Hacker Cinemacyberpunk 2077
cyberpunk 2077
TV series · 1 season
In the neon-lit streets of Night City, a mercenary named V embarks on a dangerous journey to become a legend while fighting for their own survival.
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15 comments on Hacker News
I was replaying Cyberpunk 2077 and trying to think of all the ways one might have dialed up the dystopia to 11 (beyond what the game does). And pervasive AI slop was never on my radar. Kinda reminds me of the foreword in Neuromancer bringing attention to the fact the book was written before cellphones became popular. It's already fucking with my mind. I recently watched Frankenstein 2025 and 100% thought gen ai had a role in the CGI only to find out the director hates it so much he rather die than use it. I've been noticing little things in old movies and anime where I thought to myself (if I didn't know this was made before gen ai, I would have thought this was generated for sure). One example (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGSNhVQFbOc&t=412) cityscape background in this a outro scene with buildings built on top of buildings gave me ai vibes (really the only thing in this whole anime), yet this came out ~1990. So I can already recognize a paranoia / bias in myself and really can't reliably tell what's real.. Probably also other people have this and why some non-zero number of people always thinks every blog post that comes out was written by gen ai.
No need for personal attacks.
I don't know about your argument. PC doesn't have official support either. Games say they run on Windows, or whatever, but PC is notorious for tinkering, and for random things happening. And that's on the first party platform, Windows!
Then, for a more streamlined gaming experience, there are the consoles. Games come out for consoles, so they must work on the console, right? Well, they kinda do, and they kinda don't. There is a myriad of issues on consoles as well, most notably performance issues, but there are high-profile other ones as well, like with the launch of Cyberpunk 2077.
Running software, in my opinion, is just not a guaranteed experience like playing a movie, or listening to some music. Sometimes things just don't work, and that's in the name of the game. Sometimes, especially on PC, part of the happiness is to get it to run in the first place. And in this context, Proton works very well. There are millions of people out there enjoying it on the Deck, and I'd wager two orders of magnitude more people playing with other iterations of Wine, be that Lutris, proton-ge, Bottles, etc.
I think this is a case of letting the perfect be the enemy of good.
I wonder if this motivates the recent interest in "cyberdecks", computers cobbled together out of bits and bobs designed to resemble futuristic computers cobbled together out of bits and bobs, replete with offset displays, displays with unusual aspect ratios, nonstandard ergonomics and form factors, etc. The design of these devices is definitely intended to inject style and pizzazz into a field largely dominated by gray rectangular slabs.
Upon reading (or rather, listening to) Neuromancer again, I get the feeling that the original "cyberspace deck" envisioned by Gibson was a plain, rectilinear device not at all like the greeble-encrusted gadgets you find on r/cyberdeck. It's very sparsely described, but we do know it has a built-in keyboard, "trodes" for the brain-computer interface to serve as a display, and with all this talk of "ROM constructs" and "slotting in" it accepts software via cartridge. In short—it probably resembled a 1980s home computer, like a TI-99/4A or an Atari 800XL. Gibson's technological world in his early cyberpunk works is very much informed by a cursory examination of the tech of the day, combined with a lot of imagination and guesswork.
Modern cyberdecks draw much more inspiration from all the cyberpunk stuff that emerged after Neuromancer: movies like Strange Days and The Matrix; video games like Cyberpunk 2077, Shin Megami Tensei, and even Wipeout; and anime like Ghost in the Shell or Serial Experiments Lain, all of which provide glimpses into a world in which technology might have evolved, visually and ergonomically, in a different direction from what it did. I find this sort of technofetishism fascinating for its role as a sort of roleplay of an imaginative alternate universe where modern-era tech was still cool and fun. A specific subgenre of this is the Amiga enthusiast community, where people soup up old Amiga hardware with modern, very expensive FPGA-based addons (the nearest a solo hobbyist can get to modern "custom chips") in an effort to show what computing might be like had Commodore not failed.
The challenge is to avoid cribbing from Blade Runner, or modern popular works influenced by it (such as Cyberpunk 2077 - whose original tabletop game Cyberpunk 2020 was in the same wave of '80s cyberpunk). Gibson hadn't yet seen the film when he wrote the book!
Related to that, Gibson has gotten one notorious adaptation of a short story to screen: Johnny Mnemonic. It's based on a short set vaguely "near" Neuromancer in setting/timeline. That movie is still a fun goofy pleasure and is truly aesthetics in service of Cool. I think it captures some of the aesthetics people love in the trilogy that starts with Neuromancer if you prefer the visual to the prose.
I also kind of think the Cyberpunk 2077 videogame adaptation is probably the closest to capturing the whole trilogy we might find in any adaptation, even with the indirection through the TTRPG which was heavily "inspired by" the trilogy and not directly an adaptation itself.
