Eyes-On: Cyberpunk 2077 will prove that cyberpunk isn’t dead

When I look at the world around me, and then back at a lot of my favorite fiction – Blade Runner, Neuromancer, Shadowrun – it feels like the whole cyberpunk genre is a thing of the past. After seeing CD Projekt’s Red’s Cyberpunk 2077, it feels like maybe one of my favorite genres is more current than ever.

Sure, the United States isn’t formally broken up into separate nations, but it’s definitely more divided than it’s been in a long time. Meanwhile, our relationship with big corporations is changing rapidly; they know more about us than ever, and it’s harder and harder to extricate ourselves from our connections to them. These companies have power to determine our access to wealth and basic necessities more than they ever have, and it’s harder than ever to decide for ourselves where we spend that money as they buy up smaller companies and profit off them from out of sight.

Cyberpunk 2077 imagines a world where we might have the power to take some of that agency back.

CD Projekt’s futuristic adventure splits off from its previous games, the Witcher series, in a bunch of ways, but it all feels like we’re on the way to a game that makes good on the promises the company’s name implies at this point.

Cyberpunk 2077‘s Night City is a huge place run by megacorporations, where healthcare is a private subscription service. Advertising is almost impossible to avoid. It feels like a plausible future for our world, sixty years out, even if it relies on some assumptions from the original Cyberpunk 2020 pen-and-paper game (print newspapers in 2077? Really?).

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2018/06/18/eyes-on-cyberpunk-2077-preview/