Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/02/cyberpunk-2077-devs-give-us-a.html
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This fact didn’t do a single damn thing to stop me from watching this 14-minute preview video, however.
I admire your dedication.
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I just watched a long advertisement. It’s a rarity that I’d say that it was worth it. It’s a neat preview into a world that I will likely not really get to know.
I love the cyberpunk genre, and this seems to get so much right about it. On the other hand, it seems to be another murder fest, with little ability to get around without killing people. Perhaps the dystopian future will involve endless death on a constant basis; there is evidence that we can and do devolve into this kind of behavior for short bits of time, but I would also like to story where a crafty person could, kill as few people as possible. Perhaps I was raised on too many cyberpunk stories where death happened but the protagonists seem to want to avoid physical confrontation.
I liked the Shadow Run Return games. I wish they were still being developed. I liked that I could, try not to be a murder-hobo, as Guy Sclanders would put it*. It didn’t work 100% of the time, but I liked the possibility.
From this preview, and admittedly it is a small slice of a larger world, it looks to be more of a dystopia instead of a hetrotopia, and perhaps that it my real criticism.
It is a good advertisement for a beautiful game with what looks like an amazing character development system with a great branching storyline. I may even watch some game play, but what I am truly looking forward to seeing is how this develops over time into a franchise and how it’s thoughts about the future reflect what is going on today.
*Link- Youtube 6 Signs you are a Murder Hobo
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I enjoyed the recent Deus Ex games. It’s entirely possible to complete them without killing anyone. The setting is definitely dystopian though. I hear the original Deus Ex is a better game, but I couldn’t get over the 2000-vintage graphics and controls.
I will definitely be more likely to buy Cyberpunk 2077 if a pacifist run is a viable option. I probably still won’t, though; I miss the days when I had near-unlimited free time and the patience to play big RPGs like that, but I just don’t have the time anymore.
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I’ve never really been into video games and never owned a gaming system or gaming-pc, only Macs and only for music. Like, I’ve never even held one of those controllers before.
But this fucking game and Death Stranding have me eyeing PS4s in the pawn shop in anticipation of their release next year. I can’t justify the money, or the time, but damn I want to play this game!
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I really liked the Witcher because the setting was so european for a change. The building styles and the plant life were very obviously inspired by polish reality.
Not that there’s anything wrong with the american flora, it was just nice for a change.
This game however… I don’t know. Bit too standard pewpewpew for my tastes I think. Might pick it up a few years after release when the price starts dropping. I did the same for the Witcher series though. For most of my games actually, I find it’s much cheaper to always be about 4 years behind the general release cycle 
This way you can make do with cheaper hardware, cheaper games. And as a bonus you can only buy games which are still being talked about 4 years after release, and those are often the best ones.
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And if you didn’t have enough commercialism from the op video, this game has been confirmed for release on Stadia next year.
It has a better reputation. But its a product of its time. Story and characters are a lot more simplistic.
I believe they changed it, but Human Revolution shipped without non-lethal approaches to the bosses. Which was complained about because the original game could be done entirely non-lethally. Even if it wasn’t really built for it. And I dunno if shooting people with a gun that technically doesn’t kill them, but otherwise functions identically to the gun that does technically kill them really fulfills the request for non-lethal/non-violent game options. Though with the original game I believe you can get through almost entirely through stealth and dialog options, without even using a weapon.
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Yeah, I forgot about the boss fights. They did patch them to allow approaches other than “shoot at the boss a lot” but I forget whether it actually qualifies as non-lethal (I think you may still have to kill the boss, albeit indirectly by hacking robots or whatever). I think the sequel removed boss fights entirely, though I never finished it.
And true, playing through without firing even non lethal weapons would be very difficult if not impossible. But they do function differently - firing a lethal weapon tends to alert all nearby enemies and result in escalating firefights, while the nonlethal options are meant to be used as part of a stealth run where you mainly avoid enemies and only attack occasionally, as necessary. But yeah, definitely not a nonviolent game no matter how it is played.
Neither was the first one really. Part of the weird bit with the complaints. Deus Ex wasn’t exactly an original Fallout grade talk your way through the whole game thing. But people started doing non-lethal runs (only non-lethal weapons) then non-violent runs (using stealth, convo skills, and exploits to avoid even hitting anyone) as a challenge because it was more difficult. Some of the complaints about Human Revolution were about the lack of capacity for those sorts of runs. But a lot of them were people just assuming the old game was something it wasn’t. These are fundamentally stealth games, and the non-lethal stuff exists to provide a more challenging but stealthier path.
Complaints about murder hobos are usually about complex RPGs lacking the non-violent pathways that western RPGs used to try to built some capacity for, and that pen and paper games are often all about. Like you’re not gonna beat the typical open world RPG these days through careful application of commerce. But if I’m remembering it right you could do that in Fallout 2, and New Vegas had a little bit of that going on.
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About Death Stranding…
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Yeah, though there is one at the very end but you can do it non-lethal like. I preferred human revolution, it felt a lot more focused than the sequel but the problem with it other than the boss fights is that the lethal weapons were just more ‘fun’ (for want of a better word) to use. The non-lethal ones were very uninspired so that’s what i felt they really got right in the sequel, the non-lethal play-through was a lot more satisfying.
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That fact combined with the hundreds upon hundreds of high-quality unclaimed games in my Steam library does more than enough to stop me. Regardless of who is making it, I won’t place any bets on a game being something other than an unplayable, buggy, incomplete mess upon its release anymore. Especially if someone’s pushing unplayable pre-rendered demos. Have we learned nothing?
Imma gonna go watch some more Super Mario Maker 2 videos now. That’s the good stuff.
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