Because America’s gun culture is something worth immortalizing in video game form, Cyberpunk 2077 promises to make it even worse somehow!
Ben Andrews, the concept art coordinator at Cyberpunk‘s guns and mechanical devices, claims that Cyberpunk 2077’s depiction of firearms will be like “American gun culture just gone crazy.”
Speaking to the official PlayStation Magazine, the dev team discussed the game’s fashion, weapons, and vehicles.
Speaking specifically about the weapons, Andrews said, “One of the things we thought about with the weapons is that in Cyberpunk, we have a very overt weapon culture... Everybody has a gun because violence has been taken to the extremes. The idea that you may be mugged on your way home from work is extremely common, or your apartment might be broken into at the weekend. So, everybody’s carrying a gun.”
The designers took it a step further by including advertisements for “family-friendly” guns in-universe—complete with firearms for kids and moms-to-be. They also wanted players to be able to pick up disposable guns, which go for the in-universe equivalent to $5 USD. The idea is that buying a gun is so commonplace, picking one up is similar to popping by the store to pick up some bread and milk.
This trope isn’t unique to Cyberpunk. Part of the humor of The Outer Worlds, for example, is being able to purchase guns and armor of varying quality at vending machines scattered around everywhere. However, Cyberpunk is decidedly grittier and less comedy-centric than The Outer Worlds, so pervasive weapons in the society may have a different feel to it.
All of that being said, this is—to the rest of the world—gun culture “gone crazy.” In practice, it’s less crazy than it would seem. According to a Gallup poll, 43% of Americans live in a household with a gun, and a report from two years ago stated that Americans owned 393 million guns. That’s at least one for every man, woman, and child in the country.
The only difference, really, is that we don’t have gun vending machines.
Source: Altchar
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