I get that terms like 'realistic' and 'morally grey' have been grossly overused and to some extent co-opted by gamer culture and the gaming industry, often in order to justify really indulgent horseshit, but ultimately I think it's absolutely valid to attempt a video game narrative that isn't ham-fistedly didactic while still maintaining the spirit and politics of cyberpunk, even if the point is lost on a lot of people. Because most of that crowd is going to enshrine whatever it can anyway regardless of comprehension.
That's not to say CDPR is actually going to manage that, but I'm not going to disregard the possibility out of hand.
At least three people, one since banned, have alluded to such an argument. So I can only conclude that your inability to read their posts means you are being willfully dishonest.
You're the one who's trying to pretend that those three people are everyone when I have been extremely clear that I consider it more than possible for a Corp playthrough to be highly critical of corps.
I repeat, it is dishonest to claim that everyone who opposes your moralistic insistence that bad people can never prosper does so because we want to whitewash them. If you wish to be honest then you can recant your statement and admit that your view is in no way the only way to have a corp playthrough criticize siding with corporations, but if you don't that's not my problem.
You're the one who's trying to pretend that those three people are everyone when I have been extremely clear that I consider it more than possible for a Corp playthrough to be highly critical of corps.
I repeat, it is dishonest to claim that everyone who opposes your moralistic insistence that bad people can never prosper does so because we want to whitewash them. If you wish to be honest then you can recant your statement and admit that your view is in no way the only way to have a corp playthrough criticize siding with corporations, but if you don't that's not my problem.
It doesn't do your argument any good to loudly insist that nobody's arguing the position that @stratigo has been disputing when there objectively have been people arguing that exact position.
EDIT: Look, I understand the desire to not get discredited by association when people on your relative side of the argument are arguing fervently for their right to lynch black people in video games. But denying in face of all evidence that there are people arguing that position isn't an effective way to prevent that.
It doesn't do your argument any good to loudly insist that nobody's arguing the position that @stratigo has been disputing when there objectively have been people arguing that exact position.
Good thing the post you responded to did the exact opposite.
As I said in the post you literally just quoted, my problem is that Stratigo falsely and egregiously argued that those people represented the sole opposition to his position.
Which is wrong, I oppose it because "bad people must die or else we endorse their actions!" has always been a particularly annoying assumption. It is more than possible for the PC to prosper and for the narrative to emphasize how they are bad people. And I find that to be much more interesting then them being offed at the last second because of a misguided sense of moralist absolutism.
As I said in the post you literally just quoted, my problem is that Stratigo falsely and egregiously argued that those people represented the sole opposition to his position.
Different people with different mindsets and priorities in life value things differently. Especially if they're an unhinged sociopathic cyborg or something.
In the Wire example I brought up Marlo never wanted to get 'made', and break out as a legit businessman like Stringer Bell wanted. It was just an out to avoid prison. He only gained satsifaction and fulfillment from being feared as a gangster. And a life of luxury but no respect on the street holds no meaning for him. So becoming a businessman permanently locked out of the Game is as much a purgatory for him as jail would have been.
Especially when you take into account narrative I can think of plenty of ways to make going legit the 'bad' ending of sorts. Kind of like how in some games the better ending is less narratively satisfying than the middle of the road or even bad ending. Except on purpose.
For exame have an ending where you go to a party as a newly minted corpo, only to get blown off by some of the other suits because they just consider you a glorified bodyguard or something. The player, being a cybernetic badass who might be used to hurting people at the slightest provocation, wants to pull out their cyber plate and stick it in the guy's craw, but instead roll credits.
I mean look at how many people living in luxury still seem completely unsatisfied and unhappy! Sure it's nice to have your material needs met but riches and luxury don't seem to contribute that much to a good, happy fulfilled life. Most of the time it seems people who achieve all the things they thought they wanted just end up chasing after some new obsession. Or worrying about losing what they have gained. Or looking back with regret at the things and people they sacrificed to get there. Evil, greedy, ruthless people generally don't seem to be actually all that happy, even if they do end up with tons of cash.
But being willing to let things go and to accept that you're never going to get everything you'd like to have feels quite liberating and pleasant in my experience. If you're willing to do without something that thing can't be used to force you to do something against your morals. That seems like it should be pretty valuable to anyone who's interested in being a moral person in the first place. And it seems to me like the freedom that provides is a better measure of success than snorting cocaine off a supermodel on the side of a pool.
Given the post they quoted directly slathered a decent part of the thread and its arguments that the "doing evil with no consequences" was a thing being pushed, with no clarification that it was basically... what, two people, who IIRC were called out in turn? Yeah, I can see their assertion that it could've been a dishonest summarization.
