Thread by @docsquiddy, I think cyberpunk is a pretty darn good video game because just [...]

I think cyberpunk is a pretty darn good video game because just running around in the city doing jobs that constantly pop up feels great, and the progression system (do shit to get better at it) is nice and the story is _fantastic_ so far (but it's cdpr, what did you expect)--but

I've seen some people act like this is the most incredible, ambitious video game of all time when actually it's just a big open world first person game that doesn't feel as good as rage 2 to play but has one of the most impeccably-realized worlds I've ever played in.

if you go play a bethesda game on launch, you will get a relatively bug-free experience. People love to play it up, but that shit only breaks wide open if you start modding the shit out of it. You could go boot up skyrim on your xbox or switch or whatever and do great right now.

this game is as everyone describes bethesda games as being. I've had 100+ mods installed on fallout 3 and had a more stable game than this.

And it is _really good_

it's just buggy as hell and feels incredibly unfinished; honestly? it feels like the team was overworked and started making simple mistakes as a direct result of the kind of shit management that leads to teams overworking.

the AI seems super simplistic compared to most video games--the combat radius is next to nothing, cops lose sight of you if you run 10 feet away but combat encounters can take minutes to actually end despite everyone being dead.

you can't pick up like a full third of all the shit there is to pick up in the game, it's ridiculous. There's a pickup right outside my apartment I can't get. Cars appear to follow paths rather than having any AI.

but my god is it fun to run around and shotgun people in

and the story is legitimately, so far, the best thing CDPR ever did, and Witcher 3 is like, one of the best games of last gen because of that, so

the story also seems to actually ~get~ the cyberpunk genre too. Controversial take, I know, but should really only be controversial for people whose only familiarity with the genre is Current Online Discourse and not Literacy In The Genre.

a lot of people make the mistake of assuming that punk is A) inherently a positive force (it's not, it's an anti-establishment force, and u can be anti-establishment and not a good person), and B) cyberpunk is associated w/ the music (it's not! it's literally 'them punk kids')

like a bunch of you forgot motoko's a cop written by a right-winger, deckard's a slave-hunter, case is a shitbird working for a megacorp, lenny sells snuff SQUIDs, Johnny works for a nazi... like... cyberpunk protags are not good people fighting the good fight.

like the -punk aspect of cyberpunk literally is derived by the originator, bruce bethke, from the dictionary definition, which is like "a usually petty gangster, hoodlum, or ruffian"

they're not good people. they're poor people getting by.

a lot of people make the mistake of thinking all art has to have a call to action and that's, like, how we write fiction for babies. Fiction like cyberpunk is less about encouraging you to do activism and more showing you what the future's going to be like if shit don't change.

don't be a simp for constructivism, tatlin was a dumbass

a lot of art is just people going "this is what life is like for us through a different lens" and is meant to help you empathize rather than tell you some fable about tortoises and hares.

you can separate the amateur critics from the good ones 'cause the amateurs are all wondering where the call to action is like they never moved beyond Eng 101 in college.

cyberpunk is just a version of speculative fiction wondering what the future might be like, it is not, nor has it ever been, message fiction.

it is not 'punk' in the musical sense, and even if it was, I mean, quite a lot of punk has regressive, right-leaning values and sucks ass

I would say that cyberpunk 2077 seems to be an extremely good adaptation of the tabletop, in the exact same way that the witcher was an extremely good series of adaptations of the novels.

it is a game about being a bad person who maybe wants to do good in a hostile world that actively works against goodness. It is EXTREMELY buggy.

but you know, it's the only game where I didn't cringe at the slang; it has some of the best-realized worldbuilding I've ever seen in a game. It makes long-time industry giants look like amateurs.

It's just, again, the buggiest piece of shit I've ever seen, and I played stalker

I'm not interested in arguing this point but I'm gonna let it sit here: I think people who want cyberpunk to be 'better' generally come from a place of immense privilege. And they probably don't think they do, but they've never been really, truly poor.

