CYBERPUNK: EDGERUNNERS II confirmed to be in production

CD Projekt Red, anime studio Trigger and Netflix have all confirmed they are working on a project called Cyberpunk Edgerunners II. This will be a sequel to their hit 2022 anime set in the same world as the video game Cyberpunk 2077 (2020) and the Cyberpunk tabletop roleplaying game franchise created by Mike Pondsmith in 1988.

The sequel series will again be 10 episodes in length. It will be directed by Kai Ikarashi, who worked on the first series, with writer/producer Bartosz Sztybor also returning. The creative team have confirmed this will be a new story in Night City, and there will be no retconning of the original series' ending, with the characters who died in that story staying dead in this new series. There was no confirmation if any of the surviving characters will be returning (some of them have already reappeared courtesy of a special mission added to Cyberpunk 2077 in later updates).

The new series is still early in production, with no confirmed release date as yet.

CD Projekt Red are also working on a sequel to the video game, with the working title Cyberpunk II. R. Talsorian Games are continuing to release new material for the tabletop roleplaying game, with The Edgerunner's Guide to Night City slated for release later this year.

CD Projekt Red formally announces THE WITCHER IV

CD Projekt Red has formally confirmed the existence of The Witcher IV with a CG trailer at the Games Awards. They had acknowledged that the game existed previously, but this is the first time they've confirmed that it would be called The Witcher IV (rather than The Witcher Colon Subtitle Something) and it will focus on the character of Ciri.

The game follows The Witcher (2007), The Witcher II: Assassin of Kings (2011) and The Witcher III: Wild Hunt (2015) and sees a change of protagonist. The first three games, which acted as an unofficial sequel to the nine-volume book series by Andrzej Sapkowski, saw you playing Geralt, the titular Witcher, as he grappled with various threats to the Northern Kingdoms. In The Witcher III he earned a pleasant retirement by saving Ciri, a young girl with impressive powers, who was destined to save the world. The game also saw you playing Ciri at several key points in the narrative. The game ended with Ciri in various possible states, including becoming the Empress of Nilfgaard, dying, or entering Witcher training.

The Witcher IV suggest that, whichever ending you chose, by several years later Ciri has circled back around to becoming a Witcher in her own right, wielding magical powers of the Cat School. Some fans had speculated that the game might allow you to create your own Witcher protagonist, in the vein of CDPR's other big video game adaptation, Cyberpunk 2077 (2020), but CDPR seemed to prefer to stick to the idea of using a pre-existing, firmly-established character.

The game entered development after the release of Cyberpunk 2077, although early work was slowed by the urgent need to patch and fix that game after its rough launch window. As a result, it's hard to know how far along The Witcher IV is; CDPR only recently confirmed that the game was entering full-time development, and Cyberpunk 2077's first trailer preceded the release of the game by a startling eight years. CDPR hope to speed The Witcher IV's development by using the more widely-used Unreal 5 Engine to speed onboarding of new staff. I'd be impressed to see this game released much this side of 2028 though.

As well as The Witcher IV, itself projected as the start of a new trilogy, CDPR are working on a sequel to Cyberpunk 2077, a game in a totally new IP and a remake of the original Witcher game from 2007.

Franchise Familiariser: Cyberpunk 2077 / Red / Edgerunners (2024 update)

Back in December 2020, CD Projekt Red released Cyberpunk 2077. The game allowed players to create a character of their own design and then live a life of crime in the late 21st Century metropolis of Night City, California. After an infamously rocky launch, the game was rescued through updates and a well-received expansion, and has since expanded to include a spin-off TV show, graphic novels, art books and board games.

But did you know that the game and its attendant merchandise is merely the latest part of a franchise which is more than thirty-five years old? If you don’t know your rockerboys from your Arasaka corporate suits from your netrunners, a franchise familiariser may be helpful.

Note: this is an update of an article previously published in 2020.

The Basics

Cyberpunk is a science fiction franchise created by writer and games designer Mike Pondsmith, originally published by his company, R. Talsorian Games, in 1988. Pondsmith named the game after the science fiction subgenre of the same name, which in turn was named after a 1983 short story written by Bruce Bethke. This story was actually published somewhat late in the development of the genre, as several previous works had been important in establishing it, particularly Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and John Brunner’s 1975 book The Shockwave Rider, as well as the 1982 movie Blade Runner, loosely based on Dick’s novel.

Pondsmith and his fellow designers have cited Walter Jon Williams’ 1986 novel Hardwired as being extremely influential on the design of the game, along with Dick and Blade Runner (William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, often arguably cited as cyberpunk’s codifying moment, was not read until later in the game’s development).

To make it clearer that the reader is not speaking about the short story or genre, it’s common for fans to refer to Cyberpunk by one of its edition subtitles: Cyberpunk 2013, Cyberpunk 2020, Cyberpunk v3.0 or Cyberpunk Red.

Each of the four editions of the game is set in a different decade and reflects the passage of time in the Cyberpunk universe. The original Cyberpunk (1988), now almost always referred to as Cyberpunk 2013, is set in that year and depicts a near-future dystopia where corporations have become as powerful as governments and fight one another for supremacy and where takeovers are more literally hostile than you might expect. The game is predominantly set in Night City, a custom-designed and built metropolis on the coast of Morro Bay, California, roughly halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and sees players taking on roles such as mercenaries, corporate players, police officers and netrunners, as hackers are known in this world.

Cyberpunk 2020 is the second and most popular and well-known iteration of the game, to the point that “Cyberpunk 2020” is often used to refer to the entire franchise. It was originally published in 1990 and remained continuously in print for fifteen years, accumulating a vast array of supporting supplements and adventures. The game’s rule system, Interlock, was highly praised for being customisable and allowing players to much finely adjust their character’s development through skills rather than being tied into much broader levels (the approach favoured by the medium’s heavyweight game, Dungeons and Dragons, for which Pondsmith had worked on some sourcebooks). The setting was also praised for its attitude and punk ethos.

After experimenting with a spin-off project revolving around young characters who get superhero-like powers from technology, CyberGeneration, the game returned properly in 2005 with Cyberpunk v3.0. The game switched to the Fuzion system, advanced the timeline to the mid-2030s and also adopted a transhuman approach, with much more sophisticated SF ideas such as humans downloading their consciousness into robotic bodies and thus becoming immortal. The setting also dropped some of the aesthetics of the original setting, Pondsmith reasoning that fashion and styles would move on. However, despite some praise for trying to move past cyberpunk clichés and explore more advanced ideas, the game had some negative feedback for exactly the same reason, as well as the change in rules.

