Cyberpunk 2077 Pre-Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[Mr. Hiver]

I see people complain this isn't third person like The Witcher, and i respond to it.

Where the fuk did you see that? hallucinating because a few morons started hallucinating much?

 

[Yosharian]

You're not a very pleasant person, are you? It's exhausting reading through all this 'dumbfuck' this, 'moron' that, let alone participating in it. Do you have to be like this every time you disagree with someone?

No, thats saved only for actual dumbfucks and morons. And you can go fuck yourself and your exhaust.

It isn't, though. That's what makes it so boring and tiresome. You're like that with literally everyone you engage in a discussion with.

 

[Mr. Hiver]

First of all my posting history is free to see, second of all... go fuck yourself dipshit. Who gives a shit about your dumb resentment and butthurt?

 

[Yosharian]

First of all my posting history is free to see, second of all... go fuck yourself dipshit. Who gives a shit about your dumb resentment and butthurt?

No-one...

 

[ADL]

What's with the nufags and their immershun on the Codex. It's not the first time I read something stupid like that since I returned. Are all the old farts gone and there is no one left to mock the fuckers with "Joined:" quotes?

Mock me for what? Using the correct terminology for what this is?

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

Going with the current impressions I'm hearing most of this sounds pretty fucking solid, but leveled enemies/gear still being in the game are a very disappointing note.
If The Witcher 3 is anything to go by, levels were completely unnecessary to the core ruleset and felt in the game only because "in a RPG you need to have levels, right?".
Which ironically is also a mismatch with the Cyberpunk pen & paper ruleset, which was a level-less one.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

you know you are probably going to spend 90% of your time shooting

Fuck no.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...f-cyberpunk-2077-gameplay-is-it-cyberpunk-yet

We've seen another 50 minutes of Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay - is it cyberpunk yet?

Cyberpunk 2077 very much has a presence at E3 this year - but it's also very much the same as it was the year before. Cool Keanu aside, there wasn't much new in what was shown to the public in the Xbox conference, and there wasn't any gameplay at all.

There's still no availability for an actual hands-on with the gameplay here but, at least, there is another near fifty-minute demo we were able to see behind closed doors. It was played live by someone from CD Projekt Red, and much of what we've come to know about Cyberpunk 2077 already is clearly evident. It's still beautiful and vast, still a technological marvel, at least to my layperson eyes, still extraordinarily detailed.

And we still have questions, namely about its themes - does it know what they are? And its tone - does it have anything to say? Here's what we saw, regardless, and if you're wondering about an interview don't worry, we'll have ours with you soon, too.

This Cyberpunk 2077 demo took place a little further along into the game than the previous one. We still opened with a character creator, where our in-the-room narrator was very keen to point out that one of your character stats, alongside the usual Intelligence and Body categories, is a stat for "Cool". You could do worse than taking that for a really quite obvious metaphor for where we're at with Cyberpunk at this point. It is deep and complex and vast, and also utterly obsessed with making sure you know how good it looks while being so complex and vast. Also, if you could just tell it that it looks cool every now and then that would really help.

We played as a male V to start with here - although we actually swapped between genders and character builds a few times in the demo thanks to a spot of developer magic, just to show off what was possible. There was a fleeting mention of something about the way you look, including your skin colour, affecting how people perceive you in the world. There were also some silly haircuts. CD Projekt chose the default white male with short back and sides.

The first thing we saw in this demo after that character creator, though, was probably the most interesting - and not just because it's Keanu Reeves. His character, as you'll know, is Johnny Silverhand, a musician-turned-warrior who is indeed very cool. He's also a "ghost", and he's haunting your brain. At last! Cyberpunk!

This is a video game though so your brain-ghost appears as a helpful NPC who chats to you now and then and maybe occasionally points the way. (I don't have a singular takeaway from this demo but if I did, it would perhaps be the fact that Cyberpunk 2077 is, indeed, a video game - which feels astonishing in light of the ambition; but also just a tiny bit disappointing, given the layer of magic to last year's super-slick demo, and the fact that in shaping up as a real game it's still bound by the same laws of nature - and recurring tropes - as the rest).

