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A review by frasersimons
The World of Cyberpunk 2077 by Marcin Batylda
3.0
This is an interesting bit of reading that could benefit from a mission statement.
The art changes often and isn’t actually codified on the page as to what it is. Is this concept art? An in-game snapshot? Stylization of something in-game? It’s all pretty nice but the strongest pieces are often illustrations, so the constant change ups are actually a bit of a disservice and dampen my hype for the game because it looks worse than what is typically on the page.
The text and overall structure are serviceable but won’t blow anyone away. The perspective changes a lot, I think unintentionally? The problem I had is that it introduces jargon and doesn’t explain it, so it assumes quite a bit from the reader. For instance it never actually explain ICE but explains a different program acronym right beside it, even though ICE is referenced often. I don’t think it actually tells you why money is the Eurodollar either, but I may have missed it in my read through. In any case, there are quite a few questions that popped into my head as I read that weren’t ever answered.
It does explain the world the player will be in pretty well though. But I think people will take issue with some world building aspects itself. This could be an art direction problem but every part of the city seems to have no culture bashing whatsoever. Which is wild. Rich and poor Chinese, Japanese, the displaced Haitians, and Mexicans are isolated groups into their own sectors. Why are the climate displaced people interested in settling in Night City at all with the constant wars? Why didn’t they go to Europe?
Gangs are all depicted as one ethnicity. The opening picture for nomads seems to be someone indigenous and it talks about how it’s mostly rural America. So they mixed with indigenous people? I dunno, man.
I think some of these problems could be solved by expounding on information. I’d wager a lot of this world building comes from R Talsorian games, who do quite a bit of research usually. The answers would be more interesting than how things have settled in the city in this way, to be honest.
But the page count is certainly limiting, I’m sure. But on that note, the layout could have been strengthened a lot by using paragraph styles that extend to the full use of the column. It’d look a lot better, like you’d read in any novel. It’s frustrating that full page layout almost always is the worst layout when it comes to things like that. There’s empty space on the next page because they just dropped text in when they could have just moved the entire paragraph to the next page instead of having it carry over.
However, Most people probably won’t care about that and just want to get some history and see some great art, and on that front the book succeeds wonderfully.
The art changes often and isn’t actually codified on the page as to what it is. Is this concept art? An in-game snapshot? Stylization of something in-game? It’s all pretty nice but the strongest pieces are often illustrations, so the constant change ups are actually a bit of a disservice and dampen my hype for the game because it looks worse than what is typically on the page.
The text and overall structure are serviceable but won’t blow anyone away. The perspective changes a lot, I think unintentionally? The problem I had is that it introduces jargon and doesn’t explain it, so it assumes quite a bit from the reader. For instance it never actually explain ICE but explains a different program acronym right beside it, even though ICE is referenced often. I don’t think it actually tells you why money is the Eurodollar either, but I may have missed it in my read through. In any case, there are quite a few questions that popped into my head as I read that weren’t ever answered.
It does explain the world the player will be in pretty well though. But I think people will take issue with some world building aspects itself. This could be an art direction problem but every part of the city seems to have no culture bashing whatsoever. Which is wild. Rich and poor Chinese, Japanese, the displaced Haitians, and Mexicans are isolated groups into their own sectors. Why are the climate displaced people interested in settling in Night City at all with the constant wars? Why didn’t they go to Europe?
Gangs are all depicted as one ethnicity. The opening picture for nomads seems to be someone indigenous and it talks about how it’s mostly rural America. So they mixed with indigenous people? I dunno, man.
I think some of these problems could be solved by expounding on information. I’d wager a lot of this world building comes from R Talsorian games, who do quite a bit of research usually. The answers would be more interesting than how things have settled in the city in this way, to be honest.
But the page count is certainly limiting, I’m sure. But on that note, the layout could have been strengthened a lot by using paragraph styles that extend to the full use of the column. It’d look a lot better, like you’d read in any novel. It’s frustrating that full page layout almost always is the worst layout when it comes to things like that. There’s empty space on the next page because they just dropped text in when they could have just moved the entire paragraph to the next page instead of having it carry over.
However, Most people probably won’t care about that and just want to get some history and see some great art, and on that front the book succeeds wonderfully.