What's white on the top has to be black on the bottom.
Though one of the reasons why I liked the trailer more than most is because I've started feeling that traditional cyberpunk is a bit played out. Don't get me wrong, I still want CP'MMLXXVII to be the most goddammned theme park-ass over-the-top trope-driven cyberpunk game imaginable because I want to play an open-world version of basically every cyberpunk work ever. But as a personal preference, the grey-hearted noir detectives and side-shaved neon hairdos started getting a little blase to me because I no longer felt that cyberpunk was really saying anything. It's all negativity and pessimism all the time.
And while the world will certainly never be "perfect", it could always be better. As long as you realize that you can't always play by the rules, that sacrifices have to be made, and that the ends justify the means, change can always happen.
As long as you understand that real change never happens overnight and you have to let it build over time, you will realize that you really can make a difference. The reason why we're so cynical about things is because we were told that we could make a difference but we weren't told how long it takes, so we expected to do a little marching here and shout a few slogans there and then have our desired utopian society fall into our lap. And when it didn't happen, we hoped for revolution to pick up the slack, even believing that revolution is inevitable and it's coming someday, forgetting that the Powers That Be can hear everything you're saying and usually (usually!) aren't stupid.
Then that didn't happen and we became jaded, thinking that punk is dead and the only way to survive is through cold hard nihilistic cynicism.
Funny thing is, we've been through this cycle before. A whole century ago, there was a wave of fiction detailing the dangers of totalitarianism and bureaucracy that the Industrial Revolution had inadvertently wrought. This was stuff like
We,
Brave New World, Metropolis,
The Machine Stops, A Clockwork Orange,
It Can't Happen Here,
Anthem,
The Jungle,
Animal Farm,
Fahrenheit 451,
Minority Report,
The Man In The High Castle, and of course the Messiah of them all,
Nineteen Eighty-Four. It all shouted that the future was a hellhole of totalitarian governments, totally pervasive surveillance, destructive decadence, and a general end of humanity. Following this, we began asking "what else is there?" Even some of the writers of these dystopian works started penning more hopeful and optimistic stories. The problem was that by the '70s, sci-fi got a little
too optimistic. Probably because shit genuinely did suck there for a while and detente meant that there was no clear enemy besides the Arabs. Hence cyberpunk.
Gordon Bennet, that went on too long.
My point is, the sun will still shine. Night comes and night goes. If there's too much dwelling on how shitty things are, we're apt to believe that's how it'll always be and never do anything about it. At some point, we do have to start looking up and asking "Is there a way to change this?"
Punk died when it went mainstream not because it became commodified and splintered into many subgenres like metal but because it originally espoused anarchism. Key letters: -
ism. Somewhere along the line,
anarchism became anarchy, and by "anarchy" we meant "break shit, kill people, paint your hair, fuck the System, man." Which is actually not anarchy at all, but
anomie.
TLDR: Fuckaged guy rambles too long about why a video game has daytime segments.