12 ms·

Cyberpunk 2077 a 'warning' about the future

92 points by T-A 6y ago

walrus01 6y ago
One could also say that all of Gibson and Sterling's early novels were warnings, describing in some detail near future cyberpunk dystopias. When reading Neuromancer and Count Zero, the cumulative sum of the evocative description of "the sprawl" and the post war environment led me to form a fairly bleak mental picture of the place. And floating above all that an ultra elite class of the 1% of the 1% (sensenet stars, the tessier-ashpools, etc). Islands in the Net also paints a picture of radically even more unequal wealth distribution, coupled with massive economic disruptions and civil wars in developing nations.
- aaaxyz 6y ago
  Right. To me cyberpunk is about what happens when extreme wealth inequality is coupled to extreme technological advances such that the richest are immortal (for all practical purposes) and don't need the 99% since all production has been automated and any attempt at a revolution is made futile by military drones
- masklinn 6y ago
  > One could also say that all of Gibson and Sterling's early novels were warnings, describing in some detail near future cyberpunk dystopias. That's the original core of cyberpunk, it was in no small part a condemnation / reversal of the utopian post-war SF. And the Cyberpunk TRPG (which is the universe / setting of Cyberpunk 2077) is very much set in that genre / ethos.
ramenmeal 6y ago
Was expecting it to be about the nightmares of large software projects
shahsyed 6y ago
I find it extremely ironic that the game touches upon themes of corporate greed and climbing the corporate ladder (I've only played it until I got a soft lock during the 3rd tutorial). How else do you get themes of technology being a boon to society? Isn't it these companies who indirectly dictate this (e.g by using your public data)? CD Projekt Red is a great example of why publicly owned companies and creating expectations for unreasonable deadlines for any software is going to cause your employees to deal with crunch and release something that doesn't work that great. Unfortunately I'm sure that this game will entertain more than it will highlight horrible industry practices.
- standardUser 6y ago
  I have heard a lot of murmurs about "horrible industry practices" regarding CD Projekt Red, but nothing concrete. Is this just a smear campaign, or a half-truth being thoughtlessly repeated because it fits preexisting narratives? Or more to the point, were they violating Polish or EU labor laws?
  - b0rsuk 6y ago
    "Cyberpunk 2077 has involved months of crunch, despite past promises" Including, but not limited to, 6 day work weeks for over a year. Sounds like 966 and China. https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/4/21575914/cyberpunk-2077-release-crunch-labor-delays-cd-projekt-red https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/4/21575914/cyberpunk-2077-re... Combine that with the unoptimized, buggy state the game is in. Many streamers had the game crash, forcing them to redo the combat encounter because you can't save in combat.
    - wavefunction 6y ago
      I have a beefy pc setup that I purchased recently specifically for Cyberpunk 2077 and some other demanding PC games still in development (wink wink Star Citizen) and I have had one non-gameplay bug in my couple of hours of play where elevator doors didn't open for my partner but did for me. The situation is very different for people using the previous gen consoles though, it seems, and I feel bad for them. I have a couple of good friends in this cohort who were very much looking forward to the game.
    - danielEM 6y ago
      > 6 days work weeks for over a year So not true! Greets from Poland!
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
      I'm on 7+ year old hardware and a 1080 ti and it runs fine @ 1440p. Partner has a 980ti and it runs fine @ 1080p. Any bugs I've encountered have been minor. Makes me wonder what people's "rigs" are actually like. It's no Doom Eternal but it plays about as well as GTA at launch going from memory.
manuelabeledo 6y ago
"The technology is a couple steps higher, and so forth, but in this particular universe, technology is not good for people. Pollution is rampant, crime is rampant and social and economic inequality is just accepted." So what is the difference with our current world again? Not trying to be a cynic here, but if we were to accept that most crimes aren't violent, then this description fits with what we have now. The landscape of Cyberpunk 2077 itself looks exactly like many east Asian metropolis at night.
- monocasa 6y ago
  It's a warning about the future... from the 1980s. It's more an alt history at this point.
- willis936 6y ago
