Did anon just mentally blank out every homeless person, cyber psycho victim, crime victim, police victim, corp victim?
Anon would sign an Arasaka human testing contract without reading it
Damn this dude played Cyberpunk and literally missed everything about the story and the city itself.
Well, they are, but it's a story and a very cerebral one. Of course it has a lesson to learn from.
At least it wasn't being woke or preaching about the end times of a 2000 year old prediction. It really does become an issue when the aesop anvil doesn't need to be dropped.
Absolutely, most of the Cyberpunk genre is meant to entertain. The dystopian setting is used as a foil to a hyper-individualistic power-trip main character fantasy.
Nothing inherently wrong with that, but it's good to be aware of. You don't want to live in night city, you want to be the invincible god-like merc that lives in night city. You don't want to live in the matrix, you want to be the bullet time kung fu Neo.
It's for fun, it's a fantasy.
I read Snowcrash when I was twelve and super wanted to live in that world. Then I read it again when I had twelve year old kids. Boy did it hit different.
Actually the Matrix whole point was that life in the simulation, is pretty good.
I'd say it's opposite, you want to be anyone BUT Neo in the Matrix series. Neo is the one who gets hounded in the matrix, doesn't get to enjoy the cushy life of simulation and gets to deal with existential crisis.
The one downside to the Matrix is that one rogue program, who wants to wipe out humanity. But that guy isn't even inherent to the Matrix.
Iirc at the end of the final film, the Matrix in fact gets portrayed as a good thing but with the new addition that now people can willingly enter and leave the matrix.
TL,DR: the matrix was never bad or evil. The rogue program Smith was the true antagonist.
Somebody should make a CP77 homeless mod where you're trying not to get run over or shot by upper middle class trust fund kids playing gangster in the street.
I love the Cyberpunk 2077 universe. Ive played the TTRPG, the Game from CD Project Red, and loved the anime. But no way in hell would I want to actually live in Night City...
Cyberpunk 2077, the video game, is a great story partially because Night City is practically more a character than a setting. It consumes and shits out all who are bold or stupid enough to think they can make it there.
The person romanticizing their world has somehow missed every theme of the story. Immortality is only achievable by sacrificing every last bit of your humanity through either replacing every part of your body with chrome (Smasher), or through horrific body snatching tech (Soulkiller).
Illness does exist in Cyberpunk, many characters through the story refer to their sick relatives. V themself is portrayed as being sick after installing Soulkiller after the Arasaka heist with Jackie. Indeed, Soulkiller is portrayed like a high tech, fast acting cancer.
The world in Cyberpunk reflects a kind of criticism of capitalism in showing us how excessive the divides in economic and power dynamics can become if capitalism is left to rule unchecked by governmental power (i have not yet played phantom liberty, which I assume addresses in part the corrupted and futile attempts to restore governmental agency in a world that long has handed off the reigns to unfettered capitalists).
The characters generally live in squalor. Vs initial apartment is little more than a glorified closet in a bleak concrete monolith. Quality Health care is only available to those that can afford an ultra Premium plan, executed by a Military Style Medical Corporation. Otherwise, you're lucky if your loved ones' ashes are dispensed via a Vending Machine, as seen in the anime Edgerunners.
Again, love the game, love the anime and TTRPG. NEVER in a million years would I want to live in that universe... unless maybe it was a choice between there and literal Hell, cuz at that point the line of difference befween them starts to blur...and they end up looking the same.
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Exactly, what's so grueling about the CP universe is that they have the tech and means of creating a utopia, but due to the extreme capitalism, corruption and overwhelming power of corporations nothing gets better. It's like everyone who cares just gave up on fixing that society and everyone is just fending for themselves.
Exactly, what's so grueling about our universe is that they have the tech and means of creating a utopia, but due to the extreme capitalism, corruption and overwhelming power of corporations nothing gets better. It's like everyone who cares just gave up on fixing that society and everyone is just fending for themselves.
I think it’s just that the psyche of the world just broke at some point and this is the remnants of a broken people.