But also, they weren't the only one calling out the person's post.
Yes, I accused him of lying, because he was. He took a subset of people and portrayed them as the majority of opposition to his position. Which is false, as I've said.
I think an "Evil Route", as evil as you can make it in a Grey and Gray Morality setting like Cyberpunk, is necessary in an RPG. Not so much for its own sake, but to make the player's decision to do Good more meaningful.
It should be noted that much of the cyberpunk genre dates to a time when corporations actually did the whole "work for us your entire career and we'll take care of you" thing, or at least planned to do it. Not everyone did it and they might not have done it for all of their employees, but the ones who were more valuable were actually pretty secure.
Cyberpunk 2020 does have Corporations that did the whole, "Work for us loyally and well and we'll take care of you."
That was a repeated perk in the setting and a reason why a lot of people were so goshdarn LOYAL to their Corporate overlords, especially since a lot of Corporate workers could look outside their cubicle farms office windows and see that most of the rest of the cities population is living in at best slum like conditions.
I imagine that a sellout ending for a cyberpunk game could resemble how Marlo Stanfield's story ended in the Wire where they end up going straight with wealth and success but unfulfilled because at heart they're a gangster/netrunner, and 'winning' by entering the unfamiliar and unsatisfying corporate world comes at the cost of the fear and respect their name once commanded.
Remember that the player is buying this game for badass cyberpunk criminal action, and the protagonist will probably be reflective of that one way or the other. So the ending of gaining wealth and success probably wouldn't fit their character very well.
CP2020 already kinda does this? The idea is that Edgerunners are so desperate for survival, to see the next sunrise in the morning that they've given up trying to fight the Corpo's or 'The Man' and willingly deal with them in order to keep going. Sure, not every job is done with money from a Corporate account. There's a lot of jobs that are offered by the small time group raging against the machine...These aren't an Edgerunners bread and butter though, unless their independently wealthy to take on whatever jobs they want or have some rich benevolent benefactor funding them.
Best case scenario an Edgerunner will get to choose to deal with whichever Corp is the lesser evil, maybe even get to tweak more then one Corporations snout.
At the end of the day though you still gotta eat. So you deal with the Corps.
It undercuts the theme of the genre if selling out leads to a qualitatively better and more stable life. It's essentially saying that selling out is both easy and the right thing to do. Joining the corporate world should be nigh on impossible for an outsider. You should be nothing more than a disposable tool that the corporation mismanages because they don't understand you really and they don't want to.
You don't get to rise up from the streets to the executive suite. Making that possible sends the opposite message of what cyberpunk is supposed to be. There is no path to the top, it is denied to you by dint of class and birth. You will never be more than a tool, and not one they particularly like or understand, in the corporate machine, disposable. And if you aren't disposed of, then that disposability comes into question and the people playing the game will get the message that, well, "what's so bad with corporations anyways? They seem to be doing right by me." And that is not what anyone should take away from a cyber punk setting. That is you just work with the corporations, things will turn out and your life really will be better. So knuckle under and toe the corporate line.
CP2020 had Corpo's as a valid playable Class and the setting is replete with Edgerunners who did manage to pull a Frank and make the transition to 'Businessman'
The rest of what you said is true.
The Corporations still don't see or treat Edgerunners off the street as anything but disposable pawns in their power games even if they collect a paycheck and their job title is now 'Security Consultant' instead of 'Deniable Asset', there is rarely a happy ending when you throw in with the Corps....But then again there's also rarely a happy ending if you adamantly stay on the Street. Your clocks going to get punched one way or the other.
I mean isn't wealth and success what most criminals want? The main reason why people become criminals is because they strive for precisely those goals and just aren't able to achieve them via "normal" routes or find those routes to difficult. That is why the best way to combat crime is to provide those routes to success to more people...
In my opinion you are confusing a criminal with a revolutionary and those are some very different character archetypes and underlying motivations.
Yep, pretty much this.
Edgerunners in CP2020/Red/2077 are still a cross between criminals and mercenaries who frequently use their skills in less then legal activities for whoever can promise them a decent payout at the end of it.
Great example is the 2020 adventure 'Sweet Revenge' where a Corporate Suit for Network 54 flies an AV-4 laden with a Security team to your PC's hideout....And fires rockets and machine guns into it after you and your choomba's run out the apartment...Then they waltz in when you find your hallway rigged with directional claymores.
The Suit did this to get your Teams attention and offers them a job and to meet them at a luxury 5 Star Hotel in a few hours for drinks and dinner and lets your Team stay there with fully paid for rooms for two nights plus 1000 eddies in concierge services for each person.
