Cyberpunk 2077 Pre-Release Thread [GAME RELEASED, GO TO NEW THREAD]

[rusty_shackleford]

Will they ever show us more characters other than Keanu?

Everytime they show something it's always combat this mechanic that. What's happening with the character driven story?

Maybe every character is Keanu playing a separate person.

 

[Prime Junta]

je suis keanu

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

Will they ever show us more characters other than Keanu?

Everytime they show something it's always combat this mechanic that. What's happening with the character driven story?

Why bother? From all the screens we've seen so far, every single one is some variation of black cybernetic tranny. Apparently, the entire population of Earth resides in some sort of Elysium city nestled in the bad parts of Sao Paulo.

 

[Kem0sabe]

 

[Leorgrium]

New Song! :D

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/20...s-to-be-a-unique-and-grounded-cyberpunk-city/

Cyberpunk 2077's Night City strives to be a unique and grounded cyberpunk city

Marthe Jonkers is a senior concept artist at CD Projeckt Red working on Cyberpunk 2077. Jonkers actually designed the location in the first very first teaser trailer for the game back in 2013, featuring the cyberbabe with mantis arms, and was resigned to the fact that nobody was really looking at the building behind her.

Jonkers’ team work on locations and interiors, and even the broader piecing together of Night City. “We even have urban planners on our team,” she explains, since after all, someone has to work out how a city centre actually works in practise, and how you drive around it all. And the way this cyberdystopia RPG backdrop is all designed is really bloody interesting.



One thing Jonkers emphasises again and again is that the whole dev team “really want to make you feel like you’re in a real city”. She says the word “believable” an encouraging number of times, especially when she’s saying it in reference to a game where you can turn enemies into fricassee with a slow-mo laser whip that comes out of your arm.

They’ve drawn a lot from the TRPG Cyberpunk 2020, originally created in the 80s by Mike Pondsmith. Jonkers describes him as “a walking encyclopedia of cyberpunk.” Because of this long established source material, there’s a lot of history to the world that they can use to make a very rich, very layered city — even, she says, in the literal sense, because you can do so much vertical exploration.



Jonkers explains that “of course we’d seen every cyberpunk movie that’s out there, but we wanted to create something original.” So they went back not only to the TRPG, but also to their timeline, and connected styles in the city — architectural and fashionable — to a history.

The end result is four overarching kind of epochs of style. The earliest, for example, dates back to when people were poor, so they used cheap materials and plastics, with muted colour palettes. “It’s very practical, you know. It’s not about looking great. If it works, it’s fine.”



Immediately after that comes a more style over substance era, where people were happier and wanted to show it. Buildings built during that period have rounded edges, and pinks and yellows are predominant.

These and two other styles were then mixed into Night City, based on the key events in its history and the materials available, so the whole city should make sense if you look at it with a more critical eye. “At the same time, if you use these styles to create a city it becomes so much more believable,” says Jonkers. “If you walk around Cologne you will see architecture from different times, and peoples’ fashion as well.” They wanted to have that feeling of layered, on-going history, so approached it like reality (or the kind of reality that makes sense in Cyberpunk 2077, anyway).

Within that, the six different districts feel different based on their own histories. Pacifica, the district shown in the latest demo, experienced a rapid boom and bust when corporations poured gentrification money in and then pulled it out again before anything got properly finished. It has a real fixer upper vibe. Meanwhile, if you go to the city centre, where the corporations have their stronghold, it’s more in a “neo-militaristic” style. “It’s a very different vibe. You see a lot of colours that are white and black and metal, it’s very slick.”



Santo Domingo, which hasn’t been shown yet, is what Jonkers calls “the powerplant of Night City”. It holds most of the factories and industries that actually keep the city running (and I’m sure the Santo Domingo residents won’t have opinions about that). “It’s very industrial and it’s dangerous in a very different way.”

I mention the tyranny of neon, the image of pink glowing signs that is inextricably tangled in the idea of cyberpunk as a theme. For Jonkers, though Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t have noneneon, it isn’t the selling point. She does, however, cite Watson, her favourite district and the one from last year’s demo, which has more than a few neon street signs. According to Jonkers, Watson has a large Asian community, and so the neon signs there are descended from the ones in Tokyo.



