Matthew Yang King's primary role is Kerry Eurodyne, but he also voices Detective Han, a minor character in River's storyline.
Cherami Leigh voices female V, but she also did a few ambient voicelines you can hear around town.
Erica Lindbeck voices Misty, Meredith Stout and Spider Murphy.
Carla Tassara voices Judy Alvarez and the clerk of the music store in the epilogue of the Temperance ending.
Alec Newman voices Anders Hellman, El Capitan, Dino Dinovic and Adam Smasher.
Ronan Summers voices Ozob Bozo and Joshua Stephenson.
Approval of God: In the TTRPG, the Voodoo Boyz were a predominantly white and pretty toothless posergang. In this game they were changed into a primarily Afro-Caribbean, extremely secretive and dangerous gang of highly skilled hackers. Mike Pondsmith is on record saying how much better he likes CDPR's version, with transition between the two versions happening officially in Cyberpunk RED.
A lot of Johnny's physical characteristics like way of walking or gesticulation while speaking was thought of by Keanu Reeves.
Gavin Drea and Cherami Leigh were allowed to put their own spin on their respective version of V, but most of the lines had to be kept in about the same tone. There are some instances where they diverge slightly, for example one V will be more playful, and the other one will be more dry.
The majority of English voice actors' racial and ethnic backgrounds fit the characters they're portraying.
Keanu Reeves used to be a bassist in the band called Dogstar. Johnny Silverhand plays lead guitar, but it's similar enough.
Rockstar Kerry's Polish voice actor, Jacek Beler, is a vocalist in a post-punk band called "Mięśnie".
Author's Saving Throw: Since the game's buggy launch in 2020, CD Projekt Red worked their asses off to make the game more enjoyable for players. Patch 1.07 (as showcased in the New Ways to Play trailer) in particular promises to correct some of the most glaring issues, especially the police system which was by far the most criticized element in the game even when other more problematic issues were fixed. With the releases of Patch 1.7 (roughly coinciding with Cyberpunk: Edgerunners) and Patch 2.0 (coinciding with Phantom Liberty), the game's seen significant improvements and updates upon that it's largely managed to win back audiences disillusioned by the original launch. Patch 2.1 also managed to win back some fans by introducing the metro system, a feature that was first glimpsed in early trailers but never made it into the final game until now as well as buffing Adam Smasher to a level much closer than he is within the lore of the series.
Awesome, Dear Boy: Keanu Reeves agreed for the role because he was fascinated by the story and world of the game, and because a video game with branching storylines and multiple endings was something radically different from his usual work.
Beam Me Up, Scotty!: The line "Wake the fuck up Samurai, we've got a city to burn" commonly associated with the game is never actually said in it. It was used in the 2019 E3 trailer, but it's never in the game proper.
Christmas Rushed: The higher-ups really wanted to hit the 2020 holiday season and ensure the game was out before the 9th console generation completely took hold and they could still make good sales on the PS4 and Xbox One. The devs didn't think the game would be ready until 2022, but the executives pushed forward anyway. This led to the infamously buggy and unoptimized launch. And the extremely low supply of the 9th gen consoles meant they still didn't get to cash in with double dipping the game for most people.
Content Leak: Around two weeks before the release date, physical copies of the game were out on the street. One resident of Jacksonville streamed part of it, clearly intoxicated, and didn't make any progress past the first few minutes. One week later, however, other streams and images popped up that showcased more of the game, including one image of a trophy list that referred to the game's endings.
CDPR founders Marcin Iwiński & Adam Kicinski show up in the Phantom Liberty DLC selling BDs from a van, a reference to their start selling cracked copies of games in the Warsaw marketplace.
Creator-Driven Successor: Cyberpunk 2077 has notable similarities with CD Projekt's previous game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Both games are an Action-RPG/Wide-Open Sandbox combination featuring a major corrupt city surrounded by wilderness, both protagonists aren't a blank slate but have actual backstories, both story heavily feature bittersweet tone, both have several distinct playable epilogues which content depends on player's decision. Both have a racing and a boxing optional questline. Interestingly, their plot are more or less the opposite of each others (Geralt is looking for someone, V wants to get rid of someone). Also, both are adaptations/unofficial sequels of a preexisting franchise. Note Cyberpunk 2077 has an Easter Egg mentioning The Witcher III video game exists in the Cyberpunk universe.
