Yes. You're still trying to take my statement literally.
I'm a different user from the one you initially responded to.
I've already clarified, I was intentionally making a joke. I'm well aware that MtG is not D&D itself. It's a totally different gameplay system.
And I'm make a likewise tongue-in-cheek response, correcting your geek history.
But, follow me:
1.) D&D is created. Gains a cult following.
In the 70s, by Tactical Studies Rules Incorporated AKA TSR, inc.
Founded by
Gary of the Illustrious and Most Honored House Gygax AKA Gary Gygax and Don Kaye, to publish the Dungeons and Dragons game he (Gygax) and
Dave of the Majestic and Most Revered House Arneson AKA Dave Arneson.
2.) D&D 2nd Edition is released. Gains a huge following. Wizards of the Coast now has resource to expand.
D&D 2nd edition or Advanced Dungeons & Dragons or AD&D was published by TSR
in 1977, some
13 years before the incorporation of Wizards of the Coast
in 1990. There is a second edition of AD&D itself, published in '89.
3.) They decide, you know what would be cool? Let's make a CCG based on our D&D universe!
Magic the Gathering was designed by Richard of the felicitous House Garfield AKA Richard Garfield, in 1993, 16 years after AD&D was published. While working for Wizards of the Coast, a company entirely separate from TSR.
Look, TSR and WotC were established on opposite sides of the country of Americaland.
4.) They create a card game based on the tenets of D&D (hit points, "leveling up" your cards / decks / collection, magical creatures, spells, special powers, synergy between certain races and factions, etc.) and they call it Magic: The Gathering. It's nothing like the PnP RPG, but it's the same universe.
Again, while Richard Garfield was inspired by D&D while designing MtG, he was working for a different company.
5.) Someone suggests, you know what they should do? Make an RPG based on Magic: The Gathering.
6.) Hence, reverse that process and turn it back into D&D 2nd Edition?
7.) Heh-heh-heh-heh...etc.
Wizards of the Coast did end up buying out TSR and are now beginnig to fuse D&D and MtG into the same universe. And thus D&D
is becoming the RPG version of MtG.
But the story of how this happened is important, since the causal chain leads rather directly to CDProjekt and Cyberpunk 2077.
The rather obvious case is the RTalsorian's Cyberpunk PnPRPG. Mike Pondsmith got into RPGs by getting a copy of the 1st edition D&D. That interest would lead to RTalsorian and the Cyberpunk soon-to-be quadrology of RPGs.
A slightly more convoluted path is the journey from D&D to CDProjekt;
TSR ended up making bad business desicions and went broke. If WotC hadn't picked it up, who knows where and to whom the D&D rights would have ended up at.
This is important, since it is through WotC the publisher Interplay allowed a neophyte gamestudio founded by three Canadian medical doctors, hot off the heels from their first foray into videogames with a mech sim, to develop a CRPG based on D&D. That game would be known as Baldur's Gate and the studio was BioWare.
Some three years from that in decommunising Poland, a localisation studio is looking for their big break after successfully localising Ace Ventura: The CD-Rom Game
. They approach Interplay and BioWare, to localise Baldur's Gate for Poland. That localisation studio was CD Projekt.
This began the long collaboration between CD Projekt and Interplay, that terminated with Interplay's bankruptcy. Which prompted CD Projekt to develop their own game, that after a few false starts ended up using BioWare's Aurora Engine. That was originally developed for the D&D CRPG Neverwinter Nights.
And that ends our lesson in Geek History.
Study hard, this
will be on the test.
[edit]:
My answer to the thread's core question is a question in return; Why not return to where it all began for CD Projekt?
Ace Ventura.
Dungeons and Dragons. Specifically the intersection of D&D and Magic the Gathering, the ecumenopolis plane of Ravnica. 2077 will prove that CD Projekt can do the urban setting well and since more conventional D&D is being handled by Larian Studios, this would still leave the rather outlandish world of Ravnica feeling fresh.
Especially if CD Projekt would continue their winning streak of action-RPGs, this would scratch the itch for realtime D&D, since Larian is going for their turn based weelhouse with Baldur's Gate 3. If the protagonist in the Ravnica project was a plainswalker expressed in D&D terms, they could possibly operate as a lone wolf, much like Geralt.
To me this would strike as a functional combination of the familiar and the new.