Gerrard
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It might cross their minds, but then they would never be able to implement it in a good way.
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Cyberpunk 2077 Pre-Re-Announcement Thread [GO TO NEW THREAD]
- Thread starter Outlander
- Start date
Are there any leaks on who will do the music/audio? Will it be someone properly CP like Kavinsky or Lazerhawk.. or in-house?
I think it is the same guy who was responsible for TW3. Of course things can change during the development.
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If Lazerhawk did the audio this would be GOTY already.
Last edited:
Kem0sabe
Arcane
Were those hacks ever released?
I actually deleted the post because I found this https://www.reddit.com/r/cyberpunkgame/comments/60xpjm/cyberpunk_rpg_for_beginnersnewcomers_and/
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http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-07-12-making-cyberpunk-when-mike-pondsmith-met-cd-projekt-red
Making Cyberpunk: when Mike Pondsmith met CD Projekt Red
"This is pretty posh for a bunch of guys working in a broom closet."
"We had Communism and we had Cyberpunk."
Mike Pondsmith would hear those words 25 years after he'd joked about how few people would play a Polish translation of his American paper role-playing game Cyberpunk in a country behind the Iron Curtain. They would be the words spoken by a company offering him the deal of his life, and the words responsible for him signing it. Now nearly 30 years after Mike Pondsmith first published Cyberpunk we're about to see the fruits of the seeds he once inadvertently sowed: Cyberpunk 2077.
With The Witcher series resting in the wings, CD Projekt Red is ready to bring this new collaboration centre stage, and as the spotlight of attention on Cyberpunk 2077 swivels closer, Mike Pondsmith is naturally caught in the glare. Who is this man behind the game CD Projekt Red's near future will be based on - and how is he helping shape it? I followed Mike Pondsmith to Spanish conference Gamelab to find out.
Face to face, Mike Pondsmith is a storyteller. You've seen him before in a video promoting Cyberpunk 2077, but he's embarrassed by it. It was four years ago and he isn't anywhere near as moody in real life. If anything he's sassy, relishing in a story's build up before dropping his head and looking over his pencil-narrow specs for the punchline. He's easy company and seems to know everything, as game designers do. "You need to read everything; you will use everything," he says. "You eat mozzarella, you eat dough, you eat tomatoes and you spit out pizza." He's got a million silly sayings like that.
He grew up a "service brat", always moving home with his US Air Force dad, spending time living in Germany as well as all round the States. It gave him an eclectic perspective, a never-ending string of teachers and influences, and who knows? Perhaps not a regular crowd of friends to entertain himself with. By 11 he'd discovered science fiction, and by 11 he'd also made his first game: a chess-like creation played on a rectangular board with raised squares representing different stages of hyperspace. The idea was to get your ships to the other side, dodging the enemy ships by dropping in and out of hyperspace.
He tells a memorable tale about his first run-ins with Dungeons & Dragons. "This was way the heck back," he begins. "One of the guys in our circle brought back a copy of the original Dungeons & Dragons and came back and we made characters and played, up all night. And we were loud with it.
"[My friend's] apartment was down in a fairly seedy part of Berkeley, and one of the nights we were making so much noise that one of the ladies of the evening actually came by to find out what we were doing and... she got into it! So we had this woman who, when she wasn't turning tricks, was basically playing our cleric."
He was into sci-fi, comics and war gaming but also played in bands. "I wasn't exactly a geek," he says, "because there weren't geeks then," and by university he was even positively "obnoxious", as his future wife would once describe him - he'd asked her friend out instead of her. "That was during my weird 'big man on campus days'," he explains, "when I was dating a lot of people and being, 'Hey, here I am!'"
To get another shot he'd have to pick up gaming again and join an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons group she was in. "And I got invited into a game that was currently being run by her old boyfriend," he says, "who proceeded to try, in every way possible, to kill my character!
"You've gotta understand, back then I had a big afro, I wore mirrorshades, a ratty army jacket, motorcycle boots and carried a six-inch knife - I'd been working in West Oakland which is a real rough neighbourhood. I did not look like the person you wanted to bother! And so there I am in his game and we'd all be on the wall somewhere, fighting some orcs, and he'd send a balrog after me."
But the balrog didn't work - do they ever? - and Mike and Lisa are now living happily ever after. But more importantly back then, Pondsmith was back in gaming, and back in gaming shops, where one afternoon he bumped into Traveller, a science fiction role-playing game. "I was stoked," he says. "I got it back and I whipped out my black books and I started working."
He was around 20 years old when he made what would become his first commercial game, Mekton, inspired by Japanese comic Mobile Suit Gundam. A game about big robots fighting each other. He used the type-setting machine at the University of California, where he was working, to make it, then took Mekton to a conference nearby to try it out. Six people played the first day but 40 people turned up the next, and they wanted to know when they could buy it. Pondsmith borrowed $500 from his mum in 1982 to start R. Talsorian Games and fulfil their wishes. "I was now a game designer whether I planned to be one or not."
