CD Projekt's Cyberpunk 2077 Update 2.0 + Phantom Liberty Expansion Thread

[Fargus]

Yeah, and Henry Cavill played Witcher 3 lol

Imagine being a filthy rich celeb and playing vidya instead of doing coke and raping some underage girls on some secret pedo resort for elites.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Yeah, and Henry Cavill played Witcher 3 lol

eh, he probably has
might have wanted to pick someone that hasn't livestreamed themselves putting together their new gaming PC build

 

[Fargus]

He probably didn't. I googled that stream and looks like the point of it was to show off his muscles to thirsty female fans. But it was a cool "how do you do fellow gamers" moment non the less. Good on him.

 

[mediocrepoet]

He probably didn't. I googled that stream and looks like the point of it was to show off his muscles to thirsty female fans. But it was a cool "how do you do fellow gamers" moment non the less. Good on him.

I don't know, he's talked about gaming a lot including being super into the Total War games. I think he actually is into PC gaming, just... maybe not as much as someone with a body like the average Codexer since maintaining his physique has to take a certain amount of time and effort.

 

[Fedora Master]

The shittier the game is, the better IGN likes it.

So does the Codex.

 

[Cyberarmy]

He probably didn't. I googled that stream and looks like the point of it was to show off his muscles to thirsty female fans. But it was a cool "how do you do fellow gamers" moment non the less. Good on him.

That guy is super into gaming and other nerdy hobies. He's not picking up agency calls for work because he's in dungeon in WoW, assembles his own super PC, paints Warhammer figures and a proud member of PC masterrace.

 

[Outlander]

Haha, his face at 0:13 is like 'wtf, really?'

 

[mediocrepoet]

He probably didn't. I googled that stream and looks like the point of it was to show off his muscles to thirsty female fans. But it was a cool "how do you do fellow gamers" moment non the less. Good on him.

If you think women are the target of a PC building video, I want some of what you're on. If anything, it would be aimed at dorks like everyone in this thread, so we can go "One of us! One of us!" and go back to being fat and lazy.

 

[Caim]

He probably didn't. I googled that stream and looks like the point of it was to show off his muscles to thirsty female fans. But it was a cool "how do you do fellow gamers" moment non the less. Good on him.

That guy is super into gaming and other nerdy hobies. He's not picking up agency calls for work because he's in dungeon in WoW, assembles his own super PC, paints Warhammer figures and a proud member of PC masterrace.

It still amuses me when people call him that, because that the whole "PC gaming master race" meme started with Zero Punctuation doing a review of... The Witcher.



It seems that things have a way of coming around like that.

 

[Zeriel]

What do you mean? Regardless of how those flags were generated, if the scripting checks for an incidental "talkedToKirk" variable instead of the main background one, that does indeed suggest poor structuring, the check isn't parented to the proper state. A simple oversight from a tired quest designer, or was the narrative class architecture in flux when the quest was implemented? Sure, we've all gone "fuck it, it works" at some point, but the implications are dubious.

The check for such a variable instead of for a characterBackground or similiarly named variable may be more evidence that Street Kid was the "main" background that was either intended to be the only one or was completed first.

Eh considering the amount of voice acting that would be needed for 3 actual paths, I doubt it was ever* planned. Seems more like they just threw together the lifepaths to bait people who wanted an RPG.


*Well, post 2018 reboot. The original design was for non-linear, but that team got junked.

 

[Zeriel]

Yeah, and Henry Cavill played Witcher 3 lol

Imagine being a filthy rich celeb and playing vidya instead of doing coke and raping some underage girls on some secret pedo resort for elites.

It's believable in Cavill's case considering he does it on camera and genuinely seems into it. Chads can get addicted to games too. I mean fuck, for that matter, Rogan is on record as being a Quake freak and even said it detracted from his professional life because whenever he gets into it he becomes obsessed, which rings true to me.

Faking hobbies is more of a female thing in general. And the whole "dudebro" complaint from gaming journos was based on the obvious reality that frat boys who banged sorority chicks and went to parties played games a lot.

 

[Tyrr]

 

[mediocrepoet]

Yeah these aren't the sorts of replies from someone talking about a fake hobby. His answers are usually about something that's fairly niche and they're always things that sound authentic from someone who's actually into it. Not like, "my favourite game is Planetscape Tournament!"