Samurai actually has one more song, titled "Archangel", that wasn't with the initial lineup released. Parts of it are used in a couple scenes in the game (concert at the 2013 riot in "Never Fade Away", variations play throughout "Boat Drinks" and Johnny can play a small part to lure Kerry out in "Holdin' On"), but the full version wasn't released even after the game hit stores. It wouldn't be until patch 1.5 that it would be released, one year after the game came out.
The original version of "Chippin In" from the pre-release walkthrough video was replaced when Refused took over the job of becoming Samurai. It was retconned in the story to being Kerry's version of the song.
Defictionalization: DR12 Quasar exists in real life as a gel blaster, though it isn't officially licensed by CD Projekt Red.
One of the MaxTac officers who responds to a cyberpsycho incident at the Jinguji clothing store is named Lt. Melissa Rory. She's the woman who appeared in the 2013 teaser trailer, a former cyberpsycho with mantis blades who killed 14 people before being arrested.
Judy's storyline originally involved her and V fixing an abandoned firetruck in the junkyard and taking it out on a spin in her final mission, only to be immediately busted by the cops who thought that the truck was stolen. This was completely overhauled into the "coup at CLOUDS" line of quests ending up with "Pyramid Song", but Judy still has the tattoo of the truck on her chest, and an email that references the story on her laptop (it was reworked into being a part of her backstory instead).
Johnny has an unused voiceline where he says "Sleep well, my princess/prince, I'll see you on the other side" to V before he takes over their body in "The Sun" ending.
There's cut dialogue between V and Johnny about Kerry, Alt and Rogue.
During "Holdin' On", Johnny (posessing V's body) was supposed to be able to ask Kerry about the photo of a woman on his coffee table, with Kerry saying that it's his ex-wife. The photo is still used, but the dialogue doesn't trigger, and the only clue about Kerry having an ex wife is an email exchange on his laptop. This was eventually patched back in.
If the player romanced Kerry, they were supposed to be able to kiss him to greet him if they've visited him between missions. The voicelines are still in the files, but there's no associated animation.
There's an iconic variant of the Tsunami Nue pistol called "Death and Taxes" or "Second Opinion" depending on where your source it in the files, that was supposed to belong to Maiko Maeda, the boss of the Clouds brothel, and found in her office during Automatic Love or when you go there with Judy. It has been added to Maiko's office in patch 1.3 and can be picked up now.
There's an unused Kerry Eurodyne/Us Cracks collab song in the files, titled "Off the Leash", that's supposed to play on one of the radio stations, but doesn't. The game features an ambient celebrity program on the various TVs in the overworld that mentions the premiere of a collab song by Kerry and Us Cracks, and the next-to-last mission in Kerry's questline is called "Off The Leash", implying that it was supposed to be added to the radio songs pool after finishing this quest.
Optic camo was supposed to be available as cyberware for V, coming in three tiers, each one extending the time it can be activated by five seconds. With some tweaking, it can be modded back, but it's not programmed properly and sometimes crashes the game if the player tries to activate it. It has been officially added into the game with patch 1.3.
Pretty much every character has unused models assigned to them, but most of them are placeholders used during development for playtesting and development.
There are multiple models with "jackies_companion" in the name, and tagged to the Streetkid Lifepath mission. None of them are complete so likely used in early play testing.
CLOUDS likely had an 'Onsen' theme to it during early development. Models for Tom, Roxanne, Evelyn, and even Johnny have unused placeholder models with an 'Onsen' tag. Tom, Roxanne, and Evelyn all work at CLOUDS and are encountered there at various points; Tom and Roxanne during Judy's takeover of CLOUDS and Evelyn during a holo recording of her being hacked.
Evelyn has multiple models, including "disguise", "battle dress" and "casual", implying that she played a bigger role in an earlier draft of the story. These also could be placeholders used for her current in-game appearances.
The debug menu for "The Devil" ending implies that it was possible to beat the game without meeting Judy, though if this was the case or if this menu was copy-pasted from a character like Kerry or River, that the player can still miss even in the final version of the game, is up to speculation. Panam's similar menu for "The Star" ending lists a condition "Dead", so it's implied that she could actually die at some point of the story.