The idea of Cyberpunk came to Pondsmith while crossing the San Francisco Bay Bridge at two o'clock in the morning roughly five years later. Blade Runner was his favourite film and he really loved how the city looked that night. "Hmm I wonder..." he thought.
He wanted to create a future - the first edition was set in 2013, jarringly - where society didn't work but access to technology and information allowed normal people to overcome the barriers and restrictions usually held in place by a powerful and influential elite. "And that access," he says, "is rebellious, it's dangerous, it takes risks."
Cyberpunk was the 1980s: the bottled excitement of where all the rapidly evolving technology - mobile phones and personal computers! - would lead, mixed with a blaring screech of punky nonconformity. A game of "big guns, rock and roll, drugs and craziness". "All the bad things you're supposed to not do in other role-playing games - not supposed to rob, not supposed to steal, not supposed to bust into buildings and say, 'Give me your cyberware and all your chips!' - you do that in Cyberpunk." He would give people "a wonderful opportunity to do bad things".
"I figured it would do well," he says, "but I didn't expect I would be riding a cultural wave. It sold just ridiculously. It was a life-changing release."
The success of Cyberpunk, released in 1988, moved R. Talsorian Games out of Pondsmith's house and into a proper office, and would dominate the company's output for years, producing numerous supplements as well as a second edition, Cyberpunk 2020, in 1990. A third edition would have arrived earlier than 2005, but was delayed when Pondsmith's self-described knack of predicting the future threw up a problem.
"I blew up the Arasaka twin towers in Night City with a nuclear weapon," he says. "I'd written it. ?I was sitting there, finishing off, doing a sequence where a full-body cyborg is running around - she's basically part of the recovery team getting bodies out of these gigantic buildings that have been blown up. I finish this, I walk out, and I look at the TV and I go: 'Is that a movie or something?'"
It was September 11th, 2001.
"This is too chilling," he thinks. "I'm watching the World Trade Center going, 'Not only am I horrified about this but I've just done this entire sequence, including the fire and rescue people going in, pulling people out of the building, the wreckage. I'm going, 'Oh no, no no - this is just ridiculous.' This is why Cyberpunk third was late."
But no amount of success and forecasting could keep the paper gaming market from crashing and burning in the late '90s, and Pondsmith, now with dozens and dozens of releases under his belt - including new series Castle Falkenstein - was forced to put Talsorian on ice and look for another job. "I had a kid to raise," he says.
Then the phone rang. "And Microsoft showed up out of leftfield and said, 'Hey you want a job?' And I went, 'I already have a job - I have a whole company.' And they went, 'Oh you can keep your company, that's fine.' And I went, 'Okay... How much are you paying me?' And they gave me a number and I went, 'That's more money than God.'"
His Microsoft job was running a concept team, coming up with ideas for big teams to move onto when their projects wrapped. He worked on games like Crimson Skies, Blood Wake (an Xbox launch title) and the Flight Sim series, and "oversaw a bunch of other teams that did things that never made the light of day". Microsoft even sent him to pitch a Matrix game idea to the Wachowskis, but despite bonding over a love of kung fu/wushu, and enjoying each other's company, he didn't get the gig.
He would go on to work on The Matrix Online at Monolith, though, "a very odd project I never quite figured out what was going on with, except that the directions kept changing". By the time The Matrix Online came out and sunk, Pondsmith was freelance and eyeing a teaching post at DigiPen Institute of Technolog in Redmond, Washington - and The Matrix Online remained, for a long time, the closest he came to making a Cyberpunk video game.
Then in 2012, in the midst of an R. Talsorian Games reformation, the phone rang again. It was a call from Poland, from The Witcher studio CD Projekt Red. "CDPR drop out of the sky and say, 'Hello we're a bunch of guys from Poland and we want to do Cyberpunk.'
"We're cracking up," he says. "When we did the licence my comment was, 'Well there will be six guys who play it in Polish,' and it turned out they were the people who did!"
He was sent The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings as a kind of convincer and, "holy crap", he thought it was great. But he was also sceptical. It wasn't the first time someone had asked to do a Cyberpunk video game. "It's been pretty much under licence since its inception," he says, and several major publishers had had a shot. The closest it came was contract negotiations "but the problem was they wanted to change almost everything involved" and so the negotiations fell apart.