 

[Tyrr]

Yeah these aren't the sorts of replies from someone talking about a fake hobby. His answers are usually about something that's fairly niche and they're always things that sound authentic from someone who's actually into it. Not like, "my favourite game is Planetscape Tournament!"

I laughed when that cuntish moderator asked "World of Warcraft"?

 

[lukaszek]

Yeah these aren't the sorts of replies from someone talking about a fake hobby. His answers are usually about something that's fairly niche and they're always things that sound authentic from someone who's actually into it. Not like, "my favourite game is Planetscape Tournament!"

and yet he never talks about his love for gorasul as it would expose his identity on internets too easily

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Eh considering the amount of voice acting that would be needed for 3 actual paths, I doubt it was ever* planned. Seems more like they just threw together the lifepaths to bait people who wanted an RPG

Yeah, they might have had to spend those hundreds of millions of dollars on something if they did that.

 

[mediocrepoet]

Eh considering the amount of voice acting that would be needed for 3 actual paths, I doubt it was ever* planned. Seems more like they just threw together the lifepaths to bait people who wanted an RPG

Yeah, they might have had to spend those hundreds of millions of dollars on something if they did that.

Those executive bonuses don't pay themselves.

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

The only CdProject game worthy of attention is Thronebreaker.

Thronebreaker is legit good. I hope cd projekt makes a similar spin-off game with the Cyberpunk license.

 

[mediocrepoet]

The only CdProject game worthy of attention is Thronebreaker.

Thronebreaker is legit good. I hope cd projekt makes a similar spin-off game with the Cyberpunk license.

Why does the card have boob physics?

 

[Tyrr]

The only CdProject game worthy of attention is Thronebreaker.

Thronebreaker is legit good. I hope cd projekt makes a similar spin-off game with the Cyberpunk license.

Why does the card have boob physics?

It no longer has. They removed it "performance" reasons.

 

[Caim]

The only CdProject game worthy of attention is Thronebreaker.

Thronebreaker is legit good. I hope cd projekt makes a similar spin-off game with the Cyberpunk license.

Why does the card have boob physics?

It's 2DD art.

 

[Fargus]

The only CdProject game worthy of attention is Thronebreaker.

Thronebreaker is legit good. I hope cd projekt makes a similar spin-off game with the Cyberpunk license.

Why does the card have boob physics?

It no longer has. They removed it "performance" reasons.

lol of course they did.

 

[Bliblablubb]

Since I had a little time on my hands, I tried a little more SCIENCE in this game.
Can you ignore becoming the Chosen1 with a chip and just stay a smalltime merc with the occasional Johnny hallucination, as a result of too much chrome?
Yes you can!
Instead of hopping into Dex's car, a few command lines open up the city and unlock every gig and some (non depending) sidequests, including all races and boxing matches.
And since you are so smalltime, the Afterlife stays locked to you! Because it's opened during Jackie's convo, not through a simple flag. Sad.
Also no offrenda, since Jaquito never dies, he is still happily sitting in Misty's chair. Until you use a mod to spawn him as a companion. Okay, he is useless in a fight, but... Bros4Life!

I couldn't get Peralez' or River's quest to fire tho, I guess they are started within the mainquests, but you can't have everything amirite?
I didn't want to set too many flags, after all you should still be able to revert back and progress normally through the story after you cleared/got bored with gigs.

Real sandbox mode is a small incline for this game tho. Kinda.

 

[Fedora Master]

Your pathetic attempts to claw the last remaining shreds of entertainment from a failed project are sad to witness. Learn to move on.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-strange-unfinished-saga-of-cyberpunk-2077

The Strange, Unfinished Saga of Cyberpunk 2077
How a video game that imagined a bleak future came to model dystopia, in more ways than one.

