Cyberpunk 2077 - Exclusive mike pondsmith about the cyberpunk world

It's rain wet streets, it’s nights like this with fog rolling in cars, faceless people going by, doing the things that they’re doing, there’s something kind a hypnotic about it, that’s when I get inspired To carry what these streets are like, what the city is like the mysteries, the stories, the thousands thousands of people that you pass, that are going by as shadows. In this wet, cold, dangerous environment I wanted to grab that I wanted to take it to the future And where I took it, was Cyberpunk What I loved was the fact that it was a combination of dystopian society, a lot of technology, with this really great overlayer of almost film-noir In a cyberpunk world, I realized real soon, was a world where people had the technology but didn’t fundamentally change the fact that there was a lot of treacherous, nasty behaviour, large weapons and a lot of sort of serious danger all about The important part in Cyberpunk is just that It’s not the technology, it’s the feel It’s getting that dark, gritty rain wet street feeling, but at the same time getting that rock’n roll lost and desperate, dangerous quality Cyberpunk is about that interface between people and technology But not in that transhumanous way, where it’s all about the technology changing or improving them It’s about how people use things There’s a great Gibson saying that street finds its uses for things and that’s what cyberpunk is about Cyberpunk isn’t about saving humanity, it’s about saving yourself We’ve approached doing it as a videogame numerous times before We have fought to find somebody who was enough of a fan of the world and the game to not want to go change it around or to stick a label of cyberpunk on it and then do something totally different And so when CD Projekt RED approached us, what we realized really rapidly was: these guys are fans, these guys know the material, they're quoting things back to me I forgot, they got it And that’s an important thing You have to be able to understand why this world exists They’re dragging my butt all the way over to Poland several times a year We’re excited because there is a really strong element of cross-pollination There is a really strong element of cooperative building going on and ... that’s really great Cyberpunk 2020 was about early Cyberpunk, It was a world in which people didn’t know a lot about, what the tropes were, the feel for it The great part about 2077 is that it's a mature form of that We’re basically able to progress a larger ark in which you’re going to see the outcomes of things that we started to talk about in the 4th corporate war and we’re going to be able to let players, who played the previous game to see how those progressed, see where they go to and how they'll shape them We’re looking at the same mucking, nasty Night City that you were in before, just a lot bigger and probably a lot more dangerous and with a lot of players you don’ t know about yet 2077 is about the Cyberpunk you thought you knew, scaled up bigger, badder, stranger It’s the visual component that the frozen pictures we would put in a the books can’t give you It’s the sound, it’s the feel, it’s the movement Seventy Seven is going to be about being there We’ve gone through a long long journey all of us and those of you who have been fans and waiting for us to get the right game together, the right time, the right team And we were going to wait long enough to make sure it happen the right way Cyberpunk 2077 is going to be the right way and I can’t wait to play it and I’m hoping you guys will want to play it as much as I want to play it, cause it’s going to be a hell of a ride