Cyberpunk 2077 is set a little more than 50 years after the events of the last pen-and-paper game. It still takes place in the same location — a fictional city in between LA and San Francisco — in the gritty, rain-slicked style-world that the genre is known for. There are familiar themes, like the ascension of powerful mega corporations and enhancing our lives through cybernetic modification. The move into the future was made not only because 2020 isn't actually all that far away at this point, but also as a way to give the team a bit more creative freedom — a lot has changed over that period of time. Destroyed districts have been rebuilt, while certain technologies have advanced significantly over the years.

"This still is the same city."

Among these is a new kind of entertainment called "braindances." These digital recordings let viewers fully experience events in their mind — the sites and smells of an explorer out on an adventure, for instance, or if you're into underground recordings, you can check out what it's like to be a serial killer. In 2020 braindances were still a nascent technology, but in 2077 they've become a massive entertainment industry that has incited widespread social problems. "People live someone else’s life while sleeping in the gutter," explains Janiszewski. "It’s like a new drug."





Of course, it's not just the world of Cyberpunk that's changed, it's also the medium. And unfortunately we still haven't seen the game in action, though the developer recently released a CG teaser trailer designed to capture the feeling that it wants to evoke with the final product. "We wanted to have a clip, which will show people who know Cyberpunk that we know what we’re doing, but at the same time many newcomers would find attractive," Janiszewski says of the decision to go with a CG trailer. Cyberpunk 2077 is described simply as "an ambitious RPG for mature audience" with few other details available. However, CD Projekt has a strong pedigree when it comes to developing RPGs based on existing works of fiction. The studio's most notable work, The Witcher series, is based on a collection of fantasy novels from Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski.

But adapting a game and adapting a series of books aren't quite the same. With The Witcher, CD Projekt had to create new stories that fit into the existing mythology, but since Cyberpunk 2077 takes place decades after the original, there's a lot more freedom to simply build on Pondsmith's world. However, turning a pen-and-paper RPG into a digital experience comes with its own set of problems. Namely, the challenge of adapting existing mechanics into a new game. "We want to keep as many of the mechanics as possible," Janiszewski explains. "Of course, this is not always possible. We made a lot of prototypes and checked against what is fun in a video game — some things work well with other people but don’t translate to the screen in an interesting way." It's a balancing act between creating something that works in a video game while staying true to the source material. "We have someone else’s system that we have to be careful with."