Cyberpunk 2077 release pushed back to September 17, 2020

  • We opted to only share images from the game’s gussied-up trailer that actually resemble what we saw in the hands-off demo.
  • The protagonist V lives in this sprawling apartment complex, which resembles modern-day LA buildings, though with grimy, tech-loaded tweaks like broken biometric scanners on people’s front doors.
  • The game’s opening mission sees you rescue an apparently high-ranking civilian from a kidnapping ring. Insurance in Cyberpunk 2077 seems to revolve around private companies showing up with military squads and medical personnel to help LA’s elites.
  • In the demo, V finds and makes an offer to this rich, powerful “corpo” character. A dangerous mission follows in which everyone seems to stab everyone else in the back.
  • Frankie is V’s accomplice during the demo and offers a lot of chatter and dialogue-tree options for V to pick through.
  • We saw a taste of open-world driving, but it was the least impressive part of the demo.

CD Projekt Red announced via tweet this afternoon that the heavily anticipated Cyberpunk 2077 would be released on September 17, 2020. That’s a five-month delay from the April 16 release date that was announced last June.

“We are currently at a stage where the game is complete and playable, but there’s still work to be done,” the company wrote. “Night City is massive—full of stories, content, and places to visit, but due to the sheer scale and complexity of it all, we need more time to finish playtesting, fixing, and polishing.”

“We want Cyberpunk 2077 to be our crowning achievement for this generation and postponing launch will give us the precious months we need to make the game perfect,” the message continues.

Delays for high-profile games like this are far from rare, even this close to the expected release date—the PC version of Grand Theft Auto V saw at least four “official” delays, for instance, including one just 14 days from the planned launch. But Cyberpunk‘s new release date will come more than two years after a playable slice of the game was first shown to select industry members at E3 2018 (and later to the public).

Cyberpunk‘s delay comes a few months after the delay for Doom Eternal. Publisher Bethesda Softworks announced in October that the game was being delayed from a holiday 2019 release to an expected March 20, 2020 launch.

While game release delays like these can sometime spark outsized levels of online anger, it’s always good to remember the words attributed to legendary Nintendo designer Shigeru Miyamoto: “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.”

Listing image by CD Projekt Red

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