  We’re living in a cyberpunk dystopia. Fiction of the past (1984, blade runner) were exaggerated extrapolations of the path we have been on. The path was clear then and it’s clear now. Nothing has changed.
  - hutzlibu 6y ago
    But for a real dystopia we do have quite some freedom and wealth. (That means, if the lockdowns go away at some point. If not, well, then yes. Total dystopia. Everything private total restricted, only corporate and state buisness allowed. Peoples private life only exist in virtual realities) edit: everything is relative. I was born in east germany. A state where I would not have been allowed to openly say my opinion, or drive 30 km with my bycicle to the west or south, from where I live, as I would have been arrested or literally shot back then. Pretty dystopian in comparison. Also, people in north korea can say something today, about what dystopian feels like. That means, no they cannot, while they are there.
    - KittenInABox 6y ago
      I don't know if we have freedom and wealth as correlated to happiness and fulfillment in life, however. And that's precisely what the cyberpunk genre originally was created as a commentary on- the ability to have so much advancement and also so much misery.
xwdv 6y ago
COVID-19 has taken us so much closer now to a cyberpunk dystopia. The disruption of social life, the growing inequality as the wealth of the investor class grows to precipitous heights, the use of technology to avoid physical human contact as much as possible, we're getting there, no doubt about it.
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  Well, Covid-19 will eventually go away. At least as a major threat. But I am also worried, that much of the emergency legislation is here to stay. It is rare, that laws get softened, once they are implemented.
haunter 6y ago
Too bad the game is an unfinished mess and the PS4/Xbox One version is pretty much a scam in its current form. 20fps (not even stable!) and blurry ultra low 720p textures. Just unexcusable. I feel bad for everyone with last gen consoles getting this as a christmas gift. So as for the devs. Work 6 days a week for year and now continue to do the same for bugfixing and working on the PS5/Xbox Series X version
- pmoriarty 6y ago
  I'm definitely not your typical gamer, but I've played and thoroughly enjoyed plenty of games which had way worse graphics and framerate than that. I much prefer gameplay, wide freedom of action, an interesting world and characters, and good writing than eye candy.
  - haunter 6y ago
    No offense but sub-20 FPS is unplayable, it's a slideshow. No matter what, how good the story, it ruins the whole game. Each to its own I guess but considering the historicity of the game this shouldn't have been released in this state. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvtPgetQ0VI&feature=youtu.be&t=30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvtPgetQ0VI&feature=youtu.be... It's like watching a movie in 240p. Sure you can enjoy it but is this really how you want to experience a good movie?
    - dunefox 6y ago
      For me anything less than maybe 50 is unplayable, it just looks janky.
      - mercer 6y ago
        I've gotten to accept 30 FPS on console, but honestly I avoid getting too used to more than that right now because the difference is definitely very noticeable. I did something similar back when most gaming moved to 1080p. I could accept 720p as long as I stuck with it. Once I got used to better, going back was a challenge.
SilasX 6y ago
I already knew that, but for me, it was more a warning about how difficult it is to get complex software systems right, and how grotesquely they can fail, with implications for life-critical systems that depend on them, and more and more things being controlled by software with such couplings.
codeulike 6y ago
Because the future is going to be years late?
paxys 6y ago
Funny enough the biggest criticism of the game I have seen in the reviews (apart from technical problems) is that it uses Cyberpunk as a pretty setting but touches on its themes very superficially. IMO it's futile to try and stay away from politics and controversy when you're in a genre that is so deep rooted in it.
- friedman23 6y ago
  Reviewers that lean extremely far left weren't happy that a video game didn't espouse their ideology at every second. What a surprise. Depending on what path you chose the start of the game literally has a corporate employee order the execution of elected officials. But I guess that wasn't on the nose enough?
  - danbolt 6y ago
    I think a lot of the critique people had towards the game has merit. Or, it strikes me as a strawman to reduce their ideas to "ideology".
    - friedman23 6y ago