There's also one other quick thing established here, before we dive in: you've got a damaged biochip lodged in your skull that might be the key to immortality. No big deal, got some thugs to find anyway.

We go and find some thugs. This time it's in the Pacifica region of the city, a vast once-resort zone that crumbled into destitution once the Corporations and the government pulled funding during an economic collapse. The population is now largely black, and the major language is largely Haitian Creole. We're here to meet a man called Placide, of the Voodoo Boys gang, for a mission. We search for him in a nearby church, and an NPC, named as "Poor Man", comes up to us. There is some questionable dialogue - or rather, questionable subtitling - where the man's thick Creole accent is also written out in the subtitles, "they" as "dey" and "the" as "da" or "de". This is the same for nearly all of the Voodoo Boys and people of this area, and actully after you unlock a chip in-game that translates launguage for you, your software presents it as such - "la" in a foreign language still "da" in English. Later on, Placide mentions "they are coming", or something of that ilk, and our white male character asks "who is "dey"?".

Back to the present, and Placide's found chopping meat - a delicacy in Night City now - in the back of some derelict building, and takes us through the area as an attack helicopter eviscerates an entire floor of a high-rise building in the distance, with not a remark from him or anyone nearby.

Inside another building we're forced into a very quick decision about whether or not to accept Placide "jacking in" to our own brain with no explanation. It's a classic hand-over-your-gun gang-trial moment; snap our outreached hand away and he gets angry, submit and, as it was put in the presentation, it's leaving your mind's door unlocked for this stranger to come in and do what he wants. We accept - it seems it'll play out this way one way or another, at least if we want to do this mission - and he inspects our brain to find that biochip, but can't really figure out what it's for. We pass whatever test that was and it's off to go find some people to probably kill, over a defunct Grand Imperial Mall (referred to by Placide as some sort of pantheon of greed and avarice for the people who came before).

Spoiler

When we get there it's time for some actual combat, and we can approach it however we want. Stealthily, technologically or guns blazing, depending on how we're kitted out as a character. Our current build is a Netrunner which means stealth and hacking are the weapons of choice. We sneak past some enemies - another gang, called the Animals, who sort of worship a kind of mega-steroid that makes them tougher in combat and look like walking, vascular thumbs with mohawks - and distract others with Netrunner skills. We hack into a sparring robot one was watching and it near enough punches his head off, then we drop a full, network-connected rack of weights onto someone's neck, repeatedly, until bits of blood start to splurt out (which is grim, and also a key reason why I will never have a "smart home"), and then we set a billboard flickering and use a Nano Whip, which looks like a glowing orange cheese cutter, to slash the two grunts investigating it almost in half, from behind.

Shortly after we take a moment to sneak up on a final guard to grab him in a neckhold from behind. There's an on-screen prompt to use a takedown or a non-lethal takedown. We choose non-lethal and dump him in a nearby trash disposal unit, and then we're told that the entirety of Cyberpunk 2077 can be completed without killing a single person! That's an astonishing claim for a game of Cyberpunk 2077's size, but I also wouldn't tell it to the chap you just non-violently punted into a multi-story bin.

There's a door which is too strong to punch open which is a shame (there are options like this everywhere in Cyberpunk 2077, it seems, where a little tooltip might say 3/4 netrunner or something to that effect to show whether or not you're levelled up enough in that kind of skill to complete it - an indication of its "fluid" class system in the works). We hack it instead, finding a box on the wall and prying the door open with our big old cyber mind. There's a hacking mini-game which, hands up, I found totally incomprehensible in the two or three seconds it was on the screen before the tech whiz playing it solved the problem. It's a grid, maybe five-by-five, with letter-number combinations on each square in that grid, and then you have to select certain ones and put them down the bottom. Complete some extra puzzles in the allotted time, somehow, and you get added bonuses, like the ability to upload something to the security system.

