Current Events > Polygon gives Cyberpunk 2077 a negative review.

(+) Yeah! (+)

Phynaster posted...

This board is such fucking trash.

you should run away and never come back!
that'll show em!

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Darmik posted...

The issue according to the Gamespot review is you have ads with trans fetishism but nothing in the world that backs it up. Which seems like a valid criticism?

The reviewer acknowledges that there are cis characters that are sexualized in ads as well. Their complaint is they say that there aren't enough openly trans characters in the narrative and that somehow this makes this character appearing in an ad exceptionally problematic. I disagree with the notion that a sexualized character automatically means that a game is fetishizing something, especially when said character is not treated any differently than any other character that is sexualized in the game ads.

Ubiquitous throughout Night City are ads for a beverage called Chromanticure that feature a female-coded model with a penis visible through her skintight clothing, making it clear that in Cyberpunk 2077, trans bodies are objectified and commodified. Some cis bodies are, too, of course, but the crucial difference is that, as V, we constantly meet, interact with, and form relationships with cis characters who have far more dimension than the surface of any sexualized image on a billboard. The same cant be said of trans characters. Even if you opt to play as a trans V, shes not particularly well-defined. The game is about what you see through her eyes and what she goes through, not about who she is as a person.

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Temporal posted...

>polygon

edit: literally written by Carylon Petit aka GTA V was politically incorrect so i deducted a point

figures they'd give a transwoman the game to review lmao

I knew that name sounded familiar. Petit was on of the people on Anita's Feminist Frequency thing
https://i.imgur.com/MJY07Ks.jpg
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I'm all for racial representation, but the population of transgender is so minuscule. I don't think it would be even 0.0001%. The definition of a vocal minority.

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BadKarma_JT posted...

I'm all for racial representation, but the population of transgender is so minuscule. I don't think it would be even 0.0001%. The definition of a vocal minority.

0.6% Try again.

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Phynaster posted...

0.6% Try again.

No fucking way it's that high.

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Phynaster posted...

0.6% Try again.

Big if true

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3PiesAndAFork posted...

No fucking way it's that high.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/health/transgender-population.html
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s0nicfan posted...

The reviewer acknowledges that there are cis characters that are sexualized in ads as well. Their complaint is they say that there aren't enough openly trans characters in the narrative and that somehow this makes this character appearing in an ad exceptionally problematic. I disagree with the notion that a sexualized character automatically means that a game is fetishizing something, especially when said character is not treated any differently than any other character that is sexualized in the game ads.

In a world where there's a woman with a penis is marketing beverages wouldn't that sort of thing be pretty easy to find or encounter in person? Don't you think there's a bit of a discrepancy there? If that sort of thing is mainstream enough to be used for advertisements it would surely be an attractive thing for people and something the player should encounter in their journey? If not why does the ad make sense in that world?

The issue with cis characters doesn't exist because you do indeed encounter characters like that in the game so the discrepancy still exists. The lore of the world has to still match what you're interacting with otherwise it's shallow shock value.

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Phynaster posted...

0.6% Try again.

Wow honestly thought it would be smaller. Still, personally it doesn't seem smart for a developer to focus so much resources into something that would affect less than 1% of the population.

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>GameFAQs user reads Polygon knowing what they will find with the intent to get outraged

>GameFAQs user is outraged
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BadKarma_JT posted...

Wow honestly thought it would be smaller. Still, personally it doesn't seem smart for a developer to focus so much resources into something that would affect less than 1% of the population.

So there should never be trans characters in video games unless they're like 20% of the population?

CaptainMarvel95 posted...

So there should never be trans characters in video games unless they're like 20% of the population?

But there is a trans character in Cyberpunk and the option to be a trans character.

Polygon is saying it's not enough or good enough...

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What if the next Mario game had Luigi trans to female

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I mean here's the thing. I love Witcher 3. CDPR has a lot of goodwill from me but they did things that the author (a transperson) found to be offensive. Do I agree with the criticisms? Some yeah, some not so much, but you have to realize that different worldviews exist. Keep your cool.

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Darmik posted...

In a world where there's a woman with a penis is marketing beverages wouldn't that sort of thing be pretty easy to find or encounter in person? Don't you think there's a bit of a discrepancy there? If that sort of thing is mainstream enough to be used for advertisements it would surely be an attractive thing for people and something the player should encounter in their journey? If not why does the ad make sense in that world?

The issue with cis characters doesn't exist because you do indeed encounter characters like that in the game so the discrepancy still exists. The lore of the world has to still match what you're interacting with otherwise it's shallow shock value.

