A 2019 Release Date Currently Seems Unlikely
The demo shown for Cyberpunk 2077, an upcoming RPG from The Witcher developer CD Projekt Red, absolutely floored a lot of the gaming press that were allowed to view the demo at E3 2018. However, according to the developer’s president, the demo that was a pre-alpha build.
CD Projekt Red president Adam Kiciński told a Polish finance website that the E3 build was in an “earlier” stage than alpha. “Therefore, we show the game behind closed doors – this is not the final quality yet,” Kiciński explained (according to Google Translate).
“This is the most polished part of the game we have now, prepared in some sense to show it to people outside the company,” added the developer’s Chief Financial Officer Piotr Nielubowicz.
“Pre-alpha” is defined by What Games Are (a blog owned by a game developer) as “a standard term to denote a number of interim milestones between prototyping and alpha, each of which includes new functionality and/or game content.” This means that Cyberpunk 2077 might still be in the early stages of development which most likely means that it won’t be coming out in 2019.
Notably, the game will be shown at this year’s Gamescom convention in August. However, it is currently unconfirmed whether or not it will be shown publicly instead of behind closed doors like at E3.
Cyberpunk 2077 is an open-world first-person RPG set in a futuristic American city. Players will be able to create and customize their own characters and there’ll be a dialogue system along with improvements of some of the mechanics that were featured in 2015’s The Witcher 3.