New Cyberpunk CRPG coming from CD Projekt

I don't get why you're so defensive about cyberpunk, if you want to play this game of making someone seem overly emotional when they argue a point of view different from yours. The reasons why you like or dislike something matter, even if they are just staking out a waypoint en route way the hell away from where we started.

These are terrible arguments.

Who said anything about love? We're talking about fundamentally understanding the book on the terms it lays out quite explicitly versus thinking Paul Verhoeven set out to make the most sincere transfer of Starship Troopers to film possible. Why would it be unusual for someone who likes science fiction to dislike something that was, at its root, a fantasy story? I don't know what Star Blazers is, but I bet it's one of those times when you are freely conflating by-the-numbers pulp garbage with actual writing, and not seeing why that distinction matters.

Well, and I think you're in a pretty tough spot in terms of assessing the quality of his writing, given that you have a tin ear for parody and ideological reasons for ignoring satire as purposeful.

Wherein you force me to write a defense of Neal Stephenson
So I didn't read Stephenson as a teenager, I read him as an adult. I started with the Diamond Age and then Cryptonomicon, and then stalled out for a bit. And now, reading Snow Crash, I am actually reminded a great deal of an unpleasant conversation about Hemingway last year. That is, you can dislike books that Neal Stephenson writes. You can dislike Neal Stephenson as a writer. These are not controversial things to say, and as you explain your criteria, more than likely people will just nod or express their counter-opinions and move on.

But you can't arbitrarily lump him in with people who don't actually know the first thing about writing. Or, rather, you can, but it means you just don't get it. He is, apart from the act of putting words on a page, doing something altogether different from R.A. Salvatore or Weis/Hicks or the sweatshop at the root of the Hardy Boys or whatever bestseller mass-market erotica is clogging up kindles all over the place. Those are illiterate books written for people who confuse the act of seeing words with their eyes in order to pass the time with reading, in much the same way that people confuse accumulating facts with being educated.

Then I look at your specific criticisms. Incoherent. Doubting that it is purposeful parody. Incoherent. Like badly done Mystery Science Theater, as if such a thing could be well done. Incoherent. These sound like pretty simple descriptive terms, but they don't make sense. For instance, Stephenson is rigorously coherent. If you don't see one of the base layers as parody, you're going to have a bad time because you need to be able to meta-follow as well as follow forms in order to enjoy it. If you can't switch between parody and satire and meta-characterization and philosophy riddles and sci fi, then you're just reading in one gear as a passive experience. That doesn't make you dumb, it just means that you're doing something altogether different with the work when you read it like that Shadowrun novel you read [back in high school].

Which brings me back to Hemingway. You can say you don't like what he does, but it's an altogether different tier of bullshitting to tell me he's a bad writer. I don't think a movie that I have specific criticisms x,y,z of makes Kathryn Bigelow a bad director, or even an overrated one. Quite clearly, I have problems with her, but also quite clearly, I am letting the actual hacks who make hacky war-like movies slip past because they are not working on the level of an artist but rather a student film gone horribly overfunded or some other variant of shit on a bigger stage than it merits. Hemingway wrote great first works, but his first big splash is easy to mark above them. Bigelow made great first works, and in fact I have no frame of reference for what came before. Neal Stephenson did have a training wheels period, it seems, but Snow Crash was at the tail end of it, not its start. And that's plainly apparent if you read it with an eye to quality rather than by counting the rivets in his cyber samurai and finding them lacking.

Because here's the thing. Sci fi, like most other specialized genres with a fervent sub-audience, is short on good writers. Many people who can't write worth a damn but have one or two good ideas are the top end of the genre. Some people combine really good work in writing and really good ideas and still stumble, like Peter Watts. Some people do pure writing that are only incidentally sci fi, like Colson Whitehead, and they also stumble in that intersection sometimes. Because it's really hard to do, and, not coincidentally, craft and hard work are only part of the equation for most writers so later works don't always mean better. So the person interested in sci fi sometimes feels like they have two choices: be uncritical consumers comfortable with attaching caveats of "I know it's terrible but" to the vast majority of their preferred works, or enshrining the durable works on a sacred pedestal on the basis of popularity in their subculture identity group/time alone and then arbitrarily attaching or attacking what catches their eyes around these preferred icons as the axes of their worlds. I get that, I really do.

