We may earn a commission when you buy through links in our articles. Learn more.

There was a hidden message in the Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay reveal

A message hidden in the Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay footage reveals why CDPR waited so long to show off any gameplay footage

Cyberpunk 2077

As you may be aware, CD Projekt Red chose last night to finally unveil its Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay demo to the public. The video, which was first shown to members of the press at E3 earlier this summer, and then again at Gamescom, was livestreamed last night after a days-long ARG within the Cyberpunk community.

If you’ve watched it since then you’ll have seen demonstrations of the game’s customisation, combat, and abilities, as well as plenty more. What you might have missed, however, is a message from the developer, hidden within the final frame of the video.

This being the internet, that message was swiftly transcribed and uploaded to Reddit. As a quick summary, the note apologises for the long wait between the game’s official reveal and the release of anything resembling gameplay footage. It goes on to explain the studio’s reasons for their choice in quite some detail, as well as making clear that the game is still “deep in development,” and will be subject to plenty of change between now and release.

In its entirety, the statement reads:

“Sorry to have kept you waiting for this for so long!

Did you like what you saw? Because for us, the fact that we’re finally showing you Cyberpunk 2077 is HUGE. Please go to our forums, twitter, facebook, discord, and do tell what you think. Is the game world how you imagined? Do you see what we meant by “immersion” when we talked about CP2077 being an FPP RPG? How does our vision of “cyberpunk by day” make you feel? We really want to know.

Aside from that, we think we owe you a few words of explanation on why we’re showing you this gameplay now, some time after industry professionals and media saw it at E3 and gamescom.

Each time we discussed the idea of showing the game to you (and we discussed this idea a lot), we were ending up in this “we’re not 100% sure” limbo. Why? Because (for most people), when a game dev shows gameplay footage from their game, it means that this is how the game is going to look or play like. It’s not the case here. Cyberpunk 2077 is deep in development. We have a lot of design ideas, a lot of mechanics being playtested, but we don’t know what we’ll end up with at launch. This makes publishing videos like what you just saw risky – we don’t want gamers saying ‘but in that previous video that gun was shooting differently’, or ‘why did you change the interface?’. Change is inherent to game development and there’s a ton of things being modified each day. Our fear was (and kind of still is) that you’ll think what you just saw is how Cyberpunk 2077 will look like 1:1.

What gave us that extra confidence to show you a work in progress game? Good initial feedback from people who are accustomed to see games at various stages of development. What they told us (and they told us they really liked what they saw) gave us the boost we needed to show the current version of Cyberpunk 2077 to the most passionate and insightful audience – you.

So… here’s what Cyberpunk 2077 looks like today (or rather looked like when we recorded the video). We sincerely hope you liked it.

Again, thank you for your patience and all the thoughts you shared with us.

Yours,

CD PROJEKT RED

There’s nothing monumental to take away from that – we all know games are subject to plenty of change over the course of their development. Sadly, what this suggests is that the Cyberpunk 2077 release date is still probably quite a while away – “deep in development” doesn’t speak to a game that’s scheduled for release in the short term.

YouTube Thumbnail

If you haven’t seen the Cyberpunk 2077 gameplay footage in its entirety, you can do so in the video above. To my shame, I’m yet to have had the chance to watch it all, but on the plus side that’s my lunchtime viewing sorted.