I played Cyberpunk 2077 after BG3, and though the production values and story are very strong it feels a bit like a walking simulator after the gameplay richness BG3 offered. The RPG elements feel more or less meaningless in comparison, as though I could make most any dialogue or leveling choice and it'd scarcely matter. As a result I feel very much like a passenger in a very long and mildly interactive movie.
It's an interesting experience, a situation where I can acutely detect the bar getting moved for what I expect a game to be. I hope recent progressions in AI will bring us more interactive stories a la BG3 in glossy and well-funded packages a la Cyberpunk 2077.
If you do an online search for "cyberpunk", you will notice that Cyberpunk 2077 has nearly made the word synonymous with a video game. This was probably the last stepping stone that made "cyberpunk" fully mainstream.
It appears to me that the word "cyberpunk" is now stuck to mean some kind of entertainment dressed in something from Bladerunner, with a few glowing lines from Tron, riding the remnants of the last 80s retro futurism wave.
In its heyday, cyberpunk as a literary genre was very far from being mainstream. Mostly, because it wasn't easy to get into. A major ingredient of cyberpunk is an ever changing world that has everybody in it on the edge of being overtaken and alienated by technological advance and cultural change. Often the reader would just be dropped into it, get a few paragraphs of background, and then was left to figure out the rest by themselves.
What changed is: Most of it happended and is here now and is also part of our news. You can see people around you being left behind if they don't adapt to smart phones or the internet. It's not an exciting rollercoaster of a novel anymore if the backdrop isn't a hypothetic low-life street hustle but could be set in a major city near you. Or if a documentary on the opioid crisis or tent cities of homeless looks like it could be part of Gibson's Bridge trilogy, but it isn't. It's reality.
In the 70s and 80s, technology was the path to bright utopias. The 90s had an even brighter outlook on the future after the cold war ended. That was the mainstream. Cyberpunk was the edgy punk who told you the near future might not be so bright. Nowadays you won't have anyone argue with that. All of that is mainstream now. It's not edgy anymore. It's just the sad reality.
Anyone who wants to talk about these societal issues needs to find a different vehicle for it. At least by name. "Cyberpunk" is someone's brand now.
Idunno, beating Cyberpunk 2077 elicited more of an emotional reaction from me than anything TV or movies has done. Baldur's Gate, Anachronox, Oblivion, hell even the old final fantasy games had so much more going for them story-wise than pretty much anything Hollywood could come up with save for its most longest-running series.
> Remember the film "Brainstorm" from the 1980's? Where the guy almost dies because he blasts a real-life full brain capture of sex into his own brain in a loop for days?
No, I had to go look for it and it was on youtube (NSFW) but is this the scene [0] you're talking about? This was likely what inspired the braindance features in Cyberpunk 2077, it's pretty much the 1980s iteration (with a massive tape) on what looks like a futuristic VHS cassette and a phone for some reason.
Well, it wasn't exactly just dopamine, but there was woman who pleased herself to severe level [1] with 30 min orgasms that impacted her entire life, it's a become a meme on JRE [2].
Sidenote: this is probably the only film where Chris Walken wasn't like he is portrayed now, even Kings of NY had that vibe about him but here he is kind of... normal?
0: https://youtu.be/cOGAEAJ4xJE?t=2969
1: https://www.zmescience.com/other/feature-post/brain-pain-center-brain-24052013/
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oq6KMk8tkNE
One thing I read somewhere -- and it might have been an interview with Gibson or with someone else talking about his work -- is how much William Gibson despises derivatives of cyberpunk in the books, videogames and movies that followed.
Specifically, he dislikes the focus on the aesthetic, neon lights, mirror shades, etc. I think Gibson really dislikes Cyberpunk 2077, for example. Gibson argued they are missing the point, staying shallow and forgetting the "message", which was PUNK: a rebellion and a rejection of the mainstream state of affairs. Gibson was a punk writer, and his writing was a critique of Reaganomics and the direction the world was going back then.
I think he means we need a different kind of critique now, not anchored to neon lights and vaguely Japanese inspired retrofuturistic aesthetics which look like what the 80s thought the future would be. And nothing can be more conformist and anti-punk than lazily copying a now classic aesthetic and doing nothing else with it.
That said, I love that aesthetic myself, and have no problem being stuck in the past. But I see his point.
Cyberpunk 2077 is one of my favorite games of all time.
It was unplayable on console, and a buggy mess on release (even on PC), but some of the acting and story telling in the game is really something else. I've been playing games for 30 years and nothing has really come close in terms of voice acting. Judy, V (both male & female VO's are great, but I prefer the female one), Keanu Reeves does his best work, and is totally at home in a melodramatic setting, all the smaller characters have proper voice actors that are more than just an after thought.
The story is interesting, there are limited, but real choices along the way, along with a plethora of non-impactful decisions, that merely change how your character interacts with the world. The world itself feels great, the architecture of the city feels real, and it's the first game that I've played that explored the vertical aspects of a city, though they definitely could've done more.
