I'm still on my first playthrough (and enjoying it) and am super disappointed to hear the other lifepaths are basically 15-20 minute prologues. I too was really hoping for my corpo playthrough to be playing it from the inside, lots of corporate espionage, dealing with situations with the full force of a megacorp behind me etc...

People's expectations about the life paths were really overblown, they took marketing bullshit and took it as gospel. Then their own imaginations took over.

No game _ever_ has been like this. You just can't get three completely different fully immersive all-spoken-dialog games for the price of one - unless the main plot is like 10 hours max.

Even the Fallout games have a few bigger decisions (FO3 had the choice of nuking either town), but the rest of the stat-based chat options are mostly for flavour. Maybe a few side quests have different endings or dead ends because of your stats, but the main plot is still essentially the same.

Fantasy RPGs tend to do a pretty good job of this. The macro path your character follows is consistent, but there are choices and class-specific stories that create a sense of character.

I think the question comes down to the ‘role playing’ portion. I have no problem with single character games, and am not a 2077 hater, but would love to see more ambition around narrative.

Ah no, that they made clear eons ago - V has broken off with her/his past and is just a merc now. But, they stated that different life paths would give you wildly different experiences. That they would change how others react to you. And one would assume that this would need separate voiceovers. What we get instead is "I used to ride with the Bakkers" "I would never have guessed".