Cyberunk 2077 – Tabletop Session with Mike Pondsmith, Interviews

Mike Pondsmith, the creator of Cyberpunk 2020, the tabletop RPG that serves as the foundation for CD Projekt’s upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 video game, recently visited IGN to play some Cyberpunk 2020 and chat about CD Projekt’s highly anticipated title. Check out the roleplaying session ran by the man himself:

As it turns out, Cyberpunk, the tabletop RPG, can get pretty ridiculous with its gangs of cannibal cosplayers and killer clowns. The IGN team addresses this fact in this video:

They also have a few quotes from Pondsmith on the game’s lengthy development cycle. An excerpt:

To make Cyberpunk 2077 the best it can be, “We need space, we need time, and we need the privacy to mull it over,” says Cyberpunk 2020 creator Mike Pondsmith of the games long development timeline. In an interview with IGN, the author of the cult-classic tabletop RPG said that his biggest concern is whether or not fans can be patient enough to allow CDPR to build the game they want to build. “We have an awful lot of stuff that we want to do, and it’s going to take time to do it. And I’m hoping the fans are going to give us the time to do it.”

He confided that “The game we have right now is pretty damn close to what I would have built if I built it alone myself in a broom closet. I look at things in there and I just go, ‘Oh my God, that’s perfect. That’s just downright perfect.'” He continued, “But to get that kind of perfection does take time. It takes iteration.”

And over at PCGamesN, Pondsmith explains his decision to go with CD Projekt as the studio to bring his tabletop game to the digital space:

“CD [Projekt Red] was different because from the beginning they were fans. The running joke was we licensed Cyberpunk in, like, nine countries, and we licensed it to Poland, and I said ‘OK I guess we’ll sell five copies there’. And remember, when we did this, they were still just getting out of the Soviet bloc, so we figured there are maybe six guys who are going to see it in Polish. Turned out those six guys worked in CDPR.”

CD Projekt pitched the adaptation, and Pondsmith says “what fascinated us was that they knew the material and they loved the material as fans. When I went up to see them, they could quote me chapter and verse of characters they wanted to have in it, and groups and organizations and events. So unlike many of the people who wanted to do Cyberpunk as a videogame, CDPR got it because they liked it, loved it, had lived it. The other thing is that they’re meticulous and they’re really, really good at what they do, and they’re willing to push it to get a really, really good project.”

And if you visit WCCFTech, you’ll find a translation of a recent Polish article, where CD Projekt’s CEO Adam Kiciński talks about Cyberpunk 2077’s development and the nebulous at the moment future of The Witcher franchise. For example:

So at what stage is “Cyberpunk 2077” now?

It is in the process of production. Currently, a team of nearly 350 developers from the CD Projekt RED studio is working on it – the largest in the history of the studio so far. Production goes according to the schedule, but we still have a lot of work ahead of us, because we have suspended the bar very high. Expectations are also large, which is clearly visible after our presentations at E3 – we are all very happy about the quality.