Cyberpunk 2077 Mega-Review Thread (PC)

I thought Gamespot's review was fine, if not especially insightful. Like whoever it was said earlier, PC Gamer's review engaged a lot more with what the game is trying to do and what it offers while not downplaying its issues. I'm always somewhat suspicious when game reviews dedicate entire paragraphs to a game's identity politics (except in super extreme cases like RE5's ooga-booga African tribesmen, holy shit), but the Gamespot review at least only touched on it briefly. I tried reading Polygon's review and hoo boy, based on the things they're focusing on, you'd think the game was meant to be a doctoral thesis on Judith Butler or something.

Obviously I haven't played the game yet, but from reading people's initial impressions I think that I'm going to wind up having a lot of the same issues with the discussion around this game and sexism that I did with Blade Runner 2049. The whole point of cyberpunk as a genre is that it presents the most horrific excesses of corporate capitalism and unflinchingly shows how it divides, exploits, and harms people. Just because the work shows women/trans folks being exploited doesn't mean the game means for you to think that's awesome. There's a certain strain of progressivism out there that doesn't trust people to be able to draw their own conclusions about things they see in the media; to them, bad things must be explicitly condemned by the work they're featured in, otherwise the work is "problematic." It's incredibly ironic because one of the key aspects of cyberpunk as a genre is highlighting the problems with unfettered capitalism by simply presenting without commentary what happens if you follow the ideology to its logical (if exaggerated) extremes. Again, I don't know if Cyberpunk 2077 actually lives up to this legacy (plenty of media has just cribbed cyberpunk aesthetics while not engaging with its political messages), but this reminds me a lot of the conversation around there existing woman replicant prostitutes in BR 2049, a movie whose message should be right up these people's alleys.

It's a really hard conversation to have because a sizable (and extremely vocal) minority of the fanbase of videogames are reactionary misogynists and racists. The GB forums are sane enough that hopefully this post won't be misinterpreted. I also want to make it clear that I fully support calling out games that do espouse odious political messages (Bioshock Infinite being one of the very worst). I've just grown very weary of the ideological purity tests that get applied to every piece of media that comes out, where not living up to some nebulous *inclusivity* matrix means that the whole work gets written off, regardless of what it does achieve or what it's actually trying (if not necessarily succeeding) to say.

@notkcots:

I'd argue that people not being able to draw their own conclusion on what media is telling them is a well warranted fear. Because, yeah: people are kind of fucking dumb.

I also think it's fair to call CP out for its problems because, that's what I gathered from all of its media. It's less that CyberPunk 2077 seems to have anything to say about what the game is about, and more that it's really, really focused on convincing everyone that all of this is really cool. And some of Jeff's criticism seem to suggest the game doesn't really rise above its edge lord tendencies. Not the end all be all, but I it's absolutely fair for critiques to call them out for it.

I find it worrying anytime people seemingly fetishize a developer's games and jump to defend them at every turn. I'm seeing it in every comment section I come across in every Cyberpunk 2077 video, review, et al.

That said, I also see the same kind of discourse in the comments of any political news story, Covid story, and any other fucking thing... so I guess it just proves me right when I was whining in the early 2000's that Web 2.0 (basically, the framework of the internet that created comment sections and social media) was going to be a huge mistake. Turns out, we already live in the emerging Cyberpunk dystopia.

Liking things is great. Being a fan of a thing isn't so great, especially if you're not willing to allow room in your fan bubble for criticism. You can still like a thing and be critical of its flaws. That coexistence can and should happily happen.

@Kemuri07

Yeah, fair enough. If the lunacy of the past year has shown anything, it's that propaganda is shockingly effective. I think I just really bristle at the idea that the way to counteract bad propaganda is putting out good propaganda. It might be pragmatic, but I'm personally uncomfortable with the idea of telling anyone what to believe. It's not that it doesn't work, but it seems like it leads to people being on the right side for the wrong reasons, which could seed even larger long-term issues. I'm a huge pinko, but a lot of the people who ostensibly share my ideology seem to do so more out of a sense of tribalism rather than because they read a lot about the issues and settled on their beliefs.

As far as the trans stuff goes, it's totally plausible that CDPR might have fetishized trans people in gross ways. My point is just that due to the nature of the setting, it's not clear to me whether it's the devs being shitty and crass with it, or it's meant to be seen as gross exploitation in the context of the game world. I'll have to evaluate it in context.

On a less dire note, I'm very much pleased at the prospect of a Deus Ex-style game with ludicrous Bethesda-style bugs. I like when games break in deeply silly ways, and the bug reports I read about sound very amusing (when they don't softlock ths game).

@notkcots: I too am looking forward to playing something that is in the vein of Deus Ex. I really wanted to like those recent Deux Ex games but the part where they forced you at times to engage with the shooting aspects of the game despite being a very bad shooter killed the experience for me. At least Cyberpunk seems to have made the shooting competent to say the least which I'm surprised to see because I honestly thought it was just marketing masking what would essentially be a dice roll shooter in the vein of the Fallout games.

To be honest, to this day witcher 3 has many bugs. So counting on CDPR to fix them all seems like a wishful thinking.

@notkcots:

I'm torn on this. On the one hand, I am all for developers tackling any and all issues. Cyberpunk is a wonderful setting for exploring trans identity, as technology and norms have (you'd think) progressed to the point it's just common.

