My Life As A Gamer: Don't Neglect Your Partners CD Projekt Red

CD Projekt Red cut a big promotional video for Cyberpunk 2077 and released it yesterday. I'll post the only part that matters.

Let's make this clear: you, the player, are not the protagonist here. Silverhand is; this game's narrative is his story, and you're the sidekick.

This is a big deal, because it means that the development team actually listened to Maximum Mike and spent time pouring over old Cyberpunk 2020 materials when putting this game together.

That includes the lore, lore that--in all likelyhood--will show up when you see the flashbacks of Johnny's life between 2013 and 2020ish. That clip your man steals and then slots into his brainmeats? That's from first edition Cyberpunk, when Silverhand's ex-girlfriend Alt got sucked into the prototype chip and became a ghost AI like Silverhand is in this game.

Arasaka? They're the megacorporation that snatched Alt and sucked her into that chip. Silverhand got mad, and shit went down.

That they kept him on ice in another, better version of that same chip technology is nothing more than latter-day permanent imprisonment. Your man didn't just snatch some hot tech from some corporation, you busted a big player out of prison.

And all of us old-timers, making comments about all of this, are getting the same reactions: "How do you know so much lore?" Then these same folks who never paid attention to anything not right in front of their noses and couldn't be bothered to do a simple search get their minds blown by being told that CP2077 is based on CP2020 (because We Do Not Talk About CPv3) from 30 years ago.

Which then leads to us old-timers linking them to DrivethruRPG to see the line for themselves. (And you can too; click the picture of the CP2020 cover.) It's clear that CDPR is not doing right by R.Talsorian Games by not being explicit about where the source material comes from or how you can get to it; this may not be required by contract, but if you're leaning on your sources for marketing, the least you can do is acknowledge them and promote them in turn even if in passing (and link to their landing page). If it wasn't for we old-timers filling in the blanks for the normies, the confusion would be much worse.

I don't know what's going to be more disappointing in the end. Will it be the game not living up to the hype, the developers not being good to their sources, the audience being oblivious sheep, or the press being their usual piss-poor excuses for failure. At least we're getting the cyberpunk we deserve, not what we need, but without any of the shining cyberware chrome- and I could use a proper cybernetic leg.