Read more about Cyberpunk 2077➜ https://cyberpunk2077.mgn.tv
Intro: 0:00
Corporatism: A Confused Term: 1:26
Johnny’s Backstory: 3:00
Character Creation and Romantic Subplots: 4:30
The Illusion of Choice: 5:16
Thematic Dissonance: 6:47
Unabashed Shallowness: 7:40
Jean Baudrillard: 8:55
CDPR’s Exploitative Practices: 9:20
In this installment, I will be offering a critique of the game Cyberpunk 2077. As I’m sure you know by this point, this much anticipated game had a notoriously botched release. But there are much deeper problems with Cyberpunk than the shoddy state of the game upon its release.
References:
Corporate consolidation by brand
https://21stcenturytheater.wordpress.com/2018/03/17/corporate-consolidation-by-brand-2
FORMER CYBERPUNK 2077 DEVELOPER SPEAKS OUT ABOUT BRUTAL ‘CRUNCH’ WORKING CONDITIONS
https://www.intheknow.com/2020/10/16/former-cyberpunk-2077-developer-speaks-out-about-brutal-crunch-working-conditions
source
But of course
Thank you for this!
Fucking finally, someone said it. And I don't mean whining about glitches and such, but about the core ideas and how shallow they are
Thank you for this!
The Matrix is ruthless? hmm
I confess, as a trans person myself, I think certain elements of the gender customisation were completely bungled, and a creator by the name of Jessie Gender actually did a really good analysis of that aspect from a trans perspective. And it shaded my opinion of the entire game.
My man with his luscious curls out here looking like an Albrecht Dürer self portrait
its not just bad, its an "ABOMINATION"
XD
How does the anti-corporate messaging fit in next to genre IPs like Bladerunner and Judge Dredd? Do you think it's necessary for works in this style to tackle the increasing interconnectedness of corporate and government interests, or is that a cheap schtick?
The romances are locked to body types and voices which is still Transphobic as hell and bothers me a lot.
AS a note the source of the game, the ttrpg system also rather infamously did not care múch about fuck capitalism stuff over being cool and rad and stylish as all hell. That said the author is a cool dude and it is at least tightly written game and I know many People who use it to play anti capitalistic as funk games.
A cool video!
an actual maoist cyberpunk story would be interesting.
Based and cyberpunked
idk cyberpunk the subgenre has always been way more like that 90s film 'hackers,' or like idk, trainspotting but with the internet instead of heroin. groups of young people (punks) in a high-tech world (cyber). like i get people want a specific thing out of scifi at the moment and on the box it seems like cyberpunk is about that but it just isn't that, it's not a bleak genre about strangling dehumanisation, it's about "hack the planet" and cool cyberpunks using crazy tech to do crimes, the like faceless corporation stuff is just a reflection the real world from that perspective, a requirement for hackers to be heroes, it's just not that deep in the end.
"WAKE THE F$%^ UP, CJ! WE HAVE A DAMN TRAIN TO FOLLOW."
~ Little Smoke 2077
I think the main issue is that there was no effort made to tie in the Dystopian Corporations being against Transhumanism:
**Spoilers ahead**
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The backstory of the setting is far more interesting in the sense that Cunningham creates Soulkiller not as a weapon but as a legit attempt at Transhumanism divorced from the corporations and the central conflict was that a Corporation tried to use that as a weapon and now she turned it against them.
In the game however, the only people NOT in a corporation or subservient to them that show any interesting in this game changing technology turn out to be portrayed as even more villanous to the point of ridiculous cartoons: The Voodoo boys could have become powerful allies in their attempts to contact Cunningham to actually give humanity a fighting chance against corporations but they were never even portrayed as devoted revolutionaries and were just inflamed as selfish, violent pricks that cared only about themselves.
They could have worked the no-go zone into something like an actual mutual aid zone run by the Voodoo Boys and their attempts at contacting Cunningham as just the ultimate line of defense to permanently defend against corporate intrusion. There was just so much potential and those kind of stories would go right in hand with the backstory developed in the TTRPG but they were literally too busy just creating meaningless caricatures for you to dispose while they continued with the pointless story that was basically just "The Keanu Reeves in the future show" that we've got instead.
I'd like to see a good example of a floating signifier being used as a thematic element. Is such a thing possible? Does only disappointment follow in their wake?
I'm guessing that such a thing would fall inside what was talked about in this video, superficially being used as a commentary on the world around us.
I loved Cyberpunk 2027. Honestly, it’s my GOTY. The combat, the story, the aesthetics, everything made me fall in love.
But I agree with everything you said. The game can appear incredibly shallow in regards to certain themes and how it handles them.
im glad other people picked up on this actually, around the holographic police tape and computerized magazines i kind of concluded "okay so they're making things to aesthetically resemble this sub genre but they're failing pretty hard to convey any of the motifs that it's used to deliver. in other words, it aint cyberpunk."
Welcome to the Dystopian Now
tfw the true nightmare is capitalism
It bummed me out that there’s this little snippet of a story on the in game news (I think it may be a tiny side mission too, but if so it was unmemorable) about union workers catching terrorist charges for striking. Like that could have made a good side quest. Or at least better than bombing a pop group’s van or whatever.
