Cyberpunk 2077 will have multiplayer, but CD Projekt Red has been keeping the feature pretty close to its chest. In a recent investor call, however, president Adam Kiciński did briefly touch on the subject of monetisation, though without giving very much away. 

"As far as the monetisation on the multiplayer for Cyberpunk is concerned, we believe right now it's definitely too early to share any details on that," he told investors. "The project is in a relatively early stage. We keep experimenting—this is our first multiplayer game, and we check different options and possibilities, and it's definitely not the time to point you to a certain specific direction on that." 

"Monetisation" is pretty broad. CD Projekt Red previously swore off microtransactions, but that still leaves the door open to multiplayer DLC and other methods of parting players from their cash. Investors were assured that the developer wouldn't change its policy on deals with players, and that the monetisation would be "wise" and good value for money. 

While Kiciński said Cyberpunk 2077's multiplayer was a first for the studio, that honour actually goes to Gwent, which seems to have been forgotten. It does contain microtransactions, but unlike Cyberpunk 2077 it's a free-to-play game, so the monetisation model is likely to be very different.

Cyberpunk 2077 is now in the final stretch, according to its financial results, shared in a video above. It's set to release on April 16, 2020, but the multiplayer won't appear until all of the free DLC has already launched, giving CD Projekt Red more time to figure out its approach.

Elon Musk wheeled out the latest vehicular innovation from Omni Consumer Products yesterday. The Cybertruck is perfect if you care about the environment but also want to pretend you're driving through an '80s sci-fi dystopia. We might be seeing more of it next year, not on real roads, but on the digital streets of Cyberpunk 2077's Night City.

Earlier today, Musk tweeted a picture from the reveal, which drew a response from the official Cyberpunk 2077 account. 

The exchange was then coyly posted by CD Projekt Red's lead PR manager, suggesting that perhaps there was more to this than just Twitter banter. Musk has had cameos in several movies and TV shows, including Iron Man 2, while Star Trek: Discovery bizarrely mentioned him alongside the Wright Brothers in a list of important historical figures. Tesla's vehicles, meanwhile, have had even more. 

I reached out to CD Projekt Red to confirm the collaboration, but it had no comment. We already know that Cyberpunk 2077 will let us drive several vehicles, however, and if there's anywhere that the Cybertruck wouldn't look completely ridiculous, it's Night City.

Hopefully the "bulletproof" windows will be fixed by then.

Johnny Silverhand, Keanu Reeves' character in Cyberpunk 2077, shows up a lot more than was originally planned thanks to the John Wick actor. Johnny actually lives inside protagonist V's head, on a chip, so he can turn up anywhere, but it turns out that Reeves pushed for him to have a larger role. 

At Lucca Comics and Games festival, Italian voice actor Luca Ward told journalist Gian Luca Rocco that his recording time had been doubled thanks to his Canadian counterpart. Reeves was apparently enjoying himself so much he talked CD Projekt Red into giving the virtual rock star a bigger presence. 

Reeves is not exactly starved for work these days, but the extra work might still be appreciated by the other voice actors playing Johnny Silverhand. In July, story director Marcin Blacha said that Reeves was also responsible for making the character more relatable and complex. 

CD Projekt Red wasn't aiming for a well known celebrity, but Reeves connected with the character while also putting his own spin on it. "A good actor, and Keanu is a great actor, will always infuse their character with a bit of their own special thing," Blacha said. 

Despite all the time you'll be able to spend with him, you'll just be pals. Tragically, he's not one of Cyberpunk 2077's romance options. 

Cheers, Wccftech.

Plenty of massive open world RPG games have procedurally generated quests: Skyrim and Fallout 4 are most notable, thanks to Bethesda Softworks' Radiant AI tech. But it's fairly common for loot-oriented games like Diablo and The Division to have them too. Cyberpunk 2077, on the other hand, definitely will not have them.

That's according to quest design coordinator Philipp Weber, who recently answered a bunch of questions in the CD Projekt Red forums. "Every quest in the game is handcrafted," he wrote. "For us, quality is always more important than quantity, and we just couldn’t deliver this quality with modules we assemble in different ways to create these random quests. We don’t just want to keep people busy, but actually give them something to do that’s worth their while."

Weber also assured readers that despite everything being handcrafted, the game would still be big. "But we’re making a big Open World RPG of course, so that also means that despite our quests being handcrafted, we tried to make a whole lot of them, so players can have fun in the game for many hours," he said.

The interview has some other interesting tidbits as well. Side quests will vary in size, and it sounds like some will be longer and more complex than story missions, which won't come as a surprise to players of The Witcher 3. But it's the game's other tier of mission, called Street Stories, that sounds especially interesting. According to Weber, these will most closely resemble Geralt's monster hunting missions in The Witcher 3.

"These are the jobs that V gets from fixers like Dexter DeShawn, and doing these jobs gives V more street cred, so she gets a reputation around the city," Weber said. "These jobs can be very varied and of course also benefit a lot from our different playstyles, so there’s often many creative ways to solve them. 

"Street Stories are designed and implemented by our Open World Team, so as a quest designer I’m actually really looking forward towards playing them myself, because I don’t know them as well as other quests in the game and I’ll be able to play them almost as any other player."

You can check out the full interview here. Cheers, PCGamesN, for the heads up.

Cyberpunk 2077 promises plenty of action and adventure, but in between all the gunfire and fistfights and hacking and high-speed getaways, there will be time for some tender moments of romance, too. CD Projekt has previously said that romance—or just sex—will be "heavily present in Cyberpunk," but as we noted in our rundown of everything we know about the game, it hasn't answered the most pressing question of all: Will you be able to get busy with Keanu?

