Category Archives: Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk 2077 is an open-world action role-playing video game developed by CD Projekt Red, and set in the universe of Mike Pondsmiths Cyberpunk franchise. In the game, players take on the role of up-and-coming mercenary V, embarking on a violent and dangerous journey through the underbelly of Night City, where body modification via the installation of cyberware implanted hardware is a part of everyday life.

In terms of art, Cyberpunk 2077 is the most demanding and ambitious project in CD Projekt Reds history so far. Night City is populated with characters representing a wide spectrum of society: it depicts everything from poverty, gangs, and the middle class to corporate workers, celebrities, and even droids. To fill this world, the character art department had to create hundreds of high-quality models to make the city feel as immersive and believable as possible.

Marvelous Designer, the widely used software for making, editing, and reusing 3d clothes, is one of the most important tools in CD Projekt Reds character creation pipeline. Almost all the characters clothes in Cyberpunk 2077 were created with its help. It was also used for some cybernetic parts, backpacks, ammo bags, and even weapons.

Below, Grzegorz Chojnacki, principal character Artist at CD Projekt Red, describes how they used Marvelous Designer was integrated into the production pipeline, not just to create character garments but also for some cybernetic parts, backpacks, ammo bags, and even weapons:

The main challenge during the creation of models for the game was its futuristic cloth design for example, the jacket worn by V. It combines garments with cyberware, and I was able to achieve the desired look thanks to Marvelous Designers variety of material presets, the ability to sew one cloth layer onto another, and features like seam taping.

One of my favorite techniques for making realistic folds is the two-layer approach. For the bottom layer I often use firm fabric presets like Leather_Cowhide, which is used as a cloth base, while for the top one Ill use softer prestes like Nylon_Featherweight with slightly increased Shrinkage parameters to finalize folds details. For things like cables, collars, and zippers I recommend using the Trim_Full_Grain_Leather preset which you can export to 3d modeling software and use as a starting point for the final model.

This puffy vest is a great example of how the two-layer approach combined with pressure works. In this case I created a simple vest pattern as a base. Layer clone (over), drawing internal lines, and then the cut and sew function were used to create cushioned parts. To achieve a realistic look and finalize the necessary details, I increased shrinkage value and applied some pressure to separate pattern pieces.

Marvelous Designer has the great ability to edit every single fabric parameter by hand, so the cloth look can be improved even without changing the patterns. In this case the user manual was very helpful for explaining how Bending, Shear, or Buckling works.

Another great feature of Marvelous Designer allows the importing of objects as patterns. This is very helpful in cases when you want to combine hard surfaces with cloth. For Cyberpunk 2077, I used this function to create some elements for Adam Smashers model, such as the cloth on the pipes and on his armor plates.

To make those pieces, I first created simple models with UV maps, then imported them to Marvelous Designer as Avatar. Secondly, I imported them again but this time using the Load as Garment option with Trace 2D Patterns from UV Map checked on.

One of the tricks I use to keep cloth from falling off the avatar is to apply a negative pressure value to the pattern, then freeze it and use Layer Clone (over) so I have a pattern base to start with.

The policeman hat model is a good example of how avatars can help with garment creation. Here, using other 3d software I modeled a skeleton/chassis to support the cloth shape, then imported it as Avatar.

Everybody knows how sculpting clothes by hand takes a lot of time and, sometimes, the result is not satisfactory even for the most experienced artists. Marvelous Designer is the solution for that. Its a completely new way of making clothes, its easy to learn, and the final results can be consistently outstanding. I would definitely recommend the software to other 3d artists. Using it is the best way to improve the quality of your models.

Key highlights from Marvelous Designer 11:

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How Marvelous Designer Helped Bring The Immersive Dystopia Of 'Cyberpunk 2077' To Life - Cartoon Brew

Tesla will hopefully be putting the new AMD Ryzen processors to work early next year with the release of two AAA gaming titles for their vehicles.

Elon Musk said both Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 will hopefully be added to the Tesla Arcade next quarter.

Unfortunately since both are AAA titles, they will only be available to refresh Model S and Model X owners which have the latest processors.

They will also be available to recent buyers of the Model 3 and Model Y in China, both of which were recently upgraded to include the AMD Ryzen processors.

We have yet to see the same change for cars out of Fremont, so depending on when the games are released, they could be available to more owners in North America.

Tesla has already showed Cyberpunk 2077 being played on the refresh Tesla Model S during the special Plaid delivery event in June.

You can watch the demo video below.

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Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 still in the works, hopefully coming in Q1 2022 - Drive Tesla Canada

Since the disastrous launch of Cyberpunk 2077, fans of CD Projekt Red have largely fallen into two camps. The first is in denial, desperately clinging to the studios commitments to make Cyberpunk better. The second has already moved on, accepting the loss and burying its hopes for future games to rival The Witcher 3. Im here to tell you theres a third way through the grieving process: Play Thronebreaker, CD Projekt's card-based RPG. Its out now, and has been since 2018.

If this Witcher game has passed you by, its small wonder. A spin-off of a spin-off, Thronebreaker is the singleplayer campaign of the multiplayer Gwent card game that bombed amid a slew of Hearthstone competitors. Though highly scored by reviewers on release, the solo game didnt find the kind of audience the Witcher universe typically enjoys, maybe because players didnt really get what it was. It didnt help that CD Projekt announced the shutdown of Gwent on consoles a couple of months after Thronebreakers launch, leaving a great game cut off from the supply line that should have fed it.

Theres a great metaphor in that, at least. Thronebreakers story concerns a northern monarch overthrown in the early days of the Nilfgaardian invasion that has mostly played out by the time of The Witcher 3. Cut off from her family, her armies and her allies, who have mostly given in to the gilded marauders already, Queen Meve is forced to flit between unlikely partners, rebuilding her forces (or, yknow, deck) from a new position of humility. Her goal is to survive and deal just a minor blow to her usurpersa scratch to prove to her peers in nearby lands that Nilfgaard does in fact bleed, and so can be killed.

