Good read overall, though I'd point out a couple of things, even as a Cyberpunk fan, the life path thing is interesting, but was all the rage back in the day. In Traveller (1977) you could infamously die during character generation as you would roll for what happened in your various service related lifepath tours which could range from learning skills, being maimed, going to jail for 20 years (and potentially thus being unavailable for the game) or indeed dying. There was also an old swords and sorcery game I think Chivalry and Sorcery (also 1977) where you would randomly generate your background that then informed your attributes and could mean your idea of a noble knight ended up being a clubfooted exile born under the wrong star sign.
You can compare this with things like the more modern 7th Sea where you can create your own narrative hooks in your backstory and then earn XP when the GM uses them as another way to encourage creating whole backstories.
Combat back in old school RPGS was also noticeably more deadly in general. Early Shadowrun (my personal preference for cyberpunk rpgs) was very deadly where a non combat specced character could often be taken out in a single shot and even OWoD (old World of Darkness eg Vampire et al) combat was dangerously swingy even for people prepared for it. Call of Cthulhu you mention but there was also the knock off Chill (my physics professor character was eaten by a sentient 4th dimension tesseract, way back in 89, as there was no actual way of fighting back) and Kult (come to think of it, another Cthulhu knock off) in which dying was very easy. Alien, the Roleplaying game was so lopsided you would be lucky to get a single player out the other end as well. Delta Green (again a spin off from Cthulhu) would have your soldier pretty overmatched. I think Gamma World was the one where character gen was almost entirely random meaning you could end up being a sentient tree with the ability to mind murder people, or being a near normal human who can breathe underwater which had pretty big implications for survivability in a post nuclear wasteland.
I think Cyberpunk is excellent but I'd submit luck also played a pretty big role in it's resurgence as there are lots of rpgs that did mostly what it did as well. Perhaps the biggest thing is that Pondsmith largely kept control of it so it didn't get hobbled with things like the FASA and TSR collapses.
That and the resurgence of 80's/90's aesthetics and nostalgia probably helped. I'd second that Cyberpunk 2020 is the best tabletop version, just as Shadowrun 2nd was the best it ever got (even if they mostly failed to predict wireless connectivity so you end up having to manually plug computers together).
Edit and how can I forget Rolemaster? Critical hit tables so bad the joke was that most characters died from tripping and receiving an E class critical. At least there was more variability than in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay - you did hear "Death from shock and blood loss is almost instantaneous" a lot in that game.
I basically didn't follow CP2077 development at all, other than hearing vaguely about the game's existence and something about choosing your own genitals. One day I learned that it came out and I bought it on Stadia and thought it was beautiful and really playable. I went maybe a good ten years since I last played a 3D FPS game and the magnitude of the production value that went into the game completely blew me away.
In addition to being visually stunning it has some pretty great storytelling and although some of it is cheesy and cringe (feels like 190% too PC at times), some of it's really clever and edgy and original. Like crucifying that guy. Wtf lol.
That was 2 years ago. Stadia announced it was shutting down recently, and I was reminded that the game exists. Now I have a beefy Windows PC with a respectable GPU so I bought the game again, last week, just because it felt right to have it. I even played it for a bit, and thought "huh, yup. still remarkable".
I assume all of the complaints about CP2077 are from very online types who are impossible to please. But perhaps I'm a simpleton and there are much better games out there I should spend my time on.
Oh well. Can't wait for the expansion packs and sequel.
Yeah, I was blissfully unaware. I did notice some glitches but they went away after exit/restart. Like some Johnny Silverhand flashback guitar riff never stopped playing and was still going on 20 minutes later. Minor stuff.
Kind of a tangent but I feel like I have to tell this to someone: the only part of the game that seems far-fetched to me was that they managed to build so many more skyscrapers in an American city by the year 2077.
What is even 'Eurojank' ? Stalker is proverbial eurojank, and when I played the games it wasn't more glitchy than recent Cyberpunk. About the same, I'd say - some fairly major problems if you're not careful, but mostly good.
I was refering to people who thought CP 2077, a game made by the people who made the wticher games, rpgs.... was going to be some next level rampage simulator where you hire prostitutes then murder them to get your money back.
A lot of the backlash to CP 2077 was people who the marketing campaign had trained to think it'd be GTA... but in the future and with a full cybernetically customizable character.
I'm not even that fond of Rockstar personally. Their worlds always felt dull and uninteresting once you got past the initial jokes.
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My contention isn't love of the tabletop rpg is what drives the continued interest in the world. Its that CDPR and StudioTrigger's close hewing to Pondsmith's rules of storytelling and aethetic commitments is what drives their success.
The franchise is remarkably consistent in resisting every temptation of bad modern storytelling/superhero bullshit that defines basically every other franchise, and instead hewing to Pondsmith's original narrative commitments.
I'm not even that fond of Rockstar personally. Their worlds always felt dull and uninteresting once you got past the initial jokes.
Feel the same. Don't understand the hype behind any Rockstar game's story and aesthetics. It always feels like they're trying to be Tarantino but then, they also want to be taken seriously like some top HBO drama.
Always comes off as inauthentic and shallow.
For example, in Red Dead 2, I remember the mission where you help the Native Americans fight off US soldiers and it's like....this is no different than some goober saying they would've stood up to Hitler in Nazi Germany. It's moral wish fulfillment and retrospective snobbery. In reality, if they wanted to make it more meaningful, they should have it as a 'you can't win' type scenario where you try to help Natives set up their society but either you help them and die in battle OR you sell them out so that your gang can survive. Then, maybe you can make it even somewhat morally complex here with, say, a former Confederate soldier type character who hates the Union to this day and though he may be racist or whatever, owes his life to Confederate aligned Natives who saved him during the war and therefore, empathizes with and respects Natives. That would add weight to the situation, at hand.
But games by Rockstar (and much of modern writing) feature none of this type of writing and nuance.
That's why I think Cyberpunk and CDPR is superior here. As Pondsmith says, the goal of Cyberpunk isn't about saving the world, it's about saving your soul. It reflects a more 'realistic' outlook as you deal with entities beyond your control that work against your sense of agency. That doesn't mean you don't fight for what you believe in within the Cyberpunk/CDPR universe but rather, for a 'serious' oriented story about the human condition, there isn't a wish fulfillment power fantasy thing dictating the events in your story. Sure, in game, Geralt or V can fight off 30 people at once but it's not central to the narrative that Geralt or V fights off an entire army and changes the world.
Now, I'm not saying power fantasy games or stories shouldn't exist. No, they can be equally as good but just don't pretend they're something they're not.
You realize they could have just written their own world if that was the case...
Not like even Gibson came up with anything expecially unique, he just brought all the elements together that other writers had put out in the 70s and layered a cool style over it.
No individual sci-fi elements hadn't already been done by someone else.
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And honestly if anything they turned the silliness up... the Chainsaw arm became the mantiss blades or monkey arms, They explicitly made all the goofy rockerboy stuff Canon and made one of the main characters a rockerboy who did 9/11 but with nukes, played by Keanu reeves.
Like there are entire flashback missions in game that plays out exactly how they played in the 2020 corebook.
Hell the only 2 character from the corebook who aren't one to one transplanted into the 2077 game are morgan blackhand who doesn't appear, and Johnny silverhand, who's character design they had to redo to look like Keanu reeves.
Aside from that Rose, Alt, Rache Bartmoss, Spider, Adam Smasher, Saburo Arasaka... their character designs haven't even changed. Rose even has the big 80s hair and leather jacket in the flashbacks.
Its actually incredible how much CDPR leaned into the silliest aspects of 2020 and managed to make them work in a serious and dark setting
and I don't see how a knife blade that folds into a forearm compartment is somehow more silly than a chainsaw.
It's less silly, by a lot actually. Kinda plausible, though I think something like a shotgun or maybe a huge captive-bolt style system would be more popular.
One of my theories is that Elon Musk is consciously LARPing a business tycoon from yer standard 80s franchise. The weed thing? Obsessively getting into cyberspace spats with randos? Having kids with a futuristic pop star and giving them odd names? It's all there. Even Tesla Motors, SpaceX etc. are pure cyberpunk nameology.
