Cyberpunk 2077: Keanu Reeves Spent Two Weeks Recording; CD Projekt Committed to Storytelling

Today, during the YouTube live E3 coverage, CD Projekt RED CEO Marcin Iwiński talked about the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077.

Iwiński talked about several aspects of the game, including some really interesting details.

Below you can find a recap of what was said:

• Keanu Reeves’ character is a very meaningful character, not just a cameo. He has a big role.
• CD Projekt had a lot of back and forth discussion on him and finally decided to approach him. They had a meeting about a year ago and presented the script to him. He immediately liked it and got into the role.
• Keanu Reeves is actually the second character in terms of the amount of spoken lines in the entire game. He did about 15 days of voice recording in the studio.
• A dream for the future for CD Projekt is to manage to have two full big teams working on two big games at the same time. That being said, nowadays pretty much everyone in the studio is working on Cyberpunk.
• Keanu Reeves was drawn by a fascinating story, and that’s what Iwiński believes is great about CD Projekt’s games. He doesn’t believe this will change in the future. Technology developments will simply allow them to deliver those stories on more games.
• In terms of online experiences, there is some research & development being done and they would like to learn more about it. Gwent is a huge learning experience on that front, but CD Projekt is “fully focused and committed” to storytelling and epic experiences. Of course they’re looking into expanding, but their focus is on big story-driven games like The Witcher and Cyberpunk.
• For Cyberpunk 2077, the studio has “a roadmap” and a “solid plan” responding on a question on whether they had plans in place on how to expand the game after release. That being said, the team needs to “put all they have and then some in finishing the game” and then hear from the fans on what they want.
• They’d “love to have more” but Iwiński doesn’t want people to lose focus and prefers to talk about what is coming and not about what is after that.
• There will be so many things to do and so many ways to explore the base Cyberpunk 2077 game, and a lot of freedom for gameplay with the fluid class system, but the team would definitely like to tell more stories in the Cyberpunk universe.
• The more games CD Projekt releases, the better they are at planning. Yet the beauty of game development is that “all the pieces are constantly moving” with new platforms, new technologies more. Unfortunately, the team can never anticipate how many bugs will appear especially in the final stages of development. They can plan conservatively, but that’s as far as they can go. That being said, things are going quite well, and the team is bigger now so they can share the load better.
• CD Projekt would love to tell more stories about The Witcher at some point, but Iwiński wouldn’t be able to say when for now.
• The studio isn’t not a games factory, but they treat games as an art form. It would be fairly easy to release Witcher 3.5 by using the same engine and telling the same stories to make a quick buck, but that’s not what the studio is about. That’s why they’re working on Cyberpunk 2077 now. This gives them great opportunities to expand and learn a lot, and then they’ll hopefully apply those learning to more great things.
• Ultimately it’s all about delivering great experiences and stories and pushing gaming and gameplay forward.
• They want to do “kickass stuff” and if at some point they won’t be able to, it would become really borning, so people should expect the unexpected.
• The team feels very good about the state of the game. The polishing part is always the most challenging.
• The game is made with the new Red Engine that has been reworked to a huge extent. We’ll see “quite some amazing bells and whistles graphically.” While that’s important, it’s something CD Projekt always treats as part of the storytelling
• They’re quite confident right now, and they’re working hard to deliver the game on time.
• The game will be huge. There are no shortcuts taken. It can be explored both horizontally and vertically, but the team will need to be really close to release to be able to calculate just how big it is, and it’ll also depend a lot on playing style.

If you want to see more about Cyberpunk 2077, you can check out the trailer released a few days ago showcasing plenty of cinematics and the participation of Keanu Reeves as part of the cast, alongside a brief gameplay teaser.

On top of that, you can also take look at the unboxing of the Collector’s Edition,  a recent video talking about the making of the game, the semi-recent first gameplay reveal, read about the team’s goals in terms of quality, and about their efforts to build Night City.

We also recently learned that The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt’s Game Director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz joined the team as Design Director and that CD Projekt RED plans to reach as many gamers as possible on their platform of choice.

Cyberpunk 2077 is coming to PS4, Xbox One, and PC on April 16, 2020.