Very early in the morning today I found myself awake, and I was having some coffee and browsing when I saw that CD Projekt RED's Twitch channel was playing Cyberpunk 2077. Except it was actually broadcasting a jumble of seemingly random characters, clearly part of a new ARG teaser. Obviously, the Reddit hivemind quickly caught on that it was a string of base64 code for a PNG file, which apparently hasn't been reverse-engineered yet.
After a few hours of that, it finally showed a progress bar for the upload of the gameplay reveal trailer, but not before getting stuck at 99% and teasing viewers for a few more minutes. What followed was the same 48-minute gameplay demo shown to great acclaim at E3 and gamescom, which has already been dissected and impressed upon by so many journalists and fans, including our own team. I’m still processing what I saw myself.
One of the frames in the trailer also showed the following message, similar to the one spotted in the cinematic trailer.
Sorry to have kept you waiting for this for so long!Did you like what you saw? Because for us, the fact that we're finally showing you Cyberpunk 2077 is HUGE. Please go to our forums, twitter, facebook, discord, and do tell what you think. Is the game world how you imagined? Do you see what we meant by "immersion" when we talked about CP2077 being an FPP RPG? How does our vision of "cyberpunk by day" make you feel? We really want to know.
Aside from that, we think we owe you a few words of explanation on why we're showing you this gameplay now, some time after industry professionals and media saw it at E3 and gamescom.
Each time we discussed the idea of showing the game to you (and we discussed this idea a lot), we were ending up in this "we're not 100% sure" limbo. Why? Because (for most people), when a game dev shows gameplay footage from their game, it means that this is how the game is going to look or play like. It's not the case here. Cyberpunk 2077 is deep in development. We have a lot of design ideas, a lot of mechanics being playtested, but we don't know what we'll end up with at launch. This makes publishing videos like what you just saw risky --we don't want gamers saying 'but in that previous video that gun was shooting differently', or 'why did you change the interface?'. Change is inherent to game development and there's a ton of things being modified each day. Our fear was (and kind of still is) that you'll think what you just saw is how Cyberpunk 2077 will look like.
What gave us that extra confidence to show you a work in progress game? Good initial feedback from people who are accustomed to see games at various stages of development. What they told us (and they told us they really liked what they saw) gave us the boost we needed to show the current version of Cyberpunk 2077 to the most passionate and insightful audience --you.
So here's what Cyberpunk 2077 looks like today (or rather looked like when we recorded the video). We sincerely hope you liked it.
Again, thank you for your patience and all the thoughts you shared with us.
Yours,
CD PROJEKT RED
Committed as they are to deliver on their vision, the Polish developers also seem invested in engaging the fanbase in the development process, as much as possible. It remains to be seen how much the game will change, and hopefully we will soon get to see more gameplay trailers and details. As it stands right now, it's an impressive and dense trailer that will have fans poring over its details for months.
What did you think of the gameplay reveal of Cyberpunk 2077? Were you satisfied with the first-person perspective? Let us know in the comments below!
