OK, I have to throw something out there. I hate posting anything on social media at all but I've got a backlog of thoughts on this. Long rant.

I know how soul-sucking it is to see all of your escapism subverted. Some otherwise good games have picked up the rot, and it kills me. Pillars of Eternity 2 comes to mind -- good gameplay loop with a fair difficulty curve and promising pen-and-paper mechanics, but it couldn't resist beating the player over the head with things like the leadership choices mentioned above. Poor natives vs. evil colonialists, who cares? A literal god walking the earth and we're supposed to get involved in politics?

Anyway, in Cyberpunk's defense: I sometimes find myself destroying my own enjoyment of things by overthinking stuff that wouldn't have bothered me before certain people made a big deal of them; to the extent that some things I used to like have a sickly pallor when I revisit them. For example, take KotOR (the first), arguably one of the best RPGs in PC history. When I say arguably, I mean you can claim it isn't, it's OK to be wrong.

But go back to it and look at it with the same standards I (and apparently others) find myself applying to new releases. Bastilla is a bossy, bitchy lady who is your boss from the get-go, and who is endowed with miraculous power that places her beyond the reach of even master Jedi; and the Jedi council are mostly sanctimonious white guys who are out to ruin you. Jolie Bindo, the one guy who has it all figured out, is the stereotypical wise old black hermit. Does it mean that it was a bad story all along? I don't know, as much as I like it Star Wars was never a deep philosophical well to begin with.

But did you love it when you first played it? I sure as hell did. So why am I noticing these things now? Conditioning, of course, and a huge amount of pent-up frustration with neopuritans.

So, Cyberpunk itself... first, the genre is two things: rooted in the eighties, with all the wonderful/stupid kitsch that entails; and second, *punk *is the operative word. Sure, the term has been coopted by people who listen to punk music on 1200 dollar vanity phones that could easily be used to look up the definition of "irony", but it has always meant anti-establishment. Look at the big inspirations: Bladerunner, obviously; Total Recall (and if you haven't seen the Total Recall elements in there yet, you aren't reading between the lines); Shadowrun (now there's a casualty of the culture wars). They're all unabashedly pessimistic dystopian worlds where corporations rule everything and exploit the baser human impulses like sexual degeneracy to keep people in line. Hell, even Idiocracy called that one.

They also have the "global village" milieu of twenty different cultures living the gutters of America, and it isn't meant to be a rosy picture of multicultural enlightenment. Just hell.

So yeah, the two employers you interact with at first are women, but there are six or seven others. Yes, the first hacker you enlist as support is a "strong black woman" cut-out, but she isn't around for long. It bothered me about the time I got to the "main" "fixer" in the story, who was yet another chick, but... that's about it.

So far, anyway. I'm not saying the game isn't going to disappoint me, I'm only ~12% through the main storyline according to the interface.

The protagonist Keanu plays is still hugely influential, albeit a stereotypical 80's style punk rocker with some sexual foibles implied by flavor text on world items -- just like half the cock rockers I grew up loving, and IDGAF since they were never beating me over the head with it. The black mayor of NC, who dies in the opening chapters of the game, is a fat corrupt loser who is clearly not meant to be noble or great; the guy who takes over is white but is also just another corporate shill, since this is a corporate dystopia. Your friends look like the cast from an 80's movie: vaguely latina and arguably hot Panam, unambiguously latino meatshield Jackie, a whitebread AI who doesn't understand humor. Is it always socjus, or is it just homage to over-the-top 80's shit?

And to top it all off, CDPR made a game about cynical global corporatism run amok, and when some of the cynical global corporations told them to price it at 70 dollars because why not, they insisted on 60. It's not exactly spitting in the eye of wokeness, but think about the sheer irony of that.

Anyway, if I think of everything in SJWisms then I'll just be doing their job better than they ever could.

TL;DR: it's a game about a world that represents everything reprehensible in global corporatism. Some of it may genuinely be satire.

