CYBERPUNK 2077

CD Projekt Red’s devs tell us what it took to design Night City’s guns, cars and more.

Every city has its soul: Liverpool’s cheek, London’s edginess, Madrid’s non-stop sociability, New York’s drive. Building an RPG world as vibrant and dense as Cyberpunk 2077’s is some undertaking, especially if you want it to feel like a living, believable space that’s faithful to the ’80s techno-futuristic style of the tabletop RPG it’s based on, Cyberpunk 2020. How do you give a virtual city a real soul – put the ghost in the machine?

“The first stage was just looking for the actual art style, and it was this kind of problematic question – are we making a futuristic game, or making some kind of retro-futuristic game, or are we completely leaving the game in the ’80s?” explains Paweł Mielniczuk, the game’s art director, responsible for characters, vehicles, and weapons. He explains that part of the pre-production process was creating hundreds of pieces of concept art looking for the perfect style. “We ended up with some kind of a blend. We definitely decided that we don’t want to make a futuristic game that is an expansion of our reality. [It’s] this kind of dystopian future where things went kind of wrong, where humanity never stopped emitting carbon […] and destroying nature – erasing nature – from the face of the planet and just didn’t stop expanding. Which led to the corporate wars and disasters, you know, tossing meteorites at the planet – there’s this kind of story in Cyberpunk in the original rulebook.”

It’s an imposing world, dangerous just to walk around. “We picked brutalist and modernist architecture and we based on that, so everything is blocky, imposing, just dangerouslooking,” says Mielniczuk. For more general styles the team created an ‘art bible’ to track how it had evolved over time to reach 2077. As concept art co-ordinator Ben Andrews puts it: “instead of just having one art style, we decided we actually needed four.” The aesthetic quartet encompasses flashy, bold, retro (for them) Kitsch; the luxury-and-fur Neokitsch favoured by Night City’s elite; corporate, sharp, cold Neomilitarism; and the more down-to-earth Entropism of the working class. “These cultural eras, each has its own specific style,” says Andrews, adding: “and you can see it reflected in the architecture, the technology, the cyberware, the guns – every element of the game should have some influence from one of these eras.”

For Andrews, that’s what makes the world of Cyberpunk feel so unique and vital. “It is this idea that we do have this history there,” he says. “You can literally walk down the street in Cyberpunk, and you can see in the characters, in the technology, in the environments, in the buildings, you can see these styles pass.”

You don’t need to take Andrew’s word for it. Over the next eight pages we speak to the key people behind designing everything you’ll be firing, wearing, using, and driving in Cyberpunk 2077. We’ve been given exclusive and unrivalled access to the artistic work being done to ensure Night City will be one of PlayStation’s most compelling worlds. Turn the page now to discover how the city’s vending machines will give your arsenal a Boost with a difference…

“EVERYTHING IS BLOCKY, JUST DANGEROUSLOOKING.”