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 no, none of the themes of cyberpunk are really there and aesthetic is also very far off
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… 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.
