I don’t know if he’s biased, what with playing a major character in the game’s story, but Keanu Reeves seems pretty stoked (in his own subdued way) for the release of Cyberpunk 2077. Here’s the big, splashy TV commercial the game that aired overnight during the NBA finals, starring a live action version of Keanu.
Cyberpunk 2077 is out for Xbox One, PS4 and PC on 19th November. It will be playable on Xbox Series X | S at that point – the consoles coming out on 10th November – and on PlayStation 5 on November 11th/19th, but next-gen enhancements will not be there on day one. The game could take some advantages next-gen beyond simple backward compatibility, but for ray tracing and other more integral enhancements, we’ll have to wait.
CD Projekt Red have been holding semi-regular Night City Wire streams in the run up to launch. During these they’ve done things like reveal the Braindance gameplay, and the development of a Cyberpunk 2077 – Edgerunners anime series coming in 2022. The second stream then dove into the various Lifepaths you can choose for V, some of the weaponry that you’ll be able to wield, and spoke to Swedish hardcore punk band Refused about how they’re channeling their inner cyberpunk personas to embody the in-game band Samurai.
The new advert comes a day after it was revealed the developer CD Projekt Red would be implementing mandatory “crunch” overtime for the final month and a half of development before release. CD Projekt Red’s Adam Badowski wrote that studio staff would be required to work “your typical amount of work and one day on the weekend”. He continues, “I know this is in direct opposition to what we’ve said about crunch. It’s also in direct opposition to what I personally grew to believe a while back — that crunch should never be the answer. But we’ve extended all other possible means of navigating the situation.”
This seems to break previous promises not to have mandatory crunch, after bad press and internal relations following crunch at the end of The Witcher 3’s development. Following criticism of this and with Cyberpunk 2077 looming, co-founder Marcin Iwiński told Kotaku in May 2019 that the company would be “more humane” in its approach to crunch time and that while the studio might ask employees to work overtime, it would not be mandatory. “If they need to take time off, they can take time off,” he said. “Nobody will be frowned upon if this will be requested.” That’s obviously no longer the case.
Source: press release