Illustration by Jinhwa Jang


Mike Pondsmith started playing Dungeons & Dragons in the late seventies, as an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis. The game, published just a few years before, popularized a newish form of entertainment: tabletop role-playing, in which players, typically using dice and a set of rule books, create characters who pursue open-ended quests within an established world. “The most stimulating part of the game is the fact that anything can happen,” an early D&D review noted. Soon, other such games hit the market, including Traveller, a sci-fi game published in 1977, the year that “Star Wars” came out. Pondsmith, a tall Black man who grew up in multiple countries because his dad was in the Air Force, loved sci-fi, and fancied himself a bit like Lando Calrissian, the smooth-talking “Star Wars” rogue played by Billy Dee Williams. “If I could’ve had a cape, I would have had a cape,” he told me, over video chat from his home in western Washington. He bought a copy of Traveller at a Bay Area hardware store shortly after it was released. “You had this vast, sweeping empire with aliens in it and all this stuff,” he recalled, “and people had these spaceships, and they went all over the place and traded and fought.”

There were aspects of the game that irked him. No lightsabres, for instance. Plus, once the game began, the rules made it nearly impossible for the player’s character to die. He tinkered with the rules and ended up writing his own game, Imperial Star, which he finished around 1980. By 1982, he had a degree in graphic design, and he was soon working as a typesetter in a print shop at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He produced a good-looking rule book—although the game, in his view, was a hobbyist’s effort, developed as a pastime for his friends, some of whom have been playing a campaign in the Imperial Star universe for more than three decades. He created another game, Mekton, which was inspired by his discovery of anime and involved giant fighting robots. His wife, Lisa, encouraged him to demo it at DunDraCon, a role-playing convention near San Francisco. By the second day, a few dozen people had gathered around his table, eager to have a go. A friend suggested he start a business. R. Talsorian Games—named for the father of one Pondsmith’s friends, who’d invested in the company as a tax writeoff—incorporated in 1985.

One rainy night around this time, Pondsmith was driving across the San Francisco Bay Bridge when he looked out his window and saw what looked like a “mythical city,” he told me. The sight evoked the neon Los Angeles of Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner,” a movie he’d seen not long before. Night City, Pondsmith thought this place should be called. That is also, as it happens, the name of the demimonde in William Gibson’s novel “Neuromancer,” which had been published in 1984, though Pondsmith had not yet read it. “Neuromancer” is the story of a data thief who uses a body-machine interface to break through a corporation’s A.I. defense system. It’s considered the quintessential cyberpunk novel, a genre that was just then entering its heyday. In 1986, the writer Bruce Sterling published “Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology”; in the preface, Sterling contends that, for the then-new generation of sci-fi writers, technology is “visceral,” “utterly intimate.” That same year, Walter Jon Williams published the novel “Hardwired,” set in a Balkanized post-United States, where the middle class has been decimated and megacorporations have unchecked power. Pondsmith and Williams became friends, and Pondsmith began formulating a game set in Night City that drew, in part, on Williams’s ideas. He envisioned a fractured U.S. in the thrall of technology and beset by rampant inequality. Williams tested out the game as Pondsmith worked on it.

The result, Cyberpunk, came out in 1988. It consisted of three books of rules and story lines and a pair of dice, and was set in the far-off year of 2013. The game, Pondsmith told me, was mostly about having cool gear and strutting around in it. But the format allowed for all kinds of inventiveness. Williams recalled a campaign in which he enlisted the writer Pati Nagle to play as a double agent; another player seemed to fall for Nagle’s character and was, Williams told me, “utterly heartbroken that she’d betrayed him. It was touching and hilarious at the same time.” Pondsmith kept thinking about the game’s world, and reading the novels that were beginning to form the Cyberpunk canon. He started writing a sequel, set a few years later, that focussed less on peacocking in snazzy getups than on the interlocking segments that make up a society. The world he had imagined “was a much larger ecosystem” than he had initially realized, he told me. It involved “how corporations work, how they kept people down, how they interacted with the city, how they interacted with the citizens at what levels.” He called the sequel Cyberpunk 2020. The real question, he had decided, was: Why did this world “keep producing people who get metalled up and go to the street?”

When Cyberpunk 2020 came out, in 1990, Marcin Iwiński and Michał Kiciński were kids in a newly democratic Poland. The country was in the midst of so-called shock therapy as its economy transitioned from state control to capitalism. (When I recently mentioned to Bruce Sterling that a Polish company was bringing out a cyberpunk video game, he said, “It’s great that people in Warsaw can actually get some kind of hook into the industry,” adding that he had spent a lot of time in that part of Europe, and was “glad to see them get a leg up on the old cultural production ladder.”) Iwiński and Kiciński met in a high-school math class. Both loved computer games, but the only versions of those games readily available in Poland were pirated copies traded by fans at weekend markets in Warsaw. After a couple of years hawking games in the Warsaw markets, the duo started getting CDs imported legally from international distributors and selling them to small retail stores. They incorporated in 1994, calling their company CD Projekt.

