So I’m treating this like a warm-up. The holidays have come and gone and I’m on my last week of vacation before starting my usual Developer grind. One would think with all this time, I got a ton of writing done, right?
Wrong, but I won’t say I was unproductive.
Throughout my vacation, I played through the main storyline of ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ (don’t worry, this is spoiler free). It’s not a perfect game with the bugs and missing content (I’ve read articles on how incomplete it feels and I have to agree on this). But I’m rooting for the devs to pull through the bug fixes and adding in more to make it more like the vision it promised to be.
What I did absolutely love about it were three things:
- All of the wonderful nods and influences that defined the cyberpunk genre. Sure there are easter eggs from Akira and Blade Runner. But the overall mood and theme that makes the genre so wonderful seeped through my play experience while venturing Night City: holographic images that glow in the night; never-ending rain with the sounds of bustling street life, where so many languages were echoing throughout and somehow everyone lives in this disgruntled harmony; the potential dangers of human beings surviving with so little to have despite so much ‘advanced’ technology society has achieved. It also touched on the questions and thought-provoking aspects the genre touches that are made to make you think. Despite some of the release fumbles I can see that there, deep in the dark net of ideal, there was a love letter to the growing cyberpunk genre.
- The story and world-building behind Night City. I love running tabletop RPG’s and creating home-brew worlds to run my creative bug, but I also love taking other built worlds that many people know and building more from that. Within the main storyline, you go through this paper trail of events and people that exist beyond through Mike Pondsmith’s RPG material timeline. And what CD Projekt Red (CDPR) does so well is doing their homework on the source and then using that to tie it into their own storyline; your introduced to characters, stories, rumors, second-hand knowledge and more are call-backs to Cyberpunk 2013 or 2020 modules and written works.
- The narration. While I strongly prefer third-person limited narrative, I feel like I gained a further solid example of using first-person story-telling. I do have my fair share of criticisms (i.e. driving in first person. I felt like hopping into a car as a child and forgot my booster donut), but it gave me some insight on how a story is told through a person’s own perspective (and sometimes mistakes). This wasn’t necessarily ground breaking since I’ve played other RPG’s like Fallout and Skyrim with first-person perspectives. But what hit it home was the interactions with other characters. Development of relationships through someone other than myself felt more alive and human than the aforementioned have. And to me, the natural flow of person to person development in story telling is a must have for me.
I’m fairly certain that there are other things that are worthy of more attention along with criticisms. My attention to coming back here to write has been recouping the burnout from my daytime job. I’ve had long talks before with my wife on running through the guilt of consuming instead of producing. However, we all know that is necessary for creatives. We are not machines running on content-producing autopilot. We do not have augmentations to never sleep, or eat, or take a moment to breathe. We do need time to look into the clouds and let our imaginations play through. And sometimes when that is a struggle, we always have a guiding hand of someone else’s story to experience.
Be well. I hope to have another post before the end of 2020.