the panam stuff in this game is funny because if you romance her (my favorite thing is shell fuck anyone with a “male” body because the game links voice and body type to gender so enjoy your extremely dysphoric sex scene ladies) it has extreme “Our family needs you to date our unstable child” vibes and she’s constantly asking you for favors while being bpd and always correct. All the romances in this game are funny because they’re often very flirtatious with you despite you being locked out by gender, like if you play a fella river will still text you about family dinner like he wants to suck you silly style under the table but I digress. Anyway I like the Nomads because despite the sort of strange power fantasy nature of their way of life I think they sort of exist not mainly as hardwired expy but as a clear anarchist counterpoint to corporate governance, like yes materially militech and arasaka have their little walled garden of wealth and power but they spend all their time killing each other, it’s not a real way of life, its the snake eating it’s own tail. I do think it’s sort of funny that stealing one shitty tank is enough to reverse their fortunes because you need to play your role in panams maudlin family drama so w/e the game is full of contrivances for narrative impact. the whole game is a lot about how you can never become strong enough to defend yourself individually so I think the ending where you bail with the Nomads and your gf is probably the most thematically appropriate, though I am not sure the ease with which you are able to walk away is consistent with the rest of the game
wonder which big video game will be the first one to add the real soundtrack of the future:
game extremely needs some of this shit
im going to make a guy with a moustache. i only seen people with beards for some reason but i just checked and thankfully there are moustache options
It’s easy to run through all the detailed environments and not see any of it. But I’ve been taking lots of time to just look at alleys and sidewalks to see if it really makes sense as a space, let alone a cyberpunk city.
I think this has probably been stated many times before, but it seems to me a lot of the “dystopian” color you notice by looking close is just homeless camps and an abundance of advertisements. Which, if this is what CD Projekt think is futuristic, it gets me wondering what kind of lives the studio leads are living.
for a city with an insane murder rate that means 50% of new arrivals get zeroed and sold for parts within a year there are shockingly few firefights on the street or civilians trying to be heroes when gangs come into conflict, there is a mod that fixes this on PC and honestly it’s amazing when you’re like having a casual convo with the ripperdoc shopping, there’s cacophonous gunfire the entire time and then you go outside to see 11 bodies in various states of disrepair on the pavement
this is why I’m constantly cracking jokes about how they shoulda just named the game Cyberpunk 2020, because it might actually be sorta clever in that way
This video’s game looks incredible even on low settings.
yeah, I think it’s a really good looking game! the animations both facial and otherwise in conversations are fantastic, people actually gesture and shit, jackie’s visible anxiety is great etc… the crowds are actually pretty fucking huge and barely repeat models if you have an SSD and the crowd density set at max, it rules
one thing i have noticed is that it is really difficult to dash to the left with the default keyboard controls… this looks like a gamepad situation. i wonder if i can get my dualshock 4 going on this pc? its very hard to hit “a” and “ctrl” at the same time. i wonder what driving is like on a keyboard as well, lole
the driving is unplayable on keyboard and the shooting sucks shit too until you use a gamepad, i had to use the control scheme where you press right stick to crouch which makes sliding slightly awkward but at least you can press a face button to dash
With the gog version of the game, my dualshock 4 just worked. Nothing special needed. It even had the the proper button prompts.
the gog version supports gamepads really well, it even supports ds5 natively
I sent Mike Pondsmith a lengthy private message on reddit asking him what he thinks of this game’s rampant and disgusting misogyny because he apparently responds to most things people send him and at this point the game has been so aggressively hateful to women I kind of need to know how he feels about it.
I cannot stress enough that this game will like throw you into a sidequest where you help a gal deal with the loose ends around her ex-girlfriend that’s named after a lauryn hill song and you’ll just have to sit there and pretend like it’s not incredibly tacky that they’re just making you think about songs with extremely on the nose lyrics for what emotions are attempting to be portrayed in the game’s writing. Johnny Silverhand is an evil avatar of everything i hate about gen x morons
but on the other hand like despite it being tacky i think johnny having the worst vibes when you meet him is hilarious, his stupid fucking livejournal music quest updates are extremely funny when you view this as intentional abrasiveness
on a slightly related note my friend was telling me that when you go try to find evelyn at clouds cdpr had to add pictures of the sex workers you get a choice between in a patch because gamers are so thoroughly incapable of listening to a woman speak for more than 5 seconds they kept picking the guy and got extremely mad they might have to do gay stuff
time for a geography lesson
Night City, CA circa 2020
Night City, CA circa 2077
Morro Bay, CA circa idk right now?
the idea that they demolished a national park to build upscale residential housing for rich people is certainly very cyberpunk, Mike. I figured this one out because the space port is named Morro Rock which god stop building shit over cool natural features you fucking freaks but anyway if you rotate things a bit they match up pretty good. Maybe this was more obvious if you’re a californian.
I love playing this game again and immediately hearing the most misogynist thing I’ve ever heard in a game. Some fella yelled “I’ll fuck you until you squirt blood!” at me
game is maybe a little too much of a look into the corridors of the conservative polish man’s mind
yeah, reactionary art is only good when it’s kind of tacky and pitiful (see: S Craig Zahler, others), as opposed to whatever this is
parts of this game almost get there but they can’t consistently get all the way to self awareness about it and that actually clashes badly with the source material! like the trigger anime was fun and took a tonally way different approach to the property because… CDPR’s is uniquely weird
this game is kind of tacky and pitiful in a totally obnoxious way, like guys your game came out in 2020 please with the fucking glados portal taxi and hideo kojima and fucking grimes, unlike Zahler, who is tacky and pitiful but in a normal male way