It was very important for the team, Jonkers said, that each of these places feels distinct, and that the whole thing feels real. They worked closely with other teams, and the level designers, so that the whole thing feels more immersive. In this, after all, you’re building your own version of the protagonist V, and experiencing it in first person. Compare that with looking over the shoulder of an already-experienced Geralt Of Rivia in The Witcher series.

Jonkers feels they’ve made something that can’t be confused for any other cyberpunk-y thing. If you take a screenshot of 2077, she says, nobody wonders if it might be Bladerunner. “For me that’s really exciting, because we created a cyberpunk world that’s unique but grounded.”

But you still get a slowmo laser whip, which you can also use for hacking. So, best of both worlds, right?

 

[toro]

white boy has black fever

edit: or the opposite. I'm not sure. fuck. eye contact is dangerous

 

[Kem0sabe]

Really loving everything CDP is saying about the game. The only thing that might ruin this would be massive technical issues, otherwise im pretty sure this will be a guaranteed hit.

 

[Quillon]

 

[J_C]

Community interview with Mike. Not too much about the game, but I just love to hear the voice of this man. Oh man, it resonates your soul.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[odrzut]

Since you can create a transgender character, how they will deal with localizations? Expecially when NPCs will talk to you, most european languages use gender based words

What's the problem with localization? Instead of having "male/female" choice at the beginning you have "use male pronoun/use female pronoun" and all the localization depend on that. No new code needed, no new localizations needed, just the label on the checkbox changes

 

[Mazisky]

Since you can create a transgender character, how they will deal with localizations? Expecially when NPCs will talk to you, most european languages use gender based words

What's the problem with localization? Instead of having "male/female" choice at the beginning you have "use male pronoun/use female pronoun" and all the localization depend on that. No new code needed, no new localizations needed, just the label on the checkbox changes

Why i can't select transgender voice? You know, that voice that sounds like a middleground between a feminine male and a masculine female.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/20...urning-his-tabletop-game-into-cyberpunk-2077/

Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith on turning his tabletop game into Cyberpunk 2077

The so new it’s not even out yet hotness in games is still Cyberpunk 2077, but as the name suggests, it’s not the original Cyberpunk. Although there aren’t 2076 previous entries, there is a robust and well loved tabletop roleplaying game to thank for the existence of CD Projekt Red’s upcoming RPG.

The TRPG was written by Mike Pondsmith, the founder of publisher R. Talsorian Games, and who’s often known to players as Maximum Mike. He is a charming and obviously very clever man, a teller of stories who’d be great at a party, and he is, he said, getting recognised much more often now he’s on the 2077 media circuit. At a sit down interview at Gamescom, during which he cheerfully called both me and Alice L. “AliceAlice”, he told us about his work with CD Projekt Red, the new TRPG edition Cyberpunk Red (the Jumpstart starter set for Red having come out earlier this month), and business meetings in pyjamas.



So, first of all I wanted to ask: why CD Projekt Red?

First of all, you have to understand Cyberpunk’s been optioned since we first printed it. Within that year we had people optioning it for video games. And the thing is most of them missed the joke. They would reskin it as something else, or they didn’t really sense why we had done what we’d done. And there’s a very narrow window of style that has to happen to make this game work.

CDPR turned out to be essentially the perfect match. My wife, who’s our business manager, came to me years and years ago and said ‘I’ve got a bunch of guys who want to do Cyberpunk in Polish.’ And I said ‘Well, that’ll be five copies.’ I’m thinking: Poland, Iron Curtain, not happening. Turned out the five copies went to the guys at CDPR.

Basically by the time I met them my two questions were 1) Were they going to be able to technically do it, and I saw The Witcher 2 and said ‘Yeah, they can technically do it.’ I’ve worked on projects at Microsoft and some of the other studios I’ve worked at that did not have this capability. This beautiful, beautiful tool set.

