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Comment by dwc | Hacker News Reader

"The trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 strikes me as GTA skinned-over with a generic 80s retro-future, but hey, that's just me." --William Gibson[1]

It's mentioned (and little more) in the article at the end, but it still seems odd to invoke Gibson's name and not talk about this more.

1. https://twitter.com/GreatDismal/status/1005958197654351872

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Insightful :) Sold!

(I realise Gibson's remark is meant to be dismissive.)

I'm not into gaming any more but I grew up on Gibson novels and the last game I played through and through was GTA Vice City. Ergo, I'd love this.

Oh, the tune from the trailer is Spoiler by Hyper, it's rather nice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G70S5fumHso It reminds me of Pursuit by Gesaffelstein for some reason: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRSijEW_cDM

Is this really a criticisms though? I would buy that in a heartbeat, heh

Deus Ex was there in 2000, no big, open spaces and vehicles like modern open world games but political intrigue over and beyond Neuromancer and the hacking and body modification were integral parts of gameplay, System Shock 2 had those hacking/body mod gameplay features as well in 1999 but in space, so there are some great ones out there if you don't mind older games and if they run on a system you have.

Deux Ex runs on modern PCs without issue using the GoG or Steam version. I play it without visual mods, and it still holds up.

It's not a strong one. You could say that about any two games in the same genre - "Starcraft is just a re-skin of Warcraft". I would still buy Starcraft.

It is an evaluation. He is not impressed so he doesn't look further into it.

Unfortunately, the over-hyped cyberpunk community is on a bandwagoning trip of dismissing all criticism as gating or ignorance, even elevating the remarks of a handful people on the internet as the main criticism against the game, e.g., cyberpunk on a day is not cyberpunk.

Personally, I find the direction the developers are taking refreshing, but that doesn't mean they haven't missed opportunities or made no mistakes.

The main argument of those happy with the trailer's cyberpunk style is that the later is not a mix of cyber with outrun or vaporwave, but as the term states cyber and punk. Hence it is not limited to the dusky, rainy scenes of Blade Runner.

They forget, however, that ironically cyberpunk is also more than the sum of its parts. Even if you wish to progress this very visually demanding genre into a new direction, we still have to able to experience the feeling of low life, high tech that is so essential to cyberpunk.

So to claim that you can't do cyberpunk on a day does indeed make no sense. But to imply it is of no concern how you present your day scenes and the color pallette doesn't matter, that is even worse.

Huh. I always thought the proper palette for cyberpunk was "the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." ;-)

He's not half wrong - too little cyberspace internals in the trailer. Makes me wonder how this will be resolved, given that the game is based on Cyberpunk 2020, a tabletop rpg game written well before the mobile and blockchain revolutions.

Before blockchain revolutions? I don't see how the blockchain would impact 2020/2077 in any way

No sci-fi writer predicted bitcoin mining. The rulebook vaguely stated that a cyberpunk knows a few unlawful ways to get money, so should a game such as Cyberpunk 2077 include a subplot based on simply publishing images bugged with Monero-generating code (to use just one recent example)?

Also, a friend of mine has an idea that the first true unkillable AI will run inside a blockchain, and it would be economically infeasible to hack it as it would require owning more than 50% of its infrastructure. But that's still sci-fi.

>No sci-fi writer predicted bitcoin mining.

Diamond age had a distributed tuple space, which was kind of similar in effect, enclaves that made their living off of work their computers did for digital pay.

Of course, the standout thing about cryptocoin by comparison is that there's no real useful work resulting from all the absurd amounts of electricity being used to mine it.

I'm reasonably skeptical of cryptocoin but I think it's absurd to judge utility of a work product so soon.

Yeah, it’s only been about a decade right? :|

They have some utility, if you're willing to ignore the majority use case (get-rich-quick schemes), but ultimately, they're like decorating by hanging pictures on quadcopters instead of nailing them to the wall. The pictures are technically hanged, but it's kind of a dumb use of energy.

Don't so easily underestimate the longterm utility of money outside government and corporate control.

Centralised money, like dictatorships, is only good when benevolently ruled.

For the majority, money is wielded more against than for their interests.

Cryptonomicon did

You'd better try Diamond Age, which came out earlier. However, still not early enough to predate Cyberpunk 2020, which is the main issue here.

Maybe blockchain technologies go the way of the car phone. That is, they were novel and useful for a time but other advancements rendered them obsolete. Or, maybe future fiction doesn't need to account for every possible future technology and instead will feature fictional things/ideas the author simply thinks is cool/interesting to play with.

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