Their first big investment involved a Dungeons & Dragons video game that came on five CDs and involved recruiting Polish actors to voice characters in the game. They sold eighteen thousand copies on the first day—a huge success. They then created a studio, CD Projekt Red, and developed their own game, based on a Polish fantasy series called “The Witcher,” which Andrzej Sapkowski had begun writing in the mid-eighties. The series takes place on an unnamed continent that was originally inhabited by mythical creatures and has since been colonized by humans. The titular witcher, Geralt of Rivia, is a monster-hunting mercenary. Developing the game took four years and ate up all of their funds. “For half a year, we were working twelve-hour days every day, all weekends, all the time,” the game’s lead character artist has said. The Witcher came out in 2007 and has since sold more than two million copies. Its sequel was so successful that Poland’s Prime Minister gave a copy to Barack Obama when Obama made a visit to the country, in 2011. Obama later called the game a “great example of Poland’s place in the new global economy.”

In 2012, CD Projekt Red announced that one of its next big games would be an adaptation of Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk. A teaser for the game, called Cyberpunk 2077, was released in January, 2013. It showed what appeared to be an attractive young cyborg in a tight-fitting top repelling bullets fired by heavily armored police with her skin. The video ended with a promise: “COMING: WHEN IT’S READY.” In the meantime, the company released the Witcher 3, in 2015. There were some early technical hiccups, but it was eventually hailed as one of the best video games ever made, and sold more than thirty million copies.

Three years later, CD Projekt Red premièred a nearly hour-long demo of Cyberpunk 2077 for a handful of attendees at the video-game industry’s biggest trade show, E3. Cyberpunk 2077 is an “open world” game, in which you can roam more or less freely and do things that aren’t related to the game’s principal mission. The game largely employs a first-person perspective—one of the studio’s more ambitious decisions was to mostly do away with scenes in which a player simply watches action unfold without any control over it. The idea is that, at all times, the player can wander around and see a world operating as it should.

The protagonist is a mercenary named V, who has been hired to steal a biochip. The heist goes bad, and V has to stash it in her head. (V can be whatever gender a player chooses.) The chip contains the digital incarnation of a rock star named Johnny Silverhand, who, half a century before, participated in the central tragedy in Night City history, the bombing of the Arasaka Tower, the regional headquarters of a major corporation. (Pondsmith told me that he was already writing that bit of game lore twenty years ago when he looked up at a TV and saw the second plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Center. He put the story aside for a while.) V has to remove the chip from her head before Silverhand’s identity overwrites her own. Meanwhile, she learns about the insidious activities of the Arasaka corporation, including the development of an A.I. program called Soulkiller. V must decide whether or not to sabotage Arasaka, as Silverhand once tried to do.

At an event ahead of the next E3, CD Projekt premièred a trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 that culminated with Silverhand’s arrival onscreen in the form of Keanu Reeves. It was a canny choice: Reeves is basically the Hollywood face of cyberpunk, thanks to his roles in “Johnny Mnemonic” and the “Matrix” movies. (“I’ve always wanted to participate in different genres and, now, technologies and versions of storytelling,” Reeves told me, when I asked him about Cyberpunk 2077. He also noted that Marlon Brando had a digital version of himself created in the eighties.) When the trailer ended, Reeves appeared onstage amid a puff of smoke and revealed that the game would be ready in April, 2020. “Let me tell you,” he said to the crowd, “the feeling of being there, of walking the streets of the future, is really going to be breathtaking.”

