Cyberpunk 2077 had a major presence at E3 this year. While Polish studio CD Projekt RED showed off a cinematic in-engine trailer for the game at the Microsoft press event, the real reveal of the game came with a behind-closed-doors demo. And to no one’s surprise, it was absolutely stunning.
What’s impressive is that, as per CDPR’s co-studio head Marcin Iwinski, the demo was a real build from the game itself, not a vertical slice that was made specifically from E3. “The demo, it’s not a demo-demo in terms that it’s an artificial piece of content created for the purposes of the show,” Iwinski said while speaking with Kotaku. “That’s actually a build of the game… actually, surprising it is a real build so we didn’t fake anything here and actually we had a lot of… we didn’t start these conversations but we had a lot of feedback like that in the previews by people actually noticing that certain things did not look pre-rendered or fake. And this makes us very happy and very proud because we’ve actually made it to pull off a build.”
When he was asked about when the game will be showcased next, Iwinski said that CD Projekt RED has plans to attend Gamescom, though whether or not the demo will be behind-closed-doors again, or if it will be the exact same demo as the one they had at E3 or something slightly different, are things the studio hasn’t decided yet.
“I think we still have Gamescom so we’ll be showing it,” Iwinski said. “I can’t tell you that [whether CD Projekt RED will be showing something different than what was shown at E3 2018] but it won’t be the same, it will be worth visiting. Of course do not expect a totally different demo please… but we will show maybe something different, maybe some different angle.”
We got a chance to watch the Cyberpunk 2077 demo in action at E3, and we were absolutely stunned by what we saw. You can read our impressions here. Additionally, you can read this feature we wrote to see the biggest new things we learned about the game through the demo.