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this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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The thing is that Cyberpunk 2077 exaggerates the evils of capitalism so far into absurdity that it stops being a critique of capitalism. Instead of the true mundane horrors of capitalism we have today, where companies basically knowingly stuff everything with microplastics and get away with it by greenwashing, and where single billionaires can inspired coups in foreign nations, Cyberpunk 2077 is a world where corporations feed you literal slop made of 100% artificial substances using the most crude and disgusting advertisements.
What CDPR does is basically make the most over the top faux capitalism where people do obviously evil shit and then gesture at it to go "haha wow glad we don't live like that, huh gamers?" There's absolutely zero meat to their critique, it's a capitalist strawman.
I agree with your overall point, but if news broke tomorrow that the Impossible Burger was 80% plastic by mass I would not be surprised at all. Given how evil irl corporations already are you really have to exaggerate to predict how evil they'll get in 50 years. Otherwise you end up with shit like Quantum of Solace, where James Bond fought to prevent an evil corporation from privatizing all of Bolivia's water... And raising prices less than an actual company did irl.
as long as the macros are good i'll keep eating that garbage
Even if it was 80% plastic, the advertising would still be positive advertising, trying to spin it as still a good thing.
Compared to Cyberpunk 2077 where their artificial slop is basically advertised as being the most disgusting slop ever, but people still accept that anyway
They're recycled plastics! It's green!
I would... the FDA still exists to stop that sort of thing.
doin a bang up job, they are
2077 is just the aesthetics of cyberpunk and little meat, but absurdist late stage capitalism is not uncommon in the genre.
It's also basically a post-apocalyptic setting. The rest of the world except for Canada, Sweden, and Japan is Fallout. Like despite all the evil capitalism, the main reason the world is a disaster is because there was a nuclear war, which for me really distracts from any sort of capitalist critique because I'd imagine any system dealing with those material conditions is gonna end up having horrors.
I didn't remember anything about widespread nuclear war. The Arasaka-Militech Corporate war ended with both sides getting nationalized, not widespread nuclear devastation. The USSR still exists (though subsumed by Sov Oi), as does China (as evidenced by Kang Tao and you do a quest for someone implied to be a Chinese spy). Theres also lots of references to Europe being a haven for advanced Biotech (especially in the expansion) and there's advertising for holiday packages in Somalia.
I thought it was supposed to be a dystopia
It is still a dystopia because Militech and Arasaka then ate the US and Japanese governments from the inside out. The president of the New USA is a former Militech exec.
it also totally misses the mark in some aspects. in actual gameplay, you have the ability to work for the police and literally help them fight people around the city. there's literally a whole copaganda mission glorifying some sexy detective. corps are evil, and capitalism has gone too far, but the police are your friends and you should help them shoot people on the street!
I wanted to like that section so bad too, because i'm a sucker for noir and bladerunner shit, but the glorification of the cops in this game was so gross, and immediately breaks immersion when the protag is continually shit talking them when they aren't on screen.
the game even has some in-game cartoons that mock the police force in the game, animations put out by the NCPD that depict the police officers as buff cool dogs and civilians as stupid little dogs and do show the NCPD to be authoritarian and overly violent. so they put effort into making the NCPD seem that way, but in actual gameplay they are nothing but heroes just trying to protect the city from cyberpsychos and gangs, with the police fixer telling V to simply incapacitate cyberpsychos as if ACTUAL police wouldn't be eager to slaughter someone (like capitalist police truly are like). this incongruence totally destroyed the message and immersion for me and made the actual game seem more pro-police.
She's a former journalist turned fixer, not a cop. There's even a mission where she sends you to help another journalist she knows/used to work with, who tears into her as an amoral sellout who gave up investigative journalism to go be a mercenary agent.
my mistake, i seemed to have interpreted her to be a cop for some reason. my point still stands with the random NCPD activities around the map.
Probably the vest. She has a very generic detective sort of look, and that seems to be a common assumption.
The funniest part of that is that it was clearly someone's "clever" idea for a diegetic way of pointing the player at all these little world mini-events so you don't miss them, then they forgot the system was some formal private contractor thing and included a bunch of things that the cops wouldn't be paying people to go deal with, like there's multiple NCPD Scanner events involving corporate soldiers having murdered some journalist or massacred protesters or striking workers and you get a payout for killing the soldiers and grabbing a copy of their orders or w/e.
I really can't agree with your overall read of how the game handles cops either: every "good" cop either gets killed, driven out, or fired for it, and every time a cop finds their conscience it's because of a direct personal connection to an issue (like the toxic shitbag cops who are worried about their former coworker, the cops you find in the process of murdering some corpo suit who'd put one of their family members into a coma, or the cop in the DLC who dies carrying out a heist of medical supplies to deal with a local health crisis that affected him personally). Like the mission with River ends with the discovery that the NCPD was involved in the assassination and coverup and River gets fired for investigating it at all, then his big rogue investigation thing after that was him looking for a missing family member, leaving him to hit both points of being systemically punished for doing the right thing, and only sticking his neck out to help someone when that someone was a family member of his.
oh my god those are infuriating too, because for a long time i thought maybe there was a way to actually incapacitate them but i'm pretty fucking sure there isn't. half the time, their health drops to 0 and wil roll on the floor, clearly alive but in pain, but the in game text that gets sent is still "sorry, had to waste 'em, lmao"
Depending on when you played, it was probably a DoT effect on them. In early patches (and I'm not sure when this was changed, so that could be pre 1.6 or even pre 2.0) DoT effects would keep ticking and kill incapacitated enemies, but now all DoTs are non-lethal and stop when they go down.
i'm on 2.0 but either way
Weird, I don't know what's happening then. I've been hitting them with all the quickhack DoTs and laying into them with a monowhip, and then just back off when they're down to a few percent at which point the bleed, burn, or poison incaps them. If you're using a blunt weapon be careful you're not hitting them after their health hits 0, because at that point any further damage will kill them, even nonlethal.
i think you have to use a nonlethal takedown or something but yeah its pretty stupid
ugh that's the worst.