"One of the things we’ve done to make sure the game addresses things a certain way is a lot of the time NPCs are just going to refer to you as ‘V’, because you won’t be able to choose your name," Level designer Max Pears told VGC at the Tokyo Game Show. "That way it helps people know that it’s their character that’s being spoken to and also however you’ve envisioned your V, that’s still your V. That’s been our focus: your version of V is your version as the player and that’s how you will be addressed in the game."

CD Projekt recently announced that it would forgo conventional male and female gender options in favor of enabling players to select a body type and voice, and Pears said that genitals will be based on that selection—which will be relevant, because the game will not shy away from nudity, including in sex scenes.

Which brings us back to the matter at hand: CD Projekt has previously said players will have the ability to pursue a far more diverse range of romances than they could in The Witcher games, with gay, straight, and bi NPCs. But what about Keanu? 

"Keanu plays a crucial role in the game, but as for the option to romance him, I don’t believe you can," Pears said. Sorry, everyone.

Cyberpunk 2077 is scheduled for release on April 16, 2020.

CD Projekt has released a new "behind the scenes" trailer showcasing some of the work that went into making the big Keanu Reeves-revealing Cyberpunk 2077 cinematic that debuted at E3.

It's not a detailed look into the creative process: The video is really just a fast cut of the cinematic set to cyber-music, with assets in various states of completion that illustrate things like textures being layered onto objects. But there's also a closeup look at Dexter DeShawn's facial animations that's very impressive, and a few clips of motion capture that play out beside the cinematic counterpart, including Jackie's death scene and V's fight with DeShawn's goon.

The video only hints at the amount of work that goes into making a game (and a trailer) of this scope, but it's fun to see how all the pieces come together—like the way a mo-cap actor slipping off the edge of a table becomes a frantic slide across the hood of a getaway car as bullets go whizzing by. And maybe it's best not to go too deep on it just yet—don't want to spoil the magic before the game is even out.

Cyberpunk 2077 is scheduled for release on April 16, 2020. CD Projekt recently committed to adding multiplayer sometime after that.

CD Projekt Red has officially confirmed that Cyberpunk 2077 will have a multiplayer component, but only once the studio has finished delivering all planned single-player content for the game. The Cyberpunk 2077 Twitter account announced confirmation this morning.

CDPR included a link to its careers page in the tweet, and is currently hiring for eight multiplayer-focused jobs at its Wrocław studio. These include a 3D character artist, design director, network programmer, senior gameplay programmer, and more.

The company also provided a rough post-launch roadmap for Cyberpunk 2077.

"The plan for now is to deliver Cyberpunk 2077 in April, then follow up with DLCs (free!) and single player content, and—once we're done—invite you for some multiplayer action," CDPR tweeted in a follow-up.

It's not any massive surprise that multiplayer will eventually arrive in Cyberpunk 2077, as CD Projekt has been hinting at it for years. Last year, the company brought multiplayer specialists Digital Scapes on board in a "long-term strategic cooperation" on the game. Digital Scapes previously worked on Dying Light's multiplayer component, "Be the Zombie."

Fans have expressed concern over the potential for microtransactions in a multiplayer game, particularly after CD Projekt's CEO suggested online elements will be crucial to Cyberpunk 2077's long-term success. But the company says not to worry, going so far as to put an FAQ as background text into Cyberpunk's 2018 E3 trailer that read, on the question of microtransactions, "In a single-player role-playing game? Are you nuts?"

We got a good eyeful of The Animals and the Voodoo Boys in Cyberpunk 2077's latest trailer, but even for veterans of the Cyberpunk tabletop RPG, CD Projekt Red's demo raised questions. The company has enlisted the help of Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith to help explain some of the differences fans of his universe may have noticed, specifically relating to the two gangs.

"When I created [the Voodoo Boys] many, many years ago, I was looking at an interesting idea which is what we would now call cultural appropriation," he explains in the video below. "What happens when somebody comes in and tried to adopt a culture that they know little or nothing about, and does it really, really badly." 

In Pondsmith's original vision of Cyberpunk's world, the Voodoo Boys were "average white boys" who adopted Creole and Haitian cultural icons and symbols because they thought they were cool. With the setting shifted 57 years into the future, the Voodoo Boys is a different gang: one that's been reappropriated by people from the Caribbean, practitioners of Voudon, as he explained after E3.

"One of the great things about having a few years is that you get the chance to do some re-dos, and one of the best ones is what we have with the Voodoo Boys now," Pondsmith says. "The Voodoo Boys in 2077 are really Voodoo Boys. They inherited the name, but it was sort of a natural fit: They were coming from Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and they were the real thing."

Pondsmith said this new vision of the Voodoo Boys is something that takes the "Cyberpunk vibe" and injects it into an old culture that's not usually visible to most people.

"So they're a gang, but they're not really—they're more of a cultural phenomenon," he said.

The Animals, on the other hand, are based at least in part on guys Pondsmith says he used to see at the gym back in his days of lifting weights, which were "way back in my dark, dank past."

"The Animals are like those guys," he said. "They're in it to basically build themselves up and become the tigers of their particular urban jungle. They want to be big, they want to be bad, and they want you to fear them just because they exist. And you know, it's really easy to fear a guy who blots out the sun when he walks by you."

Part of what Pondsmith enjoys about Cyberpunk 2077 is the contrast between these two groups.

"The Animals are very simple. They have an ethos: Get big, lift. Get strong, lift," he says. "Unlike the Voodoo Boys, who have a culture, the Animals have a thing."

Cyberpunk 2077 is due out in April next year.