Cyberpunk 2077: Mike Pondsmith on the Right Team Blog

The third part of Mike Pondsmith’s introduction blog to Cyberpunk 2077 focuses on the “right team”, and why he thinks CD Projekt RED fits nicely into that category.

Here’s an excerpt:

Right Feel? We dug out copies of Andrzej Sapkowski’s brilliant Witcher novels and compared the game to what we saw on the screen. It was obvious that the ambiguous, adult flavor of the novels permeated every part of the the game iteration. Heck Geralt of Rivia could almost be solo Morgan Blackhand’s long lost brother; a tough but compassionate professional; a killer with a conscience, driven not just by money, but to fulfill his own quest to do the right thing, even if in the end it was doomed. Romantic loners in a dark decaying world? Adult realism? Right feel? Check and double check.

Right Tech? Not only was that obvious from CDPR’s almost obsessive attention to detail in rendering Geralt’s medieval world and all its trappings swords that looked right to my trained fencer’s eye, cities and forests that made you believe they were actually photos from Europe circa 1000A.D. But even more; when we talked to the CDPR team, it was obvious that they knew our own Cyberpunk® technology and its roots. They talked about the weapons; the technologies of our game like they were old friends. They wanted to know the process we used to evolve that technology and its roots in the real world. So Right Tech? No problem. These guys got it.

Which leads us at last to the Right Team thing. It was obvious from the start that the CDPR team was going to give us a true to to life rendering of our Cyberpunk® world they were fans. Most of them had grown up PLAYING Cyberpunk® at a time when RPG’s of any type were far and few between in a then-Communist Poland. For many of them, this was a dream come true. So we knew the team loved the world as much as we did (maybe even more, if you counted the many obsessive crushes on the lissome Alt Cunningham I encountered while over there!) Get it right? Are you kidding?