Cyberpunk Red (2020) tacitly omits v3.0 from the canon and instead serves as a direct sequel to Cyberpunk 2020, with the timeline now advanced to the 2040s but the old cyberpunk styles and ideas are still very much around. The newest edition of the game also acts as a prequel to Cyberpunk 2077 (the tabletop game and the video game developed in tandem), with Pondsmith confirming that a Cyberpunk 2077 sourcebook updating the Cyberpunk Red timeline and rules to 2077 will follow.

As well as the tabletop roleplaying game and the video game, the franchise consists of tie-in novels and graphic novels, several board games, the first edition of the popular Netrunner collectible card game and the Cyberpunk: Arasaka Plot mobile game.

In September 2022, CD Projekt Red collaborated with Mike Pondsmith, Netflix and the Japanese animation studio Trigger to release Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, a 10-episode animated TV series set about a year before the game. The show received critical acclaim, and was credited with spurring fresh interest in both the video game and tabletop roleplaying game. The former was updated with a tie-in mission exploring the fate of some of the characters from the show, whilst the latter received a new introductory boxed set based on the TV series. In December 2023, the franchise received a further boost in popularity due to the release of Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, a sizeable expansion to the video game.

Future projects are in development. A second Cyberpunk animated show is in the planning stages, whilst a live-action television series has also been proposed. A full sequel to Cyberpunk 2077, codenamed Project Orion, is also in development. The Cyberpunk Red tabletop roleplaying game is also expanding, with a new setting based in the 2077 time period of the video game expected to launch in 2025, alongside the Night City sourcebook.

MORE AFTER THE JUMP

CYBERPUNK 2077 live-action project in the planning stages

CD Projekt Red will collaborate with production company Anonymous Content to create a live-action project set in the world of their video game, Cyberpunk 2077. It is unclear if this is a direct adaptation of the game or an adjacent project in the same world, similar to 2022 anime spin-off series Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, which was a hit for Netflix.

Anonymous Content worked on True Detective, Mr. Robot, The Revenant and Spotlight, and are known for serious, intense genre works, which would be a good fit for the Cyberpunk world.

Cyberpunk 2077 is based on the Cyberpunk role-playing game franchise created by Mike Pondsmith in the late 1980s (which had its heyday with the Cyberpunk 2020 product line, released through the 1990s). The video game, released in late 2020, sees the player taking on the role of V, a scrappy mercenary in Night City, California, who inadvertently ends up with a chip which could bring down entire global powers. To stop the chip's destruction, they install it into their cyberware, resulting in them being joined in their adventures by the apparent cyber-ghost of legendary rebel and rock star Johnny Silverhand (Keanu Reeves). The chip allows them to use more cyberware and powerful weapons than anybody else, but also will inevitably kill them, forcing them to make a hard choice on how to save Johnny, or themselves.

Despite a buggy and controversial launch, the game has undergone a redemption arc thanks to a steady bug-fixing schedule. The game has sold 25 million copies and recently launched its well-received Phantom Liberty expansion (starring Idris Elba as New United States secret agent Solomon Reed), which has sold 3 million copies in its first two weeks on sale.

Video game adaptations used to be seen as a poisoned chalice, but recent successes like The Last of Us and Arcane have seen the idea become more popular.

With this idea only just getting off the ground and Hollywood still wrapping up the issues surrounding its recent strike, it'll likely be a good few years before we see this project hit the screen. Meanwhile, CD Projekt Red have already started development on Cyberpunk 2077's sequel.

CYBERPUNK 2077: PHANTOM LIBERTY gets release date and expanded trailer

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty will be released on 26 September this year.

Cyberpunk 2077's first (and possibly only) story expansion sees protagonist V given an impossible mission: to go into Dogtown, a sealed-off area of Pacifica, Night City's most lawless district, and rescue the President of the New United States. The expansion seems inspired by John Carpenter's Escape from New York, which is a great model to base things from, and sees the game's high-profile casting expanded from a returning Keanu Reeves as Johnny Silverhand, with Idris Elba joining the fray as NUS Agent Solomon Reed. Unsurprisingly, complications abound.

The expansion will be available for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.

Sales of THE WITCHER 3 pass 50 million

CD Projekt has confirmed that its 2015 CRPG, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, has sold over 50 million copies, making it one of the best-selling video games of all time.

The news emerged in their latest earnings call. CDPR also confirmed that the Witcher trilogy as a whole has sold over 75 million copies. Combined with the over 20 million confirmed sales of their last game, Cyberpunk 2077, not to mention the video card game Gwent, this puts CDPR's lifetime sales at well over 95 million units sold.

The biggest-selling video game of all time is Minecraft, which is estimated to have sold around 238 million copies, followed by Grand Theft Auto V/Grand Theft Auto Online (180 million), Tetris (100 million) and Wii Sports (83 million).

Based on the Wikipedia ranking, The Witcher 3 has jumped over games such as Diablo 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to become the ninth-biggest-selling game of all time, although of course the accuracy of such lists may be questioned.

CDPR is currently working on Phantom Liberty, a major expansion to Cyberpunk 2077, which it will be previewing at the Summer Game Fest event on 8 June, with an anticipated release later this year. Their next full project is a fourth Witcher game, which is believed to focus on new characters and will not be a direct sequel to The Witcher 3.

Idris Elba joins CYBERPUNK 2077: PHANTOM LIBERTY

CD Projekt Red have unveiled some more information on Phantom Liberty, their expansion to Cyberpunk 2077. The main headline is that Idris Elba is joining the game, providing the voice and performance for new character Solomon Reed.

The new trailer also hints at a bit more of the storyline: the President of the New United States is visiting Night City (which is independent of NUSA control) but shenanigans ensue and they get in over their heads. V is recruited to go into Dogtown, possibly the old Combat Zone, a chaotic area of Pacific where anything goes (this area was sealed off in the main game), where they liaise with Reed on a mission that is said to be influenced by spy thrillers (with more than a whiff of Escape from New York to it).

New content in the expansion appears reasonably generous, with a new storyline extending across multiple main missions and side-missions, along with new characters and weapons and a new district of Night City to explore. The expansion will also apparently open up existing areas of the city for you to visit, including the large stadium visible from across the city which was also unreachable in the main game.

As well as Elba joining the cast, Keanu Reeves is back, having recorded new dialogue as Johnny Silverhand, V's reluctant cybernetic head-guest. It looks like the expansion will make use of a save set before the end of the main game, rather than following on from the end of it.

CDPR have indicated that the expansion will be generous in size, larger than The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone but not quite as big as the massive Blood and Wine expansion for that game. At the moment they are only planning one expansion for the game, having scaled back their plans for multiple big expansions due to the original game's troubled release and the need to extensively patch it. However, the game has enjoyed a significant critical renaissance in recent months and a boom in sales that have passed it over 20 million copies sold.