Very good read, thank you. And I agree with the author that most Role playing games are not really those. I played D&D and Shadowrun, but my best game was Vampire: The Masquerade. I remember that my first character I spend maybe a week designing died during my first session. It was a result of unlucky roll and yes, my Game Master could have salvaged the situation but he would not. I then had a talk with him and he really did not like the roleplaying aspect - my character running around with weapons was literally "out of character" I wanted to build.
The next character I created more closely resembled me, it was easier to think about his actions that way and it eased me into the whole acting stuff. I eventually made some different characters and I really liked the actual roleplaying aspect, I think it really helped me socially in my future endeavors. To this day I have fond memories of my crew. We had a lot of fun sometimes playing through the whole night until dawn with Massive Attack or Tricky playing in the background and smell of cigarettes and cheap coffee filling the room. Good times. Plus the VtM and assorted games had incredibly high quality supplements that I read just for fun to gain some occult knowledge. The whole setting was incredible rabbit hole into one of the best worldbuilding that I have seen in my life, I have read supplements for other games just for fun.
Also I played Cyberpunk 2077 on release and I rate it as 8/10, luckily I did not encounter any bug at all. I did not mind little things people endlessly harped about such as behavior of the police. I went through the story, which to me was excellently constructed, acted and voice-acted. I got my load of fun for the buck I paid as far as I am concerned. I hear that a lot of things were fixed and polished and I am eager to return to the Night City with any future content DLC. Also for anybody out there who likes these sandboxy but story driven RPGs like The Witcher, RDR2 or Cyberpunk I can recommend a hidden gem I found recently that I already poured more than 100 hours into (my mark of superb singleplayer game): Days Gone. Thank me later.
I played the game VTM:Bloodlines. Hands down one of the most engaging worlds I've ever played... The game itself shows its age after so long, and the way they manage their contentmeans you can complete all the interactions and the world starts to feel dead towards the end... but those first 5-15 hours are some of the best in all of gaming.
I've never played the Tabletop VTM, but I checked out V5 of the tabletop game... no idea how the mechanics work, but read through the introduction and my god it has one of the best world build hooks I've ever encountered.
The entire history of VTM there have always been whispers about Ghenna, the end times, there were all these prophecies the doom of vampires was right around the corner, and something was going to happen that would kill them all off... these immortals were running out of time.
Well in most material of the setting its played off as some antediluvian vampire like Cain coming back and killing all their descendants... but in V5 there's a big suggestion it might be smart phones and the NSA, that tracking the supernatural has become so much easier that self righteous mortals are hunting them down and exterminating them, vampire hunters have become major threats, government blackops are wiping them out or black bagging them for experiments like its Delta Green... and the older vampires who're established rich and have a steady supply of blood and everything... they're looking at all the young, poor, cell phone using vampires as loose ends to be tied up.
Meanwhile there's the question of if this really is Gehenna, or if there's another antediluvian eldritch shoe to drop.
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Again no idea how it actually plays, if its mechanics are still solid, or if they shaved off all the edges that make things fun... but the setting they build, the writing and the artwork are just exquisite.
I played the game VTM:Bloodlines. Hands down one of the most engaging worlds I've ever played... The game itself shows its age after so long, and the way they manage their contentmeans you can complete all the interactions and the world starts to feel dead towards the end... but those first 5-15 hours are some of the best in all of gaming.
I've never played the Tabletop VTM, but I checked out V5 of the tabletop game... no idea how the mechanics work, but read through the introduction and my god it has one of the best world build hooks I've ever encountered.
Oh, you do not even know how far the rabbit hole goes there. White Wolf and the whole Old World Of Darkness setting was incredibly intricate and interconnected. Just one thing, the cosmology. The story is that there are three cosmic energies respectively responsible for the following: The Wyld, The Weaver and The Wyrm responsible for creation, weaving that creation into The Tapestry of Cosmos and then Wyrm was the force of Destruction to keep the other forces in check. Except the Wyrm went insane and now is the force of corruption. Vampires are just one of the Wyrm creatures in this setting.
Then you have the whole Mage: The Ascension setting, where supernatural "willworkers" are trying to tap humanity AKA Sleepers and force them to view the world in line with their tradition, a Hegemony of sorts except that their power is curtailed by the force of Paradox - the collective resistance of the humanity to supernatural that can literally kill a Mage who exceeds her bounds. Except one faction of the Mages have "won" (not really) this Paradigm War, they call themselves as Technocracy, it is the Mage faction that was capable of utilizing tanks in 1500s as a form of Magic battling against literal Merlin with fireballs. Reading from cards? Technocracy calls it "statistics". Encountering ghosts and other interplanar beings? It is just this new cutting-edge technology of Void Engineering handling aliens. Including the part that "prayers" work: your cutting edge plasma weapon will not work when there are many sleepers around, at least sleepers not prone to believe that Men in Black can actually wield plasma weapons to protect Humanity from supernatural threats.
Werewolves are not just these weirdos running around in the wild. They are serving The spirit of Gaia and they fight corruption in all form, especially the Wyrmling manifestation inside The World of Darknes in form of shadowy cabal called Pentex, that controls corporations such as chemical mammoth of Rainbow Incorporated or Herculean Firearms Inc.. Of course unless you are one of the Black Spiral Dancers, a Werewolf tribe that succumbed to the Wyrm corruption, not unlike the Warhammer 40K theme.
And of course, you have all the "edge" players such as Hunters, Mummies, literal Ghosts and other beings being part of the whole world. It really is a wonderful piece of worldbuilding compared to which some nukes being shot at Vampire Antediluvian in India are just background stuff.
I have a deep, abiding love for the cyberpunk aesthetic. I've worshipped at the altar of Sterling, Gibson and Stephenson. And unfortunately I'm going to have to hard disagree and express puzzlement with:
No one expected anything from Edgerunners, even fans of the franchise had forgotten it was coming out… but the series was incredible. It might outstrip studio trigger’s earlier Kill La Kill. Aside from a, somehow simultaneously, slow and rushed pilot-episode complete with poor dubbing (outside of ep1 the dub is amazing) the show is an exceptional and damn near flawless story harkening back to not just western Cyberpunk stories, but old-school kickass Cyberpunk Anime like Akira or at points even Cowboy Bebop.
Unless you are just constitutionally incapable of watching any anime…100% watch Cyberpunk: Edgerunners on Netflix… Its a 10/10 masterpiece.
The first episode is much weaker than the rest, but every episode doubles in quality til you hit episode 6 and it might just be one of the 10 best episodes of television ever made.
As a disclaimer, I haven't played Cyberpunk:2077 so I likely missed some minor tie-ins. But Edgerunners was a good series with an amazing aesthetic that profoundly failed to live up to it's promise. Here are the problems:
**** MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW *****
Gratuitous character deaths. Pilar dying in episode 4 was shocking, and let you know we're playing for keeps. By the time Rebecca and David explode into puddles of gore, it's impossible to give a fuck anymore because the entire team died in stupid ways that don't further the plot. Just watching violence for the sake of violence isn't particularly attractive.
Utterly pointless climax. The culmination of the series is just a reheated 'Do it for her' meme. Love interest is abducted. Main character acquires macguffin (okay, giant mecha suit) to rescue love interest, dying in the process. All other main characters die pointlessly, with one possible exception (Maine dying of cyberpsychosis. But also...what's Maine's backstory? Why is he randomly running in the desert? Why should I care that he's dying?).
Complete lack of meaningful character progression. Nobody has a relevant backstory. The closest thing we get is David's mom dying early in the series, which changes virtually nothing because David already had a pile of reasons to hate the corpos. Now he hates them more. Profound. Meanwhile, what do we know about Pilar? Maine? Dorio? Kiwi? Rebecca? All these characters die and it's just impossible to care because they're sad cardboard cutouts without motivations or actual stories.
**** Spoilers done ****
And because I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the good:
Incredible worldbuilding and aesthetics. The combat sequences with the Sandevistan and cybernetics more generally are fun as hell. David and Lucy's song is a major earworm.
