#cdprojekt red

[chericardium]

lucky propaganda

bar owner/tender and fixer at ur service 💕

[leam1983]

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners - Quickie

There's something to the tone of this CD Projekt RED-produced and Studio TRIGGER-developed offshoot of a troubled AAA game that's an even better representation of the original Cyberpunk 2020 tone than V's own adventures could ever hope to be.

The first five episodes are tone-setters, and the last five are stake-builders, to the point where you don't really need to have played Cyberpunk 2077 to be able to follow along. The format may be a bit disorienting, as characters frequently exchange plot details through visually-projected conference calls (similar to 2077's, minus the animated vignettes), but it at least has the merit of laying everything out clearly. You're effectively infodumped, but provided you can keep up, the pace quickly ends up feeling natural.

What absolutely is going to be a bit odd to some is the weird juxtaposition of Mike Pondsmith's Glasgow Smile-sporting rendition of terminal Capitalism, rendered as is the case in-game with a generous dose of Californian umber tones and plenty of pink neon framing; and character designs and movement studies that are, well, effectively ripped out of Kill La Kill or Gurren Lagann. Car chases that would normally be rendered in teeth-clenching seriousness either in the game or in the pen-and-paper system here turn into automotive ping-pong, with the Anime's designers playing extremely fast and delightfully loose with the various guns' power levels.

That's without mentioning the final piece of ordnance the final two episodes introduce, which sort of rips a chuckle out of you. There is definitely a point where the script for the miniseries turns into loose bylines that basically say "do whatever the Hell you want with these characters, Pondsmith's usually-prescribed tone suggests nobody's going to make it out alive, anyway."

Not that everyone actually dies, but it's clear that TRIGGER thought that past a certain point, they were free to more or less grab the characters like a child does random action figures and then smash them together while making Mouth Explosion noises. That might seem like a bad thing, but in-context; it's absolutely fine.

So, what's the plot? Well, we open to the dreary routine of one David Martinez, seventeen years old, enrolled in Arasaka Corporation's private academy. His mother is the Santo Domingo Salt-of-the-Earth type, a Night City Medical paramedic who didn't quite make the cut for Trauma Team but who's working shift after shift in order to cover her son's exorbitant tuition and equipment-related fees. Martinez himself is the type to play it fast and loose with his program's requirements, mostly to save his mom a buck or two. It works for a while, but a mixture of his own hubris and of the academy's festering elitism sees him kicked out. Before long, you're shown that even washing machine cycles running on private laundry setups are paid-for, and that Megabuildings are mostly a place for people to squat in, as opposed to thriving in.

As you can expect, Karma deals the Martinezes an excessively crummy hand, and David soon finds himself alone. Not only alone, but also expelled from school, denied housing - and with no obvious employment opportunities. None, that is, except Edgerunning.

As a term, Edgerunning's always struck me as, well, being needlessly edgy, at the risk of feeling facile. What Pondsmith's referring to is a string of high-risk, high-reward criminal entreprises, within the scope of which a brush with death is a constant possibility. Traditionally, anyone who runs a Cyberpunk pen-and-paper campaign has to provide that extreme sense of tension, something you'd find in Dungeons & Dragons if you over-leveled your mobs or that's inherent to more masochistic game systems along the lines of Zweihander. A Cyberpunk should, canonically, always be on the run from someone, running towards something, and be led along a high-stakes tale that's less about crushing the System, and more about setting the stage so you can die trying.

In that respect, the Anime's work is flawless. What starts as Transhuman pickpocketing gigs devolves into a series of individually-small mistakes, said mishaps setting the stage for a proper settling of Cyberpsychosis as a concept. TRIGGER's tone goes from the usual bursts of jovial eccentricity you know them for and then takes a hard-left into personal trauma and all-consuming drives - and of what happens when your ambitions ultimately consume you. I'm especially surprised by the visual tells they've designed for Cyberpsychos, typically beginning as eerily fluid eye-jitters in the middle of the usual expanse of TV-grade low-FPS rendering, and then devolving into blink-and-you'll-miss-it stylistic changes and warped proportions that really sell the notion of what a proper case of psychosis is - which is a variably clean break from reality.

