#cdrp

I've found it really hard to find a customer review from someone who hasn't welded their self-worth to the review score of this product, so I'm here to try and fill that gap and rupture the spleens of a few deeply unhealthy people who really need to log off. 

First, let's be clear - as a product, Cyberpunk 2077 is in no way mechanically 'ground-breaking'. From top-to-bottom, the systems, setting, and gameplay are all well-worn within the RPG and FPS genres. Driving, shooting, stealth, crafting, weapon upgrading...it's all been done before, and in many cases it's been done better. The game doesn't even adapt its source material particularly well - the original Cyberpunk was a critique of capitalism, oppression, racism, and corporate domination; Cyberpunk 2077 is translated by a company that has openly placed itself on the wrong side of several of those issues in its recent history. It shouldn't be a surprise that their interpretation of such a property eliminates its subtext, nuance, and meaningfulness in favour of simple and staid mechanical tropes in an edgy neon slum world.

What I'm saying is that Cyberpunk 2077 is not a ‘next-gen’ experience, nor is it even the best example of what this generation of video games has to offer. Ironically, it’s surpassed in that aspect (in my mind, at least) by the game that inspired much of this game’s pre-release hype: The Witcher 3. The Witcher 3 was an example of existing trends polished to their apex. It is a high water mark of its genre. But even putting the bugs, glitches, and outright broken versions aside, Cyberpunk 2077 is not a paragon of anything. Its features are, in many instances, a lesser copy of long established features in other releases.

It looks good, in certain instances. But the most impressive visual moments will tank the performance of hardware even one year old, and you simply will not be able to run it at acceptable framerates without some kind of resolution downscaling on most systems. In many other instances, the lighting and shadowing is buggy, the textures are blurry at various distances from the aforementioned downscaling, and the character animations are often janky, making an expensive and meticulously designed world that largely cannot be interacted with feel that bit more fake. And, as always, it's on these small details that the immersion rests. So it's almost funny that CDPR spent so much money and went to so much effort trying to make the game melt your PC when that effort is frequently undone by a character whose neck bends the wrong way while he's talking to you.

The world is big and pretty, but it's filled with bullet-sponge enemies that just stand there and trade fire, vendors you can't talk to, shopfronts you can't buy from, objects you can't interact with, and NPCs that flee screaming in terror when you knock over a garbage bin. The story is almost incomprehensible, and the dialogue is edgy, performative technobabble that far too frequently loses the point of what its trying to say as the weight of all the characters' manufactured quirks pile down on top of it. The HUD is overcrowded and will hurl text and video at you that are hard to concentrate on amongst the busy and bustling visual environment. And this is kind of the way the whole game goes. There isn't really a system, visual, or gameplay element that isn't either flawed, derivative, or just not as game-changing as you were expecting.

And obviously those expectations were absurd in the first place, but sadly the poisonous community of people who have inexplicably tied their own sense of self and well-being to the critical opinion of an entertainment product made by a company they're in no-way associated with have made it near impossible to find a reaction that isn't saturated with some kind of anger at either the developers for swindling them, or the audience for daring to speak about their experience.

At the end of the day, it's just a video game. A bombastic, costly piece of entertainment software, who's reach exceeds its grasp. Maybe, one day, it might be greater than the sum of its parts, but given the rushed state it released in, the fact that the company spokespeople lied about the game's quality and embargoed reviews so consumers wouldn't find out, crunched its employees for a release date the game wasn't even ready for, and generally conducted themselves duplicitously and arrogantly, will they ever really deserve to be congratulated? Not for this product. Once again, Cyberpunk is trumped by games that released in a worse state and will likely end up in a better one than this, and I wonder if it will be simply be remembered as another example of the industry’s hubris - a product with lofty ambitions but little innovation produced under duress by a company with too much power and not enough sense.

Meet Iorveth, the elf famous for gambling away his “lucky spearhead”... Well, he can´t help doing it.

As you see, he picked him(s)elf as the leader card, because seriously, Francesca Findabair might have pointed ears, but for sure she is not the leader of the Scoia´tael. They died for the Valley of Flowers in vain... yes, you know the drivel.

The Trouble with the TPP, Day 16: Intervening in Internet Governance

The Trouble with the TPP series explores Internet-related issues this week, starting with the surprising inclusion of Internet governance in a trade deal. The debate over Internet governance for much of the past decade has often come down to a battle between ICANN and the ITU (a UN body), which in turn is characterized as a choice between a private-sector led, bottoms-up, consensus model (ICANN)…