We are almost certainly going to get more stories out of the Cyberpunk franchise, sequels, new series, new games (an expansion is already about to release for CP 2077) and between this and other Scifi properties that have come out recently, its very likely we’re going to see a widespread revival in Cyberpunk the genre… And I’m really looking forward to it.
Color me deeply skeptical. Cyberpunk and fantasy are fairly played out and at this point there isn't a whole lot of new ground to tread, just the occasional talented author who can write an excellent interpretation of the old formula. We'll keep seeing the occasional hit or new franchise, but there's not going to be a renaissance of talented authors bravely taking cyberpunk to new places.
By the way, does this site support spoiler text? The old >! !< doesn't seem to work.
All three of your points seem to miss a key aspect of the show: it's a tragedy. The characters don't 'level up' in a tragedy, they write their endings. Do people complain that Macbeth lacks 'character progression' or that Reservoir Dogs has 'meaningless deaths?' Each character earns their brutal ending by the way they conduct themselves.
The life expectancy of people doing shit like that is that of early WW2 British bomber crews. That was the realistic part of the show.
Main character acquires macguffin (okay, giant mecha suit) to rescue love interest
I believe you misremember. He acquires macguffin because he's hired to do so, but she gets abducted in the meantime so he uses it to try to free her, no ?
I believe you misremember. He acquires macguffin because he's hired to do so, but she gets abducted in the meantime so he uses it to try to free her, no ?
I disagree strongly... The entire point of edgerunners is that it comes at you fast and the characterization is done through animation, subtle character moments, implications that you read into it...
Also deaths aren't furthering the plot? The plot is they're punks trying to get rich and not die, and the tragedy is they know they probably will. You might as well complain the Deaths in "All's Quiet on the Western Front" not furthering the plot... that's the point, death can hit you at any time, you're not special.
I feel like you expected the story to be "And that's how we decided to do "Big important heroic thing" and advance "the good" and this is the story of our noble sacrifice..." no the point of edgerunners is they're just trying to achieve their personal ambitions, make it out alive, not be crushed by the world around them... and everything escalates because the intense friction and pressure they're under just achieving that.
We get the backstories for David and Lucy because they share them with eachother, the rest we get to gleen so much of their personalities, their values, what little part of life they're holding onto, just from how they behave an interact.
Its incredibly efficient show don't tell and it works remarkably effectively. There's a reason it has 100% and 96% on rotten tomatoes.
To some extent, De gustibus non est disputandum and all that. I grant that you can have different tastes that are valid, or that you can relate to characters that I find disinteresting. That being said:
I feel like you expected the story to be "And that's how we decided to do "Big important heroic thing" and advance "the good" and this is the story of our noble sacrifice..." no the point of edgerunners is they're just trying to achieve their personal ambitions, make it out alive, not be crushed by the world around them... and everything escalates because the intense friction and pressure they're under just achieving that.
Writing a quality story is orthogonal to whether the story is uplifting or has a happy ending. You can have a story whose message is ultimately nihilist or tragic, even one where every main character dies, and do it poorly or do it very well. In your mind, what differentiates Edgerunners from a lower quality tragedy or film/novel with similar themes? Or what changes could have been made to the plot that would make it better or worse?
For example, since you highlight it: David's relationship with his mother is never really examined. She knew he was talented, had big dreams for his future and made significant sacrifices to give him those opportunities. He completely rejects everything she wanted and turns to a life of a crime. That's fine, maybe he was even forced into it, but...doesn't he have any feelings whatsoever about betraying his mother's dreams and throwing away her sacrifices? Shouldn't he at least grapple with this a little bit? The closest we get is him laughing about being on top of Arasaka tower like his mom always wanted in the last episode.
You want to keep it grimdark and nihilist, but still have some emotional valence? Alright. His mom (who supposedly dies offscreen) was instead sold to human traffickers by the doctors to cover the unpaid medical bills. She ends up the pet of an Arasaka exec. David sees his mother one last time and her disappointment with what he's become just before being smashed by Mr. Smasher. Roll credits.
Or how about the fact that Pilar's death, while shocking, is utterly inconsequential to the story and other characters with deep connections to him? Rebecca is mad for that scene, they kill the nutjob, great...then nobody ever mentions him again beyond Maine suggesting that David take his cybernetic hands? The loss of her brother seems utterly inconsequential to Rebecca. If I'm remembering correctly, the next scene after Pilar dying is Lucy and David being intimate with neither of them seeming to care that their friend just died.
Contrast that to Ned Stark's imprisonment and death, which had huge consequences for the show and the characters. Rob has an emotional breakdown and needs to be comforted by his mother, highlighting the fact that he's a 16 year old boy in over his head. It marks the beginning of Arya's quest for revenge. Tywin and Tyrion bemoan Joffrey's excesses and realize the North will never sue for peace now. Jon nearly breaks his vows to ride south.
the rest we get to gleen so much of their personalities, their values, what little part of life they're holding onto, just from how they behave an interact.
no the point of edgerunners is they're just trying to achieve their personal ambitions
Really? How would you describe Kiwi's personality, besides mercenary, and why is she the way she is? How about Dorio? Why is Maine an edgerunner, what's his endgame, why is he addicted to cybernetics at the expense of his sanity? I don't even know the personal ambitions for...well, any of the characters besides Lucy wanting to go to the moon. David wanted to be an edgerunner, but he gets that in the first few episodes. What does anyone else want?
In your mind, what differentiates Edgerunners from a lower quality tragedy or film/novel with similar themes?
Withe reason Edge Runners works as a tragedy is because the characters dig their own graves without alienating themselves totally from the audience. That's hard to do. If you make your characters mistakes too obvious, the audience can't empathize anymore (lots of B slasher films fail this test.) If the consequences seem too arbitrary, the audience loses interest because it's just capricious fate.
Kiwi believes in being a heartless mercenary, but when the time comes to actually do it, she realizes it's not what she wanted after all, way too late. Tragedy. We don't really get much characterization of Dorio, but her attachment to Maine does her in.
Rebecca is mad for that scene, they kill the nutjob, great...then nobody ever mentions him again beyond Maine suggesting that David take his cybernetic hands? The loss of her brother seems utterly inconsequential to Rebecca
She spends the rest of the show being as reckless as possible until she finally pushes her luck too far. She also gets huge cybernetic hands, echoing her brother's style. She's loyal to David against all reason.
Or what changes could have been made to the plot that would make it better or worse?
One change that might have made it better? Make the mecha suit cooler? Remove 'Choom' from the script? Drop the school subplot, that felt kinda pointless? I can't think of any major flaws in the execution of the themes. They could have gotten away with not killing off Rebecca (go slightly lighter) or having Lucy remove her helmet on the moon (to go way darker.)
To make it worse is easy. David could have lived. They could have had the power of love conquer Cyberpsychosis. They could have failed to foreshadow everything so well. They could have added tons of gratuitous sexual peril. They could have shown the entire thing as some other kid watching a BD of David's life and ended it with a stupid comment. They could have done Lucy's arc without the moon thing.
having Lucy remove her helmet on the moon (to go way darker.)
Reading this made me tear up. Perhaps I've an overly sensitive emotional system which would explain my philosophical view of things is so bleak as to allow me to not feel anything most of the time.
I was waiting for it to happen. The way she gives a defeated little arm raise in the sun... I really thought that was going to be it. But they ended it on a hopeful note; David may have died for nothing, but Lucy still has her second chance.
I wasn't. Women aren't like that. They don't kill themselves on a whim.
She'd wanted to get out of Brazil, go to the Moon, and she got there.
I presume netrunners can easily find legitimate employment.
And a sad, very intelligent and attractive woman working in some tech company would have an easy time finding some solid partner and fulfilling her biological imperative.
I feel like you're disappointed they didn't explicitly have a scene for every character where they monologued about their Tragic Past like a Kojima game.
Every character has a really well defined disposition, attitude, set of motivations, and yes backstory... the show just doesn't stop to tell you them, you catch their story through glimpses of their personality, lifestyle, decisions, stylistic choices... you know like real life.
Maine andDorio's names, character designs, interactions, and dialogue tells you everything that narrative essential about their characters and back stories, without having to spell it out.