He'd also seen Eastern European development studios during his several years at Microsoft, where he also worked as a studio sorter-outer - a fixer. "I had been to a lot of countries that had just come out from the Iron Curtain and worked with dev houses over there, so I figured CDPR was a bunch of guys in a little sweatshop somewhere," he says. "In one place in Hungary they produced beautiful stuff but it was literally a broom closet with 25 guys crammed over overheated monitors. That's what I expected."
Yet, intrigued, he took the offer of a trip to Poland - and his mind began to change. "I get over there and they set me up in this really nice hotel and give me this driver who looks like he should have been driving spies around. He was almost as wide as he was tall, had heavy accent like ziss, spoke very little English, wore a severe black suit and drove a Mercedes.
"'This is pretty posh for a bunch of guys working in a broom closet,'" he thought - but he was still preparing to let CD Projekt Red down. It wasn't until he got into the studio and cast his Microsoft-trained eye over tools, procedures and general set-up that he thought, "Wow. This works."
What impressed him most, however, was how much CD Projekt Red knew about Cyberpunk. "They knew more about a lot of the things we did in the original Cyberpunk game than anybody we'd ever talked to," he says. "There were points where I was going, 'I had forgotten that,' and I wrote the damn thing! I realised these guys are fans. They loved it because they had grown up playing it. Nobody had really looked at it from that standpoint before."
CD Projekt Red shrugged and explained: "We had Communism and we had Cyberpunk."
"And that," Pondsmith says, "sealed it for us."
When he struck his deal with CD Projekt Red, Mike Pondsmith had many advantages over the studio's other major licence partner Witcher author Andrzej Sapkowski, who openly bemoans his lot. Sapkowski had no faith in games and no faith CD Projekt Red would actually make one. A decade later, Pondsmith - who had plenty of faith in games already - could play The Witcher 2 and see development of The Witcher 3. He had also spent time working on intellectual property at Microsoft so he knew what kind of deal he wanted to cut. "Suffice to say we made a lot more money in this deal than Sapkowski," he tells me. "I don't want to retire but I could."
The deal took around six months to strike. "It was a longer process because we were thinking in terms of a series and a franchise," he says, "so we had to figure out 'how is this going to work five games from now?'"
The deal declares CD Projekt Red the rights to "Cyberpunk 2077-backed stuff until the end of time and hell freezes over" - and exclusively, from what I can tell. "The way we operate is we do everything up to the 2077 period and they do beyond. Part of that was to allow everyone a little room.
"When I write new stuff for Cyberpunk now, I talk to them so what I do in 2030 matches up with what's going to happen in 2077. It allows them the ability to move forward and I can still create new stuff as long as we stay coordinated."
For instance: "A couple of weeks ago I went over the current story script and was going through it, 'okay okay this is great this is great - oh by the way that person is dead'," he says. "We're constantly going back and forth, we work really hard on the timeline. We want people to have that sense that there's a coherent universe. They mesh together surprisingly well."
CD Projekt Red didn't realise Pondsmith had a decade in video games until a few meetings in. "That's when the deal shifted from being an IP deal to my being actually pretty involved," he says, and the collaboration began with getting the Cyberpunk feel and concepts in place.
"Most people tend to look at it as 'if it's grim it's Cyberpunk'," he says. "I really believe that there should be something that's kick out the jams, rocking it, raising hell - the rebellion part of it. That's what we've been aiming for, to get that feeling. I want people to feel like it's a dark future but there are points you can have fun in it."
Cyberpunk also has to be personal. "You don't save the world, you save yourself," he says. "That's a very important thing. You're usually not the hero, you're absolutely downtrodden, you're usually the people who are not going to be up top but access to technology, knowledge, and 'what the hell I'm going to do this' gets you through."
Concepts and feeling aside, there's just a sheer mountain of Cyberpunk data to get through, spanning three sourcebooks and numerous supplements with them. Cities are mapped right down to minutiae - use your own technology access to find scans of Cyberpunk sourcebooks and you'll see what I mean. The amount of data swamps what CD Projekt Red had to work with for The Witcher, and while it's a gift of a resource, laying all of it down takes time.
But time they've had. There's been a small team beavering away on Cyberpunk 2077 ever since the game was announced in 2012 - an announcement done to attract talent to the studio, which isn't something CD Projekt Red has to worry about now. When I visited CD Projekt Red in 2013, to learn the studio's history, there were roughly 50 people working on the game. I don't know how large the team grew after that because when I returned as a fly on the wall during The Witcher 3's launch, I wasn't allowed to see. This is because of CD Projekt Red's reinforced silence surrounding the game, a way of managing expectations in a post-Witcher 3 world. Simply, CD Projekt Red is not talking about Cyberpunk until it has something to show.
Since The Witcher 3 launched, Pondsmith says CD Projekt Red has grown. "The number of bodies there has at least doubled," he says, "and now they're pretty much all on Cyberpunk. It's an impressive ton of people. I remember one trip I met the entire team in Warsaw and then went to Krakow [CD Projekt Red's smaller, second studio, opened in 2013], met the team and then went back to Warsaw again. The team has grown tremendously."
