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A hidden message in Cyberpunk 2077's gameplay demo explains the delay

Cyberpunk 2077's long-awaited gameplay demo hid a lengthy letter from CD Projekt RED within a single frame.

You might have missed it during all the fantastic sights of Cyberpunk 2077's 48-minute demo, but the final frame holds a special message from CD Projekt RED. Spotted and transcribed on Reddit (thanks IGN), explains why the studio waited so long after E3 to share this demo.

In short? The team wasn't sure it was ready!

Here's the message in full:

Sorry to have kept you waiting for this for so long!

Did you like what you saw? Because for us, the fact that we're finally showing you Cyberpunk 2077 is HUGE. Please go to our forums, twitter, facebook, discord, and do tell what you think. Is the game world how you imagined? Do you see what we meant by "immersion" when we talked about CP2077 being an FPP RPG? How does our vision of "cyberpunk by day" make you feel? We really want to know.

Aside from that, we think we owe you a few words of explanation on why we're showing you this gameplay now, some time after industry professionals and media saw it at E3 and gamescom.

Each time we discussed the idea of showing the game to you (and we discussed this idea a lot), we were ending up in this "we're not 100% sure" limbo. Why? Because (for most people), when a game dev shows gameplay footage from their game, it means that this is how the game is going to look or play like. It's not the case here. Cyberpunk 2077 is deep in development. We have a lot of design ideas, a lot of mechanics being playtested, but we don't know what we'll end up with at launch. This makes publishing videos like what you just saw risky --we don't want gamers saying 'but in that previous video that gun was shooting differently', or 'why did you change the interface?'. Change is inherent to game development and there's a ton of things being modified each day. Our fear was (and kind of still is) that you'll think what you just saw is how Cyberpunk 2077 will look like 1:1.

What gave us that extra confidence to show you a work in progress game? Good initial feedback from people who are accustomed to see games at various stages of development. What they told us (and they told us they really liked what they saw) gave us the boost we needed to show the current version of Cyberpunk 2077 to the most passionate and insightful audience --you.

So... here's what Cyberpunk 2077 looks like today (or rather looked like when we recorded the video). We sincerely hope you liked it.

Again, thank you for your patience and all the thoughts you shared with us.

Yours,

CD PROJEKT RED

It seems CD Projekt RED is well-aware that fans double-check every single video frame for details. Next time there's a trailer, make sure you keep an eye out for literal hidden messages!

Cyberpunk 2077 is currently in development for PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.

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Cyberpunk 2077

PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PC

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Marshall Lemon

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