It could be, but the author only complains that the game doesn't billboard trans characters enough to make it obvious when you're talking to one. See below:

In my 40-plus hours in Night City, I never met a single character of any significance whom the game made clear was trans, and one of the only queer-coded characters I encountered was an extremely unsavory cybernetic surgeon who does extremely unsavory things. I did spot a trans flag on one characters vehicle, though that hardly counts as positive trans representation and doesnt even necessarily mean the character is trans. It felt more like a way for Cyberpunk 2077s creators to say they had included positive trans representation without actually putting thought into it or making trans people a visible part of the makeup of Night City.

So it's possible the city has plenty of trans characters if you go around and pay attention, but because a major npc doesn't explicitly say "hi I'm a trans person" the author just kind of assumes that the representation doesn't exist.

Like, in 40 hours if they interacted with dozens or hundreds of NPCs how did they go about determining which ones were and weren't trans? because if you're talking consistency in world building, in a future where you can just replace your genitals with cybernetics why are we assuming that it's obvious who is and isn't trans? Wouldn't it make more sense that people didn't bring up their orientation at all because it stopped being a big deal when you could plug and play whatever you want it?

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FlameTurtle posted...

Remember when Gamers were desperate to have games classified as art?

Lol then they couldn't handle having them criticized as art.

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The Trent posted...

What if the next Mario game had Luigi trans to female

Mario already has Birdo, Yoshi, and Vivian.

Questionmarktarius posted...

Mario already has Birdo, Yoshi, and Vivian.

And Peach.
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Hey, you know I get it. And I think representation 100% matters and I think trans people should be represented more because they're obviously a lot of trans gamers but

In my 40-plus hours in Night City, I never met a single character of any significance whom the game made clear was trans, and one of the only queer-coded characters I encountered was an extremely unsavory cybernetic surgeon who does extremely unsavory things. I did spot a trans flag on one characters vehicle, though that hardly counts as positive trans representation and doesnt even necessarily mean the character is trans. It felt more like a way for Cyberpunk 2077s creators to say they had included positive trans representation without actually putting thought into it or making trans people a visible part of the makeup of Night City.

I think this is stupid. I think it's better to have trans characters and not make them being trans the focal point of their character. Recently, Queen's Gambit had a trans actress playing a character without mentioning once that the character (or really the actress) is trans and I think that in and of itself is positive representation.
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s0nicfan posted...

It could be, but the author only complains that the game doesn't billboard trans characters enough to make it obvious when you're talking to one. See below:

So it's possible the city has plenty of trans characters if you go around and pay attention, but because a major npc doesn't explicitly say "hi I'm a trans person" the author just kind of assumes that the representation doesn't exist.

Like, in 40 hours if they interacted with dozens or hundreds of NPCs how did they go about determining which ones were and weren't trans? because if you're talking consistency in world building, in a future where you can just replace your genitals with cybernetics why are we assuming that it's obvious who is and isn't trans? Wouldn't it make more sense that people didn't bring up their orientation at all because it stopped being a big deal when you could plug and play whatever you want it?

The game has one night stands and hook ups that the reviewer went for. So I'm sure it would come up there. The game seems to have a lot of seedy night clubs and bars. There's plenty of places for it to come up. You aren't playing as some guy who works a 9-5 job. Strippers having bulges in their pants should probably be a common occurrence if that ad is any indication.

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Balnazarr posted...

So basically the game should be mindless action and reviewers should not comment or critique the games gross mishandlings of trans issues? Fuck off. People have legimate concerns about the way the game handles trans issues and looks like we were right. But, hey, cool cyberpunk stuff yay!

Lol, this post is hitting me with a strong Poes Law effect.

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I'm very excited about the game but yeah that's a fuck up by cdpr. If anything a cyberpunk future should be genderless. I had some hopes to be able to play a character that felt like me as a non binary person, in some ways I'll be able to do that but it feels very backwards

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Darmik posted...

The game has one night stands and hook ups that the reviewer went for. So I'm sure it would come up there. The game seems to have a lot of seedy night clubs and bars. There's plenty of places for it to come up. You aren't playing as some guy who works a 9-5 job.

But this is what I mean. The author isn't saying they didn't find trans characters at all. They're saying they didn't find any "of significance" that "the game made clear was trans". Does that mean there weren't any trans characters in the night clubs and bars? Or does that mean there were, but they weren't a main story NPC?

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Romulox28 posted...

the reviewer doesnt even start to describe the actual game until the 8th paragraph, the first 7 paragraphs are all the reviewer complaining about the gender politics of the game because of her own insecurities lol

It's like if ben shapiro was writing a parody of a woke game review.