Pondsmith visits three or four times a year, hand-delivering paperwork and data - to avoid any "disasters" like the recent Cyberpunk 2077 asset theft - and spending days in endless meetings with every team. One of the reasons he believes his paper Cyberpunk game was so successful was the "tremendous" amount of research poured into making it feel real. A ranger paramedic, who had put people together in combat situations, advised on the damage system, and a trauma surgeon explained exactly what happened when you drilled someone's head for an implant.
As for guns: there's nothing like firing the real thing. "I just bought some new hardware," Pondsmith happily tells me, but it's as much for his Talsorian team as for him. "You're not going to write about shooting guns without knowing how to shoot guns," he tells them. "You need to go down and find out because otherwise you're going to be talking about silly things like, 'Yeah I one-handedly picked a .357 [Magnum] and fired it.' Yeah, and you broke your wrist."
How many guns he owns he won't tell me, which makes me think he owns a lot. He's got a Broomhandle Mauser, the vintage gun Han Solo's Star Wars pistol is based on, and he's got an H&K MP5K, his favourite. "It's the shorty equivalent of the Uzi and it's a beautiful gun," he assures me. "When we go down to Vegas I go out and shoot them then because they're illegal as hell in most of the United States."
His son is also a fan of weaponry, albeit medieval, and owns several swords and bows. "The joke is that if someone broke into our house, the biggest pause would be everyone in the house deciding what they were going to kill them with, between the swords, the guns, the crossbows..." he laughs.
Pondsmith has cast his fastidious eye for authenticity over Cyberpunk 2077 development from the beginning. And it's that, coupled with the wisdom imparted from more than a decade of making games, which makes his contribution an entire world away from the snooty indifference Andrzej Sapkowski showed CD Projekt Red during Witcher development. And all the hard work is paying off.
"We saw some gameplay stuff when I was over there last time and I went, 'Yeah this feels like I'm doing a good Cyberpunk game here; I'm in the middle of a run I would have set up,' he says. "It's pretty flashy I tell ya. We go, 'Yeah. Yeah. Yeah! You told me this is good - but this is really cool.'"
One unexpected off-shoot of the Cyberpunk 2077 collaboration is the Witcher 3 paper role-playing game, which wasn't part of the original deal but arose after yet another phone call. "We want to do a Witcher tabletop," said CD Projekt Red, "you know anyone?"
Pondsmith was busy and doesn't do fantasy, but staring him in the face was someone who did: his son Cody, who popped his head around the door and said, "I want to do Witcher."
"My son is actually a pretty damn good designer," Mike Pondsmith proudly tells me now. "I don't know that he was paying attention when the old man was doing stuff - I didn't know he was in my classes! - but at any rate he's got a knack for it.
"The first time I realised it we were on one of the trips over to Warsaw and he was bumming along with me and I look over and he's in a bar and he's talking to Damien [Monnier - former Witcher gameplay designer and Gwent co-creator], the systems guy - a really good systems guy - and he and Cody are sitting there going at it hammer and tongs on how to implement something. They're going at it," he says for emphasis. "I don't know where he learned it but he learned it. He looks at games the way I do: he will tear them apart."
Mike entertained Cody's idea but said if Cody wanted it, he had to go and get it. "You have to do the pitch, you have to put it together, you have to convince CDPR to let you do it, the whole nine yards," his father told him.
Months later they travelled to Poland, Mike for Cyberpunk 2077 meetings, Cody to make his pitch. Mike was running here, there and everywhere, but every time he passed the cafeteria where Cody was pitching, he saw a different member of CD Projekt Red on the receiving end, nodding enthusiastically. This carried on until it was company co-founder Marcin Iwinski doing the nodding. It was a good sign: Cody got the gig, and he has been immersed in Witcher lore ever since. He's even apparently heading off to Witcher School with his mother - I hope they are prepared!.
The Witcher paper RPG was supposed to be released in the middle of 2016, but wasn't because CD Projekt Red couldn't spare anyone to look over it. "CDPR is pretty exacting making sure it's good," Mike Pondsmith says. It's written, though. "It's actually in editing now getting cleaned up."
It's funny to think what the future now holds for Mike Pondsmith, a man who plied a trade imagining it. Perhaps what he saw in Night City scared him, because there he was, nearly 60 years old, out of the public eye at his house hidden by forest, "raising hell" with his corgi Pikachu, when CD Projekt Red landed like a meteor in his life and put he and Cyberpunk squarely, unequivocally, back on the map. Now 63 years old, he may be about to be more famous than ever - and he's not going to be a passenger for it. Like a surfer surveying the sea, he's preparing for the wave. "We're sort of expecting things to lift off," he says.
