I’m 10 or so hours in and have stolen high tech from a corporation (cool), resurrected a dead terrorist (possibly cool, still don’t know his motivations), and drive-by-hacked various cops’ cyberware while travelling the city (funny).
Outside of that, the side content seems to be entirely social services oriented. Batman the cyberpsychos. Judge Dredd the crimes in progress. Ambulance a guy to a doctor. Social Worker a cop having a mental breakdown. Chat to various people. Is there some sort of “do cool crimes” set of side content that I’ve missed, or did CDPR just make another sheriff sim?
Mostly the side gigs the fixers give out. In the starting area it’s a lot of hitting gangs (and in Watson that usually means hitting Maelstrom, who are neo-nazi descended cyborg-supremacist fascists) or doing favors for the former-journalist fixer who despite being a sellout is probably the most altruistic of the fixers, but that diversifies a little later on. Like in the downtown area it’s a lot more pulling off little heists on corpos or club owners on behalf of their rivals or victims.
The NCPD subcontractor alert system is a shitty diegetic device someone came up with to point out all the little world events they set up and it gets increasingly silly as you go on with you getting (leveled) payouts of tens of thousands of eddies from the cops for wiping out corporate security teams that you caught (legally) murdering someone on corporate territory.
The DLC adds car theft and delivery missions, and there's a fair bit of decent stuff in it despite the premise and initial impressions you may get from some characters. [DLC spoilers]
Like Myers is charismatic and friendly towards you, but is actually a deeply evil and sadistic piece of shit who depending on the branch you take can send UCAS specops in to No Russian the Night City Air/Space Port in an attempt to stop you. You can’t ever really mock and denounce Solomon Reed’s ideology as thoroughly as you should, but the final exchange with him in the free-Songbird path does let you come close.
Most of the little random side quests you find while wandering around are just you having an opportunity to help or hangout with someone, or get a small payout for an opportunistic crime.
I got that they were big on personal modification, but reading their lore entry off the wiki I’m now realising CDPR actually expect you to read through all the lore entries instead of being shown through the story. Now I gotta check if the mox are actually the queer/sex worker gang like I think.
In the case of Maelstrom I actually got their neo-nazi origins from the Cyberpunk Red sourcebook, which details how Maelstrom formed from the union of a neo-nazi gang and a “cyberpsycho” extremist gang. I don’t know of anything in-game more detailed than just their general sadism and might-makes-right fascist behavior.
I feel like they’re kind of underdeveloped in the story and mostly pop up in the background, probably because someone realized making them another faction like the other gangs or the corpo security groups would mean gamers could hunt them for sport and that would be terrible optics. Otherwise yeah, they’re basically a militant sex worker union that responds in kind to the casual cruelty and violence sex workers face.