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Cyberpunk 2077: Rockerboy Keanu Silverhand

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MagicMan333 said:
I'm not sure what you were expecting. Cyberpunk as a whole has never been uncritically pro-transhuman. Now it often portrays certain transhuman ideas as awesome but also functions on the idea that ultimately there will be no grand end-of-history golden age caused by new technology. That human greed and apathy will make that world just as flawed as our own if not more so.

To paraphrase someone I knew on RPG.net back in the mid-00s, "Transhumanism is about how technology will eventually help us overcome the problems that have, up until now, been endemic to human nature. Cyberpunk is about how technology won't."

So, if you're expecting traditional Cyberpunk to portray transhuman ideas like immortality as an unqualified good thing you should fight for then you're out of luck. Because a rejection of the transhumanist ethic is baked into traditional Cyberpunk.

If you want a more positive spin on transhumanism in Cyberpunk than you're going to have to turn to Post-Cyberpunk offerings like Transmetropolitan and Ghost in the Shell where things still aren't perfect but technology is portrayed in a more positive/neutral manner than older Cyberpunk.
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I wasn't asking for it to be pro-transhuman by default. The idea that the natural state is only the rich getting the immortality thing and that for everyone to get it requires some hacker heroes to release the schematic to the internet seems very cyberpunk to me.
 
Staff Notice: Do not try and crowd out others.
@WireWolf.

I will be frank, you need to step off the thread. You are doing nothing but bringing down the mood and attempting to silence (quite valid in my opinion) concerns that people have about trans representation. And this is from someone who is intrigued by the game, but has misgivings over both the crunch the studio employed for the Witcher 3 and representation issues others have brought up.

You are not getting a cookie from CDPR for your devotion, and it is clear you will stan this game till the heat-Death of the universe, so there is little for you to ad at this point.
 
Ford Prefect said:
Let me level with you: I don't even think the 'character' is anything at all. The issue is rather the presentation of something outside the gender binary as trashy which, given CDPR's record, is off-putting.
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And their track record in regards to non-binary being the one PR guy that made that awful joke who then got fired and....What else? Because I'm really not joking. If there's something else I'm not aware of....

Flibspeak said:
If that's what you took away from my argument (that not putting in pronouns is somehow an attack on the community) I think you need to reread what I've said. Although frankly from a project standpoint, it's not actually all that amount of time and budget to just use different pronouns or neutral ones, in the scale of voice work budgets etc. It's essentially, at worst, another 2 to 3 takes per dialogue line. Considering that the Polish government is basically bankrolling them and the churn that CDPR can go through employees at and not care, they can do that.

It's not a matter of you being outraged though. It's a matter of you not understanding why others are and can't put their faith in CDP as a whole, and then stanning just the same. On top of the initial anti-trans tweet, we have a number of other concerning behaviors coming from them and their subsidiaries. With the amount it's talked about I'd at least think you would note some of their other social media gaffs. It's a bad track record and more then a single mistake. Most of their apologies are functionally non-apologies. Add in some of their other problems as a churn studio and there is an easy argument to have less faith in them to do something halfway decent.

Especially since, from this very thread, we can see what the genre of cyberpunk means for a lot of people, particularly minority. As a general concern that others have echoed, we are more then likely to get the "Wow, Cool Robot" gundam meme except for the genre of cyberpunk. That'd almost be ok as a large scale product, except punching down while doing it is not necessary and the actual amount of effort to do better isn't that high.
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No, I was saying that that other then the PR snafu last year I'm unaware of anything that represents or could construed as an attack on transgender or non-binary individuals.

Also it actually can be depending on how much voice work was completed, if enough of it was your having to drag VA's back in and re-record a bunch of different lines to account for non-binary pronouns....Which considering their also translating and dubbing this game into I think ten different languages and the fact that a lot of languages are gendered would make things into an expensive and time consuming headache.

That tweet you mention mostly seems to be someone jumping on a hashtag bandwagon that sounded good before someone realized just what it meant over in a country it originated in and quickly deleted it and made an apology.
Also considering their social media gaffs seem to be at a total of three? Yeah, kinda hard to miss.

As for the last paragraph? Kinda hard to parse out what your saying.

blast flame said:
I wasn't asking for it to be pro-transhuman by default. The idea that the natural state is only the rich getting the immortality thing and that for everyone to get it requires some hacker heroes to release the schematic to the internet seems very cyberpunk to me.
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Technically? No one got access to the immortality Soulkiller represented, not the rich or the poor.
Silverhand and his team tried their best to try and wipe it out because it was just too damn dangerous for anyone to have.
Obviously for the purposes of the plot they missed a copy.
 