Its a setup that shows, for the first time, that CD Projekt Red is very capable of creating its own protagonists for Andrzej Sapkowskis world. Meve is utterly unlike Geralt in every important respect. She has a home, for startersa permanent one, and a responsibility to those within it. As a ruler shes trained herself to keep whims in check, and presents a stern veneer reminiscent of a certain kind of school teacher. Its a persona thats tough to switch off after-hours, if her strained relationship with son and successor Villem is any indication.

Of course, as a player with access to branching choices, you can choose to file down some of Meves edgesbut you quickly learn why she sharpened them in the first place. At heart, she may be just as impulsively moral as Geralta witcher crawling with scruples like a foxs pelt with fleas, as Sapkowski once described himbut any softness is a chink in her armour, an invitation for one of her many enemies to plunge a knife into the gap and twist.

Thronebreaker tells its story differently than other CD Projekt games. Though you control Meve directly as you move about the map, shes merely your Monopoly piecerepresentative of all the units and characters you carry as cards in your deck. And that abstraction extends to the narrative. Rather than restrict text to dialogue or found notes, CDPR lets loose with long passages of prose, describing your swampy surroundings and the mood of your troops. Its all fully voice acted, but in the context of storybook-style narration, delivered with steady warmth and dry wit by Timothy Watson.

The format lends Thronebreaker a soothing, bedtime gaming qualityits a shoo-in for the Steam Deckeven as the plot takes Meve to distressingly dark nooks of the Northern Realms.

The Lord of the Rings, the template for Western fantasy, is often interpreted as an allegory for a world war in which British soldiers left their home and travelled abroad to tackle a looming, but distant threat. The Witcher, by contrast, has always unmistakably been the story of an occupied nationpreoccupied by civilian collateral and the casual cruelty of soldiers. Theres something about Thronebreakers zoomed-out, monarchical perspective that hammers the point home, pushing CDPRs writers toward parallels with Polish history.

During the Second World War, the Nazis set about systematically depopulating Poland through mass murder and forced resettlement, clearing the way for ethnic Germans to live on the emptied land. In Thronebreaker, fictional invaders are doing the same: expelling peasants from Meves twin kingdoms of Lyria and Rivia in order to make space for Nilfgaardian settlers.

It might be bleak, but this kind of dark storytelling is important. It's a way for players to process cultural pain without looking it directly in the eye. The longer you study it, the more The Witchers world turns out to be a deceptively hopeful one. You may not be playing as a monster hunter in Thronebreaker, but you encounter plenty of them in Gwent-based combat. This is a land where leshens defend the forest against loggers who get too greedy, and a demon named Hym feeds on the souls of those who have committed a terrible evil. In other words, its a place where people are held to account for injustices both environmental and societaleven the ones that are covered up, explained away or forgotten. In that sense at least, its a kind of horror-tinged escapism.

If Thronebreaker is starting to sound just as meaty and complex as the numbered Witcher games, thats because it is. Although initially conceived as a relatively simple singleplayer campaign, it gradually evolved during development into a standalone game thats easily 30 hours long. Ironically, its the result of exactly the sort of overscoping that led CDPR to its downfall a couple of years later with Cyberpunk. But in Thronebreakers case, its something to be grateful for, producing a sprawling, literary RPG that proves the studios still got it.

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CD Projekt Red has made a great RPG since The Witcher 3it's just not Cyberpunk 2077 - PC Gamer

Someone finally put the big question to Keanu Reeves, and wow did he have an answer. As part of the promotion around the release of The Matrix Awakens he and Carrie-Anne Moss spoke to the Verge on a range of topics and, at the end, talk turned to Cyberpunk 2077specifically, the sex mods involving Keanu's character Johnny Silverhand, which developer CDPR does not like one bit.

Reeves says he hasn't yet tried out the game himself: "I've seen demonstrations but I've never played it." The Verge's Alex Heath then asks if Reeves was aware that players were modifying the game and his character was the most-requested sex mod.

"Yes! Oh my god: It's always nice when it's nice," says Reeves.

"I on the other hand say no thank you," interjects Moss, whose amused revulsion may be the real highlight here. "No thank you! Keanu's fine with it."

Keanu is not done with the VR sex thing.

"Think of how much money is in porn, right" says Reeves, as part of Carrie-Anne Moss's soul forever floats off into the ether. "So you could not even have to be there and people could have digital sex with your digital avatar... what's it called right now, For Members only? You could do a whole thing. Oh my god then you get the suit that's probably made in Sweden or some German thing, oh my god then you've got the VR thing. Then they've got the data on you with your arousal metrics..."

"Great," deadpans Moss.

"So then you're in the suit with arousal metrics through your Members Only Metaverse so then you're like take everything off and how do you feel about that relationship," Reeves concludes. "Then you hold that real thing and you're like oh man I'm so glad we have reality."

It's worth emphasising that the specific sex mod CDPR targeted was pretty rudimentary, and certainly a far cry from the sexual VR future Keanu is imagining. At the time CDPR told us that "Our most important rule regarding user-generated content, game mods in particular, is that it cant be harmful towards others. In the case of model swaps, especially those that involve explicit situations, it can be perceived as such by the people who lent us their appearance for the purpose of creating characters in Cyberpunk 2077."

Well: Now we know what Keanu thinks about it. He's a pretty cool dude. I don't know whether he's completely up on how the internet uses certain words, but it's nice to think about.

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Keanu Reeves on players modding Cyberpunk 2077 to have sex with him: 'It's always nice when it's nice.' - PC Gamer

Dir. Terry Gilliam10. The Zero Theorem (2013)

Qohen (Christoph Waltz) is an existentially-unsettled programmer who is vying to be The One of some all-important story.

But hes not.

Hes a hairless nutcase cooped up in a dilapidated church.

Terry Gilliams 2013 tech-noir film follows in the footsteps of his previous hits, Brazil and 12 Monkeys. Big footsteps considering those are two of the best cyberpunk movies out there. Though it never reaches the same heights, it deserves a spot in the pantheon thanks to its manic vision and twisted subversion of the cyberpunk genre.

The film plays with all the familiar tech-noir tropes: theres an oppressive corporation, a femme fatale, and an urban sprawl overflowing with advertisements. The citizens are immersed in a vibrant cyberpunk style.