At this point we switch characters (you can't do this in the game obviously) so we can take on the sandboxy area up ahead, on the central ground floor area of the derelict mall in the most violent manner possible - because the cheese slicer was not enough, dammit! We're a female V with metal arms now who can indead punch and pry open some more big doors. Some faces are punched in during an entirely melee combat sequence, someone pulls a knife on us and we take it and lob it into their face, and we slash someone up with a broken bottle, of all things. It seems you can carry on slashing and punching long after NPCs are dead if you find that entertaining, because we then hop into some gunplay and blow off every limb in sight!

We grab one 'roided up grunt - the same takedown / non-lethal takedown prompt appears - and use him as a meat shield to get up close to a mounted turret. The tooltip very soon disappears. We use our cyberpunk arms to rip the mounted turret off said mount and proceed to blow apart every chunky boy nearby into smaller (but still quite big) chunks. There's lots of "I think he's dead now!" banter from our narrator as the Animals use their stimmed-up dashing abilities to try and reach melee range before getting caught in the hellfire. It's incredibly hard to say without actually feeling it, of course, but the gunplay here did look a little stiff.

We also replayed that section again, back as the Netrunner male V, and instead chose the much less brutal option of hacking the same turret into doing the work for us; and then hacking into an Animal grunt's arm to make it blow himself up with a grenade; and then hacking another's arm to take his pistol and blow off his own head. The crowd roars. Take that downtrodden addicts of Pacifica! Cyberpunk!

More combat next: this time a boss fight, of sorts, which is an interesting twist that calls back, a little, to the larger single-enemy fights of The Witcher 3. It's against an Animal gang "alpha" called Sasquatch. She wields a massive sledgehammer, and we scan her first to reveal that - to my astonishment! - the glowing area on her back is actually a weak spot. A spot of dodging and gunplay - after a clever bit of scene-setting with pop-up cyber signs telling us to GET OUT ends in Sasquatch leaping through one into our face - results in the glowing spot being blown up and us taking the hammer to the Sasquatch, as the old saying goes. When she's on the floor defeated, there's still a choice as to whether or not you want to kill or leave them - we shoot her in the head.

Next, the Agent, who is a Netrunner himself, and a good one. We confront him in the building's cinema. The projector is playing a western, on loop. We find him in the projectionist's room and have a chat, because it seems we might have been duped: the Agent, who works for some other shady organisation, tells us that actually the Voodoo Boys are just using us: we're what they call a floor rag, to be used and disposed, and once we've got what we're here for (in all honesty I've long forgotten), they'll dispose of us. There are several dialogue options, available with different character backgrounds (Street Kid, and so on) or class types. We opt to ignore him, as we are indeed a Street Kid and so our alignment is naturally with the gang. It turns out he was right - after bludgeoning the Agent we and everyone else on the network related to this mission are killed. Only, we wake up - just as we woke up in that cinematic trailer in the Xbox conference, only still on the bloody theatre carpet - and our pal Johnny Silverhand, brain ghost, is standing over us. There's a suggestion it was the biochip in our head but it's brushed over in our demo and we head outside, to go pay Placide a visit.

The two thugs outside are spooked - we should be dead - and fearfully offer to fast-travel us back to him in exchange for their lives. Getting into the car, we meet the only loading screens you'll find in the game, apparently. The entire city is traversable - by foot or vehicle - without a single loading screen, we're told (take that next-gen). It's only when we fast travel at times like this that we'll meet one.

This is also a good time, just quickly, to mention the fantastic-looking driving in the game. At one point during all this location-hopping in the demo we hop on the back of our bike, set the radio (seems like the music is a choice between punk, cyberpunk, punky cyber or punk punk, but it's also all very cool, to be honest), and we set roaring off in first-person, vast city and skybox in our sights - we toggle into third person for a bit just to show off and look at the cool Samurai logo on our jacket, which gives us a plus-something in something stat boost (probably in Cool?). There's a very strong Grand Theft Auto vibe to travel, basically. It looks great.

