FULL_OF_ CHARACTER(S)

_ Paweł Mielniczuk talks us through the challenges of character design

“YOU KNOW, THE CHARACTER DRESSING IN BLACK ALWAYS LOOKS GREAT.”

“The basic garment of choice for us is a T-shirt and jeans, you know? And everybody wears that. Whenever you try to do something more crazy, you start to make a character that looks overstylised or they look like this kind of runway model. […] So, whenever you try to make asymmetry and stuff it starts looking, you know, at some point in production you get this question ‘why are you all making these fashion models, you know?’

So, this is difficult, to make an interesting silhouette,” says experienced character designer Paweł Mielniczuk.

He tells us designing for Cyberpunk 2077 is easier than for The Witcher 3, to a degree. The future setting ensures there are more materials – leathers and linens, but also silks, plastics, and latex,and everything comes in an array of spectacular colours.

“But on the other hand, having that many options is also troublesome sometimes because the character dressing in black always looks great. But whenever you try to toss colour on it, it becomes a problem because elements are not matching. It’s not that easy,” he says.

It’s the details, Mielniczuk tells us, that have been the hardest part of the process. The team found it hard to invent character garments that had good secondary motion – the small details that dangle, flow, and flop to bring a character alive as they move.

Mielniczuk explains: “We didn’t want to use traditional seams and buttons and zippers, we wanted these garments to be slightly differently manufactured.

Like [the clothes have been] 3D-printed or built in some other way. But it was problematic. It took us a long time to research that, because whenever we were trying to remove all the seams and buttons and details from the garment, it started to look like a badly made 3D model, because it’s lacking detail. You expect to have a button there, not a magnetic stripe that’s invisible. So, it’s way more difficult to make an interesting character in Cyberpunk [than in The Witcher

3]. Because you have a much bigger spectrum of options and variety, but everybody expects the character to be wearing some kind of regular clothes.”

Johnny Silverhand is played by Keanu Reeves, but he was still inspired by the Johnny designs in the Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop game source material.

Adam Smasher is a returning character from the tabletop RPG. Mielniczuk calls the military robot design “totalitarian” in its incorporation of cyberware.