i’ve been playing cyberpunk and it could be summarised by the fact that i’ve played it for 60 hours and have no real Big Thoughts about it.
i guess the closest i have to a Big Thought is that the sex scenes are fucking terrible. they evoke to to me nothing so much as dragon age: origins in their vibe and awkwardness; powerfully unsexy in all cases.
it does the typical rpg romance thing wherein sex represents the completion state of the romance, and the scene i saw was just not very interested in being anything other than ‘look! here’s a boob!’. i can see a boob lots of places; i’m here, cd projekt, because you wrote characters i really liked and was invested in. you could have used this scene to convey intimacy and connection between these characters, but nah just, here’s a boob. the lighting is uninteresting, the camera cuts so abrupt, the generic sex moans SO generic it just conveys nothing, explores nothing of the relationship as it exists either side of it.
the other thing is, if the sex scenes aren’t going to serve a deeper narrative purpose they could at least be fun. there’s no joy, not even a good gag in any of these scenes. the odd thing is cyberpunk feels worse at this than the witcher 3. i’m not going to argue that the witcher 3 is some landmark achievement in the depiction of digital intimacy, but at least it felt like they were having fun when geralt fucked the evil princess whilst floating through clouds.
i wish mainstream video games were less weird about sex (extrapolate this out to popular culture, culture in general as needed). there’s a vast palette of things you can do with a sex scene other than just ‘look! a boob!’ (and i am absolutely not above going ‘nice, a boob’) and it’s weird to play a game so pre-occupied with the depiction of sex that just doesn’t understand that at all. and again, they fail even at the titillation angle just by virtue of the scenes being profoundly ugly and unsexy.
ANYWAY despite its shortcomings, cyberpunk is allowing me to play as a an awful goth biker lesbian with electro whips shooting out of her arms. keanu reeves called her a cunt and i was over the moon. hell yeah she’s a cunt keanu. i love her. she also has the most cutesy uWu xD text convos with her gf and it’s delightful. the contrast of the cornball and the cunt is great narrative design no notes.
i’ve been in the neverwinter nights 2 mines; i’m open to the idea of an expansion being significantly better and more profound than the game it’s attached to, so i’m still looking forward to getting to the expansion, based on what most people’s reaction to it is.