Obsession

Night City is broken in the familiar way—megacorps in towers, dealers on the street selling neural implants and the promise of transcendence, the poor and rich separated by invisible distance. It’s cyberpunk 101, which means it’s been rendered a thousand times already. The aesthetic has become so tired that neon feels comfortable now, expected.

What makes me pay attention is that CD Projekt Red is building this. The same studio that spent years getting The Witcher 3 right, learning how to make a world feel lived-in and chaotic instead of designed and empty. If they can translate that obsession with density and detail into an entire megacity, something interesting might happen. Or they might just build an expensive shell.

As a designer, I’m drawn to the visual information in what they’ve shown. There’s no simplicity here—everything is layered, information-dense, the kind of deliberate chaos that most games avoid because it’s harder to optimize around. Whether that approach actually works for an interactive world, I have no idea yet.

I’m skeptical of hype in general. I’ve watched games long enough to see the pattern: enormous promise followed by either delivery or spectacular collapse, with most of the interesting space actually in between. Cyberpunk as a genre has a similar problem—it’s mostly aesthetic now, neon and chrome and the promise of transcendence, while the actual urgent substance got left behind somewhere.

But a studio that understands how to obsess over a world, that’s proven it can build something that feels real instead of just designed—that’s worth paying attention to when they aim for a megacity. Either they pull off something remarkable, or they build the most beautiful disaster. Either way I’ll be inside Night City for months when it launches, probably sometime next year.