Cyberpunk 2077

• 1. One Million Players

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  Cyberpunk 2077 broke a record within hours of its midnight GMT launch on the 10th of December 2020. More than one million people played it at once on Steam, and one million viewers watched live on Twitch. Together, the figures doubled the previous record, set by Fallout 4 in 2015.

  The game came from CD Projekt Red and was an action role-playing game that had been anticipated for years. Within days of that record, it was being described as one of the most conspicuous disasters in the industry's history.

  How did a game this anticipated stumble so publicly? What was it trying to be, and what did it take to build? And why did players keep coming back to it long after the first wave of anger?

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• 2. Night City

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  Night City lies between Los Angeles and San Francisco, in a version of history that went wrong in the 1980s. In this timeline, the United States became mired in wars in Central America, which badly weakened its power and economy. The Soviet Union never dissolved, and Japan became a superpower whose culture spread as far as California.

  The city itself was founded in the mid-2040s as an independent city-state, set between the Free States of North California and South California. It functions as a corporatocracy, unaffected by federal or state law. Gang violence and corporate warfare run through it, and both the municipal government and the police are ineffectual and corrupt.

  Robots handle waste management, building maintenance, and public transport in Night City. Poverty and homelessness are widespread, yet even the poor can afford cybernetic modification, which feeds cosmetic addiction and high levels of violence. People whose addictions and heavy modifications leave them mentally unstable are called cyberpsychos. A police tactical unit named MaxTac deals with them. Privatised health corporations such as Trauma Team send paramilitary doctors for rapid medical response. Because harm is a constant threat, every resident may carry weapons openly.

  Watson is home to immigrants, Westbrook is luxurious, and Heywood is an inner-city district. The corporate towers stand in City Center, the industrial suburbs make up Santo Domingo, and the Badlands surround the city. Pacifica was once a prosperous vacation destination until an economic crisis hit, and a Haitian community then built a life around its abandoned buildings. Society splits into two classes. The downtrodden seek escape in psychedelic substances, while an elite corporate class known as corpos holds the money and the power.

  The city's many non-English-speaking residents can be understood through special translation implants. Some people also use a technology called Braindance, which lets them live through another person's experiences.

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• 3. The Relic Job

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  In 2077, a fixer named Dex DeShawn hires two mercenaries, V and Jackie Welles, to steal a biochip called the Relic from the Arasaka Corporation. A fixer is a shady middleman who brokers information and smuggling, and Arasaka is a megacorporation that acts as the de facto ruler of the city. The job collapses when the pair witness Yorinobu Arasaka murder his father, Saburo, the company's founder, and disguise it as poisoning. The netrunner T-Bug, who supports the crew, is killed. Jackie is mortally wounded, and the Relic's case is damaged, so V has to slot the chip into their own head. Dex shoots V and leaves them for dead.

  V wakes in a landfill, haunted by the digital ghost of Johnny Silverhand, a rocker turned terrorist. In 2023, Johnny attacked Arasaka Tower alongside Rogue Amendiares and other mercenaries, and he died in the attack. Rogue now runs the Afterlife nightclub. Saburo's bodyguard, Goro Takemura, rescues V because he suspects the truth and wants V as proof against Yorinobu. The ripperdoc Viktor Vector, a doctor who installs cybernetic implants, explains the danger. Nanotechnology in the chip is overwriting V's mind with Johnny's engram, a stored copy of his consciousness. V has only weeks to find a cure. Johnny starts out hostile, then resolves to help while hoping to bring Arasaka down again.

  The trail leads through Evelyn Parker, who commissioned the heist, and through the Voodoo Boys, a gang of very private netrunners. They wanted Johnny's engram so they could reach beyond the Blackwall, a firewall that protects the internet and the world from rogue artificial intelligences. Through them, V relives Johnny's past. In 2013, his girlfriend Alt Cunningham created Soulkiller, a program that transfers minds into cyberspace but destroys the brain. Arasaka used it on Alt and imprisoned her in a digital fortress called Mikoshi. Johnny's later nuclear attack freed her, and she escaped into the Blackwall and became an artificial intelligence. He died and was uploaded through Soulkiller. V strikes a deal with Alt. If V gives her access to Arasaka's subnet and Mikoshi, she can separate V from Johnny.

  Meanwhile, Takemura wants to take his evidence to the Arasaka executives. He and V capture Hanako Arasaka, Yorinobu's sister, to prove his guilt. Hanako later offers V help in exchange for ousting Yorinobu, and Johnny greatly opposes the idea.

