Is the “best” cyberpunk game the game that is most like Blade Runner?
Cyberpunk Video Games
51–60 of 74 posts
Re: Cyberpunk Video Games
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Calling art design uninspired and plot that brings "nothing new" has to be the dumbest take about art I've seen in a while. I wonder if they actually played the game to write such nonsense.
Dude they literally just aped the styles that were popular on tumblr in the decade before the game was released. Here you go: > https://tacticalneuralimplant.tumblr.com/archive/2013/4 > https://cyberpunktech.tumblr.com/archive/2015/8 Aesthetically, what the game did was literally the very definition of "nothing new" and "uninspired." It wasn't bad, but they definitely weren't pushing any new angles or visions.
The general cyberpunk aesthetic was indeed established, what they did was bring it in a 3d, first person perspective world. And they had to bring it to that level of detail that it would look good and realistic from different angles, closely as well as from afar etc and in a way that represented the state of the art computer graphic realism of the time. I don't think this is trivial, "nothing new" or "uninspired".
Re: Cyberpunk Video Games
#53I love cyberpunk as a genre/style/aesthetic but there are almost no open world videogames that actually nail it. For me the cyberpunk aesthetic basically requires bustling small streets with tons of detail (shops, trash, crowds). That's where most games that try to use an open world fail in my opinion. We just don't have the technology yet to create these dense detail rich scenes without a lot of work on the develope…
I think Cyberpunk has a good basis but as you say, it's heavy weight; they did increase or tweak crowd density in an update I think, but also it's a PC game so it can be modded and improved as hardware gets better. The challenge - and you already see it on lower crowd density numbers - is getting enough unique and different characters. Cyberpunk seems to have a number (dozens?) of NPC characters making up the crowds,…
> they did increase or tweak crowd density in an update I think
I assume something like that to be the case, as I played the game last year and "empty streets like covid" definitely don't describe my experience. But apart from stuff like the NCPD-marked encounters spread around the city, you probably do not want to look too closely at the random npcs, as it does get repetitive fast. But they do give an image of a lively city, at least, as you walk through. But imo it had enough of random encounters, side quests etc around the city to give you reasons to explore and immerse into it outside the main story (which I did not hate anyway, but can def imagine playing the game without it).
Re: Cyberpunk Video Games
#54Uh, have you played in the comedic cyberpunk alternate cold war world of Jazzpunk?
https://store.steampowered.com/app/250260/Jazzpunk_Directors...
Re: Cyberpunk Video Games
#55I would add Citizen Sleeper to the list. Board-game inspired narrative cyberpunk RPG with a nice story. I loved it and currently I'm playing the second one. It's a short game. Took me around 10 hours to finish though I didn't go throught all the tasks or the full DLC.
That's one of my favourite games in terms of narrative/characters. I usually have troubling reading through too many dialogues etc in games, but in this one the storytelling was great and it made you really care about the characters and their stories, that it was easy to read through it all with pleasure.
Re: Cyberpunk Video Games
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dude they literally just aped the styles that were popular on tumblr in the decade before the game was released. Here you go: > https://tacticalneuralimplant.tumblr.com/archive/2013/4 > https://cyberpunktech.tumblr.com/archive/2015/8 Aesthetically, what the game did was literally the very definition of "nothing new" and "uninspired." It wasn't bad, but they definitely weren't pushing any new angles or visions.
The general cyberpunk aesthetic was indeed established, what they did was bring it in a 3d, first person perspective world. And they had to bring it to that level of detail that it would look good and realistic from different angles, closely as well as from afar etc and in a way that represented the state of the art computer graphic realism of the time. I don't think this is trivial, "nothing new" or "uninspired".
Deus Ex:HR did the same thing, and did it in a much more original way. That game's black-and-gold color palette was objectively unusual for the cyberpunk genre -- where the conventional color sets were either black-and-green like an old terminal (or The Matrix), or the various shades of blue/pink/green/yellow/white neon lights. This is readily apparent if you browse cyberpunk tumblr, and the generic color sets map perfectly to CP2077's aesthetic.
The Deus Ex character designs, environment designs, and armor designs were also much less conventional.
I think that it's fair to call CP2077 aesthetically uninspired. It copied wholesale from the conventional and well-established aesthetic of the 2005-2015 period, without even changing anything. The end result is perfectly generic and looks like "art by committee" or "the path of least resistance."
Re: Cyberpunk Video Games
#57The most instructive thing about this list is the 7 year gap between 2004 and 2011. Why did cyberpunk go out of style during the war on terror? Why did it come back in 2011? Did snowden in 2013 impact its popularity at all?
Re: Cyberpunk Video Games
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
The general cyberpunk aesthetic was indeed established, what they did was bring it in a 3d, first person perspective world. And they had to bring it to that level of detail that it would look good and realistic from different angles, closely as well as from afar etc and in a way that represented the state of the art computer graphic realism of the time. I don't think this is trivial, "nothing new" or "uninspired".
Deus Ex:HR did the same thing, and did it in a much more original way. That game's black-and-gold color palette was objectively unusual for the cyberpunk genre -- where the conventional color sets were either black-and-green like an old terminal (or The Matrix ), or the various shades of blue/pink/green/yellow/white neon lights. This is readily apparent if you browse cyberpunk tumblr, and the generic color sets map p…
The bright neon etc aesthetic is indeed a standard cyberpunk aesthetic, back since the 80s already. CP2077 is part of the cannon cyberpunk TT franchise, and they wanted to stay close to its aesthetic. It is not a brave choice, but it is a choice that targets familiarity of the audience that may be intimately or minimally aware of the 80s-90s cyberpunk retrofuturistic aesthetic. In this sense I do agree that it was "the path of least resistance", but I think it made sense. You cannot target both novelty and familiarity at the same time. It is not the case that the aesthetic is exhausted in computer games and it makes sense to target something new, in which case I would think that the criticism made more sense.
Re: Cyberpunk Video Games
#59I love cyberpunk as a genre/style/aesthetic but there are almost no open world videogames that actually nail it. For me the cyberpunk aesthetic basically requires bustling small streets with tons of detail (shops, trash, crowds). That's where most games that try to use an open world fail in my opinion. We just don't have the technology yet to create these dense detail rich scenes without a lot of work on the develope…
The Ascent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_(video_game)
Neon Giant have an FPS game called No Law, which is to be released later this year, which is based in a Cyberpunk-style world.
Re: Cyberpunk Video Games
#60Missing my favorite - Transistor Also missing the classic Dreamweb.
And we can't mention Transistor without shouting out Darren Korb (and Ashley Barrett on the vocals) for its amazing OST: https://supergiantgames.bandcamp.com/album/transistor-origin... It plays an important role in the story, so it double the reasons to talk about it :)
Another interesting game missing is NeoTokyo[1], essentially a "Ghost in the Shell" skin as a half-life mod. It had a soundtrack by Ed Harrison that was available to download, though it seems as though the site hosting is down.