"I was actually in the process of doing Cyberpunk Red when CD Projekt Red showed up!" he tells me, and so he will continue with that. "We'll probably do a 2077 version [for paper]," he adds. Plus there's the Mekton 0 game he says he's well behind on. In other words he has no intention of slowing down. "Lisa says I'll retire when they pry the keyboard out of my dead hands," he says.
But first, of course, there's Cyberpunk 2077. When it will be out, we don't know - 'not before 2017' is all CD Projekt Red has ever said. My guess is 2019, but then what do I know?
"Think of me!" blurts Pondsmith. "I know a bunch of stuff and I can't tell anybody. Lisa and I are likening it to the first Indiana Jones movie years and years ago. We went to a midnight showing before it was a mass release. We're in there, it's this midnight showing at this rinky-dink little theatre in Davis, California, and we watch and we're two of 12 people in the theatre, and we walk out and we go, 'OH MY GOD!' We were frothing. And it's the same thing here."
"As Lisa likes to say: 'We backed the right horse.'"
PorkyThePaladin
Arcane
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FFS, can someone summarize any gameplay related tidbits from that wall of text?
One sure way to set me against someone or something is by producing sugarcoated PR by the numbers articles like this one.
Falksi
Arcane
"we're going to reskin TW3, and instead of running through barren forests for ages between events bored out of your mind, you can run over empty wasteland/cityscapes for ages bored out of your mind instead."
PorkyThePaladin
Arcane
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Could've been worse. They could've reskinned Witcher 2 and ended up with a 90's music video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsXEbqS7cpE
Its media fault, CDPR doesnt give a fuck about marketing this game since 2013/2014. Media cant get info from CDPR, then they try with Mike Pondsmith.
PorkyThePaladin, there is nothing about Cyberpunk 2077. He is talking about time gaps, they need to fill this gap with backstory and lore etc. Nothing new, cuz he cant talk about CP2077. And also he saw gameplay.
PorkyThePaladin
Arcane
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Meh, so instead of the developers whispering sweet nothings about nothing, you have some third party doing Bioware-level pointless exposition lore dump on their past. Disappointing.
What would we more entertaining is if they got Sapkowski to wrestle this Pondsmith guy in some sort of grudge match.
What would we more entertaining is if they got Sapkowski to wrestle this Pondsmith guy in some sort of grudge match.
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That would be as expected. Turn the horse into a motorcycle, swords and magic into guns, and forests into a cardboard city occupied by dummies.
This will certainly be their proverbial version of moving from Oblivion to Fallout 3.
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That's what people thought about Fallout and Oblivion too.
We'll see.
Oh, and here's another Pondsmith interview:
https://www.gamereactor.eu/grtv/325383/Cyberpunk+2077+-+Mike+Pondsmith+Interview/
Something vague about all the roles/classes being in in some way mentioned.
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Pondsmith-mania continues: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/07/12/cyberpunk-2077-mike-pondsmith-interview/
Cyberpunk’s creator on helping CD Projekt Red stay true to the genre’s real meaning
Adam Smith on July 12th, 2017 at 7:00 pm.
During my conversation with Mike Pondsmith, two people ask him to sign artwork from the Cyberpunk pen and paper game that he created. He tells me “it never stops being weird”, the fact that people want his autograph, but he gets it. Cyberpunk is cool, it’s rebellion, it’s sticking an augmented finger to the system. And it’s not just an aesthetic.
“At core, unless you have the meaning behind the black leather and the neon, you lose what cyberpunk is. That’s the problem with getting Cyberpunk made as a videogame; people don’t get it. They think it’s about action heroes quipping as they take down corporations.” Over the years, Pondsmith has made deals with companies to bring Cyberpunk to PC but says he’s glad that those deals “crashed” because now the real deal has arrived. CD Projekt Red, the studio behind The Witcher and upcoming Cyberpunk 2077, “get it”. “They’re actual fans and they know stuff about Cyberpunk that I’ve forgotten.”
The future’s looking bright then, even through the obligatory shades.
If I could have one person running an RPG campaign for me and my friends, it’d be Mike Pondsmith. He’s been living and breathing this stuff for years, and he’s a born storyteller. At one point, I mentioned that I’d been told he owned a lot of guns and he explained that he liked to fire guns because it’s important to know how they feel when figuring out combat mechanics. The guns, like the many books that he owns, are part of a library of information to be translated into world-building and systemic game design.
But they’re also weapons, and they’re not the only ones in the Pondsmith home.
“I wanted a house that was hard to find. On the web and in life, I don’t like to be traceable, so I wanted a place that people couldn’t look up very easily. It’s in the woods, you won’t find it on Google Streetview, and nobody has any reason to come by unless they know I’m there.
