I think I'm ready to skip this game. Shame. What's annoying about this is that they could just say nothing and come out of it ok-ish. Instead they can't help but constantly say and do stupid shit.
Aren't there kind of two factors at play here that have led to this, though?
On the one hand, the actual feature I understood to be something of a product of a desire -- voiced by people here, and others -- to see a character creator that actually made sense in a Cyberpunk world; a world that should rightfully have no or few boundaries for how people can exist in it. This naturally extending to how one looks, their gender identity, body type, etc. So initially, Cyberpunk 2077 had what you might call slim pickings of the worst variety: you had male V, female V and... well, that's it. Now they have something that, you know, grading on a curve for the videogame industry, because they wholly suck at this stuff, is actually pretty good, right? It's fucked in that they have stupidly tied the tone of voice to the pronouns espoused in the game -- that's a mistake, though one that shouldn't actually be hard to correct from a programming standpoint -- but other than that, they're actually providing part of what they said they would. Which, you know, in a vacuum is actually great.
But we're not in a vacuum. And that leads to factor number two: CDPR's consistent, shitty, clown-faced, dumbass tweets, interactions, and advertisements, which have, at nearly every turn, wildly undermined the good things they've done. So what's more frustrating to me about the fact that they could have stayed quiet is this: there's clearly some fragment of CDPR that cares about this stuff and doing it. You don't end up with the features they do have because they want to tell a joke at the expense of the transgender community -- this stuff took time, and wasn't there in the first place. So the people who would have CDPR be a better company are *in* the company, clearly pushing for this stuff, and making a lot of good choices. But there's *some other* personalities very clearly present in that community, too. And they're output isn't just less desirable, in a lot of cases it's downright gross, as we're seeing.
So I'm real fucking frustrated with this. Because there's something here that's a step in the right direction, again, grading on a curve for the industry. There was a push here to provide something better, to provide a meaningful and *needed* pathway for people to express themselves in this fantasy that is extremely important -- but how can that community really feel comfortable with these efforts if at every turn CDPR makes everything relating to them or even adjacent to their needs or wants the butt of some dumbass joke on Twitter? It's getting old, and I know if they could get the quality of their social stances to be at the quality of their work then, frankly, they'd be one hell of a company to have as an ally on the political and social stage.
Sucks that they aren't.
