After seeing the Phantom Liberty ending where you
side with Reed, get Johnny removed, but speed two years in a coma and then need lose most cyberwear, I decided to see how much weaker that would really make V.
Reed states that, "Your...neurons can no longer handle most implants, chrome. Your brain can manage your personal link and simple coprocessors...but any use of a combat implant could kill you." Vik later confirms that there are major issues with your 'motor cortex systems'.
I then loaded a game from
where V was infiltrating the spaceport after having 'combat cyberwear' disabled to get an idea of what this constituted. All of my character's mods seemed to work normally, probably because the only operating system I had installed was the cyberwear booster thing.
Removing all cyberwear seemed excessive, but I wanted to err on the conservative side so I did this:
I pulled every piece of cyberwear that I didn't think would work on a vegetable, ruling out anything that needed to be manually activated, or that seemed to rely on any sort of external sensor input, leaving only the entirely passive skeletal and integumentary augments, plus the automatic or basic circulatory stuff (no microrotors as that seemed like it would tie into the motor cortex stuff). Face mods cannot be removed so I downgraded the eye to the most basic one and didn't bind/use the faceplate. I swapped out the double jump leg mod for the Leeroy Ligament System, as the latter seemed more passive and shouldn't require much in the way of motor cortex load.
So, now I had a suite of passive, purely defensive, cyberwear that should be kosher for the constraints mentioned for why V would need to retire, I decided to see if this would be enough to do the secret ending on the hardest difficulty...which would be my first time fighting the buffed Smasher in 2.x. Due to the loss of gorilla arms (which were not classified as 'combat' by security, but which seemed a step too much to keep) I decided to respec to blades, but left my usual attributes and kept my focus on tech weapons.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkZ7VnKdxCs
Things did not go smoothly at all. I brought entirely the wrong weapon loadout for Smasher. The dual tech SMGs worked extremely well for getting to him, but the charge function was bugged half the time I used it, causing delays that made fighting a Sandevistan user painful. I also didn't bring a large enough variety of weapons and ran into major ammunition issues in the final battle that forced me to rely on a sword for about half the damage I needed to do to Smasher.
Fortunately, Smasher also got stuck at one point and figuring out his patterns was not too difficult. V's second heart had to revive her three times, but I eventually prevailed. I think with a year of physical therapy and advanced medical intervention, the V I had would have still been a monster without a single brain-connected piece of cyberwear.
Had a lot of fun with Phantom Liberty, but the game still has that common issue where the narrative doesn't match up with the gameplay mechansims provided. There were many points, though both the main game and expansion, where I felt that my V was railroaded into things that the game had provided clear mechanisms to bypass or negate. This goes beyond those cases where V simply refuses, or isn't provided with an option, to do something, to make some choice, but where entire scenarios seems absurd given the constraints already depicted.