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I'd feel so relieved if I were a JRPG dev right now with my prebuilt characters and stories, unexpected to create a development nightmare expression zone for my players that only tends to end up with your player character(s) almost having no actual personality in the game other than visual style and decision trees.

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ghostblob posted...

I'm very excited about the game but yeah that's a fuck up by cdpr. If anything a cyberpunk future should be genderless. I had some hopes to be able to play a character that felt like me as a non binary person, in some ways I'll be able to do that but it feels very backwards

It is. For context, here's what the lead concept artist on the game had to say:
https://thenextweb.com/gaming/2019/08/27/cyberpunk-2077s-character-creation-system-wont-have-gender-options/

Of course, if you tackle certain subjects then you will expect people to have an opinion about it and we respect that. And its good that people give us feedback. And our character creation menu, for instance, compared to the last demo we now give you so many more options. For instance, you dont choose your gender anymore.

You dont choose, I want to be a female or male character you now choose a body type. Because we want you to feel free to create any character you want. So you choose your body type and we have two voices, one thats male sounding, one is female sounding. You can mix and match. You can just connect them any way you want. And then we have a lot of extra skin tones and tattoos and hairstyles. So we really want to give people the freedom to make their own character and play the way they want to play.

The underlying complaint (other than quantity) stems from the fact that the game has NPCs use "he" or "she" in voiced dialogue based on which voice type you pick, because other than making literally all dialogue gender neutral (or recording a dozen versions of each line) they had to have some way for the NPCs to know which word to use. They just picked one that upset people. Which is ironic, because if they had just kept in the male/female choice at the beginning than the pronouns would line up and this whole controversy could have been totally avoided.


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s0nicfan posted...

Real talk: the game is months delayed and supposedly riddled with bugs. At what point, and how much effort, are they supposed to divert from fixing core gameplay issues to fix a minor cosmetic issue that was only added in the first place because people complained about them having a male female binary choice at the beginning?

Like, I'm all for suggesting that they put in a patch later, but in the grand scheme of the work that has to get done and with consideration for the fact that they are already delayed and already working nights and weekends, where was that effort going to come from?

Sure, but they already made a way to flag what pronouns to use. Doesn't seem like it would be that much work to let you manually set that flag (I say with 0 idea of coding) and given their poor history with trans matters, seems like an obvious thing to do to get some good PR. As you say though, likely just hundreds of other things they had to work on with just how bug riddled it is but I don't think they deserve the leeway to say "oh, they just had other things to do first" yet. Priority or not compared to other things, good to keep it in awareness so they do make the change, or just show they haven't really progressed.

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Funkydog posted...

Sure, but they already made a way to flag what pronouns to use. Doesn't seem like it would be that much work to let you manually set that flag (I say with 0 idea of coding) and given their poor history with trans matters, seems like an obvious thing to do to get some good PR. As you say though, likely just hundreds of other things they had to work on with just how bug riddled it is but I don't think they deserve the leeway to say "oh, they just had other things to do first" yet. Priority or not compared to other things, good to keep it in awareness so they do make the change, or just show they haven't really progressed.

They could have literally left in the male/female choice at the beginning and it would have avoided this whole controversy. The only reason this is even an issue is because they removed the flag you're suggesting they add back in specifically in response to complaints that the flag was in the game to begin with.

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She pretty much hammers on it cause the game didnt go FAR ENOUGH with the politics she identifies with. Shes entitled to dislike the game based on that, but saying it is good or bad because of it is silly. Next thing we know the hivemind behind her twitter account will take her words as those of a prophet and spread her gospel until some decide to boycott the game.

I thought I was a SJW...but this too fucking much.

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s0nicfan posted...

They could have literally left in the male/female choice at the beginning and it would have avoided this whole controversy. The only reason this is even an issue is because they removed the flag you're suggesting they add back in specifically in response to complaints that the flag was in the game to begin with.

They had a separate option to choose how you were referred to originally?

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Spooking posted...

This is what CPR gets for trying to cater to an audience that is looking for any reason to hate.

Right? If you're a transwoman then I assume you would choose woman as gender.... isnt that the whole reason they're transitioning?

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s0nicfan posted...

But this is what I mean. The author isn't saying they didn't find trans characters at all. They're saying they didn't find any "of significance" that "the game made clear was trans". Does that mean there weren't any trans characters in the night clubs and bars? Or does that mean there were, but they weren't a main story NPC?

