Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 Fail

I’ve been trying, and failing, to play Cyberpunk 2077 for weeks now.

I smashed headlong into the game within… IDK, 10 minutes? Top-notch immersion. I reacted on Tumblr, but essentially:

I liked the different body/voice options in Cyberpunk 2077 a lot. “i haven’t liked a character creator this much since saint’s row 3” i said.

What I did not expect was for my male-body female-voice V to be called “she” by everyone, including V’s (apparently longtime) best friend.

That added a… we’ll call it a layer. lol.

…

i guess in retrospect i just feel stupid i didn’t somehow anticipate this problem even though i can honestly say that i never, in the year of our lord 202x, ever considered a character in a game this complex would be gendered by voice. ever. so now I’M the dummy somehow

Despite saying I was going to roll with it, something about the situation bugged me so much I began actively avoiding the game. Something just didn’t feel right. Then I remembered the Polygon article, It sucks that Cyberpunk 2077’s edgelord marketing worked so well, and the pieces clicked back into place for me.

Deep down, I think they did it on purpose.

That’s crazy, right? Why attribute the choice to malice when it could plausibly be attributed to ignorance? But I just can’t shake that nagging feeling those fuckers did this on purpose. At the same time, I feel completely deranged for even suspecting such a thing. Who thinks like this? What kind of psycho am I?

So that’s where I’m at on Cyberpunk. I buy games through GOG now so I can actually return them if needed, but I don’t really want to return this one. I feel like I need to… navigate this, somehow, but allowing the game to aggressively misgender my V for howevermany hours is not the way. There is a FTM Voice Mod and the comments on this mod gave me an idea of what I can expect if I go the modding route. I would like to note modder Walrus159’s final mod comment in September 2022 however:

I will not be unlocking the comments of any of my mods, and as I no longer feel comfortable or welcome in the cyberpunk community I will not be providing support for existing mods either

Yay, that’s not ominous, lol. Anyway, CP2077 is now formally stamped, “Dead dove: do not eat.” I will likely roll a new character (you can’t go to a ripperdoc to change the voice, because of course you can’t) and at this stage a paranoid read is unavoidable, but it is what it is.