Anyway back to Placide, who we punch. His boss Brigitte walks over and we negotiate. She's a little more appreciative of the fact she's talking to someone who is apparently immortal and figures there's probably something good in knowing a person like that. We get her to take us to someone called Alt Cunningham, one of the "most legendary" Netrunners in the city, seemingly as we try to untangle the thread of our brain ghost Keanu and this invincibility chip.

She takes us into... Cyberspace! Cyberpunk! In a backroom through a now-destroyed, long-forgotten international rail system (think the Overground but with investment), we get into a bath of suspicious ice. Keanu - sorry, Johnny Silverhand - is all "yeah whatever" about it and we are less so. We wake up in actual Cyberspace and Matrix-y figures made of ones and zeroes and other cyber things indicate the people in the room. Approaching cyber-Brigitte we're warped through time and (cyber) space to what she calls the Black Wall. It's red actually, but it's still as ominous as it sounds. No one's ever ventured through to the other side and come back. Alt Cunningham reckons they'll be the first to. There's a suggestion maybe it's got something to do with brain ghost Johnny. There's a massive, dubstep-wubbing bulge to the red Black Wall, and with that our first proper look at the true themes of the cyberpunk genre - transience (someone actually said it at one point!), humanity, identity, self. I've had a mental vomit break from all the limb chunking - talking to others who saw the presentation I think I might have had a particularly stab-ho demonstrator - and am way, way back on board. It feels more real, but by the end of demo it still, for the most part, feels just as astonishing.

The logo: Cyberpunk! 2077!

 

[Mr. Hiver]

The hacking minigame sounds cheap and boring over a long run. Considering the setting and the tools at disposal, and that we will be repeating that procedure a lot, they really could have gone for something better.
Luckily it isnt necessary for everything as there are quick hacks and tools like that "deamon" malware or something similar.

 

[Sentinel]

So? Firstly I doubt it as even DXHR had XP bonuses for ghost/non-lethal types of approaches which cancelled out the XP gain from killing everyone so it's not hard to come up with something.

??? What does that have to do with anything? DXHR had tech trees shown that were focused on stealth mechanics. CP2077 doesnt have any of that.

Secondly...why should each approach give you the same reward?

I never said that. Are you sure you're replying to my post?

A non-lethal playthrough should be its own reward

The motto of the lazy developer.

Everyone on Codex rages about 'balance', rightly pointing out that there should be more or less viable approaches and making everything balanced just makes everything the same.

People on the codex rage about Josh's tirade for "gameplay balance", but no one contests the reward structure balance. That's the only thing Josh ever got right.

 

[MasPingon]

It seems CDP Red is going into metaphysical tropes similar to those present in P:T and MotB, but using technology instead of magic, to build symbolism. I love those guys.

 

[Lyric Suite]

The non-lethal play through is the "story" mode, isn't it.

Lmao at Codexers thinking this was incline.

 

[Danikas]

 

[kain30]

oh god!! that journalist is so hot I want to fuck her hard

 

[undecaf]

a boss fight, of sorts, which is an interesting twist that calls back, a little, to the larger single-enemy fights of The Witcher 3. ... the glowing area on her back is actually a weak spot.

Shit is shit.

Arcade platformer prolapses to shoot.

This was fun back in the day when I was playing Turrican and had to shoot a giant piranha in the eye to damage it.

 

[Perkel]

Easy Allies summary earlier is pretty fucking amazing:

- Your background is constantly used throughout game for demo they were streetkid in bad part of town.
- Shitload of options to fight, avoid etc
- You can hack people hand and make them shot themselves or take out pin from grenade
- Boss uses huge hammer but character can take out his hammer and if you are strength based class you can use that hammer for yourself
- Strength based character can literally tear locked doors apart, your hands open and you can see piston/muscles doing work while you reap doors apart because they open up to cool off while you are doing this.
- No stop and talk. Every conversation etc is happening while everyone is doing something, they walk around, order people etc etc etc.
- nanowire can be used to hack people and use it as whip which cuts people apart.
- gore. People can be dismantled apart.
- Strength based character used someone as living shield which took bullets and was dying while being stuffed with bullets and then they walked up to turret and literally pull it out and started to use it as minigun.
- They switched a lot classes in demo. While there is no class system per see, game will name you based on skills you use.
- Skills gain experience with use but they are limited by base stats. So you can upgrade melee to certain level and then you have to pick another point in strength to have ability to further improve it.
- Unlike Deus Ex Human rev or mankind devided it doesn't feel like pathways are premade. so if you go stealth it seems like it is something more than just using alternative route developers prepared for you like in Deus Ex Mankind Devided.
- plenty of other stuff.