Phantom Liberty does not have a firm release date yet, other than some time in 2023.

CD Projekt confirm a remake of the original WITCHER game is in development

A few weeks ago CD Projekt unveiled a list of future projects they are working on, including multiple new Witcher games and a sequel to Cyberpunk 2077. They have today confirmed that one of those games, the mysterious "Canis Majoris," is a full-fledged remake of The Witcher, the 2007 RPG that kicked off the franchise and began CDPR's rise to fame.

The Witcher told the story of Geralt, the titular monster-slayer, as he dealt with amnesia and re-learned his fighting skills. Shortly into the game his home castle of Kaer Morhen is raided by the Salamandra, a criminal organisation. Geralt pursues the organisation back to the kingdom of Temeria, which is being afflicted by a plague. Through his typical mix of following clues, investigating crimes and pursuing a startling number of side-quests and optional romances, Geralt eventually uncovers the secrets of the organisation and brings them down.

The game was praised on release for its writing, its focus on character-building (notably several non-combat quests doing mundane things like setting up a pleasant dinner for your friends) and its excellent atmosphere, not to mention how it used BioWare's Aurora Engine (previously used for Neverwinter Nights) but pushed it to the limit in terms of graphics and detail. However, the game was criticised for its decidedly ropey combat and its plethora of bugs, including saved games that would take several minutes to load. CDPR released The Witcher Enhanced Edition a year later with most of these issues solved, which is when the game picked up a far bigger audience. The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings followed in 2011 and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in 2015.

The original Witcher is understandably a dated and somewhat janky game to play, not to mention never being released on consoles, so a full-blown remake certainly seems like the way to go. The remake will use Unreal Engine 5 and CDPR are using it to field-test features and ideas they want to include in their next three Witcher games, which will also be using the new engine.

Day-to-day development of the game is being carried out by Fool's Theory, a studio that previously worked on Outrider and Baldur's Gate III. Several veterans of the Witcher series are working at the studio and CDPR are providing "full creative supervision." The game is very early in development, so don't expect to see this for at least a few years.

CDPR themselves are early at work on what is informally being called The Witcher 4, although it is believed the game will not be called that and will involve a new protagonist. Their next release will be Phantom Liberty, an expansion for Cyberpunk 2077.

CD Projekt Red announce multiple new WITCHER games, new IP and CYBERPUNK 2077 sequel

CD Projekt Red have confirmed they have a lot more Witcher games coming down the pipe in future, committing to no less than five new games, as well as the first game in a new IP and a sequel to Cyberpunk 2077.

The already-announced project is code-named "Polaris," although in reality it's being informally called The Witcher 4. The game picks up after the events of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and its expansions; is a large-scale, open-world CRPG; will probably not focus on Geralt as the main character (based on previous statements); will use the Unreal 5 Engine; and is the beginning of a new Witcher trilogy. The game currently has 150 people working on it internally at CDPR.

Obviously as part of that announcement, CDPR have also confirmed that effectively The Witcher 5 and 6 (though they probably won't be called that) are also in the planning. The plan is to release the two sequels at 3-year intervals after the initial release, which will be ambitious.

Alongside that is "Sirius," an "innovative take on The Witcher universe telling an unforgettable story for existing Witcher fans and new audiences." This game is being worked on the Molasses Flood, an American studio based in Boston which CDPR acquired a year ago. The developer is known for their survival and base-building games, The Flame in the Flood and Drake Hollow, suggesting this will not be an RPG but a different genre within the same world.

"Canis Majoris" is the final title and is, intriguingly, "a story-driven, single-player, open-world RPG set within The Witcher universe." It is being worked on by a 3rd-party studio led by ex-Witcher veterans from CDPR.

CDPR - perhaps unwisely given how this turned out last time - have also confirmed they are working on "Orion," a full sequel to Cyberpunk 2077. That makes sense since, despite its rocky launch, the original game has now sold over 20 million copies. Although not confirmed by CDPR, it's likely this game will also move to Unreal Engine 5. It has no title, though fans are inevitably already calling it Cyberpunk 2078.

This is in addition to Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty, the major story expansion to Cyberpunk 2077 and the current primary focus for the company, with over 350 people involved. This title is set to launch in 2023.

CDPR have also teased "Hadar," a third, new IP project, which is in the very earliest prototyping stage.

CYBERPUNK 2077: PHANTOM LIBERTY announced

The first major expansion for Cyberpunk 2077, Phantom Liberty, has been announced for release in 2023. The new expansion sees V, the protagonist of Cyberpunk 2077, joining forces with the government of the New United States for a new mission, to the distress of their head-companion Johnny Silverhand.

CD Projekt Red has revealed little else about the expansion, save it takes place in an "all-new district" of Night City and is a "spy thriller." The presence of Johnny and V in the trailer suggests this expansion is set before the end of Cyberpunk 2077.

Cyberpunk 2077 was announced in 2012 and released in late 2020, with critical acclaim for its story, characterisation, visuals, soundtrack and atmosphere, but serious criticism of its bugs, especially on last-generation consoles. The release turned into a major fiasco, with console sales of the game suspended. A lengthy programme of bugfixes and patches eventually stabilised the game and the 1.5 patch in February this year finally resolved the bulk of the game's problems. These issues have delayed work on the game's expansions. A new 1.6 patch released today addresses further issues, adds new features and ties in with the release of the Cyberpunk 2077: Edgerunners animated series on Netflix next week.

CDPR originally planned two expansions for the game, the first being set in a new area of the Pacifica district and adding new quests and storylines. The second would have taken V to the orbiting space station known as the Crystal Palace and resolved the remaining dangling storyline issues from the original release. It's unclear if Phantom Liberty is the first expansion, or replaces both.

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty will be released in 2023 on PC, Xbox Series S/X, PlayStation 5 and Stadia.

CD Projekt confirms a new WITCHER game is in development

CD Projekt have teased a new Witcher video game project, with the byline "The Witcher: A New Saga Begins."

Not much else is known about the project - especially since CDPR's own website has crashed, possibly due to traffic - but it appears to be a new, full game in the series, following on from the 2015 release of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, one of the most acclaimed CRPGs of all time.

Based on Andrzej Sapkowski's seven-book series (recently adapted for television by Netflix), the three Witcher games were released in 2007, 2011 and 2015 and have cumulatively sold over 50 million copies. The games act as a possible continuation of the novel series, featuring the further adventures of the Witcher, Geralt, his adopted daughter Ciri and the sorceresses Triss Merigold and Yennefer. The second expansion for The Witcher 3, Blood and Wine, released in 2016, acted as a conclusion and coda to the series.

