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All things Cyberpunk 2077 General Thread


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On 9/3/2019 at 5:34 PM, Kendo 2 said:

Also fans are defending the no gender thing because somehow they've convinced themselves it's in the 'lore'.  And it's not.  I played CP2020 and transhumanism is part of the lore, woke 2019 transgender activism isn't.

Cyberpunk as a genre created by few writers questioning the status quo. And if we are talking about CP2020 you can read the rulebook (2nd edition) https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1JjfztBnaTHWEx3ZE1HYXZQSHM/edit

 

There is sex implants and there is bodysculpting allowing you to change anything. Although tabletop game allow you to choose sex who said you required to do so? Furthermore you can turn your character into an animal with fur, tail and paws. And  let's not forget ears and fangs too. You think anyone would be concerned that been an animal freak could be more acceptable than been a dickgirl or changing one's sex entirely?

Even more - there is no division between male and female clothes and hairstyles. In fact you're supposed to roll the dice to get your outfit from the list where blue jeans and miniskirts mentioned as dice numbers 2 and 5 respectively. Same with tattoos (1) and earrings (6). Not enough for ya? There is spike heeled boots (8). No, it is not in a separate category.

 

No one convinced anyone - they use elements of the lore introduced long ago. Also this is dystopia. So no nuclear families, no green lawns, America isn't great, Trump (and other billionaires) doesn't like you, gangs and drug addicts everywhere, crime is rampant, blacks and gays are not neutered, ICE non existent, there is no wall (and no camps either!) Horrible world.

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In the pencil and paper RPG you could choose (operative word) the sex of your character.  There's a line with the word 'Sex' and you can write in whatever you want.  CP2077 removed that choice.  Want to play as male/female?  Too bad.  Those identities have been removed (another operative word) from the game.  This wasn't done for the sake of lore otherwise there wouldn't have been options in the first place; being a genderless drone would have always been in the game.  They wouldn't have had to remove it.

But they did remove genders from the game and since I can't play as a character I identify with then I'm going to use SJW woke Twitteratti tactics and bitch about it.  But unlike them, I actually intended to buy the game.  CDPR lost me as a customer.  The people they're trying to please were never customers in the first place.  It was a stupid move on CDPR's part.  But whatever, as long as 00.1% of the population feels good about it, that's all that matters...I guess.

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CDPR removes references to player's character gender but lets them shape everything else the way they want--even mixing and matching sex-specific traits--and people lose their minds over a pronoun? Yeah, that hasn't affected my decision to wait until the Collector's/Complete Edition comes out with all the xpacs and paid DLC in one (hopefully hard copy) version if it's good according to actual players. I'm out of fucks to give over who does/doesn't do what or what the certifiable blue check marks on Twitter say. As long as it's not an Epic exclusive and/or the developer hasn't been acting "entitled" and "toxic" themselves, I'll give it a shot.

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Well, the 'the big lie' is the devs changed the gender thing because of 'the lore', or people are justifying the change OR attacking anyone who doesn't agree with them.  Typical chickenshit woke internet stuff.  What these people are ignoring are the numerous articles where the devs say 'We changed this to be inclusive'.  I'm not foisting some new radical opinion, I'm taking the devs at their word; something the hostile SJWs here and elsewhere refuse to see.  All of this started because of a few leftist game journo bullies targeting CDPR, and like a pack of cowards they tucked tail and submitted.  ALL the respect I had for CDPR was erased when that happened.  Why would I support a company who caters to low information morons or outright liars?

 

CDPR didn't have to remove the male/female options.  What they did was a bitch move.  Adding a third gender is possible and the new character creation proves that.  Solution; add male and female back and keep the genderless stuff too.  Everyone is happy/controversy avoided.  Too late for that shit now though.

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1 hour ago, Kendo 2 said:

Well, the 'the big lie' is the devs changed the gender thing because of 'the lore', or people are justifying the change OR attacking anyone who doesn't agree with them.  Typical chickenshit woke internet stuff.  What these people are ignoring are the numerous articles where the devs say 'We changed this to be inclusive'.  I'm not foisting some new radical opinion, I'm taking the devs at their word; something the hostile SJWs here and elsewhere refuse to see.  All of this started because of a few leftist game journo bullies targeting CDPR, and like a pack of cowards they tucked tail and submitted.  ALL the respect I had for CDPR was erased when that happened.  Why would I support a company who caters to low information morons or outright liars?

