a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
kleinbl00  ·  2331 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: November 29, 2017

Trailers are easy. gameplay is hard. Watching that was like observing the Stations of the Cross:

First we stand at the Shrine of Zhora.

Then we bow before the Ghost in the Shell Geisha.

We nod in passing to Molly from Neuromancer.

Then we prostrate ourselves before Judge Dredd.

It's what ultimately doomed cyberpunk - the early works were about the uneasy assimilation of technology by the fringe and what it would do to society. It became about the fashion; Outland is every bit the Western High Noon was, despite the fact that it's set on one of Saturn's moons.

There already is a cyberpunk video game. It's called Mirror's Edge. And just like the early cyberpunk, it was necessary to adapt to different mechanics in order to make the gameplay interesting. It's what ultimately doomed the Matrix series to the dustbin of history; they plumbed all the tropes of cyberpunk but wrapped them around a garden-variety messiah narrative in order to make it accessible to the general public but that easily-accessible messiah narrative is boring and the cyberpunk tropes are no longer fresh.

Roy Batty is a toddler now.