OK, I have to throw something out there. I hate posting anything on social media at all but I've got a backlog of thoughts on this. Long rant.

I know how soul-sucking it is to see all of your escapism subverted. Some otherwise good games have picked up the rot, and it kills me. Pillars of Eternity 2 comes to mind -- good gameplay loop with a fair difficulty curve and promising gameplay loop, but it couldn't resist beating the player over the head with things like the leadership choices mentioned above. Poor natives vs. evil colonialists, who cares? A literal god walking the earth and we're supposed to get involved in politics?

Anyway, in Cyberpunk's defense: I sometimes find myself destroying my own enjoyment of things by overthinking stuff that wouldn't have bothered me before certain people made a big deal of them; to the extent that some things I used to like have a sickly pallor when I revisit them. For example, take KotOR (the first), arguably one of the best RPGs in PC history. When I say arguably, I mean you can claim it isn't, it's OK to be wrong.

But go back to it and look at it with the same standards I (and apparently others) find myself applying to new releases. Bastilla is a bossy, bitchy lady who is your boss from the get-go, and who is endowed with miraculous power that places her beyond the reach of even master Jedi; and the Jedi council are mostly sanctimonious white guys who are out to ruin you. Jolie Bindo, the one guy who has it all figured out, is the stereotypical wise old black hermit. Does it mean that it was a bad story all along? I don't know, as much as I like it Star Wars was never a deep philosophical well to begin with.

But did you love it when you first played it? I sure as hell did. So why am I noticing these things now? Conditioning, of course, and a huge amount of pent-up frustration with neopuritans.

So, Cyberpunk itself... first, the genre is two things: rooted in the eighties, with all the wonderful/stupid kitsch that entails; and second, *punk *is the operative word. Sure, the term has been coopted by people who listen to punk music on 1200 dollar vanity phones that could easily be used to look up the definition of "irony", but it has always meant anti-establishment. Look at the big inspirations: Bladerunner, obviously; Total Recall (and if you haven't seen the Total Recall elements in there yet, you aren't reading between the lines); Shadowrun (now there's a casualty of the culture wars). They're all unabashedly pessimistic dystopian worlds where corporations rule everything and exploit the baser human impulses like sexual degeneracy to keep people in line. Hell, even Idiocracy called that one.

They also have the "global village" milieu of twenty different cultures living the gutters of America, and it isn't meant to be a rosy picture of multicultural enlightenment. Just hell.

So yeah, the two employers you interact with at first are women, but there are six or seven others. Yes, the first hacker you enlist as support is a "strong black woman" cut-out, but she isn't around for long. It bothered me about the time I got to the "main" "fixer" in the story, who was yet another chick, but... that's about it.

So far, anyway. I'm not saying the game isn't going to disappoint me, I'm only ~12% through the main storyline according to the interface.

The protagonist Keanu plays is still hugely influential, albeit a stereotypical 80's style punk rocker with some sexual foibles implied by flavor text on world items -- just like half the cock rockers I grew up loving, and IDGAF since they were never beating me over the head with it. The black mayor of NC, who dies in the opening chapters of the game, is a fat corrupt loser who is clearly not meant to be noble or great; the guy who takes over is white but is also just another corporate shill, since this is a corporate dystopia. Your friends look like the cast from an 80's movie: vaguely latina and arguably hot Panam, unambiguously latino meatshield Jackie, a whitebread AI who doesn't understand humor. Is it always socjus, or is it just homage to over-the-top 80's shit?

And to top it all off, CDPR made a game about cynical global corporatism run amok, and when some of the cynical global corporations told them to price it at 70 dollars because why not, they insisted on 60. It's not exactly spitting in the eye of wokeness, but think about the sheer irony of that.

Anyway, if I think of everything in SJWisms then I'll just be doing their job better than they ever could.

TL;DR: it's a game about a world that represents everything reprehensible in global corporatism. Some of it may genuinely be satire.