There's a kind of idealism that people have when they've never had to suffer. When you have sat in an office listening to screaming babies and rough-looking angry people yelling and single mothers crying while you shuffle your paperwork to beg someone to give you food money--

--you develop a different kind of outlook on life. One that, I would say, is a bit more sympathetic to the guy who steals bread, or the person who says 'fuck this' and tells you he's gonna transport some cocaine because he needs the cash.

Most cyberpunk fiction I've seen puts a sci-fi veneer on poverty, and its protagonists often (but not always, looking at you, motoko kusanagi and hiro protagonist) seem to do a great job of conveying what it's like to live through poverty.

People who want cyberpunk to be something else are, I think, people who aren't willing to be empathetic to what the work is _doing_ or the people it's representing. They want it to be nice and clean and not at all ugly. The protagonists have to be good and virtuous comrades.

But that ain't life.

"doc why do you care about this"

well as u may have noticed, in my last game, the protagonists were, as I wrote them:

1) a poor girl
2) a woman who kills people for cash
3) a guy who's forced to smuggle haunted tapes

my original concept for the game was that it would follow an arc wherein our primary protagonist, the smuggler, who does crimes because he is forced to (you will notice he discusses debt and job loss in the final game)--

--discovers what's on the tapes (the murder of the poor person). The original murder was supposed to take place in the concrete fallingwater you see overlooking the murder site.

My overarching plot episodes 2-5 were that our protagonist begins seeking justice for the murdered, impoverished photographer while the news and cops are focused more on getting justice for the rich man. Anyways that's not gonna happen now.

But now we've got Adios, and in adios, we have a similar situation, characters making bad decisions for good reasons 'cause cash is short and you do what you gotta do to survive.

Nearly all of the projects I want to do are about people doing shit they don't want to do because they can't afford the luxury of choice. They simply don't have the cash.

I want you to empathize with people who are poor and disabled like me, or maybe I just want to write about what it's like to work through my own shit.

There's so much more to fiction than didactism and calls to action. That stuff is tiny, it's for children.

tl;dr:
1) a lot of critics of the game are comparing it to an idea of the genre that is not accurate and seems rooted in a romantic understanding of punk music/subculture, which is NOT the punk cyberpunk is referring to

2) it is a game by the makers of one of the most-praised, best video games of the last generation, and it seems to be a better game so far

however it is also the buggiest piece of shit I've ever played

I love playing it so far

3) a lot of people seem stuck on square one of art, right? like they're going "what does the smoke MEAN in LOST, or what is the SYMBOLISM of The Yellow Wallpaper?" or "how can this art teach us a lesson going forward" and tatlin's constructivism is dead for a reason, :P

there's a whole world of art out there that isn't didactic, like, did ya'll literally forget about the fact that most art is literally _expression_

a lot of people seem to want art to tell them to do something and like, grow up, mature, become an adult, realize that art is a means of knowing the artist and that the artist is _expressing_ something meaningful to them.

art is a way of empathizing with the people around us; we just use it to tell little kids why tortoises can beat hares in races sometimes.

thanks for bearing with me, this is my second day on adhd meds

anyways, as an exercise, I want you to listen to a song without words, I want you to look at a painting from vincent van gogh, and I want you to watch a movie while empathizing with the characters and asking for nothing else. Just ride the feelings. Open yourself up for a bit.

(btw please don't take anything in this thread as saying 'activism is unimportant' or 'we should never issue call to actions,' my forcefulness is both the fact that I've never had treatment for adhd before and the pills are kicking my ass and I want you to Think Different)

(like my hope here is that if you've sat there dismantling every story as 'what is the message,' and most of the criticism you read is like that, then maybe I have to shout with a bullhorn that you should try a flavor other than vanilla, because there's so much more out there)

also, hey, i'm doc. i'm disabled. i'm diabetic and I am running out of metformin and don't have insurance. i'm an award-winning writer but thanks to covid and shit i'm kinda in a bad place.

If you wanna hire a writer, i'm pretty good at that.

Also check out this sick trailer for my new game adios, which is VERY close to being done (we're polishing and it turns out porting is hard work)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1271400/Adios/

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