WireWolf said:
No, I was saying that that other then the PR snafu last year I'm unaware of anything that represents or could construed as an attack on transgender or non-binary individuals.

Also it actually can be depending on how much voice work was completed, if enough of it was your having to drag VA's back in and re-record a bunch of different lines to account for non-binary pronouns....Which considering their also translating and dubbing this game into I think ten different languages and the fact that a lot of languages are gendered would make things into an expensive and time consuming headache.

That tweet you mention mostly seems to be someone jumping on a hashtag bandwagon that sounded good before someone realized just what it meant over in a country it originated in and quickly deleted it and made an apology.
Also considering their social media gaffs seem to be at a total of three? Yeah, kinda hard to miss.

As for the last paragraph? Kinda hard to parse out what your saying.
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At this point in the process, retouching previously finished work would require more effort, yes. But they have their own recording studios and the actual overall cost is, again, not a huge deal. I actually work with game budgets and I know the costs it takes for localization and renting out studios for voice work, not to mention scheduling. CDP is not having budgetary issues in these cases. There a ton of ways to skin that situation that aren't all that bad, not to mention a ton of ways to do to PR around it that isn't shitty. I'll note that the idea of just using a neutral pronoun was one such potential olive branch that could be done by the company, there is plenty more options that could be done to encourage trust in communities they have done bad by. My original thesis was literally do something more to provide some basic faith. A high minded hard to hit ideal at this point would be the personal RPG customization, but even some token characters that aren't the norm is at least a start. And again, we don't know what's in store for content. But the issue is it's hard to trust based on their actions.

The other mistakes CDP has done I actually don't think would be hard to miss at this point in the conversation. 3 times in a year is actually fairly significant, particularly as it makes it clear lessons were not learned from the first mistakes. It's also been talked about enough that if you had looked, it's pretty much part of every article that discusses it in a quick google search. As a fair number of people in this thread have already been saying, a single mistake is one thing, a record of it means it's hard to trust the team. Is it that hard to understand and grasp that concept? Do you really have to shill so hard and defend CDP that much?

My last paragraph is pretty simple to understand I'd think. I'll expand on it. How people have viewed the cyberpunk genre in relation to being trans or a number of other experiences. The greater body of cyberpunk work actually does cover a lot of being representative of a minority. Cyberpunk is one of the next big blockbuster games. It's likely to largely have a lot of shallow dips into the genre itself. Most people likely will not pick up on the dystopian shitty future because tech guns and cybermods are cool, and that's mostly fine for the type of project it is. But you don't need to punch down to do that. If a small art asset is just a joke at the expense of trans people, and that's all that is left there for it, that's punching down. There are ways it can balance out. It hasn't been demonstrated yet.
 
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WireWolf said:
Probably Colorado Springs? Maybe some really desperate people during the Collapse. I don't think cannibalism is mentioned broadly.
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I wouldn't put it past the game designers to have us encounter cannibals... so, here's a moral quandary! Since it's possible to play a pacifist run and most weapons have a built-in non-lethal option, is it morally right to spare the lives of cannibals, knowing what they'll do to passers-by? It is morally right to kill them for being what they are, without provocation?
 
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IgnusDei said:
I wouldn't put it past the game designers to have us encounter cannibals... so, here's a moral quandary! Since it's possible to play a pacifist run and most weapons have a built-in non-lethal option, is it morally right to spare the lives of cannibals, knowing what they'll do to passers-by? It is morally right to kill them for being what they are, without provocation?
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Depends on the type of cannibal.

If they are deliberately killing people to eat, there is a moral issue, depending on their choice of victim. Corp executives would taste better since they have better healthcare and diets.

But if it's an underpaid intern at the local morgue who brings some of her work home... It's not like she is hurting anyone.
 
Fuck this nonsense, CDPR keep squandering all of the good will we give them, please don't buy this.
 
Sucal said:
If they are deliberately killing people to eat, there is a moral issue, depending on their choice of victim. Corp executives would taste better since they have better healthcare and diets.
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Nice! That's an angle I haven't thought about. Shit, you can make a story about it: a solo chasing a cannibal serial killer that targets upper class people specifically because they're not raised on kibble.
 
Kalaong said:
I'm a coward who just wants to play video games. Why are you bothering me and not some of those psycho cops in Cleveland?
Because you know I'm a wimp even before you account for the mods being on your side.
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Why are you trying so, so, so hard to paint yourself as the victim?