      The game has corporate leaders and the rich killing and trampling over poor people throughout the game. While walking through the city you will have people randomly hit the ground in front of you because they jumped from a building. Do we really need a character to come out and tell us how bad this is in words for it to be a critique?
      - danbolt 6y ago
        I was thinking of critique more along the lines of Carolyn Petit's article for Polygon.
        freeflight 6y ago
        That's exactly the kind of political criticism that I consider very odd. It barely admits that being able to choose genitals, independent of gender, is a step forward, only to then complain why CDPR didn't go much further by having players select pronouns and a non-binary voice. Then it complains how the game is allegedly transphobic because it "objectifies trans bodies", a statement solely based on one poster in the game that made the rounds trough the Twitter-outrage-sphere a while ago, while completely missing how in the CP2077 world pretty much everything is commodified down to peoples memories and their individual body parts. It's like there is some kind of agenda to paint the game, and it's developers, as transphobic since their PR Twitter account made a not so well received "Did you just assume my gender?" joke a couple of years back. Along similar lines: Jeff Gerstmann complains about the lack of political correctness in some of the NPC lines, like when hardened gang-bangers proclaim "We are getting raped over here". Which is just such an odd thing to complain about considering the setting: Here are these hardened criminals committing all kinds of unimaginable crimes like human trafficking, killing people, torturing people and pretty much everything else in the book, yet there's a weird expectation that they should be completely PC in their speech while engaging in these inherently anti-social practices. Extra odd considering that a lot of the source material did something very similar for its time: The slang Gibson used in his books was inspired by very real criminal sub cultures like biker gangs and dope pushers. These kinds of sub-cultures where never particularly PC, still are not to this day. So the expectation that criminal sub-cultures have to use socially progressive language, while abducting somebody to saw them apart for parts to sell, is just really weird and highlights a very odd double standard in our actual times: Depictions of all kinds of nasty things is okay, but as soon as the language gets nasty, that's where we want to draw very vaguely defined lines.
mortenjorck 6y ago
"At some point, you'll look down at your character's hands and say 'wow, my hands are metal all the way up to my elbows? Well, that's kind of creepy, it feels kind of wrong'." The article doesn't really dig into any of Pondsmith's thoughts here, but to my reading, Cyberpunk's fantastical body-modification tech is very much intended as a mirror of our real technology. We've all been wired in with cyberware for the past decade; we just didn't notice because the hardware stays in our pockets instead of under our skin. But the effect has not been entirely different: We are now persistently linked to our contacts wherever we go; we can instantly look up contextual information whenever the need arises; we can store anything from a date and time we need to remember to an entire scene of sight and sound, all in an external extension of our memories that can be called up almost as quickly as the ones in our heads. Smartphones made us all cyborgs, just ones with lower-bandwidth implants.
jmclnx 6y ago
I really like this quote: "I am seeing some extremely good creators showing up, a lot of really good people of colour and women coming into the field," It always amazed be that in a supposedly capitalist country, companies do not take advantage of talent, not matter what their background is.
- CodeGlitch 6y ago
  I don't believe that is accurate. When we recruit obviously we don't take race or gender into account, but 90% of applicants are white males. The issue happens earlier "in the pipeline", why don't girls get into engineering? I think the reason for that is complex, but I'm not sure companies are to blame for that one. We tried a "girl focused" advert once but got so much flack for sexism that we never made that mistake again.
  - medecau 6y ago
    Could it be that the problem is much latter in the 'pipeline' but it feeds back to earlier stages? i.e. work environments being toxic feeds back to career choice.
dafoex 6y ago
>The only thing we don't have is flying cars, which is really what I was hoping for. Aren't they called helicopters?
idclip 6y ago
Eve online with people? Thatll be exciting heh
ftr45 6y ago
cyberpunk 2077 development is a warning about the future

