Itās something like 6-8 months of feature time from an engineer and a couple of UI artists and a good chunk of character art. Iāve seen it in the spec and dropped twice because nobody is willing to eat that cost
I donāt think so but when everything is mocapped artists get really picky about walk cycles; weāre presently considering 6 mocap actors for slim/med/heavy masculine/femme body types, to results that I canāt even observe
Itās very similar to the way they worry over sword edges clipping through walls. Everybody realizes itās a game and there are a million ways to make it look stupid already
Cyberpunk just seems like a game where it would be thematically appropriate to have characters with weird digital distortion modifications in their voices! Why not get weird with it! But this is the question Iāll be asking about everything in this game, because itās not that kind of game
Iāve never played the tabletop game but it seems like there were some concessions for transgender roleplay but it came with some hamhanded mechanical costs like a penalty to āhumanityā.
This was removed in later rulebooks but I donāt know if the tabletop developed roleplay with more fluid gender concepts or if it was left to homebrew stuff. In any case it seems like something CD Projekt RED would have had to consider at some point given how extensive body modification and bodily expression plays into the themes of the original rpg. Either it was decided against for scope reasons, was overlooked due to unconscious bias or was deliberately avoided for political reasons.
This isnāt actually in the core rulebook, this is a supplement based on a series of problematic but extremely well intentioned scifi books that were a big influence on CP2020 (that I have been meaning to read to have Tigressā Official Transwoman Opinion on).
Also to give mechanical perspective on this: the humanity cost thing is problematic but in the context this is one of the lowest humanity costs in the game, and no other instance in the entire game features a specific note that you can just skip humanity costā¦so Iām actually pretty sympathetic to this personally.
(also the original conception of humanity cost in the game wasnāt that getting a robot arm made you less human, it was getting a Google Brand Google Arm meant that your arm was always filtered through a corporate conception of what an arm was and should be, which was dehumanizing. Anyway, this has been Tigressā cyberpunk tabletop RPG discourse corner)
This seems like more of a trap than it is. The ostensible problem is: we want to depict people losing their humanity as they undergo further and further body modifications, usually depicted as like an āessenceā score or something. But if sex reassignment is a body mod, how do we say that people getting sex reassignment arenāt also losing āhumanityā with that same mechanical hook?
Solution: you can keep the same framing and just say that sex reassignment is a medical procedure like a kidney transplant or open heart surgery and not a body modification like giving yourself Wolverine claws. Which I think has the advantage of being true. That they donāt really consider this possibility isnāt a failure of imagination, per se; itās a failure of perspective stemming from a social norm at the time of writing that surgically altering sex characteristics is just as weird and scifi as surgically altering a cannon into your arm.
Better solution: destroy the frame entirely. The idea that having night vision eyes or super muscles destroys my natural empathy and makes me an inhuman monster is pretty obviously stupid. Recenter the conflict over changes to the mind, not the body. If I get cyberware that filters toxins out of my blood, who cares. If I get cyberware that directly interfaces my brain with the internet, wellā¦
this is all making me think about the weird mis-allocation of ādifficultyā when it comes to game dev just because like
rami ismail has a thing where he talks about how the industry is so good at presenting solutions that seem like magic where you just put on a suit with grey balls on it and act out the scene and BOOM suddenly itās perfectly rigged, animated and textured in the game
and itās so frustrating to think that weāve set up audiences to think that thatās how the process works but as soon as gender expression or racial identity comes into play the animators and rigging artists and texture artists spontaneously pop into view, and theyāve only been trotted out to prove that āitās a lot of work, actuallyā
the industry is rendering all this work invisible until itās called upon to change, upon which the work becomes supremely visible, but not enough to you know, pay anyone above 5% of the salary bobby kotick makes
none of this is actually new or particularly provocative I just kind of hate how it is rn
Going to add one more detail that slipped my mind: The book also introduces the concept of bioware instead of cyberware. Bioware costs much more, but the āhumanity costā is reduced to the lowest possible die roll.
In this case, mechanically a bio-modded version of the procedure would be 1 point, literally the lowest cost in the entire game, so low it wouldnāt even register in any of the mechanics.
Iām just expanding on myself because Iām nothing if not pedant whoās obsessed with context.
The more I see of the game, the more Iām convinced that virtually none of it was.
I think Mike Pondsmith has functionally nothing to do with the project for example?
I also know that aesthetically theyāve retained very little from tabletop as well, since most of the mechanical designs were heavily inspired by Appleseed, Bubblegum Crisis, and other 80s anime cyberpunk .
So besides the names this is probably mostly itās own thing.
Yeah this rings true the more I see GTA: Human Revolution. I think the only major thing they carried over was āCoolā as a stat from what I can remember of the promo stuff.
couple consulting meetings and thatās it; heās geeked that his thing is now this huge deal (and he was already an endearingly massive geek who would be happy to talk your ear off about Gundam or Macross)
he finagled it into an opportunity for his son to write the Witcher pen & paper game, which I hear is pretty good