At least LGBT people are well accepted, I suppose🤷🏿
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Dude, life is already going extinct. Cats are mostly extinct already, and most animals are either robots or uber expensive clones! There are no animals in wilderness. There are acid rains and all sort of climate problems because the climate is already in shambles.
Cops will definitely kill you on a whim. Or it will be one of the gangs or corpo who will. Didn't you see the shootings in pacifica?
Religion is very much there with a guy who crucifies himself on a braindance!
Cyberpsycho would be killed on sight of Regina wasn't hiring you to extract them. Did you watch any of the media of CP77? It seems like you didn't.
Did you hear about the corpo wars? CP77 is about the start of a war between arasaka and militech btw...
Except there is, did you not do the sidequest with the monk brothers? It gives some insight into their beliefs, which are anti implant, anti consumerist, probably futuristic Buddhism.
I think you may have replied to the wrong person. I was saying that person didn't notice all the religion in the game.
And also, since I forgot to answer this earlier.
Yes, it is a religion. I grew up in the south and have known many people who practiced.
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This is not true. The game doesn't have to touch on this topics to tell Vs story but they do touch on climate on the news, cops are very trigger happy, religion is present in the game and you go to a church as part of a mission and there's a whole sect obsessed with cyberware that does judge everyone else constantly throughout the game, including mutilating a monk that refused to get augmented.
I see your points and I agree but I have to call out their climate is not stable. You often hear the news in the game talk about weather and temperatures being in the safe range for humans.
Also the cops gun you down over the slightest infraction, or at least they did, I haven't played since the Phantom Liberty update.
Also in Pacific you attend a funeral at a church and it is heavy on the Christian iconography. Oh and I just remembered you can help a dude crucify (kill) himself for his sins while it's being streamed and recorded for brain dance experiences!
I recall domestic/intentional politics and espionage being mentioned several times in the game. Even to the point where we uncover a conspiracy where someone is brainwashing potential political candidates. I have an inkling politics will come up in Phantom Liberty as well.
How do you know most of this isn't true just out of scope of Vs vision he is pretty laser focused on the brain cancer quickly replacing his personality and multiple threads of his own drama enough so he's not as interested in larger social issues.
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Almost all of these are directly in the game. I wonder whether these people are blind or oblivious...
Well the cops are corrupt and there are clearly tribalistic behavior. Racism is a type of tribalism. I don't know how racist arasaka is. Do they want to keep their bloodline "pure"? So why wouldn't a corrupt police force attack in the interest of racists? There might be a lot of racism for all I know.
It would be pretty weird for the game focused on a particular city to focus on global issues
There's actually a few games with great settings like this. Night City is, in some ways, like Rapture from Bioshock: a city both terrible in its capacity to inflict violence on the unprepared and which horribly reshapes the individuals who inhabit it, either technologically or biologically, while being vibrant and interesting in a way cities in our world aren't. It's sort of the innate aesthetic of cyberpunk or, in Bioshock's case, biopunk: "terrible, but interesting."
another case where the pictured OP should be reminded sci fi is more about the present than the future
everything depicted in CP77, except the technology, is a comment on any given metropolis post-1979 than it is a fantasy with no correlation to the modern era
All this plus they skipped directly over the focus on lethality that Friday Night Firefight had. If you get shot your outlook is extremely grim. I think it's the only system I've played that has rules for using other people as shields.
V's apartment isn't actually that bad though is the funny thing. That's like 4k a month in San Francisco.
Yes, but is it inside a Brutalist monolith concrete building with a single small slit of a window? I get what you're saying, but my point in regards to Vs initial apartment is that despite it's small niceties, the harshness of the world that exists just right outside their door is mlre prison like than almost all modern 1st world apartments today.
I love the gig where you have to comfort and console your neighbor, Barry, because you get to see that his apartment is slightly smaller, slightly lower scale than yours, but more or less the same.
