CD Projekt RED’s showcase of Cyberpunk 2077 stunned our editors (and everyone else, too) at E3 2018. Since then, we’re all waiting eagerly for more details on every single aspect of the game.
In the latest Official Xbox Magazine (September 2018, issue 167), CD Projekt RED Quest Designer Patrick Mills dived a bit into what the studio is putting into the game when it comes to the social commentary of a dystopian society such as the one featured in Cyberpunk 2077.
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Cyberpunk 2077 is a game about people with power at the top and people at the bottom with none. That power can come from money, hierarchies, technology and violence.
The original Cyberpunk 2020 setting, like the setting of The Witcher stories, was a complex critique of the author’s world, and we don’t shy away from that In our games. On the contrary! I think it’s one of the things that sets us apart. Of course, to us, mature doesn’t mean just sex and violence. We will try to engage you on multiple levels, not just the visceral, but also the intellectual. Cyberpunk is an inherently political genre and it’s an inherently political franchise.
It’s a place that is very critical of the world in which we live, in interesting and complex ways and we hope we can get that across. Cyberpunk 2077 is about a world where a vanishingly small number of ultra-rich individuals at the top of intractable corporate power structures reign over a disintegrating world where the vast majority of the population lives in an endless cycle of poverty and violence. How different that is from our world depends a lot on your perspective, I suppose.
Mills also wanted to address once again the controversial choice of making Cyberpunk 2077 a game played in the first-person perspective. He urged fans to try and look up with the camera in any third person game, The Witcher titles included, and went on to say that looking up to the giant skyscrapers of Cyberpunk 2077 couldn’t possibly be the same in third-person.
There’s a lot of things we get from first-person and part of it is being closer to the character and to feel like you’re inhabiting that character. But at the same time I would also say this: go play a third-person game, go play The Witcher, and look up. Just try to look straight up. You’ll find that the immersion never really works, it never feels like you are looking up.
It feels like you’re moving a camera around. In Cyberpunk 2077 we really want you to be able to walk around Night City and look up and see those skyscrapers made of concrete, glass and steel. To feel like you’re in this canyon, this jungle and it’s eating you alive. That’s only possible in first-person.
Cyberpunk 2077 doesn’t have a release date, but we know it will launch on PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, which suggests it should be out within the next two years or so at the latest.
Needless to say, we’ll keep bringing you reports and rumors on what’s arguably the most anticipated game right now for most players.
