cyberpunk 2077 is actually a really good video game, sorry lads

here's the thing though:

you should buy adios, which costs much less than cyberpunk and has better reviews

That said I did enjoy cyberpunk as a narrative and as a shootybang

one thing that surprises me is how people are like "it's so flat" and my friends who were playing it when I was were describing things it did as being completely different than I was. I played very shotgun heavy, my friends were doing things like gorilla arms and hackerman

I SUSPECT part of the issue for people is that they didn't have double jump, which should be a base part of your kit, as it's essential. You're just flying around like a kinetic hypermonkey and like jumping over people as you shotgun them and dash into someone else, grenade em

I feel like so much discourse is about external things--being mad at fans, getting hyped by clickbait and forum posts, and fundamental misreading of the game (it's entirely anticop, it's very clearly not pro cop) that plenty of people won't cut through that to get to the game

I think very poorly of the directors at the company but the game itself is still an absurdly high bar that few have crossed. It's up there with some of the best gun feel and quest design and writing out there. I watched a vending machine die and I was sad!! A car tried to kill me

I think if you took your favorite game with sidequests and compared its sidequests to Cyberpunk 2077, the latter would have a lot more diverse and interesting sidequests with surprisingly deep writing

it feels like people who are too dumb to be literate didn't play any of these quests and went "hurr u can take jobs from cops so it's a pro cop game" because they're so stupid they don't know how to understand subtext and need a game to just state "cops are bad"

im probably going to make a game where cops are literal pig men and they squeal when you kill them and you blow up a police station and people are still going to demand my characters look into the camera and say "abolish the police"

I should mention I got it on a pc and the only issues I had was like two crashes and some t-posing NPCs and one progression bug fixed by restarting the game that they patched like the first week of launch

open world games is hard ya'll

why didn't you bring this heat you got for cdprojekt red to, say, bethesda and obsidian for new vegas releasing on the ps3 at all, or for rockstar dropping gtav on the xbox 360?

why cyberpunk? what made you turn on them specifically?

"i care about workers" ok where were you when the shit about naughty dog came out? why were some of you SAME guys who told me that you wouldn't support 2077 telling me that the stuff about quantic dream was a 'lie' and later 'we have to buy it to support the workers'?? huh?

why do you gotta buy a bad race metaphor by a guy who sexually harasses his workers and got a nude cgi model of one of his actors made and tell everyone that you're supporting the workers but you flip around and go "well cdpr doesn't deserve my sales!"

where are your standards?

yeah their management sucks but their game has better politics than anything david cage has ever made, and yeah it sucks they said it ran great on platforms it never should've shipped on. and it sucks they lied and said "we won't crunch" and did. All true!!

but how can you be an honest critic of a video game if you can't look at what's there and be completely 100% honest about what you're seeing?

did you know gamers got mad at me for reviewing a game poorly--because it sucked--because some youtuber they liked did some music for it I guess? they'd never played it, they just thought I was lying 'cause they were a fan of some guy who worked on it

Kingdom Come Deliverance is a game so bad my review got canned due to my sheer frustration with it and the game I'm talking about above was _even worse_

what is the work and what is the work doing and what does that mean?

Can't begin to tell you how many games I fell in love with that got shit reviews for being "not worth $60" that I replay every year now

"doc why do you care so much, it's not like you were hyped before it came out and you forgot you even ordered it" I think it's because I see a world where people get away with shaping a narrative around a game based on preconceptions or wish fulfillment

Imagine if people see me as "walking sim guy" because of my last few games and then I make a city builder and they are like "no, here's negative reviews"

This happened when I wrote about games, people would only pay me to write one type of article, praised me for it...

Then they would go "oh we can't hire you, we want someone more well rounded"

It sucks to see people do that, put people in a box and get mad when they get something only they themselves set expectations for

We should be able to say "this sucks and this is good" without going "this is the best thing ever, this is the worst thing ever."

Maybe you like the movie Primer or Upstream Color. Turns out Shane Carruth doxxed his wife during divorce proceedings. Lots of other shit.

I don't think you can say "oh primer is bad because it turns out shane is bad." When you didn't know it, you thought it was good, now you are saying it is bad. The thing itself and its impact on you didn't change. When you do that, you're being dishonest.

I want good criticism and that means a critic needs to look the game in the eyes and go "so much about this game's creation sucks" without then going "this game is pro corporate and pro cop," which is not justified in the text at all

I saw someone trying to say the game was taking an awful stance because they, as a critic, did not bother to research Durkheim, which the interview subject was talking about, and took the idea to mean something else entirely.

Like imagine if I was talking about the cold war and someone tried to make an air conditioning argument, it's that absurd of a stretch, but they had to make that to fit their preexisting thesis that this is bad.

You have to grapple with complexity!! You can't just decide to say "actually this wasn't good or influential and I'm erasing everything about it" because it's emotionally easy for you to think bad people make bad things and good people make good things.

I say this because creatively I'm obsessed with these contradictions. I made a game about a man who had to lie to his son to save his life and chose to enable evil out of love. It's a difficult thing! But to me this complexity is fascinating.

When we try to reduce this to simplicity, good and like are the same, bad and dislike are the same, we can never be honest and we should always be honest

Because here's the thing. Those people I mentioned, the ones who said Detroit was good? They ignored the evil done by management to do that. They let their like of something justify someone else's bullshit. We have to separate this.

We have to accept that we liked things made by bad people, even when that sucks. And we have to accept that things we don't like might actually be good. Long time ago, someone lied to me about someone else so I didn't like her work even though it was good.

So I was like "oh this is shit" and I ended up being completely _wrong_ about that; the game was excellent, the people behind it were excellent, I was lied to by a sociopath.

I am trying to give you as many examples as I can, but do you get the point? When you don't evaluate the text, but instead are dishonest about the text because of external circumstances, how can anyone ever learn anything? How can we grow and improve artistically?

Be honest, no matter what, in all things.

Just don't be a dick about it

one of the worst critics i ever read tried to crib my style (someone got mad at me for writing my 'worst piece' before realizing i was not the author, it was that close) and wrote a piece that started off "this jump is bad" but ultimately was trying to rewrite history

the piece was like "should th is game REALLY get praised?" but had nothing of any substance to say except "one jump is kind of hard," and then went into a tirade about the genuinely awful (no argument from me) creator who has since done homophobic things (because he sucks)

lol i typoed the name of a guy. Rob Cohen should be in jail, so despite him launching the fast and the furious franchise, that's not gonna stop me from enjoying Fast Five.

tl;dr don't rewrite history or attempt to criticize a game because external circumstances make it good; criticize the external circumstances, absolutely. focus on that! but always be honest in the feedback about the work so everybody can LEARN somethin

i didn't play a game a lot of people love for years 'cause someone lied to me about it; it's now one of my favorite games. how fucked up is that?