DrunkOnEstus said:
Another game from CDProject based on some rather esoteric source material...but that's not a complaint. I read some of the Witcher books because of the games, so now I wouldn't mind looking into the ruleset of this game for my next currently unplanned tabletop session.
Most importantly, good on them for making the kind of games they want to, they wish a game existed so they go ahead and make it real. Mark me as totally excited about this.
EDIT: I hadn't realized Cyberpunk was so popular, I've played a lot of D20 settings (I don't imagine this is) and never heard of it. My mistake for equating "I don't know about it" to "esoteric"
Now that I was thinking about this game more, I hope they take their time and release it a little closer to their ideal state. I appreciated all the patches, DLC, and revisions for Wither 2 being free, but it was kinda jarring sometimes to get new quests for areas I'd already been through, and the many restarts I did because "now it's the definitive experience" or director's cut, or whatever it may be called. Then again, if I finished it near launch and they went ahead and overhauled the whole damn thing, it would be an incentive to re-visit it. I imagine they're quite the perfectionists over there.
Don't feel bad, I HAVE heard of it, and played and GMed it more than a few times (have a pretty huge stack of the books still), and agree with you that it counts as esoteric. It's one of those "also ran" RPGs that enjoyed a degree of success among pnp RPG gamers and spawned a good number of supplements and multiple editions BUT never achieved anything like the semi-mainstream recognition of games like "Dungeons and Dragons", "Vampire: The Masquerade" or even "Shadowrun" enjoyed at various times.
It was one of the first games to come up with a fair way of handling cyberware, and was perhaps the first I seriously played that used a system of damage scales, basically a big thing being needed to take out a big thing, so you couldn't say blow a tank away with enough shots from a handgun. Palladium came up with a more famous (and also much simpler, and also much parodied) system but I first encountered the basic idea with CP2020.
Basically, don't let fanboys get you down. I actually think one of Cyberpunk's saving graces was that it never got too mainstream. Trying to cater to more casual gamers and an increasingly younger player base and lower human denominator was part of what lead to D&D's degeneration over the years, but that's another entire discussion.
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As far as the news goes, I'm cautious. My gut feeling is that this will be a cash grab made in hopes of revitalizing the property (taking something fairly obscure and making it more mainstream through game exposure) and while good for the pocketbooks of R. Talslorian or whomever holds the CP2020 liscence and CD Projeckt won't be good for the property.
In the final equasion I just think CD Projekt might be good, but they are all wrong for this material. Sure they do dark, edgy, stuff, but they tend to not really be freeform enough to really create a true RPG world. "The Witcher" worked because it was dealing with a series of novels, doing minimal character development when you get down to it, and basically telling a story that could be heavily controlled by the definition of the protaganist they were using.
One of the big strengths of CP 2020, like any successful RPG, is the character generation system. That's the big hook that grabs people and what a successful game builds on in spades. You take that, and the diverse kinds of characters that can be created, away from it and it's pretty much "meh". It's the way you can control the mechanics in CP 2020 and what you can do with them rather than the system itself, and if someone hands you "Billy Bob, the cyber merc" the way they do with Geralt and then build the world around that one perspective, your losing like 90% of the point of wanting to use this engine to begin with. See in CP 2020 you could play as the Solo (mercenary guy) but also as a Fixer, Reporter (Max Headroom), Cop (Judge Dredd), or even one of the corperate dudes who is typically a genere villain. It's also a setting where outside of the cities is totally lawless (again think Judge Dredd) and you have bands of Nomads (think Mad Max) terrorizing everything, which are another player option. Bringing all those diverse elements together and experiencing the world from any of those perspectives (or variations on them) is part of the point.
I'd also point out that if they DO indeed do this, they might need to go further than 2077. If the idea is to use the world, they already did CP 2020's "future" in a game called "Cyber Generation". A sequel that met with mixed results but was kind of fun. Basically the so called "Dark Future" ends and things civilize, but a technological accident releases clouds of nanites that infect large numbers of kids and give them nano-based powers, this being referred to as "The Carbon Plague". Cybergeneration basically being about the future of the 2020 universe where you play as one of those kids that are being hunted down by the now totalitarian semi-utopian society.
Now yes, I'm an uber-nerd (and have admitted it before), but I'm one of those people who looks at people picking up a property and has to wonder if they realy want that property or just some elements of it, and if it's just some elements of it, why bother to keep the name or association?
In the end this is a case where I feel a lot of fans are going to get stepped on if they view this as a real CP 2020 revival of sorts. Truthfully I think CD Projeckt would do better to drop the entire "Cyberpunk 2020" referance and system, create their own dark future game from scratch, and just use Mr. Pondsmith as a consultant. Everyone gets paid, and honestly I think a lot of people would be happy to see CP 2020 have ended with some fond memory rather than being re-animated from it's pseudo-grave and made to dance around until it collapses into a pile of muck that will taint the fond memories it previously spawned.
Such are my thoughts.
). Later, her "digital ghost" was able to break free into the net...