Spoiler

By then, former employees of CD Projekt Red had already told the journalist Jason Schreier, then working at Kotaku, that the development of the game had been “rocky.” In order to meet production deadlines, the ex-employees said many developers at the company had to rely on “crunch”—i.e., mandatory, or effectively mandatory, overtime, a widespread industry practice that is notorious for causing burnout. Iwiński assured Schreier that his company was going to forbid mandatory overtime. Then, in January, 2020, the release of Cyberpunk 2077 was pushed back to September. In June, it was pushed to November. In early fall, Schreier, now writing for Bloomberg, reported that CD Projekt Red had ordered six-day workweeks for its developers. “Starting today, the entire (development) studio is in overdrive,” Adam Badowski, the studio’s director, wrote in an e-mail obtained by Schreier. “I know this is in direct opposition to what we’ve said about crunch,” he added. “It’s also in direct opposition to what I personally grew to believe a while back—that crunch should never be the answer. But we’ve extended all other possible means of navigating the situation.” (In response to Schreier’s article, Badowski posted a message on Twitter: “This is one of the hardest decisions I’ve had to make, but everyone is well compensated for every extra hour they put in.”) A few weeks after that, the release was postponed again, to December.

In the months leading up to the new December launch date, I spoke and corresponded with a number of people at CD Projekt Red. In an e-mail, Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, the quest director for Cyberpunk 2077, wrote, “I believe we’re trying to show with our worldbuilding and narrative that in reality the issues that plague the Cyberpunk society, and by extension our own society, are much more complex and fundamental—as Johnny Silverhand learns the hard way, it’s not enough to topple one corporation to really make a difference, as others will take its place right away.” One of the clichés that his team had tried to avoid, he went on, was a binary depiction of corporations as bad and cyberpunks as good. “The corporations and their dysfunctions in this approach are a symptom of a systemic issue, not the cause,” he explained. Iwiński told me that, for him, “the worst kind of entertainment is obvious entertainment,” and insisted that, in the Witcher games and in this one, there is “no clear distinction between good and evil.” Patrick Mills, at the time the game’s senior quest designer, said that one of his “high-level goals” for the game’s lore was that there would be “no consensus reality.” He had coördinated with Pondsmith to insure continuity between the video game and its pen-and-paper siblings. Still, he said, “We know with this many people working on this, telling this many number of stories, that we’re going to have inconsistencies. So why not work with that?”

Mills moved from the U.S. to Warsaw for his job. When we spoke, in the fall of 2020, Cyberpunk 2077 had been in development for years, and the coronavirus pandemic had forced the developers to work remotely for months. I asked him if working on a game with such a grim world view made him want to look for more light in his life. “I’ve been working on it, and I want to get out of this place,” he said, referring to the world of the game. He added, “I imagined this process in my head: I would write about the destruction of the American civilization, the dissolution of it into factions, and things like that—I’d write about it, and then I’d go back to the U.S. And, now, in actual 2020, I’m, like, Can I go back to the U.S.? Is it safe to go back to the U.S. right now? Can I possibly go back to that health-care system?” He pointed out that among the concepts the developers took directly from Pondsmith’s game was a team of armed rapid-response health-care providers who exclusively serve the wealthy. (The team is also the basis for a spinoff comic book.) “I hope that people will finish this game and they will look at this world, at this story, and ask themselves if this is really what they wanted,” Mills said. Cyberpunk 2077 finally came out on December 10, 2020. More than eight million people had preordered it, and CD Projekt had briefly become the most valuable company in Poland.

Iplayed the game shortly before its release, when the PC version was made available to reviewers. I used an Alienware computer, designed specifically for gaming, with a graphics card that, in the words of its manufacturer, uses a “neural network to boost frame rates.” (It employs machine learning to make video games look better.) In Cyberpunk 2077, V can have one of three backstories, and other characters react differently to V depending on the origin that you select. I chose the corporate option, beginning the game as an employee of the Arasaka corporation. Early on, I reluctantly went along with a harebrained scheme, hatched by the head of my department, to take out a senior Arasaka official. I was fired and became a mercenary. After Silverhand was implanted in my head, thanks to the biochip, I worked to cultivate an amicable relationship with him—and I found myself reluctant to disappoint him, even knowing that he was an A.I. construct and was slowly overwriting my own consciousness. After I finished the game and the credits rolled, I returned to the middle of my journey by loading up a save file, and I played through a couple of alternate endings. There was a high-mindedness to the game’s narrative gestures, though it still played like a fairly traditional role-playing video game, with plenty of action sequences sprinkled among the story beats.