  In the final act, V must either assault Arasaka Tower or accept Hanako's offer. On every path, V fights Adam Smasher, Arasaka's ruthless cyborg head of security and Johnny's nemesis, and defeats him. V can spare Adam or strike the exposed part of his brain to deactivate him. The tower attack can be carried out solo, with Rogue, or with the Aldecaldos, and with Rogue, Johnny takes control of V's body. By then the chip's effects are irreversible, and the Relic has tailored the body for Johnny.

  The endings differ. V can upload their engram to Mikoshi to await a new body, an option available only after accepting Hanako's offer. V can live on in their own body with a shortened lifespan while seeking a way to undo the damage. Or V can give the body to Johnny permanently and go beyond the Blackwall with Alt, an option available only after attacking the tower. In that case, Johnny leaves Night City to start anew.

  Every one of those paths descends from a tabletop game written by Mike Pondsmith.

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• 4. Pondsmith's Permission

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  In early 2012, CD Projekt Red approached Mike Pondsmith, the writer of Cyberpunk and founder of R. Talsorian Games. It sent him a copy of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, released in 2011. Pondsmith was impressed by how well the studio understood the Cyberpunk universe. The two sides agreed that the studio would license the story from the year 2077 onward, while Pondsmith kept the rights to media set before that year.

  Pondsmith stayed on as a consultant to keep the story cohesive, and he voiced the DJ of an in-game radio station. His earlier work gave the studio valuable experience to draw on. He had developed Crimson Skies in 2000 and Blood Wake in 2001 at Microsoft, and The Matrix Online in 2005 at Monolith Productions. The studio's earlier collaboration with Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski, whose novels inspired The Witcher, had been marked by his indifference.

  Pondsmith's original game carries a mood of rebellion and whimsy inside a grim tone. Its protagonist is not the usual hero saving the world, but someone trying to save themself from a downtrodden position. Lead gameplay designer Marcin Janiszewski wrote, "We want to assure fans of the pen-and-paper game that this is still the same Cyberpunk you know". The long gap between the tabletop events and 2077 gave the studio more freedom than it had with The Witcher.

  The script was first written in Polish and then translated into English, which quest director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz described as standard practice at the studio. The team chose a first-person view to immerse players and to reinforce the megacorporation theme. Cutscenes are also framed in first person, with limited exceptions. Players can drive in third person, and V appears in mirrors and security cameras. Game director Adam Badowski defended the inclusion of nudity by arguing that in a world of augmented bodies, the body is no longer sacred.

  The player first picks one of three life paths: Nomad, Street Kid, or Corpo. The Street Kid starts in Heywood with deep knowledge of the streets and gangs. The Corpo starts in City Center with the expertise to deal with the upper echelon of corporate life. The Nomad starts in the Badlands as an outsider who knows how corporate goods are acquired and transported. The paths grant no advantage in perks, attributes, or levelling, but they add unique dialogue options.

  The two main play styles are Netrunner, which centres on hacking, and Solo, which centres on combat. The game can be completed without killing anyone, not counting robots. The quest team built logic that lets players tackle quests in seemingly random orders while the story stays coherent. They also doubled down on The Witcher 3 philosophy of a quest twist, and they recycled unused parts of the main story as side quests.

  That first-person view would soon push the studio to rebuild its own technology.

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• 5. Rebuilding the Engine

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  Cyberpunk 2077 was initially developed on REDengine 3, as far back as 2013. The studio had built that engine for third-person games, and a first-person game proved difficult to make with it. CD Projekt Red therefore created REDengine 4, funded with a US$7 million grant from the Polish government. Nearly every aspect of the engine changed, including the particle effects editor. A report from the studio showed that work on the engine continued as late as 2017. Cyberpunk 2077 is the final game to use REDengine. Future games from the studio will be built with Unreal Engine 5.

  A team of around 500 people developed the game, and CD Projekt launched a new division in Wroclaw, Poland. Several outside companies helped. Digital Scapes, a Vancouver-based studio, built additional tools. Nvidia helped implement real-time ray tracing, which simulates how light behaves. The developer QLOC handled quality assurance. Jali Research, an artificial intelligence company, helped generate lip syncing for all ten localisations through procedural generation.

  REDengine 4 added many lighting upgrades to make the world feel more realistic. These included hardware-accelerated real-time ray tracing, global illumination, and ambient occlusion, none of which appear on the console versions. The engine also used physically based rendering, improved shadows, and subsurface scattering and realistic skin shading for characters. Ray-traced reflections leave out the player's character, though mirrors still show V. To save memory, the game uses vertical asset streaming, which skips objects above and below the player's field of view.

