Oh My! Cyberpunk 2077 To Bare All With Full Nudity But You'll Survive

During E3 2018, one of the coolest game projects that was talked about came from CD Projekt Red and a title called Cyberpunk 2077. The devs rolled out a demo of the game that was 50 minutes long that had a mockup of the character creation system in it. In that creation system was a pair of generic male and female avatars on a blue background, both completely nude.

The character's genitalia was covered by pixelated boxes in the demo and that was done for the E3 demo only. In the final version of the game that launches for players, those boxes are expected to be removed. Why the boxes in the demo? CD Projekt Red didn't want to have the press sidetracked by talk of nudity in the game, or to be accused of using nudity for shock value.

Game director Adam Badowski said, "We covered these parts for one reason. Because during the presentation, we don’t want people to focus on and think about these things and laugh. It's normal! Nudity makes it more believable; that’s why we want to have it. There’s nothing special in it."

Badowski says that in the final game, the team intends to have full nudity because it supports one of the most important themes in the cyberpunk genre, that of transhumanism. That is the belief that humans can transcend mental and physical form with the aid of tech. Cyberpunk 2077 will have gamers grapple with what their personal rationale is for becoming transhuman. Part of the imagery in that personal battle with transhumanism is nudity, plain and simple.

One scene pointed to in the E3 demo that grapples with that, is when the player has to rescue a kidnapped woman. In that scene, the kidnappers plan to chop the woman up and remove the implants in her body and sell them on the black market. The player finds her nude in a bathtub filled with ice and must carry her out to the paramedics.

"Nudity is important for us because of one reason," Badowski said. "This is cyberpunk, so people augment their body. So the body is no longer sacrum [sacred]; it’s profanum [profane]. Because people modify everything, they are losing their connection to the body, to the meat. And that’s why we need to use the nudity in many situations.

"You see that there are bodies in the tub, and you need to take care of this woman. But at the same time she is augmented," he continued. "She is not clean. Maybe she is augmented too much. Maybe the humanity level is pretty low in her, so it’s an interesting topic. It’s one of the key themes in cyberpunk. The very first scenes in the original Ghost in the Shell anime show exactly the same aspect. Because where is sacrum and where is profanum in a world when you can simply modify yourself to such limits that it makes you a different kind of person? It’s one of the most important themes in cyberpunk, as a genre."

This ought to be an intriguing game when it releases to be sure, and based on raw, basic fundamentals of immersion.