The pay was roughly 25k per Runner plus fully paid luxury apartments for each runner for two years. (Worth 40k in rent and utilities.)
(He also fully intends on selling your Team out to the rival Corp at the end of it for smokescreen...But if you manage to find this out and confront him he applauds your teams skills. Offers you a an extra 15k each in bonuses in lieu of the luxury apartments as well as promising to not reveal your exact location but for the Corps goals to work they need someone to take the heat for a few days. Granted there's a number of ways to handle the mission but I relayed this to give you an idea of what Ops are like in the setting and what the Corps do. Also selling the guy out to the Rival Corps has said Rival Corps try and happily murder you anyway after promising to pay you...Because of course they do.)
Military actually seems like more of a valid choice since one could do a 'Fellow soldiers in arms' deal. Cue hilarity as snooty corp troubleshooters come in and get chainsawed by the defenses they were supposed to deal with since they are VR soldiers who had to deal with hopped up gangers at most.
Edit: I wonder if it will be possible to doa mostly uncybered playstyle. I believe that you will be getting some via the story. But like Dishonored, if you stick to just that you can get a 'Mostly meat' achievement.
Pounds for pound Corporate soldiers are more powerful then the America's grunts....Thankfully the U.S. military is a leviathan of men, tanks, aircraft and nukes and the Corps are aware of this discrepancy.
Maybe make a case for a cautionary tale with Adam Smasher. Adam, from what I remember is like someone who treats life like a video game and smashes through the meatbags in search of the next payout that tickles his adrenal gland. Going that route means that normal RPGing like say Geralt in Witcher 3 is near impossible because people run off when you walk through the area and your employer briefs you via monitor since they don't want to be in the same room with you. So you end up stripping bodies for ammo and cash and a loot box opens at the end of a mission as your employer sends them in via drone. To top it off, at the end, Adam, who has praised you for your metal over meat attitude ends up as a final boss because there is room for only one at the top. Who wins doesn't matter, even if you win, you just become the new Adam Smasher.
Adam Smasher is....Literally a lunatic that absolutely *HATES* *HATES* *HATES* regular humans. Anyone who isn't a cyborg is a valid target for death in his eyes because regular humans are soft, weak and pathetic and deserving only death.
He only tolerates his Employers because they both gave him his cybernetic body when his old body played catch with a rocket, give him missions where he can maximize his bodycount and finally pay him money so he can buy more equipment and gear.
He advocates literally everyone ditching their meat and becoming cyborgs as the next stage in human evolution and anyone who doesn't deserves death.
For people looking to dig into the message and the theming, sure, it could be true to cyberpunk themes. But, even if CD PROJECKT RED portray the themes and tone of the genre perfectly, well, a lot of the people playing this game are going to have that messaging fly right over their heads. This is a game intended for a pretty wide audience, after all.
I think that's nigh unavoidable no matter how you write it tbh.
As someone else pointed out, people unironically idolize Tyler Durden and Scarface, despite how much those narratives spell out the self-destructive nature of those peoples' personality and lifestyles.
Heck, there are fascists out there with unironic nazi headcanons of My Little Pony of all things. My Little Pony, the show that promotes harmony, friendship, and peaceful cooperation, is interpreted as supporting an ideology based on tribalism and hatred.
There will always be some people, somewhere, who are too dense to get the message or are utterly determined to warp everything around their own rigid worldview.
It's hard to get people to understand stories critiquing brutal and unjust societies when acceptance of the brutality and unjust nature of society is often the norm. A lot of people will just parse Hartman as tough but fair and Pyle as a big pussy who took the easy way out. A lot of people will perfectly cheerfully say that sure the civilian casualties suck but war is war and the Vietnam war was definitely necessary.
It's the reason why I don't idolize subtlety and offhanded apoliticalness in messaging as an ipso facto good the way a lot of people do, because a lot of the time it don't fuckin' work.
I think that's nigh unavoidable no matter how you write it tbh.
As someone else pointed out, people unironically idolize Tyler Durden and Scarface, despite how much those narratives spell out the self-destructive nature of those peoples' personality and lifestyles.
Heck, there are fascists out there with unironic nazi headcanons of My Little Pony of all things. My Little Pony, the show that promotes harmony, friendship, and peaceful cooperation, is interpreted as supporting an ideology based on tribalism and hatred.
There will always be some people, somewhere, who are too dense to get the message or are utterly determined to warp everything around their own rigid worldview.
Welcome to literally ALL forms of media since people started telling stories to one another.
The overwhelming majority of people either don't care or are unable to read into media...Or if they can don't delve any deeper then surface level stuff.
You also have the people that for one reason or another get a completely different read on a piece of media's subject matter then what was intended.