2 thing. This could be only made demo for purpose of E3 demos to vow crowds but if this is how they design everything in game this could great incline.

Also worth noting one of the fevs in gamespot interview said: TW3 was Story + immersion while CB2077 is story + immersion + gameplay and unlike other games they made they put heavy focus on gameplay.

 

[AwesomeButton]

oh god!! that journalist is so hot I want to fuck her hard

And she even sounds intelligent, not the usual dumb questions.

 

[Infinitron]

So, let's see how many previews of the demo I can find:



PC Gamer: https://www.pcgamer.com/cyberpunk-2077-e3-2019-gameplay/
PCWorld: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3402076/cyberpunk-2077-e3-2019-preview-keanu-reeves.html
Tom's Hardware: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/cyberpunk-2077-demo-gameplay-e3-2019,39630.html
Eurogamer: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...f-cyberpunk-2077-gameplay-is-it-cyberpunk-yet
IGN: https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/06/11/cyberpunk-2077-new-gameplay-details-from-the-e3-2019-demo
https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/06/11/thoughts-after-cyberpunk-2077s-50-minute-gameplay-demo
TechRadar: https://www.techradar.com/news/in-cyberpunk-2077-keanu-reeves-is-the-key-to-immortality
Video Games Chronicle: https://www.videogameschronicle.com...-18-new-details-revealed-in-the-e3-2019-demo/
Game Informer: https://www.gameinformer.com/preview/2019/06/12/the-coolest-things-we-saw-at-e3-2019

 

[Yosharian]

oh god!! that journalist is so hot I want to fuck her hard

So does Pawel, I think

 

[Infinitron]

Rock Paper Shotgun is becoming unreadable: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/20...s-weak-gunplay-and-unimaginative-stereotypes/

Cyberpunk 2077's E3 demo has weak gunplay and unimaginative stereotypes

At some point, Cyberpunk 2077 has to evolve from a visually impressive – yes Keanu, even breathtaking – world and into something more interesting. I want more than meat and gun oil: I want moral dilemmas and a thoughtful exploration of transhumanism. More importantly, I want the game not to lean on racial stereotypes. After CD Projekt Red’s latest E3 demo, I’m concerned on both fronts.

I have seen the face of Cyberpunk, and it’s got blemishes.

We wake up with Keanu Reeves in our head, a biochip that might contain the secret to immortality, and a mission to find out more about it. Keanu is actually Johnny Silverhand, a “digitised construct” that stays with us for “a very large portion of the game”. He’s a technoghost that occasionally makes snarky comments. The demo was off to a good start.

We choose from one of three backgrounds. The developer guiding us through our demo mulls over a life spent on the streets, or being ex-corporation (corpo, in cyberlingo). This comes into effect straight away, as our corporate history greys out a street background conversation option. It doesn’t really matter, though. The “poor man” we’ve accosted directs us to the Voodoo Boys anyway.

They’re a hacker group “obsessed with transcendence” – or sublimation, if you’re into your Ian M Banks – and fixated on uploading themselves to cyberspace.

We’re in Pacifica, one of six districts that will feature in the full game. It’s a mess. Far from the thriving metropolis we saw last year, Pacifica is in ruins. It’s all shanty towns and half-destroyed buildings. In one of the busier areas, a man yells and fires his rifle into the air. Nobody bats an eyelid.

