If there’s one genre that is often associated with a lot of gaming and game-related culture, it is the cyberpunk genre.
Pioneered by Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, and the seminal work by William Gibson, “Neuromancer,” the cyberpunk genre grew into its own about the same time as home consoles from Nintendo and Sega became mainstream.
All of these various influences converged in the masterpiece Akira, but then, suddenly, cyberpunk was as irrelevant as it had once been impactful. Some might argue that cyberpunk isn’t irrelevant, it’s just so well embedded in certain genres now that it is hard to see it.
Plus, things have changed a lot since the neon-drenched futurescapes dreamed up in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Could Cyberpunk 2077 do what Blade Runner 2049 couldn’t?
Blade Runner 2049, for good or ill, was seen as the genre’s next big attempt at relevance in the modern era. It would be unfair to say that Blade Runner 2049 failed, because it didn’t. But just like the first movie, it looks like it is going to be a slow burn of a film and might not be fully appreciated until years after its release.
That’s nice and all, but it does nothing for the cyberpunk genre now, and that’s the problem. Hence why so many people think that Cyberpunk 2077 might be able to do what Blade Runner 2049 couldn’t do, and that is make the CP relevant again.
No high expectations to be found in that statement, right?
Cyberpunk 2077 is going to be massive – but what kind of massive?
Part of the reason that Cyberpunk 2077 is starting to become the next biggest thing, aside from the involvement of the geniuses at CD Projekt Red, is that this console generation is nearing its end and there’s nothing else big on the horizon.
We have no doubt that Cyberpunk 2077 is going to be massive. There’s just a lot of questions as to what kind of massive it is going to want to achieve.
Are we talking about a GTA V style game where the online component outstrips and eventually overshadows the single-player experience? Or are we looking at something self-contained like the Witcher games?
The latter is a promising prospect because that means that Cyberpunk 2077 will not only attempt to bring us some of the best gameplay ever, but it is also going to deliver more cyberpunk content than any other property in the past twenty years.
Spending hundreds of hours in a fantasy setting is nothing unique to video gaming. In fact, it is quite overdone. And, unless you’re talking about zombies, there aren’t very many compelling pseudo-dystopian open-world games out there.
Cyberpunk 2077 promises to give you the experience of living in a world governed by that genre’s tropes and we can’t think of a better way for people to experience it than that.
There’s little doubt that Cyberpunk 2077 is going to be great. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for its arrival.