Every outfit and storefront is the color of candy and bubblegum.

Gilliam on set design inspiration

Unlike the chiaroscuro lighting of cyberpunk films like Blade Runneror Minority Report, this city is bathed in light. It proves that the sun actually can rise in these neon-noir wonderlands. Gilliams camera hovers and tilts through long sequences in a way thats sometimes distracting, but frames his world as more unhinged than its contemplative peers.

One look at the art style of Renaissance will tell you everything you need to know about it. The animation is submerged in such high-contrast black and white that it makes Sin Cityshiver. Its classic noir with a cyberpunk aesthetic.

Director Christian Volckman achieved this look by recording live actors with motion capture, then replacing them with digital models in post-production. Its not unlike the approach taken by A Scanner Darkly, which instead rotoscoped over the actors performances.

A lot of cyberpunk movies have roots in Japanese anime, so the animated approach feels right at home here. This sci-fi genre lives and dies on the production design, so animation allows the film to flaunt a spectacular city and fantastical futurism without the risk of losing its actors in the sauce of cyberpunk style.

Volockman on the benefits of motion capture

And theres a lot of sauce here. The megacorporation Avalon has kidnapped one of its scientists and its up to police captain Barthlmy Karas (Daniel Craig in the English dub) to figure out why.

Plus, its French, so you know its gonna get weird.

Speaking of Japanese roots, Alita: Battle Angel is a direct adaptation of a cyberpunk manga. The script doesnt do anyone any favors, but Rosa Salazar shines as Alita, and the film succeeds in all the ways Ghost in the Shell failed its a fully-realized dystopian utopia riddled with cyberpunk style and no whitewashing.

Though Alita doesnt look like other cyberpunk films on the surface, it explores all the motifs of vengeance, identity, and corporate oppression. If youre looking for the conventional tech-noir protagonist, turn your attention to Dr. Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz). Hes a bounty hunter with a trenchcoat and a dark history who takes to the streets to avenge his late daughter. When he goes on the prowl, it oozes with cyberpunk aesthetic.

But thats not why you should watch Alita.

Watch it for Alita. Watch it for her plucky, naively-optimistic point-of-view. And watch it for the way she actually dares to confront the corruption of her city rather than become a part of it.

Its rare to see that much hopefulness in cyberpunk movies, and it shows that theres more to look forward to in the future than drugs and sexual deviance. Like motorball!

Then take a look at this behind-the-scenes video to see how the VFX team pulled Alita from the pages of manga and dropped her into a photorealistic world.

How VFX brought Alita to life

While its understandably lumped in with superhero flicks, Watchmen also shares sensibilities with cyberpunk movies. This is thanks to its lead antihero, Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley).

Like any hard-boiled detectives story, his mission begins after an impossible murder. Who killed the Comedian? From there, the past and present collide in a caped crusader conspiracy.

Combine that with the otherworldly visuals of Dr. Manhattan and the retrofuturism of the other costumed heroes. You end up with a decidedly cyberpunk aesthetic.

Alan Moores original graphic was published in 1986, right around the time of groundbreaking cyber noir movies like Terminator and Blade Runner. It flaunts the same grit and cynicism, just minutes away from a similar dystopia, waiting with one beady smiley-face eye on the clock.

Watchmens stylized realism lighting and sets

As is ought to happen with Zack Snyder, the narrative loses some of the nuance in the translation to film. He takes some creative liberties that dont pay off and, at worst, contradict the themes of the source material.

That said, its still Watchmen.

Snyder pulls panels straight from the comic and realizes them in true pulp rock fashion. It bleeds sci-fi noir. And, if youre not sold on his adaptation, you can always see how Damien Lindelof fares with the Watchmen television series on HBO.

The first of several Philip K. Dick-inspired adaptations on this list. A Scanner Darkly is remembered for its unique art style

...and for being one of the last times Hollywood could cast Robert Downey Jr., Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder, and Woody Harrelson without dropping $20 million minimum.

Rather than mirror the neon-noir/thriller approach that Minority Report took years earlier, director Richard Linklater decided to set the film 20 minutes in the future and place the drug crisis at the forefront.

The result is an intimate character study that also happens to be surreally animated.

A Scanner Darklys mesmerizing animation

As The Zero Theorem made painfully clear at times, cyberpunk films that are unmuddled by smoke and shadow risk looking like YA fantasy cities. Scanner circumvents that by heightening every visual with computer-rotoscoped overlays.

Its a style previously used by Linklater in Waking Life and currently used by Undone on Amazon.

Towing the line between real and imaginary, the animation lends itself to the fluctuating visuals of the sci-fi genre, particularly when Arctor (Keanu Reeves) wears his scramble suit.

Thanks to this almost-psychedelic effect, A Scanner Darkly is one of the most unusual cyberpunk films out there. Its also one of the best.

Before Hollywood would let him direct Star Wars, Rian Johnson made a name for himself in the noir genre with Brick. He drew on the works of Dahisell Hammett, writer of the quintessential Maltese Falcon, to unravel a murder mystery about high schoolers.

By the time he made Looper, Johnson was fully versed in the language of tech-noir. His film is reminiscent of the best cyberpunk movies like Terminator, 12 Monkeys, and Akira while establishing lore of its own.

Back in pre-Gemini Mantimes, when actors couldnt be (pretty much) seamlessly de-aged, it was up to Joseph Gordon Levitt and Bruce Willis to depict the same character at different times in his life.

Where this could have been a trite rehashing of the tired tropes of old science fiction sub-genres, Johnson downplays its more outlandish elements. Time travel? Dont worry about it. Telekinesis? Yeah, sometimes. Instead, he pulls his characters from their grand dystopia and brings them to quieter terrain where their inner-conflict can shine.

Physicists discuss time travel in Looper

Thats Loopers greatest achievement. It isnt compelled to over-explain its cyberpunk style. Johnson lets is breathe by turning the high concept into a quiet, introspective piece. Thats a constant youll find in this list: cyber noir movies can be both exciting and understated.

In case that just made it sound like ALL cyberpunk movies have to sacrifice action for philosophy, turn your attention to Dredd.

