Cyberpunk 2077

Ill have to give it to them, CD Projekt can make awesome trailers.

Cyberpunk debuted in 1988, so at least it predates Strange Days.

I need this game.

That video? Apparently it's how your team acquires its Token Evil Teammate.

The cyborg chick?

I guess its gonna be a case of "We are in serious shit and we need people who kick serious ass, and she just kicked serious ass"

According to the backstory, when you get too many cybernetic implants, you go Axe-Crazy, call people 'Meatbags', and go on a Kill All Humans psychosis. And one can become a party member.

At least she's cuter than HK-47.

That sounds like she would be difficult to control. Maybe she's on the edge? Like, her kneeling was because she just realized what she had done.

I dunno, but what's with all Cybernetics Eat Your Soul / anti-transhumanism in cyberpunk work in general? (sorry, I just didn't read cyberpunk much)

edited 11th Jan '13 6:08:14 AM by onyhow

Basic human nature. We're afraid of what would happen when we start sticking computers into ourselves.

Probably just a hold back from old tabletop games where they would use stuff like Humanity to balance out characters. Like, "You can choose this nifty pair of retractable fist lasers, but you'll have a 30% higher chance of gaining Cyberschizophrenia."

edited 11th Jan '13 6:52:34 AM by Kev-O

I would say its that more than actual anti-transhuman fears. Remember, cyberpunk games actually date *way* back, to the dark days of RP Gs when anything that made you more powerful than a red shirt had to come with some serious price, whether theoretical or actual.

Should we start a trope page?

Man, I get flashbacks to old discussions in a Shadowrun forum, where people talked about the pro and contra of anti-humanizing effects of cyberware, whether it's feasible to create special rules for them or whether they should be "only" role-played, how much (if at all) the more "human-friendly" bioware is affected and how much they should be tied to the Essence value. I didn't actually participate in them, but they were fun to read.

Does Cyberpunk 2020 actually have rules for that?

Why not?

Yeah, if you install too many augs in Cyberpunk 2020 you basically turn into HK-47's unfunny and slightly fleshier cousin who hates all organics.

Perhaps you're looking at the genre the wrong way around? Cyberpunk's a genre that came about so that writers could explore trans- and post-human anxieties in a literary context, rather than a literary context that happens to often contain trans and post-human anxiety.

This kind of narrative is a syntactic marker for the genre, and not a semiotic one.

(That's from genre theory. Syntactic Markers are the kind of things that a genre is — Road Movies have set-pieces interspersed by travel, Science Fiction is speculative, Westerns are often about law, chaos and the building of communities on the frontiers — while Semiotic Markers are the kind of things that often turn up in those genre, and give you the tip-off as to what the genre is emulating — Road Movies often have cars and roads, but they don't have to; Science Fiction has laser pistols and spaceships, but they don't have to; Westerns have saloons and tumbleweed, but they don't have to.)

I would argue cyberpunk is far more about social and cultural changes than transhumanism. Technology is only relevant insofar as technological advances encourage social change, creating periods of uncertainty and flux. You can totally have cyberpunk without any transhuman elements at all ( barring perhaps a uselessly broad definition of "transhumanism" ).

I wonder if you can. The relationship between human and machine feels essential to cyberpunk. It's perhaps a little glib to jump straight from that to transhumanism, but I don't think it's unexpected or even escapable. If you've got other examples, I'd love to hear them.

Our trope page for the genre isn't that great, though. Seems to link cyberpunk implicitly to dystopia, which I don't necessarily agree with.

edited 11th Jan '13 9:59:55 PM by Nicknacks

Well, I've never seen a cyberpunk utopia, so I'm gonna say the page is pretty accurate.

Caprica, which while not set in a utopia certainly isn't dystopic. The series spends a lot of time comparing the setting Heaven prior to the fall of man.

In The City Of The Saved... which is a Noir set explicitly in a Utopia brimming with with cyberpunk paraphernalia.

I'm sure there are others as well.

edited 12th Jan '13 4:49:01 PM by Nicknacks

Made a page.

Just bought the song in the trailer. So good.

I don't like the song that much. The vocals are really bad and kind of drag down the whole experience. At least it wasn't cliche techno music, though.

It's just mildly frustrating in that there's no hint about what the game mechanics will be. The Witcher with cybernetics?

They've said they're basing it off the tabletop games combat system, which pretty much translates to, "Get shot in the head without protection? Dead. Get shot in the head with helmet on? Better hope you roll high, son."

Would be nice if it was somehow like the older fallout games in some aspect like that.