I don't ascribe all of this to people being dense.
For some a stories just a story. Something used to entertain. Any deep level commentary just slides right off them, not because it's not there but because they don't really want to engage with it.
You have others that are willing or able to engage with surface level ideas that a story puts out. Basic themes, ideas, morals and etc but they don't for whatever reason go really deep.
They'll engage with it to a certain point. But not really break anything down or get into the deep end.
The last one is usually just a case of different value systems, cultures, belief systems, social/economic classes or heck, the person just being wired differently approaching or interacting with a work in a completely different way then intended.
This will always be a thing and there's really nothing that can be done to stop it.
Different people with different mindsets and priorities in life value things differently. Especially if they're an unhinged sociopathic cyborg or something.
In the Wire example I brought up Marlo never wanted to get 'made', and break out as a legit businessman like Stringer Bell wanted. It was just an out to avoid prison. He only gained satsifaction and fulfillment from being feared as a gangster. And a life of luxury but no respect on the street holds no meaning for him. So becoming a businessman permanently locked out of the Game is as much a purgatory for him as jail would have been.
Especially when you take into account narrative I can think of plenty of ways to make going legit the 'bad' ending of sorts. Kind of like how in some games the better ending is less narratively satisfying than the middle of the road or even bad ending. Except on purpose.
For exame have an ending where you go to a party as a newly minted corpo, only to get blown off by some of the other suits because they just consider you a glorified bodyguard or something. The player, being a cybernetic badass who might be used to hurting people at the slightest provocation, wants to pull out their cyber plate and stick it in the guy's craw, but instead roll credits.
Plus he may very well slip back in trying to be a gangster and this time get hauled in for good. While Omar, despite getting headshot by a kid, has now become a street legend.
I mean look at how many people living in luxury still seem completely unsatisfied and unhappy! Sure it's nice to have your material needs met but riches and luxury don't seem to contribute that much to a good, happy fulfilled life. Most of the time it seems people who achieve all the things they thought they wanted just end up chasing after some new obsession. Or worrying about losing what they have gained. Or looking back with regret at the things and people they sacrificed to get there. Evil, greedy, ruthless people generally don't seem to be actually all that happy, even if they do end up with tons of cash.
But being willing to let things go and to accept that you're never going to get everything you'd like to have feels quite liberating and pleasant in my experience. If you're willing to do without something that thing can't be used to force you to do something against your morals. That seems like it should be pretty valuable to anyone who's interested in being a moral person in the first place. And it seems to me like the freedom that provides is a better measure of success than snorting cocaine off a supermodel on the side of a pool.
Perhaps kind alike Notch. I've seen a few things where despite his 2 Billion and what, 70 million dollar house, he is ooohhhhhh so very lonely (sarcasm) and empty. Plus it seems his name has gone down the toilet.
Different people with different mindsets and priorities in life value things differently. Especially if they're an unhinged sociopathic cyborg or something.
In the Wire example I brought up Marlo never wanted to get 'made', and break out as a legit businessman like Stringer Bell wanted. It was just an out to avoid prison. He only gained satsifaction and fulfillment from being feared as a gangster. And a life of luxury but no respect on the street holds no meaning for him. So becoming a businessman permanently locked out of the Game is as much a purgatory for him as jail would have been.
Especially when you take into account narrative I can think of plenty of ways to make going legit the 'bad' ending of sorts. Kind of like how in some games the better ending is less narratively satisfying than the middle of the road or even bad ending. Except on purpose.
For exame have an ending where you go to a party as a newly minted corpo, only to get blown off by some of the other suits because they just consider you a glorified bodyguard or something. The player, being a cybernetic badass who might be used to hurting people at the slightest provocation, wants to pull out their cyber plate and stick it in the guy's craw, but instead roll credits.
"Being a successful business man is as bad as jail!"
Like, I get someone's life not being as fulfilling as they wanted. But, uh, in the US jail is a torture box. Someone who legitimately prefers it to being a mildly successful business person is probably not okay psychologically.
Yes, I accused him of lying, because he was. He took a subset of people and portrayed them as the majority of opposition to his position. Which is false, as I've said.
I in fact did not, so please stop libeling me okay? We all know what forum we're on. We all know what dark segments of the gaming community there is. Your outrage destroying your reading comprehension is actually more indicative of the dark segments of gamers I don't want catered to than anything you've said though.
I do loves me some cyberpunk and some Cyberpunk. Very interested in this game and all, but every time I see it I can't help but think of my favorite cyberpunk setting: Shadowrun.
I would die happy if I could play a Shadowrun game with this sort of production value and... big-ness.
