Tag: cyberpunk 2077 australia

Cyberpunk 2077 News – NO Censorship, Summer Games Fest & More Lore!

NO censorship being confirmed for one of the stingiest regions when it comes to ratings, some new gang and corporation lore, UI and menu iteration, another gaming event coming soon featuring CD PROJEKT RED, and some examples of more of the adult themes in Cyberpunk 2077 from rating agencies all in today’s Cyberpunk 2077 News!

First up let’s jump into CDPR being confirmed for the Summer Games Fest, a new digital gaming conference led by the Video Game Awards leading man Geoff Kneighley. This convention will last 4 months and will feature in-game events, playable content, demos and surprises from your favorite devs and publishers. It is a whole season of events and the first phase has just been announced in terms of which developers will be present. Now phase 1 doesn’t mean the order in which content will be dropping but more along the lines of building up hype as each new phase they announce more devs. This conference will run from May to august and yes CD PROJEKT RED was announced in their first phase lineup along with the likes of PlayStation, Bethesda, Steam, Riot, Xbox, Bungie and Blizzard.

Moving on we have some great great news for Australia and likely the rest of the world in that the game was given an 18+ classification in Australia, there will not be censorship, and CDPR did not have to change anything to get a mature classification. Taking a look at each point from an Australian Kotaku article we have themes, violence and sex being rated 18+ under the high impact category, language and nudity is a tier down at strongly impactful, as well as drug use which was moderately impactful. Honestly pretty surprising judging by how prevalent this is in the Cyberpunk world. Now let’s compare this to the Witcher 3’s designation where it is uniform across the board, with Cyberpunk edging Witcher out in terms of high impact themes.

We also have a redacted Cyberpunk 2077 classification report where the board talks about some of the scenes to give us an idea on how they rated each of these metrics. Now there are not story spoilers here due to redacted pieces of text in the examples, but if you want to go into 2077 without knowing the minutia you might want to skip this part.

First the report notes that “there are virtually no restrictions on the treatment of themes” and that ‘the game contains no depictions of actual sexual activity nor does it contain explicit and realistic simulated sexual activity.” I’m not sure if I’m reading this wrong, but that would seem to suggest that the sex scenes are implied or that CDPR have cleverly shot their cutscenes to reflect this. Again, this is confusing, and they go on to contradict this in the article, so I’m going to chalk this up to a writing error.

Moving on we have confirmation that Not ALL cutscenes in Cyberpunk will be in first person.
In a quote the agency says “Cutscenes, including the game’s non interactive sex scenes, are primarily depicted from the first-person perspective.”

Moving onto specifics, there is a point where a player can hire male or female NPCs as prostitutes. The sequence is depicted from first person perspective with nudity visible as the NPC assumes sexual positions and poses.
You can also have first person scenes with other NPCs, that are likely not labelled as prostitutes.
The sequence uses a brief wide-angle depiction of full-frontal female nudity, to depict simulated sexual activity, again putting a huge whole in what was said earlier in this article.
During another quest, V enters a sex shop with mannequins that are posed inside glass cabinets in various sexual positions. Other, smaller cabinets contain a variety of sex toys or devices including a number of oversized phallic-shaped dildos.

Moving on players can choose to “inflict post-mortem damage on NPC corpses”. Arms, legs and heads of corpses can be detached with gunfire, with some stylized injuries and details of entrails and bone visibility in some cases.

Moving on we have some awesome new corporation and gang lore. First up CDPR tweeted about one of the fan favorite gangs the Tyger Claws, which are “a gang of Japanese origin and stylistic influence located in Japantown. They’re ruthless and violent in practice and intimidating in appearance. Katanas, street bikes and luminous tattoos are their trademarks.”

We also have Militech which is “one of the largest manufacturers of weapons and military vehicles in the world, they’ve worked closely with the American military and police agencies for years, providing high-grade weaponry and training.

Finally shout out to Madqueen and Miles tost for this UI and menu tidbit. Madqueen posted how she wasn’t a fan of the color of the menus from the Deep dive demo, which I agree with, to which Senior Level Designer Miles Tost responds with that he can’t say too much, but that games are iterative, implying this has been changed.

Female Image in Thumbnail – kris__mew on instagram

Cyberpunk 2077 – Censorship & Its Impact On Cyberpunk!

Today’s Cyberpunk 2077 video is on Sony’s new censorship policies, how it could affect Cyberpunk 2077, what I think will end up happening, if you should jump ship to another platform, addressing the knee jerk response to Censorship, How it can impact Cyberpunk 2077 and the genre, and what you can do to prevent censorship in general.

Now it seems when I brought the censorship issue up last week, people were losing their collective minds based on it and it even lead to others to jump on the topic. If you guys are unaware, Sony is pursuing a new policy with it’s releases when it comes to sexual content. This has caused some titles in the past to be delayed, impacted or even cancelled in some cases. These are policies that are mainly in Japan as of now but Sony seems to have plans to extend this to the west. These policies have seen even “mild games” like this Japanese title censoring bras and panties. It was originally released on the PLaystation Vita with no problems, but upon it’s HD remaster, was treated with lighting effects to censor any sexuality.

Why does this apply and potentially impact Cyberpunk 2077? Firstly, and the more obvious reason is because Cyberpunk 2077 will be releasing on PC, Xbox 1 and Sony’s platform in The PS4.

The other reason is due to the history of Cyberpunk as a genre. Now Cyberpunk is a specific genre which is all about future dystopias, where lack of morals and compassion intersects with expedited and advanced technology. This can be seen in works such as Bladerunner, ghost in the shell, akira, neuromancer and more.

Cyberpunk worlds are a place where everything in it is no longer sacred. No one bats an eye at violence, sex, corruption and solisiptic tendencies. If you peel back the layers of what Cyberpunk is in a nutshell, you get something reminiscent of how we live today. Cyberpunk takes all of that and radicalizes and extrapolates on what we could be, if we are careless with our humanity, morality and technology. The Cyberpunk genre is the distillation of everything filthy and reckless about modern society. It only takes a slightly deeper look to know that Cyberpunk 2077 will be on the far end of the spectrum when it comes to this. The ability to order prositututes via vending machine, theoretical hallucinatory sexual braindance experiences via a woman with 3 mouths, bare breasts and red light districts all play into that. And this could only be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to 2077. This is what they showed the public for the first time. Now I wan’t to make it clear we don’t actually know much about how wide-spread sexuality and violence will be in 2077. We can only make an educated guess based on what we’ve seen.

Now for the average consumer, the genre isn’t something that’s overly well known. Most people will look at it and chalk it up to a futuristic GTA. Take a look at this picture and don’t tell me this isn’t exactly how most people on a surface level are going to look at it. Most of the nuianced things in the genre of CYberpunk go over the head of the average consumer. They think its about cool weapons, fighting against the system and being a sexual deviant, and it is all those things, but the reason is to show you that under the veil of what our world presents you, this future ideal lies indisiously under the surface. This means not having nudity, sexual content, graphic violence, and what not goes against everything the narrative of what Cyberpunk is trying to show you. This potential censorship extends to more than just the nudity.

High tech meets low life is the slogan of the genre of Cyberpunk, and Cyberpunk 2077 seems to be taking that to the max degree. 2077 looks more violent, more crude, more dark and more disparaging than we’ve seen from prior titles, and is looking to push the boundaries of gaming in terms of shock value in the same way Grand Theft Auto did when it was first introduced to the market.

Now what this means, is that new policies that Sony seems to be pursuing, if they go through, will not only fragment the nature of what Cyberpunk is, it’ll also take away from what CD PROJEKT RED is creating.