Cyberpunk 2077 News

Dragon's Dogma 2 is seemingly a superb game, when it's not buggy or surprising its players with microtransactions.

CD Projekt Red are no stranger to releasing buggy games, but they're less keen on microtransactions - at least for singleplayer games. In an interview with a Polish investor site, CDPR's chief financial officer Piotr Nielubowicz said that they "do not see a place for microtransactions in the case of singleplayer games", but they wouldn't rule it out for multiplayer.

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CD Projekt Red are continuing to bulk up the team developing The Witcher 4 - officially codenamed Polaris - with two-thirds of the studio now working on the follow-up to The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Meanwhile, the team working on Cyberpunk 2077 has shrunk to fewer than 20 people, less than half the number working on its upcoming sequel.

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Numerous game companies are currently experimenting with NPCs powered by generative AI, from Nvidia's Convai-powered ramen connoisseur, to Ubisoft's GDC showcase of its "Neo NPCs". There is potential for interesting game design using these technologies, with Ubisoft boldly claiming the tech could "transform the way players interact with non-playable characters". Yet the quest designer involved in creating some of the best handcrafted NPCs in existence—CD Projekt Red's Pawel Sasko—believes there's a "gigantic, really long way to go" before AI NPCs will match the quality of scripted characters...
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If everything you've heard about Cyberpunk 2077 over the years has you uncertain about it, an upcoming free trial can let you try it out without financial regrets.

It would be pretty understandable if you've been waiting for the right time to play Cyberpunk. We all know how bad a launch it has, we don't need to get into that here, but it also released more than three years ago, meaning a whole bunch of other good games have come out since then. So, even if you wanted to try it out, maybe you couldn't justify the purchase (I can fully appreciate that in a stacked year like 2023, and also just because of how expensive games are now). Well, if you can manage to get yourself away from Dragon's Dogma 2 this weekend, CD Projekt Red is offering a free trial, no strings attached.

The trail will be available on both PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and offers up to five hours of playtime. You also don't need a subscription of any kind, so don't worry if you aren't a PlayStation Plus or Game Pass subscriber, it's available to all. However, it's not around for all that long. You'll be able to start the demo this Thursday, March 28, at 8am PT/ 3pm GMT, and it will be available until March 31, 11:59pm PT/ April 1, 7:59am BST (the clocks change for us over in the EU this coming Sunday, in case any Americans are confused by the time zone designation change).

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Cyberpunk 2077 has plenty of good side quests, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the road to get there is paved with a whole lot of rejections.

Earlier this week, Cyberpunk 2077 lead quest designer Paweł Sasko spoke with PC Gamer at GDC, where he shared what it took to make the side quests as good as they are. Turns out, all you need to do is reject a whole bunch of them. "A good designer has an acceptance ratio of their ideas of between five to 10%," Sasko said. "If someone has 10%, this is probably one of the best people we have in the team." Obviously that means a whole lot of pitching has to be done, as even 10 pitches would result in only one side quest being developed.

Sasko went on to explain that part of weeding out the bad ideas at CD Projekt Red is by simply having quest designers offer all of their ideas, no matter the quality - that way, the best ones will stand out even more. "So what I do with our designers, I'm like, okay here's the list of genres. Here's a list of the themes that I want you to work with—list of topics. Write me pitches. And then they write, yeah, five, 10, 20 a day. Basically, an excellent pitch is like four sentences of like: That's the pitch."

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