A similar portrayal can be seen in the apartment of K in Blade Runner 2049. Sure the interiors are nicer than some, but the apartments, to me, feel like the architects intended to treat the tenants like prisoners with nicer digs than actual prisoners. Space efficient to the point of just barely not cramped. Nice enough that initially you don't complain. Isolated enough that you don't connect with your neighbors.
Grant you there are community spaces like the boxing gym, but again, it reminds me of a prison gym mainly because of the Brutalist concrete foundation of the building.
Youtuber Dami Lee does a much better job breaking down Cyberpunk style architecture than I ever could. Id highly recommend you check out her video on the subject.
I, for one, think we SHOULD create the Torment Nexus from the hit sci-fi novel "Don't Create the Torment Nexus"
anon chooses photo of someone who literally got crushed to death by a terminator in a gunfight
utopia
This is one of those posts that says way more about the person making it than anything else...
"Explain to me how night City isnt a utopia" "right to bear arms? Yep"
Sounds like he explained one big reason himself.
For some people the right to keep and bear arms is a good thing not a bad thing.
I think the bigger problem is not that armed people are everywhere, but that violent crime is common...
Right to self defense and reasonable means to do so is a fair enough.
The problem is that currently people think the explodey instant death pointers are somehow a defensive tool instead of just adding more offense to the problem.
Want to feel secure in your home? Invest in something actually useful like durable doors and windows, difficult to pick locks, if law enforcement is outside a safe response time range, a panic room is probably a good idea. All of those are infinitely more helpful against the one in a million shot of a home intruder event happening to you than all but handing said intruder the weapon they will soon kill you with.
And that's not exaggerating, women who purchase arms for defense against stalkers and/or abusers are more likely to be specifically killed with that weapon they bought for their own defense than they are to successfully defend themselves with it.
Also, most of these home intruder fantasizers have all the sense of avoiding escalation in a conflict of a fucking nuclear powered rocket breaking the carmen line speed record.
While I recognize your good faith argument, I don't believe it fits with the reality of how criminals operate, or the practicality of what most people can afford.
You can turn your house into a prison/fortress, which is expensive and only protects you when you're inside with everything locked up. Panic rooms are expensive as fuck, if you weren't aware.
And the odds of self-defense are MUCH better than you think. It's not a 'one in a million' shot that your gun helps you- in 90+% of defensive gun uses, the criminal sees the gun and runs away because he's not there to fight to the death, he's there to steal things he can get somewhere else from someone else without risk to his life. He wants a helpless victim, not a fight.
Click this reddit link- it goes to reddit's /r/ccw (concealed carry weapon) but filtered to show only stories of when /r/CCW members had to use their guns in self-defense.
Please just go read some of those stories and rethink your 'one in a million shot' position.
Nice selection bias, as if the many more people it turns out catastrophically for are able to speak their opinions on the matter in contrast.
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"Fuck what this guy said goes directly against my worldview... maybe there's nuance to this very layered conundrum?"
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"Nah, double down"
Ah yes, pointing out that the denizens of the building jumper survivor's club might have a skewed view of the survival rate of jumping off buildings. What a double down and rejection of nuance.
Ok you say it's selection bias... Can you show me some news stories of people who's guns were taken from them? Surely if as you say a successful defensive gun use is one in a million there are tens of not hundreds of millions of failed DGU gone wrong stories...
I doubt you will find many. Even anti gun researchers say there are minimum 4x as many DGUs as firearm homicides. I can cite stats on that when back at my desktop if you want them.
There's plenty of valid reasons to be against gun ownership. But the idea that DGU is one in a million is not one of them.
I'm one of those. An educated armed population is a formidable adversary. Now I don't agree with most American bullshitery but being armed isn't the issue, being armed, dumb and emotionally unstable is the issue which are 100% things we as a society chose not fix not something that isn't fixable.
Yes a world where crackheads can legally carry guns will definitely not lead to violence.
You think a crackhead gives one single fuck what they are legally allowed to do?