“One day I looked out of the window early in the morning and there was this guy out front. I kept an eye on him and he wasn’t moving. I didn’t know him so I figure he has no good reason to be here, so I got hold of a katana…”
We’d been talking for long enough at this point that the casual katana barely registered. Of course Mike Pondsmith would have a katana close at hand in case of intruders, I thought. The day I met him he had a Millennium Falcon stud through his ear. The day before there had been another favoured pop culture reference hanging from the lobe. Like Cyberpunk itself, Pondsmith is nerdy as heck but shot through with a slightly unhinged sense of cool that he carries well, even though his particular cool is either very forward-looking or a couple of decades out of date. In conversation, he’s part professor, part excitable enthusiast. He laughs a lot, often at his own lines, but is serious and sincere behind that.
He’d be a great person to have around an RPG table so, yeah, if I could have one person running an RPG campaign for me and my friends, it’d be Mike Pondsmith. But if I had to fight one RPG designer with a katana, it would be just about anybody else.
“I didn’t have to use it but I was prepared to,” he says when I ask how the encounter ended. “He had just got back from a tour in Afghanistan and had somehow managed to look me up online and wanted to tell me how he and some of the other guys had played Cyberpunk out there, and how much it meant to him.”
One of the stories I shared with Pondsmith was far more mundane but it helped me to get to the heart of what Cyberpunk means to him. We met at Gamelab in Barcelona and a couple of weeks earlier, right before E3, my phone had died. I had to buy a replacement in the airport before the flight out to Los Angeles and anyone who has been on the verge of a long trip and finds themselves suddenly without their most-treasured gadget can no doubt sympathise. Without it, I didn’t have access to maps, hotel details, contact numbers and emails for appointments, or even the boarding pass for my flight. It’s only when I’m suddenly without a phone that I realise how much I need it.
I mentioned this to Pondsmith as we were talking about anxieties around reliance on technology and I used my former phone as a convenient example.
“But what did you do?” He asked.
“I bought a new phone. I had to.”
“That’s cyberpunk. It’s not just about the tech, it’s about the ubiquity of the tech. If augmentations are rare, if they make the people who have them special, that’s not cyberpunk. It has to be street level. It has to be everywhere and available to almost everyone.”
The phone anecdote might have triggered this central idea about cyberpunk, but before we dug into body horror, the ubiquity of tech, and real world social and political parallels, we spent some time discussing exactly what CD Projekt Red are doing with Pondsmith’s fictional future, and how he’s contributing to the game.
“What happened was, around four years ago they called us up and I’d never heard of them. I was imagining a tiny studio out in Poland that had done very little, and then I looked at The Witcher 2 and thought, “Wow. This is good. This is really good.” So I flew out to see them and realised they were genuine fans of Cyberpunk. What they didn’t realise is that I’ve worked in design on the videogame side as well as tabletop
“At the beginning of the project, I talked to them a lot, every week. For a long time they didn’t realise I’d worked in digital, but I’ve been doing pen and paper for 20 years and digital for fifteen. When I was explaining Cyberpunk to them, I was explaining the mechanics in a way that they understood and that helped them to realise I could contribute more to the actual design.
“Now I do a lot more meta-talk to the whole team, to make sure that they get the gag and they know what the touchstones are. From there I got involved more in actual gameplay mechanics; what can we get away with. We had a discussion at one point, for example, about flying cars. I have them in cyberpunk because they are a fast and efficient way of getting characters from one end of a ruined city to another. And trauma teams are there because we don’t have clerics.
“But what happens to these things in a digital, three- dimensional environment. Flying cars are cool but they’re not there for flying car gun fights. It’s not their place in the world. They’re a convenience in the design and like so many things in Cyberpunk they have a mechanical function rather than just being there because they’re cool.
“So a lot of the conversations we’ve had on the team are not “can we do this?” We cando just about anything. Instead, it’s me explaining why I did it in pen and paper, and then we figure out if we need it again, and whether it serves a different purpose in a videogame. I know why flying cars are there in the original but that’s not necessarily the same functionality we need in 2077. Everything is taken apart in terms of what it does to the game, how it differs from tabletop, and getting the right feel.”
It was news to me that Pondsmith was having this kind of input on Cyberpunk 2077, alongside his work on a new iteration of the tabletop game. The new pen and paper version, coincidentally codenamed Cyberpunk Red before any contact with CD Projekt Red had occurred, will be set in 2020, decades earlier in the timeframe. Because the two games are in the same continuity, there’s a back and forth about narrative aspects that need to match in a credible way. Pondsmith has had to tell the 2077 devs that certain characters they might want to use will be dead and forgotten by the time their story begins, although he smiles, saying “I do have ways to bring some of them back”.
