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I must admit that 2015 The Witcher 3 m took me by surprise when he came out. The epic fantasy has crept over me and ended up being one of my most played games of 2016, and I have finished the year with a hundred or so. 39 hours easy.
The game has fascinated me for a number of reasons, but mostly because of the care and detail that CD Projekt RED developers had written around the world. The land of Rivalia de Geralt felt alive and complex, with a complex network of motivations of politics and character spread over a beautifully bright and luminous landscape. It seemed to me that everything I had wanted Bethesda Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim either. Both games were revealed in their fancy arrangements but it was only The Witcher that looked like politics and gameplay, while Skyrim did not never transcended
When the CDPR announced its intention to create a game based on Mike Pondsmith's [194900] Cyberpunk 2020 I could not have been more excited: who better? design a company hellscape that the creators of one of my favorite RPGs in recent memory, and the one that really had the impression got why Rivia's world had to be detailed enough to support his conflicts?
Cyberpunk (The genre, and not the particular conception of Mike Pondsmith that the CDPR adapts) has a long and historical history of connection with the socio-political context of his time. At first, cyberpunk novels and 1980s news saw the future as a dark, populated megacorporeal structure that would eventually eclipse the nations that engendered them.
The 1980s cyberpunk spoke of fears of the time, but defended an individualism that led to conflicting messages. As noted by Cameron Kunzelman of Paste on Twitter even in the early 90s, there was a start of repression against a cyberpunk aesthetic that presented "… absolutely no criticism of corporate power, the possibility that it may be shaken or badaulted by heroes who are fully part of the system and who benefit from their mastery within it, regardless of their ostensible marginalization and their postures on the constitution of the organization. a form of counter-culture "(as Nicola Nixon said in 1991 interview.)
The primary inconsistency in most cyberpunk revolves around this: While systems of different dystopias are presented as bad, they must also be presented as "cool", since the product's marketability requires some sense of "cool-ness" in order to be desirable. So, the many megabits are horrible, of course, and do horrible things in fiction, but they are also a key part of marketing materials. They constitute the background of the world, and the world must be attractive to the player or the potential buyer.
We are now in 2018 and we receive the first full trailer of CD Projekt RED's interpretation of one of the most influential cyberpunk table role-playing games. It's a high-tech, colorful and luminous rendition of Pondsmith's Night City, the main setting of the original table books.
Like all good cyberpunk megacities, Night City is too big and too populated, a mix of thousands of rich and poor citizens in tight neighborhoods. The trailer is short, and essentially cinematic, but presents all the expected rhythms of a cyberpunk metropolis: augmented mercenaries, slicks suits of corporate agents and dirty streets of night markets and lane fixers.
And like all good cyberpunk, 2077 bleeds cool the first definition of modern cyberpunk. We see dirt and neon juxtaposed. The corporate hooligans and the hired guns both sport high-tech weapons and armor, the skin becomes hard and bullet-proof as bullets fly. It's our cyberpunk: Everything is cool and nothing hurts.
If it was another studio, I would be more worried that this visual aesthetic signaled a lack of attention to the interiority of politics in Cyberpunk 2077 . Even if I am suspicious, as any critical player should be, the fact that CD Projekt RED was able to impregnate The Witcher 3 so much detail in its main quests as in those who surrounds it gives me hope 2077 will also be thoughtful.
We will have to wait a bit to find out (the official trailer does not mention release date) but I hope that the CDPR will take into account the weight of the cyberpunk story during the construction of the world and possibilities for the player 2077 . It's easy to fall into the trap of writing a world that focuses solely on the aesthetics of cyberpunk without the darker messages inherent in a world controlled by uncontrolled corporatism, violence and individualism. Let's hope that Cyberpunk takes this into account.
Dante Douglas is a writer, poet and game developer. You can find it on Twitter at @videodante .
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