The action aspects are a little limited, surface level stuff. It's such a shame that the game wasn't given the same scope it has right now, but another year or two for polish (pun unintended...) and I think the systems in the game could be fleshed out and be much more fun.
For anyone that has moderately decent hardware, I highly recommend a play through.
EDIT: forgot about the music. Might be the best soundtrack of anything ever. Movie/TV/Game/Other.
I think most of the negative sentiment against Cyberpunk 2077 comes from three sources:
1) Some players expected this to be cyberpunk-themed RDR2/GTA5. It turns out it's nothing like that, it's more like a new Deus Ex game.
2) It just doesn't run on consoles. It's a very inferior experience, unless you're the type who can be happy with 2020 movies in .3gp format in your old Nokia phone. Having watched a video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5pHpQqhmR4) of how it runs on PS4, I now clearly see where all this hate comes from.
3) There are some bugs and quirks, depending on your platform and luck. I haven't had any major issues, though I know for some it's just unplayable at the moment. This will likely get much better after patches hit.
On a personal note, I like the game a lot. Yes it has its quirks, and I generally feel it's a less refined/polished game compared to what Witcher 3 was, but still it's an extremely fun, really well-made game. Combat is great, world is enticing, story-telling swings between good enough and great. For one reason or another whenever I launch the game another 5 hours passes without me noticing. FPS camera and general art direction also helps with suspension of disbelief, and the game is as immersive as it gets.
It's a shame that this game now has such a bad reputation for relatively minor & mostly avoidable reasons.
It’s not fair to critique a film or video game based on its trailer. The phrase “don’t judge a book by its cover” comes to mind.
Let’s suspend judgment of Cyberpunk 2077 until it’s released in a couple months. They surprised everyone with how awesome Witcher 3 was, so let’s give CD Projekt the benefit of the doubt.
> The idea of "seeing the ending" of Factorio undermining its appeal seems disconnected from my own experience. I'm not sure how giving up a game with no micro transactions helps that issue with the gaming industry either.
I guess it was the stark realization that the Industry was in the midst of shifting to this predatory business model and that I (seemingly) was also prone to the pitfalls of its optimization that did my head in... I didn't need to divert my attention away from my work or my relationship, and yet I still managed to spend 6 hours a day playing and researching how to get the most efficient layout and upgrades for a game I only found by a random impulse purchase.
I'm well aware that Factorio doesn't have micro txs, as I mentioned: I paid for it in BTC.
I guess it seemed like in my absence the gaming Industry took what was once a seemingly innocent, fun thing you did to pass the time or play with friends with known upfront costs for development/expansions and hardware into an altogether exploitative trap that was refined by what appeared to me at least, as the same addiction based conditioning beavhiour patterns seen in Social media platforms.
Fortnight went on to make over a Billion dollars, countless of stories of kids stealing their parents credit card in the process (and then uploaded to social media) showed how effective their strategies were, at least on impressionable minds; so, I'd say my intuition turned out to be right.
So much so it became a meme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbAMrNpMrg8
I guess when I saw how underwhelming something like Factorio is when it ends it made me realize I need to cut my losses and focus on something that actually enhances my quality of Life? Facrorio seemed more like a distraction to me, then and now.
Factorio was mildly amusing at best, it reminded me of a more intricate look at what the building up resources portion of RTS games could be; by contrast I'm looking forward and prepared to sinking tons of hours on Cyberpunk 2077 and AoE 4, but that's mainly because they've been in development for so long and I've followed them closely since the beginning.
But, in practice I'm fairly sure that my initial excitement will fizzle out to my other hobbies, as I have so many.
Another anecdote to support this observation: I bought Watch Dogs 1 and 2 for PS4 when 2 came out to support the genre/studio, but I hadn't owned a console since PS2. They sat in their shrink wrap for years.
I recently got the time/chance to play and got a friend to lend me his PS4 when he went on vacation. I played 1 and it was fun in a GTA kind of way and I got to the last mission in about 2 weeks, which I couldn't beat so I went youtube saw the ending(s) and was satisfied enough to then start 2.
I must have gotten 4 hours into it before I lost all interest and just watched the no commentary 'cut-scene movie' someone uploaded in the background while I went back to working on other stuff. I can't even remember how it ends now, which goes to show how much I was paying attention. The plot was solid, and entertaining, I just preferred to do other stuff instead.
mmmmm yeahhh, not gonna argue that, I think you're probably right on all points. haha
The reason I made it though is because of my love of the Cyberpunk genre specifically. Deus Ex, Tron Legacy, Cyberpunk 2077, and so many more shows, games, and movies are where I draw inspiration from.
They always feature this style as if it was easy to do, just wanted to give back and help bring that to reality.
Thank you!
edit: also, augmentations/augs by that name, I think, are specifically cyberpunk. Augs as an idea fits very well as an analogy for both how this works under the hood and how it's used on the surface. Soooo it's more specifically Cyberpunk than generic sci-fi in that regard, imo. :)