But the tone and meaning of Cyberpunk 2077 is harder to capture than the specifics of individual characters.
“One of the things I love about cyberpunk as a genre is that there is a romanticism to it. There’s a sincerity. Even now, cities are romantic. Me and my wife were staring out over the chasm of the city one night and seeing the neon and hearing the sirens, and when you’re there, you’re aware of this whole manic aspect living underneath you. The addition of these new technologies just gives it a bigger impact.
“It’s about more than big guns and leather jackets. Walter Jon Williams wrote the book that really got me into this, Hardwired. It’s total whack-out fable of doomed romance against desperate stupid odds. You know it’s not going to work but you really hope that it does, and that’s what cyberpunk is all about.
“It’s constantly evolving though, as a genre and I don’t feel any ownership of it. Take Ghost in the Shell. The new movie is not Standalone Complex, which is not the original Ghost in the Shell. Then there’s something like Appleseed, which is what we will get if we manage to survive what’s going on in Ghost. They’re different kinds of cyberpunk – a lot of the Japanese works have made me feel more about what defines it. Believable technology and a callous universe of people more powerful than you who are so powerful they’re faceless. It’s about fighting for your piece of ground so you can have a life. Cyberpunk heroes aren’t trying to save the world, they’re trying to save themselves.”
I’m interested in the idea of faceless villains, though I’m not entirely sure ‘villains’ is the right word. Pondsmith uses Blade Runner as an example.
“We never see the face of power in Blade Runner. Instead, we see an errand boy, Gaff, but we never see the top level. And Deckard doesn’t think about what he’s doing, he doesn’t really question it. Some power that is tells him to kill replicants, who might well essentially be people, but the whole point when he leaves with Rachel is that he doesn’t save the replicants. He saves Rachel and goes away. That’s not a hero’s tale. That’s somebody saving his skin and the skin of someone he cares about, but it’s very cyberpunk. That idea of feeling that the chance that we have with each other, and the chance of a better life, is worth incurring the wrath of these unseen and mighty powers.”
But Blade Runner’s cyberpunk isn’t Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk. He likes Blade Runner though, which is more than can be said for a lot of the sci-fi movies we end up discussing. He likes internal consistency, particularly when it comes to tech and the ideas behind that tech, and it’s something he thinks writers often sacrifice for a thematic punch, or to move a plot. When it comes to games, he’s critical of Deus Ex, though not so much because of any specific aspect, but rather, I think, because it’s worryingly close to the game Cyberpunk might have become in the wrong hands.
“I like a lot of the things that are going on there but the main characters are special because of the technology so it’s very far from street-level cyberpunk. The tech shouldn’t make you a hero, it should just be a part of ordinary life.”
This bring us back to my dead phone and the ubiquity of technologies that were so recently unimaginably powerful.
“If you lose your phone, or it dies, then you just replace it.” Pondsmith says, waving around his own smartphone, which is currently pinging him real-time information about seismic activity somewhere in South America. “I’m plugged into the planet with this thing. That’s how amazing it is, but the tech is everywhere. It took me about an hour at most to re-establish everything that had been on my old phone on this one when I bought it. Information and preferences are easily transferable.”
I think there’s a deeper issue though: even if I can replace the phone, I don’t control the networks and the satellites that allow the phone to operate. So much of the power isn’t in the phone, it’s in the access that the phone has, and that is not replaceable. Not by me at any rate. If my provider cuts me off from data and telecommunications networks, I own a very expensive brick that can play match-3 games.
“Think of it in the context of net neutrality, which is really about corporations not wanting people to have access to other people. Within six to eight years of net neutrality crashing and burning, if that happens, we’ll end up with an alternate net. You might not be able to build it yourself, but somebody will create it and provide ways for you to access it. The upshot of the ubiquity isn’t just that you can buy a thing or access it through official channels, it’s that when those official channels are taken away, or censored or throttled or controlled, somebody will always replace them. People will make alternate forms. It even happens with currency. Look at Bitcoin; it’s money that the government doesn’t necessarily control.“
To build his vision of the future, Pondsmith has absorbed knowledge about technology, futurism, politics, social trends, fashion, geology, and just about any other topic you might care to mention. A designer’s library, he says, should be deep and broad.
“We’re just having two new bookcases into the bedroom, which will mean every wall contains books, and that’s on top of an entire room devoted to books downstairs, and the ones stored in the office. It’s paleontology, a hobby of mine, to human history and everything in between. Part of the reading is building knowledge, but it’s about trying to get a sense of the zeitgeist: what is going on, what is visible, what will give us certain outcomes.”
I asked if finding the zeitgeist had become easier now that there’s so much data to dig through, or if all the noise made finding a clear signal harder than it had been in the eighties, before information clogged the air that we breathe.
