There are occasional appearances of trans flags and a few characters who may or may not be LGBTQ, but the majority of the characters appear to be cisgender and heterosexual.
Imagine completely ignoring a canonically trans character to try to dunk on a game. Also softballing that “may or may not” when half of the romance options are homosexual.
“…its portrayal of trans characters is anything but progressive. Many gamers have criticized how Cyberpunk 2077 and its developer, CD Projekt Red, choose to fetishize and commodity trans bodies and trans identity.”
That’s… the entire point. There is a big, big difference between how CDPR feels about transgender people, and how the Late Stage Capitalist Pigs in Night City treats trans people.
Yes, the advertisements in the game are gross, they’re supposed to be. Human beings are treated like garbage in 2077. You were never supposed to look at these ads and be like “Hey, this is totally cool and normal.” If your reaction was “This is gross”, that’s exactly how you were meant to feel. It was supposed to make you reflect upon the culture the game takes place in and realize how messed up and broken it is.
You don’t (I sincerely hope) watch a film and conclude that the views expressed by the villains of the piece are the views held by the actor or director do you? There is a reason Ad Agencies in Cyberpunk treat human beings as commodities, because that’s exactly how they view them.
“Obviously, Cyberpunk 2077 presents a dystopian society rather than an aspirational one. Trans identity is treated as a product because everything is a product designed to be sexualized in this future. However, there’s never any contrast established. With other elements of Night City, players see how the commodified image contrasts with the rougher, harsher reality. This is not the case with LGBTQ characters, especially not trans characters.”
One of the main characters in the game is a trans woman, and she isn’t fetishized in any way. There are also some very prominent LGBT characters, and they are treated respectfully as well imo. The person who wrote that article never even played the game and it shows. It’s possible the “reviewers who have played anywhere from 40 to 60 hours have yet to encounter any meaningful trans NPCs.” simply missed the fact that Claire was transgender because no one makes a big deal about it, but it is most definitely mentioned. She has a trans pride flag on her racing truck as well.
Edit: The same is true of the Gay and Lesbian characters as well. The “reviewers” may have missed that that’s what they were because they are not treated as if they are different, they are just treated as people. You wouldn’t know whether they were or not if you didn’t spend the time to build a relationship with them so that flirting seems natural. I think that is actually really heartwarming, despite all the brainwashing by the corpos, (the people that V interacts with at least) don’t seem to really have been affected by it.
E: In my first playthrough, I was a * “Male” V. Another one of the main characters is a woman named Judy. After spending dozens of hours with her and going through hell together we became really close friends. Then there was this really sweet ‘mission’ where Judy took me scuba diving and basically opened up her heart to me and told me what a good friend I had been to her. I awkwardly made a pass at her and she just gently brushes it off to let me know that I was barking up the wrong tree. I could easily see someone spending 40 hours in the game not having a clue what Judy’s sexual orientation was- especially if they were a jerk to her.
E: With a couple of the guy characters it gave me the option of flirting with them, which I didn’t try because my V was already in a relationship with a different character. After beating the game I still had no clue which one would have been receptive to my advances, I had to look it up. Basically the game seemed to be saying that someones sexual orientation is really none of your business unless you are tying to get with them.
E: * “Male” in this instance just means masculine voice and body type, sex organs aren’t factored in when determining who you are able to romance.
During character creation you can choose genitalia for your character independently from their ‘body type’. You can also choose a ‘male’ or ‘female’ voice artist for V no matter how your character looks. I don’t know of any other game that let’s you have that sort of freedom in character creation. This game let’s you be whoever you want to be in a way rarely (if ever) seen in other games.
“Cyberpunk 2077 never makes an effort to reflect on this fetishization, which erases any possibility of satire or social commentary. If a game presents transphobic advertisements and never addresses these depictions, it just regurgitates and upholds transphobia.”
Cyberpunk treats players as if they aren’t idiots, as is the case with any good satire. The idea that it must specifically call out any bit of satire it’s doing or ‘it doesn’t count’, is insulting and ridiculous. Would “Monty Pythons Life of Brian” have been a better film if at one point the main character had turned to camera and said “This is just like Jesus, get it?”
After the tweet received massive backlash, the social media account responded with a non-apology.
The fact that they used CDPR’s apology as proof that they weren’t sorry is just… come on. Calling it a stretch seems inadequate.