92 points by T-A 6y ago

One could also say that all of Gibson and Sterling's early novels were warnings, describing in some detail near future cyberpunk dystopias. When reading Neuromancer and Count Zero, the cumulative sum of the evocative description of "the sprawl" and the post war environment led me to form a fairly bleak mental picture of the place. And floating above all that an ultra elite class of the 1% of the 1% (sensenet stars, the tessier-ashpools, etc). Islands in the Net also paints a picture of radically even more unequal wealth distribution, coupled with massive economic disruptions and civil wars in developing nations.

aaaxyz 6y ago
Right. To me cyberpunk is about what happens when extreme wealth inequality is coupled to extreme technological advances such that the richest are immortal (for all practical purposes) and don't need the 99% since all production has been automated and any attempt at a revolution is made futile by military drones
masklinn 6y ago
> One could also say that all of Gibson and Sterling's early novels were warnings, describing in some detail near future cyberpunk dystopias. That's the original core of cyberpunk, it was in no small part a condemnation / reversal of the utopian post-war SF. And the Cyberpunk TRPG (which is the universe / setting of Cyberpunk 2077) is very much set in that genre / ethos.

ramenmeal 6y ago

Was expecting it to be about the nightmares of large software projects

shahsyed 6y ago

I find it extremely ironic that the game touches upon themes of corporate greed and climbing the corporate ladder (I've only played it until I got a soft lock during the 3rd tutorial). How else do you get themes of technology being a boon to society? Isn't it these companies who indirectly dictate this (e.g by using your public data)? CD Projekt Red is a great example of why publicly owned companies and creating expectations for unreasonable deadlines for any software is going to cause your employees to deal with crunch and release something that doesn't work that great. Unfortunately I'm sure that this game will entertain more than it will highlight horrible industry practices.

standardUser 6y ago
I have heard a lot of murmurs about "horrible industry practices" regarding CD Projekt Red, but nothing concrete. Is this just a smear campaign, or a half-truth being thoughtlessly repeated because it fits preexisting narratives? Or more to the point, were they violating Polish or EU labor laws?
- b0rsuk 6y ago
  "Cyberpunk 2077 has involved months of crunch, despite past promises" Including, but not limited to, 6 day work weeks for over a year. Sounds like 966 and China. https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/4/21575914/cyberpunk-2077-release-crunch-labor-delays-cd-projekt-red https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/4/21575914/cyberpunk-2077-re... Combine that with the unoptimized, buggy state the game is in. Many streamers had the game crash, forcing them to redo the combat encounter because you can't save in combat.
  - wavefunction 6y ago
    I have a beefy pc setup that I purchased recently specifically for Cyberpunk 2077 and some other demanding PC games still in development (wink wink Star Citizen) and I have had one non-gameplay bug in my couple of hours of play where elevator doors didn't open for my partner but did for me. The situation is very different for people using the previous gen consoles though, it seems, and I feel bad for them. I have a couple of good friends in this cohort who were very much looking forward to the game.
  - danielEM 6y ago
    > 6 days work weeks for over a year So not true! Greets from Poland!
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 6y ago
    I'm on 7+ year old hardware and a 1080 ti and it runs fine @ 1440p. Partner has a 980ti and it runs fine @ 1080p. Any bugs I've encountered have been minor. Makes me wonder what people's "rigs" are actually like. It's no Doom Eternal but it plays about as well as GTA at launch going from memory.

manuelabeledo 6y ago

"The technology is a couple steps higher, and so forth, but in this particular universe, technology is not good for people. Pollution is rampant, crime is rampant and social and economic inequality is just accepted." So what is the difference with our current world again? Not trying to be a cynic here, but if we were to accept that most crimes aren't violent, then this description fits with what we have now. The landscape of Cyberpunk 2077 itself looks exactly like many east Asian metropolis at night.

