I played maybe two hours of Cyberpunk 2077 on my brother’s Steam Deck before I had to give it back, so this isn’t a completionist’s take. But two hours was enough to notice the game doing something interesting with the exact problem we talked about in class: how do you sort players into recognizable identities without building a biology-based caste system like D&D’s?
CD Projekt Red’s answer is the lifepath: before you even name your character, you pick Corpo, Streetkid, or Nomad. It’s the closest thing the game has to a “race” selector, doing the same job D&D’s species menu does — giving you a legible identity before you’ve done anything. The difference is that a lifepath is framed as background, not blood. You’re not a Corpo because you were born with Corpo traits; you’re a Corpo because you grew up inside a corporation’s org chart. That’s the same distinction D&D’s race mod was reaching for when it swapped biological traits for cultural upbringing. Where this connects to the Bronfenbrenner reading is that a lifepath is supposed to be an outer layer (i.e. family, economy, institution) pressing in on a person and shaping who they become. On paper, V isn’t defined by an inherent trait, but by which rings of Night City’s ecosystem raised him. That’s a more honest model of identity than “elves are naturally nimble,” and it’s the version of worldbuilding the game is clearly reaching for.
Except the reach mostly stops at the prologue. Once the three lifepaths converge, the game funnels all three into the same heist mission within the first act: your background shows up as a few unique dialogue lines, not as a structural force still acting on your choices. While I played as a Streetkid V, I did some research and found Corpo V and Streetkid V end up building the same cyborg mercenary with the same skill trees and the same relationship to the same gangs. The “it’s cultural, not biological” promise turns out to be cosmetic. That’s its own quiet harm: it implies class origin in Night City is flavor text, when the world is constantly insisting that corp money versus street survival is the most brutal, structuring divide in the setting. The game wants you to feel the stratification in the environment art (i.e. gleaming towers over the slums) while refusing to let your actual mechanical journey be shaped by which side of it you started on.
Compare that to how D&D’s stereotype-driven species traits at least stay consistent for the whole campaign, for better or worse, you’re always an elf. Cyberpunk 2077 sets up something more socially honest and then abandons it for convenience, which might be worse: it gestures at critique of class-as-destiny without paying the design cost of actually modeling it. My stance on the ethics question: coding identity as cultural instead of biological is the right instinct, but only if the world keeps acting on it. A lifepath that stops mattering after the tutorial isn’t progress past D&D’s essentialism, it’s just a shorter-lived version of the same shortcut.
