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toblix

Cyberpunk 2077

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Fair enough. You're right. I was not implying that she has to be a crazed sex bot in the context of this teaser. That's just one scenario that comes to mind in respect to how her body is clothed and framed in that situation, as well as how other trailers in recent memory portrayed women. It seems to perpetuate a similar notion of Sex & Violence in her past as character building features. That's why I said that it doesn't make it any less problematic, for reasons you just pointed out.

But that's just speculation. I share your skepticism and I am curious to see how the game explains this situation - if it is picked up at all and not just seasoning for the setting.

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I think you're absolutely right... but let's just say that it's not surprising that that character was a woman. A sexy woman. :eyebrow:

My point was that I don't think the nudity in the movie comes across as sexualized. I do not feel the same way about the TV series and the manga (the latter of which contains scenes that are pretty much softcore porn).

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Fair enough. You're right. I was not implying that she has to be a crazed sex bot in the context of this teaser. That's just one scenario that comes to mind in respect to how her body is clothed and framed in that situation, as well as how other trailers in recent memory portrayed women. It seems to perpetuate a similar notion of Sex & Violence in her past as character building features. That's why I said that it doesn't make it any less problematic, for reasons you just pointed out.

But that's just speculation. I share your skepticism and I am curious to see how the game explains this situation - if it is picked up at all and not just seasoning for the setting.

Not to say that this "justifies" it or whatever, but homicidal sex-worker is a trope that has some backing in the source material. It's been ages since I've read Neuromancer, but I'm pretty sure there's a side anecdote about Molly working as a meat puppet and "waking up" in the middle of a session which ends with her killing her "client".

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While I still think we're reading stuff that isn't necessarily present in the video, I can try and address your particular reading. That she is an escaped pleasure cyborg smacks of the same kind of rationalization as Kusanagi using her body to distract men. Ultimately these are still just nuances aligned with the general intent of fetishizing women's bodies. Why does she have to be a crazed sex bot? Because it's a perfect combination of sex and violence, the bread and butter of film and video games.

The nuns in Absolution have a similar rationalization. They're all rescued women from various war torn regions of the world. It's implied they've been sexual victims. It's a very similar calculus: that they're in the act of seeking revenge justifies the fact that they're portrayed in an oversexualized manner, because somehow that's their personal choice in reacting to their origins. I don't really buy it.

I'm not familiar at all with the pen and paper Cyberpunk game, so I may be off base, but the assumption I made from watching the trailer was that they've basically extrapolated the trend line of the hypersexualization of young women in our society out another 60+ years to their dystopian future setting. Which doesn't strike me as altogether off-base. It's not where I anticipate society heading, nor is it where I would like for society to head, but I don't think it's crazy or inappropriate for them to go there.

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That doesn't really reply to youmeyou effectively, I think. The point was that even though you can have a perfect justification for having half-naked hyper-idealized sexually objectified women in your game, it's still your choice to come up with a game universe filled with rationalizations for showing gamers the kind of women that all other games show them. When creating fiction, the possibilities are wide open, but somehow game developers just happen to create fictional worlds with great excuses for women to be dressed like strippers.

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Fucking Miranda and her backstory that explains how she was genetically engineered to look like a blow up doll. And hey, let's pan this camera across her butt for a few minutes.

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My point was that I don't think the nudity in the movie comes across as sexualized. I do not feel the same way about the TV series and the manga (the latter of which contains scenes that are pretty much softcore porn).

I agree, to a point, but I don't see how you can deny that the film enjoys showing us the naked female form. During the opening mission, doesn't she just get naked for no obvious reason?

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I agree, to a point, but I don't see how you can deny that the film enjoys showing us the naked female form. During the opening mission, doesn't she just get naked for no obvious reason?

See I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with showing naked women, it's just the context in which they're shown that I have a problem with (which I think is also what your point is here).

My point was that I don't think the nudity in the movie comes across as sexualized. I do not feel the same way about the TV series and the manga (the latter of which contains scenes that are pretty much softcore porn).

For what it's worth, I've actually heard really positive things about the movie, from men and women.

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I agree, to a point, but I don't see how you can deny that the film enjoys showing us the naked female form. During the opening mission, doesn't she just get naked for no obvious reason?

