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Anon romanticizes Night City
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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I love the Cyberpunk 2077 universe. Ive played the TTRPG, the Game from CD Project Red, and loved the anime. But no way in hell would I want to actually live in Night City...
Cyberpunk 2077, the video game, is a great story partially because Night City is practically more a character than a setting. It consumes and shits out all who are bold or stupid enough to think they can make it there.
The person romanticizing their world has somehow missed every theme of the story. Immortality is only achievable by sacrificing every last bit of your humanity through either replacing every part of your body with chrome (Smasher), or through horrific body snatching tech (Soulkiller).
Illness does exist in Cyberpunk, many characters through the story refer to their sick relatives. V themself is portrayed as being sick after installing Soulkiller after the Arasaka heist with Jackie. Indeed, Soulkiller is portrayed like a high tech, fast acting cancer.
The world in Cyberpunk reflects a kind of criticism of capitalism in showing us how excessive the divides in economic and power dynamics can become if capitalism is left to rule unchecked by governmental power (i have not yet played phantom liberty, which I assume addresses in part the corrupted and futile attempts to restore governmental agency in a world that long has handed off the reigns to unfettered capitalists).
The characters generally live in squalor. Vs initial apartment is little more than a glorified closet in a bleak concrete monolith. Quality Health care is only available to those that can afford an ultra Premium plan, executed by a Military Style Medical Corporation. Otherwise, you're lucky if your loved ones' ashes are dispensed via a Vending Machine, as seen in the anime Edgerunners.
Again, love the game, love the anime and TTRPG. NEVER in a million years would I want to live in that universe... unless maybe it was a choice between there and literal Hell, cuz at that point the line of difference befween them starts to blur...and they end up looking the same.
Exactly, what's so grueling about the CP universe is that they have the tech and means of creating a utopia, but due to the extreme capitalism, corruption and overwhelming power of corporations nothing gets better. It's like everyone who cares just gave up on fixing that society and everyone is just fending for themselves.
I think it’s just that the psyche of the world just broke at some point and this is the remnants of a broken people.
At least LGBT people are well accepted, I suppose🤷🏿
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Dude, life is already going extinct. Cats are mostly extinct already, and most animals are either robots or uber expensive clones! There are no animals in wilderness. There are acid rains and all sort of climate problems because the climate is already in shambles.
Cops will definitely kill you on a whim. Or it will be one of the gangs or corpo who will. Didn't you see the shootings in pacifica?
Religion is very much there with a guy who crucifies himself on a braindance!
Cyberpsycho would be killed on sight of Regina wasn't hiring you to extract them. Did you watch any of the media of CP77? It seems like you didn't.
Did you hear about the corpo wars? CP77 is about the start of a war between arasaka and militech btw...
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No one could at launch
Except there is, did you not do the sidequest with the monk brothers? It gives some insight into their beliefs, which are anti implant, anti consumerist, probably futuristic Buddhism.
I think you may have replied to the wrong person. I was saying that person didn't notice all the religion in the game.
I did, my bad.
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Bloody hell lmao
So Canadian Luddites.
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This is not true. The game doesn't have to touch on this topics to tell Vs story but they do touch on climate on the news, cops are very trigger happy, religion is present in the game and you go to a church as part of a mission and there's a whole sect obsessed with cyberware that does judge everyone else constantly throughout the game, including mutilating a monk that refused to get augmented.
I see your points and I agree but I have to call out their climate is not stable. You often hear the news in the game talk about weather and temperatures being in the safe range for humans.
Also the cops gun you down over the slightest infraction, or at least they did, I haven't played since the Phantom Liberty update.
Also in Pacific you attend a funeral at a church and it is heavy on the Christian iconography. Oh and I just remembered you can help a dude crucify (kill) himself for his sins while it's being streamed and recorded for brain dance experiences!
I recall domestic/intentional politics and espionage being mentioned several times in the game. Even to the point where we uncover a conspiracy where someone is brainwashing potential political candidates. I have an inkling politics will come up in Phantom Liberty as well.
How do you know most of this isn't true just out of scope of Vs vision he is pretty laser focused on the brain cancer quickly replacing his personality and multiple threads of his own drama enough so he's not as interested in larger social issues.
Almost all of these are directly in the game. I wonder whether these people are blind or oblivious...
Well the cops are corrupt and there are clearly tribalistic behavior. Racism is a type of tribalism. I don't know how racist arasaka is. Do they want to keep their bloodline "pure"? So why wouldn't a corrupt police force attack in the interest of racists? There might be a lot of racism for all I know.
It would be pretty weird for the game focused on a particular city to focus on global issues
Forgetting the bird flu?
There's actually a few games with great settings like this. Night City is, in some ways, like Rapture from Bioshock: a city both terrible in its capacity to inflict violence on the unprepared and which horribly reshapes the individuals who inhabit it, either technologically or biologically, while being vibrant and interesting in a way cities in our world aren't. It's sort of the innate aesthetic of cyberpunk or, in Bioshock's case, biopunk: "terrible, but interesting."
another case where the pictured OP should be reminded sci fi is more about the present than the future
everything depicted in CP77, except the technology, is a comment on any given metropolis post-1979 than it is a fantasy with no correlation to the modern era
All this plus they skipped directly over the focus on lethality that Friday Night Firefight had. If you get shot your outlook is extremely grim. I think it's the only system I've played that has rules for using other people as shields.
Frankie Boyle: "Humans actually make very poor shields. That's why we invented... the shield."
Even if humans and shields were as effective, it's a lot easier to replace all your shields every battle than half your army. And shields are a lot more obedient than people going straight into harms way.
V's apartment isn't actually that bad though is the funny thing. That's like 4k a month in San Francisco.
Yes, but is it inside a Brutalist monolith concrete building with a single small slit of a window? I get what you're saying, but my point in regards to Vs initial apartment is that despite it's small niceties, the harshness of the world that exists just right outside their door is mlre prison like than almost all modern 1st world apartments today.
I love the gig where you have to comfort and console your neighbor, Barry, because you get to see that his apartment is slightly smaller, slightly lower scale than yours, but more or less the same.
A similar portrayal can be seen in the apartment of K in Blade Runner 2049. Sure the interiors are nicer than some, but the apartments, to me, feel like the architects intended to treat the tenants like prisoners with nicer digs than actual prisoners. Space efficient to the point of just barely not cramped. Nice enough that initially you don't complain. Isolated enough that you don't connect with your neighbors.
Grant you there are community spaces like the boxing gym, but again, it reminds me of a prison gym mainly because of the Brutalist concrete foundation of the building.
Youtuber Dami Lee does a much better job breaking down Cyberpunk style architecture than I ever could. Id highly recommend you check out her video on the subject.