The so new it’s not even out yet hotness in games is still Cyberpunk 2077, but as the name suggests, it’s not the original Cyberpunk. Although there aren’t 2076 previous entries, there is a robust and well loved tabletop roleplaying game to thank for the existence of CD Projekt Red’s upcoming RPG.

The TRPG was written by Mike Pondsmith, the founder of publisher R. Talsorian Games, and who’s often known to players as Maximum Mike. He is a charming and obviously very clever man, a teller of stories who’d be great at a party, and he is, he said, getting recognised much more often now he’s on the 2077 media circuit. At a sit down interview at Gamescom, during which he cheerfully called both me and Alice L. “AliceAlice”, he told us about his work with CD Projekt Red, the new TRPG edition Cyberpunk Red (the Jumpstart starter set for Red having come out earlier this month), and business meetings in pyjamas.

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Marthe Jonkers is a senior concept artist at CD Projeckt Red working on Cyberpunk 2077. Jonkers actually designed the location in the first very first teaser trailer for the game back in 2013, featuring the cyberbabe with mantis arms, and was resigned to the fact that nobody was really looking at the building behind her.

Jonkers’ team work on locations and interiors, and even the broader piecing together of Night City. “We even have urban planners on our team,” she explains, since after all, someone has to work out how a city centre actually works in practise, and how you drive around it all. And the way this cyberdystopia RPG backdrop is all designed is really bloody interesting.

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Reader, I often tire quickly of the bangs. The shooties. The click click booms. I think it’s because damn near every action game has guns, but not many developers make shooters really bloody good. And indeed, I agree with Matt that, at least from what we’ve seen so far, the guns in Cyberpunk 2077 look mostly like floaty number generators.

And yet, as was pointed out to me by a developer, Cyberpunk 2077 is not a shooter. It is an RPG. Having seen this year’s hands-off demo, though, I think you can make a pretty good case that it’s actually a stealth game.

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Google held another one of their Stadia Connect conferences today, and this one was meant to be all about what games you’ll be playing in the “scary” cloud come November. Sure enough, there were new Stadia games aplenty announced this evening, with the biggest addition being Cyberpunk 2077.

To help keep track of them all, here’s a list of every Google Stadia game confirmed so far, as well as which games are coming at launch, which ones will be arriving a little bit later, and which games you’ll only be able to play by subscribing to one of the special Stadia publisher subscriptions.

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It’s Gamescom this week, which can only mean one thing – more confirmed ray tracing games for Nvidia’s RTX and selected GTX 16-series graphics cards. Indeed, the big one that’s just been announced is Minecraft, which (like Quake II RTX) is getting full, real-time ray tracing support for everything from water reflections to its entire lighting system. That’s not all, though. Dying Light 2 will also be getting real-time ray tracing, while Tencent’s freshly-announced action survival game Synced: Off-Planet will be getting ray-traced reflections and shadow support.

In truth, the number of games on this list that you can actually play with ray tracing enabled right this second is still pretty small. A lot of the confirmed RTX games you’ll see below still haven’t received their promised ray tracing and performance-boosting DLSS support, so this is more of a complete ‘this is how many games will have it eventually’ kind of thing than ‘these are all the games you can play with ray tracing right now’. Still, if you’re currently on the fence about buying one of Nvidia’s RTX or RTX Super graphics cards as opposed to the new AMD Navi GPUs, this guide should hopefully help you decide whether ray tracing is something worth investing in. Here’s every confirmed ray tracing and DLSS game we know about so far.

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The German Play is happening next week, or Gamescom, as you may have heard it called by uninformed proles. The big games show will see a few of the RPS treehousers zipping off to Cologne to breach and clear the whole city of all its games, like a well-oiled unit of militant journalists. On this week s podcast, they prepare themselves for the mission. Thumbs at the ready, maggots.

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With Cyberpunk 2077 making a grand appearance at Gamescom 2019, it’s about time that we ran an update to our neural sensors as to what has been happening with the game.

The game had a rather eventful E3, with not only the Cyberpunk 2077 release date being announced, but also that “John Wick” himself Keanu Reeves has now been confirmed as having a large part in the game. It’s likely that we’ll hear more stuff at Gamescom.

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Cyberpunk 2077 developers CD Projekt Red have confirmed they are working on a New Game Plus mode, which I can only hope somehow incorporates a Keanu Reeves-starring storyline which is just the plot of My Own Private Idaho except it takes place in the year 2077.

Alas, we’ll have to wait to find out if I’m right because there are no actual details available.

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It’s another dire old week in Chartland, with the last breaths of the Summer Sale ensuring, with the exception of spots #4 and #5, that all the usual suspects dominate. But we won’t let that change us! We’re better than this! We’re going to have fun anyway!

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So E3 2019 has come and gone, with Cyberpunk 2077 getting the bulk of the attention that eventful week. We got many surprises, not least of which that John Wick himself Keanu Reeves has now been confirmed as having a large part in the game, but also some more details from the various previews.

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