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The creator of the Cyberpunk franchise, Mike Pondsmith, has been discussing his involvement with the development of the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 sequel, teasing that, like in CD Projekt Red's 2020 RPG, he's very aware of what the devs are putting into the game.
In Cyberpunk 2077, amongst other things, Pondsmith is listed in the credits for "lore consultation," and he's been speaking about his role advising the developers throughout the making of the RPG in a recent special episode of CD Projekt Red's REDstreams on YouTube. Asked if he felt the devs got anything "completely wrong," Pondsmith says no, and "part of that was that I was involved in that process all the way."
He continues: "Because I was involved in it, what it meant was I could get my input into it and we could adapt and get it closer to what we wanted." He gives an example of being shown some "silver, blaster-like" guns that were originally planned to be added to the game, to which he had to explain that Cyberpunk guns were instead "big, nasty, black, scary things which occasionally have little lights on them that watch you like eyes, but they are not science fiction. They are brutal things from where we are that have been basically kicked up two or three notches."
Following this, Pondsmith was asked to explain this same concept to the devs at CD Projekt Red's Krakow studio. "The important part was everybody listened," he adds, and he later saw things matching up with the ideas he had in his head because the team kept asking his opinion on things.
"People had asked me the entire time, 'What do you think?' In fact, that still goes on now," he continues. "A good portion of the trip I've just taken out here to CD Projekt, people have been showing me what they're doing, they're showing me what's going to be happening in the new iteration of the game, they're showing me what's happening with, you know, some of the TV or radio or whatever stuff. And they ask me all the time. So it means that we stay in the same space, and we see the same outcomes."
Hopefully, then, that means that whatever CD Projekt Red is cooking up for Project Orion will line up with Pondsmith's vision and original universe. There's still no announced release date for the upcoming RPG – nor an official name, for that matter – but Keanu Reeves has already made it clear he'd love to return as Johnny Silverhand, somehow.
