Damn this dude played Cyberpunk and literally missed everything about the story and the city itself.
Sounds “corporations are le bad” with more words
Corporations ARE le bad though
They are though.
Well, they are, but it’s a story and a very cerebral one. Of course it has a lesson to learn from.
At least it wasn’t being woke or preaching about the end times of a 2000 year old prediction. It really does become an issue when the aesop anvil doesn’t need to be dropped.
I love the Cyberpunk 2077 universe. Ive played the TTRPG, the Game from CD Project Red, and loved the anime. But no way in hell would I want to actually live in Night City…
Cyberpunk 2077, the video game, is a great story partially because Night City is practically more a character than a setting. It consumes and shits out all who are bold or stupid enough to think they can make it there.
The person romanticizing their world has somehow missed every theme of the story. Immortality is only achievable by sacrificing every last bit of your humanity through either replacing every part of your body with chrome (Smasher), or through horrific body snatching tech (Soulkiller).
Illness does exist in Cyberpunk, many characters through the story refer to their sick relatives. V themself is portrayed as being sick after installing Soulkiller after the Arasaka heist with Jackie. Indeed, Soulkiller is portrayed like a high tech, fast acting cancer.
The world in Cyberpunk reflects a kind of criticism of capitalism in showing us how excessive the divides in economic and power dynamics can become if capitalism is left to rule unchecked by governmental power (i have not yet played phantom liberty, which I assume addresses in part the corrupted and futile attempts to restore governmental agency in a world that long has handed off the reigns to unfettered capitalists).
The characters generally live in squalor. Vs initial apartment is little more than a glorified closet in a bleak concrete monolith. Quality Health care is only available to those that can afford an ultra Premium plan, executed by a Military Style Medical Corporation. Otherwise, you’re lucky if your loved ones’ ashes are dispensed via a Vending Machine, as seen in the anime Edgerunners.
Again, love the game, love the anime and TTRPG. NEVER in a million years would I want to live in that universe… unless maybe it was a choice between there and literal Hell, cuz at that point the line of difference befween them starts to blur…and they end up looking the same.
There’s actually a few games with great settings like this. Night City is, in some ways, like Rapture from Bioshock: a city both terrible in its capacity to inflict violence on the unprepared and which horribly reshapes the individuals who inhabit it, either technologically or biologically, while being vibrant and interesting in a way cities in our world aren’t. It’s sort of the innate aesthetic of cyberpunk or, in Bioshock’s case, biopunk: “terrible, but interesting.”
another case where the pictured OP should be reminded sci fi is more about the present than the future
everything depicted in CP77, except the technology, is a comment on any given metropolis post-1979 than it is a fantasy with no correlation to the modern era
All this plus they skipped directly over the focus on lethality that Friday Night Firefight had. If you get shot your outlook is extremely grim. I think it’s the only system I’ve played that has rules for using other people as shields.
Frankie Boyle: “Humans actually make very poor shields. That’s why we invented… the shield.”
V’s apartment isn’t actually that bad though is the funny thing. That’s like 4k a month in San Francisco.
Yes, but is it inside a Brutalist monolith concrete building with a single small slit of a window? I get what you’re saying, but my point in regards to Vs initial apartment is that despite it’s small niceties, the harshness of the world that exists just right outside their door is mlre prison like than almost all modern 1st world apartments today.
I love the gig where you have to comfort and console your neighbor, Barry, because you get to see that his apartment is slightly smaller, slightly lower scale than yours, but more or less the same.
A similar portrayal can be seen in the apartment of K in Blade Runner 2049. Sure the interiors are nicer than some, but the apartments, to me, feel like the architects intended to treat the tenants like prisoners with nicer digs than actual prisoners. Space efficient to the point of just barely not cramped. Nice enough that initially you don’t complain. Isolated enough that you don’t connect with your neighbors.
Grant you there are community spaces like the boxing gym, but again, it reminds me of a prison gym mainly because of the Brutalist concrete foundation of the building.
Youtuber Dami Lee does a much better job breaking down Cyberpunk style architecture than I ever could. Id highly recommend you check out her video on the subject.
Somebody should make a CP77 homeless mod where you’re trying not to get run over or shot by upper middle class trust fund kids playing gangster in the street.
I mean, they made a whole anime about it.
I, for one, think we SHOULD create the Torment Nexus from the hit sci-fi novel “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus”
I’ve been No Mouth Screaming this exact same thing!
This is one of those posts that says way more about the person making it than anything else…
“Explain to me how night City isnt a utopia” “right to bear arms? Yep”
Sounds like he explained one big reason himself.
Illness, no such thing
So the guy just isn’t familiar with the property then, gotcha
Arkansas is literally uninhabitable because of a Bio-Plague. Lol
People who support free market and capitalism should support Night City in order to be consistent with their beliefs.
This selective ignorance is very common in actual political discussion
Removed by mod
Thats just a very long version of “corporations are le good.”
Making money and a decent quality of life through extremely illegal activities? Apart from the respawn, it’s exactly how it works in real life too.
See the difference is that morality has almost completely broken down in CP2077. What did V have to do between the prolog and tutorial to get a nice apartment and a reliable car? Those assholes at the meat packing plant where you get the robot sure don’t look like they have any qualms even if V does.
Also, we still have an ecosystem and efficient oceanic transport. Climate change and a rogue AI that controls a global oceanic swarm of self replicating sea mines mean that the pizza is gross because pigs are extinct (they use tuna) and all overseas cargo is transported by air.
People still care about their friends, but that’s it. Even if internet in CP2077 was global and filled with punks and not just a NetWatch-policed glorified municipal Teletext, do you think anyone would give a shit about the world they live in on a chat site?
It’s also heavily implied that successful cyberpunks are vastly outnumbered by idiots who were in over their heads from the start and it cost those amateurs their lives. Those that succeed and become even slightly known, including V, are often exceptionally skilled individuals.
corporations are le bad
This is a problem a few “dystopian” Sci Fi publications have, they’re often better than what we have now.
I’m not sure whether you’re naive or blind if you think CP77 is better than what we have.
deleted by creator