You portray the situation as if you were completely uninvolved, and people attack you from every angle because they have nothing better to do, but the truth is the complete opposite. You started this discussion by attacking the other side, and you've kept it going.
 
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Okay so I'm going to now stumble in and offer my take in a way that will probably help no-one. Hooray!

So. A trans woman (yes, she is a trans woman, or can be read close enough as one that we can assume she's intended to be read as such) presented in exploitative fashion in an in-universe advert. Hooray, representation, I guess? But it's shit representation, really shit exploitative representation. So the question becomes 'is some representation actually worse than no representation'?

For posters that think this representation is okay, the answer is 'no, some representation, no matter how heinous, is better than erasure'. However, the posters that don't think this is okay - the majority of which are, if I'm not mistaken, trans women themselves, and thus should have a certain level of weighting leaning towards their view on the matter - answer this question with 'yes, exploitative/incorrect representation is in many ways worse than erasure'.

Given that, as I've said, the majority of the people pointing this out are trans (and are thus more likely to know what they're talking about) and given that CDPR has a bad to terrible history vis a vis social issues (the way all women in the Witcher series are either in possession of massive tracts of land or ignorable, the 'comedy' crossdressing elven merchant, social media issues, etc.), it's reasonable for them to be nervous and express concern.

However, for some people, expressing concern about this is wrong. Which is one of the major issues with the gaming fanbase - that it's okay to express concern and not want to be hyped about/be concerned about some products, but if you dare touch certain golden children then you are a monster and wrong (see how it's not okay to criticise the Witcher 3, Red Dead Redemption, etc.). I think that this is actually the main issue here - that the defenders aren't even going as far as I said above and considering the question I posed, they're just going 'someone is attacking Cyberpunk 2077, which people must be excited for, or they are terrible garbage people, so these people must be terrible garbage people'.
 
LSkullD said:
Fuck this nonsense, CDPR keep squandering all of the good will we give them, please don't buy this.
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Why? It won't affect their bottom line and they wouldn't learn even if it did. Like I said before, taking a moral stand is all well and good, but you're going to find that you living a very limited life. If you find yourself unable to buy it that's fine but don't ask others to not buy it.
 
VolantRedX said:
Why? It won't affect their bottom line and they wouldn't learn even if it did. Like I said before, taking a moral stand is all well and good, but you're going to find that you living a very limited life. If you find yourself unable to buy it that's fine but don't ask others to not buy it.
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It's not like you really need to give them money to play a game if you search the right place :V
 
I feel sorry that what looks to be a great game that allows for gay/lesbian protagonists has apparently been ruined permanently for so many people because of one unthought comment and they have my sympathies in being able to find other upcoming entertainment that does not make light of their plight.
 
Gul Damar said:
I feel sorry that what looks to be a great game that allows for gay/lesbian protagonists has apparently been ruined permanently for so many people because of one unthought comment and they have my sympathies in being able to find other upcoming entertainment that does not make light of their plight.
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I mean that new Vampire the Masquerade game looks cool. Not that Paradox doesn't have it's own issues.
 
I think I have even more issues with the World of Darkness than I do with classic cyberpunk*. :V

*Though how many issues I have with classic cyberpunk depends a bit on both which interpretation they run with and some of the specifics.
 
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Subrosian_Smithy said:
Yes, and by its very nature as a world where the player can become the master of their own fate, this setting intrinsically cannot be an authentic depiction of cyberpunk dystopia.
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I agree with your points about gender, but I think the idea of cyberpunk as a dystopia is a little bit reductive.

While some are, I would say that a lot of the original works of cyberpunk aren't actually dystopian. This applies especially to Gibson, but also to later works like those of Richard Morgan. Neuromancer isn't attempting to give you a look at the dark future, it's just attempting to show you the future. A future that doesn't look like the one that you, 1980s reader of SF, may be expecting. It's not a future with the starship enterprise (though their are space ships), or with an evil empire, you're not fighting aliens, there's no increasingly anachronistic space america as envisioned in the 1950s running the show. Rather it's a time of institutional collapse, of the aftermath of a nuclear war, of the rise of Japan, of computers and engineered bodies.

Obviously films like Blade Runner are dystopian, but I'd argue that Gibson is actually a lot more seminal in creating cyberpunk as a genre than Blade Runner was. It created the aesthetic, but not the tropes.

