Is Overwatch considered Cyberpunk ("the style" not the game)

General Discussion
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Again not talking about the Cyberpunk game that came out last year.

Aka: Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting that tends to focus on a “combination of lowlife and high tech” featuring advanced technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cybernetics, juxtaposed with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order.

I feel like Overwatch is technically that, but there seems some separations of reality.

Something is just feels hugely off for me.

Maybe it’s the year 2077? (That seems too early.)

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Eh, either way the answer is probably yes

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Hadn’t really thought about it, but yeah, it kinda is.

Doesn’t really trip those “this is Cyberpunk” vibes though, because Cyberpunk is usually a lot more neon…And a bit of a depressing dystopia

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It’s like a more optimistic cyberpunk. Kind of like what they call solarpunk or whatever it is.

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Yeah, OW is much too upbeat to be cyberpunk imo.

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To be fair a lot of series are flipping the tone.

For instance most superhero shows are relatively upbeat. Then you have something like Watchmen, and The Boys, which takes that trope, and flips it on it’s head.

If you can have Dark Fantasy, and Dark Sci-fi.

I guess you could have “Light Cyberpunk”

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It certainly has cyberpunk elements. Widowmaker is a prime example, being kidnapped by an organisation, brain washed, turned into a slave.

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Its very mixed but yeah, it has cyberpunk elements to it.

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Are they? Genuine question. The last bunch I saw on Amazon Video/Netflix were very much in the Blade Runner mold. Well, except that most of them were utter crap. I liked The Expanse, the rest I can’t even remember the names of.

Superhero stuff hasn’t been unanimously happy-go-lucky for ages, since comic book writers starting messing around with injecting more serious tones back in the…seventies? Definitely eighties. I can’t remember when Moore wrote Watchmen. It’s possible that cyberpunk as a genre’s evolving in the same and I simply haven’t noticed, though.

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So basically “Night City” exist in the Overwatch universe… we are just censored from it.

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I’ve always kinda compared Talon to Team Rocket.

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…Now wondering what an actual Cyberpunk Pokemon series would look like.

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I think there was a grittier Pokemon game for the Gamecube, but it was more Mad Max than Blade Runner IIRC.

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It doesn’t fit the ‘punk’ part of cyberpunk. They aren’t really gritty anti-heroes fighting a losing battle against an oppressive and all-powerful technocracy. They have scifi elements, but they aren’t cyberpunk. If they were, Tracer would be way cooler than she is.

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Is StarWars Cyberpunk?

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Overwatch is more of a Sci-fi game than anything else. While Cyberpunk tends to also have some outrageous technological implications, most of them are at least somewhat plausible (to an extent). Additionally, Overwatch is lacking that one thing almost every Cyberpunk game has: mega-corporations being the dominant power in the world.

So I’d say Overwatch is more inline with the Sci-fi genre, rather than Cyberpunk.

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I think you missed my point.

Or were you taken over by an ad bot.

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I advise everyone who’s thinking of trying to define what is and isn’t cyberpunk to be careful. You can find cyberpunk elements in many things, so it’s not an exact science. :yum: Like, I could start being snobby about this, but then I realised it would be silly to start saying what is and isn’t.

For me, a cautionary aspect of technological improvements being used / abused to take away peoples freedoms is more important than wearing a black trench coat and having neon lighting, but I’m also not going to say that a piece of media that has cyberpunk visual elements isn’t true cyberpunk and conversely I’m not going to say that every piece of media that involves technology being used to take freedom away is necessarily cyberpunk either.

For example, the Black Mirror Christmas special episode has what I consider to be very cyberpunk elements, however it doesn’t look very cyberpunk.

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Star Wars is a space opera.

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