But in addition, they were fans. I walk through the building and they’re going, “yes, we have to have Alt [Cunningham, a key character in existing Cyberpunk lore] and Johnny [Silverhand; Keanu Reeves] doing this thing, and that..” and I’m going, my God, they are fans. They’re, like, shipping Alt and Johnny. That’s hardcore. So they liked it as much as we liked it — loved it in fact — they had the capability, and they’re really straightforward, honest guys. I like ’em. We describe them as being a lot like us, only they speak Polish and we don’t, because we’re not any good at languages.

Spoiler

So what’s your involvement like now? Are you going over to Poland a lot?

I go over less than I used to. I used to go over about three times a year, and now I go over maybe twice a year. It’s evolved. When I first went over it was just kind of meeting and getting the team. Then I had a lot of weekly meetings, several days a week, with the team via Skype, which was always funny because I’d be in my pyjamas. Literally, it’s like six in the morning, right? And I’d be talking via Skype and they’re all getting ready to leave for the day.

“So Mike, we’ve all gathered together. How come you don’t have your camera on?”

“You don’t wanna see me first thing in the morning, at all.”

So we would discuss and organise things. The story team would come over — twice, I believe, they came over where we just saw everybody, and we went through storyboarding, talking about what was going to happen in the story and getting things organised and all that. Then I started going over a bit more, and some of the team, particularly Adam [Badowski], who’s the story director and studio manager, came over. We spent a marathon week, week and a half, just going through game elements, what worked what didn’t, ideas and stuff like that. He took that all back, talked to people, and I went over a like month later and talked to everybody in the studio.

The process has been ongoing. One reason I think is I’m not just licensing it, but because I worked in video games I can actually offer constructive information. I won’t ask them to do really dumb things because I know how dumb it is. It’s like a discussion Adam and I had a long time ago about the AV-4’s, the flying cars. I said, “Before you step off into that, I worked on Combat Flight Sim. I know what you’re getting yourself into, and you don’t want to do it like this.” So I do bring something to the table more than just, you know, a fun thing.



Are there any other examples of things like the cars, that have changed because of your input?

My favourite is the weapons. When I first saw the weapon stuff people sent over, they were all these shiny raygun things. And I said, “Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-no. Cyberpunk weapons are large, black, lethal, dangerous things that look distinctly unfriendly, paramilitary, and they’re not shiny, they’re not happy. They look like ‘I’m here to kill you now.’ They should be things that make Darth Vader pee his pants.”

So they went back and I started to see weapons like that. And then the next trip over, which was about three months later, I walked in and they had a wall of weapons, about as long as this wall, that is basically one of those classic, like, in spy movies they open up the wall, and there’s all these guns in racks? They had that. And I’m going “Ooh, shiny”, you know? And that was the reference point, they started looking at real world weapons, which is one of the core elements of the 2020 universe. The weapons are realistic. We try to make it as realistic as possible.



I wanted to ask about Cyberpunk Red as well. The Jumpstart kit just came out earlier in the month, and I understand you developed Red with CDPR to bridge the gap.

Oh yeah. I have an opposite number at CDPR, they’ve given me one guy, Patrick Mills, and Patrick is my go-to now, because everybody is so busy, but I know Patrick’s job is disseminate stuff, and one of the jobs we had to do is coordinate the timelines.

There’s a really big advantage, and many people miss this, in coordinating timelines and making it one timeline. What that allows CDPR to do is to take advantage of the tremendous amount of lore that we built over the years. There’s close to about a hundred books that we’ve done in that world, so we have a very, very broad depth, and they can mine it for whatever they want. But to do that means we have to make it all come out at the end.

So Patrick and my jobs are to look at things that have to happen way up here in 2077, versus back in 2020, or during the Red period, and say, “Okay, so these characters die.”

“Yeah but I need to have this character over here.”

“Okay, I didn’t kill him, but you can have him.”