The pacing, however, is all over the place. The first episodes feel lovingly crafted, comfortably stretching out to let the source material breathe, while the second half spiders off into a handful of side-plots that don't all consistently lead somewhere. Some characters disappear without much fanfare and appear without much more consideration. All that's missing is one of YouTube's signature comedians known for their loud and random insertions to barge in and yell "ELLIPSIS!" during a scene change.

"ELLIPSIS! DAVID IS SHREDDED NOW, DON'T ASK QUESTIONS! ELLIPSIS! THEY HAVE A FIXER NOW, AND GIANCARLO ESPOSITO IS HAMMING IT UP FOR A PAYCHECK! ELLIPSIS! MARTINEZ IS HAVING MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES!"

On the plus-side, one of these weird jump-cuts is a rather obvious callback to the game's notorious bugginess upon release, with Martinez phasing through an oncoming car just before a sudden and jarringly hilarious four-lane car T-Bone-a-ganza occurs and sends Night City's big and chunky Chevillons flying across the screens like pool balls bouncing around.

The series acts like the viewer's just going to pick things up as they go without much lag, and expects them to pick up on concepts mentioned once and never properly framed. That leads to a situation where the preferrable watching experience is Ye Olde Netflix Binge Watch, seeing as everything can remain consistently fresh. If you watch one episode per day or week, you might find yourself asking "Who's that guy again? Why does he have four eyes? Why the Hell is Arasaka Counterintel getting involved, again? Why do people repeat words all the time?"

There's a missable bit in 2077's prologue where, after being poked about his spotless Innocent Schoolboy impersonation, Jackie Welles half-jokingly and half-defensively replies "I'm always never not nice!" That last sentence's concept - inverting values to sort of elongate a structure - becomes oddly prevalent after Episode 6, as if it had been elected as part of the lingo at the same level as preem, choom, nova and so on. It's cute the first few times, but soon becomes annoying.

Otherwise, if you've gone through multiple playthroughs of 2077 like I have, you'll realize that a lot of the Anime's set designs are faithful renditions of certain early-game locations. It's fun, but you'd figure not every Megabuilding apartment has to look exactly like V's, and that not every Scavenger den has to look like where we're tasked to save Sandra Dorsett. It's less of a problem as the series opens up, but the early episodes do feel like the producers had a field day referencing in-engine stills.

So, is it max nova, or should you ghost on it? Well, choombhatta; I'd say it depends. If you're expecting true-blue CD Projekt RED grit, you'll be left scratching your head. If you wondered what Night City would look like if the highs were so high as to turn cartoony, and so low as to make V's own sojourn feel sobering in contrast, you'll get some sense of it here.

[where-is-my-mind-tho]

Johnny Silverhand is a M I L L E N N I A L

[unpopularly-opinionated]

People keep complaining about the AI in CP2077 and I genuinely don’t know what game y’all are playing because the AI is not that bad. The only “bad” part is the police wanted system because the police literally spawn into existence on top of you no matter where you are which is a little ridiculous. Beyond that small detail, the AI is fine. It’s not award-winning, sure, but it’s far far from terrible like people are claiming.

I legitimately don’t understand where this criticism is coming from. This just feels like one of those unrealistic expectations people had for the game that they believe isn’t being met. It wasn’t as if CDPR was going to be the first in the world to develop true AI all for a video game lmao.

[bloodstonegoth]

Imagine any other company trying to pull this off.

They’re really out there making themselves a second generation of Nintendrones, getting applauded for absolute non-achievements, while being generally detested in the Polish industry for their awful working conditions.

[frankalmeida]

V from Cyberpunk 2077

[omnigeekempire]

CD Projekt Red's Lead Quest Designer Paweł Sasko Explains What Happened With Cyberpunk 2077

CD Projekt Red’s Lead Quest Designer Paweł Sasko Explains What Happened With Cyberpunk 2077

CyberPunk 2077 set an expectation that it did not deliver, we can all agree on that! It was an ambitious game that was bound to face obstacles along the way, however, regardless of that fact, the fact of the matter is when the consumers received their copy of the game, it was not finished. Paweł Sasko, CD Projekt Red’s lead quest designer decided to explain what happened with Cyberpunk 2077 AND…

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[lemmonhead67]

CYBERPUNK 2077 APOLOGY - IS IT GOOD ENOUGH? - Game Chat