 

CDPR didn't have to remove the male/female options.  What they did was a bitch move.  Adding a third gender is possible and the new character creation proves that.  Solution; add male and female back and keep the genderless stuff too.  Everyone is happy/controversy avoided.  Too late for that shit now though.

If a Freeware game like Amorous can have the option to identify as male, female or other points in between if anything at all, it wouldn't have been world shaking for a AAA-developer to include those options as well.

It isn't the breaking point for me just yet but I can definitely see this as an unnecessary concession which does deserve some measure of disrespect for making it in the first place. I have no interest in trying to talk up CDProjekt Red to bring anyone back in who has been turned off by this powerless play on their part.

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They didn't need to remove Male/Female from CC, and all options they talk can still be in there, but no they remove Male/Female from CC and than try to sell some crap how people misunderstanding them, also CDPR have worst fanbase if you don't follow CDPR blindly, and even say one thing how you don't really like what they doing, you are attack by so many people telling you how stupid you are, that you spoiled brat, little bitch and so on. 

 

You can see even on CP2077 forum on multiplayer thread how people defend CDPR if they put microtransaction in to multiplayer.

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On 9/13/2019 at 4:35 PM, Koca87 said:

They didn't need to remove Male/Female from CC, and all options they talk can still be in there, but no they remove Male/Female from CC and than try to sell some crap how people misunderstanding them, also CDPR have worst fanbase if you don't follow CDPR blindly, and even say one thing how you don't really like what they doing, you are attack by so many people telling you how stupid you are, that you spoiled brat, little bitch and so on. 

 

You can see even on CP2077 forum on multiplayer thread how people defend CDPR if they put microtransaction in to multiplayer.

How have they removed anything? You can play as male, you can play as female. Just because you can't pin a post-it note on your character saying "Male" shouldn't matter to you, as you're secure in your identity. Right?

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1 hour ago, eaterofspleens said:

How have they removed anything? You can play as male, you can play as female. Just because you can't pin a post-it note on your character saying "Male" shouldn't matter to you, as you're secure in your identity. Right?

Tell that to the trans activist who squawked about not being represented in the game.  Tell THEM they can't pin a post-it note and what they want shouldn't matter if they're secure in their identity.

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19 hours ago, eaterofspleens said:

How have they removed anything? You can play as male, you can play as female. Just because you can't pin a post-it note on your character saying "Male" shouldn't matter to you, as you're secure in your identity. Right?

I'd prefer to pin a defined identity to the character which I am playing at any given time rather than having them be referred to by a generic gender neutral pronoun.

 

It makes any choice of gender attributes feels like a afterthought as it is in games such as The Way of the Samurai 4 where every player character is considered male by every NPC except for the one or two times in separate story paths when a joke could be made about how the main character isn't actually a man so appealing to machismo isn't going to be effective or Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 in which Dimps simply couldn't be bothered with gender definition outside of gameplay.

 

It gives the air of small budget jankiness as well as laziness to ignore pronouns altogether yet CDProjekt is doing this intentionally. It could have just been an option.

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I think that cyberpunk as a genre isn't necessarily deeply political (it often is) but it is deeply philosphical in nature. CDPR falls into the same trap the makers of the Matrix movies fell, which was heavily inspired by Baudrillard's work, that the artificial reality supersedes the actual reality, with humans eventually being incapable of distinguishing what's what or even preferring the fakeness over the 'desert of the real', a direct quote from Baudrillard also used in the movie itself. But what The Matrix actually represents in its story is more of a Plato's Cave scenario, the people outside the Matrix are clearly being able to tell reality from the Matrix, which should be almost impossible according to Baudrillard. Hence, he said the following about the movie: "The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce."