And also, this is what happens to this area, this is what happens to the world, here’s what the politics are in 2040, 2060, and so forth: “Okay, well I want to have the president leave by 2060, but I want to have this entire big war between Night City and-“

So we coordinate those, and one of the nice things about it is that the fans like that a lot. My social media guy Jay basically started a topic, I guess, called 365 Days of Cyberpunk in which he tells a new lore piece about the 2020 universe, usually context to 2077. And at first people went “What? This is 2077, why are you doing this?” but then they began to realise that these things tied together. So they’d go ‘Oh, so Johnny Silverhand had this background, he did this thing.” And then we could start seeing things like, “wow, I hope this gang is going to be in there”, or “I hope they’re going to be able to show this”, or “are they going to have this backstory?”, which of course gives CDPR more information they can use later on as well.



What’s one of your favourites of those threads that’s going to get explored in 2077?

I’m not sure whether it’s going to get explored or not, but my favourite is the Bozos. The Bozos are a gang, a poser gang, which means they’re cosplay gangs, basically. And they’re clowns.

Now this was before the Juggalos, before Insane Clown Posse. My wife came up with this, which makes me worry sometimes. They’re a crazy clown gang that’s sadistic and frightening. They’re IT from Stephen King, but in groups of two or three hundred.

Somebody got on our boards and said “I hope they don’t have any dumb gangs like the Bozos, I mean clown gangs, that’s dumb!” You know, “arghararghargh.” So the next week Jay posted about the Bozos, he described stuff the Bozos did to people. Like the Bozo gets in the elevator with you, and he puts on a scuba tank, and while you’re standing there the elevator doors close, the elevator gets about half a floor up, and then the elevator begins to fill with salt water. And it continues, and about the time you’re trying to fight the Bozo, the Bozo basically climbs out the top, and then bugs start falling in from the ceiling.

He just started describing all these horrible things that the Bozos do to you. Now you see why I worry about my wife. And people went, “Oh man!” One group said, “wow, I hope we never meet them!” Another group said, “if I meet a Bozo anywhere in the game, I’m shooting him right there.” And other people were saying “I wanna play a Bozo!”

So now that gives CDPR a whole new possibility — and I don’t know whether the Bozos are in there or not, I haven’t seen everything by a long shot. There’s a lot in this game. A staggering amount of stuff. But, now they know that people wouldn’t mind seeing a bunch of really horrific killer clowns that make The Joker look like a wimp.

Are you going to be in the game? Are you maybe voicing a character?

I was voicing a character, and I actually did the voice in it, and they decided the character was too limited. So, next thing I knew, he was cut, or moved. And then they said, “we have something else for you, but it’s going to take a little time to organise it.” So I don’t entirely know what it is yet, I just know I’m supposed to be prepared for it, that’s all.

That’s ominous.

I’m waiting for the script to show up, like, “Oh! Wait, I do this? Woah.”



I wanted to ask you some other things about TRPGs, because I play a lot of tabletop games myself, and I always think there’s a weird difference between TRPGs and video game RPGs. Something like 2077 is single player, it’s just you, and obviously in the TRPG you’re a group. Is it difficult adapting the rules for that change?

Actually, it’s interesting. ‘Lo, many years ago, I actually taught video game design, at DigiPen school in Seattle area, and I remember explaining to my students the differences, because I’d worked in both. And the thing is, in a video game you can show a lot of things, it’s a very broad canvas, but you can’t go very deep. Because there’s only so much can be put together, so many plot threads, so many story threads, and so forth. But in a tabletop, it’s as deep as the referee is willing to let it be, so you can get a tremendously deep picture of the world, and you have to make choices.

You have to say “I’m willing to show this much of the world in a video game,” or “I’m going to have this much background, and I have to communicate that rapidly and clearly.” In addition, you also need to find a way to shorthand and cover for the things that would be visible in a tabletop. Mechanics and things like that.

So there’s Lifepath, for example, in 2077, but it’s never going to be as complex as it would be in the original game, or even in Red, although we have a more simplified version of Red right now. And that is because nobody is going to, in a video game, spend two hours Lifepathing a character. But I get people all the time writing me going “Yeah, I did Lifepath!”, and they’ll do Lifepaths of their character ’til the cows come home, you know. “I made a character! Next character!” They like that. But it’s not a mechanic that works in a video game.



I heard that Netrunning has changed a bit as well.