Game files reveal that Saul was originally supposed to be Santiago, a character from the tabletop game that's briefly featured in the "Never Fade Away" mission. Paweł Sasko implied that the reason why the change was made was due to age discrepancies (when deciding which tabletop characters will be alive in 2077, they've tried to pick ones for which it would make sense, like the Arasakas, Rogue or Kerry) and balancing out the amount of old characters from the tabletop with new ones made specifically for the game.
There's a cut epilogue called "The Heir", that seemingly involved V sneaking into Hanako's mansion to kill her (there's an unused code for an animation of Hanako looking at a dead guard and then at V), implying that she used to be the main antagonist in an earlier draft of the story. There are also clues that Kei, Saburo's eldest and most loyal son, would be the main antagonist in an earlier draft, and that Saburo was meant to live and show up in the Crystal Palace in one of the epilogues.
Morgan Blackhand has a placeholder model that was supposed to appear in the "Love Like Fire" quest. Shaitan's model also has "blackhand_minion" in the name of his model. There's leftover code implying that Johnny, Rogue and Thompson were supposed to meet Blackhand on the roof of the Totentanz club. A leftover spam email claims to have Morgan Blackhand's fingers for sale (they were found in the Arasaka Tower rubble in 2023)- nobody found it in the game proper, but there's a chance it's particularly well hidden.
One line of unused text implies that T-Bug used to have a sister that V and Jackie wanted to contact after the heist to prepare her funeral. There's also code that implies that T-Bug was actually supposed to wait for V with Dex in the No Tell Motel, and got killed in the end. It's also suggested that T-Bug could've been turned into an engram and V could talk to her and Jackie in the "Last Caress" quest.
Jackie used to have an estranged sister named Melissa. Unused string of text implies that V could try to comfort Jackie at the end of "The Heist" by saying that "They'll find and help Melissa", and V having a related line where they say "Help your sister". She was supposed to appear in "Heroes" in a hotel room, implying that she would be present for Jackie's ofrenda, with Johnny having an unused command to comment on her. The only other character in the game named Melissa is Melissa Rory, the cyberpsycho leader of a MAX-TAC squad, but it's unclear if she's supposed to be the same character or if this is just a case of a reused name.
Mr Blue Eyes was supposed to appear in "The Pickup", with Militech soldiers guarding him. His clothes have the name "paulnight" in the files. Reverand Paul Night was a character in the tabletop's game lore, but it's unlikely that he and Mr Blue Eyes are the same character. The reason as to why his name was in the files is currently unknown.
After the initial rocky launch, CD Projekt RED promised refunds for those dissatisfied on the eighth generation consoles (despite not having made any deals regarding refunds with other companies for consoles). Sony was initially slow on the draw, but this was rectified a few days later, offering refunds and outright pulling the entire game off the digital PS Store. Shortly thereafter, Microsoft followed suit and offered refunds on Microsoft Store, and even Best Buy would make a special exception to their refund policy towards the game until December 21. Unfortunately for a lot of PC users, they only ever gave refunds to GOG users, so Steam and Epic users outside the normal 2 hour refund window were out of luck, as CDPR never included Steam or Epic on their own special refund form.
The game's directors and the CDPR board were primarily responsible for the game releasing in the state it was in, despite the developers' protests, due to fear of losing their customer base, who were very clear and vocal in refusing to tolerate any more delays. Both current and former developers at the company later stated that the game wasn't ready and needed more time.
On a non-CDPR (and more understandable) note, Mike Pondsmith went on unofficial record, saying that part of the reason why Morgan Blackhand is such a nonentity in the final game is because Mike "[has] a few things he needs to do with him" in the timeline between RED and 2077 before letting CDPR do anything with him.
Texas-born and raised Johnny Silverhand is played by the Canadian Keanu Reeves.
Male V, who grew up in California-based Night City is voiced by Gavin Drea, an Irish actor.
Alt Cunningham is voiced by English actress Alix Wilton Regan, despite speaking with an American accent in-game.
Fake Nationality: Filipino-American Kerry Eurodyne is voiced by Matthew Yang King, a Chinese-American actor.