“What you have to do is go outside your bubbles. The more dataflow you can stand in, the more you can learn. I hit reddit and twitter, and do a lot of lurking. There are only three places where I let people know who I am, mainly so that I can get a reaction from fans and people who are interested in our work. I can learn a lot by going to a store, looking at the magazines people are reading. I can learn a million things by visiting a toy store. These are the ideas the next generation will grow up with.
“The internet is important too, of course. I spend a lot of time trawling for information, checking things and going down rabbit holes. But you expose yourself to a lot of terrible things as well as wonderful things out there. I had a really nice young woman who was my social media person and she almost had a breakdown dealing with it. The biggest advantage you can have out there is to be unflappable. That helps. The most horrible voices are usually the loudest because they have no other place to yell.”
All of that noise, the yelling and the disenfranchisement included, often seems symptomatic of a peculiarly modern mania. Does Cyberpunk have to reflect the times we live in, and the geopolitical changes from one edition to the next?
“Cyberpunk Red has an entire bunch of sections that say ‘2020 is closer than you think’. I talk about ramifications of what we are doing now. This is my son’s reality and future, and unless we start straightening our shit out, it’s not going to be pretty. There is a strong political undercurrent in Cyberpunk, but the biggest message is simple: if you want a future you have to take it into your own hands and realise that nobody else will build it for you. That may involve political action, hacking, or picking up a gun. But the future doesn’t come out how you want it unless you make that change.”
Another central tenet of Cyberpunk, Pondsmith tells me, is that “even if a cause is doomed, you need to fight for it”. Indeed, the Cyberpunk world is full of people striking against what they see as misuse and abuse of power, whether in the form of ecoterrorism or anti-corp hacks and assaults. The line between freedom fighter, survivor and terrorist is blurred.
“There are some eerie parallels in things I’ve written about terrorist attacks and situations in the real world, but if you follow the trends as you write about the future you’re probably going to end up a place that is sometimes painfully familiar. But Cyberpunk is a parallel future rather than a prediction of our future. Terrorism comes about when you have people who want to fight someone but don’t have the means to fight them except through these acts. These situations aren’t new – they could reflect 19th century India, mid-20th century Europe or 21st century America.”
But whether these futures are parallel or predictive, Pondsmith doesn’t think we’re far from our very own cyberpunk lifestyle.
“The thing of it for me is that it all boils down to people and how they use tech. It boils down to tool-use and that is the extension that makes us kind of meta-creatures. You remember things on a much larger level because you have memory devices. At any minute you can get a story and translate it into five languages, then throw graphics behind it. You have access to these insane tools.
“Part of what’s happening now is that these tools are becoming accessible to more and more people; across history, powerful creative tools have been the promise of the very few, like the printing press and even paper and ink. Benjamin Franklin said “the power of the press belongs to those who own one”. Well, a whole lot of us own things more powerful than the printing press now.”
But how far away is a device transmitting information and providing access to tools from actual body augmentation?
“Body horror creates an interesting cultural sliding point. Once we get over the body horror aspect though, we’ll be happy to have it all built-in as long as, once again, it’s easy to repair or replace. One of the things about the cyberpunk culture is that we’re not going to get man-machines because we want to turn ourselves into robots; not in terms of jumping fifty feet in the air or punching through a wall. It’ll happen because we want more choices, more knowledge and more access.”
So no bionic arms then?
“I didn’t say that, but I certainly wouldn’t be first in line. My kids might though. The idea that I’m going to cut my arm off all the way to the elbow and replace it with metal is…” he shudders. “But the tipping point is already gone. Old people have artificial hips, my mother had surgery to remove cataracts and now her vision is better than it was beforethe cataracts.
“Eventually the transgressive nature will be reduced. An entire new thing right now is 3d printing to build prostheses for kids that lack limbs. Well, somebody who has a silver-chrome cyberlimb like [Cyberpunk character] Johnny Silverhand might tempt some kid who isn’t missing a limb to have their hand removed just so they can have a better one. Like Johnny’s. At some point, when that process is easy to do, it won’t seem like such a big deal.”
Pondsmith introduces me to Aimee Mullins, through the medium of a TED talk rather than in person. I’ll leave you with that excellent talk, but first a word about a familiar character.
“I think Geralt is a little bit cyberpunk and I hope we can sneak something in 2077 that relates to him without the fans immediately catching on. He does what he needs to do, he doesn’t necessarily get any joy out of it – he just makes sure that what needs to go down does go down. It’s a combination of fatalism and romanticism. That’s cyberpunk.”
Falksi
Arcane
Christ I daren't wish for something THAT good. If only
Viata
Arcane
So should I believe they will keep the Friday Night Firefight system?
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