Written and overseen by Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation), this film is a pure testosterone-fueled crime story. Nothing about it reinvents the wheel nor is that the goal.

Dredd is the return of the ultra-violent, metropolitan heroics of Robocop that helped define cyberpunk. And, actually, its a better Robocop than the 2014 remake. Instead of a messianic journey, Dredd follows its hero (Karl Urban) through just one judgment in a long line of judgments, like a police procedural bumped up to the nines.

A break down of Judge Dredds wardrobe

Via the character of Judge Anderson (Olivia Thirlby), we get a window into the explosive world of Mega-City. In true cyberpunk style, the streets are flooded with crime and psychoactive drugs, so the Judges are tasked with overthrowing the slum lord responsible (Its Lena Heady as basically junkie Cersei Lannister).

The character development is sidelined as the movie unfolds in a succession of boss battles leading up to one final confrontation, so enjoy it for what it is. In a time when most action movies belong to Disney and Marvel, you deserve to enjoy some R-rated thrills.

When Upgrade came out, some viewers considered it future-noir Venom. I mean, theyre not wrong.

Leading man Grey Trace (Logan Marshall-Green) not only looks like Tom Hardy, but he has the same offbeat, symbiotic partnership with his digital consciousness STEM (Simon Maiden). The movie elevates above its b-movie book cover in the same way Venom did: with heart and pulpy excess. Only, Upgrade isnt just fun its good.

Right out of the gate, director Leigh Whannell constructs a bleak and sleek metropolis with self-driving cars and a staunch wealth gap. Though its guilty of some genre sins like fridging Asha (Melanie Vallejo), it does lead to a revenge fantasy amped up with some of the best parts from its influences.

Check out one of the fight scenes from the film in the clip below. Its set in a seedy bathroom, lit up with the cool hues used by neo-noir movies like Atomic Blonde, John Wick: Chapter 2,and Blade Runner 2049. It really makes for a perfect neon-noir set piece.

A classic fight scene from Upgrade

One of the first blockbusters of the 21st century is also one of the best cyberpunk movies. Inspired by the Philip K. Dick short story and brought to life by Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise, how could it NOT be?

Like a classic noir tale, the film is about a person of integrity who is forced to go on the run to clear his name. John Anderton (Cruise) has been accused of a crime he didnt commit yet. But a precognitive vision says he will. That premise is enhanced with cyberpunk production design, but retains its philosophical core about the nature of free will: is Anderton destined to commit this crime, or can he change his fate?

Minority Report navigates the pitfalls of hard sci-fi by grounding itself in a naturally-evolved future. In crafting the tech-noir setting, Spielberg recruited a think tank of futurists to give the 2054 Washington D.C. a realistic look and feel.

The team wrote a 2054 bible with all the architectural and economic trends of that era, and their efforts really bring the city to life. Its no surprise that Minority Report remains the go-to example when we discuss personalized advertising trends in the modern-day.

It even got some of its predictions right. Check out the impact that Spielbergs vision had on modern tech in the video below:

How Minority Report inspired real technology

Despite Andertons bleak situation, and converse to Blade Runners vision, Minority Report is the Good Timeline of cyberpunk movies. Sure, its a late-stage capitalist nightmare but at this point, thats a best-case scenario! Heres to the next thirty years!

Yep, even when its not Blade Runner, its still Blade Runner.

This is the apex of cyberpunk movies. The original helped define cyberpunk, and Denis Villeneuves installment continues the canon while morphing it for a modern audience.

2049 is the only proper sequel on this list, a designation it comfortably owns. If some poor director had opted to reboot the franchise, it may have invited unnecessary comparisons or criticisms.

Instead, the franchise builds out. Villeneuve excels in contemplative sci-fi, as weve seen in Arrival and hopefully continue to see in Dune. He grants 2049 its quiet intensity and focuses it with practical settings, vehicles, and props.

But he also flexes his action muscles when the scene calls for it. This makes 2049 even more dynamic than its predecessor.

Villenueve on practical props and sets

Present as ever is the obligatory rain, cascading down neon-noir billboards covered in electric sex, but things have changed in dystopic Los Angeles. The weather is toxic. The shores are junkyards. K (Ryan Gosling) even steps out of the shadows into a Mad Max-esque desert steeped in orange.

Its a refreshing palette change and its stunning. The entire film is a visual marvel, thanks to DP Roger Deakins and production designer Dennis Gassner. Both of them scored Oscar noms for the film, with Deakins taking home the trophy in his category.

Though 2049 underperformed at the box office, it still stands as the best of the best cyberpunk movies. This is no replicant; this is the real deal.

Now youre all caught up with the best modern cyber noir movies! While we wait for our mega-corporate overlords to seize control and plunge us into a tech-noir film of our own, lets go back to the origins of film noir and see how we ended up here.

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10 Best Cyberpunk Movies, Ranked for Filmmakers

Mike Pondsmith started playing Dungeons & Dragons in the late seventies, as an undergraduate at the University of California, Davis. The game, published just a few years before, popularized a newish form of entertainment: tabletop role-playing, in which players, typically using dice and a set of rule books, create characters who pursue open-ended quests within an established world. The most stimulating part of the game is the fact that anything can happen, an early D&D review noted. Soon, other such games hit the market, including Traveller, a sci-fi game published in 1977, the year that Star Wars came out. Pondsmith, a tall Black man who grew up in multiple countries because his dad was in the Air Force, loved sci-fi, and fancied himself a bit like Lando Calrissian, the smooth-talking Star Wars rogue played by Billy Dee Williams. If I couldve had a cape, I would have had a cape, he told me, over video chat from his home in western Washington. He bought a copy of Traveller at a Bay Area hardware store shortly after it was released. You had this vast, sweeping empire with aliens in it and all this stuff, he recalled, and people had these spaceships, and they went all over the place and traded and fought.