But Stephenson can write, dammit, and stumbling is not the same as never trying to write.

Snow Crash is parody. Anyone who says otherwise either doesn't know what parody is or is trying to sell an untenable point of view. I know I shouldn't be shocked by people unable or unwilling to understand stuff like this anymore, but Snow Crash, a book in which a samurai hacker pizza delivery boy named Hiro Protagonist is relentlessly cyberawesome for several hundred pages, seemed so fucking obvious I guess I never considered there were people who actually took it seriously.

And again, parody doesn't mean it doesn't also do other things. Blood Meridian is a relentlessly focused book, but it includes a number of seemingly incompatible genres under one cover. That's what interesting books do, sometimes.

That is a bit sad. While 'We can remember it for you wholesale' (the basis of Total Recall) is one of his weaker short stories, Philip K. Dick was a brilliant author. Not extremely consistent, granted, and oftentimes it seems that his imagination outpaced his abilities of chaining them to words. But at his best he was a really good writer, and his imagination far beyond that of most other authors. I recommend 'Ubik', 'Flow my tears, the policeman said' or 'The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch'. For a short view into his mind read the book-length interview Tim Powers did with him ('What if our world is their heaven ?'), for an extended view read his nearly autobiographical 'Valis' trilogy. Warning - most of his works, but especially the mentioned trilogy are laced with themes of mental illness, religious experiences and drug abuse. No clue if he was ever diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, but I wouldn't be surprised by it.

Or - of course - don't. But you are missing out. If only on realizing how crappy Hollywood has actually treated his works.

Edit: Screwed up the name of the trilogy - Divine Invasion is the name of book two. Corrected.

Bah, having read the story it's based off, I'd say that the film Minority Report does better things with the premise than the book does, even if it defeats its own awesome with a completely unnecessary extra twenty minutes at the end because God forbid it shouldn't have a happy ending.

The problem with nearly any adaptation that Hollywood tried to make is that they consistently choose the weak stories as basis, with the exception of 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep' (Bladerunner). Again, Dick was not a consistently good author. Especially given his early career drug habits and nearly life-long poverty, forcing him to crank out short stories in amazing numbers. His short stories were mostly not very notable, his books ? Different story.

Edit: Hollywood also frequently only takes a basic idea, and then clobbers everything together into an adventure story.

The trouble with Snow Crash as a parody is that for a lot of people (myself included), at the time we read the book we were completely oblivious to what he was actually parodying.

I made a Snow Crash thread, as presumably some people want to talk about CdProjekt's game or how Cyberpunk as a genre relates to this potential game. Eventually.

But the way it turned the standard formula on its head (hero is falsely accused and fights the odds to clear his name) was fantastic. It hides the twist out in the open by using your expectations of the formula against you. But then those last twenty minutes ruined everything.

The story in the book was weak, but I don't think the film was. Until it fucked itself.

Blendo Games is working on a little cyberpunk game game called Quadrilateral Cowboy that looks promising, but that is the only intriguing cyberpunk thing on the horizon, at least as far as I know.


Every time I think about big budget cyberpunk-styled games Syndicate pops into my head and I cry.

The best parody always exemplifies the best aspects of the genre it pokes fun at.

Cryptonomicon.
The Necronomicon was written by one Abdul Alhazred.

The preferred nomenclature is "Mad Arab". Goddamnit.

Klaatu Barada N... Necktie... Neckturn... Nickel...

