Cyberpunk 2077 Interviews and Impressions

We’re now less than a year away from the long-awaited release of CD Projekt’s Cyberpunk 2077. And even though we’ll have to wait at least a few months before we get any new substantial Cyberpunk 2077-related reveals, there’s still some stuff you may be interested in checking out in the meantime. First, here’s Metro with a preview of the game’s E3 demo and a fairly extensive interview with CD Projekt’s lead quest designer Paweł Sasko. A few sample paragraphs:

GC: That’s perfect then. The game looked amazing, just as it did last year, but I think it’s the scale that impresses the most. I don’t see how you can have that many quests, that offer that much detail, without having either a tiny game world, the game in development for 20 years, or you employing thousands of developers.

PS: It’s a good question. First of all, we are a fairly big team. Right now we are around 450, so the team is kind of big. And most of this team worked on The Witcher 2 and Witcher 3, so the team is fairly experienced. I mean, I’ve been with the company for eight years, so most of us saw how to make the really big games in good quality. Because The Witcher 3 was absolutely massive and it was made by a team that was half the size! So that’s one of the ways of how we do it.

The second thing is that when we’re building scenes we’re building them in a systemic way. Basically, the way we’re doing, we’re doing it in a way that you don’t have to rebuild everything. So if you’re replicating similar solutions on something you build it once and you can basically reuse and change elements to give it this unique feel, but you still don’t need to build it from the ground up.

And we’re using this, pretty much, to be able to finish it. There’s still almost a year of work but that time will mostly be spent on iterating, polishing it, playing it, making sure it looks and feels the way we want. To be honest, in the demo, I know myself there were plenty of problems that we know about and we are going to fix it and we are going to improve it.

Then, there’s this Eurogamer interview with, Mike Pondsmith, the original creator of Cyberpunk 2020:

Sure. So obviously in the demo that’s being shown at E3 right now we’re getting our first glimpse at how Netrunning works.

Mike Pondsmith: Which I was really happy about because I spent a lot of time working that out with everybody.

You’ve pre-empted my question: what were the pillars that were really important for you to hit?

Mike Pondsmith: The biggest problem with Netrunning right now [in Cyberpunk 2020], is oddly enough the Gibson-esque worldview of Netrunning, which is you go out into a vast cyberspace, you fly around and you do things. Case [the protagonist in Gibson’s famous novel Neuromancer] works doing that because that’s pretty much what everybody does. But if you do that in the context of a game, everybody goes, ‘okay I’m gonna go get a beer, Netrunner’s going in, anybody need pizza?’ and they’re gone. So one of the biggest things for us when we went into it was we needed to get the net back into a box that was usable. To that, and you’ll see this extremely well done in Red, is we needed to force the Netrunner to be with the group. He can’t sit back in his comfy chair with his keyboard and say ‘go to the fifth level and open the door’. No, he has to go in there. You have to be under risk.

So I spent a lot of time studying computer architectures and I have two friends who specialise in computer security systems, so I said, ‘okay, so tell me how I can screw myself and give me some goal plans here,’ and they helped me design stuff that forced the Netrunner to be there, better toward how it works and that sort of thing. It’s not super realistic but it’s realistic enough. And that informed a lot of what goes on in what you saw today, in that people are doing hacks very close to the runner, they’re doing hacks of stuff, they’re not flying through cyberspace. When our hero goes to one particular area and they go to the wider net, that is rare. That is insanely rare. That’s like saying, ‘okay, by the way we’re going to now get on the jet plane and we’re going to fly to the moon.’ It is very much right there, it’s gonna come and bite you in the face.

There’s also a couple of bite-sized, yet quite interesting, interviews. VG247 lets us know that the game will let us explore the Badlands area surrounding the Night City and will even let us begin our journey there. And Prima Games has some information about the game’s planned post-release content that will include some The Witcher-style massive expansions.

Finally, you may be interested in this PC Gamer article where the editors discuss the game’s demo and liken it to Deus Ex with an unlimited budget.