Kiwi's interactions and relationships with Lucy, Faraday, Maine and Falco are all you have to see to start drawing out the past of her character... Even her design, she specifically chose Cyberware that didn't have a mouth and would prevent her from being expressive, purposefully alienating herself from everyone around her, fleeing the interpersonal Trauma implicit in everything she does.
These are characters are incredibly designed characterized and fleshed out, unique backstories and personalities are implicit in everything about them, StudioTrigger just followed the show don't tell school of thought (as you expect from litteral animators and artists) and embodied this in their characters and actions instead of stopping the show's breakneck pace.
And as for the characters who's inner monologues we do get ,its incredibly rich!
The entire reason David keeps doing merc work instead of ditching and enjoying his modest wealt and girlfriend is he feels he needs to become a great success in order to live up to his mother's dreams and retroactively undo his abandonment of her ambitions through success, He feels he needs to continue Maine's ambitions so as to render Maine's tragedy a success...
He's fleeing his Trauma by embracing the very danger that caused it.
That is very strongly characterized and very subtlety handled, and every character is like this!
This is how in 10 episodes they can cover so much ground at such a break-neck pace, and with so much style, because their writing, artstyle, plotting, and even music is operating at maximum efficiency.
Bernd
Fighting algorithmic racism like John Henry
KulakRevolt 1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
Think I've said this before, but I don't know that "not dying" was realistically on any character's agenda. Rebecca was always going to die in a stupid fight with someone much tougher; her progress in the show was in being killed by the strongest guy in the setting rather than some bouncer she got mad and pulled a gun on.
Maine was always going to go psycho and die destroying everything and everyone he cared about. Kiwi was always going to die in some stupid triple-cross backstabbing she thought she was smart enough to pull off, etc.
The whole story was about dying a little harder and becoming a legend doing it.
Basically its a dive into how Cyberpunk 2020 the table top game died, revived itself, died agian, and then revived again... and how its a franchise that will keep getting second, third and forth chances with obscene budgets.
I attribute the amount of affection it has to its unique gameplay mechanisms, which are basically designed to create dynamic, tragic, consequencial stories, of real meaningful deprivation and struggle... and how that's so vastly different from basically everything in our superhero driven culture.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
KulakRevolt 1yr ago
Thanks!
I don't get it, though. What every writer should learn from Pondsmith is...to make great literature? Maybe I missed an entire paragraph, but I don't at all see your answer to the question of the HOW you repeatedly raised.
That character should have real ties to their world and their actions should have real consequences.
The lifepath and FNFF systems ensure that their is no way for your character to be a generic orphan without grief, while the FNFF system ensures your character can't be superhero effortless evading the consequences of combat or conflict, but instead must take everything smart and always be in real meaningful risk even if they are smart.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
KulakRevolt 1yr ago·Edited 1yr ago
Alright, I apologize - I did indeed miss several entire paragraphs. I was reading on my phone and the article was cut off before it even got to Lifepaths. See? A submission statement giving a tl;dr of what you were going to lay out would have prevented this misunderstanding! Going to re-read. Thanks for patiently answering me.
A picture! Mike Pondsmith is black? Never knew. I expect something like this to be screamed from the rooftops for woke points, not slid on my desk in this matter-of-fact, race-blind manner.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
Bernd 1yr ago
Shadowrun, unlike CP2020, got more than one videogame adaptation. There's one on SNES, one on Sega, a Kickstarter-era trilogy and probably some terrible FPS that I have erased from my memory.
Not exclusive! It was on PC as well, and one of the features they touted was that you could play with Xbox players on PC, and vice versa. Which to be fair was pretty unique at the time. I heard the game wasn't at all good though.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
meh 1yr ago
I have a couple friends who enjoyed it. The way you could build out gear/cyberwear/magic let you have really customizable builds and loadouts for an FPS. Kind of a waste of the IP though.
Ironically enough, I think Shadowrun could stand to have an open-world first-person adaptation not unlike CP2077. Question, though, is who on Earth would take that undertaking?
Well, besides the big developer/publisher that already has a competing tabletop franchise they've invested in...Paradox, maybe? Except Paradox also basically owns WOD (though they also published the HBS BattleTech game). I doubt Microsoft would do it (unless they're that hard up for stuff to put under the Xbox brand).
I don't agree that all fictional parents exist to be killed for the sake of narrative convenience. One good example is the original Mobile Suit Gundam, where Amuro is simply estranged from his parents. First he thinks he loses his father in the attack on Side 7, then he's estranged from his mother when she sees that he's no longer the sweet boy she raised, and then he's estranged from his actually-alive father when it's clear that oxygen deprivation from his unplanned EVA in the first episode has made him loony. That series shows that war can tear families apart and change people even without making them into orphans (though there definitely are war orphans in that series and in the broader franchise, starting with Frau Bow and the three little kids: Katz, Letz, and Kikka). Sure, that's still writing them out of the story, but Gundam 0079 stands in contrast to a lot of other anime shows more infamous for killing their protags' mothers.
Also, I think there are certainly other tabletop franchises that have experienced surprise revivals (BattleTech, namely). And that reminds me, thoughts on Shadowrun? It's life-path system is different, but somewhat similar.
Like my overwhelming emotion about it is just... "WHY?"
Like imagine if Call of Cthulhu was out... then they made a competitor game that was Call of Cuthulu, but there were elves and dwarves... or Vampire the Masquerade... but there were also halflings...
Like I've never gotten into it so I can't judge, but I just don't get how throwing high fantasy into the cyberpunk future wouldn't detract from both...
Like honestly the opposite of shadowrun would seems way cooler on paper... Shadowrun is a world where high fantasy has crashed into the real cyberpunk world through some sort of cataclym... It'd seem a fantasy world that just kept technologically advancing til they were cyberpunk would be way more interesting. Is the wizards guild losing influence now that Hackers are doing more and information is the main currency... how are the ancient order of knights adapting to everyone being an augmented killing machine... are they outgunned and the whole thing is falling to chaos... or have they made the deal with the devil and are now leading the trend? Is it an age of high colonialism where all the dark lands are being conquered because the humans and civilized races are now so technologically advanced?
Like I've never played shadowrun... but Its world feels disrupted enough that litterally anything could happen at any second and there's no predictability or consistency that the characters choices can have real consequences... like you can't dispatch the kill teams after the players for doing something dumb, when so little makes sense and no one even knows what would be dumb.
To add onto Iconochasm's reply, Shadowrun is very aware of the conflict between the natural, magical world and the artificial, technological world, and it makes for a really nasty setting when you think about it for long enough. Getting augs makes you less good at magic (and there is a character in the second game from the Harebrained Schemes trilogy who exploits this for a reason), one of the top 10 megacorps literally performs blood magic (or at least is heavily, heavily implied to benefit from it), and the powers that be are where they are because they've tamed the chaos the world gives rise to.
That despair in the face of megacorp dominance takes on entire new dimensions when the CEO is a millennia-old Literal Fucking Dragon that knows ancient lore beyond space and time and can cram new research faster than any metahuman.
I mean... yes, but that's still just Saburo Arasaka...
The dude's a 180 year old Japanese flying ace from ww2 that's run his company and most the world more than most people's grandparents have been alive, and he pretty much literally eats people's souls
but I just don't get how throwing high fantasy into the cyberpunk future wouldn't detract from both...
No, it adds to it. Shadowrun is a hilariously awful hellscape that merges the alienation of cyberpunk with the sheer danger and wonder of urban dark fantasy, against the mundane reality of A Boring Dystopia. Imagine being a wage mage whose day job is just walking a perimeter around some megacorp chip factory, casting the same ward against nature spirits every 6 minutes. Being in the poor part of town and hearing there are literal flesh-eating ghouls in the sewers. Or seeing an entire assault helicopter full of a Fast Response Team crash and burn because some teenaged punk had a dream where Dragonslayer taught him Lightning Bolt, and told him to go rage against the machine.
like you can't dispatch the kill teams after the players for doing something dumb
Noooo, Shadowrun has kill teams a plenty. On top of the cyberwarriors and elite hackers, they also have combat mages who can track you through the astral based on blood traces you left at the crime scene, and then levitate invisible snipers into overwatch positions.