 

Now, back to cyberpunk and 2077 more specifically: Cyberpunk often shows a dystopia of consumerism, where the world is shit yet the inhabitants turned everything and everybody into a commodity, ready for consumption for those that can afford it. Body parts, human beings, hell, even identity itself has been commodified, there's nothing that has any value or meaning behind it. Don't feel like being you anymore? Just modify your body with a bionic horse dick and big anime tiddies. There's no you anymore, you're just an amalgamation of meaningless modes of consumption. There's also the theme of mega corporations controlling everything and everyone through said consumption. To hail no gender selection as a positive feature of the game is exactly what the cyberpunk setting itself would criticize. On a related note, many cyberpunk setting are set in perpetual darkness and or rain, with bright neon signs everywhere to illuminate the landscape. Which is a cool thing to do aesthetically and it sets the mood perfecty, but on the other hand it's also a clever play on the desert of the real thing - to see the slums, the low-life, high-tech setting and the monolothic cities in broad daylight would take away from the illusion the inhabitants of these places experience.

 

Cyberpunk 2077 is surely the kind of game about a cyberpunk society that a cyberpunk society would have been able to produce.

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4 hours ago, GrimReaper said:

There's also the theme of mega corporations controlling everything and everyone through said consumption. To hail no gender selection as a positive feature of the game is exactly what the cyberpunk setting itself would criticize. On a related note, many cyberpunk setting are set in perpetual darkness and or rain, with bright neon signs everywhere to illuminate the landscape. Which is a cool thing to do aesthetically and it sets the mood perfecty, but on the other hand it's also a clever play on the desert of the real thing - to see the slums, the low-life, high-tech setting and the monolothic cities in broad daylight would take away from the illusion the inhabitants of these places experience.

 

Funny thing -  that Western Cyberpunk totally unrelated to Eastern Cyberpunk.The birth and growth of this genre came exactly from Asian manga and animations, that was inspired by Western writers, and bear absolutely nothing with gender association. More " Transhumanism " philosophy can be seen in both culture but mostly its influenced in the West where problems with self-identity are. In the East, its more like global aspect of population of future, how technology and people are constantly battling each other to either progress or regress with politics and wars.Overpopulation problems and where's Wars there's always big corporations, manipulating economy,experimenting in military tech, using humans as rat labs.Body augmentations are more like gaining power and control. Here is world conflicts for you - that all brings Dystopia to the world. Decades it was presented in the Asian culture of Cyberpunk genre.In western culture I have seen similarity only in 1 movie - Johnny Mnemonic. Every other Cyberpunk movie was more like about cyborgs in human flesh hunting bums and toxic rains.
Will CP2077 gonna bring in its story more from Asian CP genre ? Don't think so, cause I don't feel "that" dystopian world in CP2077.?

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Idk, Ghost in the Shell also asks some questions about identity, as well as Akira. Those are pretty personal story lines as well, with Akira, the protagonist loses himself in the metamorphosis his body and mind undergoes. The major from GitS also comments on why she likes to dive despite being a cyborg - it makes her feel like becoming someone else. She has an utter disregard for her own body, as shown in the tank fight where she rips herself apart to stop a machine. There's also a scene during the city montage where an identical model of the body the major uses is shown sitting at a window, and being all cyborg except a tiny part of her brain she also questions whether her memories are real or if she's just entirely a machine. Ultimately, she loses all identity when she loses her body and becomes one with the information network at the end of the movie.

 

You're right that western and eastern cyberpunk differ in some areas, but the question about identity is a central core to both of them. What makes a human human, those kinds of questions. Gender identity, however, was never really a theme, neither in the western nor eastern version. But if it were, the commodification of it would've been part of the dystopia.

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32 minutes ago, GrimReaper said:

Idk, Ghost in the Shell also asks some questions about identity, as well as Akira. Those are pretty personal story lines as well, with Akira, the protagonist loses himself in the metamorphosis his body and mind undergoes. The major from GitS also comments on why she likes to dive despite being a cyborg - it makes her feel like becoming someone else. She has an utter disregard for her own body, as shown in the tank fight where she rips herself apart to stop a machine. There's also a scene during the city montage where an identical model of the body the major uses is shown sitting at a window, and being all cyborg except a tiny part of her brain she also questions whether her memories are real or if she's just entirely a machine. Ultimately, she loses all identity when she loses her body and becomes one with the information network at the end of the movie.