Yeah. Part of it is, Netrunning, when we did it, we were trying to simulate what everybody had heard about the idea of Netrunning. Remember, this is at a time when the most advanced net, so to speak, would have been CompuServe, okay, very stone age. So at that time, the idea of the kind of architecture we have on our net now didn’t exist. And I was fascinated to look at how the net would have developed in the 2020 universe, and I realised you wouldn’t have had Apple Computer, you wouldn’t have had HyperCard stacks, you wouldn’t have many of the things that are the foundational pieces of the internet we use. It would be more like Usenet or ARPANET, you know, much much simpler, more code based.

When we cut things back, and restructured things in Red, we wanted to get it back to that simplicity. We wanted to get it back to: the Netrunner is part of the party, they have distinct jobs they have to do, they cannot sit on a couch and netrun from five miles away. Their time frames are much closer to that of the party, and they’re in the sharp end. That’s a lot of fun, because what happens is, your Netrunner now might be doing something really desperate to crack into a system or shut something down, and the rest of the party’s over shooting at whatever’s coming to get him.

We have stuff coming in in Red where, there might be party threats, like cyberhounds or something, that are motivated by something that’s actually in the net of that particular area. The Netrunner’s gotta kill the thing that’s motivating the cyberhounds, while the party’s fighting the cyberhounds and keeping them from eating the Netrunner and themselves.

It’s much more interactive now, and that was one of my writing and design rules. Put the guy in the middle of the heat.



Have you played a lot, or any of 2077 yet?

I’ve played some of it. Understand, when I see it, it’s on the drawing boards. What you see is, everybody compiles it, it’s gone through a lot of debugging cycles and all of it like that. I come in and environment guy will go, “Hey! Wanna look around?” Someone else will say, “Hey! Wanna go shoot things?” So I see it piecemeal. And a lot of times I’m as surprised as the audience to see it all at once.

And does it look how you’d imagined Cyberpunk?

Oh yeah, yeah. It actually looks amazingly like that. And I think part of it is that I’ve been involved in the process. If they weren’t going to listen to me I would have known by now. But they obviously are listening, and we’re doing it together, so it comes out to be remarkably close to what I originally saw.

What’s your favourite kind of build for V, then?

Right now I haven’t had a chance to play much with the stealth, Netrunner version. There’s a couple others out there, builds, that we haven’t seen yet. I’m fascinated by the hard solo version of V, partially because the female version looks like my daughter. So I always can imagine: there’s Nolan, tearing a door open.

“Hey honey, come over here and rip the door off the walls!”

“Da-aad!“

https://www.pcgamer.com/cyberpunk-2...ation-of-the-1990-tabletop-game-creator-says/

Cyberpunk 2077 should feel like a continuation of the 1990 tabletop game, creator says

Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith says he's still very involved in the development of CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077, and a big part of that has been to make sure this new vision of his near-future setting idea maintains a continuity with the original tabletop game.

Speaking with us at Gamescom this week, Pondsmith said it's been a collaborative process between himself and CD Projekt when it comes to generating new ideas for the 2077 setting.

"We have to basically negotiate," he said. "A large part of what we do is to make sure that there is a seamless flow between the times [2020 and 2077]. We really want people to feel like if they went back and pulled out [Cyberpunk] 2020, they would find stuff out about our socket that was germane to stuff for 77."

Pondsmith says there's been a lot of work done to create the kind of connective tissue needed to bridge that gap in time, and some of that has been accomplished through social media. J Gray, who runs PR and community events for Cyberpunk publisher R. Talsorian Games, has been posting a series called 365 Days of Cyberpunk, or #countdowntothedarkfuture, which has helped fill out the lore.

These are factoids about Cyberpunk that range from in-universe character descriptions to the history of the game's development. An example, #49 from February 18, describes the kinds of rental services available in Night City—it turns out these AI-controlled vehicles work a lot like those Lyft and Bird scooters you can find in present-day cities.

"At first, people on a 77 board went, 'whuh?' But then they started going, 'Oh, that's cool,'" Pondsmith said. "They just started riffing on it. Players want to know what's going on in the world, and there's no way we can possibly generate all that in a reasonable amount of time."