The real "trick" of doing shadowruns is that the world is a nightmare of jurisdictions, so if you can evade or hold off pursuit long enough to get extra-territorial, you can probably dodge consequences for the time being. But over time, every team will build up a list of corps and governments that want you dead, so that gets harder and harder, unless you take active measures about it.
And that's why it's so fun that it's based in the real world. There is so much real history, that hundreds of writers have built on over decades of the game, so that most stuff actually is pretty nailed down. You can do a run in a new city, and look up which corps or governments control which areas, then bring up Google Maps and plot out your getaway route on real highways.
But because of that, Shadowrun really only works super well if you have a whole group of mega-nerds who want to learn deep lore on top of intense crunch.
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You're in my house now Kulak cracks my knuckles
Good read overall, though I'd point out a couple of things, even as a Cyberpunk fan, the life path thing is interesting, but was all the rage back in the day. In Traveller (1977) you could infamously die during character generation as you would roll for what happened in your various service related lifepath tours which could range from learning skills, being maimed, going to jail for 20 years (and potentially thus being unavailable for the game) or indeed dying. There was also an old swords and sorcery game I think Chivalry and Sorcery (also 1977) where you would randomly generate your background that then informed your attributes and could mean your idea of a noble knight ended up being a clubfooted exile born under the wrong star sign.
You can compare this with things like the more modern 7th Sea where you can create your own narrative hooks in your backstory and then earn XP when the GM uses them as another way to encourage creating whole backstories.
Combat back in old school RPGS was also noticeably more deadly in general. Early Shadowrun (my personal preference for cyberpunk rpgs) was very deadly where a non combat specced character could often be taken out in a single shot and even OWoD (old World of Darkness eg Vampire et al) combat was dangerously swingy even for people prepared for it. Call of Cthulhu you mention but there was also the knock off Chill (my physics professor character was eaten by a sentient 4th dimension tesseract, way back in 89, as there was no actual way of fighting back) and Kult (come to think of it, another Cthulhu knock off) in which dying was very easy. Alien, the Roleplaying game was so lopsided you would be lucky to get a single player out the other end as well. Delta Green (again a spin off from Cthulhu) would have your soldier pretty overmatched. I think Gamma World was the one where character gen was almost entirely random meaning you could end up being a sentient tree with the ability to mind murder people, or being a near normal human who can breathe underwater which had pretty big implications for survivability in a post nuclear wasteland.
I think Cyberpunk is excellent but I'd submit luck also played a pretty big role in it's resurgence as there are lots of rpgs that did mostly what it did as well. Perhaps the biggest thing is that Pondsmith largely kept control of it so it didn't get hobbled with things like the FASA and TSR collapses.
That and the resurgence of 80's/90's aesthetics and nostalgia probably helped. I'd second that Cyberpunk 2020 is the best tabletop version, just as Shadowrun 2nd was the best it ever got (even if they mostly failed to predict wireless connectivity so you end up having to manually plug computers together).
Edit and how can I forget Rolemaster? Critical hit tables so bad the joke was that most characters died from tripping and receiving an E class critical. At least there was more variability than in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay - you did hear "Death from shock and blood loss is almost instantaneous" a lot in that game.
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I basically didn't follow CP2077 development at all, other than hearing vaguely about the game's existence and something about choosing your own genitals. One day I learned that it came out and I bought it on Stadia and thought it was beautiful and really playable. I went maybe a good ten years since I last played a 3D FPS game and the magnitude of the production value that went into the game completely blew me away.
In addition to being visually stunning it has some pretty great storytelling and although some of it is cheesy and cringe (feels like 190% too PC at times), some of it's really clever and edgy and original. Like crucifying that guy. Wtf lol.
That was 2 years ago. Stadia announced it was shutting down recently, and I was reminded that the game exists. Now I have a beefy Windows PC with a respectable GPU so I bought the game again, last week, just because it felt right to have it. I even played it for a bit, and thought "huh, yup. still remarkable".
I assume all of the complaints about CP2077 are from very online types who are impossible to please. But perhaps I'm a simpleton and there are much better games out there I should spend my time on.
Oh well. Can't wait for the expansion packs and sequel.
Yeah, I was blissfully unaware. I did notice some glitches but they went away after exit/restart. Like some Johnny Silverhand flashback guitar riff never stopped playing and was still going on 20 minutes later. Minor stuff.
Kind of a tangent but I feel like I have to tell this to someone: the only part of the game that seems far-fetched to me was that they managed to build so many more skyscrapers in an American city by the year 2077.
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What is even 'Eurojank' ? Stalker is proverbial eurojank, and when I played the games it wasn't more glitchy than recent Cyberpunk. About the same, I'd say - some fairly major problems if you're not careful, but mostly good.
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I was refering to people who thought CP 2077, a game made by the people who made the wticher games, rpgs.... was going to be some next level rampage simulator where you hire prostitutes then murder them to get your money back.
A lot of the backlash to CP 2077 was people who the marketing campaign had trained to think it'd be GTA... but in the future and with a full cybernetically customizable character.
I'm not even that fond of Rockstar personally. Their worlds always felt dull and uninteresting once you got past the initial jokes.
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My contention isn't love of the tabletop rpg is what drives the continued interest in the world. Its that CDPR and StudioTrigger's close hewing to Pondsmith's rules of storytelling and aethetic commitments is what drives their success.
The franchise is remarkably consistent in resisting every temptation of bad modern storytelling/superhero bullshit that defines basically every other franchise, and instead hewing to Pondsmith's original narrative commitments.
Feel the same. Don't understand the hype behind any Rockstar game's story and aesthetics. It always feels like they're trying to be Tarantino but then, they also want to be taken seriously like some top HBO drama.
Always comes off as inauthentic and shallow.
For example, in Red Dead 2, I remember the mission where you help the Native Americans fight off US soldiers and it's like....this is no different than some goober saying they would've stood up to Hitler in Nazi Germany. It's moral wish fulfillment and retrospective snobbery. In reality, if they wanted to make it more meaningful, they should have it as a 'you can't win' type scenario where you try to help Natives set up their society but either you help them and die in battle OR you sell them out so that your gang can survive. Then, maybe you can make it even somewhat morally complex here with, say, a former Confederate soldier type character who hates the Union to this day and though he may be racist or whatever, owes his life to Confederate aligned Natives who saved him during the war and therefore, empathizes with and respects Natives. That would add weight to the situation, at hand.
But games by Rockstar (and much of modern writing) feature none of this type of writing and nuance.
That's why I think Cyberpunk and CDPR is superior here. As Pondsmith says, the goal of Cyberpunk isn't about saving the world, it's about saving your soul. It reflects a more 'realistic' outlook as you deal with entities beyond your control that work against your sense of agency. That doesn't mean you don't fight for what you believe in within the Cyberpunk/CDPR universe but rather, for a 'serious' oriented story about the human condition, there isn't a wish fulfillment power fantasy thing dictating the events in your story. Sure, in game, Geralt or V can fight off 30 people at once but it's not central to the narrative that Geralt or V fights off an entire army and changes the world.
Now, I'm not saying power fantasy games or stories shouldn't exist. No, they can be equally as good but just don't pretend they're something they're not.
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You realize they could have just written their own world if that was the case...
Not like even Gibson came up with anything expecially unique, he just brought all the elements together that other writers had put out in the 70s and layered a cool style over it.
No individual sci-fi elements hadn't already been done by someone else.
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And honestly if anything they turned the silliness up... the Chainsaw arm became the mantiss blades or monkey arms, They explicitly made all the goofy rockerboy stuff Canon and made one of the main characters a rockerboy who did 9/11 but with nukes, played by Keanu reeves.
Like there are entire flashback missions in game that plays out exactly how they played in the 2020 corebook.
Hell the only 2 character from the corebook who aren't one to one transplanted into the 2077 game are morgan blackhand who doesn't appear, and Johnny silverhand, who's character design they had to redo to look like Keanu reeves.
Aside from that Rose, Alt, Rache Bartmoss, Spider, Adam Smasher, Saburo Arasaka... their character designs haven't even changed. Rose even has the big 80s hair and leather jacket in the flashbacks.
