Cyberpunk 2077

Hah, that is hilarious.

I really hope there is some quest for the absolute BEST weapon in the game that is gated by a NPC that won't give it to you if your penis is too big.

The internet rage would be glorious

fightcitymayor wrote: Am I the only one that finds the "cyberpunk" setting to be utterly predictable? Always a packed dystopian urban landscape populated by downtrodden plebs from whose ranks a champion rises to challenge the always shadowy corporatocracy who inevitably exists to further the interests of shadowy rich guys. Always with cybernetic parts enhancement & neon film noir tropes & "hacking" & floating automobiles & cyborg bad guys & eternal night. Same setting, same roles, same methods, same technobabble.

I'll give a pass to the kids who never watched Bladerunner or read Neuromancer or played Netrunner, but otherwise I struggle to buy into the hype.

A very small number of cyberpunk books and movies (especially movies) were excessively influential in defining the genre, making it seem more limited than necessary. Basically the early writings of William Gibson plus Blade Runner. Kind of like how Tolkien's writing had an overwhelming influence on the fantasy genre, to the extent that great writers like Fritz Lieber and Michael Moorcock have practically become obscure.

If you want to see a more exciting range of possibilities explored within the cyberpunk genre, here are some books worth trying:

When Gravity Fails (plus two sequels), by George Alec Effinger
Islands in the Net, by Bruce Sterling
Vacuum Flowers, by Michael Swanwick
Moxyland, by Lauren Beukes
Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson
Steel Beach, by John Varley
The Glass Hammer, by K.W. Jeter
The Artificial Kid, by Bruce Sterling

Ultimately, cyberpunk is a small genre, but that doesn't necessarily make it bad. Blues music is also a relatively small genre (of music), but there is still a decent amount of variety and some outstanding individual songs.

I enjoyed Snow Crash (and The Diamond Age.)

Maybe there are parallels to "fantasy" where the genre allows for almost innumerable worlds and races and places and things, but almost always ghettoizes itself back down to generic elves & dwarfs & sword-&-sorcery tropes when it reaches popular culture. I guess if you consider "cyberpunk" to be a ghettoized sub-genre of "speculative fiction" maybe there is room to grow into something other than endless Bladerunner ripoffs.

I've always thought a great multi-part series anthology could be made just out of Harlan Ellison's output. Film a different short story for each two-hour episode & create a speculative fiction anthology series. Throw in some Ted Sturgeon stuff too. Like a bigger-budget Outer Limits or Twilight Zone upgrade. Put it on HBO or Netflix so it collects the modern-day must-watch cool factor.

Update: I have found some sick leather pants that are better protection than my basketball shorts.

Further update: my AI buddy gets in the way of me throwing grenades. I also got a double barreled shotgun that does great work from 2 feet away.

I think it's a little bit of a misstep to use this creaky old property as your base IP, that would explain why some people are thinking it's pretty rote and old fashioned. It is old fashioned! The setting was made in like 1990 iirc.

My favorite cyberpunk book is Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling , if we're talking cool books. It doesn't fall particularly near any cliche cyberpunk stuff, but that's okay. I really like Rudy Rucker's short stories too, even if many of them are basically "I've got a weird idea loosely based off this math concept, here's the barest bones of a story to wrap around it".

I saw a review of cyberpunk 2077 titled "Dad Rock, not New Wave" lamenting it's steadfast adherence to cyberpunk cliches etc. Pretty good title I thought, though you can't get too mad at a game literally called Cyberpunk leaning heavily into cyberpunk cliches.

Yeah, it's definitely cyberpunk-by-the-numbers, and old, classical cyberpunk numbers at that. But The Witcher 3 was fantasy by-the-numbers. Neither game breaks a lot of new ground, thematically.

The original Cyberpunk rpg is the specific basis for the setting of this game, though the first edition was set in 2013 and the second edition was set in 2020. The first edition of Cyberpunk was published in 1988. The genre dates back to the '60s, though it didn't have a name until 1980. Gibson's early cyberpunk short stories were published in science-fiction magazines in the early '80s, and of course Blade Runner debuted in theaters in 1982. All genres tend to get blurry around the edges, but cyberpunk tends to stay within a limited range because the stories were generally set in a near-future timeframe, and we have already seen technology catch up and sometimes blow past cyberpunk. For example, When Gravity Fails was set about 200 years in the future, and nearly every character had a "belt phone" that was very comparable to a typical cell phone that you could buy in the real world by 1999.

Looks like things aren't great on the base ps4/xbox. Shocker!

How does this game look in DOS? Asking for a friend.

I mean the game was announced a long time ago and heavily marketed for ps4/xbox, expecting a functional game doesn't seem like asking for too much. If they couldn't make it work they should have just released it as a pc game, and we wouldn't be talking about it.

Cyberpunk is interesting because while Gibson and Blade runner get a lot of the credit there are a tons of adjacent stuff that contributed as well. Manga, Heavy Metal comics, video games, and various rpgs. As a genre it happily steals from almost every source. Robocop? Sure, we'll take it. Lawnmower Man? Yup. On and on. Heck, just add some cyborg mercs and a direct neural link or three and "Trading Places" is quintissential cyberpunk! Shirow took it out to a pretty advanced degree with "Ghost in the Shell" (and the IMHO superior Appleseed) though he had a more beneificent authoritarian perspective I think (i.e. his characters were often the bad guys from the usual CP character POV).

Yet it steers so far away from the most obvious future tech aesthetic, Star Trek (if you subtract the spaceships and just focus on the personal tech) and aggressively squashes any optimism or sense of communal cooperation.

Anyway, I have high hopes CDPR has a great story in the game, not just engrossing but shocking side quests.

Just finished a section of the game (not quite 6 hours in) that introduces the "brain dance". It's kind of like VR Batman Arkham Asylum detective mode, combined with a video editor! You can scrub a timeline of a "brain dance", which for lack of a better term is a recording of someone's experience. You can highlight the audio track, the video track, or a thermal signature track.

During all of this, you search for clues in the recording and gather intel for later use. It's fairly interesting, and considering the lengthy intro you get for it, I assume they will be using it more than a couple of times over the course of the game.

Side notes: The brain dance is the now infamous sequence that carries the epilepsy warning. It flashes a bit when you start it. While this brain dance is going on, your character is in a chair, and periodically the scene would supposedly cut to you talking to other characters in the room. I say "supposedly", because for ME, the camera jumped to my car in the parking lot. Nice bug.

IIRC, braindance in the old Cyberpunk rpg was strictly a form of entertainment. Instead of just watching music videos by your favorite pop star, you could jack into a VR simulation of her living her best life for a few hours. Sounds like this game takes the old braindance idea from the rpg and combines it with that neat scene in the original Blade Runner where Dekker is zooming in on various details from digital crime scene photos.

I literally haven't looked at my Cyberpunk stuff in about 25 years, but I still have it and now feel motivated to get it out and look through it this weekend. Might take some time to give a write-up of the 2013 and 2020 settings, just so we can compare it with the reality of those years.

That would be cool. I played a ton of CP2020 back in the day

I recall an article talking about how Gibson was so ignorant of how a computer works that he didn't even know a hard drive had a spinning disc in it (though with those old PCs you could usually hear it pretty easily). Anyway, jump to now and most laptops use SSDs. Funny how that works out...future fiction written by engineers often drastically underestimated just how far we would come while the artsy hippy types just guess and end up nailing it.