this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2023
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The phantom liberty expansion is out now, and something to note is just how many roads and cars are in the game considering... well... how are they still burning fossil fuels in 2077?

Something interesting about it is how the game now reads like Grand Theft Auto in the dystopian future. Cars exist so you must be able to drive and shoot out of them and there must be cops and there must be traffic and... all of that is sort of meaningless in that universe. So much of the marketing is set around cars, but if they got rid of the cars, if cars weren't there, then maybe they would have put more effort into the other systems.

Maybe the broken systems just wouldn't need to be built, because so many of them are shoehorned in around cars.

EDIT: wanted to address the comments here as they are all very similarly themed:

I am not talking about the fiction, I am talking about the game design. Yes it's a dystopia but that's not why the game is buggy or boring. Having cars in the fiction means the game must add mechanics to drive and get new cars and vehicular combat. Once there's so much car stuff, the game feels like GTA, which prompts people to make comparisons, which means CDPR needs even more GTA-like mechanics. That's time which could have gone into more RPG mechanics, better missions, etc.

The only time I was talking about the fiction was in reference to how much would cost to own a car, including roads and so on. Why isn't every road pay per use? Why isn't biofuel like $20 a litre? But that would be oppressive to drive in, and because it's a power fantasy, all of that goes by the wayside.

Overall my point was that just as cars dominate the city scape of the present, so they dominate the game design of everything where cars are present.

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[–] [email protected] 55 points 11 months ago (3 children)

The whole point of Cyberpunk's setting is that it's a capitalist hellscape. The corpos don't care about the environment or setting up a nice public transport network. And of course there is also the gameplay perspective, riding a train in a videogame gets very boring very quickly.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah. Its probably just me that is boring enough to ride the train in GTA occasionally. Also the train in RDR2. Just watching nature and city goes by. Its relaxing. If its a interesting view. Which C2077 absolutely has a lot of.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Bear in mind that there's a whole series of Train Simulator games, so I can pretty much guarantee you're not the only fan of an in-game train ride :)

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

OP smacks of the criticism of the transwoman advertisement. "Are they really trying to tell us that commodification and fetishization of trans bodies is acceptable?"

No!!! The point is that the entire world is a cautionary tale about what happens when you allow corporations unlimited power!!!

[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago

I'm sorry but this is rubbish. It's a hellscape but also very fun and easy. The government or similar entity still pays for road infrastructure. Biofuel is cheap or free (do you ever fill up in game?). Hellscape but your character isn't effectively a chattel slave and you don't have any debt. At least have the design explore the problem. Make it so if you use a car in your heist you will end up losing money. Do something with the premise. Anything. Don't be like "whee this is fun and consequence free wow this is a corporate hellscape"

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

They aren't burning fossil fuels. They're burning CHOOH2, which is the product of a genetically engineered plant.

Everything else has already been addressed by others. It's a dystopia. Public transit exists in universe, but it's very dangerous (as is the rest of the city). The corporate solution is to upsell you cars.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

It's a dystopia not a utopia. I think that is the cyberpunk hellscape that is to be expected.

I think they should have focused harder on the campaign rather than the car-centric open world though. They were never going to match the how good GTA does it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

IT'S A DYSTOPIA DUMMY

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

In the case of CP, as it was already pointed out by other commenters: car culture is firmly rooted in the world building.

However, imagining av alternative world without cars could be interesting as well. How would that transform Night City? How would you make moment-to-moment movement and exploration fun and engaging in a game with big city distances, bit with no cars?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

There’s already dash, crouch dash, and air dash. Allow us to modify our cyberwear so we can increase sprint speed and double dash and we’re already more than halfway there.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Cars exist so you must be able to drive and shoot out of them and there must be cops and there must be traffic and…

Why wasnt this expectation in L.A. Noire? Didnt hear much yelling for cops and better traffic there. What we got was very barebones.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It's not fossil fuels. It's biofuel made from high-sugar wheat that was created by Biotechnica.

https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/CHOOH2

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

TIL. Nevertheless, it must cost a lot more than it does in game.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I don't understand why you think that biofuel would be cost prohibitive in a world with literal robots, sword arms, guns with tracking bullets the ability to jack-in to cyberspace and hack shit with your mind?

Plus it's not like 20 eddies a litre would be cost prohibitive anyway? You drop 10-15k on implants all the time.

As others have pointed out, it is intentionally meant to be a dystopian future, that is to say, a shit one. So the car prevalence could be intentional. (Also there is a public transit system in the lore, it's just not working in the game because they never finished it.)

[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago

All the stuff you talk about is either hard sci-fi, or an inch away from hard sci-fi. A car that is efficient and makes a vroom vroom noise is not hard sci-fi. It's fantasy.

it’s not like 20 eddies a litre would be cost prohibitive anyway? You drop 10-15k on implants all the time.

This part is a fair point, you are incredibly consequential in the world, but that kind of adds to the idea that a car is not something everyday people can afford.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Something I always have noticed on cyberpunk games is that there's no traffic congestion, neither public transit while being overpopulated. Pretty unrealistic.