Cyberpunk 2077 – Marcin Iwiński Interview

Following the highly anticipated Cyberpunk 2077 reveal during this year’s E3, CD Projekt’s founder Marcin Iwiński chatted with GamesIndustry.biz about the labor-intensive development of the upcoming first person RPG. He talked about the game’s early announcement, the studio’s desire to match if not surpass the success of The Witcher 3, working with established IPs, and the realities of AAA development. It’s quite an interesting read. A few sample paragraphs:

As CD Projekt Red employees talk us through the gameplay demo, they pull out characters and references from the original Cyberpunk 2020 pen-and-paper RPG on which the title is based. As with The Witcher, CD Projekt has been given the opportunity to build on someone else’s fiction, but does this not limit the team’s creativity?

“Frankly speaking, no,” says Iwiński, pointing yet again to the studio’s success with The Witcher.

CD Projekt Red started as a games distributor but when it moved into development, the company wanted to find a world that had already been created, since building a new IP from scratch was deemed a riskier proposition. The popularity of The Witcher books in the team’s homeland of Poland – likened by Iwiński to Tolkien’s worldwide impact – “gave us incredible leverage in terms of development.”

“First of all, we had a huge believable world that had sold hundreds of thousands of books, so it had a lot of fans. It also helped us to attract talent – there were lots of people who wanted to work on The Witcher.

“We took [author Andrzej] Sapkowski’s world but we inserted our own stories. We are true to the lore, but our imaginations run wild so the creation is actually ours – just within the ramifications of the amazing world Sapkowski has created.

“It’s very similar with Cyberpunk. We thought about this from the beginning – since The Witcher worked so well for us, we approached [Cyberpunk 2020 creator] Mike Pondsmith, started talking to him. We didn’t want to do 2020, but our own Cyberpunk. So we take a lot from his creation as the foundation, but then we reimagine certain things, create new stuff and then the story is fully ours. It makes it more believable because we’re already working on proven concepts or world creations.”