That beings said, the majority of trans criticism right now isn't that Cyberpunk 2077 has "the wrong points" or isn't "good propaganda", (I'm curious who you think is arguing for propaganda, honestly) as you called it, but that it has little, if anything, to say about this identity, despite including it on garish energy drink billboards. Putting a trans woman with a bulging dick on a billboard in a world with the tone/intention (as developers are quoted as saying), "Man, isn't this so craaaaaass? Hasn't capitalism and advertising become so tasteless?" is questionable. Is the ad crass because it's fetishizing a trans woman, or because there's a trans woman there at all? Fetishizing a trans woman and then saying, "See, we're showing how bad commercialism fetishizing identity is!" is incredibly lazy, and a lot of the trans community were hoping for more, especially after the token "genital" option on the character creator.

I'm looking forward to playing it myself and seeing the context for myself, but from the several trans game critics' takes I've read? I'm not getting my hopes up.

@theoracleofgame:

Yeah, I hear you about the lazy "Look guys, we're doing the shitty thing that we're ostensibly against! Isn't that such clever satire?" move. That's always eye-rollingly bad. I think I just need to see how it plays out in context before I can make a judgement, because I have seen disappointment and outrage directed against works that I thought handled controversial topics really well (like BR 2049).

I think the locking down of voices as "man" and "woman" is more disappointing. It was more work to not let you mix and match the voices with the gender than to allow it, and this is something that Saint's Row 2 got right back in 2008. I get that this game is coming in hot (to say the least), but it's a disappointing omission for a game set in a universe of all kinds of crazy body modification and shit. I'm not super invested in trans issues or anything, but the woman voice actor for V is so much better than the guy that I really wanted to be able to have her voice on all kinds of different characters that I roll.

In any case, though, I think there was basically zero chance this game (or any other AAA game coming out in 2020) was going to really nail how to handle transgender issues in character creation. Even though this seems to fall pretty far short (being clumsy at best or leering at worst), it at least seems like a step in the right direction. Hopefully other devs can build off of this and make their character creators more robust in the future.

@notkcots: I’ve been having trouble finding a definitive answer on this with my Googling, but do you know if the voice locked to phenotype? Or can I, say, use the male voice (and get gendered as male throughout the story) on a female-bodied character?

@banefirelord: Via Carolyn Petit writing for Polygon:

Before you hit the streets of Night City, you’ll construct your version of the game’s central character, V, in a process indicative of one of Cyberpunk 2077’s most glaring problems. For whatever reason, among all the hairstyles and eyes and makeup and tattoos you might expect, genitals are included as part of the character creation process, with two penis options — and three size settings for each! — and one vagina. (You can also opt not to select genitals at all, always viewing your V in panties or boxers at a bare minimum.)

Thankfully, your character’s gender is not tied to your choice of genitals. You can create a dude with a vagina or a lady with a penis, that’s no problem. But because of everything else about how the game handles trans identity, this hardly feels like the progressive step it should be. Rather than just letting you pick your pronouns independently of all your other character creation choices, your pronouns are assigned based on your selection of voice: Pick the “feminine” voice and your pronouns are she/her, and vice versa. (There are no nonbinary pronoun options.) As a trans woman with a voice that many would not describe as “feminine,” this direct linking of gender identity to having a voice that sounds “masculine” or “feminine” feels weirdly essentializing.

From this description, it seems clear to me you can assign either voice to either gender, but you'll be a male with a female voice referred to as "her" which is...weird? I suppose if you were a trans person (or hoping to play a trans character) you could do yourself some mental gymnastics and play a female character with a male voice and consider yourself in the early stages of transition ala Eliot Page, but it doesn't seem like the game has room for post-trans characters, at least not totally?

I'll admit I'm a bit ignorant on these issues so if I've said anything out of touch, apologies.

@nodima: Cheers, thanks!

(For context I’m interested in playing a male-identifying but gender-nonconforming character, so being able to do the mismatch is pretty cool)

@theoracleofgame: A significant chunk of the discourse over that ad feels like queer people with certain (probably legitimate) hangups trying to score points over other, less inhibited, queer people via guilt by association. Like most similar panics, it kind of reminds me of the cancelled Waypoint end of year fandom event a few years back, though less disingenuous this time.

That said, it says a lot that they are putting this ad forward as some hypothetical example of fetishization gone wild only possible in a dystopian capitalist hellscape. When the image itself is several degrees tamer than (SFW) stuff I see trans people post on my twitter timeline every day in the current IRL real world. And that's without even getting into spontaneous internet phenomena like Bowsette et al.

If they consider this to be something impossible Today, then imagine how narrow their conception of normal in Today's world is.

As if CDPR hasn’t made this launch confusing enough, the console versions all just got hit with a 26 gig “day 1” patch which seems to be the one that, according to that CDPR dev, turns the game into something different with significantly less bugs from what reviewers were talking about.

This doesn’t make any sense to me when you consider that all the reviews have been based on the PC version and there is zero mention about the PC version getting any kind of update. This new patch is console only.

So much complaining and nitpicking people just seem bored. Complaining about a patch is silly. Seems like devs and TV/movie creators get less hate for skipping over LGBT characters than having them.

@colourful_hippie: There was an update on gog earlier this morning, actually. From what I have read, it wasn't on steam at that point, though.

@jacksmedulla: yup 10 gig patch is live. I’m glad they didn’t wait till launch time to post it due to my slow internet.