We’re soon face to face with Placide, a burly Haitian man decked out in dreadlocks and an uncompromising attitude. He’s got the info we need, but he’s also got a job for us – and first he wants to plug into us. Not in a saucy way, but a potentially disastrous one. The developer walking us through the demo says that most people in Cyberpunk have a personal link – a wriggly extendable cable in their wrist. “Handing that over to a skilled netrunner is like handing over the keys to your brain to someone”, he says. V goes ahead and offers up his arm anyway.

Now Placide is in our head too. He tells us we have to go check out a van that’s being guarded by some hired muscle: meatheads, he calls them. “Animals”, he calls them next. It’s their faction name, it turns out, and they’re obsessed with juice. The nature of the juice was not specified.

I’d later ask quest director Mateusz Tomaskiewicz if the factions are more nuanced than they appear. So far, they’ve all been defined by one fixation: juice for the Animals, uploading themselves for the Voodoo Boys. He told me that nuance would appear over the course of the game, and that the Animals would appear again under different circumstances. He didn’t give me any examples of that nuance, mind.

Spoiler

Back in the demo, our character hops on a motorcycle and rides over to the Animal’s base. We head in via the back, although our guide tells us there are multiple ways in. We’re sliding between cars, so far undetected, and this allows us to sneak up on a guy, knock him out and shove him down a trash chute. You can apparently complete the whole game without harming or killing anyone, though it’s hard to see any but the most dedicated pacifists not even knocking goons unconscious.

We’re playing as a Netrunner, which means we can hack turrets. It’s a little disappointing that the first example of hacking is so mundane, but soon we’re tapping into robot boxing trainers and gym weights. The robot punches someone’s face off, and a poor fella who’s working out gets his neck crushed. It’s neat, but very Watch Dogs – you’re not being creative, you’re just walking up and pressing a contextual hack button.

At this point, the demo resets to before we infiltrated the compound. Now the person playing is controlling a “Strong Solo” character type, who immediately demonstrates this by tearing two doors open with her cyberarms. We’re discovered soon after, as a stealth attack goes awry. We punch that man to the floor, then stab another Animal many times with a broken bottle as they try to run away from us. It’s horrible.

The stabbing causes V to level up, and the person playing the demo opens up a menu with twelve options for skill points, though we don’t get a good look at them. Once the menu’s closed, a man comes at us with superhuman speed, but we grab hold of him and advance on a turret as it riddles his body with bullets. Then – because again, we’re very strong – we rip the turret off its base and turn it on the Animals. At this point, I feel increasingly uncomfortable that we’re shooting at predominantly black people labelled as animals.



On a very different note, the shooting looks limp. Bullets pile into people as their healthbars tick down, each shot lacking impact despite goon after goon tumbling to the floor. I’m hoping I won’t need to resort to my gun too often, though: abilities like that turret manhandling spice up what looks like piddly gunplay.

When the demo later switches away from the strong character type and back to controlling the Netrunner, we get up to some more interesting hacking. We use that wrist cable – now in glowing orange “Nanowire” form – to hack someone from a distance. This opens up a menu where we can overload their cyberware, jam their targeting systems, track their squad’s movements, or deploy a handful of other tricks.

Once our cover’s blown, we start hacking people’s robo-arms, making them prematurely pull grenades or shoot themselves in the head. It is, again, horrible. Pleasingly so, on some level – but it’s a shame that this is the main side of Cyberpunk we’ve been shown. Plunging into dens of violence, then revelling in the cyber-gore.

I asked Tomaskiewicz for examples of quests that explored the kinds of questions I’m interested in. Questions less like “how many people can I chop to bits at once with my Nanowire”, and more “what are these cranial augmentations doing to my identity”. He gestured towards transgression as a theme, and the city as an antagonist that “grinds people up and spits them out”. It’s understandable that he didn’t want to talk about specifics, but frustrating that he couldn’t point to anything more interesting.