God Never Said That: Shortly after the game's release, there was some discourse revolving around Kerry's sexuality (he was bi in the tabletop game, but only available as a romance option for a masculine V in the video game). Talsorian games, responsible for the tabletop game, have tweeted that Kerry is still bisexual, but that "(..)Kerry's attraction is deeply rooted into unresolved issues involving Johnny. Male-presenting V fits that particular mold better, to his subconscious.", which a lot of people took as "Kerry isn't interested in V, but instead just uses him as proxy to be with Johnny whose subconscious is on the chip in V's head". The game itself contradicts this (Kerry stays with V in the "Path of Glory" and "The Devil" endings, where Johnny's engram gets wiped from the chip/the chip is removed altogether), so the more likely it's supposed to mean that Kerry just Has a Type.
Lying Creator: Regarding worker treatment and criticism response.
"Ready when it's done" being "something we live by" turned out to be less than true when executives, spooked by a tsunami of raging gamers who refused to tolerate any more delays (up to and including sending death threats to the company) forced the game out for a December launch.
When the game was delayed again in April 2020, the PR response claimed that the game was feature-complete and playable from start to finish, and the delay was purely to iron out bugs and in one of the statements "to make it perfect". A leaked post-release Q&A between developers and CD Projekt management revealed that those claims were completely false and made without input from the development team, who noted the game was not at all in a fully-playable state at that time.
When apologizing, the company promised refunds to people who wanted, but admitted elsewhere that they had made no agreements for special treatment in regards to refunds by the console companies. While Sony and Microsoft did end up issuing refunds days after the announcement, it was largely at their own behest and with no coordination with CD Projekt. These refunds also didn't extend to PC players outside the GOG platform. This included Steam users, where a huge amount of the purchases came from, and the special CDPR website and email system also excluded PC users.
The game's release year of 2020 matches up with the setting of the second edition of the original tabletop game.
It was also released in the year 2077 of Vikram Samvat, the official calendar of Nepal.
The Merch: CDProjekt runs an official merch store, where you can buy official cyberpunk merchendise, from clothes to keychains and pins to puzzles.
Mid-Development Genre Shift: The earliest information released to the public showed the game as more of a classic RPG, with third person camera and the plot focusing on the MAX-TAC unit and recruiting cyberpsychos. At some point during development, the game was remade into a first-person action RPG, with the plot telling the story of V and the consequences of their botched heist.
Multi-Disc Work: The physical release of the console version came on two discs.
No Dub for You: For Latin American Spanish speaking players: CD Projekt only made a European Spanish dub, which is exclusive to Europe, leaving Latin American Spanish speakers with subtitles only. To throw salt on the wound, the European Spanish dub casted famous Latin American actors (Jessica Angeles, Humberto Vélez, Abraham Vega being the most notable) for all of the Hispanic characters (Jackie, Panam, Judy, etc), as well as native Japanese speakers for the Japanese characters, making the European Spanish dub one of the most culturally diverse ever made.
Non-Singing Voice: Keanu Reeves provides speaking voice and likeness to Johnny Silverhand, but his singing voice was done by the vocalist of the hardcore punk band "Refused", Dennis Lyxzén. Likewise, Kerry Eurodyne is voiced by Matthew Yang King, but his singing voice is done by a Polish vocalist Damian Ukeje.
Cherami Leigh normally plays Anime roles, usually of the Nice Girl type. This is one of her very few non-eastern roles as of late, and furthermore she's playing the anti-heroic, foul-mouthed female version of the protagonist, V. She also used a similar voice back in 2017 for her performance as A2 in NieR: Automata, and, for V's angry side, as Rhea in Fire Emblem: Three Houses.
Gaming influencers Alanah Pearce, Jesse Cox and CohhCarnage all have cameos in the game, as does Brazilian RPG blogger Azaghal - who, in the Brazilian Portuguese dub, voices his Cyberpunk 2020 character, Ozob.
Matthew Yang King, Kerry's English voice actor, is a huge fan of the original tabletop game. He told his agent that he's willing to play as literally anyone, but he has to end up in the game somehow.
Prop Recycling: The guns that were introduced alongside various updates are almost entirely kitbashed together from already existing firearms, and also reuse preexisting first-equip animations. Couple this with a lack of unique gameplay features and there's very little that sets them apart from what was in the game from the start.
Claire is voiced by Maddie Taylor. Both are transgender women.
A V of either gender can have a one-night stand with Meredith Stout. Stout's voice actress, Erica Lindbeck, is bisexual.