I soon learned that my experience with the game was not typical. The versions of Cyberpunk 2077 that had been made for consoles like the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4—which do not have the computing power I was using—were not provided to reviewers until December 8th, and they had a raft of bugs. I followed much of the ensuing drama through an old college friend, Milton, who played the game on an Xbox One S, and who introduced me to what became a veritable YouTube subgenre: video catalogues of the many faults of Cyberpunk 2077. A number of these videos castigated CD Projekt Red for showing things in the trailers that didn’t make it into the finished product. There were also frequent glitches in the game’s fictional world, which included, as the Times later noted, “tiny trees covering the floors of buildings, tanks falling from the sky and characters standing up, inexplicably pantless, while riding motorcycles.” Open-world games often require post-release patches to nip bugs and improve performance; the past few generations of video games have buckled the hardware of popular consoles. (On Steam, the leading distribution platform for PC games, user reviews of Cyberpunk 2077 have generally been favorable.) But the problems with Cyberpunk 2077 were so extensive that gamers demanded refunds, and Sony took the highly unusual step of removing the game from its digital storefront. CD Projekt Red ultimately offered refunds to anyone who purchased a physical copy of the game before December 21st.

The game’s dramatic flop on consoles prompted a wave of postmortems. The Times dug up reviews of the company on the employer-review site Glassdoor, which described “chaos behind the scenes: Office rumors spreading on Discord servers, misleading deadlines set by managers, infighting among the company’s top brass, and incompetence and poor planning.” Schreier reported, in Bloomberg, that top developers at CD Projekt Red had left the studio after clashing with Badowski about the direction of the game, and that developers had found problems with the game ahead of release, but “just didn’t have time to fix them.” He also reported that the demo that had awed gamers and industry people in 2018 was “almost entirely fake,” and that this was why elements that appeared there were not in the game as it was released. Badowski pushed back against this characterization on Twitter, arguing that a “test of vision” for a work in progress is inevitably different from the final product, and that this didn’t make it phony.

I asked Iwiński if he regretted showing the game in an unfinished state. Over e-mail, he stressed that games are developed in a nonlinear fashion and that they often don’t reach anything close to their final forms until soon before they ship. By his account, the team was making changes to the in-game streaming systems for consoles, which handle everything from graphics to game play, right up until launch—an insurmountable feat, clearly, for a tired staff working long hours at home during the pandemic. Iwiński also insisted that consumers expect to see a near-final version of a game well before it’s done, and that “this gives birth to a situation where you have to develop the final look of the game that doesn’t exist yet, grow that vision on a Petri dish, and show it.” One could counter that a hype cycle need not unfold over years, and that it might have been in the developers’ and consumers’ best interests if the company had kept its experiments under wraps. But Iwiński, drawing a contrast with the film industry, maintained that video-game companies are hamstrung by the complexity of their development process. “Since, in movies, you can’t significantly alter what’s been recorded, you record multiple takes of a scene and make them work in edit,” he said. “In games, you can make everything and change everything, but creating a ‘take’ is more time-consuming, so you’re sometimes working with a system that, after a few months, you deem stops working for your game. It’s a complex process where you can’t foresee a lot of moving parts before you actually create them.”

The dream of games like Cyberpunk 2077 is to create a world in which a player feels free to act and make decisions as though he or she were truly in that world, to simulate a heightened and imaginative version of real life. But demanding more immersive features, with ever more seamless environmental logic, invariably means more work—putting developers even more at the mercy of systems that already seem barely able to support them. At a certain juncture, one begins to wonder if the human cost of developing “a living, breathing world,” to use Iwiński’s words, is worth it. (The irony that this raises with regard to a game that purports to comment on a world where human concerns are beholden to economic imperatives is almost too obvious to mention.) When I asked Iwiński if he thought that consumers should dial back their expectations and accept that this is beyond the scope of current technology, he replied, “I don’t think this was ever Cyberpunk’s intention, and if you see the game as a life simulator set in 2077, well, maybe that’s our mistake in saying something that led you to believe that.”

