this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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[–] [email protected] 206 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] Aqarius 55 points 1 year ago (1 children)

He blanks them out in real life too.

[–] KidsTryThisAtHome 18 points 1 year ago

The op is actually Jeff Bezos

[–] [email protected] 156 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Damn this dude played Cyberpunk and literally missed everything about the story and the city itself.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Sounds "corporations are le bad" with more words

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

Corporations ARE le bad though

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A problem the entire cyberpunk genre has

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] TrismegistusMx 134 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 87 points 1 year ago

I mean, they made a whole anime about it.

[–] [email protected] 123 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 year ago (25 children)

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.

[–] LemmysMum 26 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago

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."

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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

[–] uid0gid0 7 points 1 year ago

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.

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[–] VonCesaw 90 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I, for one, think we SHOULD create the Torment Nexus from the hit sci-fi novel "Don't Create the Torment Nexus"

[–] lateraltwo 19 points 1 year ago

I've been No Mouth Screaming this exact same thing!

[–] [email protected] 83 points 1 year ago (2 children)

anon chooses photo of someone who literally got crushed to death by a terminator in a gunfight

utopia

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[–] [email protected] 77 points 1 year ago

This is one of those posts that says way more about the person making it than anything else...

[–] [email protected] 72 points 1 year ago (2 children)

"Explain to me how night City isnt a utopia" "right to bear arms? Yep"

Sounds like he explained one big reason himself.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

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[–] Madison420 22 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] JayObey711 10 points 1 year ago (16 children)

Yes a world where crackheads can legally carry guns will definitely not lead to violence.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Violent crimes are common because armed people are everywhere.

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[–] [email protected] 71 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Easy!

They have all that AND life expectancy for the poor is mid 30's.

[–] nyoooom 8 points 1 year ago

At least they die healthy

[–] [email protected] 68 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Illness, no such thing

So the guy just isn't familiar with the property then, gotcha

[–] SSX 15 points 1 year ago

Arkansas is literally uninhabitable because of a Bio-Plague. Lol

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

"Cyberpsychosis isn't an illness" ~OP probably

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thats just a very long version of "corporations are le good."

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] Pregnenolone 10 points 1 year ago

corporations are le bad

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This is a problem a few "dystopian" Sci Fi publications have, they're often better than what we have now.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The tech is usually better, but that just kind of comes with the genre.

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[–] bouh 11 points 1 year ago

I'm not sure whether you're naive or blind if you think CP77 is better than what we have.

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