Real-Life Relative: Kamil Kula and Marta Żmuda Trzebiatowska, the Polish voices of male V and Judy, are actually a married couple. A bit ironic that their characters can never get together due to Incompatible Orientation.
Schedule Slip: The game is infamous for those. It kept slipping all through 2020 - from April, to September, to November, to December. CDPR claimed the was "feature-complete" on the original April 2020 date, but needed more time for bug fixing, the creation of physical copies and for rating boards to do their thing. The last slip, three weeks from late November to early December, was caused by the need to make the PS4 and Xbox One versions work. Even after all these delays the launch was so bad that the game was removed from the PlayStation Store and the general consensus is that it would have needed two more years of development to get to the "ready when it's done" state CDPR promised the fans it would be.
Sequel in Another Medium: The second video game sequel to the tabletop games, while the first sequel was in fact a 2007 mobile game subtitled The Arasaka's Plot.
Throw It In!: Cherami Leigh's reaction to Ozob, the clown with a grenade stapled to his face, was a genuine response to seeing the character for the first time. The director liked it so much that they kept it in the game.
Despite having announced the game in 2012, production didn't really get rolling until the blockbuster success of 2015's The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. While a small team had been quietly working on base concepts for the game during the development of Wild Hunt, the completion of that game’s final downloadable expansion saw the Wild Hunt team joining up with the Cyberpunk team… and immediately clashing with them. The veterans behind the Witcher titles had very different ideas for what Cyberpunk should be, and disliked that Cyberpunk's gameplay was similar to Wild Hunt. The clashes led to studio head Adam Badowski taking over the project and several lead developers walking away from the company, as development was effectively rebooted.
CD Projekt was keen on exceeding expectations. The first gameplay reveal at E3 2018 showed a vast array of role-playing options, a massive world and advanced graphics, all of which appeared to eclipse that of Wild Hunt. While the presentation drew wide praise, the entirety of the presentation had been created specifically for E3 and had no basis in the game’s actual progress, taking vital months away from development and setting unrealistic expectations.
On the 10th of June 2019 at the E3 Xbox conference, a 3 minute trailer ended with the reveal of the character of Johnny Silverhand, ending the trailer with the the iconic "wake the fuck up samurai, we have a city to burn" line. Keanu Reeves, riding high on a Career Resurrection from the John Wick films, came out to announce that he was the likeness and voice of Silverhand. They also announced the release date, 16th of April 2020. At this point it would not be out of line to say this 7 minute event had turned 2077 into the most hyped video game of all time. Pre-orders came in the millions.
Back in Warsaw, however, employees at CD Projekt RED were quietly panicking over the 2020 release frame. They saw obvious signs of feature creep as the studio's management had made increasingly grandiose promises they had no way of meeting with the timeframe they were given, with one manager dismissing concerns with "We'll figure it out along the way". The release date of 2020 was at least in part from hoping to “double dip” consumers by getting the game out before next-generation consoles released, then forcing consumers to buy the game again on the latest hardware.
Despite having increased the size of the team to over 500 people for the game, they were still considered grossly understaffed, and the company's inexperience with handling a large team further impacted work. There were also troubles between the native Polish employees and foreign expats brought in for work, with the expats frequently feeling disrespected (for example, employees would frequently speak Polish during meetings or reviews while non-Polish speakers were present, despite standing policy to use English during such occasions). Against the backdrop of these troubles, management forced a long period of brutal crunch time in order to get the game finished by its planned April 2020 release date, despite having publicly promised that no crunch would happen. This lead to numerous departures from longtime engineering staff due to overwork, as well as backlash when the crunch conditions were made public.
As 2019 ended, management realized that there was no possible way the game would be ready in time even as the team cut content, and in January 2020, with just three months before release, they announced that they were pushing it back to September. In June, they pushed it back to November as the COVID-19 Pandemic severely impacted communication and workrate, and in October, after the game had been announced as having "gone gold", they pushed it back again to December as the team scrambled to fix severe bugs. By this point, next-generation consoles had already hit stores, scuttling the "double dip" plans and splitting the team's efforts between the new consoles and the prior generation.
Despite the hype, the reveal of crunch conditions and the constant delays served as red flags as they went directly against many PR statements made by CDPR. More red flags raised in the immediate lead-up to release, as LGBTQI+ groups took exception to the game’s treatment of trans characters, and the release build contained sequences that consistently caused seizures. It was known within the studio that, while the PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions were buggy but functional, the PS4 and Xbox One versions were nearly unplayable. The game would be shipping regardless. CD Projekt RED only allowed reviewers to play the PC version in controlled conditions to mitigate the issues.
