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Comment by A_D_E_P_T | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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."

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.

By which I guess you mean they copied Syd Mead? Sure. But that's totally valid. I personally don't really like the game (too many rpg trappings of being stuck in conversations I truly don't care about) but the way the city was realized is gorgeous, especially if you're into brutalism in any way. It's very reminiscent of the BTS system in Bangkok the way that there's a lot of straight concrete.

Not only Syd Mead, but he's in that set. (One of the great environment designers, but not a particularly noteworthy character designer or, e.g., UI designer.) Put it like this: They copied a well-established aesthetic, which was extremely popular at the time. It fed, and fed upon, the synthwave genre's ascent in the early 2010s. There was even some fawning over brutalism in the ~decade before the game was released: https://tacticalneuralimplant.tumblr.com/post/47196027149

Thing is, nothing was added to the game's aesthetic. No artist or designer put, as it were, his own stamp on the game's designs or environments. It was strictly generic and derivative. So by the time it came out I had seen it all a million times before. It could not have been less original, less inspired.

This is such a bizarre take - a piece of media set in "New York" isn't "uninspired" because it uses NY as a backdrop. It's what it does with it.

Same as a historical/fantasy game isn't "uninspired" and "nothing new" if it grounds itself in medieval style.

Same here - CP2077 is an established gameworld and putting the game in it is what the title promises. It's so strange to see complaints that a Cyberpunk franchise game looks like Cyberpunk IP. Especially when you see just how beautifully realized it is in IF YOU ACTUALLY PLAY IT.

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