  These features added computational complexity that tested older consoles such as the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

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• 6. Look and Sound

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  Two designers shaped the look of Night City from opposite directions. German industrial designer Dieter Rams supplied the elegance that the art team set against the low-class neighbourhoods. American concept artist Syd Mead supplied the vibrant colours and materialism behind the city's character, which the team called kitsch. Building these environments took eight years. The team studied dilapidated, old-fashioned buildings and added futuristic touches. Environment City Coordinator Hiroshi Sakakibara described the idea at Tokyo Game Show 2020, saying, "For example, you could have a run down building with an old wooden door, but an LED light might be attached to that door, which could be a part of a high-tech security system".

  Blade Runner, released in 1982, was a key source of inspiration, and Sakakibara called it the "Bible of all cyberpunk". The team also looked to the manga and anime series Ghost in the Shell and to the video games System Shock and the first Deus Ex. They consulted urban planners and drew on Brutalist architecture. Yellow became the game's signature colour to set it apart from other icons of the genre. The designs of Marcello Gandini shaped many of the cars. A motorbike like the one in Akira appears in the game, along with a car inspired by Mad Max: Fury Road.

  Four visual styles explain what happened to the world before the story begins. Entropism came first, an austere style of bulky cars and unappealing buildings that valued practicality over looks. As the economy recovered, the colourful style of Kitsch took hold. Neomilitarism followed, an imposing and ascetic movement in which the rise of corporations undid many of Entropism's choices. Neokitsch then joined the class divisions of Neomilitarism to the vibrance of Kitsch, with the rich building in scarce materials such as wood and marble. The team designed the city with the digital compositing software Nuke. Where most games use tone-mapping, this one uses a classic film LUT.

  Gavin Drea and Cherami Leigh voice the male and female versions of V. In July 2018, CD Projekt Red approached Keanu Reeves to play Johnny Silverhand. Reeves was recorded with motion capture, a technique he had used as Neo in The Matrix in 1999. He was new to video games but enjoyed the script. CD Projekt co-founder Marcin Iwinski recalled that only V has more dialogue than Johnny. Localisation involved nearly half of the 5,381 people who worked on the game, including 1,966 voice actors.

  Marcin Przybylowicz composed the original score, and several licensed artists contributed to the fictional radio stations and soundtrack albums. They included Run the Jewels, Rosa Walton, Grimes, Refused, ASAP Rocky, Gazelle Twin, Yugen Blakrok, and Ilan Rubin. Run the Jewels wrote "No Save Point", which critiques the socioeconomic state of Night City. El-P and Killer Mike perform it in the game as "Yankee and the Brave". Rosa Walton's "I Really Want to Stay at Your House" went viral in 2022 after an anime series used it prominently. It then topped the Billboard Top TV Songs chart in the United States.

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• 7. A Troubled Launch

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  Anticipation was enormous. The game won over one hundred awards at E3 2018, and at E3 2019 CD Projekt Red announced a release date of the 16th of April 2020. That date slipped to the 17th of September, then to the 19th of November, and finally into December. The developers received death threats over the last delay. It was decided suddenly, with discussions starting only a day before the announcement. Polish law barred CD Projekt from telling its whole large team, so around ninety per cent learned at the last minute. Everspace 2 from Rockfish Games and an expansion for Grinding Gear Games' Path of Exile were pushed back a month to avoid competing.

  Trust frayed before release. CD Projekt Red gave review copies to major outlets under strict embargo terms. Reviewers had to sign non-disclosure agreements and could show only footage supplied by the company. According to Wired, which received no copy, a violation could cost around $27,000. The review copies were all for the PC version, so no pre-release review covered the consoles.

  Liana Ruppert, a Game Informer journalist with photosensitive epilepsy, had a grand mal seizure while reviewing the game days before release. The trigger was the Braindance sequence, which uses red and white flashing lights. At that point the game offered only a generic warning about flashing lights and images in its licence agreement. CD Projekt Red made a public statement and reached out to Ruppert. A patch added a warning, and a later patch on the 11th of December adjusted the whole sequence to reduce the risk.

  When reviews arrived, the PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series versions earned "generally favorable" scores on Metacritic. The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions earned "mixed or average" scores. On OpenCritic, 66% of critics recommended the game. Critics praised the story, the depth of the side quests, the atmosphere, and the visuals. Crafting, driving, and combat drew a mixed response. Some critics argued that transgender characters were fetishised in the game's material but given no meaningful role in the narrative.