 

You're right that western and eastern cyberpunk differ in some areas, but the question about identity is a central core to both of them. What makes a human human, those kinds of questions. Gender identity, however, was never really a theme, neither in the western nor eastern version. But if it were, the commodification of it would've been part of the dystopia.

The funny thing about The Major from Ghost in the Shell is that different interpretations of the Major answer questions about identity is their own ways.

While film Kusanagi throws away her identity, Stand Alone Complex Kusanagi has a sentimental attachment to her original self, even becoming annoyed at Batou asking why she doesn't ditch the gynoid frame for a sturdier android frame. She specifically picked it to make up for the body which she lost due to disease, having it crafted in the shape of what she would like to think she would have looked like if she had fully physically matured into a woman before that body died.

The two are technically the same character yet their viewpoints on something so important diverging the way that they do makes them distinct from one another.

 

Another series which dealt with what it means to be oneself when everything else about the self can be changed was Transformers: Beast Machines. Perhaps it is most appropriate that people contracted to write a series based upon a toy line which can update its figures at a moments notice as a half-hour toy ad would inject so many cyberpunk themes into the affair as well as a heaping dollop of spiritualism.

After all, if everything about one's being can be modified completely (species included), there would have to be some sort of unique core element which defines them. That core element turned out to be unexpected in a few cases, such as what was misinterpreted as a zeal for justice actually being a love of combat and domination of weaker opponents which was held in check by the programming that the previous body held in its brain module.

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58 minutes ago, FauxFurry said:

The funny thing about The Major from Ghost in the Shell is that different interpretations of the Major answer questions about identity is their own ways.

While film Kusanagi throws away her identity, Stand Alone Complex Kusanagi has a sentimental attachment to her original self, even becoming annoyed at Batou asking why she doesn't ditch the gynoid frame for a sturdier android frame. She specifically picked it to make up for the body which she lost due to disease, having it crafted in the shape of what she would like to think she would have looked like if she had fully physically matured into a woman before that body died.

The two are technically the same character yet their viewpoints on something so important diverging the way that they do makes them distinct from one another.

 

Another series which dealt with what it means to be oneself when everything else about the self can be changed was Transformers: Beast Machines. Perhaps it is most appropriate that people contracted to write a series based upon a toy line which can update its figures at a moments notice as a half-hour toy ad would inject so many cyberpunk themes into the affair as well as a heaping dollop of spiritualism.

After all, if everything about one's being can be modified completely (species included), there would have to be some sort of unique core element which defines them. That core element turned out to be unexpected in a few cases, such as what was misinterpreted as a zeal for justice actually being a love of combat and domination of weaker opponents which was held in check by the programming that the previous body held in its brain module.

Yeah, there are 4 major iteration of the Major iirc. The one in the manga has a juvenile, quirky and sexually agressive personality, she even has a side business as a lesbian e-prostitute, taking full advantage of her advanced body. The one in the film is much more alienated from her experience as a cyborg, she's mostly cold, distanced and stoic. Stand Alone Complex Major sits somewhere inbetween, but has much more in common with the one from the manga, though she's not as juvenile. The Major from the Arise series is affected by a memory altering virus as well as her body belonging to the agency she's working for. That's an interesting meta-narrative in its own right but if this isn't a recipe for a good old existential identity crisis I don't know what is, especially the Major from Arise. I can't really comprehend how one can come to the conclusion that japanese cyberpunk doesn't deal with identity.

 

I don't really know anything about Transformers, but I've heard some interesting things about it.

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8 hours ago, GrimReaper said:

Yeah, there are 4 major iteration of the Major iirc. The one in the manga has a juvenile, quirky and sexually agressive personality, she even has a side business as a lesbian e-prostitute, taking full advantage of her advanced body. The one in the film is much more alienated from her experience as a cyborg, she's mostly cold, distanced and stoic. Stand Alone Complex Major sits somewhere inbetween, but has much more in common with the one from the manga, though she's not as juvenile. The Major from the Arise series is affected by a memory altering virus as well as her body belonging to the agency she's working for. That's an interesting meta-narrative in its own right but if this isn't a recipe for a good old existential identity crisis I don't know what is, especially the Major from Arise. I can't really comprehend how one can come to the conclusion that japanese cyberpunk doesn't deal with identity.

