1) They are not in the game. If they were they would have announced that by now. In addition, keep in mind that CDPR also shunned them by not allowing them to be part of the June crew to play 4 hours of the game.
2) Well it should matter to you. This sets an uncomfortable precedence. Gaming "journalism" already has a bad rap for being inconsistent and not credible as they are too close to the people they are supposed to objectively cover. While Alanah and many of these "influencers" are not journalists but they do have a following of people who will buy or not buy a game based on their coverage. If I see influencer X always talking positively about game Z and then find out that the developers for game Z put influencer X in the game for some quid pro quo relationship, how credible does that make influencer X?
CDPR might be the darling developers for the fans now but they can turn into a laughing stock tomorrow, see Bioware. People like Madqueen and Neon Arcade has done more for keeping up the discussion for CP2077 2077 since forever, before it became cool for the influencers to tag along and yet CDPR does not acknowledge them.
Give a person an inch and they take a foot.
I'm glad you're so well informed about everything that is going on inside CDPR. Not many people can say the same. As for X or Y person not getting to play the game early, you have no idea what you're talking about (unless, of course, you really do work for CDPR and you know everything about it
). It has never been about "oh hey.. this guy posted some videos about our game, let's invite him over". At least that was never the case when I was involved with such event over at EA some time ago. There's a lot more going on behind the scenes that you or I don't know about. If you want to claim yourself an expert on the subject, so be it... but to me, you sound really angry.
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And no, your dislike of something has no impact on my enjoyment of the game. I really don't know why this is so hard for you to comprehend.
The biggest issue I see is that CDPR is its worst enemy. Its Witcher success has resulted in them having this cult following of their work, and Cyberpunk is an evidence of it. The game is soooo overhyped, people put it up on the pedestal like it's a holy grail of gaming, a second coming of Jesus, whatever. Come release day, there are going to be thousands of people crapping on this game, because it isn't going to be perfect, because it isn't how they imagined it would be, because X, Y, Z... and it's going to be hilarious. And don't even get me started on the outcry, if the game will have 1 too many bugs, or if the game will be crashing on arrival. lol (never mind the people with their nvidia 1060 GPU's wondering why they can't push 4k RTX, since it was a recommended spec)
You're right about one thing... gaming jurnos have a bad rep... which is exactly why I don't follow any of them, or read any gaming reviews. And maybe that's the difference... I ignore that aspect of media completely, so when someone tells me some Youtuber is now an NPC in the game, I just shrug it off, because it really doesn't matter to me. I've got bigger problems to deal with in my life, and some random NPC in a game isn't one of them. Stuff like that doesn't even register on my radar.
And if you're still angry about someone being in the game, than instead of taking a quest from them, blast their head off with a shotgun, or chop it off with the sword. That's gotta count for something, right?