TLDR:
The dystopian hellscape set in the future isn’t as dystopian as current reality…
The video game is fairly tame when it comes to themes like this, when compared to the source material and genre as a whole.
“Cyberpunk was a warning, not an aspiration.” – Mike Pondsmith
Honestly its aspirational at this point, there’s no way we’d get cybernetics IRL without them being directly remote controlable by police, companies or just rich people who pay a small fee to watch poor people hit themselves.
Isn’t that part of most cyberpunk lore? That they have to hack those attachments or get them at shady backyard shops, because they would originally be under control of the big company that controls everything and also provides security?
I’m not much into cyberpunk though, so my impression might be off.
Most cyberpunk tends to handwave it, consider the sheer amount of crime in such settings but generally no one every has their implants shuttdown unless its by hacking. In many settings it doesn’t even need a wireless connection (shadowrun) but IRL we’re almost certainly going to end up with always online implants for the soel purpose of control.
Kind of a given for the entire genre, isn’t it?
You’d be surprised how many people’s heads that goes over
Somehow also CDPR
Isn’t that… like… almost the entirety of the purpose of the genre?
Ya I always figured cyberpunk got big in the 80’s because it was a commentary of the hyper capitalist neoliberal policies of the era, which have only gotten stronger since then.
I’ve never double-checked or researched this but I always thought it made sense.
Sorta. The whole point is more capitalism gone to the extreme, homelessness and poverty are just a consequence of that.
They should focus on making a functioning playable game within 3 years of launching it before they focus on preaching at its players
Odd, it was functioning just fine and entirely playable for me at launch. I put over 100 hours into my first play through without issue
I played at launch too. It wasn’t as bad as people were making it out to be, but I ran into a number of major bugs.
Agreed. It was a buggy mess, but nothing made it unplayable (unless you were playing on xbox1/ps4). Additionally, the game is in a much better state now, CDPR put a lot of effort into polishing it up rather than leaving it a buggy mess
You are just burying your head in the sand if you refuse to acknowledge the myriad of bugs and stability issues this game had at launch, even if you didn’t personally experience them.
Even today, years later, it has some major bugs.
Video games are not the place for political statements. We play video games to escape reality.