I finished reading that article that Youmeyou linked to (that was some damn dense vocabulary) and it made me go back and watch a few of the scenes it talked about. It provides two readings of the movie "I will first read the film as a progressive representation of the cyborg that challenges dominant culture in order to demonstrate how it creates the illusion that the dominant is really being challenged. I will then re-consider this reading by re-examining the film in order to show how its subversive potential has been, in effect, de-fanged and redirected to serve more conservative interests." and while I didn't find myself agreeing with all his points in the 2nd reading, I do think some of them have merit. Like Youmeyou said; it kind of undermines its own point, in effect.

To adress the opening scene directly; it's a toughie for me. It makes sense in the context of the narrative. but then, yea, she is the only one with the skin-fitting thermoptic camouflage. I'm divided on it. I think I gotta rewatch the movie in its entirety and let it all mull around a bit more.

See I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with showing naked women, it's just the context in which they're shown that I have a problem with

Very much this.

For what it's worth, I've actually heard really positive things about the movie, from men and women.

Definitely worth a watch, but as has been established, not without its flaws. :grin:

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Gameplay Demo:
 


My thoughts:

Gameplay, at least in the demo looks like what the new Deus Ex games should have been. Although the lack of any sort of morality system probably means the game can get super fucked up.

The damage numbers remind me a lot of Borderlands. Hope you can toggle them off.

The swearing and nudity fell like some #EDGY #GRITTY #CONTENT like GoT or WestWorld. A bit disappointing but not surprising considering the Witcher 1 sex cards.

The narrator was super weird and a bit of a creep.

Overall I am excited, but a bit wary as I didn't enjoy Witcher 3 very much and have been burned by my enthusiasm for cyberpunk games before.

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I thoroughly enjoyed Witcher 3....but I'm with you about this one.  Gameplay looks nice but the content is weird.  Like Batman Arkham City level of dialogue writing, which is off putting to say the least.

 

I feel like every narrator for a video game demo or trailer seems to be required to be a bit creepy or weird?  I'm always always always turned off by that shit regardless of who's doing it.

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Yup, that looks fantastic. Lots of lovely little details. Combat looks great, driving looks good. I'm hyped!

 

On 8/28/2018 at 2:11 AM, Cordeos said:

Although the lack of any sort of morality system probably means the game can get super fucked up.

 

Would you actually want a morality system? Personally I don't like those. I like that the in-game factions will react differently to you depending on past interactions, but I don't want a morality slider telling me if I'm a good boy or a bad boy. I know what kind of boy I am, TYVM!

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2 hours ago, Henke said:

Would you actually want a morality system? Personally I don't like those. I like that the in-game factions will react differently to you depending on past interactions, but I don't want a morality slider telling me if I'm a good boy or a bad boy. I know what kind of boy I am, TYVM!

I dislike morality systems, especially ones that are explicitly laid out in sliders, But in games like GTA I get grossed out by the total ignoring of horrific player actions. I just get the feeling this game will let me murder everyone all the time and no one in the game will bat an eye. That dissonance was already on display a bit when the main character and her partner were talking about how fucked up the scavengers were without really thinking about how many people they had killed that day alone.

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Night City shows definite signs of sandbox blandness. I sure hope they can bring much more iconicity into it and don't just try to show off how immeasurably BIG THE WORLD is and how many HUNDREDS OF HOURS it will keep you playing. As to the mission shown however, I like how story driven these moments are, and especially the effort that goes into visually communicating the story beats. This is, hopefully, maintained throughout the game. I've only just started Mass Effect Andromeda and I'm appalled how many missions are squeezed in that just let you wander from map point to map point, a cutscene that shows you some face devoid of emotion that voices some words, then it's on to the next map point. It's superfluous crap, and unfortunately most of it is. It just leaves no impression. I forgot all those missions already. The Cyberpunk mission at least left an impression. Yeah, there are some really cheap shock effects in there, and a good bit more violence than I'd usually accept. But if CDPR goes on to continuously show, not just tell the desperate situation of this society's struggling members, this could still make an impact that ME:A can only dream of.

 

I've had an odd feeling that I can only describe with difficulty during some of the high risk conversations they've shown. I felt like they aptly recreate what I dealt with "back in the day" when playing Cyberpunk 2020. That is not necessarily a good thing, I tell you, because the GMs were just about as juvenile as I was. Maybe that haphazard feeling, that rapid oscillation between the possible outcomes will be a good thing eventually. But maybe the 2077 creators are still just 15 year old GMs in a bad disguise and will treat you with arbitrary decisions that are a whole lot of things, but not in your favor, and not fun to play.

