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CD Projekt Red gives impressive first look at sprawling world of ‘Cyberpunk 2077’

Microsoft’s E3 2018 conference was jam-packed with scintillating trailers, but perhaps the coolest one was for Cyberpunk 2077, the next game from Witcher-developer CD Projekt Red.

The trailer was preceded by a neat command line boot sequence, similar to what Bethesda used at E3 2016. While we previously saw an extremely brief glimpse of the science fiction RPG, the trailer shown on Microsoft’s stage was our first in-depth look at the epic adventure.

Cyberpunk 2077 has a somewhat on-the-nose title. It’s certainly cyberpunk, but it’s set in a retro-futuristic 1990s inspired by the role-playing game Cyberpunk 2020. It takes place in Night City, a sprawling metropolis entrenched in technology. People have implants attached to their body, but as these things go, the implants can go rogue and attack their wearers or other people. This chilling effect is shown in the trailer, along with the task force assigned to stop the self-created threat, the Psycho Squad.

Image used with permission by copyright holder

We learn in the trailer that Night City has become one of the worst places in America in terms of violence and poverty. Despite the perceived peril of the city, the narrator — we think he’s the currently unnamed protagonist — remarks that people still want to live there because it is a place of opportunity.

What the trailer does best is show off the scope of Cyberpunk 2077. If you’ve played a CD Projekt Red game, especially The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, you know that the worlds created by the Polish development studio are absolutely massive and rich with detail. In the trailer, we see people fight, engage in small talk, play some pool, and square off against robots. There are also some pretty cool-looking rides that will surely help players travel across Night City in style. The cars even fly!

While the trailer looks amazing, it’s important to note that none of it was gameplay. Still, the world of Cyberpunk 2077 looks like a fascinating place that will appeal to fans of Neuromancer and Blade Runner.

We still have no idea when Cyberpunk 2077 will launch, but we imagine it’s still a ways off. It’ll be interesting to see if it arrives before this current console generation ends.

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Steven Petite
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Steven is a writer from Northeast Ohio currently based in Louisiana. He writes about video games and books, and consumes…
CD Projekt Red isn’t slowing down, for better or worse
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The past year-and-a-half havs not been kind to Polish developer CD Projekt Red. The studio -- part of CD Projekt Group, a company that also owns the online games marketplace GOG -- faced enormous criticism with the release of Cyberpunk 2077 and has since been busy fixing the game. In the time since, the studio has faced setback after setback, with its announcements leaning more toward a project being delayed rather than good news for fans.

Outwardly though, the company is appearing to shake off the dust of Cyberpunk 2077. While its short-term ambitions are pointed exclusively at past releases, the studio has future plans. It's looking forward -- and in a big way. A recent earnings report from the company revealed that it's working on numerous unannounced projects, one of which is being co-developed by another studio, The Molasses Flood, and will be based on one of CD Projekt Red's franchises.
Flooding the pipeline
CD Projekt Red's current content plans seek to reinforce what the studio already has out there. Cyberpunk 2077 recently received a current-gen update and will get its first major story expansion next year. The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is also set to get its own current-gen update, though its release date has been postponed indefinitely following CD Projekt Red's decision to bring development in-house.

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During an investor relations call, CD Projekt Red revealed that its long-awaited story expansion for Cyberpunk 2077 will not be released this year. Instead, the expansion is set to release sometime in 2023.

https://twitter.com/CyberpunkGame/status/1514646107434987532?s=20&t=RlvdedDMZ8OHf66Mznx86Q

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The Witcher reveal repeats Cyberpunk 2077’s biggest mistake
A player points a gun at a cyborg in Cyberpunk 2077's reveal trailer.

On March 21, CD Projekt Red confirmed a new The Witcher game while revealing a new Unreal Engine 5 partnership with Epic Games. Shortly after that announcement, CD Projekt Red's Global PR Director Radek Grabowski had to clarify some crucial details about this new game and the Epic Games partnership in a tweet:
https://twitter.com/gamebowski/status/1506022957591797760
While this tweet clarifies the biggest misconceptions about CD Projekt Red's The Witcher announcement, it also highlights that the developer announced this game way too early and vaguely. CD Projekt Red is already losing control of some of the discourse around the game and risks repeating one of the biggest mistakes of Cyberpunk 2077's development and marketing: Overpromising.
Cyberpunk 2077's big mistake
CD Projekt Red announced Cyberpunk 2077 in May 2012 at a press conference. At the time, the developer promised features like a "gripping non-linear story filled with life and detail" and a variety of character classes, weapons, upgrades, implants, and more to choose from. It said the game would "set [a] new standard in the futuristic RPG genre with an exceptional gaming experience."
Cyberpunk 2077 would not release until December 2020, over eight years later. But in the meantime, CD Projekt Red continued to tease the title with trailers and interviews, highlighting the game's ambitious scope and vision. CD Projekt Red developers hyped up how the main story and sidequests intertwined, how the game would feature multiplayer, how cops would be very reactive, and more. Although the game looked and sounded very impressive prior to its release, many of these features and promises were either missing or half-baked in their implementation into Cyberpunk 2077.
Cyberpunk 2077 Teaser Trailer
For eight years, an RPG that was supposed to change the genre forever was promised, but in the end, all we got was a fairly standard open-world RPG with a bevy of technical problems at release. The massive backlash happened because people were so excited for Cyberpunk 2077, partly because CD Projekt Red hyped up all of these ambitious features over eight years.
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As CD Projekt Red made the mistake of announcing Cyberpunk 2077 too early and overpromising, I thought the studio would what to share more details on its next game until it was close to release. That was not the case. 
Initial Confirmation
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Meanwhile, CD Projekt Red is still recovering from the backlash toward Cyberpunk 2077's rocky launch. Announcing a follow-up title to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt now not only restores a little bit of goodwill with fans and investors but will also attract some Unreal Engine-experienced developers who might be nervous to come to CD Projekt Red following Cyberpunk 2077. 2022 has been a year of anticlimatic and purposefully vague game announcements. CD Projekt Red's The Witcher announcement is simply the latest one to be part of this trend, but it's also one of the most worrying because this developer has made this mistake before.  
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