Cyberpunk RPG Rock Paper Shotgun Interview With Marcin Iwinski

Rock, Paper, Shotgun had the chance to chat with CD Projekt CEO Marcin Iwinski on their recently announced Cyberpunk RPG. What led to their property choice, whether the studio will work on an original IP in the future, and a timeframe for when we’ll be able to see more of the title are some of the subjects touched upon in the interview, which will get a part 2 tomorrow. Here’s an excerpt:

RPS: Is there any interest at CD Projekt in breaking out of that cycle and creating wholly unique worlds removed from someone else’s license?

Iwinski: We definitely want to do things right. So obviously, we’re not abandoning The Witcher. We’re not talking about what’s next right now, but you can guess it’ll be happening sometime in the future. And then there’s Cyberpunk [occupying our other team]. So, for the foreseeable future, that’s what we’ll be focusing on. And these aren’t just books or in Cyberpunk’s case pen-and-paper games. They’re worlds. And they allow us to tell great stories with different kinds of gameplay. And we probably could’ve just stuck with The Witcher, but it’s a new setting. So it’s great for our developers who wanted to try different things. Because, for some, it’s like (How many more years will I be working on swords?) So now they can work on great guns or implants. I think that’s a good balance for us.

I’m not saying (no) [to the idea of a wholly original IP], but we’ll take probably a long time to come up with a system.

RPS: Why didn’t Cyberpunk get an E3 showing? How long has it been in development?

Iwinski: It’s early in development. We definitely wanted to communicate to the world that we’re working on the game obviously to see what the reaction would be like. It’s really important to gauge that. And with Cyberpunk, there’s the pen-and-paper game and there are books, but recently, there hasn’t been much happening around it. But based on people’s comments [after our announcement], people just loved the idea. We also got to announce the second team which actually formed quite some time ago. But we’re still looking for new talent, so that was sort of the initial goal of this announcement.

But, moving forward, we’ll be showing more and revealing how things work.

RPS: Do you have any sort of timeframe for when that’ll happen?

Iwinski: By the end of the year.