Cyberpunk 2077 was announced all the way back in 2012, but with The Witcher 3, its expansions, and Gwent at the top of the order back then, we only heard scraps about CD Projekt REDs next open world RPG. All combined, though, the past six years of interview snippets paint Cyberpunk 2077 as a behemoth of a game, even bigger that The Witcher 3 and with possible multiplayer features on top of hundreds of hours of single-player roleplaying. And, as we've learned, first-person shooting.

The time has finally come for Cyberpunk to take the spotlight, beginning with a big cinematic trailer revealed at E3 2018 (scroll down a bit for that). We'll be updating this post with new details throughout E3 and beyond.

CD Projekt has mostly stuck with the "when its done" line, but we know that it plans to release Cyberpunk 2077 between 2017 and 2021, along with another, still unannounced RPG. Weve been hearing about Cyberpunk since 2012, so the expectation is that itll be the first of the two to release. Our guess, then, is that Cyberpunk 2077 will release in 2019.

This is backed up by comments from a March 2017 financial results conference during which CD Projekt developers said that progress on Cyberpunk is "quite advanced." That said, the "when it's done" motto is something CD Projekt is serious about (recall it delaying The Witcher 3). If it isn't ready in 2019, it could be 2020, or 2021. We'd be really surprised if it released this year, but anything's possible.

It's more playful than we expected, but also just as violent as we expected.

Yes, so long as you understand 'FPS' literally: first-person shooter. Cyberpunk 2077 is an RPG, as CD Projekt has been saying, but it is an RPG played from a first-person perspective with guns. There's cover, there's sliding, there's wall-runninglots of things we associate with, say, Titanfall 2. So while it's a big open world RPG with stats and dialogue, it's an FPS, too.

You will have a third-person view in vehicles and cutscenes, but other than that, this is a first-person game. That's a surprise!

Yep. You can play as a woman or a man, and also customize your look a bit, such as by choosing a hairstyle, tattoos, makeup, and clothing. There are also stats: strength, constitution, intelligence, reflexes, tech, and "cool," which as we understand it from the tabletop game is how you perform under pressure.

This is another departure from The Witcher seriesof course, those games were based on books, while this is based on a tabletop roleplaying game with its own rules and ideas.

However you customize your character, you're still one specific person: V. Not 'Vee.' Just V. You're a mercenary, and that's most of what we know so far.

While guns seem to be your primary weapons, we saw lots of cool abilities in the E3 gameplay demonstration we saw.

It shouldn't come as a big surprise that a giant open world shooter-RPG has cars. You can indeed drive in Cyberpunk 2077, from either a first or third-person perspective. There's vehicular combat, tooin the demonstration we saw, the player leaned out a window to shoot.

We haven't. But we did get to see a jam-packed gameplay demonstration at E3. The footage hasn't been made public yet, but you can read all about it here.

Back in September 2016, we learned that CD Projekt applied for grants which suggest Cyberpunk 2077 could feature a huge living city and seamless multiplayer.

Thats backed up by this story from 2015, in which we learn that Cyberpunk 2077 will be far bigger than anything else that CD Projekt Red has done before, including The Witcher 3. So, if we take CD Projekt RED at its word, Cyberpunk 2077 will be exceptionally large and, hopefully, full of sidequests.

We first heard about multiplayer features back in 2013, but CD Projekt RED clearly knew the word could agitate its fans. "It will be a story-based RPG experience with amazing single-player playthroughs," reassured managing director Adam Badowski in a 2013 talk with Eurogamer, "but we're going to add multiplayer features."

In 2017, CD Projekt CEO Adam Kiciski said that the multiplayer features would ensure Cyberpunk's "long-term success," which caused some concerns given the current kerfuffle over microtransactions, especially with Star Wars Battlefront 2's loot box progression system going over so poorly.

CD Projekt responded to the concerns with a tweet meant to reassure fans that they'll still be getting a Witcher 3-style singleplayer epic. "Worry not," it said. "When thinking CP2077, think nothing less than TW3huge single player, open world, story-driven RPG. No hidden catch, you get what you pay forno bullshit, just honest gaming like with Wild Hunt. We leave greed to others."

As of March of this year, they still weren't keen to talk much about it.

No. The E3 2018 trailer contains a little Easter egg which confirms that there will be no microtransactions in Cyberpunk 2077. (Enlarge the image and read the red text, in which CD Projekt responds to the question: "In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?")

The cover of the Night City sourcebook. Click here to enlarge.

Cyberpunk 2077 takes place in the year 2077which you probably didnt need us to tell youin the sandbox environment of Night City, a fictional city between San Francisco and LA (as described here, although if it's really in Del Coronado Bay it would be well south of LA) that already exists in the Cyberpunk pen and paper RPG created by Mike Pondsmith. Heres an except from the Night City sourcebook, describing Night City as it exists in Cyberpunk 2020:

"A planned urban community founded in 1994 by the late entrepreneur Richard Alix Night (1954 - 1998). Established at the head of the Del Coronado Bay (dredged to current capacity in 1999), and facing the Pacific Ocean to the west, Night City is a modern city of the twenty-first century. Its wide streets and ultra-modern towers are home to over a million people, with another four-and-a-half million living in the greater Night City areas of Westbrook, North Oak, Heywood, Pacifica, South Night City and Rancho Coronado.

An exciting and vibrant place to live, Night City is even more fun to visit; world famous for its slogan "The City on the Edge of Tomorrow," the area hosts almost nine million tourists, conventioneers and corporate travellers every year. A planned community with an advanced rapid transit system, its own Net LDL, and a Corporate Center boasting representatives from over a dozen of the world's most powerful megacorps, Night City is a shining example of Technology Triumphant over the Trouble of the Past."

Thats an optimistic description, of course, leaving out the mucky, nasty parts of Night City, as Pondsmith puts it in the video above. Punks and corporate stooges of all varieties wander these foggy, once Mob-ruled streets, and by 2023, corporations are openly warring for them. Cyberpunk 2077 will show us what happened to the city in the aftermath of that war.

People have wondered whats going to happen, there are clues and hintsif we told you more wed have to kill you, as usual, said Pondsmith during Cyberpunk 2077s reveal in 2012, which you can watch below. One of them is a big hint I left for everybody at the end of the fourth Corporate War, when I dropped a small pocket tactical nuke in the middle of the Arasaka Towers, and that left kind of a really large real estate space that were gonna be playing around with.

The event hes referring to happened in 2024 on the Cyberpunk timeline, which means we step into Night City a little over 50 years after part of the downtown was destroyed and, presumably, rebuilt.

The announcement video doesnt reveal much more, except that CD Projekt RED and Pondsmith are using Cyberpunks pen and paper combat systemthough exactly how thatll be implemented is unclearand inventing new weapons and technology for the year 2077.

In a 2017 interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, Pondsmith said that the CD Projekt developers "get it," which is why he's happy to work with them on the game, and explained a little about his approach to cyberpunk themes.

We expect to hear more as 2019 approaches, so drop by our hub of all things Cyberpunk anytime you're curious about the latest updates. There's also a newsletter signup on the official site.

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Everything we know about Cyberpunk 2077 - PC Gamer