CDPR 100% should have gone with/kept a more mature methodology for this game, but it seems at the last hour, they decided to make it "more appealing" to a wider audience. Despite them touting it, as far back as 2012 when they first announced the game, as being a "dark, gritty, mature experience for adults." Well, I feel like Cyberpunk lost its edge due to CDPR wanting to appeal to more people, and that ruined the entire overarching experience.
CDPR made such a big deal about nudity and character genitals, but then completely gutted it from the game and relegated it to the inventory menu─a sales pitch and nothing more. A way to make the game seem more mature than it was so more people would buy it, only to realize after the fact that it was all in reality just a surface level marketing ploy, entirely lacking in substance or depth.
Let's be honest, I don't really care about genitals in a video game, but the idea of it being there tells everyone that it's a game for adults, and that it'll likely have other adult themes and perhaps a depth of character deserving of the Cyberpunk genre. If you so happen to see a sex scene in a movie, you aren't going, "Oh, genitals!" unless you're too young to be watching it. But if the entire scene was done right, and fits in with the narrative, if they so happen to show nudity, then fine. It was a film for mature audiences.
We know it wasn't just put there as a surface level ploy to say, "Look at our game, it's so raw and gritty, it let's you customize your genitals!" What they don't tell you is that it doesn't matter, because your customized genitals aren't in the game anyway. The sex scenes are PG-13. The strippers are clothed. The hookers are clothed. I don't care that they are, but don't tell me with marketing that they won't be, implying it's a game for mature audiences, and then make it PG-13 anyway. That just shows me you're a bunch of manipulative corpos trying to use psycho-marketing BS to make more sales. But keep showing your true colors, it only helps me to decide where my money won't go.
The entire reason they did this was because of greed. If the game contained those things, as an example, it would get far less play on social media and streaming platforms, and even the play it did get would be limited to the adults who don't mind that sort of thing. This was CDPR's attempt to make the game accessible to a younger audience, when it never should have been in the first place. It was not, and still even in its current state, is not for children. So why ruin it at all?
This game is meant to be mature, grotesque and difficult to stomach. It is meant to leave a bad taste in your mouth, to represent some of the darkest times in humanity. And while it does do that to some degree, it does so in a way that feels diluted and watered down. CDPR only made a softened, more palatable caricature of that dystopia, ruining the entire point of it existing in the first place. You can't please everyone, so stop trying, and just make the damn game like it was meant to be.
Now we just need a company to come along like Larian or Remedy Entertainment, who doesn't care what you think, and make it the dark, gritty, mature experience we all thought we were getting in the first place. Because obviously CDPR is too concerned with profits to make the game they initially promised. That'll never happen, however, so all we can do is hope CDPR does better with the atmosphere of their next Cyberpunk title.
In my opinion, Cyberpunk 2077 is entirely too bright and soft of a Cyberpunk game. It's just missing something. It's missing its edge. Probably because CDPR took sandpaper to its edges in an attempt to please both your nephew and your grandma, pleasing everyone less in the process. The game tells you over and over again that it most definitely has edge via Johnny Silverhand, like it's trying to brainwash you into believing it, despite looking around and realizing it was all very purposefully diluted for CDPR's initial YouTube and Twitch viewership numbers.
And it doesn't make sense, because the game does have some very graphic situations buried in there, so for them to censor it in so many other ways just makes it even more mind boggling. Censor the nudity, but not the guy being nailed to a cross? Hmm, makes sense. I guess it's okay to bury dark things in your game as long as they aren't surface level in a way that they affect your profits. But Cyberpunk is and should be a very dark game even on the surface.
I feel like they tried to offset this by giving everyone in the game a bad attitude, like dystopian America makes everyone act so apathetic, and of course it would to some degree, but living in horrible times like that in America doesn't always result in 100% everyone being in a constant bad mood (that's a Slavic thing─Polish people don't laugh in public because they think it makes you look simple-minded) but Americans who are going through hard times, well, they laugh even more. They go out of their way to laugh and smile and have fun, and I feel like Cyberpunk is missing that in a lot of ways. They're entirely too serious and matter-of-fact. This is just my opinion and observation, but CDPR needs to get some American writers if they're going to continue making games based in America.
We got the opposite of what we should have gotten: we should have gotten an extremely dark and gritty game full of people trying to laugh and enjoy themselves despite it. But what we got instead was a game diluted of its grittiness and maturity, full of people with horrible, apathetic attitudes that I found difficult to enjoy. This is a generalization, but it's as if we're being told how to feel about the game by the attitude of the characters, instead of being made to feel any sort of way organically by the story. And this doesn't apply to every single part of the game, as of course some parts are emotionally charged, but just as an overarching issue that I personally see in its plot and storytelling.
CDPR's Cyberpunk in a nutshell: like adding strawberry milk to your absinth in an attempt to make it more appealing to children, but it just made it taste even more like shit in the process. And children shouldn't be drinking absinth anyway.
