CD Projekt Red Explains Why Cyberpunk 2077 Gameplay Footage Was Held Back
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, by now you’ve surely feasted you eyes on the glorious Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay footage released earlier today. If you watched until the end of the Twitch stream, you may have noticed a secret message from CD Projekt RED explaining why this footage has been held back until now.
Just a few months ago, at E3, Cyberpunk 2077 footage blasted on scene in an epic way at the end of Microsoft’s press conference. At the time, the short snippet was enough to keep fans satisfied but now CD Projekt RED has shared some badass gameplay footage, a whole 48 minutes worth, which was originally a behind-closed-doors demo shown only to members of the gaming press at E3 2018. So why did they wait so long to share the footage with the public? The developers explained the move at the very end of the video today and thanks to Reddit user Divinus, you can check out what they had to say below.
“Sorry to have kept you waiting for this for so long! Did you like what you saw? Because for us, the fact that we’re finally showing you Cyberpunk 2077 is HUGE. Please go to our forums, twitter, Facebook, discord, and do tell what you think. Is the game world how you imagined? Do you see what we meant by “immersion” when we talked about CP2077 being an FPP RPG? How does our vision of “cyberpunk by day” make you feel? We really want to know.
Aside from that, we think we owe you a few words of explanation on why we’re showing you this gameplay now, some time after industry professionals and media saw it at E3 and Gamescom. Each time we discussed the idea of showing the game to you (and we discussed this idea a lot), we were ending up in this “we’re not 100% sure” limbo. Why? Because (for most people), when a game dev shows gameplay footage from their game, it means that this is how the game is going to look or play like. It’s not the case here. Cyberpunk 2077 is deep in development. We have a lot of design ideas, a lot of mechanics being play tested, but we don’t know what we’ll end up with at launch. This makes publishing videos like what you just saw risky –we don’t want gamers saying, ‘But in that previous video that gun was shooting differently’, or ‘why did you change the interface?’. Change is inherent to game development and there’s a ton of things being modified each day. Our fear was (and kind of still is) that you’ll think what you just saw is how Cyberpunk 2077 will look like 1:1.
What gave us that extra confidence to show you a work in progress game? Good initial feedback from people who are accustomed to see games at various stages of development. What they told us (and they told us they really liked what they saw) gave us the boost we needed to show the current version of Cyberpunk 2077 to the most passionate and insightful audience — you. So… here’s what Cyberpunk 2077 looks like today (or rather looked like when we recorded the video). We sincerely hope you liked it. Again, thank you for your patience and all the thoughts you shared with us. Yours, CD PROJEKT RED.”
Though there is no release date, or window set for Cyberpunk 2077 it is in development for PC, Xbox One, and PS4. What are your thoughts on the gameplay footage and their reasons for keeping this footage hidden for the last few months? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below and don’t forget to keep it locked for updates!