Its actually incredible how much CDPR leaned into the silliest aspects of 2020 and managed to make them work in a serious and dark setting
It's less silly, by a lot actually. Kinda plausible, though I think something like a shotgun or maybe a huge captive-bolt style system would be more popular.
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One of my theories is that Elon Musk is consciously LARPing a business tycoon from yer standard 80s franchise. The weed thing? Obsessively getting into cyberspace spats with randos? Having kids with a futuristic pop star and giving them odd names? It's all there. Even Tesla Motors, SpaceX etc. are pure cyberpunk nameology.
I mean his ex-wife was literally in Cyberpunk 2077.
Grimes plays a full-borg pop star who hires the player to dig up dirt on her older lover.
Had some songs on the soundtrack
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Very good read, thank you. And I agree with the author that most Role playing games are not really those. I played D&D and Shadowrun, but my best game was Vampire: The Masquerade. I remember that my first character I spend maybe a week designing died during my first session. It was a result of unlucky roll and yes, my Game Master could have salvaged the situation but he would not. I then had a talk with him and he really did not like the roleplaying aspect - my character running around with weapons was literally "out of character" I wanted to build.
The next character I created more closely resembled me, it was easier to think about his actions that way and it eased me into the whole acting stuff. I eventually made some different characters and I really liked the actual roleplaying aspect, I think it really helped me socially in my future endeavors. To this day I have fond memories of my crew. We had a lot of fun sometimes playing through the whole night until dawn with Massive Attack or Tricky playing in the background and smell of cigarettes and cheap coffee filling the room. Good times. Plus the VtM and assorted games had incredibly high quality supplements that I read just for fun to gain some occult knowledge. The whole setting was incredible rabbit hole into one of the best worldbuilding that I have seen in my life, I have read supplements for other games just for fun.
Also I played Cyberpunk 2077 on release and I rate it as 8/10, luckily I did not encounter any bug at all. I did not mind little things people endlessly harped about such as behavior of the police. I went through the story, which to me was excellently constructed, acted and voice-acted. I got my load of fun for the buck I paid as far as I am concerned. I hear that a lot of things were fixed and polished and I am eager to return to the Night City with any future content DLC. Also for anybody out there who likes these sandboxy but story driven RPGs like The Witcher, RDR2 or Cyberpunk I can recommend a hidden gem I found recently that I already poured more than 100 hours into (my mark of superb singleplayer game): Days Gone. Thank me later.
I played the game VTM:Bloodlines. Hands down one of the most engaging worlds I've ever played... The game itself shows its age after so long, and the way they manage their contentmeans you can complete all the interactions and the world starts to feel dead towards the end... but those first 5-15 hours are some of the best in all of gaming.
I've never played the Tabletop VTM, but I checked out V5 of the tabletop game... no idea how the mechanics work, but read through the introduction and my god it has one of the best world build hooks I've ever encountered.
The entire history of VTM there have always been whispers about Ghenna, the end times, there were all these prophecies the doom of vampires was right around the corner, and something was going to happen that would kill them all off... these immortals were running out of time.
Well in most material of the setting its played off as some antediluvian vampire like Cain coming back and killing all their descendants... but in V5 there's a big suggestion it might be smart phones and the NSA, that tracking the supernatural has become so much easier that self righteous mortals are hunting them down and exterminating them, vampire hunters have become major threats, government blackops are wiping them out or black bagging them for experiments like its Delta Green... and the older vampires who're established rich and have a steady supply of blood and everything... they're looking at all the young, poor, cell phone using vampires as loose ends to be tied up.
Meanwhile there's the question of if this really is Gehenna, or if there's another antediluvian eldritch shoe to drop.
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Again no idea how it actually plays, if its mechanics are still solid, or if they shaved off all the edges that make things fun... but the setting they build, the writing and the artwork are just exquisite.
Oh, you do not even know how far the rabbit hole goes there. White Wolf and the whole Old World Of Darkness setting was incredibly intricate and interconnected. Just one thing, the cosmology. The story is that there are three cosmic energies respectively responsible for the following: The Wyld, The Weaver and The Wyrm responsible for creation, weaving that creation into The Tapestry of Cosmos and then Wyrm was the force of Destruction to keep the other forces in check. Except the Wyrm went insane and now is the force of corruption. Vampires are just one of the Wyrm creatures in this setting.
Then you have the whole Mage: The Ascension setting, where supernatural "willworkers" are trying to tap humanity AKA Sleepers and force them to view the world in line with their tradition, a Hegemony of sorts except that their power is curtailed by the force of Paradox - the collective resistance of the humanity to supernatural that can literally kill a Mage who exceeds her bounds. Except one faction of the Mages have "won" (not really) this Paradigm War, they call themselves as Technocracy, it is the Mage faction that was capable of utilizing tanks in 1500s as a form of Magic battling against literal Merlin with fireballs. Reading from cards? Technocracy calls it "statistics". Encountering ghosts and other interplanar beings? It is just this new cutting-edge technology of Void Engineering handling aliens. Including the part that "prayers" work: your cutting edge plasma weapon will not work when there are many sleepers around, at least sleepers not prone to believe that Men in Black can actually wield plasma weapons to protect Humanity from supernatural threats.
Werewolves are not just these weirdos running around in the wild. They are serving The spirit of Gaia and they fight corruption in all form, especially the Wyrmling manifestation inside The World of Darknes in form of shadowy cabal called Pentex, that controls corporations such as chemical mammoth of Rainbow Incorporated or Herculean Firearms Inc.. Of course unless you are one of the Black Spiral Dancers, a Werewolf tribe that succumbed to the Wyrm corruption, not unlike the Warhammer 40K theme.
And of course, you have all the "edge" players such as Hunters, Mummies, literal Ghosts and other beings being part of the whole world. It really is a wonderful piece of worldbuilding compared to which some nukes being shot at Vampire Antediluvian in India are just background stuff.
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I have a deep, abiding love for the cyberpunk aesthetic. I've worshipped at the altar of Sterling, Gibson and Stephenson. And unfortunately I'm going to have to hard disagree and express puzzlement with:
As a disclaimer, I haven't played Cyberpunk:2077 so I likely missed some minor tie-ins. But Edgerunners was a good series with an amazing aesthetic that profoundly failed to live up to it's promise. Here are the problems:
**** MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW *****
Gratuitous character deaths. Pilar dying in episode 4 was shocking, and let you know we're playing for keeps. By the time Rebecca and David explode into puddles of gore, it's impossible to give a fuck anymore because the entire team died in stupid ways that don't further the plot. Just watching violence for the sake of violence isn't particularly attractive.
Utterly pointless climax. The culmination of the series is just a reheated 'Do it for her' meme. Love interest is abducted. Main character acquires
macguffin(okay, giant mecha suit) to rescue love interest, dying in the process. All other main characters die pointlessly, with one possible exception (Maine dying of cyberpsychosis. But also...what's Maine's backstory? Why is he randomly running in the desert? Why should I care that he's dying?).Complete lack of meaningful character progression. Nobody has a relevant backstory. The closest thing we get is David's mom dying early in the series, which changes virtually nothing because David already had a pile of reasons to hate the corpos. Now he hates them more. Profound. Meanwhile, what do we know about Pilar? Maine? Dorio? Kiwi? Rebecca? All these characters die and it's just impossible to care because they're sad cardboard cutouts without motivations or actual stories.
**** Spoilers done ****
And because I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the good:
Incredible worldbuilding and aesthetics. The combat sequences with the Sandevistan and cybernetics more generally are fun as hell. David and Lucy's song is a major earworm.
Color me deeply skeptical. Cyberpunk and fantasy are fairly played out and at this point there isn't a whole lot of new ground to tread, just the occasional talented author who can write an excellent interpretation of the old formula. We'll keep seeing the occasional hit or new franchise, but there's not going to be a renaissance of talented authors bravely taking cyberpunk to new places.
By the way, does this site support spoiler text? The old >! !< doesn't seem to work.
All three of your points seem to miss a key aspect of the show: it's a tragedy. The characters don't 'level up' in a tragedy, they write their endings. Do people complain that Macbeth lacks 'character progression' or that Reservoir Dogs has 'meaningless deaths?' Each character earns their brutal ending by the way they conduct themselves.