 

The awesome custom main character is, as expected, totally wasted on the First Person perspective. Sure, there are cutscenes to show off the player customized protagonist, which in principle breaks the "immersion" that they seem to be so damn proud of. They're trying a 'best of both worlds' approach here and as I see it, it doesn't get them something coherent. I've trouble playing in first person perspective for more than a few minutes, so Cyberpunk 2077 really doesn't look like the game for me, despite all those memories a quarter century ago.

 

Ah well. Seems like this game is a good ways off anyway. Whether it will be that new PC, the PS5 or whether I'll choose not to play it at all, we'll see.

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I did a double take when I saw that the post preceeding the gameplay trailer is from 2013. Gee willickers.

 

Gameplay looked fine, definitely like a sandbox cyberpunk game, I guess, and boy do they go through a loooot of trouble to make sure you see those extra nicely bump-mapped breasts and asses in close-up. Early on, the narrator combines the words MATURE and VISCERAL, and I very nearly switched the damn thing off. Sure, this is just the marketing, but it doesn't bode well for the actual maturity of this title.

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Ugh, this game looks embarrassing.

 

It also looks, in a lot of ways, good, and what I want out of an expensive RPG. Ughhhh.

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Yeah I'm willing to attribute that "mature" stuff to marketing for the time being. The same buzzwords could have been attached to the witcher 3 as well. But at the same time what they chose to show gave me the same concerns as the rest of you.

 

I dunno...overall the mechanics they show off in the trailer seemed fine but I'm a bit surprised at the buzz it got out of E3. Outside of the visual polish nothing seemed especially mind blowing. Maybe people are projecting what made the witcher 3 great onto this new setting? I mean I hope that's true...

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The presentation of the gameplay demo was a bit :tmeh: but I still found a lot to like about the game. I like the visuals a lot and the city feels adequately dense. I hope they manage to maintain the quintessential cyberpunk dread that comes from knowing that there are entities out there that are way too advanced in terms of tech and other resources that you can't possibly fuck with them in a conventional way. My fear is that it all falls apart once you do a few too many side missions and become a classic RPG demigod.

 

I'm looking forward to all the weird shit the body augmentations can offer. Seeing yourself through your recently-purchased eye while it was being installed was pretty cool already. However, I feel that stuff like this would be more effective if they didn't cut to third person in the cutscenes.

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I'm a bit less excited for this than I was a couple of months ago after how crappy they've been on social media and seeming like they have no idea that non-binary people exist. Maybe they can turn it around in the next year or two before the game comes out.

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On 8/28/2018 at 8:17 PM, Brannigan said:

I thoroughly enjoyed Witcher 3....but I'm with you about this one.  Gameplay looks nice but the content is weird.  Like Batman Arkham City level of dialogue writing, which is off putting to say the least.

 

I feel like every narrator for a video game demo or trailer seems to be required to be a bit creepy or weird?  I'm always always always turned off by that shit regardless of who's doing it.

The first thing I noticed was the chromatic aberration, which is hopefully toggleable, but the second thing was the writing. The banter between V and the sidekick dude falls completely flat, I have no interest in hearing that character speak and I hope I'm not saddled with him for the entirety of the game. When they were interacting with the quest givers the dialogue wasn't as bothersome, but clearly a huge step back from their previous efforts. It felt like a quest giver talking directly to the player, instead of a genuine character interaction, something they were great at in the Witcher series. I hope it's not a consequence of the first person perspective, that they don't want to give us big dialogue trees. Deus Ex cut to 3rd person for conversations and I thought that worked well.

 

This is my main worry about the game. From what I've seen of the gameplay I'll probably enjoy the game regardless. However, we don't get many of these hugely ambitious RPGs, and I so badly want a well written story with character's I'll grow attached to, especially now that BioWare seems to be out of the game. Bethesda's writing never did anything for me either.

 

On 8/29/2018 at 5:03 PM, Roderick said:

I did a double take when I saw that the post preceeding the gameplay trailer is from 2013. Gee willickers.

 

Gameplay looked fine, definitely like a sandbox cyberpunk game, I guess, and boy do they go through a loooot of trouble to make sure you see those extra nicely bump-mapped breasts and asses in close-up. Early on, the narrator combines the words MATURE and VISCERAL, and I very nearly switched the damn thing off. Sure, this is just the marketing, but it doesn't bode well for the actual maturity of this title.


They announced it as soon as they knew they were making it, which was before they actually started making it (afaik they didn't really get started until TW3 wrapped up).