The new game, possibly the start of a series, is not expected to focus on Geralt, and may allow players to create their own Witcher rather than forcing them to play a pre-generated character. The game also marks a major technical shift, with CDPR using Unreal Engine 5 as part of a "multi-year strategic partnership" with Epic Games, rather than continuing to develop their own propriety REDengine.

CDPR are continuing to refine, revise and develop Cyberpunk 2077, their SF CRPG which was released in a technically poor state in late 2020. Recent updates have improved the game and CDPR are working on several expansions to the game which they hope to release this year or in 2023.

No release date for the new Witcher project has been mooted, although CDPR did acknowledge the eight-year gap between announcing and releasing Cyberpunk 2077 was a huge mistake, and subsequent gaps between announcement and release will be shorter.

Cyberpunk 2077

In 2023, the Fourth Corporate War ended when a group of terrorists led by charismatic rock star Johnny Silverhand smuggled a thermonuclear device into Arasaka Tower in Night City, California, and destroyed it. Silverhand vanished during the attack and was never seen again. Fifty-four years later, this minor historical detail becomes crucially important to mercenary V when they are offered a contract to steal an advanced biochip from Arasaka Corporation. What seems to be a normal gig turns into a gruelling nightmare of high-stakes international geo-politics, existential confusion and corporate intrigue. A clock is ticking and V now has to build up a network of allies so they can save themselves and survive what is coming.

Cyberpunk 2077 has a lot of Things in it. These Things include: Sentient Waymo; a hyperactive anime girl band whose signature song could become the next "Gangnam Style" if it didn't have a swear in the title; a soundtrack of near non-stop bangers; iguanas; cats; characters you actually want to hang out with in real life; giant holographic fish; wonderful dialogue; superb stealth; Hideo Kojima playing himself; a shotgun that sets people on fire; decidedly non-cringey romances; the red bike from Akira; Keanu Actual Reeves; GLaDOS from Portal; several YouTube streamers; hard moral choices; really cringey first-person sex scenes; a rocket launcher which is also your arm; a sentient gun; Half-Life gags that dated before the game even came out; mysteriously teleporting cops; a vending machine who becomes your friend; lots and lots of freezers you can hide bodies in; inventive hacking; city blocks from Judge Dredd; cars that drive like bricks; and a slew of bugs (mostly minor, very occasionally major).

The number of Things in Cyberpunk 2077 is so overwhelming that it's hard to fully appreciate them all in one go. Cyberpunk 2077 is a towering achievement, a story-driven, open-world RPG with a gripping central narrative and a lot of player choice in how you achieve objectives. It's also - rather infamously by now - a janky game which, in order to hit its punishingly optimistic release date, has had to not so much cut corners as sear them from existence with industrial-strength flamethrowers. There are moments in this game that are polished beyond brilliance, with storytelling and character beats that, even more than the developers' previous game, The Witcher 3, contemptuously rewrite your expectations of what video games are capable of in terms of storytelling and characterisation. Five seconds later you'll be driving down the street wondering why cars are fading in and out of existence two hundred yards away and why the police only chased you (on foot!) for three yards after you accidentally ran someone over before eerily dematerialising.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a game that started life (way back in 2012) as an RPG but over the course of its development metamorphosed into something else: The Metagame, The Ubergame, the game that would include all other games within itself. CDPR decided that as well as an RPG, it also had to be an immersive sim like the Deus Ex and Dishonored series; a first-person stealth version of recent cult hits Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun and Desperados III; an apocalyptic collect 'em up which at times feels like a Fallout title; and an open-world, icon-hoovering action game with driving, like Grand Theft Auto V or (maybe more appropriately, given the hacking angle) the Watch_Dogs series.

At some point CDPR must have realised that the game was never going to achieve all of these goals simultaneously, but rather than manage expectations it decided to expand them. In the last two-and-a-half years of development, they released no less than 72 videos, ranging from expansive trailers to detailed behind-the-scenes development videos about the music, weapons, the involvement of Keanu Reeves and the work needed to translate the game into other languages. CDPR decided to pour petrol on the flames of hype rather than try to keep them under control. The result is a game that delights and frustrates in turn, sometimes in the same minute of gameplay.

Most importantly, Cyberpunk 2077 emerges as a good game. It's very nearly a great game, a classic ranking alongside CDPR's previous title, but the sheer volume of jank in the game and the evidently cut or compromised features reduces its impact.

Cyberpunk 2077 casts you as "V", a mercenary working in and around Night City, California. You can't choose V's name, but you can choose their gender, sexuality, appearance and background before being set loose in the city. At any time you'll have a series of main story missions to follow, which push forward the overall narrative, and a number of side-missions, mostly phoned in to you by various "fixers" who work all over the city (who also have side-jobs begging you to buy really rubbish used cars for some reason). You also get side-jobs from characters you meet in the main story missions. These side-jobs can extend into lengthy, multi-hour quest chains of their own, sometimes ending in romances or at least winning the loyalty of the character in question. On top of these, there's also a truly startling number of map icons, depicting crimes in progress (V is a subcontractor for the police, for reasons that are hazily explained), yet more side-missions, shops and sites of interest. Cyberpunk 2077 easily has a hundred hours of content in the base game, easily a lot more if you experiment with different builds and different quest choices, and more still if you're happy just travelling around looking at things.

Cyberpunk 2077 is gorgeous. Night City is one of the most gawp-worthy settings for a video game, ever, and your screenshot key (enhanced by a comprehensive photo mode) may burn out from overuse during the course of the game. If you grew up watching Blade Runner, reading Neuromancer, watching Akira or playing Syndicate, you've probably fantasised about a game that put you right in the middle of a cyberpunk city and let you just walk around sampling the sights. This year's cult hit Cloudpunk got a huge amount of mileage of that on a budget comfortably less than 1% of Cyberpunk 2077, and unsurprisingly this game takes it to a whole new level. Whether its watching the sun rise over town-sized solar collectors, the rain falling between city apartment blocks taller than the Sears Tower or homeless folk living on the toxic beaches of Pacifica, the game throws more memorable images at you per hour than most some major franchises have managed in countless iterations. Those on more powerful hardware with ray-tracing and 4K resolutions will get the best out of the game, but even those on modest hardware will appreciate the art direction and atmosphere.

