Earlier this morning, CD Projekt Red (CDPR) launched its long-awaited and once-delayed first episode of Night City Wire event. As promised, we were given a new trailer with new gameplay snippets, but more importantly, it was also when CDPR announced that it was also working an anime with a standalone plot in the studio’s version of the Cyberpunk world.
To start, the new in-game trailer gives us a somewhat more in-depth look of the titular Night City. For the uninitiated, the world of Cyberpunk 2077 is divided into six areas; five of those areas are based within the boundaries of Night City, while the sixth area, dubbed the Badlands, is situated on the fringes and border of the city and seems to be portrayed as lawless and inhabited by outcasts of the game’s societies.
The first city of Night City Wire also introduces a new gameplay element within the game known as Braindance, or BD for short. Basically, it’s a game mode that allows you to replay the events of an NPC in real-time in order to play detective and investigate for clues, usually over how or who killed the subject. Think of Batman’s Detective Mode in the Arkham series, just with better graphics and an expanded set of controls.
New trailer and gameplay mode aside, we can now move on to the other exciting announcement: the Cyberpunk anime. Officially called Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, the animated series will reportedly be a 10-episode story focused around a street kid trying to survive in both the underbelly and high society world of Night City. To that end, he apparently becomes an “Edgerunner”; basically, a mercenary driven by the allure of Eurodollars or “Eddies” for short.
Not much else is known about the plot of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, but it may be of some interest to fans that CDPR has engaged the services of Studio Trigger, famed for its work on other critically-acclaimed anime such as Kill la Kill, Drailing in the Franxx, and more recently, Promare. Additionally, the anime will be a Netflix exclusive, but will only be arriving on the streaming service sometime in 2022.
Cyberpunk 2077 is now slated for a 19 November launch from 17 September. After its developers CDPR announced that the game, while already completed, still required some polishing and fine-tuning before it could finally be shipped to the masses. It’s a bittersweet feeling, especially since this marks the second time the company has had to delay the game. That said, it’s always better to launch a more polished game late, than a title riddled with bugs early on.
