Cyberpunk 2077 Rock Paper Shotgun Interview With Mike Pondsmith

Rock, Paper, Shotgun is offering an article-style interview with Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith, who explains why he’s pleased with CD Projekt RED as a developer and why it didn’t work out with other studios in the past among other things. Here’s a snip:

(Cyberpunk 2020 is about key places, characters and technologies,) he said. (You have to have characters like Morgan, Johnny Silverhand and Alt’; they’re fan faves that have generated tons of fan fiction. You can’t have Cyberpunk 2020 without the evil ninja-corp Arasaka and it’s paranoid corporate heads. Places like the Afterlife; the Forlorn Hope these are the sites where a million adventures started in so many player’s own games. CD Projekt’s team are fans, and they get that these things are important; that they make Cyberpunk what it is. They remember things I’ve forgotten about my own world sometimes.)

(As for shooting down [ideas proposed by CD Projekt]: yeah, in the beginning, there were a few ideas that came out of left field, but we all got zeroed in pretty fast on what we all wanted, and it’s been pretty solid ever since.)

That alone, however, makes this a pretty huge change of pace for CD Projekt, given that the Witcher games were separated from the Witcher books long before birth. But Pondsmith is by no means being kept at grotesque scythe arm’s length. Well, OK, Poland is by the standard Grotesque Scythe Arm measurement system a pretty decent number of GSAs away, but CDP and Pondsmith are doing everything in their power to bridge the gap.

(I’m actually pretty involved in 2077,) Pondsmith said. (I’ve been part of the story and dev conferences both on-site and via the net. I get over to Poland about every 5-6 months and spend at least a week there meeting and talking to the whole team. I see the updates when they get posted and I talk to the whole team at least once a week in long Skype meetings where we cover mechanics, concepts, plots, dumb ideas you name it.)