The story and its attendant characters are the main draw here. V's journey through Night City's criminal underworld and corporate entanglements is engrossing. The major characters you meet - fellow merc Jackie Welles, ripperdoc Viktor Vector, braindance expert Judy Alvarez, Nomad Panam Palmer, racing driver turned barmaid Claire, Tarot expert Misty, fixer Rogue, grumpy modern samurai Takemura and, of course, the ghostly Johnny Silverhand - are fleshed-out individuals with complex motivations and intriguing backstories. Like The Witcher 3 before it, CDPR has created some wonderfully real characters you enjoy spending time with (unlike, say, almost every Bethesda game ever, with an honourable exception made for Nick Valentine), with characterisation that exceeds BioWare at their long-ago best. There are a few characters who aren't as well fleshed-out and whose stories aren't as well-done - effective arch-villains Yorinobu Araska and Adam Smasher get very little screentime, whilst a fascinating story about a mayoral candidate who's being mentally manipulated seems to peter out - but for the most part the stories and characters are excellent, with real, emotionally satisfying moments and a surprising amount of heart. Cyberpunk 2077 can be an at times cynical and brutal game, but it also has a lot of warmth in its character relationships and humour. The only weakness with the story is that your choice of opening background feels less significant than it really should, and it may have been better to have just given you one set background.

The story and characters are also surprisingly powerful in the matters of representation: the game's marketing was deliberately "edgy," with a marketing campaign that seemed intent on making the game appear transphobic (until the marketing person responsible for that was fired). The game itself is decidedly much more LGBTQ+ friendly, with straight and gay romantic relationships available and your character able to present as non-gender-specific (albeit with somewhat limited parameters, with your pronouns dependent on your choice of voice actor). Gay, straight and trans characters are present in the narrative (contrary to some reviewers, who erroneously claimed there are no trans characters in the game, which just goes to show how many reviewers didn't bother to play the full game) and presented as people, with no fuss at all made about gender or sexuality. The only iffy area in the game is some of its advertising, which feels exploitative and tawdry, but given the nature of the game's corporations, that's almost certainly deliberate.

Mechanically, the game tries to give players a lot of choice in how to advance their character, perhaps with the developers feeling that The Witcher 3 rolled back too many RPG systems in favour of being more of an action RPG. Cyberpunk 2077 has a level-based system where you can choose to upgrade stats and skills, but also an advance-by-doing system where skills can also be upgraded by simply using those skills. You can also pick up shards (datafiles) which update skills directly. It's a complex and interesting system, but one that feels like it was designed to allow skill points to be spread more evenly. If you decide to focus on stealth and hacking and pour most of your skill points into those skill trees, you can quickly become a ghost-like superhacker who can wipe out entire platoons of enemies from afar by hacking into their systems and setting them literally on fire, or short-circuiting them, or creating a localised computer virus that can do tremendous damage to entire groups with one hack (by the end of the game you can literally kill entire gangs of 5-10 enemies with hacking attacks long before they can locate you). You also have elaborate systems for armour, implants, cyberdecks and weapons mods which can dramatically increase your damage output and reduce incoming damage. This is all very cool but can get quite over-powered, and enemies cease being a serious threat by around the halfway point of the game, unless you crank the difficulty way up.

The open world is an area where Cyberpunk 2077 falters, surprisingly. Night City is gorgeous and it's fun to travel around the city and its environs, but you'll quickly discover that the city simulation aspect of the game is illusory. Pedestrians and cars fade into and out of view rather artificially (shades of the early 2000s Grand Theft Auto games on the PlayStation 2), it's almost pitifully easy to evade the police (especially since they can't chase after you in police cars!) and the randomly-encountered hostile gang members and street crimes can be dealt with with almost contemptuous ease. Shopping at street vendors and shops opens a rather functional menu screen for buying food, clothes and equipment, despite elaborate animations existing in missions for eating at food stalls, which would have been more fun to do at will. There's also a bizarrely limited number of ways for pedestrians to react to you. Pulling out a gun or causing an explosion will root everyone to the spot rather than more sensibly running away, and passing civilians whom you save from criminals will almost never express any kind of gratitude or talk to you, usually instead sauntering off (or even responding with the same automated "f--k off!" response most passers-by give you when you try to talk to them). Ten years ago, you might have gotten away with these kind of limited reactions but with not just Grand Theft Auto V but also the Watch_Dogs series (each game of which has had a lower budget than Cyberpunk 2077) and even forgotten classic Sleeping Dogs having much more realistic, immersive open city features, Night City feels a lot more disappointing. The lack of a functioning metro system (despite featuring in trailers) and the presence of flying cars and aircraft but not being able to use them feel like weird limitations as well.

This isn't helped by the fact that most cars in the game feel too heavy and unwieldy, with ridiculous turning circles and poor design (the driving model is highly reminiscent of Grand Theft Auto IV's underwhelming performance, in fact, and not GTAV's much smoother experience). Only a couple of cars, like a Batmobile-like sports car variant you find in a tunnel and Silverhand's Porsche 911 you inherit through a later mission, are really worthwhile. Much better are the motorbikes, which allow you to cut through alleys and side-streets and across the Badlands in a more dynamic manner.

Fortunately then, the game's systems in use feel very satisfying. Combat can be chunky and visceral, with a nice mixture of options. You can blow people away with a rocket launcher arm implant, get close and personal with shotguns, or stand off with sniper rifles (which are more like railguns given their propensity for popping heads like helium balloons). You can even attach a silencer to a pistol for more a violent approach to stealth. Stealth itself is reasonably solid, although a little flaky at first until you get the skill which slows down time when you're spotted, giving you an opportunity to slip back into hiding. Stealth feels more like a first-person version of recent isometric games like Desperados III, although without vision cones so you have to be more careful in how you approach enemies. Stealth takedowns are fun and you can actually move bodies and hide them in containers (unlike Watch_Dogs 2, which allowed you to knock people out and...just leave them where they fell, for other people to find), making it a very viable strategy. Hacking computer systems to turn off cameras or make turrets friendly is also enjoyable, and taking out an entire enemy squad of guards by turning their own weapons against them may make you sit back and twirl your moustache (metaphorical or real) whilst cackling in satisfaction.

In several missions, this combination of systems turns Cyberpunk 2077 into a worthy follow-up to Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, with you infiltrating elaborately-designed locations, hacking computer systems, stealth-knocking out guards of even ghosting your way through entire missions. The main game quest locations are the best for these, with slipping out of a massive hotel after an important mission goes south being one of my favourite stealth experiences in any game ever, and infiltrating a huge Arasaka compound later on not being far behind. There are also several side-missions with comparable design strengths, and the game even manages to enhance stealth by taking away one of Deus Ex's more contrived standbys, the surprisingly common handy human-sized air vents that no-one ever thinks to look in. However, the overall number of excellently-designed mission environments is relatively low, and the more optional activities, like crime-fighting, afford far less challenge to those inclined to go with stealth or hacking options, leaving you rather over-powered in those circumstances. But whilst the illusion lasts, it's a powerfully satisfying one.

