Cyberpunk 2077 Concept Art and Interviews

The official Cyberpunk 2077 Twitter account has recently shared a fresh batch of gritty concept art for the game. If you’re interested in seeing the vision behind the game before it got worked over by CD Projekt’s engine, you can check it out below:

You can also watch this GameSpot interview with Richard Borzymowski, one of the producers on the game, where he talks about the importance of freedom for this particular title:

And if you prefer reading, there’s also this engadget interview with Borzymowski where he mentions that the game is currently “playable from start to finish” among other things. An excerpt:

After the E3 trailer dropped, some vocal fans took to message boards and Twitter to complain about the amount of daylight in the trailer. Even classic cyberpunk author William Gibson joined in the criticism, calling the game “GTA skinned-over with a generic 80s retro future.” Others defended the bright vision of Night City, saying it was a relief to see cyberpunk in a new light.

“We knew how to create beautiful scenery in the night in Night City, like awesome Blade Runner terrain aspects,” Borzymowski said. “But creating Cyberpunk as an open-world game with a day and night cycle, we knew we would have to build Night City in a fashion which will look cool in the daylight as well. This was a bigger challenge to us than night, and we just opted to go with that and make a trailer in daylight, which pushed us farther.”

The Gamescom trailer ends with a new vision of Night City. Under an inky black sky, a dense, towering skyline is illuminated by a thousand neon signs in traditional Blade Runner fashion.

And finally, the folks over at PCGamesN have spotted an interesting lore tidbit in the currently available press demo, so if you’re into that sort of thing, you may want to check it out:

It’s the same demo that was shown at E3 – sorry, it’s still not online – but one particular line jumped out at us, with a radio noting that it’s “been a year since Johnny Silverhand’s last ride.” Unusual, since in the existing lore, Johnny died way back in 2024, and if you couldn’t guess, that’s over half a century before 2077 is set to take place.

Of course, sci-fi character deaths are always fungible, particularly when that death occurs as part of an RPG sourcebook. (Maybe 2077 assumes the old player characters were somewhat more competent.) But this does mean we might expect some of the details of the world to change between the 2020 books and CD Projekt’s version of the universe – perhaps we can think of this as more of a soft reboot than a sequel to the original RPG.