Cyberpunk 2077 Review thread - Umm....

CriticalGaming

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The problem is that the voice is generally one of the things you can't adequately transition as an adult, even with lots of vocal practice. Being a transman often means having a fair, sometimes distinctly female, voice even if you can achieve a butch body and being a transwoman is the opposite. But if transgender people try to emulate this, their lived reality, in CP77 they find out that a deep voice makes you a man and a fair voice makes you a woman. The easiest way to remedy this (and it is frankly baffling that CDPR didn't go down this route) is to have a "Sex Presentation", or whatever you want to call it, option that you set to either man or woman.
I dunno how reasonable that is, because either way it's still binary right? So what about the non-conforming people. See the issue with trying to include things like this is that someone is always going to be left out. So the question is, is it better that they have the options they have? Or would it have been better to not bother and just stick with male and female and left it alone.

But I guess you are more referring to how the player's pronouns are listed within NPC dialog right? Which I think it just had to tie to something. And at least the voice is defining the character as male or female. Which the same argument can be made if they linked it to the body type. Either way it's linked to something that might not be what the player wants.
 

09philj

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Because that's how programming works.

If X then Y.

Even if they tied it to options, it still is linked to some choice.
Yeah, and that choice could have been putting a "What pronouns do you want?" question in the character creator.
 

Houseman

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Should have had voice synthesizer technology, where you can type in your pronouns, and the NPC's will attempt to say it in real-time.

You can even have that be a in-universe mechanic. Like some kind of "micro-aggression filter", where if someone misgenders you, a chip in your brain overwrites that with your preferred pronoun.

Hire me as your diversity consultant, I'm a minority.
 

Adam Jensen

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Criticizing the character creator for not accounting for every possible gender option is about as moronic ad gamers can get. The game is not about gender politics and gender identity. Be glad that you have as many options as you do. You are not owed any of them. In fact, if this little exercise in stupidity has proven anything, is that if you try to cater to these people, they will simply demand even more. It's never enough and it never will be. And the sad part is that if the game didn't allow you to create a trans character at all, no one would have said a fuckin' thing. It wouldn't even register. The option put the game on the map and painted a target on its back. It just goes to show that you shouldn't listen to political activists when you're designing your game.
 

09philj

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Criticizing the character creator for not accounting for every possible gender option is about as moronic ad gamers can get. The game is not about gender politics and gender identity. Be glad that you have as many options as you do. You are not owed any of them. In fact, if this little exercise in stupidity has proven anything, is that if you try to cater to these people, they will simply demand even more. It's never enough and it never will be. And the sad part is that if the game didn't allow you to create a trans character at all, no one would have said a fuckin' thing. It wouldn't even register. The option put the game on the map and painted a target on its back. It just goes to show that you shouldn't listen to political activists when you're designing your game.
It is a cyberpunk game. The genre deals in the overt and deliberate annihilation of the traditional physical self in defiance of societal norms. Transhumanism is not some abstract, theoretical concept. It is, in a variety of ways, happening now. Limiting your ability to do so is genre illiterate at best and intellectual cowardice at worst. "He", "She", and "They" will cover the vast majority of people relatively comfortably, and the devs have no excuse for not being able to cover that bare minimum to proper satisfaction. Their vision of the future has failed to progress with the times. (And, actually, is still less progressive than a lot of other 80s sci fi, like the late great Iain Banks having the in universe narrator openly mocking the reader for having a gender in The Player of Games)
 

ObsidianJones

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Question for those who played the game.

In the game's universe, is there a in-game explanation of the HUD? Like you have a chip or everyone has a chip that can display information to some degree about what or who they are looking at?
 

happyninja42

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It is a cyberpunk game. The genre deals in the overt and deliberate annihilation of the traditional physical self in defiance of societal norms. Transhumanism is not some abstract, theoretical concept. It is, in a variety of ways, happening now. Limiting your ability to do so is genre illiterate at best and intellectual cowardice at worst. "He", "She", and "They" will cover the vast majority of people relatively comfortably, and the devs have no excuse for not being able to cover that bare minimum to proper satisfaction. Their vision of the future has failed to progress with the times. (And, actually, is still less progressive than a lot of other 80s sci fi, like the late great Iain Banks having the in universe narrator openly mocking the reader for having a gender in The Player of Games)
Complete tangent, but you reminded me of a book by John Scalzi called Lock-In, about a variant of...I think it's meningitis, that traps a % of humanity in their bodies. They are conscious, but unable to control their bodies. They eventually develop tech to let them remote control robot bodies, allowing them to go out and still exist. Their entire awareness is from the angle of the robot, and they have a digital projection as well in a virtual space. It's all very interesting about what it is to be human.

But, one of the cool things, that I wasn't aware of when I first read it, is that he never used gendered pronouns in the novel. It was first person, so it was always "Me/My/I/etc" and when people spoke to the MC, it was always by name, or a nickname. And honestly....you don't really notice anything weird, or at least I didn't. And another cool wrinkle, was when they did the audiobook for it, they had a male and female narrator, make 2 versions of it. So that you could pick the gender of your choice for the listening enjoyment. The name was a gender neutral name (Alex if I recall correctly), and yeah, he just, made a genderless murder mystery novel, and it was a really good one too.

Might check it out if you find that kind of thing interesting.
 

CriticalGaming

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Question for those who played the game.

In the game's universe, is there a in-game explanation of the HUD? Like you have a chip or everyone has a chip that can display information to some degree about what or who they are looking at?
Yeah you get an eye implant in like the first or second mission of the game, which gives you the enhanced vision.
 

happyninja42

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Question for those who played the game.

