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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CTPhipps" data-source="post: 8482082" data-attributes="member: 7033812">I mean, none of them are rampaging because they've been driven mad by cybernetics. If you read the shards, they're all going on killing sprees for entirely other reasons like poverty, their cybernetics being badly installed, their daughter being sex trafficked by the Tyger Claws, and so on. It was a nice twist, I felt.What I'm saying is the corporations don't actually have nearly the control to dictate terms. The governments of the world still exist in the Cyberpunk world with Europe being still in power. The United States as of RED is also in charge of Militech (albeit its slowly taking over from within) and other corporations compete. There's also the fact the majority of hardware an Edgerunner possesses isn't going to be "straight off the rack" cybernetics.Arasaka employees will have Arasaka brand cybernetics and civilians will buy the normal stuff but any Edgerunner worth his salt will have their own privately made and assembled cybernetics from their local Ripperdocs. Sort of like how you're not going to see Hackers get their hardware from computer stores but assemble their own.I imagine it's a careful balance of the fact you need the corporations to keep enough infrastructure going they can do but also preserve the satire that is central to cyberpunk: that privatization of basic public needs and government has utterly naughty word over the world. Its a capitalist dystopia where WW3 was fought between Militech and Arasaka. So you need to make the corpos competent enough to be rulers of the world but also incompetent enough to note that their takeover of so much is what has ruined the planet and life for themselves.Like in 1984 where it comments that even the Ruling Party's lives suck due to how hard and demanding the world is.One detail I always liked was Mike Pondsmith's sourcebook on Japan (I forget the name) which revealed that Japan had every bit as much misery and anti-Arasaka sentiment as Night City because Arasaka had ruined it as well--because fascists gonna fascist.</blockquote>

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