Speaking to IGN, CD Projekt RED game director Mateusz Kanik and creative director Sebastian Stepien talked about their upcoming Cyberpunk 2077, and retaining the mood of the original universe while also making it work within the framework of a modern RPG.
Mateusz says the team wants to make the game “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.”
Speaking about “modernizing” the game’s technology, he says that, “The original Cyberpunk 2020 is a kind of retro game – you cannot believe in this world today because a lot of things in our world are already higher-tech. So we needed to change this to make it more real for modern people.
“But also it’s important to still keep the mood and the original feel of Cyberpunk – we don’t want to just create a science-fiction game. It’s easy to do that. We still want to balance it with those main features and the mood from the Cyberpunk original. This is a huge task, I think.”
Stepien remarked that, “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. 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.”
Mateusz added that, “There are lots of cyber games around, but there’s not a lot of punk in those games. 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.” Stepien calls it “more like a Tarantino approach.”
As of now, the game won’t be released before 2015 for PC, and given the direction that the company’s other project The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, it may indeed come to next gen consoles like the PS4 and Xbox 720. As of now, there’s plenty of work to be done, especially for elements like multiplayer.