How would that game look, do you think? The game as is has quite a lot of sex and gore, and some pretty disturbing themes as well. I found the Evelyn Parker questline pretty rough once I read some emails about how she was being used at the BD studio. There’s not a lot of runway left before you’re into full on hardcore sex or torture porn.
Contrast that with Mass Effect where your choices are Good or Evil. And it is obvious which is which.
I did not see Witcher 3 choices as “gotchas” but rather your choices had consequences. E.G. Save the kids and someone else has a bad ending.
I guess you want a “good” choice to only result in “good” results. I get that. It is demoralizing to make a “good” choice like saving kids only to find later some other group got screwed.
To me that is the charm of Witcher…choices are ambiguous and it plays out that way. And it can be annoying. You want to be the good guy, the hero everyone loves and then, despite your best efforts…not to much.
I think that is the brilliance of the Witcher games but I can see if you (general “you”) wants to be the savior it grates to find that saving one person killed three other people somewhere else.
There is not right or wrong to it. Just individual preference.
They go to great lengths to let you choose your junk and then it barely matters.
If you want to say some logs you find along the way count fine. I have read a few so far that were disturbing. But that’s it? Some edgy diaries?
Less a desire to be a pure savior and more finding their particular approach to being “consequential” quickly played out and tiresome. Used lightly or in select moments, it can be thought provoking or add a twist. In Witcher 3, I was already thinking “Yeah, yeah, whatever” before I got to the praised Baron quest line (which blunted the impact from that significantly). Anyway, CP2077 offers much less jerking me around in that fashion which works for me. I can see where people who found it to be good writing would be let down, though.
I find that there isn’t much choice in the game. A lot of times I felt that I was on a track and nothing I did really changed the outcome. For example, I was running a race, missed a turn and shot over the edge of a steep hill; I figured there was no way that I didn’t come in dead last, but when I got back on the course all the other cars were kind of waiting for me. It didn’t matter how I drove except the last 100 meters.
I’ve heard this complaint a lot, but… I can’t imagine a single game mechanic where it would matter what kind of vagina or dick you have, which wouldn’t be gratuitous and pornigraphic.
Right.
So why bother having it as an option?
They was much published on how detailed you could be when choosing your gender and then it amounts to nothing.
Probably to be edgy. And because trans issues come up in the game so they wanted to let you play as trans - again, for marketing reasons. You are right, there is no game play reason to have it.
It’s a first-person game, which means your character’s physical appearance doesn’t matter, period. Same thing with any other first-person RPG. And yet, I still spend half an hour designing my character’s face. Why? For the same reason I always scour the web for hours looking for the perfect portrait for a new D&D character - it helps me get into their skin.
The character generation feels like they either intended a 3rd person mode or else at least 3rd person cut scenes and had to scrap them. The creator is cool and all but it feels like time and energy wasted versus other mechanics that could have been better.
So again, what do you want from the game? What lines were they unwilling to cross that you wish they had in order up get to that NC-17 rating?
I want Night City. “Worst place to live in America”
Too much to ask for?
The place is crawling with gangs, there are ads for BD pornos and cybernetic dicks everywhere, warring gangs control the city and you often run into a firefight between rival gangs, gangs and cops, or robberies. I’ve gotten that “worst place to live in America” vibe already. I just don’t see how, practically, they would make it any more evocative by upping the ratings?
A PG-13 city doesn’t really sell it. It just doesn’t. It’s like a PG-13 Disney haunted house. It looks like a haunted house. It has haunted house things. But you are never really sold on it being a haunted house.
I just got Johnny’s Porsche. Too bad the car handles like a drunk 8 year old is driving.
So you would prefer to see the rape, the torture, and the sex in full unadulterated detail rather than it being only very strongly implied?
That’s not a game that most people (myself included) would buy, and it’s not even a game that would get past every country’s rating system.
Yeah, I’m not really interested in a game where you pop in a BD and watch a hard-core porno cutscene. Especially considering how disturbing most of the BD titles are. You hint at that sort of thing, you don’t show it.
Yep!
Let’s take the Evelyn Parker quest that takes you to the black market BD studio. I’m spoilering it because there are minor spoilers, but also because it’s pretty disturbing.
Evelyn Parker is a prostitute at a club where an AI takes control of your brain and turns you into an autonomous puppet while the client has sex with your body. A bad guy attacks her with a computer virus and the club owner sells her to a BD studio that uses damaged prostitutes to film edgier material than you can otherwise get through legal means. In the course of tracking down the location of the studio, you watch one of the BDs - it’s a film of a person being dragged to an operating chair, tied down, and operated on against their will. You watch them struggle to get away, but they’re unable to overpower their attackers.
You eventually make it to the club, where you find a combination movie studio and charnel house. The bodies of discarded “actors” are tossed haphazardly into corners. You find some email messages talking about how Evelyn is smarter than their average acquisition. They’ve been recording BDs where they make her think she has a chance to escape but catching her at the last minute. They suggest letting her attempt suicide by jumping out a convenient window only to have a net set up below.
When you find Evelyn, she’s been tortured and raped into a state of complete unresponsiveness. You carry her out of the building and leave her with her friend Judy, curled up on a bed and flinching at the slightest touch.
This is the “PG-13” version of the game. How shall we turn it from “it has haunted house things” into an actual haunted house?
edit: Well I tried to spoiler it.
[mod edit - fixed]
Quick note: obviously we are watching it one way or the other, but inuniverse you don’t just watch a BD - you get full sensory information experienced by the recorder as if you were living through it (possibly edited). You feel what they feel, think what they think, etc - so it’s even more horrifying.
The first time V uses a BD ingame, he experiences death - and is horribly disturbed by it. He will die again in other BDs but won’t be so disturbed because by then he has died in real life…
Ps I say he because my V is male (and a nevernude with a pair of tiny blue shorts lol!)
Put the spoiler tags on their own lines