It means in the 40 hours of the game they played that they only had one meaningful encounter with a trans character.

Pretty sure both the Polygon and Gamespot review made similar observations. I haven't played the game yet but I don't think it's wise to dismiss the criticisms by assuming they've missed something. Especially because you haven't played the game.

Not saying you have to care about it but it's not really good to just assume they're wrong for no real reason.

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Spooking posted...

This is what CPR gets for trying to cater to an audience that is looking for any reason to hate.

Cyberpunk the genre has always been progressive and political, it's understandable to expect inclusion and tact

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JuanCarlos1 posted...

Right? If you're a transwoman then I assume you would choose woman as gender.... isnt that the whole reason they're transitioning?

I think the point is for people who have yet to transition, or don't have a "standard" sounding voice for their gender.

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Drunk Cobra posted...

Lol then they couldn't handle having them criticized as art.

Yeah, just completely unable to handle any amount of analysis or critique

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Really the obvious solution is to just have a pronoun choice of he/she/they regardless of everything else but I don't think they really had any intention to have V be some gender fluid character and this aspect of the game was never meant to be anything important. Which is why the criticism has always existed.

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FlameTurtle posted...

Yeah, just completely unable to handle any amount of analysis or critique

A lot of gamers actually don't want games to be art anymore since they found out that art has a left leaning bias.

s0nicfan posted...

No, the deliberate choice they made at design time was to just let you pick male or female. It wasn't until relatively recently that people complained that they weren't being inclusive enough, so they had to retroactively change character creation. That created a new problem, though, because of all the spoken dialogue. They needed to find a way to let NPCs know how to address you, but the option that used to do that was removed. Since NPC's don't automatically know what kind of junk you have, they picked voice as the way to do it. Obviously that wasn't a perfect solution, but it was never part of their original design to begin with.

Edit: for context, here's what the lead concept artist on the game had to say
https://thenextweb.com/gaming/2019/08/27/cyberpunk-2077s-character-creation-system-wont-have-gender-options/

But that's not a coding issue. A coding issue is like Assassin's Creed Odyssey, where when you pick Alexios as the playable character it sometimes pulls the audio files for Kassandra saying the line instead of Alexios, which doesn't happen in reverse (ie. when playing as Kassandra, it won't pull Alexios' audio files).

They could have added a "pronoun" option while they were changing everything else, but chose not to. That is a design choice.
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CaptainMarvel95 posted...

A lot of gamers actually don't want games to be art anymore since they found out that art has a left leaning bias.

Right, it isn't because the vast vast VAST majority of games that focus on being art more than games suck ass.

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Altright Cyberpunk 2077

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oh no there's not trans people everywhere what a terrible game

KillerSlaw posted...

Right, it isn't because the vast vast VAST majority of games that focus on being art more than games suck ass.

That's not how art works.
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Is "not enough trans people" going to be the new "too much water"?

Bio1590 posted...

But that's not a coding issue. A coding issue is like Assassin's Creed Odyssey, where when you pick Alexios as the playable character it sometimes pulls the audio files for Kassandra saying the line instead of Alexios, which doesn't happen in reverse (ie. when playing as Kassandra, it won't pull Alexios' audio files).

They could have added a "pronoun" option while they were changing everything else, but chose not to. That is a design choice.

They HAD THAT when you picked male or female, which they removed because of explicit criticism from people who are now complaining that they game didn't add a specific way to choose how people address you. Do you not see how insane that is?

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s0nicfan posted...

They HAD THAT when you picked male or female, which they removed because of explicit criticism from people who are now complaining that they game didn't add a specific way to choose how people address you. Do you not see how insane that is?

They had an option to choose how people addressed you, so people complained they had no way to choose how people address you?

Was this "male or female" choice separate from the usual way it's done with looking like the associated gender? (I genuinely don't know) as if it was its own flag then it seems odd they would complain about it.

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Polygon and Kotaku are blacklisted for me. I never click on their sites.

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Polygon can eat shit

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Funkydog posted...

They had an option to choose how people addressed you, so people complained they had no way to choose how people address you?

Was this "male or female" choice separate from the usual way it's done with looking like the associated gender? (I genuinely don't know) as if it was its own flag then it seems odd they would complain about it.

They complained that "male" and "female" wasn't sufficiently representative of nonbinary people, so in direct response they actually bothered to go back and remove it from the character creator and replace it with a "body style" option.

Here's a video of the original character creator (no idea if this youtuber is known for drama, it's just the first video that came up). Notice that on the second page (after you pick your sex) your character bio ALSO lets you pick gender.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pob7legNEYQ

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