CD Projekt has spent the year since the game’s launch trying to win back the faith of gamers—and investors. In January, Poland’s Office of Competition and Consumer Protection requested information from the company to insure that it was taking proper steps to improve the gameplay of Cyberpunk 2077 and address consumer complaints. (CD Projekt received millions of dollars in grants from the government to work on multiplayer systems and the creation of “live,” large-scale virtual cities.) The studio has released several patches and updates for the game in an effort to “improve performance across all platforms, especially old-generation consoles,” a company spokesperson said. In February, those steps were briefly slowed when hackers accessed CD Projekt’s internal network, making threats and demanding payment. (The company has since restored everything that was compromised.) In March, the company promised that, going forward, “marketing campaigns will be much shorter, with promotional content released closer to the actual release of the given game, presenting its operation on all supported hardware platforms.” The Office of Competition and Consumer Protection was ultimately satisfied with the steps that CD Projekt took, and declined to open a formal investigation.

Meanwhile, multiple investors sued the company, arguing that it had made misleading statements about the game’s playability on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles. In May, four separate lawsuits were merged into one. That month, Adam Badowski left his role as the game director for Cyberpunk 2077, though he remains the head of the studio; Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz left the company after twelve years and is now heading to Riot Games, a company based in Los Angeles. In June, Sony finally relisted the game in its store, adding a recommendation that it be played on a PlayStation 4 Pro or PlayStation 5. Recently, CD Projekt announced that the “next-gen upgrade” of the game—which will better leverage the hardware of the most advanced consoles, and which had been expected sometime this year—wouldn’t come until 2022. The company said that the postponement followed the recommendation of the development team. “We’re very much trying to be mindful of timelines and our team needs, weaving them into plans for the future,” the company spokesperson said, adding that the company “was working with a professional therapy center, and, if someone finds themselves in a difficult situation and needs a consultation with a specialist—they can do that for free.”

This past Wednesday, CD Projekt posted a note on its Web site announcing that the parties to the lawsuit filed against the company had “entered into negotiations concerning a potential settlement.” I recently spoke with Harold Goldberg, the founder of the New York Videogame Critics Circle, about the continued fallout of the Cyberpunk debacle. The Witcher 3 won game of the year from the critics circle five years ago, he pointed out. “CD Projekt Red got too big for itself,” he said. “It could not deliver this awesome, very complicated, open world that was promised.” He noted that CD Projekt is a publicly traded company. “When you’re beholden to stockholders,” he said, “you have this odd, extra pressure that makes you want to meet your deadlines, come hell or high water. The game was not ready for consumers.”

Watching the events of the past year unfold, speaking with people at CD Projekt and with people who know their games, I’ve thought often of my conversations with Mike Pondsmith, and his account of creating Cyberpunk more than three decades ago. When I last spoke with him, he had just finished wrapping up Cyberpunk Red, a new rule book for the tabletop game that brings its calendar up to the twenty-forties. In Cyberpunk Red, a computer virus renders much of the Internet functionally inoperable, diminishing the power of the megacorporations. “I was really fascinated by the fact that most of what we actually eat, wear, drive, whatever, is moved around the world at ridiculous distances, and it manages to show up just in time when we need it,” he told me, describing his thought process as he worked on the new edition. “When that breaks down all of a sudden, you know, half your fruit just disappeared, your components for the phone over there just disappeared. All those things are interconnected. And what we’re asking is, well, what happens when they’re not? How do we live in that society? Does everything grind to a halt or do we figure out new pathways?”

At one point, I asked Pondsmith to describe the allure of pen-and-paper role-playing games. “If you had any normal childhood, you pretended you were something or somebody, or you went to magical places, or you had abilities and powers,” he said, in his low, resonant voice. “You had a secret world that was yours, Let’s Pretend. And, if you’re really lucky, you had friends who shared in that, and you all had this secret world that you can hang on to. And, to be honest, I’ve said this before, role-playing is Let’s Pretend, with rules. It’s Let’s Pretend with rules because adults fight over the rules, where kids usually don’t.”

He went on to plug the Cyberpunk Red Jumpstart Kit as an ideal way to become acquainted with Night City. Then, comparing the tabletop experience with its video-game incarnation, he noted that the latter doesn’t really compare to the former when it comes to self-expression. “You could be you in a tabletop game and bring all the stuff that you wanted to bring into it,” he said. “A tabletop game is limitless. A video game, by its very nature of how it’s designed, has some limits.”