I just think it’s really tacky and gross to do a surface level scan of a piece of media you haven’t personally experienced, put no thought into it, and then write a hit piece to get clicks on your website. There are plenty of actually transphobic assholes out there to call out. At the very least CDPR got people talking about these issues, name 3 other games you can say the same thing about.-
Yeah, you’re a genius all right. You managed to completely miss the whole point of cyberpunk. I imagine any story much more complex than a children’s book just flies right over your head.
Every major Unreal Engine upgrade sucks for the first few years. Eventually it’ll get optimized (the source is available and studios regularly contribute to it) or the documentation will start pointing out pitfalls and ways to increase performance. We’ll just have to suffer through a deluge of chip-melting games until then.
I wish there was more competition in the high-end game engine scene. Unreal tries to do all of the things all of the time and suffers for it, Unity requires tuning to look good and its management keeps shooting itself in the foot, Godot isn’t there yet and has a bare-bones approach that requires devs to implement nearly everything from scratch, and the dozens of in-house engines that have been open-sourced lack the community or documentation quality to foster significant uptake.
I just got 2077 after however many years. 50 hours, I know the end is like the next mission or two but I don’t want it to end. Easily my favorite game ever. Guess I’ll get another play through in 5 years before I play the sequel after its released and has a couple years of debugging.
I thought I saw somewhere that it was 150 hours for a full play through. I’m down to just a handful of cyberphycos and side gigs before the last mission. Almost 60 hours now. I’ve been trying to do literally everything but there’s not much left.
When phantom liberty goes on sale I’ll probably get it and do another full play through. I know there are multiple endings, tons of different builds, but its all still the same story that I know what’s going to happen so there’s only so much replay value after you know the story, kinda like skyrim.
This would 100% be the game I would choose to completely forget so I could experience it again.
And so the endless cycle of the borderline CD projekt games continues. Everything is hyped beyond realistic expectations a decade before launch, the masses whipped in anticipation. The game developers are kneecapped by suits making technical changes and demands they don’t understand. The game is launched after sorely felt apologies for delays, as a messy distasteful buggy disaster. Then the devs get to finish the game during thn next five unars after sorely felt apologies for the buggy mess at launch. 5 more years later the game is hailed as a creative masterpiece, despite being held by bubblegum and paperclips under the hood and still being a subpar experience. Then CDPR announces a new game, and the cycle repeats.
We didn’t learn anything from “Bethesda’s magic”. What a mismanaged company.
Yes, you did. The last step of the cycle is that everyone forgets that this already happened before. The witcher, then the witcher 2, then witcher 3, then cyberpunk. Each was such a mess at launch that the press at the time thought the games would flop. Each time devs, not suits, pulled the games out of PR hell after the fact.
People forget that the console port of the first witcher game nearly bankrupted them.
Just look at this thread people are talking like cyberpunk was always a perfect masterpiece since launch and negative comments are being buried in down votes.
The difference between CDPR and Bethesda is CDPR games always end up being all time greats though. That’s why I don’t get influenced by the hype, and keep faith in them as developers, as well as their move to unreal engine
Bethesda’s games are also celebrated as all time greats.
Games are good, eventually, in spite of the mismanagement, not because of it. At one point they will run out of magic, just like Bethesda did. For said magic is just a ton of good writing and developers putting up with crunch.
Agree to disagree on that, I haven’t played a Bethesda game I’ve considered “good” since Morrowind personally, and on the other hand Cyberpunk is top tier for me.
Bethesda delivers just good enough for the modding community to pick up the rest and fix their shit. Unofficial patches, Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul, and all that.
CDPR fixes their own shit.
Both end up with solid games for patientgamers but damn you gotta be really patient.
I played Witcher 3 a few months after it released, and it was nearly bug free, and certainly lived up to most expectations. It had a massive world, every inch of which was crammed with fleshed out interesting stories and characters with character. It was a breathtaking experience from the start, and if it had a few things to work out in the initial weeks, I can understand that.
I think I got to the part where they show Johnny Sins doing mischief? I can never get past the fucking vision tutorials after getting the crawling toenail thumb or what ever that fucking bot is called. It’s a slog.
To me it felt completely sterile, lifeless and just set dressing. Although the stories where cool the immersion didn’t work at all, turning it into a bore and ultimately disappointing. I played the patched version that supposedly had all this fixed.
You can just say you didn’t like it, it’s fine. You don’t have to try and rationalize everything. Like this: I don’t like the new Doom games and think the OGs are way more fun. See? Now you go.
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