Speaking to Kotaku’s Jason Schreier, CD Projekt co-CEO Marcin Iwiński said that the Cyberpunk 2077 demo is a real slice of gameplay rather than a separate project. The entire Cyberpunk team focused on making assets for the demo, and that will eventually be used in the completed game.
“From what I’ve heard, some companies have separate teams that work on E3 demos and stuff like that; we don’t do it this way,” Iwiński said in the interview for Kotaku's Splitscreen podcast. “Maybe it’s better or worse, but for us it’s a cool milestone. We obviously branch out to get it done, but [building the demo] is moving the whole game forward.”
“It’s surprisingly a real build, so we didn’t fake anything here,” he said, explaining to Schreier that they’re using the “same RED Engine” they used for The Witcher 3, but “with 90 percent of it rewritten.”
“We didn’t start these conversations, but we got a lot of feedback like that in the previews, people actually noticing that certain things just look natural, they don’t look pre-rendered or fake,” he said. “This makes us very happy, and very proud, because we’ve actually managed to pull it off, to take a build.”