I feel like you made a lot of large statements, with 0 actual evidence to back up the claim. So I just have to assume you have justification for this, but given on my analysis the alienating principles of capitalism were made plainly clear in the game. Sure, the game spent a lot of it's time writing in the narrative concepts from the tabletop to be understood in this new format…and the main story, while fun and explosive, was really just a ship of Theseus dilemma with 1 question: what do to about capitalism…join and lose your soul, don't join and peace out while the world burns, or fight the system and be crushed…because the POINT of Cyberpunk is to show a far gone dystopia where solutions no longer exist…it's over. You just wait for the doomsday clock to run out and then maybe people are so scarred by the past they finally pick Communism or a new path. The game doesn't provide solutions it just explores the problem, which is fine…especially for an immersive space. So I don't see the hangup.
Getting angry that expensive games use genre tropes is pretty lame, like…don't get me wrong…I love me some indie games where the gameplay perfectly feeds into the narrative. The reality is, if the gameplay doesn't look familiar they will get roasted by the gaming populace. Gamers aren't looking for revolution, they are looking for an addiction to be quenched by more of the same but a bigger hit. Why do you think every gamer thinks the game sucked because it was X game franchise but better in every way…pick your poison, then keep looking for the next hit.
Narrative "Dissidence"…well yeah, there are 3 lifepaths with 3 core outcomes that pull from manners in which you choose to interact with the world. If you had a dissident playthrough it likely had to do with an arc you chose. All of my playthroughs have clear narrative arcs showcasing different facets of capitalist alienation.
…and then the classic "game has crunch so let's handwave"…I've been told to not "normalize crunch"…no, crunch IS normalized, which is WHY it's a problem. Treating crunch like the symptom of a few companies is absolutely naive, and acting like saying "no CDPR don't do that" is going to fix the problem is juvenile. Crunch isn't a product of culture, it's not a product of bad management…it's capitalism…it's a literal feature. Getting people to work more and longer for less through a culture of shame, alienation, and greed. Capitalism producing its own critiques that are a product of and feed into the system is a feature. Why are we shocked?
So acting like a boycott is going to fix Crunch is so fucking laughable.
What people need to understand about corporatism is that it's not a bug, it's not a mistake nor is it a corrupted form of1 capitalism. It is a feature, it is The Logical conclusion of a system dedicated to minimizing costs for the sake of maximizing profits.
Corporatism is the result of capitalism working exactly as intended.
Hey I just noticed House of Leaves behind you, nice.
Great review! I stopped playing about 25 hours in because disappointment came in fast due to the shallowness of the design of the game and narrative. I could tell that instead of having the game have you engaging with the themes associated with Cyberpunk in a meaningful way, the game would just escalate the firefights and violence and the story would just serve to carry you from one encounter to the next.
There is a shell of a good game in there; if they spend the next few years tweaking the narrative and mission design, add more ways to progress through the game nonviolently, and make the starting lifestyle backstory have more impact on the game over than just dialog options then they may have a chance at pulling a No Man's Sky. If all the post launch content is just more shit to shoot at then that would be a massive disappointment.
The table top game attacks capitalism way better.
I dunno, man… I've seen people more than any other game in history projecting their ideals and beliefs onto this game HARD as if CDPR promised them some kind of magical world that was going to be a video game utopia, and being pissed that it didn't live up to those promises I'm pretty sure CDPR never made. It's just Skyrim in the future. It's buggy, it's main storyline is under developed and shitty, and the real fun is in the huge atmospheric open world that modders are going to perfect and customize over time. As someone who finds the medieval fantasy game setting boring and overdone I've been waiting for a game like this forever and I'm enjoying it a lot. Really not sure why everyone seemed to think it was gonna be the second coming of the messiah in game form.
I'd also love to understand why when a game doesn't even ATTEMPT to represent something at all nobody says a damn thing but the moment they TRY to represent something some subsection of people care about and don't do it EXACTLY how that group would prefer then people go apeshit. Like… doesn't this attitude just discourage devs from even bothering to try in the future? Next time they'll just not bother letting you choose a gender, gender lock the character, only record one voice actor for dialog and railroad the customization even further. Is that what people would prefer? I'm not trying to defend the devs, I'm questioning the effectiveness of this strategy that especially the pro trans folk seem to have. Name the last game that even TRIED to do anything with gender, let alone did it JUST the way you want.
If I was them and saw this reaction then going forward I'd just think "maybe trying to cater to this small section of our consumer base by trying to represent people who have an issue specifically with how they're represented is not a good use of our time and energy".
As usual… mostly playing devil's advocate because I'm interested in more thought out answers.
Maybe we need "cyberpunk" stories that incorporate references to real historical events and labor movements, maybe even setting then in the past. The stuff cyberpunk as a genre critiques is real and has been around for a long time.
At this point cyberpunk's trademark retrofuturistic aesthetic only serves to make the stories feel like they exist in a fantasy land that doesn't really reflect our current situation. I think games like Fallout and Bioshock, while not leftist, do a kind of good job at making us feel that maybe things weren't so good in America in ways that cyberpunk media that regularly detaches itself from real world history can't do.
do you have a different pair of glasses? thanks anyway
i found myself enjoying the game,s gameplay elements for brief periods of time. i have 40 hours in it, and i think i hate this game.
there is just something perverse about it, like im playing a billboard advertisement, and not a real game.
Interesting analysis. I won't deny that I had fun with the game (from a strictly "video gamey" perspective) but yeah, you are right. Now I am wondering if the original tabletop RPG shares any similarities with the CRPG version.
I love how the 1920s utopian vision of the future fades away to reveal the 'I Want To Believe' poster. Seems our systems are not yet done analprobing us into a bright future.
Did you play the game or just watch a play through?
Eh