Been following the game since the start and let me make this clear: absolutely LOVED the gameplay demo. The aesthetic, the characters, voice acting, environment, gunplay, hacking....everything about it was brilliant. I'm super excited.
However, the only thing I found damaged the atmosphere and pulled me out of it was what I felt was a juvenile reliance on constant cursing in the dialogue even at inappropriate times.
I know people are going to immediately point out that it's a "gritty, mature" setting and it's hypocritical to complain about swearing in a game where you can blow people's legs off...but it's not the presence of swearing that bothers me, it's the excessive extent of it. Every casual line of dialogue with every character except Dex and Victor is basically F-bombs nearly every single sentence with occasional random c-bombs thrown in too in a way that feels excessive even for Night City IMO.
In context: I can understand Royce calling the player character a **** during a life-or-death fight with him. That's fair enough. He's a scummy psycho, he's in mortal danger, it makes sense. Such swearing was present with bandits in Witcher 3. That feels realistic. However, V's "I'm cleaner than a **** in a convent." line felt super forced, I've never heard even the roughest people talk that way in real life and it doesn't really fit with the rest of her character either.
Geralt swore every now and then but he wasn't like "Hey Triss, how the f*** are you doing you ****? Let's go ****ing kill some ****ing ****s!"
"Alright Geralt you grey bearded old ****! We should **** up the ****ing church of Novigrad together, the bunch of ****s!"
If they talked like that constantly I wouldn't like those characters nearly as much.
Similarly, Gilchrist screaming "THIS ****'s GOOD AS DEAD!" as you walk away from the corpo deal just felt...cringe to me. We barely know the character - I can already see he hates Stout and he's probably a slimy guy too, do we really need him screaming obscenities right after Stout has spent 5 straight minutes shouting obscenities at us? They're corporate scum, I get it. Having another c-bomb right after 5 minutes of effin' just makes me think that these people are cheesy game characters rather than people.
Same at the end of the demo. Jackie is a coarse guy, but we've been listening to him rant about "borg f***s" for 15 minutes. Does he really need to say "We ****ing pried the door open, V." at the end for +1 to the excessive curse count rather than just "We pried the door wide open" or something like a normal person would say?
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TLDR: I'm not against c-bombs and cursing, they fit the environment and it's a mature game. But can it be made more appropriate and less insanely excessive in the release version? It crosses the line of being believable in the casual dialogue and, in my humble opinion, dents the amazing atmosphere CDPR have built in every other part of the game.