For me, a greater problem for cyberpunk 2077 and the future like that in general is that it's become an alternate future, not the future of the one we have. That artfulness, that lack of naturalism is what makes the continuation of neon and prosthetics cyberpunk so eyebrow raising, and also so interesting. It is in some ways both the future we fear, and also the future that we wish we could have had.

So I don't think "player agency makes this insufficiently dystopian" is a fair criticism because cyberpunk is not really a dystopian genre.
 
So between the comments about how only masculine and feminine pronouns will be used and the in-game advertisement, I'm actually expecting Cyberpunk won't talk about or otherwise address trans issues at all. Specifically in the "oh, why would anybody care about stuff like that when changing sexes is as easy as taking a trip down to the local hardware store and asking for a size six robo-dong with the limited edition multi-tool attachment" sense. Social mores have changed, priorities are different, and why would anybody really care about what's between your legs or what you're born with when it can all but ruthlessly exploited by corporations?

And I think that'll be the case because it's an easy way of dodging the issue. You don't need to address trans issues in your game if the setting has erased said issues from existence and all that. It avoids controversy as best as possible and gives off a thin veneer of progressiveness without actually doing much as well.

Of course given how early it is and how little we actually know, I'm fully expecting to be proven wrong when the game comes out and it's nothing but toxic stereotypes as far as the eye can see.
 
Sidheach said:
"oh, why would anybody care about stuff like that when changing sexes is as easy as taking a trip down to the local hardware store and asking for a size six robo-dong with the limited edition multi-tool attachment"
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Alternative you can remove your reproductive organs and sexual features to make room for more armor plating and integrated weaponry.
 
Sidheach said:
So between the comments about how only masculine and feminine pronouns will be used and the in-game advertisement, I'm actually expecting Cyberpunk won't talk about or otherwise address trans issues at all. Specifically in the "oh, why would anybody care about stuff like that when changing sexes is as easy as taking a trip down to the local hardware store and asking for a size six robo-dong with the limited edition multi-tool attachment" sense. Social mores have changed, priorities are different, and why would anybody really care about what's between your legs or what you're born with when it can all but ruthlessly exploited by corporations?

And I think that'll be the case because it's an easy way of dodging the issue. You don't need to address trans issues in your game if the setting has erased said issues from existence and all that. It avoids controversy as best as possible and gives off a thin veneer of progressiveness without actually doing much as well.

Of course given how early it is and how little we actually know, I'm fully expecting to be proven wrong when the game comes out and it's nothing but toxic stereotypes as far as the eye can see.
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If that's really the case then the game should give a few signs that the issue has been dealt with and that switching gender is in fact that easy and accepted.

If I'm not mistaken, full body cyborgs aren't that common for the average pleb though. So the reality is more like putting yourself in debt for a generation to get your properly gendered body. :V
 
Nyvis said:
If that's really the case then the game should give a few signs that the issue has been dealt with and that switching gender is in fact that easy and accepted.

If I'm not mistaken, full body cyborgs aren't that common for the average pleb though. So the reality is more like putting yourself in debt for a generation to get your properly gendered body. :V
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According to the wiki biosculpting is pretty cheap but more expensive work tends to be better.
 
Sidheach said:
So between the comments about how only masculine and feminine pronouns will be used and the in-game advertisement, I'm actually expecting Cyberpunk won't talk about or otherwise address trans issues at all. Specifically in the "oh, why would anybody care about stuff like that when changing sexes is as easy as taking a trip down to the local hardware store and asking for a size six robo-dong with the limited edition multi-tool attachment" sense. Social mores have changed, priorities are different, and why would anybody really care about what's between your legs or what you're born with when it can all but ruthlessly exploited by corporations?

And I think that'll be the case because it's an easy way of dodging the issue. You don't need to address trans issues in your game if the setting has erased said issues from existence and all that. It avoids controversy as best as possible and gives off a thin veneer of progressiveness without actually doing much as well.

Of course given how early it is and how little we actually know, I'm fully expecting to be proven wrong when the game comes out and it's nothing but toxic stereotypes as far as the eye can see.
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Given the fact that even if CDPR isn't outright bigots they clearly lack a real understanding or sensitivity when it comes trans issues would anyone want them to? Like the earlier quest of bad representation over no representation would having a highly sensitive and very personal topic discussed by someone who has no understanding about it and in fact, gets many things totally wrong really be in anyone's best interests? There certainly should be games that deal with trans issues, but I don't think those games should be made by CDPR.
 
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