Between the popularity of the Edgerunners anime series, the improvements in the latest patches, and the recent milestone of having sold 20 million copies, there’s no doubting the fact that CD Projekt Red’s take on ‘roleplaying in the dark future’ is finally living up to much of its original promise – even if it took a bit longer than expected.
What we didn’t necessarily expect, however, was that CDPR would be so quick to announce their plans for another installment of the Cyberpunk series. Details are admittedly sparse – all we really know for certain is that plans for it exist, and that it’s being made by a brand new studio. But given that I’ve already dumped 200+ hours into 2077 and god knows how many more into the original tabletop RPG, it’s never too early to start thinking about how the next chapter of the Cyberpunk saga could benefit from a few lessons learned on its journey so far.
Don’t Announce (or Release) Too Early
Let’s put the cyber-elephant in the room outside first, yes? Lesson One is don’t announce your game a full four years before it even goes into development.
Now, given the recent announcement, it's already too late to avoid this one entirely – though at least this wasn’t a full-blown trailer or anything. All we know for certain after this week’s Strategy Update is that there is another Cyberpunk game planned, currently codenamed Project Orion, it’s slated to be developed by CD Projekt’s new North American studio. Now, CDPR’s leadership has said there are at least three new Witcher games on the docket before Project Orion - and given that only two of those three games are currently even in pre-production, it seems unlikely we can expect to see any real details on Orion (or whatever it ends up being called) for at least another few years.
No small part of 2077’s hardships stemmed from the fact that the game was simply revealed way too early, with its initial announcement in 2012 predating not just its own development starting in earnest by several years, but even the announcement of The Witcher 3. This clearly put a ton of pressure on the developers to over-promise when it was re-revealed in 2018 – which then made matters all the worse as it became clear that Cyberpunk probably shouldn’t have been scheduled for release until at least 2022 in the first place.
It’s obviously not as black and white as some would make it out to be, as game development is an innately complex and messy business. That’s especially true for an ambitious project that both had to adapt to the madness of a global pandemic during its final months and contend with expectations set by a fully runaway hype train hungry to regurgitate every morsel of new information. I’m not going to act like we on the press side of the industry are blameless, here – after all, here I am writing this when we don’t even have so much as a real name for this presumed sequel.
But there’s no doubt in my mind that Cyberpunk 2077’s difficulties – the huge amount of reported crunch, its massive, obfuscated technical problems on older consoles and the sloppy messaging around its launch, and the abhorrent treatment of developers by certain so-called fans – all stem from the root of a much-too-early announcement and the huge amount of pressure that created for the creative team. Ultimately, had Cyberpunk simply remained a cool sci-fi alternative to D&D for a few more years, with no one any the wiser about a video game adaptation, it may have been much easier for it to live up to its original Coming: when it’s ready tagline.
All that being said, CD Projekt Red has clearly gone all-in on making itself a development powerhouse. The 2077 team leads are heading to this new Boston studio to helm the project, joining the flagship in Poland as well as CDPR Vancouver and other third-party partners to concurrently produce multiple games and plenty of other media at once – and one has to assume that there are no plans to have any of their upcoming projects become such a fiasco as Cyberpunk did. Here’s hoping that’s enough to avoid what Cyberpunk's Quest Director called a "heartbreaking" experience this time.
Okay, with that colossal hurdle out of the way, let’s take a look at some of the actual gameplay elements that we’d like to see revived or updated in our next visit to Night City…
‘Cyberpunk: Edgerunners’ Nailed Cyberpsychosis – 'Orion' Should Too
If you’ve watched any of the new Edgerunners series on Netflix, you’ll know – without getting into spoiler territory – that a major focus of the show is this concept of Cyberpsychosis; of what happens to a person’s mind when they become too dependent on cyberware. This is a great example of how the show bolsters elements of 2077’s gameplay, since the only real interaction with cyberpsychosis we see in-game is a series of loosely connected minibosses.
Even this in itself I found odd, since preserving your humanity is such a huge part of the tabletop RPG, too – get too much cyberware and fail the wrong checks, and you hand your character sheet over to the GM… and that doesn’t end well for anybody.
It would be great to have to take that into consideration when upgrading your cybernetics, or even activating certain pieces of cyberware. Maybe seeing a debuff to social stats if you pass a certain threshold, or being able to gain additional power boosts at the risk of running along that edge (get it?!). I don’t know what the “bad ending” would look like if you ended up going full cyberpsycho, but I’d love to be able to find out.
Crank Up the Weird (But Tone it Down Elsewhere)
Between the in-universe slang, fashion options (did anyone else think parachute pants would have made such a comeback?), and general absurdity of life under the 2077 corporatocracy, CDPR has done a great job designing its immersive cyberpunk dystopia. But it would be great to see that dialed up to 11 – let us see what TV is like beyond the three talk shows and endless parade of half-voiced ads. Let us order braindances from that weird guy on the corner, or show us the more bizarre side of cybernetic enhancements. Hell, the original Cyberpunk tabletop had gangs based off Gilligan’s Island and Bozo the Clown! It definitely doesn’t need to get that wacky, but there’s a deep, dark well of weirdness hiding under the neon-tinted surface, and it’d be great to see more of what’s down there.