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I understand the desire to declare the game awful because of every failure of management we've seen, but everybody in my friend circle who played it absolutely loved it and it is better at most games that do the things it tried to do. Buggy as shit but genuinely fantastic game. https://twitter.com/thegamerwebsite/status/1353004542531686401
it's always hard to talk about video games where the people who make the most money off of them are awful people forcing their staff to crunch because they are inept managers who do not deserve power or authority, but like...
it's actually a phenomenal game with great writing
it's actually a phenomenal game with great writing
I think a lot of people don't want to grapple with that because it feels bad to miss out on a great game if you stick to your guns about things, but I don't think lying about the quality of the game (or boosting negative takes if you didn't play) is the right move, you know?
this isn't to say there aren't honest negative takes, but it does feel like people WANT the game to fail and it's hard to come by honest criticism of the game with balanced looks at the things it sucks ass at and the things it does well.
"it's not true cyberpunk/it's pro cop" are unfair and ignorant takes that require deliberately misreading decades of literary history. The game is honestly one of the most faithful interpretations of the genre.
Better criticism would be "is this faithfulness RIGHT TO DO?"
Better criticism would be "is this faithfulness RIGHT TO DO?"
to lie and rewrite history so you can say "it isn't real cyberpunk" reifies the genre and lets you pretend the GENRE is actually FREE OF FAULT. If you acknowledge the game's SHOCKING faithfulness to cyberpunk, you can then call cyberpunk as a CONCEPT into question.
right now we're a ta place where a lot of the criticism is "it's not authentic so it's bad" which promotes ignorance of the genre itself but also conveys the idea that authenticity is good--it prevents us from interrogating where we came from, asking if we can be better.
I grew up with a lot of republican types who were all into 'heritage' ideas, and 'founding fathers' and the like, right? the idea that something Has Been Done This Way And Thus It's Good is really faulty imo. It promotes uncritical thought.
"it's not true cyberpunk! cyberpunk is all positive ideas!" erases cyberpunk's lengthy history with rightwingers, sexism, racism, transphobia, etc.
"we should not be authentic" is the criticism we deserve, not "if it was TRUE cyberpunk it would have something to say and by the way I'm ignoring all the things it IS SAYING"
not only that but cyberpunk actually _does_ say a lot and it depicts poverty, which I've lived through, more accurately than any other game I have played, because it's not pity porn, it's people with their backs to the wall going "what else can I do??"
it's not clearly hollywood types going "oh wow... those poor poors..." or "if only they'd work harder they'd escape this." It's a game where you have people going "how DARE you try to get a job working for a corp; we hate the corps" and her going "i hate it but i have to eat."
when people go "cops issue missions which you can take and this is the easiest way to play the game," you'd think they'd go "so considering how easy it is for cops to kill you and all the scenes showing cops act with impunity, clearly cops are bad," but no.
people go "oh you can take jobs for cops? that means the game is pro cop."
like, I was walking along the street while cops were brutalizing someone and a cop went "get out of my face" and then DECIDED IT WS COOL TO TRY TO EXECUTE ME at random. That's hardly pro-cop!!!
like, I was walking along the street while cops were brutalizing someone and a cop went "get out of my face" and then DECIDED IT WS COOL TO TRY TO EXECUTE ME at random. That's hardly pro-cop!!!
also some people have deliberately bad-faith interpretations of what the game is doing, like when a guy gave an essay on the profane/sacred dichotomy and talked about how that relates to replacing human body parts, he was talking about a shitload of long-standing philosophy stuff
and you had really bad faith actors who WANTED to find something wrong with this going "wow he's being discriminatory, he's saying if you change your body you're bad" and no, no, he's discussing what happens when a moral paradigm shifts post-religion you dumb fucks
he's actually saying that society has spent a long time dominated by religion saying "you are made in the image of god so you can't cahnge it" and he is asking what a society would be without that impulse; it is a common theme in cyberpunk, which you'd know if you fucking read it
And that's what frustrates me; we don't get to have interesting criticism because we have a lot of people who want to do hot takes because they are RIGHTFULLY upset at the studio leadership, and that's... like it's of no use to any of us. It's dishonest.
Shit on the game honestly, like how it wasn't ready for ship or how there's some really fuckin bad ideas in the game or complaints about tech and theme and whatever. But dunk on the management for sucking ass, don't make up shit like "it's a game about how cops are good." jfc.
the best takes I'ves een are like "goddamn this is really good AND THAT SUCKS"
When I see someone going "wow theres a gang called the animals that must be racist" when the animals are mostly white bodybuilders it's like... that's kind of shitty. The game actually has questionable handling of race too that is worth discussing. So discuss that.
Plus when someoen goes "I wnt to play this game" and then you go "here is a reason it's bad," and then the person plays it and goes "you are wrong about it," then congratulations, you've convinced them that people complaining are deliberately ignorant.
In film we don't have this issue that much? It's happening moreso with social media film critics but like... a lot of people LOVED chinatown and then they were like "wow, turns out polanski is shit." They didn't reevaluate chinatown to claim it was bad.
and as a result there's never a like... person going "oh I loved this movie" and another person going "oh it's shit) which is demonstrably false, leading to the other person feeling "well that's obviously false so they must be wrong about everything."
And that sucks that people think that way but SO MANY do. People get DEFENSIVE about what they like. So if you do anything wrong when criticizing something, they will latch onto it as proof you're wrong about everything.
When you are honest and right in your criticism, you can win people over so much better. I know, I had one of the biggest audiences in the world for text criticism at kotaku and my comment sections never got batshit insane because my criticism was ALWAYS honest and concrete.
Most people who play the game actually love the fuck out of it aside from the bugs. If you want to convince them that's wrong to do, you can absolutely do it. Hell, I've got a lot of negative shit to say about it. But you gotta. be. honest.
anyways when i say "having air dashes in first person shooters is good and cyberpunk 2077 is a great example of that," I am not also saying "CRUNCH IS GREAT," right? I can say both things in a single article. I want to see more of that from the rest of you.
as someone who actually studied cyberpunk and noir as part of my writing, let me tell you: that genre is fuckin misogynist as hell and we should talk about that
"misogyny isn't true to cyberpunk" is I think a far more toxic thing to say than "cyberpunk 2077 is a good video game but in being faithful to cyberpunk is perpetuates harmful ideas" because the former actually gives misogyny cover.
btw people who say 'u cant be a punk if ur not a good person'
not only do i direct you to the famous line "nazi punks get fucked" as evidence that punk is not an inherent good, but "cyberpunk" has no relation to 'punk' as a movement
not only do i direct you to the famous line "nazi punks get fucked" as evidence that punk is not an inherent good, but "cyberpunk" has no relation to 'punk' as a movement
"cyberpunk" comes from noted right winger bruce bethke using a thesaurus to figure out a way to describe disaffected malcontent kids within society who use computers to fuck with it. "punk" there is more of a 50s definition--them punk kids are up to no good.
literally coming from someone whose political views I hope most of you find reprehensible because fuck right wing ideology, but yeah... assuming "punk" is an inherent good is ignorant of both the punk movement and the literary genre lol