I’m also increasingly concerned about Cyberpunk’s handling of non-white cultures. Last year’s Gamescom demo drew criticism for its clumsy and inauthentic presentation of a Latino character, and I’m not convinced the Voodoo Boys are a step in the right direction. At one point V, the player character, mockingly says “and who are dem” in response to Placide’s pronunciation. I asked Tomaskiewicz if he was concerned they weren’t treating certain cultures with enough respect.

“Obviously we’re paying a lot of attention to representing different groups respectfully. You know, there’s always a risk. Of course we have it in the back of our heads that we need to be careful about this. We are contacting different consultants to learn about specific groups, and our company has a variety of people with different beliefs. As for The Animals, if you play through the game you’ll see that they’re not mostly black people, it’s mixed.”

He told me that most of the city were mixed race, but the backstory for this particular area concerned most people being immigrants from Haiti. By itself, that would be fine. But near the end of the demo, we meet a white man in a suit and tie who gives us the information we need. He also tells us the Voodoo Boys are going to turn on us the moment we’ve done their dirty work – and is immediately proved right.

The violent black thugs betrayed us, as the corporate white man said they would. If CD Projeckt are trying to subvert expectations – if the punchline is, but sometimes the thugs are really thugs – then it’s not one that lands.

It was hard to suppress excitement at last years demo. I had to fight to remind myself of the artifice, to look past the intricate bombast and see the sporadic wall destruction and implausible drowning animations. We’ve still seen only another small slice of a game that will be dozens of hours long, but after this year’s inconsistent combat and questionable representation, my expectations have been tempered.

 

[Yosharian]

They’re a hacker group “obsessed with transcendence” – or sublimation, if you’re into your Ian M Banks – and fixated on uploading themselves to cyberspace.

Why am I not surprised that RPS has hired a writer that's pretentious enough to name drop Iain Banks for absolutely no reason and simultaneously too stupid to spell his name properly.

He's also blatantly racist, and you can smell the fucking soy from here - "it was so horrible!"

That nonsense aside, what he said about the hacking mirrors my own concerns, and I worry about the presence of forced QTE events from that description of the stabbing.

 

[Curratum]

Rock Paper Shotgun is becoming unreadable

RPS has been unreadable for the better part of the past decade...

 

[Perkel]

lol at rps article.

At this point, the demo resets to before we infiltrated the compound. Now the person playing is controlling a “Strong Solo” character type, who immediately demonstrates this by tearing two doors open with her cyberarms. We’re discovered soon after, as a stealth attack goes awry. We punch that man to the floor, then stab another Animal many times with a broken bottle as they try to run away from us. It’s horrible.

HORRIBLU !

The stabbing causes V to level up, and the person playing the demo opens up a menu with twelve options for skill points, though we don’t get a good look at them. Once the menu’s closed, a man comes at us with superhuman speed, but we grab hold of him and advance on a turret as it riddles his body with bullets. Then – because again, we’re very strong – we rip the turret off its base and turn it on the Animals. At this point, I feel increasingly uncomfortable that we’re shooting at predominantly black people labelled as animals.

RAYCIST !

I asked Tomaskiewicz for examples of quests that explored the kinds of questions I’m interested in. Questions less like “how many people can I chop to bits at once with my Nanowire”, and more “what are these cranial augmentations doing to my identity”. He gestured towards transgression as a theme, and the city as an antagonist that “grinds people up and spits them out”. It’s understandable that he didn’t want to talk about specifics, but frustrating that he couldn’t point to anything more interesting.

WHERE IS MY TRANSPENS !

The violent black thugs betrayed us, as the corporate white man said they would. If CD Projeckt are trying to subvert expectations – if the punchline is, but sometimes the thugs are really thugs – then it’s not one that lands.

NO ! NU THOSE KANGS ! WHITE MAN BADDD

 

[Yosharian]

He looks pretty much how you'd expect:

 

[Infinitron]

Rock Paper Shotgun is becoming unreadable

RPS has been unreadable for the better part of the past decade...

They've become worse. Since being acquired by The Gamer Network in 2017 the site has been transforming into basically a woke sub-site of Eurogamer. I think that transformation is complete now.