The crackhead is gonna have a gun whether it's legal or not (or maybe they'll sell it for more crack). The gangster that sells them the crack is DEFINITELY gonna have a gun. Laws have no effect on the lawless.
The question though is you. When you encounter the violent crackhead, do YOU want to have a gun?
A gun is not difficult or complicated to make. Any decent machine shop can make them, especially if you don't care too much about quality. And unlike a drug lab, the machine shop has a legitimate daytime use so you can set it up in plain sight.
especially if you don't care too much about quality
You do realize these things are directionally oriented resettable explosives right?
Every time you fire a round is a fucking explosion going off very close to your hand.
Someone not caring about quality is gonna wish they had after losing their fingers to an overpacked round.
Perhaps, but it depends on the customer. A crackhead who wants a gat probably won't even know what ammo to load in it. (Apparently it's somewhat common for police to arrest street criminals with a gun loaded full of the wrong caliber ammunition). And unless you seriously overpack the round or make the barrel out of pot metal, more likely the quality problem that you will get is the gun failing to fire or failing to cycle. Remember though, you are talking about criminals, not people like you and me who care about safety ratings.
Therefore, we should acknowledge reality and form policy around that rather than pissing into the wind while pretending we're doing something useful.
For example- if you want to attack the lion's share of gun violence, address the causes of it, rather than the tools used in it. That means address drugs and drug gangs. Decriminalize or legalize drugs, put the gangs and cartels out of business. Treat addicts like patients who need help rather than criminals who need punishment, or at the very least stop locking up non-violent drug users with violent criminals (and thus turning them into violent drug users).
Let's also tackle poverty. Poverty is strongly correlated with drug use, so let's give people some hope and upward mobility so they don't feel desperate enough to use drugs. Doesn't work for everybody, but a good intervention that takes a young kid from the hood and gives him opportunity and resources so he has an obvious path to make something of his life will keep an awful lot of kids out of gangs and drugs.
Of course these solutions require more work and money than passing another law that criminals will ignore and getting your photo taken and saying I Did Something!.
Damn it's crazy that you say that despite there being dozens of countries where crackheads just don't have guns.
Um, please think this through. You're basically saying that weapons cause violence.
But that's not how human nature works. Some PEOPLE are violent, and they commit acts of violence whether they have weapons or not.
I could approach you on the street and beat you up- that's a violent crime. No guns involved.
I could approach you on the street and stab you or hit you with a baseball bat- that's a violent crime. No guns involved.
Guns don't cause violence. Weapons don't cause violence. Weapons in the wrong hands can make violence worse, or in the right hands can prevent violence or stop it.
Guns enable more efficient violence. The US army discovered this during World War 1 when they stopped slapping people and shot them instead.
If I want to punch you in the face I think twice because I can't kill you from distance with a single blow, but having access to a gun is lowering the hurdle
And you're missing the most important part of the point here. WOULD you?
Whether you can kill me from a distance or from up close, WOULD you do so? I wouldn't. Most people wouldn't.
There's a few who would. And a few of them think it's fun.
You say you can't kill me from a distance. I think you can, even without a gun. Consider this a thought experiment. You need to kill me from say 100' away. You don't get a gun. How do you do it?
As an European, we have culture, we know about (cross)bows and spears and whatnot. The world is not black and white, its not about some people that always would and some people that always would not. Different environments will bring different behavior in different people. An environment where everyone has access to a firearm will lower the hurdle for extremely violent crimes that can easily result in death.
Please, have a "thought experiment" yourself and think this whole thing through, at least once. Its kindoff unfair debating with someone that went through an american school system, I know you don't have the mental capacity for this conversation, but for the sake of inclusion, we are still having it.
I think you do me an injustice, and needlessly so.
The US is not 'just one country' with the same ideals and attitudes everywhere. We are 50 states, and while there is an overall American culture, each state or even city area has its own local culture, ideals, politics, etc.
I live in a 'blue state' (IE Democrat-majority, Democrats are generally an anti-gun party). There's not a big gun culture here. There are not people with 10 gallon hats and a 6-shooter on their hip riding around in a giant pickup truck with a gun rack. My state has more gun control laws than most in the union.
