Cyberpunk 2077 Gamescom 2019 Interviews

This year’s Gamescom trade fair brings us a good number of fresh interviews dedicated to CD Projekt’s upcoming open world RPG Cyberpunk 2077. The interviews mostly focus on the game’s world and its high degree of verticality, vehicles, varied playstyles and character customization.

Here’s GamesRadar+ talking to Richard Borzymowski, one of CD Projekt’s producers:

And here’s Shacknews’ interview with the man:

If you’re interested in something more text-based, here are a few sample questions from Twinfinite’s interview:

Giuseppe: You can start as a street kid, a nomad, or a corporate. Does that actually influence your starting equipment and money?

Richard Borzymowski: It does change your starting equipment. It also influences how you’re able to progress at some point of the story.

You are from a certain background and you can draw information from your background, you know things other people don’t, you can talk to NPCs in a certain way.

This backstory is certainly influential on your story’s progression.

Giuseppe: I really love the fashion in the game. How did you guys go about evolving fashion from Cyberpunk 2020 that had an established look, but also a lot of variety in terms of sources and artists?

Richard Borzymowski: We have a very dedicated team of concept artists solely working on designing the characters.

We took the style from Cyberpunk 2020, but it wasn’t simply a matter of adding 57 years to that look because it was originally designed in 1986.

“Style over substance” is one of the mottos of the Cyberpunk that Mike Pondsmith created, so the thing that we did was looking at how the look of celebrities and more extravagant people is progressing.

We did a lot of brainstorming, and there are thousands of concepts around. We ended up with something we find suitable to our setting in Cyberpunk 2077.

CDPR’s Senior concept artist Marthe Jonkers had a chat with Metro:

GC: Seeing the verticality of the environment was very impressive but I’m still not clear how many of those buildings or floors you can actually go into?

MJ: That’s a good question, because we have a lot of verticality in this game. But we also value quality over quantity. So we made sure that… not every building will have a hundred floors for you to explore because that would be really boring, really repetitive. So we make sure that we have the right balance in how much you can explore and it will be a lot, but it won’t be so much that it’s not fun anymore.

GC: So how will it work? Will it be like GTA where some buildings just don’t have doors that open?

MJ: Some parts will be, maybe, closed off. So you can explore part of an apartment building, but won’t be able to go everywhere because there’s just not anything interesting there. There’s no point opening every door of an apartment because it wouldn’t add anything to the whole experience.

VGC:

Mike Pondsmith also created a lot of the original art for Cyberpunk. How authentic did you want to be in that sense?

We worked a lot with Mike as a kick-off point. He was very involved in development and would answer any questions we had, but 2077 is obviously more than 50 years later so we also had a lot of freedom to bring in our own art styles as well.

I don’t know if you’ve seen the posters of the different districts in the game, but these represent all the different art styles in the game, because of course a city doesn’t have just one style. Because we wanted to create a realistic city, we actually created a timeline for these four styles.

For example, there’s the Kitsch style which is really pink, yellow and with round shapes. It’s really happy because at the time people were having a good time. Then there’s the Neomilitarism style, which is very corporate, from when the corporations started to take over. We mix those styles together in the game, so if you travel the city you will see architecture from different eras. This is all stuff that CDPR added to the fiction, to overlap that 50-year gap from Cyberpunk 2020.

And RPG Site:

RPG Site: When conceptualizing levels in the city did you ever create or use table-top as references to test city layouts or blueprints for the city?

Marthe Jonkers: It was interesting when we designed Night City, it’s of course based on 2020, but we actually had an urban planner on our team that really helped us create this layout. It was also to make sure that you always had cool views or you always know where you’re going, it was really tough actually because it can quickly become very confusing if you can’t really see where you are. The composition was very important for that. As for level design, I’m not a level designer but I’ll try to answer the question because I work with these guys, but what’s really awesome is that you can play each level with very different play styles. Of course, they’ll make a lot of different versions and test them.

Actually, there is a lot of back and forth between us and them. They’ll come to us with a super cool gameplay layout and it’ll just be a bunch of grey boxes and we come in and paint it over and make it look like some super cool abandoned warehouse and then the environment team will come in and build it. But in the context of Cyberpunk 2027, yeah, I guess the approach to designing a level is maybe thinking of an area in 2020 and thinking of a map or a layout and you start building from that.

RPG Site: That’s really cool that you have a city planner helping you out with creating the layout for Night City.

Marthe Jonkers: Yeah. It really helps and it’s really great. You need someone who thinks about the layout, the map and how the roads will go and what is realistic.