It's also impossible to talk about the game without talking about its music. The original soundtrack itself is solid, if a bit underwhelming (Deus Ex: Human Revolution's soundtrack remains unmatched in this area), but the enormous battery of artists and original songs assembled for the game is incredible. Lots of other games have had as many, if not more, licensed songs, but for original tracks assembled specifically for a video game, Cyberpunk 2077 is likely unmatched, and most of them are impressive bangers, often presented in multiple versions. The music is one area this game has definitely not skimped on.

Cyberpunk 2077 (****) is an accomplished game in many key areas. Its story and characters are among the very best-in-class with some of the most outstanding story beats and quiet character moments in a video game that I've ever experienced; its RPG systems are adequate to very good; it has great combat and stealth; and its design, graphics, music and atmosphere are fantastic. Ranged against that is that its open world design is flaky as hell, and key game systems like driving, police, traffic AI and pedestrian reactions feel like they need major revisions, not to mention lingering bugs (see below) which need to stamped out fast.

Also, whilst the PC version of the game is (mostly) excellent, CDPR deserve all the criticism that've gotten for trying to release barely-functional versions of the game on X-Box One and PlayStation 4 and hiding the state they were in from reviewers. CDPR have spent thirteen years building up a formidable reputation for player friendliness and integrity and that reputation is now in the gutter, and they're going to have to work very hard to get it back again.

Cyberpunk 2077 is available now on PC, Stadia, X-Box One and X-Box Series X. The PlayStation 4 and 5 versions are on hold pending further patches.

Technical Note: I played the game on a relatively middling gaming PC (nVidia 2060 graphics card, 16 GB RAM) and experienced exactly one (1) crash. I did experience minor but relatively common graphical bugs, like flickering as new textures loaded in and occasional objects left hanging in mid-air (loot, cigarettes, weapons). Once or twice, especially in the Badlands, vehicles spawned upside down. Towards the end of the game, as I wrapped up more and more side-jobs and activities, graphical bugs seemed to increase, with street textures failing to load until I was already driving over them. These problems were rare; numerous gaming sessions failed to produce a single bug of note. This year alone, I experienced far more crashes, graphical problems and bugs in both Horizon Zero Dawn and Red Dead Redemption 2. For this review I completed the main story, every side-quest and every optional activity, which took 95 hours. I will revise the review in future should CDPR make substantial improvements to the game in the coming months.

Franchise Familiariser: Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 is a few days away from hitting shelves and will almost certainly become the biggest video game of 2020 when it launches. Eight years in development, the game will allow players to create a character of their own design and then live a life of crime in the late 21st Century metropolis of Night City, California. But did you know that the game is merely the latest part of a franchise which is more than thirty years old? If you don’t know your rockerboys from your Arasaka corporate suits from your netrunners, a franchise familiariser may be helpful. 

The Basics

Cyberpunk is a science fiction franchise created by writer and games designer Mike Pondsmith, originally published by his company, R. Talsorian Games, in 1988. Pondsmith named the game after the science fiction subgenre of the same name, which in turn was named after a 1983 short story written by Bruce Bethke. This story was actually published somewhat late in the development of the genre, as several previous works had been important in establishing the genre, particularly Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and John Brunner’s 1975 book The Shockwave Rider, as well as the 1982 movie Blade Runner, loosely based on Dick’s novel.

Pondsmith and his fellow designers have cited Walter Jon Williams’ 1986 novel Hardwired as being extremely influential on the design of the game, along with Dick and Blade Runner (William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, often arguably cited as cyberpunk’s codifying moment, was not read until later in the game’s development).

To make it clearer that the reader is not speaking about the short story or genre, it’s common for fans to refer to Cyberpunk by one of its edition subtitles: Cyberpunk 2013, Cyberpunk 2020, Cyberpunk v3.0 or Cyberpunk Red.

Each of the four editions of the game is set in a different decade and reflects the passage of time in the Cyberpunk universe. The original Cyberpunk (1988), now almost always referred to as Cyberpunk 2013, is set in that year and depicts a near-future dystopia where corporations have become as powerful as governments and fight one another for supremacy and where takeovers are more literally hostile than you might expect. The game is predominantly set in Night City, a custom-designed and built metropolis on the coast of Morro Bay, California, roughly halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, and sees players taking on roles such as mercenaries, corporate players, police officers and netrunners, as hackers are known in this world.

Cyberpunk 2020 is the second and most popular and well-known iteration of the game, to the point that “Cyberpunk 2020” is often used to refer to the entire franchise. It was originally published in 1990 and remained continuously in print for fifteen years, accumulating a vast array of supporting supplements and adventures. The game’s rule system, Interlock, was highly praised for being customisable and allowing players to much finely adjust their character’s development through skills rather than being tied into much broader levels (the approach favoured by the medium’s heavyweight game, Dungeons and Dragons, for which Pondsmith had worked on some sourcebooks). The setting was also praised for its attitude and punk ethos.

After experimenting with a spin-off project revolving around young characters who get superhero-like powers from technology, CyberGeneration, the game returned properly in 2005 with Cyberpunk v3.0. The game switched to the Fuzion system, advanced the timeline to the mid-2030s and also adopted a transhuman approach, with much more sophisticated SF ideas such as humans downloading their consciousness into robotic bodies and thus becoming immortal. The setting also dropped some of the aesthetics of the original setting, Pondsmith reasoning that fashion and styles would move on. However, despite some praise for trying to move past cyberpunk clichés and explore more advanced ideas, the game had some negative feedback for exactly the same reason, as well as the change in rules.

Cyberpunk Red (2020) tacitly omits v3.0 from the canon and instead serves as a direct sequel to Cyberpunk 2020, with the timeline now advanced to the 2040s but the old cyberpunk styles and ideas are still very much around. The newest edition of the game also acts as a prequel to Cyberpunk 2077 (the tabletop game and the video game developed in tandem), with Pondsmith confirming that a Cyberpunk 2077 sourcebook updating the Cyberpunk Red timeline and rules to 2077 will follow.

As well as the tabletop roleplaying game and the imminent video game, the franchise consists of six tie-in novels, the first edition of the popular Netrunner collectible card game and the Cyberpunk: Arasaka Plot mobile game. 

MORE AFTER THE JUMP

CYBERPUNK 2077 delayed by three weeks

In slightly surprising news (or utterly unsurprising news, depending on how cynical you are), CD Projekt Red have confirmed they are delaying the release of Cyberpunk 2077 yet again. This is their most modest delay yet, being by just 21 days to 10 December.

