Cyberpunk 2077 has been at the back of CDP’s mind since even before The Witcher was out. The team has spoken before about their collective love for the original pen-and-paper RPG, which many of them had played as teenagers in then-Communist Poland, where it was hardly a mainstream pastime. Whilst making the Witcher, the developer came up with plenty of ideas that just weren’t usable in a fantasy RPG, and Cyberpunk was a dream property to work with.​

Character customisation, for instance, was necessarily not an option in Geralt’s world. But in Cyberpunk 2077, it’s self-defined role-playing: your style and personality will have deep and far-reaching effects on the world and how it reacts to you. “We will have several features that allow you to create your [visual] style, and your style will affect gameplay, storyline and relationships between characters,” explains creative director Sebastian Stepien. “Your appearance and your dress will change the behaviour of NPCs, and also the story also in some parts,” Mateusz adds. Style and appearance works together with the personality you create for your character and express in conversation to determine how the world reacts to you.​

“It’s about telling story via what happens, not cutscenes or other features,” Mateusz says. “To do that we need to create a totally new unique dialogue system – we’re doing that right now, it should be awesome.”​

Augments, of course, are a huge part of the Cyberpunk world. They are the focal point of the teaser trailer, which shows a squad of specialised police facing off against a woman who has gone too rather far with her biomechanical self-improvement regime. But Cyberpunk 2077 will not be about conflict between the augmented and the police; that Deus Ex: Human Revolution-style societal tension over the morality and ethics of augmentation is not at the centre of the story.​

“The psycho squad is just one of many cool elements in this world," Sebastian explains. “We had several ideas for this short teaser and had to focus on one of them. Augmentations and cyberware is a big subject in the world, and that’s why it’s in the teaser. But it won’t be a game about police hunting cyber-psychos. That’s a sub-plot… The story will be low-level. We are not going to save the world, or even save a city. We are focused on the main character and his problems, or her problems.”​

Cyberpunk hasn’t been as easy to adapt as a video game as you might think. Pen and paper mechanics have been the foundation of many digital RPGs over the years, but they do not translate well into the kind of game that CDP is trying to make. “The game mechanics are totally different on paper, they don’t work in video games because they would be super boring,” Mateusz says.​

“The main problem is that the original system is based on dice rolls. When you think about Cyberpunk you think about shooting, action, a lot of explosions. But that doesn’t fit dice rolls in a video game. We want to make it more action-like – there will be a system that lets you use active skills actually in the gameplay in a shooting sequence or something like that, rather than just passive skills like in the books.”​