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The life expectancy of people doing shit like that is that of early WW2 British bomber crews. That was the realistic part of the show.
I believe you misremember. He acquires macguffin because he's hired to do so, but she gets abducted in the meantime so he uses it to try to free her, no ?
Yes, you're correct.
For the other point, see my response to Kulak.
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I disagree strongly... The entire point of edgerunners is that it comes at you fast and the characterization is done through animation, subtle character moments, implications that you read into it...
Also deaths aren't furthering the plot? The plot is they're punks trying to get rich and not die, and the tragedy is they know they probably will. You might as well complain the Deaths in "All's Quiet on the Western Front" not furthering the plot... that's the point, death can hit you at any time, you're not special.
I feel like you expected the story to be "And that's how we decided to do "Big important heroic thing" and advance "the good" and this is the story of our noble sacrifice..." no the point of edgerunners is they're just trying to achieve their personal ambitions, make it out alive, not be crushed by the world around them... and everything escalates because the intense friction and pressure they're under just achieving that.
We get the backstories for David and Lucy because they share them with eachother, the rest we get to gleen so much of their personalities, their values, what little part of life they're holding onto, just from how they behave an interact.
Its incredibly efficient show don't tell and it works remarkably effectively. There's a reason it has 100% and 96% on rotten tomatoes.
To some extent, De gustibus non est disputandum and all that. I grant that you can have different tastes that are valid, or that you can relate to characters that I find disinteresting. That being said:
Writing a quality story is orthogonal to whether the story is uplifting or has a happy ending. You can have a story whose message is ultimately nihilist or tragic, even one where every main character dies, and do it poorly or do it very well. In your mind, what differentiates Edgerunners from a lower quality tragedy or film/novel with similar themes? Or what changes could have been made to the plot that would make it better or worse?
For example, since you highlight it: David's relationship with his mother is never really examined. She knew he was talented, had big dreams for his future and made significant sacrifices to give him those opportunities. He completely rejects everything she wanted and turns to a life of a crime. That's fine, maybe he was even forced into it, but...doesn't he have any feelings whatsoever about betraying his mother's dreams and throwing away her sacrifices? Shouldn't he at least grapple with this a little bit? The closest we get is him laughing about being on top of Arasaka tower like his mom always wanted in the last episode.
You want to keep it grimdark and nihilist, but still have some emotional valence? Alright. His mom (who supposedly dies offscreen) was instead sold to human traffickers by the doctors to cover the unpaid medical bills. She ends up the pet of an Arasaka exec. David sees his mother one last time and her disappointment with what he's become just before being smashed by Mr. Smasher. Roll credits.
Or how about the fact that Pilar's death, while shocking, is utterly inconsequential to the story and other characters with deep connections to him? Rebecca is mad for that scene, they kill the nutjob, great...then nobody ever mentions him again beyond Maine suggesting that David take his cybernetic hands? The loss of her brother seems utterly inconsequential to Rebecca. If I'm remembering correctly, the next scene after Pilar dying is Lucy and David being intimate with neither of them seeming to care that their friend just died.
Contrast that to Ned Stark's imprisonment and death, which had huge consequences for the show and the characters. Rob has an emotional breakdown and needs to be comforted by his mother, highlighting the fact that he's a 16 year old boy in over his head. It marks the beginning of Arya's quest for revenge. Tywin and Tyrion bemoan Joffrey's excesses and realize the North will never sue for peace now. Jon nearly breaks his vows to ride south.
Really? How would you describe Kiwi's personality, besides mercenary, and why is she the way she is? How about Dorio? Why is Maine an edgerunner, what's his endgame, why is he addicted to cybernetics at the expense of his sanity? I don't even know the personal ambitions for...well, any of the characters besides Lucy wanting to go to the moon. David wanted to be an edgerunner, but he gets that in the first few episodes. What does anyone else want?
@Bernd @Evinceo
Withe reason Edge Runners works as a tragedy is because the characters dig their own graves without alienating themselves totally from the audience. That's hard to do. If you make your characters mistakes too obvious, the audience can't empathize anymore (lots of B slasher films fail this test.) If the consequences seem too arbitrary, the audience loses interest because it's just capricious fate.
Kiwi believes in being a heartless mercenary, but when the time comes to actually do it, she realizes it's not what she wanted after all, way too late. Tragedy. We don't really get much characterization of Dorio, but her attachment to Maine does her in.
She spends the rest of the show being as reckless as possible until she finally pushes her luck too far. She also gets huge cybernetic hands, echoing her brother's style. She's loyal to David against all reason.
One change that might have made it better? Make the mecha suit cooler? Remove 'Choom' from the script? Drop the school subplot, that felt kinda pointless? I can't think of any major flaws in the execution of the themes. They could have gotten away with not killing off Rebecca (go slightly lighter) or having Lucy remove her helmet on the moon (to go way darker.)
To make it worse is easy. David could have lived. They could have had the power of love conquer Cyberpsychosis. They could have failed to foreshadow everything so well. They could have added tons of gratuitous sexual peril. They could have shown the entire thing as some other kid watching a BD of David's life and ended it with a stupid comment. They could have done Lucy's arc without the moon thing.
Reading this made me tear up. Perhaps I've an overly sensitive emotional system which would explain my philosophical view of things is so bleak as to allow me to not feel anything most of the time.
I was waiting for it to happen. The way she gives a defeated little arm raise in the sun... I really thought that was going to be it. But they ended it on a hopeful note; David may have died for nothing, but Lucy still has her second chance.
I wasn't. Women aren't like that. They don't kill themselves on a whim.
She'd wanted to get out of Brazil, go to the Moon, and she got there.
I presume netrunners can easily find legitimate employment.
And a sad, very intelligent and attractive woman working in some tech company would have an easy time finding some solid partner and fulfilling her biological imperative.
Fictional character
It wasn't a whim; I assumed she went to the moon specifically for that purpose.
On a tour bus. It's not implied that she can stay and even if she could life on the moon is, in reality, bleak.
Not when Arasaka wants you dead.
I think that the authors of the show have a more nuanced view of what that means.
Is the Moon ran by Arasaka ?
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I feel like you're disappointed they didn't explicitly have a scene for every character where they monologued about their Tragic Past like a Kojima game.
Every character has a really well defined disposition, attitude, set of motivations, and yes backstory... the show just doesn't stop to tell you them, you catch their story through glimpses of their personality, lifestyle, decisions, stylistic choices... you know like real life.
Maine andDorio's names, character designs, interactions, and dialogue tells you everything that narrative essential about their characters and back stories, without having to spell it out.
Kiwi's interactions and relationships with Lucy, Faraday, Maine and Falco are all you have to see to start drawing out the past of her character... Even her design, she specifically chose Cyberware that didn't have a mouth and would prevent her from being expressive, purposefully alienating herself from everyone around her, fleeing the interpersonal Trauma implicit in everything she does.
These are characters are incredibly designed characterized and fleshed out, unique backstories and personalities are implicit in everything about them, StudioTrigger just followed the show don't tell school of thought (as you expect from litteral animators and artists) and embodied this in their characters and actions instead of stopping the show's breakneck pace.
And as for the characters who's inner monologues we do get ,its incredibly rich!
The entire reason David keeps doing merc work instead of ditching and enjoying his modest wealt and girlfriend is he feels he needs to become a great success in order to live up to his mother's dreams and retroactively undo his abandonment of her ambitions through success, He feels he needs to continue Maine's ambitions so as to render Maine's tragedy a success...
He's fleeing his Trauma by embracing the very danger that caused it.
That is very strongly characterized and very subtlety handled, and every character is like this!
This is how in 10 episodes they can cover so much ground at such a break-neck pace, and with so much style, because their writing, artstyle, plotting, and even music is operating at maximum efficiency.
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Think I've said this before, but I don't know that "not dying" was realistically on any character's agenda. Rebecca was always going to die in a stupid fight with someone much tougher; her progress in the show was in being killed by the strongest guy in the setting rather than some bouncer she got mad and pulled a gun on.