When I grew up we had no guns or interest in guns. During my whole childhood the only exposure to guns I had was once at summer camp there was an activity shooting .22LR rifles (small caliber), lying down, at targets. And once on vacation we went to a shooting range that was part of a resort.
If we'd had this conversation 10 or 12 years ago, I'd have been mostly on your side. I recognized the 2nd Amendment was a thing that existed, but I saw no reason anybody needed an 'assault rifle', I thought gun free zones were a pretty good way to improve safety, and overall a lot of 'gun culture' seemed like needless penis extension.
It was actually one conversation that kicked off a change in my position. An old friend of mine and I were getting lunch together. This guy has always been very Republican (pro-gun/conservative party), owns several guns, goes hunting, etc- but we have a lot of mutual respect despite differing worldviews on many subjects. Anyway, as we finished lunch he mentions that he's going to buy an AR-15 rifle and would I like to come along? I made a dumb joke like 'damn man, I didn't realize it was that small, I'm sorry dude'. He just laughed and said 'You know my deer hunting rifle, the one you said you have no problem with civilians owning? Well it's actually a lot MORE powerful than an AR-15.' I started to argue but he said 'look, nothing I say is going to convince you. So just Google it when you get home, okay?'.
I KNEW he was wrong- a 'military weapon of war' would definitely be more powerful than a stupid wood stock hunting rifle like Elmer Fudd would carry. Surely the military wouldn't be carrying weapons inferior to those of random civilian hunters, right?
So I went home and Googled it. And I found he was right- his .30-06 hunting rifle has SIGNIFICANTLY more muzzle energy than the .223 AR-15 he was planning to buy. The hunting rifle was larger and heavier and in almost every way, more powerful.
I'm usually not wrong about technical things. So I was curious what else I was wrong about on the subject, turned out it was a lot. Not about policy or position, but about provable technical things of how guns work and how deadly they are and whatnot.
So I decided the best course of action was to basically forget everything I thought I knew, and start fresh. That kicked off a good 3-4 week deep dive on the subject, reading articles, watching YouTubes, doing research on both sides of the issue.
This brought about a few basic conclusions. The biggest is that most of the politicians who talk about guns appear to know little or nothing about guns, as many of their gun control arguments are easily disproved on basis of fact. And many of the laws they promote do nothing to regulate the actual lethality of guns, but rather try to describe 'scary looking guns' and ban those. For example, my own state's laws regulate rifles that have ergonomic features like a pistol grip or collapsible stock that have NO bearing on the rifle's lethality.
I then started doing research into use of force, defensive situations, etc. And that brought a very sobering realization- I lived in a bubble. Violence is not a part of my life (and I prefer it that way). My area is quite safe. But that doesn't mean I am immune to violent people- and there ARE people out there who ARE violent. Not many near me, but they exist.
And I'd say I've done more research than most into what happens in a fight. I've seen a lot of videos of defensive situations- robberies, fistfights, assaults, kidnapping, and straight up attempted murder. I've seen what happens when people get shot (you won't find it on YouTube). And I've seen how easy it is to seriously harm a human. We live safe lives in civilized society, but on the scale of the world, our bodies are pretty fragile and it doesn't take much to seriously damage them.
And that's why I say thought experiment for how to kill someone from 100' away. It's why I say that if someone wants to kill people, they will, gun or not. It's why I reject the logic that removing guns will save lives, because I recognize that gun regulations affect the law-abiding more than the criminals who are doing the most harm.
Point is-- I have done the thought experiment, a few different ways.
Do I want guns in vending machines? No. Is the absolute ideal to have everybody armed? No, the ideal is where nobody needs to be armed. But absent that perfect future, I think civilian armament as a deterrence to criminals works.
In a place like Night City i think it's pretty clear why everyone walking around armed to the gills is a bad idea.
The fact that you're pretty likely to be shot into ribbons is a big downside, even if sometimes that's survivable (and it's pretty clear that it is not for most people).