In the game's universe, is there a in-game explanation of the HUD? Like you have a chip or everyone has a chip that can display information to some degree about what or who they are looking at?
Haven't played it, but given how many people can literally have cyber-eyes, that provide information beyond the normal visual spectrum and what a biological eye can do, I'm confident it's in-universe. They might not actually address it, since at this point, that kind of thing is like "well yeah, of course it provides you hud info, that's just standard design" after generations of cybernetics. It would be like, asking someone with the newest iPhone "wait, so that thing has like, a list of contacts and a calculator in it already?" It's just default features.

As I recall, what information you might have, would vary based on the rest of your cybernetic suite. Like if you were a Rigger (someone who remotely controls and hacks vehicles to pilot them), or a Decker (Hacker), the information would probably vary, from say, a Street Samurai, who would likely want displays of weak points, vulnerabilities, etc.
 

Dwarvenhobble

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Yeah, but the game was announced like in 2013 or something and went in full development after TW3 which is like 5,5 years ago now. At one point you can ask how much time do they need? I think the real problem is that a lot of these developers just overreach and can't scale back. Like, they aim for the moon but the rocket explodes somewhere midway the stratosphere. It's not even necessary b/c almost no one has time for these 100+ hours games anyway. They could have reduced some futures, compressed the city more and cut some superfluous content. It would have still been amazing and you could still add more content down the line. I really feel that with CP2077 CDPR thought ''we can't let the fans down, we need to blow away expectations'' without being realistically able to hold on to that premise. There are too many moving parts that make the game engine chug along, glitch or bug out. Another detriment of all these calculations is that the graphics really don't look that great. The driving is also pretty bad and the streets are empty. The ragdoll physics are also some of the worst I've seen in an open world game.

And still the game has an irresistable charm to it. When it all comes together it's one of the best experiences I've had in gaming. The high stakes storyline with character interactions that can escalate at any moment into a furious gunfight with pumping techno soundtrack. The quiet moments where Night City really feels like an entity of it's own. The quality of the writing and anticipation of new adventures. The top notch world building. The creative/artistic qualities of the game are terrific. It's just a downer that it somewhat fails in it's execution. But fortunately that is the one thing that can be fixed.
I mean it's Eurojank, there's a reason that term came into being as it's often ambitious games that are compelling but often highly unpolished due to the teams making them often pushing things.

Do you have any other recommendations. I have crunch itch and the Shadowrun games can only do so much.
Aerannis

Maybe Shadowrain

I've heard good things about:

E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy
VA-11 HALL-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action

Isn't Brianna trans? I thought the trans community automatically thought this was the most evil game ever because of transphobic fake commercials within the game?
It seems to be the more activist ones who seem to hate it. Brianna Wu may be an activist but she's never really been a Trans activist type, she's been a women in tech activist type instead.


I thought this game was being touted as extremely pro-trans because you can put anything on anything?
Some activists aren't happy.

Pronouns are tied to voice selection. Also they're claiming there isn't enough focus on stories about Trans people and almost no character comes up to you as says "My Face hurts by the way I used to be a man" (you know just like people don't in real life outside of the bubble some people seem to live in).

No clue. Maybe. But my biggest problem is that my fe-mail V's dick keeps poking out of her pants. Which is not only inappropriate but it also ruins the surprise.
Oddly not the first time I've heard about this bug with the pants lol


It doesn't really do anything to address the weird othering and transphobic commercials that exist in game.
Well everyone is commodified in the future so yeh corporations will use anything they can in marketing.


Apparently you can get Street Cred for collecting bounties from the police, which...

I don't know much about The Street, but that seems exactly wrong. You'd think it would be exactly to opposite, but that's apparently not an option
I mean being a bounty hunter would give some street cred. It's a world where the corpos and corpo owned cops are like organised crime almost so the ambition of a street punk would be to move up to the big leagues which would be the corpos to an extent.
 

Houseman

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I've heard good things about:

E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy
I've played it, I wouldn't recommend it. First of all, it's old, like Half-Life 1 old. Second of all, it's broken. The save feature hardly works, so progressing in the game is impossible.
 

Dwarvenhobble

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The problem is that the voice is generally one of the things you can't adequately transition as an adult, even with lots of vocal practice. Being a transman often means having a fair, sometimes distinctly female, voice even if you can achieve a butch body and being a transwoman is the opposite. But if transgender people try to emulate this, their lived reality, in CP77 they find out that a deep voice makes you a man and a fair voice makes you a woman. The easiest way to remedy this (and it is frankly baffling that CDPR didn't go down this route) is to have a "Sex Presentation", or whatever you want to call it, option that you set to either man or woman.
I think the idea is in the future they'll have found a way to actually change said thing.

So people are annoyed they can't make themselves in game when themselves in Cyberpunk 2077 world would have been able to pay for voice mod surgery or something.
 

Dwarvenhobble

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ObsidianJones

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Yeah you get an eye implant in like the first or second mission of the game, which gives you the enhanced vision.
Ok.

So, information about who you're looking at is literally beamed into your eyes. From some kind of a registry or something, right?

Which would actually be somewhat Immersion Building

"Hey, listen. I'm not taking orders from hi... *NPC looks at your character* Her. All this information she's broadcasting could be easily made up by a Decker."
 
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happyninja42

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Ok.

So, information about who you're looking at is literally beamed into your eyes. From some kind of a registry or something, right?

Which would actually be somewhat Immersion Building

"Hey, listen. I'm not taking orders from hi... *NPC looks at your character* Her. All this information she's broadcasting could be easily made up by a Decker."
Yeah, think of it similar to being on an open wifi, where you can see other people sharing that same data space. They're public information would likely be pinged to any passive scan from your own implant, whereas more personal data would require literally hacking their personal data, likely in an implant. Basically, whatever you can traditionally do with a computer, assume you can also do it to a person in Cyberpunk, because most of them have enough augmentations to be on par with hardware these days.