I’ve been reading through some of the books recently and I realized I haven’t seen anything about robot characters. I don’t remember any in Cyberpunk 2077 either. Is there any established lore for androids?
Zhirafa manufactures a lot of animal inspired drones (in this case drone=robot, not a flying drone) for construction job purposes. If you were to have any megacorp create a prototype humanoid drone, it would likely be them.
There are Robot R Mk. 2s in 2077 which are defense robots that are owned by different megacorps, the police, and rich people like Kerry Eurodyne. They’re androids, but not very human-like. They’re very clearly robots.
Despite this, since there are lifelike full-borgs, it’s definitely possible they’ve used a similar style of body for a prototype. I think their movements would be the hardest thing to make lifelike since they aren’t piloted by a human brain, so there would definitely be an uncanny valley effect to them. They’d basically move like really detailed video game characters, but in real life.
Cyberpunk RED has full body conversion cyborgs, but no androids that I’ve seen.
After the Fourth Corporate War, people are pretty leary of connectivity (hence the city nets) and AI (also city nets).
At my table, I’d play most NPCs as hostile towards androids because they’re too similar to AI.
Games with cyber psychosis tend not to have androids, as they blunt the impact of exploring the stories of people who replace more and more of themselves with cyberware and lose their humanity as they do it.
So the androids that have existed in the various version of cyberpunk over the years have all been some variant of replacing your body with chrome, whilst leaving at least some part of your original brain behind to drive it.
Huh. Now you mention it, I don’t remember seeing androids in Shadowrun either.
In 2020, there is a materials about full cyborg I would expect in some Chrome books, but may be somewhere else.
See for example https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Militech_Eclipse_(2020)