One of the bigger surprises of the recent E3 event was the appearance of wholesome Hollywood actor Keanu Reeves on-stage at the Xbox conference as part of CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 event. In the game, Reeves plays Johnny Silverhand, a digital ghost that haunts the player character.
Before he became a digital ghost, the Silverhand character happened to be one of the more famous rockers in the Cyberpunk society. CD Projekt also says that music will play a big part of the game and you’ll be able to utilise different radio stations as you drive around the city in-game. Perhaps this will open the doors for Keanu Reeves to star on some of the games soundtrack?
“That’s one of the things that I cannot talk about,” lead quest designer Pawel Sasko told me. “I cannot confirm or deny. Actually the song that you have heard when Keanu walked on the stage, the tune that was playing, the heavy one, that’s part of it, because that’s the music of Johnny Silverhand and that was his voice, what you heard there. But we cannot talk about it yet.”
“But going back to the stations, because in the game we have music score that is like score for a game, so because you solve the quest, it has its own score and so on. But you have also a playlist, or the radio stations with lots of different types of music, that you’ll be able to switch to, and you can listen to the music being on bike or being on motorcycle or in the car. And you can switch them on the fly.”
Some of the music stations are solely music-focused while some are news channels that talk about opportunities in the world, faction conflicts, and, of course, your exploits.
“As a player you can basically switch freely between those and just pick music you want to have, so just play the way you want,” Sasko explained. “We are trying to make it always like it’s freedom for the player. You pick the way you play, you build the character you want, you pick the choices you want, you pick the branches you want, and then you listen to the music you want when you drive the car you want. It’s that thing, it’s my view, my story.”