When the game was shown off for the first time back on August 27, 2018, V's backstory would have involved a Childhood Hero (Johnny Silverhand, Morgan Blackhand, Saburo Arasaka), a Key Life event (death of a sibling, running away from home, first kill) and why they came to Night City (unfinished business, visiting an ex-lover in town, got something to prove). This was eventually replaced by Lifepaths where V is either a hoodlum from Night City, a member of a Nomad tribe or a big-wig corpo member of Arasaka.
Going back even further, when the initial teaser was released, the plot was going to be more about the Cyber part of Cyber Punk, specifically in the setting, cyborgs are going violently insane and you are part of a task force meant to bring them down, but also potentially recruit them to the squad to bring down others like them. When the game was properly revealed years later with gameplay footage to go with it, the game began to lean much more into the Punk part of Cyber Punk, with the player character being a mercenary from one of three life paths trying to make a name for yourself within Night City while getting caught up in a conspiracy involving one VERY famous rock star/terrorist getting implanted into your brain.
The game's in-universe translation of dialogue from foreign languages to English (or whatever language the player has set it to) was originally supposed to be an actual game mechanic. You would have to invest in language upgrades to be able to understand what was being spoken. Now, you simply translate what everyone is saying to something understandable.
The cutscenes in the game would have been more along the lines of those found in the Deus Ex series, in which the gameplay is exclusively in first person but the story segments would have varied cinematic angles, where the player character is seen more often than not; that seemed like a direction internally set for quite a long time during development, only changing in about less than 2 years before the game’s final release, as CD Project ended up deciding that they opted to have the cutscenes primarily set in first person, reasoning that it is more immersive for players that way, thus the cinematics are never set out of V’s line of sight, where even when V can be seen it’s because of a mirror reflection or another point of view.
In the 2018 gameplay showcase, it was mentioned that the mission to retrieve the Flathead model for Dexter DeShawn was originally going to be "one of the many missions" players could undertake. In the final game, "The Pickup" is a mandatory story mission.
V was originally conceived as a female character, and the option to play as a man was added later in development. Quest descriptions used for development consistently refer to V with she/her pronouns. In an interview with Dan Allen, Cherami Leigh, the English voice actress for the female V, said that she was casted even before male V was created.
The team briefly had an idea of making the conversation scenes more realistic. For example, some characters would stop talking to you, get mad or even pull out their guns if during the conversation with them, the player would jump on a nearby table. This was cut because it seemed like it would be frustrating for too many players who would do this on accident, though most NPCs with conversation options outside of cutscenes do have lines which express annoyance or dismay if the player character walks away from them during the conversation.
The bullet-deflecting and superheated properties of katanas that were advertised in the trailers never made it into the game until the 2.0 update - the update added the ability to deflect bullets as part of the Reflex skill tree, whilst a superheated katana was added to the game as an iconic weapon.
According to an update stream with some CDProjekt members, Jackie used to be a bad guy in a very early draft of the story. He was the reason as to why the heist went belly up, and the player would fight him at some point during it. All the devs agreed that they prefer the final version, where Jackie is V's best friend, much more.
Some very early (2015) concept art hint that Judy was originally Asian and was named Jenny, or at least that Judy's final design was based off Jenny's. In "Pyramid Song", Judy mentions that she used to have a crush on a girl named Jenni, which may or may not be a reference to her earlier design.
Panam's early design had her hair in a large curly design with lots of volume. This design can be found in the art book.
Around the time of the games' Launch, a 2013 Pre-Alpha gameplay of 2077 was leaked revealing a male version of V, contradicting that 2077 always intended to have a female V. This version of V is exclusively shown in a third person Always Over the Shoulder camera and able to roam around the apartment of a version of Sandra, who in this version was a recent widow who was seemingly set for life due to her husband's death. V is involved with Sandra intimately and had an ally named Pat, that appears to be digging for information that V was is suppose to be looking for as well, including the "cyber-whacko" test the deceased husband had done by Maxtac. This Pre-alpha shows a version of V that's only visible cybernetics are along his back and spine and a lot more interactivity with the apartment environment than the final version of 2077 shows in pre-1.5 living spaces. It's unknown if this was a simple test of the systems, including a third person camera and the script was slapped together for the test. Or, if it was an early version of the originally intended systems and storyline that was then reworked until it became the product we know.