  The launch itself was considered disastrous because of numerous bugs and performance problems, especially on the older consoles. The Guardian called the release "a shambles". Commentators described it as a fall from grace for a studio that had enjoyed a fiercely pro-consumer reputation. CD Projekt apologised and said unhappy buyers could seek refunds. Sony offered refunds and removed the game from the PlayStation Store from December 2020 until June 2021. After it returned, the store warned that purchase for the PlayStation 4 was not recommended. Microsoft also offered refunds. In the United States, GameStop accepted returns of opened boxes, an exception to its usual policy. Executives told investors the studio had taken the "wrong approach" with the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions.

  CD Projekt's stock fell by up to 9.4% after the Metacritic scores appeared. A class-action lawsuit on behalf of investors was filed in California on the 24th of December 2020, accusing the company of misleading claims. By May 2021, four lawsuits had been merged into one action. A judge approved a settlement in January 2023, and the matter ended with a US$1.85 million payment. Poland's Office of Competition and Consumer Protection opened its own investigation in January 2021. The company had asked staff to work six-day weeks for several final months. It dropped plans to tie bonuses to review scores and paid the full bonus.

  Jason Schreier of Bloomberg News reported that management had underestimated the effort. The studio brought in more than twice as many developers as for The Witcher 3 but expected the same development time. The bulk of the work began in late 2016. A new engine and a larger scope made things harder, and many developers urged management to delay. On the 13th of January 2021, co-CEO Marcin Iwinski apologised in an open message. He said the company had "underestimated the risk" of bringing a game built for personal computers to older consoles. He blamed the streaming engine that loads assets on the fly, and he said the release was a management decision, not the developers' fault. He then laid out a year-long plan of patches for the older consoles.

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• 8. The Second Life

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  On the 13th of September 2022, Netflix premiered Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, an anime co-produced by CD Projekt Red and the studio Trigger. Days earlier, Patch 1.6, called the Edgerunners Update, had added free in-game material inspired by the series. Unit sales in 2022 rose by up to 18%, and 94% of them were digital. CD Projekt credited the update and the series for a significant jump in third-quarter sales. The PC player count surged to levels not seen since launch, and more than a million players a day continued for at least four weeks.

  Steam reviews tell the story of the recovery. They began as mostly positive, reached very positive after two and a half years, and hit overwhelmingly positive by January 2025. In September 2023, the Phantom Liberty expansion arrived with Idris Elba voicing and modelling Solomon Reed. Update 2.0 came just days before it and overhauled core parts of the game. Polygon reported, "Update 2.0 has given Cyberpunk 2077 a pulse that didn't exist before". Nvidia's DLSS 3.5 made it the first game to use ray tracing enhanced by artificial intelligence.

  Update 2.1 arrived on the 5th of December 2023 with the Ultimate Edition, and it was described as the last major update. It added a working Metro system and more scenes with V's romantic interest. By February 2024 only 17 developers still worked on the game, and three months later none remained. Yet at the end of 2024, CD Projekt unexpectedly released Update 2.2, which lets Johnny sit in the passenger seat while V drives and comment on events. Patch 2.21 made the game the first to use DLSS 4's multi-frame generation.

  The game reached the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S on the 15th of February 2022. On the 5th of June 2025 it launched on the Nintendo Switch 2, on a 64GB cartridge rather than a Game-Key Card. The macOS version followed on the 17th of July 2025.

  Awards followed the recovery. On the 7th of December 2023, the game won Best Ongoing Game at The Game Awards, its first win there. It took the Evolving Game category at the British Academy Games Awards in 2024. It also won two Steam Awards, for Outstanding Story-Rich Game and Labor of Love. The comic Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams won the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story or Comic in 2023.

  The money tells its own story. The game drew eight million pre-orders, 74% of them digital, more than The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt received. CD Projekt Red says the digital pre-orders alone recouped the production cost and the 2020 marketing cost. Sales passed 13 million in December 2020, including 10.2 million digital units, the biggest digital launch of all time. They passed 20 million by September 2022 and 25 million by October 2023. CD Projekt announced 30 million copies by November 2024 and over 35 million a year later.

  The base game cost $174 million to develop. Phantom Liberty cost roughly $85 million to develop and market, and CD Projekt Red spent $125 million on updates and fixes after launch. The total production cost is reported at between $436 million and around $440 million, making it one of the most expensive games ever made.

  A sequel was announced in October 2022 under the internal codename Project Orion. CD Projekt's North American studios are developing it, and it entered pre-production in May 2025. The company said its journey from pre-production to final release takes four to five years on average. It did not rule out a release as late as late 2030 or early 2031.

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