 

I don't really know anything about Transformers, but I've heard some interesting things about it.

All you described is derivative from Transhumanism. But instead of embracing posthuman, some objecting it in the form of ethical and spiritual debate of one personality & soul.Those people don't understand that the Nature for human evolution history already made it all,only waaay slower. If you researched about human race from paleontology, you would understand what I'm trying to say.

In the era of technological singularity people artificially can make it way faster. We already can clone ourselves as humans back in 90's thanks to medical advanced genome engineering.But its not ethical due to "Faith and God".So it comes down to a "complex" of a human being as "Am I a human with a soul if I'm not existing from organics?" As if from GITS Human Liberation Front .And GITS was actually about Transhumanism in all the series, thus the creation of "Ghost Dive\net", even for AI it was the ultimate goal, to break free from its Shell (Soul) to something evolving in the first OVA.I think you didn't understand what the series was about.

Interesting, as CP2077 takes place in California would they honor William Gibson as easter egg ?  

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But all that you've described is about identity, what it means to be human. Which is a question that gets automatically asked when trans- or posthumanism is the topic. The grand narrative about humans gets questioned - the whole one body, one soul mantra that's still going on today. If you don't have a human body anymore, are you still human? If you're an AI that develops self-awareness like the Tachikoma tanks in Stand Alone Complex, are you a mere machine anymore? Something more, something less? These questions are difficult to answer, hence why every creative director had a different vision of the protagonist of the series.

 

There's also a huge theme of cyberattacks in GitS, where people get hacked like computers for terrorist purposes and the like. Biological evolution is quite different from the technological one, because biological evolution happens through chance and selection, whereas technological evolution has an intelligent agent behind it, that's why people often call it playing god.

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5 hours ago, GrimReaper said:

But all that you've described is about identity, what it means to be human. Which is a question that gets automatically asked when trans- or posthumanism is the topic.

I have presented an example of what you initially wrote.THE identity,gender question comes from Western ideology instead of Eastern, where its about society IN the technology.

Judging from the information on CP2077 , I think it will be the grey area of both ideologies.We have corporations theme in the lore,the city,the people and also have an immortality chip with a "Ghost" as the central story.

About "identity, what it means to be human" - that is in the box thinking.That question is non relevant if, humans leave Earth and live many generations in another galaxy, then returns to Earth.  

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One of GitS' main themes is literally the Theseus Paradox. Maybe you think I mean 'identity' as in the contemporary definition used by socjus and anti-socjus crazies but I can assure you, I'm not. I already agreed that gender identity wasn't a thing in cyberpunk until now (neither in the western nor the eastern version) but IF it would've been, the way 2077 utilizes it would've been a subject of criticism in the cyberpunk genre itself. Cyberpunk by its very nature is anti-establishment, it's not about how the world should look like as imagined by people living in their ivory towers, it's the exact opposite.

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On 9/17/2019 at 1:35 PM, FauxFurry said:

I'd prefer to pin a defined identity to the character which I am playing at any given time rather than having them be referred to by a generic gender neutral pronoun.

How often would that be an issue really? When was the last time in real life that someone speaking to you referred to you by a gendered pronoun? It won't effect 99% of the dialogue at all. This seems like a complete non-issue, except for to people (of any gender or non gender specific plant people) who are determined to make it an issue. 

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10 hours ago, eaterofspleens said:

How often would that be an issue really? When was the last time in real life that someone speaking to you referred to you by a gendered pronoun? It won't effect 99% of the dialogue at all. This seems like a complete non-issue, except for to people (of any gender or non gender specific plant people) who are determined to make it an issue. 

The woke activists and the pandering devs are the ones who made this an issue.

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8 hours ago, Kendo 2 said:

The woke activists and the pandering devs are the ones who made this an issue.

So the cause of the issue is that the developers made a trivial change which doesn't harm anyone, and will have a negligible change to the game. And in response, people are exploding with impotent fury as if someone skinned and ate their cat. The correct response is an amused shrug at most, not outraged foot stamping. 

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