There was a leak of Phantom Liberty's story that came out before the expansion was formally announced that appears to have been an early draft. It had the names of Songbird, Alex, and Kurt (though Kurt's last name was different and Barghest was called Fang) and it laid out the general plot of the storyline, including the split for the third act and how you had a last second choice in both paths. In this draft of the story however, instead of the NUSA offering the facility to cure V, V would take the chip that contains the cure to Arasaka which would lead to a modified version of the Devil ending. The cure would remove Johnny and repair V's brain without the neurodegradation they suffer in the Tower ending, but V's personality would change, becoming colder and less moral. The ending would be different based on whether Takamura was alive. If not, Hellman would ask V to help him defect to Kangtao and ask V to defect with him. If Takamura is alive, he would tell V that Arasaka wants Viktor dead because V tells him about the chip before coming to Arasaka and they want V to kill him (if V says yes, Takamura is shocked by how cold and indifferent V is at the idea of killing a trusted friend). Depending on the choice you make to either scenario, it is revealed to be a test that Hanako is giving for V to potentially become her head of security. V can either accept or choose to return home.
There was some confusion over Kerry's sexuality shortly after the game came out: in the original tabletop game, he was bisexual, but in the video game, he's only an available romance option for a masculine (masculine voice + body) V. There are some clues that the player can find (like an email exchange with his ex-wife, or female clothing strewn around his house, or the fact that he will introduce V as his newest fling to other members of Samurai regardless of V's gender) that imply he's bisexual, but nothing was openly stated in the game, letting players see Kerry as anything from "bisexual" to "closeted gay" to "gay, but used to identify as bi". Talsorian Games, the company responsible for the tabletop game the video game was based on, confirmed on twitter that Kerry is still bisexual, but is only attracted to male V because he reminds him ofJohnny.
The players have discovered unused voicelines for male V that mirror the voicelines for Judy Alvarez's Romance Sidequest done by female V. This led to speculations that Judy was supposed to be bisexual, but due to how the romance system is programmed (no character can be romanced by male or female V, it's always one or the other), it was cut. CDProjekt has confirmed that Judy was always written as a lesbian, and the voicelines were simply recorded for posterity's sake (in games where the player can pick a voice for their character, it's common for all voice actors to record lines available for the other voices, even if those lines end up unused). Gavin Drea, the English voice actor for male V, confirmed in an interview that when he received the voiceline sheet for Judy's missions, the romantic ones were already tagged as "female V only", but he and the recording studio staff he worked with decided to record them just in case.
The same was true of Female V. Modders discovered that Cherami Leigh, V's female voice, recorded the entirety of the romance route for V and Panam despite the fact that Panam is the Hetero romance for Male V. As a result, they managed to mod it all back into the game, and made it available for people who felt Panam should've been a Bisexual choice instead, or headcanoned her as Bi in general (closeted or not.) Without it, Female V is explicitly rejected by Panam if an attempt is made to romance her during the game.
Mike Pondsmith has provided many details for the world of 2077 despite the fact that CD Projekt Red has final say due to the terms of their contract. Though it helped that the lead developers were all lifelong fans of the tabletop game, and that Pondsmith was already in the process of updating the game's world for a new edition when CDPR proposed the video game adaptation.
Paweł Sasko, the game's lead quest designer, hosts a weekly twitch stream every Sunday where he talks about designing the game and answers chat's comments. He also has a youtube channel with archived streams.
Working Title: According to various English voice actors, the game was called "project cheetah".
Miscellaneous
According to Mike Pondsmith, he noted that the developers took much of the game's content from the original tabletop game Cyberpunk 2020. They also partnered with him to make Cyberpunk Red, a version of the tabletop that replaced Cybergeneration/Cyberpunk V3 as a connective tissue from 2020 to 2077, some of the material even points to holes and contradictions in Johnny's stories/memories of the old days in 2077.
The scene where V talks to Viktor for the first time in "The Ripperdoc" was Cherami Leigh's audition.
The English voice cast was told to avoid using pronouns if they wanted to change the line, unless they were absolutely necessary for the sentence to make sense.