There were aspects of the game that irked him. No lightsabres, for instance. Plus, once the game began, the rules made it nearly impossible for the players character to die. He tinkered with the rules and ended up writing his own game, Imperial Star, which he finished around 1980. By 1982, he had a degree in graphic design, and he was soon working as a typesetter in a print shop at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He produced a good-looking rule bookalthough the game, in his view, was a hobbyists effort, developed as a pastime for his friends, some of whom have been playing a campaign in the Imperial Star universe for more than three decades. He created another game, Mekton, which was inspired by his discovery of anime and involved giant fighting robots. His wife, Lisa, encouraged him to demo it at DunDraCon, a role-playing convention near San Francisco. By the second day, a few dozen people had gathered around his table, eager to have a go. A friend suggested he start a business. R.Talsorian Gamesnamed for the father of one Pondsmiths friends, whod invested in the company as a tax writeoffincorporated in 1985.

One rainy night around this time, Pondsmith was driving across the San Francisco Bay Bridge when he looked out his window and saw what looked like a mythical city, he told me. The sight evoked the neon Los Angeles of Ridley Scotts Blade Runner, a movie hed seen not long before. Night City, Pondsmith thought this place should be called. That is also, as it happens, the name of the demimonde in William Gibsons novel Neuromancer, which had been published in 1984, though Pondsmith had not yet read it. Neuromancer is the story of a data thief who uses a body-machine interface to break through a corporations A.I. defense system. Its considered the quintessential cyberpunk novel, a genre that was just then entering its heyday. In 1986, the writer Bruce Sterling published Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology; in the preface, Sterling contends that, for the then-new generation of sci-fi writers, technology is visceral, utterly intimate. That same year, Walter Jon Williams published the novel Hardwired, set in a Balkanized post-United States, where the middle class has been decimated and megacorporations have unchecked power. Pondsmith and Williams became friends, and Pondsmith began formulating a game set in Night City that drew, in part, on Williamss ideas. He envisioned a fractured U.S. in the thrall of technology and beset by rampant inequality. Williams tested out the game as Pondsmith worked on it.

The result, Cyberpunk, came out in 1988. It consisted of three books of rules and story lines and a pair of dice, and was set in the far-off year of 2013. The game, Pondsmith told me, was mostly about having cool gear and strutting around in it. But the format allowed for all kinds of inventiveness. Williams recalled a campaign in which he enlisted the writer Pati Nagle to play as a double agent; another player seemed to fall for Nagles character and was, Williams told me, utterly heartbroken that shed betrayed him. It was touching and hilarious at the same time. Pondsmith kept thinking about the games world, and reading the novels that were beginning to form the Cyberpunk canon. He started writing a sequel, set a few years later, that focussed less on peacocking in snazzy getups than on the interlocking segments that make up a society. The world he had imagined was a much larger ecosystem than he had initially realized, he told me. It involved how corporations work, how they kept people down, how they interacted with the city, how they interacted with the citizens at what levels. He called the sequel Cyberpunk 2020. The real question, he had decided, was: Why did this world keep producing people who get metalled up and go to the street?

When Cyberpunk 2020 came out, in 1990, Marcin Iwiski and Micha Kiciski were kids in a newly democratic Poland. The country was in the midst of so-called shock therapy as its economy transitioned from state control to capitalism. (When I recently mentioned to Bruce Sterling that a Polish company was bringing out a cyberpunk video game, he said, Its great that people in Warsaw can actually get some kind of hook into the industry, adding that he had spent a lot of time in that part of Europe, and was glad to see them get a leg up on the old cultural production ladder.) Iwiski and Kiciski met in a high-school math class. Both loved computer games, but the only versions of those games readily available in Poland were pirated copies traded by fans at weekend markets in Warsaw. After a couple of years hawking games in the Warsaw markets, the duo started getting CDs imported legally from international distributors and selling them to small retail stores. They incorporated in 1994, calling their company CD Projekt.

Their first big investment involved a Dungeons & Dragons video game that came on five CDs and involved recruiting Polish actors to voice characters in the game. They sold eighteen thousand copies on the first daya huge success. They then created a studio, CD Projekt Red, and developed their own game, based on a Polish fantasy series called The Witcher, which Andrzej Sapkowski had begun writing in the mid-eighties. The series takes place on an unnamed continent that was originally inhabited by mythical creatures and has since been colonized by humans. The titular witcher, Geralt of Rivia, is a monster-hunting mercenary. Developing the game took four years and ate up all of their funds. For half a year, we were working twelve-hour days every day, all weekends, all the time, the games lead character artist has said. The Witcher came out in 2007 and has since sold more than two million copies. Its sequel was so successful that Polands Prime Minister gave a copy to Barack Obama when Obama made a visit to the country, in 2011. Obama later called the game a great example of Polands place in the new global economy.

In 2012, CD Projekt Red announced that one of its next big games would be an adaptation of Mike Pondsmiths Cyberpunk. A teaser for the game, called Cyberpunk 2077, was released in January, 2013. It showed what appeared to be an attractive young cyborg in a tight-fitting top repelling bullets fired by heavily armored police with her skin. The video ended with a promise: COMING: WHEN ITS READY. In the meantime, the company released the Witcher 3, in 2015. There were some early technical hiccups, but it was eventually hailed as one of the best video games ever made, and sold more than thirty million copies.

Three years later, CD Projekt Red premired a nearly hour-long demo of Cyberpunk 2077 for a handful of attendees at the video-game industrys biggest trade show, E3. Cyberpunk 2077 is an open world game, in which you can roam more or less freely and do things that arent related to the games principal mission. The game largely employs a first-person perspectiveone of the studios more ambitious decisions was to mostly do away with scenes in which a player simply watches action unfold without any control over it. The idea is that, at all times, the player can wander around and see a world operating as it should.

The protagonist is a mercenary named V, who has been hired to steal a biochip. The heist goes bad, and V has to stash it in her head. (V can be whatever gender a player chooses.) The chip contains the digital incarnation of a rock star named Johnny Silverhand, who, half a century before, participated in the central tragedy in Night City history, the bombing of the Arasaka Tower, the regional headquarters of a major corporation. (Pondsmith told me that he was already writing that bit of game lore twenty years ago when he looked up at a TV and saw the second plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Center. He put the story aside for a while.) V has to remove the chip from her head before Silverhands identity overwrites her own. Meanwhile, she learns about the insidious activities of the Arasaka corporation, including the development of an A.I. program called Soulkiller. V must decide whether or not to sabotage Arasaka, as Silverhand once tried to do.

