Cyberpunk 2077: Putting the Punk Back Into Cyberpunk
CD Projekt reveals a little more about Cyberpunk 2077, its open-world science-fiction epic.
If you ask Cyberpunk 2020 creator Mike Pondsmith, most cyberpunk games aren’t cyberpunk at all. They’re just third-person shooters, racers or action games with a cyberpunk veneer, a grimy sci-fi aesthetic that doesn’t actually translate into anything especially interesting in-game besides the odd augment. “Most people think cyberpunk is just a summary of specific tropes; big guns, dark streets and dangerous guys in ubiquitous leather dusters,” writes Pondsmith in the first of a series of excellent blogs on the Cyberpunk 2077 website. “But the core of cyberpunk is a lot more subtle than that. Cyberpunk is about the seductive qualities of corruption and decay… It doesn’t have to be dirty or grimy on the physical level. But on the psycho-social level, even the cleanest and most orderly Corp-zone should be rife with darkness and collapse.”
Character customisation, for instance, was necessarily not an option in Geralt’s world. But in Cyberpunk 2077, it’s self-defined role-playing: your style and personality will have deep and far-reaching effects on the world and how it reacts to you. “We will have several features that allow you to create your [visual] style, and your style will affect gameplay, storyline and relationships between characters,” explains creative director Sebastian Stepien. “Your appearance and your dress will change the behaviour of NPCs, and also the story also in some parts,” Mateusz adds. Style and appearance works together with the personality you create for your character and express in conversation to determine how the world reacts to you.
“It’s about telling story via what happens, not cutscenes or other features,” Mateusz says. “To do that we need to create a totally new unique dialogue system – we’re doing that right now, it should be awesome.”
“The psycho squad is just one of many cool elements in this world," Sebastian explains. “We had several ideas for this short teaser and had to focus on one of them. Augmentations and cyberware is a big subject in the world, and that’s why it’s in the teaser. But it won’t be a game about police hunting cyber-psychos. That’s a sub-plot… The story will be low-level. We are not going to save the world, or even save a city. We are focused on the main character and his problems, or her problems.”
“The main problem is that the original system is based on dice rolls. When you think about Cyberpunk you think about shooting, action, a lot of explosions. But that doesn’t fit dice rolls in a video game. We want to make it more action-like – there will be a system that lets you use active skills actually in the gameplay in a shooting sequence or something like that, rather than just passive skills like in the books.”
“First of all it will be an RPG, so that means you create the story. In Syndicate and other shooters you can do no such thing,” says Sebastian. “The other thing is that you will have the chance to create your character’s personality. This is very, very important. The style and mood and atmosphere of this world, what you do at the bar, what do you drink, how you react with other people, what dialogue you choose –all these things let us keep the Cyberpunk atmosphere all the time.”
“There are lots of cyber games around, but there’s not a lot of punk in those games,” adds Mateusz. “We want to put more punk into ours. We do not want to make a dark and hopeless world. We are not doing Blade Runner. It will be full of rock and roll.”
“It’s more like a Tarantino approach,” Sebastian concludes.
Full article http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/05/01/cyberpunk-2077-putting-the-punk-back-into-cyberpunk I just picked out some interesting bits
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