monocasa 6y ago
It's a warning about the future... from the 1980s. It's more an alt history at this point.
willis936 6y ago
We’re living in a cyberpunk dystopia. Fiction of the past (1984, blade runner) were exaggerated extrapolations of the path we have been on. The path was clear then and it’s clear now. Nothing has changed.
- hutzlibu 6y ago
  But for a real dystopia we do have quite some freedom and wealth. (That means, if the lockdowns go away at some point. If not, well, then yes. Total dystopia. Everything private total restricted, only corporate and state buisness allowed. Peoples private life only exist in virtual realities) edit: everything is relative. I was born in east germany. A state where I would not have been allowed to openly say my opinion, or drive 30 km with my bycicle to the west or south, from where I live, as I would have been arrested or literally shot back then. Pretty dystopian in comparison. Also, people in north korea can say something today, about what dystopian feels like. That means, no they cannot, while they are there.
  - KittenInABox 6y ago
    I don't know if we have freedom and wealth as correlated to happiness and fulfillment in life, however. And that's precisely what the cyberpunk genre originally was created as a commentary on- the ability to have so much advancement and also so much misery.

xwdv 6y ago

COVID-19 has taken us so much closer now to a cyberpunk dystopia. The disruption of social life, the growing inequality as the wealth of the investor class grows to precipitous heights, the use of technology to avoid physical human contact as much as possible, we're getting there, no doubt about it.

hutzlibu 6y ago
Well, Covid-19 will eventually go away. At least as a major threat. But I am also worried, that much of the emergency legislation is here to stay. It is rare, that laws get softened, once they are implemented.

haunter 6y ago

Too bad the game is an unfinished mess and the PS4/Xbox One version is pretty much a scam in its current form. 20fps (not even stable!) and blurry ultra low 720p textures. Just unexcusable. I feel bad for everyone with last gen consoles getting this as a christmas gift. So as for the devs. Work 6 days a week for year and now continue to do the same for bugfixing and working on the PS5/Xbox Series X version

pmoriarty 6y ago
I'm definitely not your typical gamer, but I've played and thoroughly enjoyed plenty of games which had way worse graphics and framerate than that. I much prefer gameplay, wide freedom of action, an interesting world and characters, and good writing than eye candy.
- haunter 6y ago
  No offense but sub-20 FPS is unplayable, it's a slideshow. No matter what, how good the story, it ruins the whole game. Each to its own I guess but considering the historicity of the game this shouldn't have been released in this state. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvtPgetQ0VI&feature=youtu.be&t=30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvtPgetQ0VI&feature=youtu.be... It's like watching a movie in 240p. Sure you can enjoy it but is this really how you want to experience a good movie?
  - dunefox 6y ago
    For me anything less than maybe 50 is unplayable, it just looks janky.
    - mercer 6y ago
      I've gotten to accept 30 FPS on console, but honestly I avoid getting too used to more than that right now because the difference is definitely very noticeable. I did something similar back when most gaming moved to 1080p. I could accept 720p as long as I stuck with it. Once I got used to better, going back was a challenge.

SilasX 6y ago

I already knew that, but for me, it was more a warning about how difficult it is to get complex software systems right, and how grotesquely they can fail, with implications for life-critical systems that depend on them, and more and more things being controlled by software with such couplings.

codeulike 6y ago

Because the future is going to be years late?

paxys 6y ago

Funny enough the biggest criticism of the game I have seen in the reviews (apart from technical problems) is that it uses Cyberpunk as a pretty setting but touches on its themes very superficially. IMO it's futile to try and stay away from politics and controversy when you're in a genre that is so deep rooted in it.