At an event ahead of the next E3, CD Projekt premired a trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 that culminated with Silverhands arrival onscreen in the form of Keanu Reeves. It was a canny choice: Reeves is basically the Hollywood face of cyberpunk, thanks to his roles in Johnny Mnemonic and the Matrix movies. (Ive always wanted to participate in different genres and, now, technologies and versions of storytelling, Reeves told me, when I asked him about Cyberpunk 2077. He also noted that Marlon Brando had a digital version of himself created in the eighties.) When the trailer ended, Reeves appeared onstage amid a puff of smoke and revealed that the game would be ready in April, 2020. Let me tell you, he said to the crowd, the feeling of being there, of walking the streets of the future, is really going to be breathtaking.

By then, former employees of CD Projekt Red had already told the journalist Jason Schreier, then working at Kotaku, that the development of the game had been rocky. In order to meet production deadlines, the ex-employees said many developers at the company had to rely on crunchi.e., mandatory, or effectively mandatory, overtime, a widespread industry practice that is notorious for causing burnout. Iwiski assured Schreier that his company was going to forbid mandatory overtime. Then, in January, 2020, the release of Cyberpunk 2077 was pushed back to September. In June, it was pushed to November. In early fall, Schreier, now writing for Bloomberg, reported that CD Projekt Red had ordered six-day workweeks for its developers. Starting today, the entire (development) studio is in overdrive, Adam Badowski, the studios director, wrote in an e-mail obtained by Schreier. I know this is in direct opposition to what weve said about crunch, he added. Its also in direct opposition to what I personally grew to believe a while backthat crunch should never be the answer. But weve extended all other possible means of navigating the situation. (In response to Schreiers article, Badowski posted a message on Twitter: This is one of the hardest decisions Ive had to make, but everyone is well compensated for every extra hour they put in.) A few weeks after that, the release was postponed again, to December.

In the months leading up to the new December launch date, I spoke and corresponded with a number of people at CD Projekt Red. In an e-mail, Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz, the quest director for Cyberpunk 2077, wrote, I believe were trying to show with our worldbuilding and narrative that in reality the issues that plague the Cyberpunk society, and by extension our own society, are much more complex and fundamentalas Johnny Silverhand learns the hard way, its not enough to topple one corporation to really make a difference, as others will take its place right away. One of the clichs that his team had tried to avoid, he went on, was a binary depiction of corporations as bad and cyberpunks as good. The corporations and their dysfunctions in this approach are a symptom of a systemic issue, not the cause, he explained. Iwiski told me that, for him, the worst kind of entertainment is obvious entertainment, and insisted that, in the Witcher games and in this one, there is no clear distinction between good and evil. Patrick Mills, at the time the games senior quest designer, said that one of his high-level goals for the games lore was that there would be no consensus reality. He had cordinated with Pondsmith to insure continuity between the video game and its pen-and-paper siblings. Still, he said, We know with this many people working on this, telling this many number of stories, that were going to have inconsistencies. So why not work with that?

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The Strange, Unfinished Saga of Cyberpunk 2077 - The New Yorker

Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red has entered negotiations to settle a class-action lawsuit over the games bungled launch.

There are still a number of outstanding questions about any potential settlement, according to court documents, including all class certification requirements, the proposed allocation plan for the settlement fund, and how the settlement will be administered. In other words, its undecided exactly who will be eligible for anything awarded in a settlement or how much those eligible parties may receive.

The plaintiffs in the case must next file a preliminary approval of the settlement or an update on its status by January 13th, 2022. Four lawsuits against the company were compiled into one in May.

At release (which was almost exactly one year ago), Cyberpunk 2077 had many glitches and ran quite poorly on older consoles. Things were so bad that Sony pulled the game from the PlayStation Store within a week. CDPR has spent much of the year since trying to fix things up with hotfixes and updates, and the game eventually returned to the PlayStation Store after more than six months. The studio also pushed a planned update optimizing Cyberpunk 2077 for next-gen consoles into 2022.

Original post:

CD Projekt Red is working to settle a class-action lawsuit over botched Cyberpunk 2077 launch - The Verge

Its hard to describe the games story because I still dont quite understand whats going on after finishing it twice. You take control of Randolph Carter, who is transported to what I understand into his mind, where he emerges on an alien planet.

After traversing this alien planet, he awakes in his apartment only to discover that hes getting messages from his dead friends and sets off to solve their murders by hacking into his memories to figure out what happened. That is at least how I understood what was going on.

There are aspects of the story that I truly enjoyed, the best of which involve the games horror aspects that utilize demons and a giant tentacle-faced monster. As you explore the environment and solve puzzles, shadows of demonic entities appear in the distance, just far enough away that you cant quite make out whats haunting your memories.

The other big mystery is what happened to the world you live in. The remaining citizens live underground, connected to a virtual machine to live in a better world. Though you know that the surface of the planet is uninhabitable, the game does a great job making you wonder throughout if Cathulu himself was the cause of the surfaces destruction.

The majority of the game sees you examining dead bodies, hacking terminals, and solving various puzzles. These puzzles are complex enough that they would have made them great head-scratchers, but the answers are presented to you in your journal, making them all reasonably easy to solve.

Each of the games five chapters features different puzzles, so you wont be stuck doing the same thing throughout the game.

Hacking sees you moving an avatar around on a grid trying to collect files while avoiding security bots, while another puzzle has you mixing various chemicals to create specific compounds. These are just some examples of the kind of puzzles youll have to deal with.

Solving riddles arent the only obstacles in your way, however. There are moments in Transient where youre transported to other games within the game. One of these experiences is an old school horror title much like the original Alone In The Dark, which sees you playing through in a third-person perspective with old-school tank controls facing off against zombies.

Another mini-game is a first-person adventure game that reminded me of System Shock as you fight your way through hordes of robots with a steel pipe.

Unfortunately, these mini-games come with the same problems that plagued them in the past. For example, the robot min-game constantly has enemies spawning right behind you without indicating theyre there.

