When news first came out that CDProjekt RED, the company behind The Witcher series of fantasy action-RPGs, was planning something set closer to our modern age, speculation flew high as to what it could possibly be. A gritty detective tale? A low-fantasy thriller? Instead, the company revealed that they were working on a game based on Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk 2020 game, a pen-and-paper role-playing system set in a future of corporate rule and biological/technological fusion.
Now the title is out of the bag: Cyberpunk 2077. The year is different because this isn’t just an adaptation of the Cyberpunk 2020 rules and world to a PC RPG, but a de facto sequel, set in the same world approximately fifty years later, but featuring familiar locales and an overall theme pulled from the pages of the PnP system.
Further, a blog post on the game’s new website outlines some of the challenges of adapting a PnP system to the more rigid framework of a video game, a setting in which rules have to be absolute and GM interpretation is left entirely up to the developers. It’s certainly worth a read.