When you’re making a brand new game, especially one that you know is based on a certain style, you have to know what exactly you’re making and how it “feels” in terms of looks, sounds, etc. For example, if you want to make a medieval game, you need to look at things like Lord of the Rings, King Arthur films (the good ones anyone), and more. For the team at CD Projekt Red, they’re making a Cyberpunk game, and they knew that they needed to have the right “viewing material” to nail the look and feel of the game.
“The core of the inspiration: the entire studio likes ‘Cyberpunk 2020, the pen and paper RPG. And just, generally, Cyberpunk as a genre, movies like Bladerunner, Ghost in the Shell, and books like Neuromancer,” said Senior Quest Designer Phillip Weber while speaking to Sector.sk. “This is the same reason why we also made The Witcher, because we really, really love it and want to make a good video game….that we want to play ourselves.”
They went on to talk about the importance of the reading list they had:
“If you want to tell really, really good stories, you have to really know the world. So, story team — the writers, the quest designers, cinematic designer — we had to assemble a list. ‘These are the books you have to read,’ ‘these are the rulebooks of Cyberpunk 2020 you have to read,’ ‘these are the movies.’ We had to get really immersed in it. Of course, many of us who were fans of cyberpunk knew those things already. But, it really was, we have to know cyberpunk just as well as we knew everything around The Witcher. On the other hand, we make mature games. We want to tell interesting stories with interesting themes. That hasn’t changed. Telling interesting stories is the same thing we did before, so in that way, it feels like something we know.”
So it’s clear that the team is putting all they have into making Cyberpunk 2077 is accurate to the style as they can make it. No release date for the game has been given yet.