Even worse, as youre trying to solve a puzzle, they spawn and attack you in the middle of tackling the conundrum, forcing you to try and solve the puzzle as quickly as you could before more robots spawned. Suffice to say; I saw many games over screens during this part.

Visually, Transient looks solid enough, especially with HDR enabled. The neon lights of the Cyberpunk world create a great vibe, and the desolate look of the world pushes the dystopian setting.

Shadows are really where the game shines, and they do a great job of playing tricks on your eyes. The mini-games are also perfectly recreated for better or worse. But I got to say, its something special having real-time shadows in a pixilated world that looks like it was designed in the early 90s.

The games soundtrack is pretty solid though; the tracks that are present, along with the ambient noise that plays throughout the game, is haunting and complements the game world perfectly.

I should flag up a major bug I encountered. Sometime at the start of chapter four, the game would suddenly crash as the same spot over and over again. I crashed about twelve times. I believe this is due to playing the game on my PS5. Thankfully, I got around the glitch by uninstalling the game, reinstalling it on my PS4 and transferring my save file.

Transient is a game that had the makings of something great, but the mixing of Lovecraftian horror and Cyberpunk doesnt work as well as it should. The biggest culprit is the presentation of the story, which after two playthroughs, is still as confusing as it was the first time through.

The games best features, its puzzles, should have been fun to solve, but instead, the game holds your hand through every one of them.

Transient is a competent game; its just not a long lasting or memorable one. Case and point: one of its Trophies asks you to finish the game in under 90 minutes, proving just how easy and forgettable the experience can be.

Transient is now available on PS4 and PS5.

Review code provided by PR

Read more:

Transient Review (PS4) - A Lovecraftian Story Set In A Cyberpunk World That Doesn't Do Either One Justice - PlayStation Universe

As I sat down at my PC on December 10, 2020, I had big plans. I was going to start playing Cyberpunk 2077 as a Corpomy version of V would be young, driven, and privilegeda ruthless company techbro. I carefully designed my character with a tidy hairstyle, no tattoos, and minimal cyberware.

I figured as I progressed through the game and fell deeper and deeper into the violent underworld of Night City, I'd alter my appearance. My hairstyle would get shaggier and wilder. I'd slowly add tattoos and more severe cyberware to my face and body. My character's looks would reflect his life. You know. Roleplaying.

That was the plan. But it became clear almost immediately I wouldn't be able to do anything like that.

The Corpo lifepath in Cyberpunk 2020 was absurdly briefI walked around an office for a bit, clicked a few things on my desk, got a wad of cash and a shady assignment from my boss, and then met my old friend Jackie in a barwhere I was immediately fired from my job and severed from my corporate contacts. That was it? That was the Corpo lifepath option I'd heard about so much in the pre-launch buildup to the game? It's hard to call something a path if you run into a brick wall after a single step.

An even shorter cutscene showed my character descending into a life of violent crimethe sort of thing I wanted to experience myself rather than sit there watching. A few minutes into the game I was, essentially, a Street Kid, the lifepath I deliberately didn't choose. And more bafflingly, I could forget about changing my looks to mirror my new lifestyle. There were no character customization options once I began playing. I couldn't alter my appearance or add tattoos. In a game about becoming whoever you want, I couldn't even change my nail polish color once I'd picked it.

That was a lot of disappointment to experience in the first 20 minutes of one of the most hyped and highly-anticipated games ever. And the Corpo lifepath I'd chosen felt like it rarely came into play over the next 20 hours. There were some dialogue options, one or two Corpo-related choices to make during quests, and one side-mission late in the game which was more of a quick encounter. The disappointments didn't end there.

Bugs. Everywhere there were bugs. The first time I stepped out of V's apartment and into the streets of Night City, I just stood and stared. I should have been gawping at the city itself, but instead I was drawn to a street corner where each and every car that turned down the block plowed into the same concrete barricade. Doors were torn off, glass shattered, bumpers bent and crumpled, and drivers shouted expletives as they sped off in their ruined cars.

As the first few hours passed it became clear Cyberpunk 2077 wasn't just a buggy game. Cyberpunk 2077 was an unfinished game.

Most of the bugs I experienced in my first playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077 weren't major. There were one or two that actually prevented me from progressing and required a reload of my last save, which is always irritating. But it really wasn't the individual bugs themselves that were the issue. It was the overwhelming number of them. In every missionthat's not an exaggeration, it was every single missionat least a few things would go wrong. A character would repeat the same line of dialogue over and over from start to finish or T-pose during a dramatic moment. A weapon would wind up sticking out of someone's face or an object would simply hover in midair. A notification would get stuck on the screen or someone would get stuck walking in midair or my car would get stuck in another car, flip upside down, and explode.

Every game has bugs and glitches, but they were inescapable in Cyberpunk 2077. It was a mess, and distracted heavily from interactions with interesting characters and what would otherwise be engrossing storylines.

Other issues weren't the result of bugs but systems that seemed incomplete at best or simply nonexistent at worst. It felt weird how quickly police would respond to a crime, and weirder how they'd prefer to run after your car than jump into their own to give chase, until it became obviousthey didn't possess the ability to follow you in cars and they responded so quickly because they were simply teleporting to a space a few feet behind you. In one mission where cops are specifically supposed to pursue me in cars, they diduntil I briefly looked away from them. When I looked back, they'd vanished:

As the first few hours passed it became clear Cyberpunk 2077 wasn't just a buggy game. Cyberpunk 2077 was an unfinished game. There's a big difference.

Cyberpunk 2077 was a massive hit, with 13 million copies sold within 10 days across all platforms. It was also a major disaster, with backlash from unhappy fans and angry developers inside CD Projekt, a refund debacle, its removal from the PlayStation store, multiple lawsuits, and the rapid erosion of CDP's reputation.

The apologies began to arrive a few days after launch, with the studio first suggesting issues with AI were just bugs, which was obviously not the case, then doubling down by saying that pre-launch testing "did not show a big part of the issues," which was clearly bullshit. The game wasn't finished and everyone knew it. Our review recommended coming back in a few months to see if some of the major bugs had been fixed, but I personally felt it needed another two years of development. A couple patches weren't going to fix Cyberpunk 2077, because it didn't just need to be fixed, it needed to be finished.

