I’m excited by update 2.0, but honestly, I wish they hadn’t tried to tie the new mechanical limit on cyberware to cyberpsychosis. If anything I’m really hoping that the article is wrong and the author just misunderstood.

One of the smartest things that Cyberpunk 2077 did was eliminating cyberpsychosis from the game as a mechanical concept. It exists as something in the world, but the more you explore the game’s take on it the more you realize that there is absolutely no medical basis for the condition at all. It’s just something invented by the media. All of the cyberpsycho side missions are about how these people were drowning under the crushing weight of a world fully given over to corporate plunder, and their augmentations were just a symptom of the desperate steps they were taking to exist within that world. Chromed up billionaires almost never go “psycho”, it’s always desperate people driven to the edge, circumstances where any reasonable person would break. The cyberware just makes them more dangerous when it happens, in the same way that easy access to guns turns a mental health crisis into an endless torrent of mass shootings.

My biggest disappointment with Edgerunners was how it ran directly counter to all of that, pushing this ablist, bio-essentialist and - let’s be honest - actually quite transphobic narrative that altering your body in any way is a mortal sin that will only ever lead to corruption and dispair. According to Edgerunners, people are born into the flesh they have and if you dare try to do anything about it you’re a misguided sinner and God or the universe will punish you with madness. Your augmented body will never be your “true” self in some cosmic sense, and your sense of alienation from it will inevitably drive you insane (Shadowrun has this exact same problem, which is why I trashed the entire essence system for my PbtA Shadowrun hack). Never mind that in real life things like sexual reassignment surgery, in over 99% of cases, make people feel more comfortable in their modified / augmented body and closer than ever to their true self. Even the game doesn’t do a great job with some of this stuff. The only mention of a biomechanical penis is entirely a joke, but I know so many trans men and enbies whose lives would be transformed in the most incredible way by the existence of a medical prosthesis like that.

I know there need to be mechanical systems for limiting upgrades - trust me, I design RPGs, I get how balance works - but for the love of God stop attaching them to puritan moralistic judgements about people having bodily autonomy.

I wonder if the person who wrote the article has ever played the game.

Does it fix the shitty AI behavior?