 

On 8/29/2018 at 1:28 PM, Cordeos said:

I dislike morality systems, especially ones that are explicitly laid out in sliders, But in games like GTA I get grossed out by the total ignoring of horrific player actions. I just get the feeling this game will let me murder everyone all the time and no one in the game will bat an eye. That dissonance was already on display a bit when the main character and her partner were talking about how fucked up the scavengers were without really thinking about how many people they had killed that day alone.


Isn't that every game with gunplay or combat though? Nathan Drake is a mass murderer.

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5 minutes ago, eot said:

Isn't that every game with gunplay or combat though? Nathan Drake is a mass murderer.

You don't make choices in a lot of those games though, you are in a level with a bunch of enemies you need to kill or get past, there is no alternate way to do it. I am specifically annoyed by things like Nico from GTA4 lamenting his life of crime in cut scenes and then allowing you to murder a whole city in game play. The discussion of the scavengers in the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer reminded me of those kinds of moments. Hitman Blood Money and Mercenaries Playground of Destruction actually had decent systems for dealing with this, killing civilians cost you money, its a good way to encourage players to not be complete psychopaths.

Despite my issues with Dues Ex it also did a good job of not having a visible morality slider but adjusting NPC reactions to you based on how many people you killed.

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I was really interested in this from the E3 trailer, and hearing people just go nuts about it from the secret E3 showing, but wow this footage convinced me outright that CyberPunk 2077 is not my thing.

 

Relevant note here: I don't like Deus Ex either. I think that character's voice, and every square inch of his look, is NEXT-LEVEL try-hard. Someone is DESPERATE for me to think this is sssooooo cccooooool, and that's very off-putting to me. At some time I did think Solid Snake and Wolverine or Devil-May-Cry were cool dudes, but shoving that double-shot of machismo in my face now, especially without any levity, just feels misguided.

 

It felt like the characters in CyberPunk were really trying to jam in as much badass attitude as they could, at the behest of building compelling characters. It really painted the scene with the limp, cold body in a different light after a character said "I've got news as big as MY BALLS!" a couple minutes later. I was ready for the cool car and the cool jacket, but once you introduce the notion that this is all just pandering to my arrested development, it makes the whole thing feel like a pessimistic man-cave wank-fest, like Ready Player One or Duke Nukem.

 

I'm sorry I don't like this big game everyone likes. I did want to!

I actually felt myself wondering "Do I just not like the cyberpunk genre?", but I loved watching Blade Runner for the first time recently, and I do like Final Fantasy 7's grubby neon slums. That cyberpunk is mostly about people just feeling abandoned in a very busy world though.

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On 9/3/2018 at 10:32 AM, I_smell said:

I actually felt myself wondering "Do I just not like the cyberpunk genre?", but I loved watching Blade Runner for the first time recently, and I do like Final Fantasy 7's grubby neon slums. That cyberpunk is mostly about people just feeling abandoned in a very busy world though.

 

I think that is the core of cyberpunk, at least in my experience? The problem, as demonstrated by steampunk, is that there's a contingent of people who are just there for the aesthetic, rather than the themes that dictate those aesthetics. So many people who "like" cyberpunk actually just like high technology, violence, and super-beefy dudes. The themes of human commodification and atomization, societal and cultural alienation, and the ubiquity of corporate control in most classic works of cyperpunk are, at best, adjuncts to the fantasy of being a badass with a big gun to such people. If those themes go missing or are subsumed in more overt pandering, they won't complain.

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On 9/3/2018 at 5:32 PM, I_smell said:

Relevant note here: I don't like Deus Ex either. I think that character's voice, and every square inch of his look, is NEXT-LEVEL try-hard. Someone is DESPERATE for me to think this is sssooooo cccooooool, and that's very off-putting to me. At some time I did think Solid Snake and Wolverine or Devil-May-Cry were cool dudes, but shoving that double-shot of machismo in my face now, especially without any levity, just feels misguided.

 

It felt like the characters in CyberPunk were really trying to jam in as much badass attitude as they could, at the behest of building compelling characters. It really painted the scene with the limp, cold body in a different light after a character said "I've got news as big as MY BALLS!" a couple minutes later. I was ready for the cool car and the cool jacket, but once you introduce the notion that this is all just pandering to my arrested development, it makes the whole thing feel like a pessimistic man-cave wank-fest, like Ready Player One or Duke Nukem.

When you say Deus Ex, are you referring to Human Revolution?
 

As for the pandering, that's not an aspect of the genre. Most of the works I like are very restrained, just like Blade Runner. From what little I know of the pen and paper game Cyberpunk 2077 is based on, it has a slightly different tone and is more interested in the human cost of these types of modifications than making you a badass.

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