Cyberpunk 2077?
Not so much
I think the Cyberpunk genre needs updating, it borrows a lot of it’s aesthetics from Blade Runner nowadays, which just seems like a hopeful view of the future from the 80’s.
We all know the future is going to suck, and the advancements in technology will only go towards selling us products until it reaches a point where it gets too costly so they stop spending money… So it’ll probably be like small holographic bus stop ads, but they’re poorly maintained so the shit’s broken half the time, cities feel like dying malls. Neon signs used to mean a hip, ritzy place, but have been around so long that they no longer have that sort of appeal, trends changed and now you have the flickering neon sign look cause shit’s broken and there’s no money to fix shit.
So cyberpunk assumed shit was gonna suck in a specific way, it just has to be updated.
compared to today?
Edit: I’ll elaborate, the aesthetics are hopeful, the technology seems more developed than what we have today. With capitalism at the helm, pushes on tech only come if there’s profit in them, like for example, cell phones. Future tech worlds has advanced technology because it’s just believed they should.
counterpoint: the a e s t h e t i c s kind of a vibe tho.
But yeah I think they could synthesize some more modern influence in the genre, beyond superficial shit like cp2077’s dead mall where it’s like “ha ha see? its a dead mall, they didn’t consider dead malls in the 80s but we know in the 2010s/20. Dead mall!”
MGS, especially 2 has a lot in common with cyberpunk, yes, but also shares none of the aesthetics and also the “simulation in simulation” thing is pretty exclusive to MGS2.
I guess you have a point with the VR business, though the cyborg ninjas and the mechas is also kind of shared across a lot of anime which is not necessarily cyberpunk. It’s hard to draw the distinction, though I guess the litmus test is that MGS doesn’t take place in a future dystopia. If cyberpunk explores what the future might be, and thus is implicitly optimistic about the present, MGS implies this is all happening now, and is more cynical about the present.