To add to this, there are literally vending machines in the game that sell loaded guns.
I have a pistol in my nightstand that I've only used at the shooting range. Now that I know how to use it, it will literally never leave my nightstand unless someone breaks in to my house, and I'm not exactly excited about using it again.
Then there's my gun nut brother with a safe full of different kinds of shotguns and rifles and all kinds of shit that's "fun" for a gun nut, stuff that you'd never use in a million years to defend yourself or to go hunting with.
The problem isn't the right to bear arms, it's people, restrictions, access, and education. It's too easy for a wackjob to get a weapon used for mass murder that wouldn't have much application elsewhere.
People who support free market and capitalism should support Night City in order to be consistent with their beliefs.
This selective ignorance is very common in actual political discussion
I think the most accurate way to point out the most obvious flaw in the reasoning is:
You haven't heard about XYZ in fantasy world yyy, doesn't mean XYZ doesn't exist in that world. If you take star wars, before episode 1, we hadn't heard of jar jar Binks but he existed in that world and had (surprisingly) big influence. Proving that something doesn't exist is literally impossible. Thinking that something doesn't exist because you weren't exposed to any evidence for it, is flawed thinking. Especially in a fictional stories... especially in a fictional story that wants to talk about a specific issue.
Where? I am referring to star wars the Clone wars. Do you consider that fan fic? Is that a star wars meme that I don't know?
It's ye old "part of franchise I don't like isn't canon". I feel like it's more apt for the sequels since the prequels are actually by the original author. Plus I like em lol. They brought us great memes.
Making money and a decent quality of life through extremely illegal activities? Apart from the respawn, it's exactly how it works in real life too.
See the difference is that morality has almost completely broken down in CP2077. What did V have to do between the prolog and tutorial to get a nice apartment and a reliable car? Those assholes at the meat packing plant where you get the robot sure don't look like they have any qualms even if V does.
Also, we still have an ecosystem and efficient oceanic transport. Climate change and a rogue AI that controls a global oceanic swarm of self replicating sea mines mean that the pizza is gross because pigs are extinct (they use tuna) and all overseas cargo is transported by air.
People still care about their friends, but that's it. Even if internet in CP2077 was global and filled with punks and not just a NetWatch-policed glorified municipal Teletext, do you think anyone would give a shit about the world they live in on a chat site?
It's also heavily implied that successful cyberpunks are vastly outnumbered by idiots who were in over their heads from the start and it cost those amateurs their lives. Those that succeed and become even slightly known, including V, are often exceptionally skilled individuals.
This is a problem a few "dystopian" Sci Fi publications have, they're often better than what we have now.
Yeah it literally wouldn't be sci fi without the sci, with the edge case of post-apocalypse scenarios aside, it would be kind of hard to do a sci fi without better tech. In fact aside from post-apocalypse or older outdated sci fi, I literally cannot think of any property we would call sci fi that doesn't have better tech.
That's mostly just an aesthetic, they still have scientific advancements beyond ours. Your own link continually mentions Alien (which is outdated as I mentioned) which even if it was made today, they have interstellar travel, live long-term cryogenics, futuristic vehicles and weapons beyond what we have today.
Just because they use old blinky retro computers doesn't mean they have dozens of tech advances over ours, that's literally the most surface level way to look at that setting, which really doesn't have a lot of modern stories and is mainly just an aesthetic used for art.
There's always the ones where AI are always omnicidal and all digital tech is taboo, or the ones that predate the information age where you have very manual but powerful tech... Like sure, FTL is definitely sci-fi, but without automation (even human guided automation like ripperdocs) you end up with very unequal societies where magic tech exists, but only for the rich or large organizations
The first is a newer genre so I can't think of anything well known, the second includes things like the time machine where the time machine is sci-fi, but technology regresses, and the last one could be things like dune. Or 1984, where we've surpassed the "futuristic" tech (and unfortunately was mostly used like a how-to guide in recent years)