You’re a cyberpunk fixer and street samurai, but you can casually do bounties for the police murdering petty criminals?
I think that went as far as someone saying "ok how do we create a narrative tie-in for these minor world encounters where you happen upon a massacre or assassination in progress/that just happened and can be rewarded for interacting with it?" that got resolved with "a subcontractor bounty system?" and no one ever thought about it again, because it gets used in places where no crime happened at all (one of them is just a flipped car in the hills outside of town, where you learn about a stash of goods) or where the violence in question was done by a legally-authorized party that the police are aligned with (there are several alerts where it's a corporate PMC like the police behind it). It's basically just a pre-placed world event system with a narratively incoherent justification for alerting you to things you can stick your nose into.
There's something interesting in potentially BEING the agent of state terror in post-cyberpunk works like Ghost In The Shell. I don't trust games exploring those concepts though, it'd be a hard needle to thread. I guess Spec Ops The Line managed to, so it isn't impossible. It helped that in Spec Ops you're killing American soldiers AND suffering a mental breakdown AND dropping white phosphorous on citizens all while being profoundly uncool so chuds can presumably not get a fascist rise out of it.
I think that went as far as someone saying "ok how do we create a narrative tie-in for these minor world encounters where you happen upon a massacre or assassination in progress/that just happened and can be rewarded for interacting with it?" that got resolved with "a subcontractor bounty system?" and no one ever thought about it again, because it gets used in places where no crime happened at all (one of them is just a flipped car in the hills outside of town, where you learn about a stash of goods) or where the violence in question was done by a legally-authorized party that the police are aligned with (there are several alerts where it's a corporate PMC like the police behind it). It's basically just a pre-placed world event system with a narratively incoherent justification for alerting you to things you can stick your nose into.
There's something interesting in potentially BEING the agent of state terror in post-cyberpunk works like Ghost In The Shell. I don't trust games exploring those concepts though, it'd be a hard needle to thread. I guess Spec Ops The Line managed to, so it isn't impossible. It helped that in Spec Ops you're killing American soldiers AND suffering a mental breakdown AND dropping white phosphorous on citizens all while being profoundly uncool so chuds can presumably not get a fascist rise out of it.