If you think this game is just about player choice and not making a statement on the military idk what to tell you

Just like the trailer narrator of 90% of cop action movies said in the 80s and 90s!

I think I got caught by that one in my first playthrough. I think it's an interesting scenario because blind compassion isn't really a feasible ethos with which to navigate life unless you like getting constantly taken advantage of. After all, we don't drain our bank accounts helping Nigerian princes in a tight spot, do we? Gerry recognizing that her story doesn't quite add up is an example of tempering compassion with scrutiny.

The game was mostly chill about that style of peaceful ritual exorcism being the way to deal with spirits nonviolently, but if you do it the spirit reveals itself to be some evil spirit that murders her lover then flees, with the game implying she'll just keep killing

That's the kind of shit I ran into before giving up entirely on it.

There's plot twists and surprises, then there's feeling the heavy hand of the narrative's preferred direction.

my initial impressions in both CDPR-made series were that straying too far from the sometimes-obvious narrative lead (if the game even allowed it; even less choices or even potential mission path availability in CP2077) were routinely punished early on.

I don't really remember any decisions clearly being punished in general, although like you said there's a lot fewer branching paths in Cyberpunk and that's the game that's freshest in my memory. What I remember of the Witcher 3 is that it pretty clearly favored helping people in general but that sometimes situations were murky and just an interpersonal dispute or everyone was awful or everyone had valid points and no matter what snap judgement you make it's going to feel bad afterwards.

Call it "wholesome peaceful YA novel protagonists who win by being ontologically good" if you want (which is bullshit, I'm more than fine with surprises if it doesn't just feel like a punitive narrator), but don't bother accusing me of a bad faith position if that's what you're leading with.

That was a comment on what I remembered from how people were talking about it when it came out, like it was this big shock because of how common liberal storytelling made rebels just sort of empty wholesome underdogs who never did anything wrong and then just won by being the good guys, and then with the Witcher you had a clear hollywood "morally correct" choice of helping the downtrodden underdogs only to be confronted with the revelation that they were in fact fighting a war and following their own agenda. And there was just so much vapid commentary on how cool and edgy it was that the "good" choice could have "bad" consequences, although admittedly that was coming from a valid place of disliking the Bioware style "moral choices" where someone is either being a saint or a cartoon villain and it's all very silly because the sides are all just nice guy or mean guy vibes with no material underpinnings at all.

I just get the feeling you've mostly seen that sort of gamer discourse and are inferring the worst because of how insufferable they are and what they focus on.

In the "bringing about meaningful change is impossible and attempting to change things outside of immediate personal fuckbuddy and adopted family circumstances is naive at best and probably worse than the status quo" way, maybe.

Not really? In both the Witcher and Cyberpunk the player is someone on the margins, and while Geralt is involved in things that actually have big implications for the setting and do actually change things, V is a dumbass lumpen petty bourgeoisie killer for hire whose best move is just fucking off and not doing that anymore.

Yeah, the white phosphorous scene doesn't really work unless you're coming into it with a mindset of "whoa badass, this is gonna be just like those AC-130 missions in Call of Duty"

Apparently the devs wanted to include a branching story path where the player doesn't use the WP, but they didn't have the budget.

I assume they were joking but it wasn't too clear.

That'd be like seriously saying anyone using Breaking Bad emojis cooks meth and sells it to high school kids and makes deals with neo-nazis.

Sure, right, it's their game, they can do whatever they want, and what they wanted to do was tell a story badly.

People talk about The Line to this day, but they only argue about whether that scene was a legitimate story telling beat or a gotcha. No one actually talks about the story, whether the story was moving or effecting, whether it changed anyone's minds. They just argue over the wp scene. People remember that there was a forced non-choice that folks didn't like and that's all they really recall about the game. I'd argue that's good evidence the game failed in its messaging.