Moe Lane

The company recently trademarked the word in Europe with regard to software and gaming, but they’re swearing up and down that it’s only for defensive use.  The idea, according to CD Projekt Red, is to keep people from making their own game and titling it ‘Cyberpunk’ in a way that makes it look like it’ll be a sequel to Cyberpunk 2077, which is of course is a hotly-anticipated game at this point.  As the Geeks Are Sexy notes: “It turned out that CD Prokect Red has already held a US trademark on the term since 2012, something that’s strengthened its argument that it doesn’t plan to use the term aggressively, for example by trying to stop any games with a cyberpunk theme.”

Personally, I think that it’s going to be OK.  CD Projekt Red doesn’t seem to have very many idiots working for it, and you’d have to be an idiot to start an unnecessary trademark war with your most likely customers. But you have to expect that people will seize on any little scrap of information that they see when you won’t, you know, SHOW THEM THE GAME OR ANYTHING…

Creator Mike Pondsmith is actively working with CD Projekt Red on the Cyberpunk 2077 game:

“My wife told me that these guys in Poland wrote to us and said they wanted to do a Cyberpunk game,” says Pondsmith. “They told me that the game was really important to them back in the Iron Curtain days – back then, they had Cyberpunk and communism. What impressed us was not just their capabilities and their well-organized toolsets, but that they knew and loved the material. I said, let’s do this thing.”

“I go over there pretty regularly,” says Pondsmith. “I’ll probably go back in the next couple of months. I’m in a room with a hundred people, all firing ideas back and forth. We jump up and down on the systems and see how well they work. I really got lucky.”

Also: mayyyyybe more tabletop Cyberpunk.  That could be a thing.

Grain of salt, but it’s been in development for years. There’s a Swedish online shop (Komplett) that’s listing the game being available on 09/30/2017; is it true?  Dunno. I’m not going to pretend that I know whether Komplett is a reliable site or not. And neither am I going to pretend that I don’t want Cyberpunk 2077 to come out already, either.

Screenshot in case the link gets changed. Also: I don’t know who originally came up with the report that later got swarmed by all the traffic-bots, sorry.

Mayyyybee: “Submitted to the GameINN program (translation via Gamepressure), CD Projekt has requested funding to create something it calls “City Creation.” According to Gamepressure’s translation, City Creation will be a complex technology that will create a “huge living city, playable in real time, [where the technology is] based on rules, AI, and automation, and supports innovative processes and tools for making top-notch open-world games.””  The article goes on to note that they’re looking to get Watch Dogs-style multiplayer up and running, and… I have no idea if that’s good news, or not. I’ve never played Watch Dogs.

But, hey, fresh Cyberpunk 2077 news, right?  There’s a limit that you can obsessively watch the teaser trailer, right?  …Right.

That would be nice – but I’m frankly just guessing, based on this:

Kraków-based branch of CD Projekt Red, established in 2013 and best known for The Witcher series, is about to expand significantly. This news has been revealed by John Mamais, the future head of CD Projekt Red’s Kraków studio, in a Q&A session put through by the studio itself. As claimed by Mamais, to truly make use of the potential of a project as ambitious as Cyberpunk 2077, CD Projekt Red will soon increase the number of employees to 500, and Kraków-based branch, now consisting of about 30 developers, will expand to about 100.

If they’re expanding the staff now then they’re probably not going to have the game done either this year or next. 2018 is the earliest, right? – I’ve never worked in a video game studio, mind you. I may be making bad assumptions. I’d love to be told that this is consistent with a Christmas 2017 release…

This being “CD Projekt Red CEO: Cyberpunk 2077 will be “More Ambitious on Every Single Front”” …I mean, I believe that they want to make it. And goodness knows that Witcher: Wild Hunt will give them a budget. Still, it’s been four freaking years…

Moe Lane

PS: Yeah, I saw that somebody was trying to stir up a controversy over the game. …Annnnnd that’s all the attention that said attempt deserves, in my opinion.

I know it’s not true. The guy who wrote this article knows that it’s not true. BUT WE WANT IT TO BE TRUE. We want it to be true oh, so so badly.

Well. Time to torment myself with the teaser trailer again. Maybe it’ll be out before I start drawing Social Security…

How did I miss this?

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