Maine was always going to go psycho and die destroying everything and everyone he cared about. Kiwi was always going to die in some stupid triple-cross backstabbing she thought she was smart enough to pull off, etc.
The whole story was about dying a little harder and becoming a legend doing it.
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I want to read this but out of principle I won't because not even you are too cool for submission statements.
I included the lond form of the Title!
Basically its a dive into how Cyberpunk 2020 the table top game died, revived itself, died agian, and then revived again... and how its a franchise that will keep getting second, third and forth chances with obscene budgets.
I attribute the amount of affection it has to its unique gameplay mechanisms, which are basically designed to create dynamic, tragic, consequencial stories, of real meaningful deprivation and struggle... and how that's so vastly different from basically everything in our superhero driven culture.
Thanks!
I don't get it, though. What every writer should learn from Pondsmith is...to make great literature? Maybe I missed an entire paragraph, but I don't at all see your answer to the question of the HOW you repeatedly raised.
That character should have real ties to their world and their actions should have real consequences.
The lifepath and FNFF systems ensure that their is no way for your character to be a generic orphan without grief, while the FNFF system ensures your character can't be superhero effortless evading the consequences of combat or conflict, but instead must take everything smart and always be in real meaningful risk even if they are smart.
Alright, I apologize - I did indeed miss several entire paragraphs. I was reading on my phone and the article was cut off before it even got to Lifepaths. See? A submission statement giving a tl;dr of what you were going to lay out would have prevented this misunderstanding! Going to re-read. Thanks for patiently answering me.
A picture! Mike Pondsmith is black? Never knew. I expect something like this to be screamed from the rooftops for woke points, not slid on my desk in this matter-of-fact, race-blind manner.
I generally agree with your perspective on the genre and on what I know of the Cyberpunk Franchise. I disagree on the Edgerunners series - I thought it was unexpectedly good for animé, which surprised me when I watched it with a buddy as a sequel to our hate-watching the recent Witcher series - but overall still a clichéd mess with a horribly rushed plot. Consumable, enjoyable, certainly one of the better animé series, but hardly something for the ages. But still, overall I think you've made a good case for the qualities of the franchise, setting and ruleset. Not enough to get me into playing a TTRPG, but I still appreciate the thought that went into it.
You also mentioned MGRR. Did you by any chance write about the Steven Armstrong speech before?
I never wrote about it no.
If someone here did though I'd be very interested to read it. Always found that character inspiring
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Weaving the character's story through the whole thing was brilliant. Got seriously attached to her after the second interlude.
I keep wondering how I never once heard of Cyberpunk as a kid. We only had the local knockoff with cyber elves and wizards.
Shadowrun, unlike CP2020, got more than one videogame adaptation. There's one on SNES, one on Sega, a Kickstarter-era trilogy and probably some terrible FPS that I have erased from my memory.
Not exclusive! It was on PC as well, and one of the features they touted was that you could play with Xbox players on PC, and vice versa. Which to be fair was pretty unique at the time. I heard the game wasn't at all good though.
I have a couple friends who enjoyed it. The way you could build out gear/cyberwear/magic let you have really customizable builds and loadouts for an FPS. Kind of a waste of the IP though.
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Ironically enough, I think Shadowrun could stand to have an open-world first-person adaptation not unlike CP2077. Question, though, is who on Earth would take that undertaking?
CDProjekt Red?
Well, besides the big developer/publisher that already has a competing tabletop franchise they've invested in...Paradox, maybe? Except Paradox also basically owns WOD (though they also published the HBS BattleTech game). I doubt Microsoft would do it (unless they're that hard up for stuff to put under the Xbox brand).
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I don't agree that all fictional parents exist to be killed for the sake of narrative convenience. One good example is the original Mobile Suit Gundam, where Amuro is simply estranged from his parents. First he thinks he loses his father in the attack on Side 7, then he's estranged from his mother when she sees that he's no longer the sweet boy she raised, and then he's estranged from his actually-alive father when it's clear that oxygen deprivation from his unplanned EVA in the first episode has made him loony. That series shows that war can tear families apart and change people even without making them into orphans (though there definitely are war orphans in that series and in the broader franchise, starting with Frau Bow and the three little kids: Katz, Letz, and Kikka). Sure, that's still writing them out of the story, but Gundam 0079 stands in contrast to a lot of other anime shows more infamous for killing their protags' mothers.
Also, I think there are certainly other tabletop franchises that have experienced surprise revivals (BattleTech, namely). And that reminds me, thoughts on Shadowrun? It's life-path system is different, but somewhat similar.
I honestly don't get Shadowrun...
Like my overwhelming emotion about it is just... "WHY?"
Like imagine if Call of Cthulhu was out... then they made a competitor game that was Call of Cuthulu, but there were elves and dwarves... or Vampire the Masquerade... but there were also halflings...
Like I've never gotten into it so I can't judge, but I just don't get how throwing high fantasy into the cyberpunk future wouldn't detract from both...
Like honestly the opposite of shadowrun would seems way cooler on paper... Shadowrun is a world where high fantasy has crashed into the real cyberpunk world through some sort of cataclym... It'd seem a fantasy world that just kept technologically advancing til they were cyberpunk would be way more interesting. Is the wizards guild losing influence now that Hackers are doing more and information is the main currency... how are the ancient order of knights adapting to everyone being an augmented killing machine... are they outgunned and the whole thing is falling to chaos... or have they made the deal with the devil and are now leading the trend? Is it an age of high colonialism where all the dark lands are being conquered because the humans and civilized races are now so technologically advanced?
Like I've never played shadowrun... but Its world feels disrupted enough that litterally anything could happen at any second and there's no predictability or consistency that the characters choices can have real consequences... like you can't dispatch the kill teams after the players for doing something dumb, when so little makes sense and no one even knows what would be dumb.
To add onto Iconochasm's reply, Shadowrun is very aware of the conflict between the natural, magical world and the artificial, technological world, and it makes for a really nasty setting when you think about it for long enough. Getting augs makes you less good at magic (and there is a character in the second game from the Harebrained Schemes trilogy who exploits this for a reason), one of the top 10 megacorps literally performs blood magic (or at least is heavily, heavily implied to benefit from it), and the powers that be are where they are because they've tamed the chaos the world gives rise to.
That despair in the face of megacorp dominance takes on entire new dimensions when the CEO is a millennia-old Literal Fucking Dragon that knows ancient lore beyond space and time and can cram new research faster than any metahuman.
I mean... yes, but that's still just Saburo Arasaka...
The dude's a 180 year old Japanese flying ace from ww2 that's run his company and most the world more than most people's grandparents have been alive, and he pretty much literally eats people's souls
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No, it adds to it. Shadowrun is a hilariously awful hellscape that merges the alienation of cyberpunk with the sheer danger and wonder of urban dark fantasy, against the mundane reality of A Boring Dystopia. Imagine being a wage mage whose day job is just walking a perimeter around some megacorp chip factory, casting the same ward against nature spirits every 6 minutes. Being in the poor part of town and hearing there are literal flesh-eating ghouls in the sewers. Or seeing an entire assault helicopter full of a Fast Response Team crash and burn because some teenaged punk had a dream where Dragonslayer taught him Lightning Bolt, and told him to go rage against the machine.
Noooo, Shadowrun has kill teams a plenty. On top of the cyberwarriors and elite hackers, they also have combat mages who can track you through the astral based on blood traces you left at the crime scene, and then levitate invisible snipers into overwatch positions.
The real "trick" of doing shadowruns is that the world is a nightmare of jurisdictions, so if you can evade or hold off pursuit long enough to get extra-territorial, you can probably dodge consequences for the time being. But over time, every team will build up a list of corps and governments that want you dead, so that gets harder and harder, unless you take active measures about it.
And that's why it's so fun that it's based in the real world. There is so much real history, that hundreds of writers have built on over decades of the game, so that most stuff actually is pretty nailed down. You can do a run in a new city, and look up which corps or governments control which areas, then bring up Google Maps and plot out your getaway route on real highways.
But because of that, Shadowrun really only works super well if you have a whole group of mega-nerds who want to learn deep lore on top of intense crunch.
Ok that does sound more interesting
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