Sure, it seems to have hints of William Gibson's vision of a chrome future. Being in Japan and other countries with their neon signs, it inspired him to write his novels.

But when I play (yes, I bought the game) Cyberpunk 2077, you know in the part where V uses the headset to dive into "the net", it's a complete and total rip-off of the show Caprica when they used their headsets also to dive into the VR world of New Caprica.

That is just one gripe I have. I love this game. But this has taken from so many elements from other stories and shows, I fail to find it's uniqueness.

Oh, the scene early on where you have to go rescue that woman who has Platinum protection. The music they're playing in that apartment? Totally industrial. A thing from the 80's (and a music genre I personally love). Taken that Gibson had envisioned his future in the 80's, I suppose it's not surprising.

But. Has anyone actually died from connecting to the internet? The idea that one would connect their link to a computer to go onto the internet, and that you could literally be killed through that connection is preposterous.

I love sci-fi like anyone (but hate Star Trek, it's too ridiculous even for science fiction), but really, I fail to see how Cyberpunk really stands on its own. It takes from so many other elements, I fail to find anything that I would consider a real futuristic possibility, or anything authentic in its own right. I might as well just watch Blade Runner or read (again) Neuromancer if I want a cyberpunk fix.

Any thoughts?

My thoughts on the music. Trends come and go, and loop back around again.

You don't have to prove what you are saying. There is literally nothing scandalous that a studio may have issued takedown notices on what is, regardless of our ethical stance, ultimately media piracy, and then subsequently providing a way for people to purchase that content legitimately to make money off of their own product. That's not not a scandal, that's buisiness, the law, and YouTube's TOS. Nothingburger.

As far as your actual comment I kind of don't get the... issue?

You seem to be well read in cyberpunk as a genre? You should know that "braindance" and netrunning, with a visual and/or neural connection, as a *concept* goes way back to the beginning. More to the point, as a "named" Cuberpunk [IP] technology, they go all the way back to at least 1989. If your issue, specifically is that it looks kind of like the holoband in Caprica, I also have to say that there is about a 0% chance that the appearance of *their* device is 100% original, despite that most cyberpunk headsets were a bit blockier due to the bulk of what was, at the time, bulky consumer electronics. Heck, off the top of my head I can think of an episode of Star Trek TNG (which you likely haven't seen, given your comment) which featured a band that didn't look unlike a Google Glass, that used brain activity to control projected "video" games.


I fail to see how someone listening to industrial-adjacent music 100 years from now is any different than people today sampling songs from the 40s. Besides, you need to consider that in the last 50 years we had the jump from analog instruments and production to electronics. We are not going to have that hard line between old music and new music now that that leap has occurred. Like, once we start utilizing electricity, that's it. There is not some other kind of instrument. We either hit something physically or we sent electricity through it. You can make any sound you want on a computer, and it's just going to sound like Skrillex, yknow?

You seem to be glancing past two key points: Cyberpunk, the IP and cyberpunk the Genre, are not only purposefully derivative of their own predecessors - that is how genres work after all - but they are derivative of real life. The technology follows speculative paths (Pondsmith has talked at length about how many of his game's technologies reached their current states as of "2020," and how some of that translated to 2077).

It is authentic in every way that it can be with one exception -- the world of cyberpunk has kind of conceptually been bound up in being stuck in a time period where we have digital jobs done by analogue tech. 2077 is far enough in a "real future" where the digital cat is already out of the bag. The only way around this would to have had a digital dark age or something, but that is also not a unique solution.

As far as "has anyone ever died from connecting to the internet" -- I mean maybe? But in a world where you are using brain implants and neural links to use the internet -- if someone can fry my thermostat over the internet, they can fry my brain.

I know this may sound sassy, I'm not trying to be sassy. I apologize if it reads that way. But I think you're expecting too much from a genre story. You seem to simultaneously to have a gripe that they seemed unwilling to buck their own tropes, while simultaneously nitpicking the things they did do to add a twist as "too scifi" for you. so I really don't understand what you expect from this game.

You don't have to like it -- I'm not a stan. I personally don't like the action thriller aspects added to Phantom Liberty, I think their setup and stakes were sound but their execution and beats verged too far outside of what would be considered Noire, which is a better fit, IMO, to "cyberpunk"; that is,they wanted to deliver Lost in New York, but they delivered The Manchurian Candidate. It's fine, but it's not cyberpunk to me, and the backdrop of helping the brain hologram lady hack the world and ultimately kill Johnny does not fix that. And it's nuts that the previous sentence does not really narrow down who I am talking about.

In short, Cyberpunk 2077 maybe creeps into SciFi the way that Mass Effect creeps into Cyberpunk. The genre is the genre. In many ways cyberpunk IS scifi; to be even more specific, it's speculative fiction -- even moreso when there is a 55 year jump between chapters. That is to say -- Cyberpunk 2077 is authentic to *itself.*

Authentic to what?

Authentic to the R. Talsorian Games tabletop setting?
Authentic to the cyberpunk genre in general?
Authentic to reality? (i.e. your comment about dying while connecting to the internet.)

Your reference to the headset in Caprica is particularly curious, seeing as the RTG setting had headsets for connecting to a VR network long before Caprica came out. The tech advanced by the time of 2077, but back in 2020 and 2045, Netrunners still had goggles that they needed to wear in order to navigate through the various networks.

Caprica came out in 2004. Serial Experiments Lain, with the character Nezumi who has a wearable computer, came out in 1999. Snow Crash came out in 1992. The original Cyberpunk tabletop game came out in 1988. There's probably other works of fiction that involve using goggles to connect to a computer interface that are older than that. Caprica by no means invented this concept. It's a common trope in many different types of science fiction, not just cyberpunk.

Also, what's preposterous about being killed by connecting to a computer network in these settings? People die all the time by connecting their bodies to electricity that is too intense. Why is it preposterous to imagine that someone who plugs an electrical cable into the back of their skull could die from it?

'Caprica' would be a VR ripoff of VR5 the series from the 1990s as well as William Shatner's TekWar series also from the early 1990s. Both "dove" into a virtual world. And then there's Bubblegum Crisis from the mid 1980s.

I like Star Trek (not the 21st century stuff).

What is so bad in Star Trek of the 21st century? There are Picard, SNW, Discovery and so on...

All crap.

u2jedi, I understand your opinion. What can I say? Yes, all crap! I am so dissapointed...J.J. Abrams und Alex Kurtzman, both of them, have ruined the Star Trek franchise. Do you remember Wrath of Khan or The Undiscovered Country? That is Star Trek, but these new junk Picard or Discovery...Clearly, thumbs down!