Cyberpunk 2077's delays are becoming meme-like at this point. The game was originally announced on 19 October 2012 - yup, eight years ago - before getting its first teaser trailer on 10 January 2013. After going completely radio silent on the game for five years, CDPR started revving up the hype engine again by releasing a much bigger trailer on 10 June 2018.

CDPR finally announced a release date with a trailer that they released on 9 June 2019, which confirmed both the participation of Keanu Reeves and the release date of 16 April 2020. However, this was delayed, first until 17 September and then 19 November.

The news seems to have taken the CDPR Twitter team by surprise: as recently as yesterday they were telling people it was fine to take 19 November off of work because the game would definitely, 100% come out on that date. Unsurprisingly, a lot of fans (especially those who have arranged holidays around the date) are unhappy with the news.

CDPR has cited multiple reasons for the delay, including a switch to work-from-home for staff during the COVID-19 pandemic. They have also been testing nine versions of the game simultaneously: one each for the PC, Stadia, X-Box One and X-Box One X, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 4 Pro, X-Box S, X-Box X and PlayStation 5 platforms. The cross-generational release of Cyberpunk 2077 (not a problem facing their last, mid-generation release of The Witcher 3 in 2015) and ensuring a bug-free launch seems to be their key concern here.

The news will be disappointing to many, although the delay is somewhat modest and the game will still arrive this side of Christmas (assuming no further delays).

CD Projekt Red enter home stretch of development on CYBERPUNK 2077

CD Projekt Red have entered the home stretch of development on their massive, eagerly-awaited video game Cyberpunk 2077. They have sent a complete build to Sony and Microsoft for release certification for their consoles and the game is effectively complete and working. The focus now for the final two months is bug-crunching and stress-testing for different PC configurations, which will entail forced overtime on the project, contradicting previous promises that such mandatory "crunch" would be avoided for this title.

The game was announced in 2012 and had its first proper trailer released in January 2013. The studio moved into full-time production on the game after the release of The Witcher 3 in May 2015. CDPR began spooling up to full release in June 2018, and since then have issued numerous trailers, previews and interviews. The incredibly lengthy gestation period of the game - only Star Citizen and Beyond Good and Evil 2 have officially been in development for longer and arguably Bethesda's Starfield - has led to its development becoming a meme and many people expressing doubt the game would ever come out. In reality the development process is, although long, not unprecedented; CDPR simply started talking about the game way earlier in the process than most companies normally would.

As covered (although not as in much detail as might be wished) in Jason Schreier's fine book Blood, Sweat and Pixels, CDPR suffered a huge amount of worker attrition during the development of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and its expansions in the period 2011-16. Staff were forced to work mandatory six-day and sometimes seven-day weeks for many months on end, and talented, experienced staff ended the experience by quitting. This move was self-defeating, since it meant that CDPR had to train up new staff with their procedures, software and the engine rather than using the skills and talent that had been built up over years. Labour laws in the European Union (CDPR are based in Poland) means that such "crunch" is compensated, which is not always the case in the United States, but it still takes its toll on the workforce.

More and more software developers are taking action to avoid crunch, noting that the (often temporary) boost in productivity it grants is often outweighed by the loss of talented and experienced staff in the process. Bethesda Game Studios, for example, take pride in how long they retain staff for and for their last several titles have avoided announcing any kind of release date until 3-4 months before they are there, at a point when the game is functionally complete, thus avoiding the issue.

In the specific case of Cyberpunk 2077, the head of the company has noted that the crunch period will only be for the last seven weeks of development and will be fully financially compensated. It's also typical for companies to offer extended periods of leave for non-essential staff (i.e. those not needed to address post-release patches) once the product ships and before they have to start firing up their next project. CDPR also note that 10% of the game's profits will be shared by staff. With their last game, The Witcher 3, having sold almost 30 million copies to become one of the biggest-selling games of the decade, this bonus will not be inconsiderable.

This doesn't excuse the hardship and problems caused by crunch, but in this specific case CD Projekt Red have taken steps to mitigate it and do better next time.

Cyberpunk 2077 now looks pretty locked on for its release date on 19 November on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4. Xbox X and PlayStation 5 versions will follow in 2021.

The World of Cyberpunk 2077 by Marcin Batylda

Night City, California, 2077. A city of netrunners, megacorps, edgerunners, gangs and outcasts. Nearly destroyed in the Fourth Corporate War of 2023 (when a tactical nuke went off deep inside the Arasaka Towers), the city has survived flood, famine and war to emerge stronger and more influential than ever before. Now an independent city-state free of outside governmental control, Night City is attracting more people than ever before.

The World of Cyberpunk 2077 is, as the title implies, a background setting book for CD Projekt Red's forthcoming roleplaying video game, Cyberpunk 2077 (due for release in November). It's also set in the same world as Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk pen-and-paper roleplaying game (best-known for its Cyberpunk 2013 and Cyberpunk 2020 editions), which makes this book doubly worthwhile, not just as scene-setting for the video game but also as a lorebook for those interested in trying out the pen-and-paper game. Semi-coincidentally, the latest edition of that roleplaying game, Cyberpunk Red, should be hitting shelves in the next couple of months.

The book is 192 pages long, full colour, with every page combining text exploring the world of Night City with art from the video game. Some of this is concept art, some are video game screenshots and some are fake (and often RoboCop levels of subversive) adverts for in-universe products. How about some Real Water®? Only 99E$ per gallon!

The book is presented as a series of articles from the Night City Inquirer, an anarchic news and press organisation determined to get the real truth out there (with the implication that maybe you shouldn't take everything in the book as being 100% reliable).

The first section focuses on history, mostly alternate history since the Cyberpunk universe deviated from our own in the 1980s. The devastating impact of climate change, resource conflicts, declining nation-states, growing international digital supercorps, a new Dustbowl and three corporate wars fought in the 1990s and 2000s are detailed, along with the founding of Night City on Morro Bay. The devastation of the Fourth Corporate War gets a spotlight, followed by the lengthy rebuilding process for both Night City and the Free State of Northern California.

Once that is covered, there's a lengthy section on the technology of the setting: cyberware, weapons, vehicles, braindance (a potent VR experience where people can go for rides in other people's lives, experiences and hallucinations) and netrunning. The implications of cybernetic technology are covered and the dangers, such as cyberpsychosis, whilst the moral question of how much of yourself you can replace whilst still being considered human is briefly pondered (although not in too much detail).

