Does Overwatch, the Blizzard game, count as cyberpunk, or does cyberpunk require a darker aesthetic?
I only know cyberpunk through CDPR’s Cyberpunk 2077 game, and I guess also through the Blade Runner movies. So, I don’t really know much about it from literature or tabletop games.
That said, Overwatch has a lot of the same themes, but with a brighter “Sunday morning cartoon/anime” aesthetic.
So yeah, thoughts?
I would say… sort of? It’s much more comic book superhero shit with some very loose nods to cyberpunk (a la the robot stuff). What I think it lacks is anything more than a surface level social commentary or any real analysis of how technological advancement intersects with capital accumulation to create a dystopia. It’s more about capeshit with a thin premise of “DAE robot rights?” without really even exploring that subject on a meaningful or philosophical level.
Contrast that with, for example, the recently revitalized Armored Core franchise. That is Cyberpunk.
Overwatch has a lot of the same sci-fi elements, but I don’t think cyberpunk would be an accurate way to describe it. In a way, it’s a patchwork of a bunch of different stuff; for example, you might say Sombra is cyberpunk. But I don’t think it generalizes well.
One of the main things in cyberpunk (and in a lot of punk genres) is economic inequality and the flaws of capitalism. In Overwatch, large corporations are part of the setting (and so is poverty, I would guess), but that’s all they are — background set pieces.
I would say no, none of the themes of cyberpunk are really there and aesthetic is also very far off
There’s the lijiang tower map that has some really cool aesthetics, I’d say kinda cyberpunkysh:
I think it mostly looks futuristic, and not cyberpunk, what I consider cyberpunk look is more dirty, less utopistic and polished look. I tried to post image from Deus Ex Mankind Divided Golem City, but it didn’t work for some reason.
