CD Projekt Red has released a video in which Mike Pondsmith, the creator of the pen-and-paper RPG Cyberpunk 2020, talks about the world in which the company's upcoming open-world game Cyberpunk 2077 will take place.
Pondsmith says that he gets his inspiration for the Cyberpunk world from nights in the city when it's raining and foggy, and cars and people are going by, and each person is like a “shadow”. He says he wanted to take that feeling and bring it into the future, and you can really see that in the trailer with the combination of an obviously futuristic setting and the familiar rainy, foggy city streets most of us are familiar with in the real world today. That dark, gritty feel is, according to Pondsmith, the most important feature of the Cyberpunk world.
Fans of Cyberpunk 2020 will be pleased to know that the only reason we've had to wait so long for this game is that Pondsmith wanted to make sure it was created by a team that really understood the game and didn't want to change it. Now that he's settled on CD Projekt Red, he goes to Poland several times a year to check on how things are doing. “There's a really strong element of cross-pollination,” he says, and of “cooperative building.” Fans of Cyberpunk 2020 will be able to see the outcomes of things discussed in the pen-and-paper game in 2077. According to Pondsmith:
“Cyberpunk 2077 is about the Cyberpunk you thought you knew, scaled up bigger, badder, stranger.”