Having read a bunch of great (and not so great) cyberpunk fiction from the 80's & 90's, that's actually a theme that really shines through here for me. Crazy cybernetics & brain/computer interfaces, hacking, drugs, weird AI doing things like running a transport/security company with some splinter groups that have existential crisis... I really get that original cyberpunk vibe.
When an article compared William Gibson's visions to Second Life, he rejected the notion explicitly[1]:
But as Gully Jimson says, in The Horse's Mouth,
"It wasn't the vision I had."
Neither is Second Life.
Chia and her buds build their treehouses in
corporate ghost sites. That's the difference.
Interstitial. Gotta be interstitial.
Unfortunately, the trend over the last few decades in cyberpunk has steadily shifted towards aesthetics. The only true counterexample I know of (and by far the best cyberpunk movie ever made is Sleep Dealer (2008). Its aesthetics suffered due to a very tiny budget, but it was shockingly prescient in its depiction of the "gig economy" and drone violence.
[1] http://williamgibsonblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/#8519138918500...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZr8A_9VZBw&disable_polymer=...
It's extremely a game that is pastiche of cyberpunk, diving neither into the cyber nor punk beyond skinning things. Where's the Ghost in the Shell examination of the self? Where's the dive into what it means to have modifiable bodies? Where's the anti-establishment story (oh wait, the game opens with praise of the cops by multiple characters, including V).
For a game that wants to be cyberpunk, it sure relies on a lot of stereotypes about people and what they can be.
To me, it reads a lot like a Boomer/GenX take on what they remember cyberpunk being (NEON AND CHROME) and not an actual understanding of the genre (exploration of what it means to be a human in a corporate, transhuman world.)
If you want to play an actual cyberpunk game, check out Umurangi Generation or Shadowrun: Dragonfall. The Final Fantasy 7 Remake that came out this year is more cyberpunk than Cyberpunk.
That said, the game is a serviceable noire and shooter with some extremely always on aesthetic choices which aren't really my taste but they might be other's tastes.
IIRC this comment was made when you're on a quest and partnered with probably the one good cop on the force, who was also suspended for doing his job. The quest started based on the incompetence of the police leading to him needing to ask V for help to pursue the case. And the comment was made in reference to this one guy you're trying to help out. Meanwhile the next quest V will matter-of-factly state that the cops can't be trusted to handle so-and-so issue.
So please don't take lines out of their context.
Remember that Night City evolved out of LA and imagine that description applied to the LAPD.
But back to the point: you work with all sorts of terrible people in the game. That's sort of one conclusion of the Cyberpunk genre: every level of society is rotten has decayed even as technology progressed. The police are no better (and no worse) than any other faction of human traffickers, politicians, crime syndicates, drug dealers, fixers - everyone is simply looking out for their own interests. You regularly get gigs with orders to kidnap or kill people with no questions asked. So it seems unnatural for you to single out the police as being the one faction where it is unforgivable for the game to have you side with at any point.
How much of the game have you played? The entire main quest is about transhumanism and corporate control. Cyberpsychosis and the Maelstrom are used as a means for examining the results of the overuse of body modification.
Just like the Cyberpunk RPG, it was very heavily inspired by Gibson's work, and I mean that in a good way.
Gibson himself offered the critique that the game looked like GTA papered over with 80s retrofuturism.
I think it's totally reasonable to critique the game as not really doing anything interesting in the genre or even doing anything more than appropriating genre tropes.
The Japanese stereotypes and Haitian gangs are lifted straight off the pages of Neuromancer and Count Zero. I dig the retrofuturist 80s vibe, but then I love retrofuturism in general so that's not surprising.
In the end, CP2077 is a AAA video game. It has to appeal to the general population, so yeah, it's probably not going to be the most experimental take on the genre. As mainstream cyberpunk attempts go, can we at least agree it's heads-and-shoulders better than Netflix's Altered Carbon? :)
Yes. It definitely fell flat for me. Having read the source material probably didn't help there since it was so much better. Although even the book... I re-read about 2 years ago and it wasn't nearly as good as I remembered it from around 2006.
The tabletop game draws heavily on Gibson and Philip K. Dick by the way of Blade Runner. (And to be clear, I love that!)
Also, it's only 57 years in the future. You're not going to advance that much in that time. Personally I think the aesthetic seems a little too trapped in 80s retrofuturism -- I guess I agree with Gibson there -- but that was always the interpretation of cyberpunk and scifi that I liked the most so it gets a pass.
There is plenty of whimsical, optimistic visions into the future, and while I think a setting that explores "high tech, low life" in that context would be cool to see, it'd feel a lot closer to Star Wars than "cyberpunk".
That said, media like ghost in the shell and altered carbon (the novels) gesture in this direction. Altered carbon, for instance, has people who have modded their bodies with animal features. GitS goes hard on the ship of Theseus metaphors and has lots of mods that don't fit a standard human shape. Not to mention plenty of discussions of gender and gender roles in a society where you can just choose whatever body you want.
You are right in that I think the universe could explore those themes more thoroughly, but then maybe it will and I'm just not there yet
On what to means to have a modifiable body, there too from the beginning the game puts it right in front of you where it causes a sort of body dysmorphic disorder that can drive people crazy. There's even a series of side quests that deal directly with this.
But that's the beauty of critique, I think we can both look at the same work and draw different messages from it.
The common idiom high tech, low life is another way of describing the genre and also succinctly suggests that the genre is, in fact, cyber + punk.
Happy to provide references, but a quick internet search clearly shows that what you've suggested is factually incorrect.
Personally, it's a great game. I find myself caring about the characters and the outcomes of my actions. Despite technology being everywhere, everything feels so human.