the game even has some in-game cartoons that mock the police force in the game, animations put out by the NCPD that depict the police officers as buff cool dogs and civilians as stupid little dogs and do show the NCPD to be authoritarian and overly violent. so they put effort into making the NCPD seem that way, but in actual gameplay they are nothing but heroes just trying to protect the city from cyberpsychos and gangs, with the police fixer telling V to simply incapacitate cyberpsychos as if ACTUAL police wouldn't be eager to slaughter someone (like capitalist police truly are like). this incongruence totally destroyed the message and immersion for me and made the actual game seem more pro-police.
oh my god those are infuriating too, because for a long time i thought maybe there was a way to actually incapacitate them but i'm pretty fucking sure there isn't. half the time, their health drops to 0 and wil roll on the floor, clearly alive but in pain, but the in game text that gets sent is still "sorry, had to waste 'em, lmao"
Depending on when you played, it was probably a DoT effect on them. In early patches (and I'm not sure when this was changed, so that could be pre 1.6 or even pre 2.0) DoT effects would keep ticking and kill incapacitated enemies, but now all DoTs are non-lethal and stop when they go down.
Weird, I don't know what's happening then. I've been hitting them with all the quickhack DoTs and laying into them with a monowhip, and then just back off when they're down to a few percent at which point the bleed, burn, or poison incaps them. If you're using a blunt weapon be careful you're not hitting them after their health hits 0, because at that point any further damage will kill them, even nonlethal.
She's a former journalist turned fixer, not a cop. There's even a mission where she sends you to help another journalist she knows/used to work with, who tears into her as an amoral sellout who gave up investigative journalism to go be a mercenary agent.
Probably the vest. She has a very generic detective sort of look, and that seems to be a common assumption.
the random NCPD activities around the map.
The funniest part of that is that it was clearly someone's "clever" idea for a diegetic way of pointing the player at all these little world mini-events so you don't miss them, then they forgot the system was some formal private contractor thing and included a bunch of things that the cops wouldn't be paying people to go deal with, like there's multiple NCPD Scanner events involving corporate soldiers having murdered some journalist or massacred protesters or striking workers and you get a payout for killing the soldiers and grabbing a copy of their orders or w/e.
I really can't agree with your overall read of how the game handles cops either: every "good" cop either gets killed, driven out, or fired for it, and every time a cop finds their conscience it's because of a direct personal connection to an issue (like the toxic shitbag cops who are worried about their former coworker, the cops you find in the process of murdering some corpo suit who'd put one of their family members into a coma, or the cop in the DLC who dies carrying out a heist of medical supplies to deal with a local health crisis that affected him personally). Like the mission with River ends with the discovery that the NCPD was involved in the assassination and coverup and River gets fired for investigating it at all, then his big rogue investigation thing after that was him looking for a missing family member, leaving him to hit both points of being systemically punished for doing the right thing, and only sticking his neck out to help someone when that someone was a family member of his.
the game even has some in-game cartoons that mock the police force in the game, animations put out by the NCPD that depict the police officers as buff cool dogs and civilians as stupid little dogs and do show the NCPD to be authoritarian and overly violent. so they put effort into making the NCPD seem that way, but in actual gameplay they are nothing but heroes just trying to protect the city from cyberpsychos and gangs, with the police fixer telling V to simply incapacitate cyberpsychos as if ACTUAL police wouldn't be eager to slaughter someone (like capitalist police truly are like). this incongruence totally destroyed the message and immersion for me and made the actual game seem more pro-police.
oh my god those are infuriating too, because for a long time i thought maybe there was a way to actually incapacitate them but i'm pretty fucking sure there isn't. half the time, their health drops to 0 and wil roll on the floor, clearly alive but in pain, but the in game text that gets sent is still "sorry, had to waste 'em, lmao"
Depending on when you played, it was probably a DoT effect on them. In early patches (and I'm not sure when this was changed, so that could be pre 1.6 or even pre 2.0) DoT effects would keep ticking and kill incapacitated enemies, but now all DoTs are non-lethal and stop when they go down.
i'm on 2.0 but either way
Weird, I don't know what's happening then. I've been hitting them with all the quickhack DoTs and laying into them with a monowhip, and then just back off when they're down to a few percent at which point the bleed, burn, or poison incaps them. If you're using a blunt weapon be careful you're not hitting them after their health hits 0, because at that point any further damage will kill them, even nonlethal.
i think you have to use a nonlethal takedown or something but yeah its pretty stupid
ugh that's the worst.
She's a former journalist turned fixer, not a cop. There's even a mission where she sends you to help another journalist she knows/used to work with, who tears into her as an amoral sellout who gave up investigative journalism to go be a mercenary agent.
my mistake, i seemed to have interpreted her to be a cop for some reason. my point still stands with the random NCPD activities around the map.
Probably the vest. She has a very generic detective sort of look, and that seems to be a common assumption.
The funniest part of that is that it was clearly someone's "clever" idea for a diegetic way of pointing the player at all these little world mini-events so you don't miss them, then they forgot the system was some formal private contractor thing and included a bunch of things that the cops wouldn't be paying people to go deal with, like there's multiple NCPD Scanner events involving corporate soldiers having murdered some journalist or massacred protesters or striking workers and you get a payout for killing the soldiers and grabbing a copy of their orders or w/e.
I really can't agree with your overall read of how the game handles cops either: every "good" cop either gets killed, driven out, or fired for it, and every time a cop finds their conscience it's because of a direct personal connection to an issue (like the toxic shitbag cops who are worried about their former coworker, the cops you find in the process of murdering some corpo suit who'd put one of their family members into a coma, or the cop in the DLC who dies carrying out a heist of medical supplies to deal with a local health crisis that affected him personally). Like the mission with River ends with the discovery that the NCPD was involved in the assassination and coverup and River gets fired for investigating it at all, then his big rogue investigation thing after that was him looking for a missing family member, leaving him to hit both points of being systemically punished for doing the right thing, and only sticking his neck out to help someone when that someone was a family member of his.