mediocrepoet, are you retarded? Cyberpunk definitely has its own sense of political struggle. Pondsmith himself mentions that just about everything in cyberpunk is "inherently political." It just isn't the "left vs right" kind of political, unless you count its flirtings with anarchism as a leftist position, but anarchism doesn't really fall on the conventional left vs right spectrum either.
Jesus just cut the politics crap and start shitting on cyberpunk and cdprojekt again.
It
is shitting on CDPR, which is why they're so triggered.
CDPR failed to adapt the most basic aspects of the game it's based on because they were too scared to offend anyone. Game is the definition of milquetoast.
This, tbh. It was cyberpunk done by conformists pursuing inoffensive content and a clearly lacking vision, so basically a joke.
What aspects of pondsmith CP that you think they left out because they were afraid of offending anyone? I am not familiar with CP before the game, but from my brief experience with it, I think all the general themes are there to some degree.
The corpos are basically a joke, just people acting like cunts as if cuntishness is all corpo is about. Many of the Arasaka board even come off as sniveling cowards. You don't truly get the sense of almost faceless apathy, ruthlessness, ambition, indifference, and authority that corpos are meant to radiate, like they are the real law society must bow down to. Instead it feels like the corpos are mostly a bunch of spoiled brats with sand in their vaginas. The street kid theme isn't really shit like the struggle to survive, establishing yourself, and clawing what's yours from an uncaring and unforgiving world but "OMG I WANNA BE A
LEGEND ONE DAY, LIKE MY IDOL!" Character drive's basically a joke, which is why it got supplanted with the more reasonable need to not fucking die when the main plot gets started. And yet despite that premise, even questions about the link between man and machine, as well as humanity and the self, are very underdone. Hell, shit like how technology transforms society is massively half-assed since shit like flying cars are gone, cyberpsychosis basically got nixed, and you still need to log into a desktop PC to check your e-mail even though people can phone calls into your brain and you can get a display on your retinal implants. I guess cyberware is just cool beans now. There's very minimal engagement with the near-futurism side of things. Even themes like urbanization, population density, resource competition, etc. are underdone. People go to Night City because it's a
land of opportunity somehow, and there's no real handling of the question of what's so bad about pursuing a normal job and why you aren't doing it (except, of course, "I wanna be a legend!") but you do very quickly get the notion that it's a violent shithole with little opportunity to offer your dubious career choice except to end as a body in the ground and that you'd be better off fucking off into the sunset like the nomads do, which is clearly an option. In fact, in one of the endings, you do precisely that, and it is indeed drastically better than living in Night City. If only you'd done it sooner, your protagonist wouldn't have to race against the clock in the hopes of not dying. Makes you wonder why people put up with the extremely violent shithole, and there's no good reason for it, aside from the fact that in your case clearly everyone you fuck over is retarded and never tries to get even with you (and V wants to be a legend for some stupid fucking reason). You really don't get the feeling that this is someone you shouldn't've fucked with because your decisions come back to haunt you, even though you are repeatedly dicking Arasaka. Just continue going around letting everyone know you're V and no problems. Move out of your home? Nah, no need. The sense of danger and hard circumstances just isn't there the way it ought to be. There's tons more that's wrong with the setting. For example, themes like freedom of expression, censorship, information control, and being able to tell the truth are not really present either, unlike the tabletop system CP2077 is based on. The whole societal side of things is just used as a backdrop at most and it doesn't come off as a hard world the way it ought to either.
They basically wimped their way out of pretty much every theme that cyberpunk thrives on, all the rough edges that are usually present in a cyberpunk world, and didn't seem ready to handle any form of societal conflict or introspection in the game. It's cyberpunk as window dressing, and not even good window dressing at that. They could've taken out the cyberware, poisoned your protagonist, and just done it as a full GTA knockoff and probably the game would've been better for it.
Chose corpo background, get trolled by CDPR shock&awe dept™ , get shoehorned into street kid instead of unfolding existential crisis etc etc.
Yeah, everyone's basically a street kid in CP2077. Also, pretty sure the corpo vignette was originally meant to be some kind of middle-of-the-game sequence but CP2077 is full of nixed shit so they took what little they had for corpos and stuck it as an opening sequence then funneled you down the only main campaign path they had enough content to slap a finished label on, and even then they basically rushed through tons of shit. You can just feel the overwhelming incompleteness of the game. The sense of "Yeah, they had a lot more planned here, and didn't deliver." Also the sense that they had no idea wtf they were doing. There was a
huge gap between concept and execution in CP2077 and a clear lack of adequate understanding on how to bridge the two.