friedman23 6y ago
Reviewers that lean extremely far left weren't happy that a video game didn't espouse their ideology at every second. What a surprise. Depending on what path you chose the start of the game literally has a corporate employee order the execution of elected officials. But I guess that wasn't on the nose enough?
- danbolt 6y ago
  I think a lot of the critique people had towards the game has merit. Or, it strikes me as a strawman to reduce their ideas to "ideology".
  - friedman23 6y ago
    The game has corporate leaders and the rich killing and trampling over poor people throughout the game. While walking through the city you will have people randomly hit the ground in front of you because they jumped from a building. Do we really need a character to come out and tell us how bad this is in words for it to be a critique?
    - danbolt 6y ago
      I was thinking of critique more along the lines of Carolyn Petit's article for Polygon.
      - freeflight 6y ago
        That's exactly the kind of political criticism that I consider very odd. It barely admits that being able to choose genitals, independent of gender, is a step forward, only to then complain why CDPR didn't go much further by having players select pronouns and a non-binary voice. Then it complains how the game is allegedly transphobic because it "objectifies trans bodies", a statement solely based on one poster in the game that made the rounds trough the Twitter-outrage-sphere a while ago, while completely missing how in the CP2077 world pretty much everything is commodified down to peoples memories and their individual body parts. It's like there is some kind of agenda to paint the game, and it's developers, as transphobic since their PR Twitter account made a not so well received "Did you just assume my gender?" joke a couple of years back. Along similar lines: Jeff Gerstmann complains about the lack of political correctness in some of the NPC lines, like when hardened gang-bangers proclaim "We are getting raped over here". Which is just such an odd thing to complain about considering the setting: Here are these hardened criminals committing all kinds of unimaginable crimes like human trafficking, killing people, torturing people and pretty much everything else in the book, yet there's a weird expectation that they should be completely PC in their speech while engaging in these inherently anti-social practices. Extra odd considering that a lot of the source material did something very similar for its time: The slang Gibson used in his books was inspired by very real criminal sub cultures like biker gangs and dope pushers. These kinds of sub-cultures where never particularly PC, still are not to this day. So the expectation that criminal sub-cultures have to use socially progressive language, while abducting somebody to saw them apart for parts to sell, is just really weird and highlights a very odd double standard in our actual times: Depictions of all kinds of nasty things is okay, but as soon as the language gets nasty, that's where we want to draw very vaguely defined lines.

mortenjorck 6y ago

"At some point, you'll look down at your character's hands and say 'wow, my hands are metal all the way up to my elbows? Well, that's kind of creepy, it feels kind of wrong'." The article doesn't really dig into any of Pondsmith's thoughts here, but to my reading, Cyberpunk's fantastical body-modification tech is very much intended as a mirror of our real technology. We've all been wired in with cyberware for the past decade; we just didn't notice because the hardware stays in our pockets instead of under our skin. But the effect has not been entirely different: We are now persistently linked to our contacts wherever we go; we can instantly look up contextual information whenever the need arises; we can store anything from a date and time we need to remember to an entire scene of sight and sound, all in an external extension of our memories that can be called up almost as quickly as the ones in our heads. Smartphones made us all cyborgs, just ones with lower-bandwidth implants.

jmclnx 6y ago

I really like this quote: "I am seeing some extremely good creators showing up, a lot of really good people of colour and women coming into the field," It always amazed be that in a supposedly capitalist country, companies do not take advantage of talent, not matter what their background is.

CodeGlitch 6y ago
I don't believe that is accurate. When we recruit obviously we don't take race or gender into account, but 90% of applicants are white males. The issue happens earlier "in the pipeline", why don't girls get into engineering? I think the reason for that is complex, but I'm not sure companies are to blame for that one. We tried a "girl focused" advert once but got so much flack for sexism that we never made that mistake again.
- medecau 6y ago
  Could it be that the problem is much latter in the 'pipeline' but it feeds back to earlier stages? i.e. work environments being toxic feeds back to career choice.

dafoex 6y ago

>The only thing we don't have is flying cars, which is really what I was hoping for. Aren't they called helicopters?

idclip 6y ago

Eve online with people? Thatll be exciting heh

ftr45 6y ago

cyberpunk 2077 development is a warning about the future