The Cyberpunk world is expanding in other ways as well: R. Talsorian has a new "Cyberpunk Red" tabletop game out that's set in 2045, and a Cyberpunk card game is due out next year.

Cyberpunk 2077 is due out April 16, 2020.

 

[what am i doing]

Why i can't select transgender voice? You know, that voice that sounds like a middleground between a feminine male and a masculine female.

This is a good point, the transgenders don't want to play as the gender they identify as, they want to play as a freak who has the same mental illness as themselves. To make it authentic we need an uncanny valley in-between option for them.

 

[Wyatt_Derp]

Why i can't select transgender voice? You know, that voice that sounds like a middleground between a feminine male and a masculine female.

This is a good point, the transgenders don't want to play as the gender they identify as, they want to play as a freak who has the same mental illness as themselves. To make it authentic we need an uncanny valley in-between option for them.

Caitlyn Jenner mods will fix it.

 

[Alexios]

would have been worth watching if the nerdy girl gave us an upskirt view

 

[Ivan]

 

[AwesomeButton]

would have been worth watching if the nerdy girl gave us an upskirt view

She practically does it.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.pcgamesn.com/cyberpunk-2077/pondsmith-keanu

Mike Pondsmith didn’t think CDPR could get Keanu Reeves for Cyberpunk 2077
CD Projekt Red surprised the world when Keanu Reeves took the stageto announce he’d be playing Johnny Silverhand in Cyberpunk 2077 during Microsoft’s Xbox E3 briefing earlier this year. And when the creator of the Cyberpunk universe and tabletop roleplaying system Mike Pondsmith found out, he was surprised too – although perhaps not quite as much as the developers had hoped.

“CDPR didn’t tell me who they’d got,” he told us at Gamescom this past week. “They said, ‘We have an actor.’ So I said, ‘Who have you got?’ And they said, ‘We can’t tell you, wait until you get to Warsaw.'”

Pondsmith periodically traveled to CDPR’s Warsaw studios to collaborate on the development of Cyberpunk 2077. While they were preparing for their next visit, Pondsmith spoke with his wife Lisa Pondsmith, who handles the business side of their company R. Talsorian Games. Lisa made a guess at who CDPR had found to play Silverhand.

“It’s Keanu Reeves,” she said.

“And I said, nahh, that’s way below his paygrade, no way,” Mike recalled. “Besides, he’s never going to do Cyberpunk stuff again.”

When they arrived in Warsaw the next day, Pondsmith said, the developers were eager to reveal the secret.

“They say, ‘Before we tell you who it is, would you like to take a guess?’ And my wife says, ‘It’s Keanu Reeves, isn’t it?'” Pondsmith said. “And their face falls, and they say, ‘How did you know?'”

Pondsmith says he and Lisa checked out Reeves’ motion capture performances and were impressed – even though Pondsmith himself always imagined Silverhand as looking more like David Bowie.

“Keanu worked out really well, because he got across the essential element of Johnny, which is that in the end, Johnny’s not a person you cross, and Johnny’s looking out for Johnny.”

So far, Pondsmith hasn’t had a chance to chat about all things Cyberpunk with Reeves in person.

“I haven’t met him yet, but sooner or later, the trap I’ve set will bring him in,” Pondsmith said.

We’ll get to see more of Reeves’ performance as Johnny Silverhand, and of CD Projekt Red’s vision of Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk universe, when Cyberpunk 2077 launches April 16, 2020.

 

[gerey]

I just wonder how much content they had to cut to pay Keanu to whisper sweet nothings into the player's ear.

 

[Turisas]

I just wonder how much content they had to cut to pay Keanu to whisper sweet nothings into the player's ear.

Just the latter C from C&C, no big deal.

 

[Frozen]

I read that Keanu character was based on David Bowie. Black dude wanted to contact him way before but Bowie didn't answered lol

 

[DeepOcean]

I just wonder how much content they had to cut to pay Keanu to whisper sweet nothings into the player's ear.

Say goodbye to non-linearity on the main quest at least.

 

[Zer0wing]

Say goodbye to non-linearity on the main quest at least.

B-but many major side quests connected to main story line... They'll also won't be non-linear then.