I actually like the movie. The problem is seeing it as an adaptation. It has been ages since I read the story, and again found it a minor story from PKD. But the movie generates action and adventure where none exists, and dilutes central ideas of the story by doing so - while the everyman figure in the story is in the situation where they are similarly threatened, that is not the point of the story told, nor should it be. PKD mostly worked on the idea of pulling the rug out of under reality, throwing an everyman into disarray. Each story or book does this in a different way, of course, and it is not always the point but oftentimes the vehicle for a different idea. My problem with nearly all adaptations is that they generally (with the exception of A Scanner Darkly) turn the source material into a sci-fi action adventure. The closest works to PKD I know are by Kafka. Imagine 'Der Prozess' with Tom Cruise as the protagonist, lots of explosions and guns. Beside A Scanner Darkly (which fails because to understand the movie you kind of need to know the book) only Bladerunner managed to somehow stay close in theme to the original. Even though it entered a lot of shooting into the mix, by borrowing from the Noir genre the movie at least manages to entertain without having to fully compromise. Still, massively changed in comparison to the book, but at least the theme of the protagonist having to question his own identity as a human being, and the theme of empathy with the non-human is present.
Perhaps it might help if I add that while I do like PKDs stories, they are generally weak. Apparently he had the habit of throwing in some drugs, then write 60 to 70 pages of story per day, just to earn enough money to survive. As a result many stories are not nearly as fleshed out as the books, and are generally ideas that are presented, but normally with insufficient space to expand on them. But if you just read a short story collection and realize that he generated ideas like this pretty much on a continuous stream ? Amazing. There is a reason Hollywood likes to borrow so many ideas there. Checking on Wikipedia I find this. As far as I know no other SF author had so many works adapted to film. Probably since his dealing with the idea of interwoven realities was unique. And he did this at a time when SF authors wrote robot adventure and crime stories, decades before mainstream SF caught up. And he did it better than most if not all current authors, in my opinion.

Neal Stephenson is just his second pen name.

I believe, and should probably check the wiki but won't let a good story go to waste, that "Flow my tears, the policeman said" was finished in 72 hours. That's the one where he changes protagonist, right? PKD will never go down in history as the greatest writer but when it comes to original ideas? No one better. No one. It's not unusual for him to start off a novel, or even a short-story, on some premise (a military outpost who has no way of telling if the war is over and if they won or lost), get bored and go somewhere else with it (the mines in the minefields outside has started to make new and better mines, the most recent ones look like humans). In 2013, a lot of his ideas may seem boring or unoriginal, hard for me to say. I can attest that in the 80's, stuff he wrote in the 50's and 60's would still blow your mind completely.

(Maybe this should have been posted in the Snow Crash thread? Or not at all?)

Probably. Ah well, I wanted to stop raving about PKD anyways. But the conversation made me go back to 'Three Stigmata...', so very worthwhile outcome.

I read Ubik recently. When PKD is semi-coherent and has a firm grasp of the squirming ideas in his skull (Ubik and DADOES) he is the best mind fucker around. Unfortunately he succumbed too often to New Wave of SciFi sickness, so a lot of his stuff is just incoherent noise.

While I was aware of it I never really sat down to read about the New Wave of Sci-fi... Probably the last time I thought about it there wasn't a wikipedia. Anyway, glad I did because this isn't a bad writeup. Somewhat bears on a thread I started to avoid threadjacking LK's thread that he started to avoid threadjacking this thread.

Hopefully they post another teaser video with sexy mass murdering cyborgs in it soon, so we can this thing back on track.

Probably as part of their Kickstarter pitch.

IGN did a 10-minute breakdown of the trailer that pointed out some more details as well as some Easter eggs. Apart from images pulled from the P&P game books, the small text they flash at the end of the trailer says CD Projekt will announce a different new open-world RPG they have in development on February 5th. One that is much farther along than Cyberpunk 2077, and will be "familiar", whatever that means. Open-world Witcher game?

That's the speculation.

Since I don't think it warrants its own thread, I'm going to put it here.

I started playing the old SNES Shadowrun, and while it's pretty basic I'm having a good deal of fun (though I'm relying on a guide cuz I'd be getting nowhere without it). Is the Sega Shadowrun any fun? Is anyone excited about the new? Shadowrun in the works?