The longest section details Night City itself, its districts and neighbourhoods. This is fairly bare bones - which given its length is a surprise - since a lot of the detail of the setting will be found in the game itself. It does provide an overview of what districts to avoid after dark (unless you want to get jumped by gangs), where the most exclusive bars are and where might be the best place to procure some shady items. Further chapters look at the the society of Night City, from the rich megacorp regional directors down to the homeless, and at the city's forces of both law and disorder: the police, the gangs and the Nomad tribes who live beyond the city limits. The book ends with an interview with Rogue, an infamous operative of the 2020s who's now in semi-retirement but unofficially still working as a "fixer."

As these kind of companion books go, The World of Cyberpunk 2077 is pretty good. The artwork is excellent, as you might expect given that the book is able to draw on seven years' worth of concept art, finalised design work and renders. The production value of the book is very high and the writing is surprisingly engaging. Lore fluff for video games can be hit or miss, but the immense amount of background material developed previously for the pen-and-paper game means there's a ton of information available on the factions, politics and tech of the setting that goes far beyond what you'd normally expect from this kind of tie-in. There's enough meat here to help run a pen-and-paper game in 2077 Night City as well as prepping for the video game.

In terms of flaws, there's not too many. The book seems to assume knowledge on the reader's part about certain characters like Johnny Silverhand and Morgan Blackhand which the overwhelming majority won't have. There's also a distinct lack of deep context on some things, like the gangs. Some of the gangs are based on fairly obvious cliches (the Haitian gang is called the Voodoo Boys, because obviously that's the only thing anyone knows about Haiti; both the Japanese Arasaka Corporation and the Tyger Claws yakuza gang are about honour and face in public, whilst being corrupt behind the scenes), but without the context of the video game it's hard to know if they get more development than that. The book's maps of Night City are also a bit odd, omitting the shoreline, so it's hard to tell at a glance which is an inland district of the city and which is a coastal one.

Beyond that, The World of Cyberpunk 2077 (****) is a readable and solid worldbuilding guidebook, and it does several jobs of providing background for the game, acting as an advertisement for it and providing context for the new Cyberpunk Red pen-and-paper game. It is available in the UK and USA now.

Sales of THE WITCHER books pass 15 million

Based on publicity information released by Gollancz, the Witcher books by Andrzej Sapkowski have now passed 15 million worldwide sales.

The previous available figure indicated that the series had sold around 6 million copies by the middle of last decade. The massive jump in sales in just a few years is down to two factors: the immense success of the Witcher video game trilogy by CD Projekt Red (the last of which has now sold around 30 million copies by itself) and the success of the Netflix television series based on the books, which debuted last December. As we saw with Game of Thrones on HBO, a successful and well-received TV adaptation can massively drive sales of the books; the Song of Ice and Fire novels sold 9 million copies in 2012 alone and have sold around 80 million extra copies since the TV show debuted in 2011. Whether The Witcher can match those kind of sales remains to be seen.

The first Witcher book - also called The Witcher - was published in 1990 and was a collection of short stories. It was later revised and reissued in 1993 as The Last Wish. A second story collection, Sword of Destiny, was released in 1992. The five-volume "proper" novel series followed: Blood of Elves (1994), Time of Contempt (1995), Baptism of Fire (1996), The Tower of the Swallow (1997) and The Lady of the Lake (1999). A stand-alone prequel, Season of Storms, followed in 2013.

CD Projekt Red unveil new CYBERPUNK 2077 trailer and announce Netflix tie-in series

CD Projekt Red have unveiled a new trailer for Cyberpunk 2077, their upcoming science fiction roleplaying game (note, contains swearing).

The trailer is part of a media blitz for the game taking place today, which also includes a gameplay stream and multiple outlets previewing the title via a special preview build of the game, with more reactions expected this evening. This kind of coverage is unusual given the game is still five months from launching, but is a display of CDPR's immense confidence in the project.

The game is set in 2077 in Night City, a new metropolis that has grown up on the Californian coast between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The game followers a central character named V who gets in over their head (the character is fully customisable). The game will feature remarkable reactivity, with the first several hours of the game dramatically different depending on what character background you choose, and the player able to exert tremendous influence over how the story unfolds.

The game was announced in 2012 and has been in full-time production since 2015.

CDPR and Netflix also announced that they are collaborating on an animated TV show, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. The series is expected to debut in 2022.

Cyberpunk 2077 will launch on PC, X-Box One and PlayStation 4 on 19 November 2020. The game will also be backwards-compatible on the X-Box X and PlayStation 5, which are expected to launch around the same time.

CD Projekt Red decentralises operations to continue work on CYBERPUNK 2077

With TV and film projects being suspended globally at a rate of knots in reaction to coronavirus, it's interesting to see the response from the video game industry. Poland's CD Projekt Red, who's forthcoming science fiction RPG Cyberpunk 2077 is the most eagerly-awaited game of the year, have revealed how they are tackling the issue via a public announcement on Twitter.

CDPR have switched to a fully decentralised, work-from-home ethos where developers will remotely log into servers to access the latest build of the game and provide updates, bug-checking and polish.

It should be noted that Cyberpunk 2077 is functionally complete: it was originally due for release in April and CDPR have noted they could still hit that date if they didn't mind releasing a buggy game, which they do. The bulk of the work left on the game at this stage is bug-testing, polish and a last round of work to make sure that the game releases in as perfect a condition as possible. Whether it is possible for a company like, say, Bethesda or Rockstar (who are hip-deep in developing multiple games, including Starfield, The Elder Scrolls VI and the rumoured Grand Theft Auto VI) to do the same thing much earlier in their games' development remains unclear.

That said, CDPR also confirmed recently that they are working on a new Witcher game which is much earlier in production, and presumably work on that game will also continue in this remote fashion.

The video game industry has flirted with remote working and decentralised production for years, with many small mods and indie projects being developed in such a way. However, forcing new employees to relocate to the company studio's physical location and attend in person has been the norm in larger studios for decades. It will be interesting to see if this adaptation becomes a permanent trend.

CYBERPUNK 2077 delayed five months

Cyberpunk 2077, comfortably the single most eagerly-awaited video game of 2020, has slipped five months from its original release date.

The huge, open-world CRPG, based on Mike Pondsmith's classic 1980s tabletop game Cyberpunk 2020, has engendered massive pre-release coverage after recruiting man-of-the-moment Keanu Reeves to star in the game as cult character Johnny Silverhand. The developers, CD Projekt Red, are riding high at the moment as their previous game, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, has seen a huge boost in sales after the success of the Netflix TV series.

Reeves announced the game's original release date (16 April 2020) last year. Since then, CDPR has been working on polishing the game into a release-ready state. However, the company had also vowed to avoid the punishing crunch that marked the release of The Witcher 3 and led to several key developers leaving the company after the game came out.

The new release date is 17 September 2020, which CDPR is more hopeful of hitting.