Cherami Leigh joined the project in 2018 to record a demo for E3 and expected to never hear from CDProjekt again, thinking that they have an A-list celebrity for her place for the game proper. Both her and Gavin Drea, the voice actor for male V, expected that they will be replaced as late as six months into their recording sessions.
Michael-Leon Wooley, the voice actor for Dexter deShawn, was the first voice actor Pierce O'Toole, the voice director, worked with on the project.
Keanu Reeves recorded his lines for a month, in two four hour long sessions every day. On some days, according to Pierce O'Toole, Keanu would train for The Matrix Resurrections in the morning and come to the studio to record for cyberpunk in the evening.
One of the last recording sessions Cherami Leigh participated in was during Christmas, and she spend almost the entire day in the studio. She said that she decorated christmas cookies on her breaks.
The studio responsible for the English dubbing was split in two divisions, an American and an English one. Cherami Leigh and Keanu Reeves recorded their lines in the Los Angeles studio, while Gavin Drea did his lines in the English one.
All of T-Bug's voicelines she says in the tutorial were recorded from her voice actress' house, due to safety measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cherami Leigh found out that Keanu Reeves is going to be in the game after the E3 reveal trailer from 2019. Her first though was that CDProjekt is going to fire her for sure, and replace her with someone more high-profile.
The phonecalls to Jackie player can make in act two were added later in development and weren't planned from the start.
Keanu Reeves wasn't always considered for the role of Johnny Silverhand. CDProjekt only started looking for a suitable actor after the game's script was nearly finished. One of the directors suggested offering the role to Reeves, both due to the role Johnny plays in the story, and Reeves' history with the Cyberpunk genre.
Borys Pugacz Moraszkiewicz, the adaptation director, recommended the 1961 movie Last Year at Marienbad to Cherami Leigh and Pierce O'Toole, saying that it's essentially about "being V".
Viktor's facial model was Sebastian Kalemba, the head of animation at CDProjekt.
The song Kerry plays on his guitar during "Boat Drinks" was performed by Piotrek Lewandowski. According to him, the tune was composed by P.T Adamczyk, but he lacked the skills to actually perform it, so he asked Lewandowski for help. You can watch him play it here.
All of the character movement animation was motion captured, even the random NPC animations.
Keanu Reeves actually offered to sing all the Samurai songs himself, but CDProjekt opted for Dennis Lyxzén instead.
The recipe for the "Johnny Silverhand" drink you can order in the Afterlife was created by a Polish mixologist, Dawid "Panda" Pytkowski.
Cherami Leigh said that the only other voice actor from the game that she met in person was Jason Hightower, the voice actor for Jackie Welles, and even then it was mostly due to a coincidence, because Leigh was recording lines for a different project at the same time as Hightower was recording lines for Jackie in the next booth at the same studio. She talked with Gavin Drea (voice actor for male V) through zoom for the first time a couple days before the game's launch, when the two were supposed to be interviewed together. She also never met Keanu Reeves (Johnny Silverhand), though she did see him on a parking lot of the studio they recorded their lines, as he was leaving and she just arrived. Apparently, she was too nervous to approach him, because it happened at Halloween and Leigh was dressed in a witch costume, and she didn't want to make a strange first impression.
The drink recipe Jackie gives Claire on his first visit to Afterlife which will later become his memorial drink the "Jackie Welles", is actually an existing drink called the "Moscow Mule"—minus the splash of love.
Dogtown was based on Las Vegas and Managua (the capital of Nicaragua). Longshore Stacks, the "living" district, was based on favelas and the type of living architecture that was used during the South American migration boom. Dogtown having its main shopping district in a derelict stadion was based on Stadion Dziesięciolecia in Poland, which was turned into a bazaar in the 90s where you could buy almost anything from a less than legal source.
The secret ending of the game, "(Don't) Fear The Reaper", where V and Johnny storm the Arasaka Tower together, wasn't originally planned to be in the game. It was the idea of someone in the design team and it really stuck with Paweł Ochocki, the game's cinematic design coordinator. His team wasn't sure if this is possible; A few days later, Ochocki was approached by Eero Varendi, the game's senior quest designer, who said that he will work on the idea with him. They worked on the ending together untill it was ready to be shown to the leadership who approved it and allowed it to be put in the game.
◊.