And, jesus, the Shadowrun setting/universe is so goofy that it's impossible to take in earnest. When the pen and paper RPG came out were people serious about it? Were they serious about it into the 90s? It seems possible, given the earlier discussion of how the best work in the genre is a parody and the tendency of the rest of the genre to try and outcool itself. I mean, I could see the fun in it all, but it seems like it (the genre, the games, that one Wired article with the dude all done up in cyberpunk-y gear that I'm too lazy to find) was too serious/earnest about itself. I ask because cyberpunk was definitely before my time and it all seems so over the top (though I read and liked Neuromancer).

That Snow Crash may have been an intentionally over the top parody does not mean the rest of the genre is meant to be viewed that way. As to Shadowrun specifically, I never got into it because to me cyberpunk was best defined by Neuromancer, other Gibson stuff, and what Bruce Sterling did in the genre as well (among others). That "cool" factor was part of it, but it was a more seriously presented world in general in those works. And that is how Cyberpunk the p&p RPG was written - as a serious potential future. So I would expect that version of cyberpunk is what we are going to see in this game, as opposed to the Snow Crash or Shadowrun variations. Shadowrun has its own upcoming RPG anyway (via Kickstarter).

Of course any sci-fi genre or story that is "near future" is going to look rather dated and odd when the near future comes and what was speculated never really comes to pass, at least not in that form. That is the problem that many classic sci-fi books and settings face. Go try and read 2001: A Space Odyssey or The Stand now and while you can still enjoy them, it requires a fair amount of suspension of disbelief.

Shadowrun does get a bit goofy in places; it's best taken in the context of Earthdawn, which it's sort of an extension/projection of.

The 2300 and Cyberpunk RPGs are more strictly "cyberpunk", i.e. serious potential future, while Shadowrun consciously had magic and horror elements (though the horror is often overshadowed it's a large part of the background) and is more Magic+Tech than Tech+Magic, basically a "serious" potential future -- only for Earthdawn.

If you're careful you can run it without being either too silly or too serious, but the setting and some of the source material is certainly rife with pitfalls!

I read The Stand once. That was enough. And I hope 2001 continues to stand the test of time (though I've only seen the movie). But I definitely see your point.

It probably isn't helping that I'm looking at the genre knowing all of the tropes and next to none of the material.

There was an updated 90s version of The Stand (it was originally released in the 1970s) but even that has elements that fall flat now. The internet and cel phones have become such a big part of life that any book that doesn't even mention them seems rather anachronistic now. Among other problems that The Stand has in the modern context. I still think its one of the best post-apoc novels ever written, but its funny how dated it seems when compared to something like Earth Abides, which was written far earlier and yet holds up better.

So in terms of ideas dropped on their forums, they are floating the notion of different languages playing a role:

Sounds expensive.

Sorry for the tangent, but I couldn't let this slide.
IMO you're doing yourself a serious diservice if you've never read the book.
I remember watching the movie for the 3rd time and still not getting the last 15 minutes or so, then I read the book and it was like "THAT'S what all that goofy stuff meant?"
I then went back and watched the movie again and it was much more enjoyable.

The book is only Arthur C. Clarke's interpretation of the story. That's all. The movie 2001 and the novel 2001 are, and should be considered, separate, and you absolutely do not need to read the book in order to understand or enjoy the movie.

In fact I think it's better to not read the novel of 2001 at all if you want to appreciate how brilliantly the movie uses ambiguity and subjectivity.

One of the few cases where watching the movie should come first, then reading the book. Neither is "Better" than the other.

Maybe they're thinking that authentic regional voice overs would justify their just having the subtitles localized rather than the whole voiceover - notionally it could be cooler and cheaper - if they have a savvy foreign-film-watching, subtitle-tolerant gaming audience.

I'm not sure if CRPGs have a savvy foreign film watching, subtitle-tolerant audience. Also, who'd be helping CDProjekt cast and record skilled actors in however many different languages and locations? I guess Steven Soderbergh's time on his hands these days.

I thought for the witcher that they did have a strong outcry for the original polish voiceovers with subtitles. I know that's how I played the games, and it felt better for it. Like watching dubbed anime, it usually doesn't feel right.

That's because the original release butchered the English script so badly. There was some demand still after the Enhanced Edition, but I suspect that demand wouldn't have occurred in the first place if it weren't for the shitty release.