Cyberpunk 2077's launch was a rotten situation on all sides. It was unfair to players who bought the game expecting it to be complete. It was unfair to the developers who worked for years and weren't allowed to take their game across the finish line before it was shipped. Cyberpunk 2077 was, and still is, an Early Access game. It just didn't say that on the box. It should have. It would have tempered expectations and no one would have felt cheated.

The patches began rolling out alongside repeated promises to make Cyberpunk 2077 whole. Stability, performance issues, and critical quest and game-breaking bugs were addressed first, along with a bizarre memory limit issue that was corrupting saved games over a certain size. Last-gen consoles, which bore the brunt of the problems, were naturally a big focus of patches and the game finally returned to the PlayStation store in June. I jumped back in to try it again on PC after the v1.2 patch, which was a whopping 32GB in size. I played a few hours, then quit because despite the patch addressing over 500 different issues, the game was still a huge mess. Even those cars I witnessed smashing into the barricade outside V's apartment on day one were still doing it. That was back in April. There was a long way to go, I wrote at the time. There still is.

I'm playing through Cyberpunk 2077 again now, almost exactly a year after launch. And it's honestly nice to be back. There are some excellent characters with interesting stories, and despite all the problems my first time around I truly enjoyed getting to know them and seeing their stories develop. There's some great dialogue (along with plenty that's terrible) and some truly excellent missions.

And I can, finally and definitely, see the difference a year of patches has made. I'm not getting anywhere near as many bugs as I did those first few weeks and the following several months. The cops still teleport when I get a warrant on V (they're a shade more subtle about it) and still won't chase me in cars, but I wasn't really expecting that to have improved. Maybe in 2022.

There's been an impressive amount of work done over the year, and it shows. An early quest where Jackie kept getting stuck midway through the level on my first run went perfectly smoothly this time, and looking through patch notes it appears dozens of other quest bugs have been squashed along with that one. I haven't been launched through the air while climbing ladders, something that happened regularly the last time I played, and notifications don't get stuck on my screen anymore.

I'm especially happy to see some quality of life changes, like fewer messages from fixers trying to sell me cars (this, and the rest of the near-constant phone call spam was a major irritant for me), the improved zoom level on the minimap so I don't miss turns while following the GPS, and the fact that open world NPCs now react differently to events instead of all crouching or running or exiting their cars in perfect unison, which was pretty immersion breaking.

I am, however, getting far more frequent crashes to desktop than I ever did. In about eight hours of playing, the game crashed five or six times. That's not great, especially since crashing was one problem I never really had originally (and I'm using the exact same PC). And I'm pretty pleased to report that the cars outside V's apartment no longer ram mindlessly into that barricade.

But like I said, bugs aren't the only problem. I still can't change my appearance after starting the game. The lifepaths still feel entirely pointless. And playing the game again I'm remembering other things I was excited about, like brain dancing, which turned out to be used only a few times to solve some low-level puzzles, and the fearsome Trauma Team, who show up what, once? Twice? And have absolutely no other part in the game? Surely there was meant to be more of them.

I'd love to be writing a year later that it's a great time to be jumping back into Cyberpunk 2077. Apparently a lot of new players are having a great time. But honestly, if you've waited this long, I recommend waiting another year to see if more than just bugs get patched. A lotbut not nearly everythinghas been fixed in a year, but making Cyberpunk 2077 whole will mean not just fixing what's broken but addressing what's lacking. I'm sure they'll eventually do the first part. I'm not so sure about the second. Maybe I'll try again next December.

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A year later, Cyberpunk 2077 has fewer bugs but still feels like it's in Early Access - PC Gamer

CD Projekt Red has confirmed that they will be adding to the lore of Cyberpunk 2077 and Night City with the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime series, but when is it being released?

The anime was initially announced ahead of the actual release of Cyberpunk 2077 in 2020l however, fans have become more interested in the Netflix release following the major success of the League of Legends Arcane anime on the streaming service.

While the massively botched initial release of Cyberpunk 2077 on consoles and PC initially took all of the headlines, the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime is now back in the minds of fans as the game proper gets closer to being the realisation of the vision that CDPR originally had for the game.

The initial press release for the anime stated that it would: "tell a standalone, 10-episode story about a street kid trying to survive in a technology and body modification-obsessed city of the future.

Having everything to lose, he chooses to stay alive by becoming an edgerunnera mercenary outlaw also known as a cyberpunk."

Cyberpunk 2077 game director Adam Badowski explained why the company was bringing out the standalone series, saying: We are so excited to finally reveal that we are working on an anime in the Cyberpunk world.

Weve devoured just about all the cyberpunk fiction there is to watch, read, and play; its a genre that leaves so much room for creativity, and has had such a strong influence on us. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is our love letter to cyberpunk as a whole, and to stories told in animated form.

Heres everything you need to know about the release of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners on Netflix.

Read More: Cyberpunk 2077 Patch 1.4 Update: Release Date, Roadmap, Patch Notes and Everything We Know So Far

The Netflix original series is set to be released in 2022, although there is currently no exact date for the actual release.

With CDPR set to release the Next-Gen version of the game in the first quarter of 2022, it is likely that the anime will be coming after, assuming that all goes smoothly with the latest update of the game.

CDPR will clearly be hoping to replicate the success of Arcane: League of Legends, bringing even more potential fans to the world of Night City and Cyberpunk 2077 as a franchise.

We will update this page as and when there is an official release for Cyberpunk: Edgerunners on Netflix!

Read More: Cyberpunk 2077 Patch 1.4 Update: Release Date, Roadmap, Patch Notes and Everything We Know So Far

Enter the November Giveaway to win a Nintendo Switch with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and FIFA 22 Legacy Edition!

You can find all of the latest Cyberpunk 2077 News and everything Gaming related right here at GiveMeSport.

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When is the Cyberpunk: Edgerunners Anime Being Released on Netflix? - GiveMeSport