made additions to Cyberpunk 2077’s main story, we recently reported on a modder who’s added a whole new intro sequence and lifepath to it.
Kurt Indovina
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