Future Shock

How CD Projekt Red is making sci-fi real in Cyberpunk 2077, a game years ahead of anything we’ve ever seen before

- Jen Simpkins

We hardly know where to look. Every inch of Night City’s Watson district is alive with detail, denser and richer than anything we’ve ever seen in a videogame before. Normally in a scene like this there’s a particular focal point – in Cyberpunk 2077, everything is a focal point. Over to the left pedestrians pour over a crossing; in the foreground two tattooed Slackers lounge on a low concrete wall as the sun beats down. Hundreds more people, chattering, no single one the same, sweep past protagonist V as he pushes against the crowd. Blinking neon signs boast ‘live nude’ on the sides of skyscrapers; advertisements for NiCola soda blare out jingles. As V turns a corner into a bustling side street, what looks to be a religious group – cybermonks, if you will – shuffle past, hands tucked inside of billowing sleeves, heads threaded with glinting metal.

Said side street is flanked by stalls, their vendors loudly trying to catch V’s attention, the sizzle of pad thai in the air. As he reaches the entrance to a seedy back alley, something finally holds our gaze: a cherry blossom tree, growing impossibly out of the side of a building. It’s not real, of course – it’s a hologram, flickering almost imperceptibly as its pink petals fall and melt away into nothingness overhead. And in that moment we understand what makes Night City so alluring: we are entranced by a vision of a reality where the grass on the other side is so green it’s neon.