CYBERPUNK 2077
How CD Projekt Red is making sci-fi real in Cyberpunk 2077, a game years ahead of anything we’ve ever seen before
CD PROJEKT ’ S OPEN WORLD RAISES THE BAR TO STAGGERING NEW HEIGHTS
We hardly know where to look. Every inch of Night City’s Watson district is alive with detail, denser and richer than anything we’ve ever seen in a videogame before. Normally in a scene like this there’s a particular focal point – in Cyberpunk 2077, everything is a focal point. Over to the left pedestrians pour over a crossing; in the foreground two tattooed Slackers lounge on a low concrete wall as the sun beats down. Hundreds more people, chattering, no single one the same, sweep past protagonist V as he pushes against the crowd. Blinking neon signs boast ‘live nude’ on the sides of skyscrapers; advertisements for NiCola soda blare out jingles. As V turns a corner into a bustling side street, what looks to be a religious group – cybermonks, if you will – shuffle past, hands tucked inside of billowing sleeves, heads threaded with glinting metal.
Said side street is flanked by stalls, their vendors loudly trying to catch V’s attention, the sizzle of pad thai in the air. As he reaches the entrance to a seedy back alley, something finally holds our gaze: a cherry blossom tree, growing impossibly out of the side of a building. It’s not real, of course – it’s a hologram, flickering almost imperceptibly as its pink petals fall and melt away into nothingness overhead. And in that moment we understand what makes Night City so alluring: we are entranced by a vision of a reality where the grass on the other side is so green it’s neon.
By all appearances, Cyberpunk 2077 is the videogame fantasy come to life. Night City is more virtual than real, a place in which everything can and will be enhanced – louder, brighter, better, more convenient. People are decipherable at a glance, labels hovering over their heads: Mallrat, Dirtboy, Slacker, Corpo Rat. Digital posters, when examined, identify the nearest place to buy the product. Friendly neighbourhood Ripperdocs give you an anaesthetic and a menu from which you can choose a range of cybernetic implants to modify your body.
And what makes it all so believable is it that CD Projekt Red’s firstperson-shooter/roleplaying game keeps pace with the fantasy in perfect step. Everything flows seamlessly: there are no loading screens, meaning that when V takes the lift from his apartment down to the streets we can see glimpses of the urban chaos below before stepping out into it. You can also interact with seemingly anything you care to. In our demo, V ignores dozens of different interaction and dialogue options as he walks through the streets: one homeless man waving a camera promises that there’s something on it that’s bound to be of interest if only you’ll listen.
Stopping to view an ad drops a marker on the screen that directs you towards the nearest vending machine.
CYBERPUNK SUGGESTS A SANDBOX CITY THAT EASILY OUTSTRIPS THE DETAIL AND QUALITY OF GTA V
Head to the Ripperdoc for a new eyeball or subdermal grip, meanwhile, and it has a substantial impact on your game. A Kiroshi Mk-I optical scanner allows you to zoom in on small details such as your Ripperdoc’s boxing-glove necklace or a set of blueprints on a faraway wall – or a potentially dangerous group of people during one of V’s many mercenary jobs, the scanner analysing their threat level so you can decide whether to continue the quest or walk away. A subdermal grip implanted in V’s hand increases the damage dealt by all his guns, as well as updating the UI to show the weapon’s firing mode and an ammo count.
The cyberpunk genre suits the medium of videogames to a T. While plenty of other games have explored the sci-fi subgenre, none have yet managed to do it to this level of sophistication. What we’ve seen of Cyberpunk 2077 so far suggests a sandbox city that easily outstrips the detail and quality of GTA V; not only that, but a city in which a truly next-generation mission system ensures you feel less like a fetch-quest reticule travelling from point A to point B and more like you’re really making your way in Night City as a cyberpunk for hire.
It almost sounds too good to be true. This is CD Projekt Red, after all; while its finances are healthy it is not exactly powered by the multiple millions of dollars and gargantuan dev teams of a Rockstar or Ubisoft. But there is, you may remember, a precedent. The Witcher III: Wild Hunt was, despite its flaws, quite the achievement for a then-unfancied studio, an action-RPG in which quality writing, combat and world-building brought real, tangible life to stony-faced warrior Geralt of Rivia and his world. It also brought real, tangible change to the Polish studio – The Witcher III was ten times more successful than anything it had done before. Two-hundred-odd staff worked on it; more than double that number are currently working on Cyberpunk 2077.
This is the start of understanding how CD Projekt has managed to put together a demo that elicited audible gasps from roomfuls of seasoned journalists. The studio has evolved dramatically over the past five or six years, and that growth, at that particular time, has had a radical impact on the way the studio works. It now has all the tools to create a game that could potentially push the medium into the next generation. “It gave us a sense of safety in our own skills,” producer Richard Borzymowski says of The Witcher III’s success. “Right now our environment artists are populating a level with the assets, and they are not afraid of testing out new things. This is exactly what we need to stay open to, because personally I believe that The Witcher turned out that good – and why Cyberpunk will turn out really good – because we are not afraid of change.”
From the outset, ambitions were higher. “It takes a degree of determination, for sure,” Borzymowski says. “From the very beginning we were saying ‘Alright, this is huge, but this is what we want to aim for.’ As producers, we’re responsible for taking this vision and verifying the capability of the team and deciding if we have to change it structure-wise, or if we have to somehow change the content of the game to make it more flexible.” Creating something of Night City’s scope and detail has required significant changes to the way CD Projekt has worked before, “certainly when it comes to world building,” Borzymowski says. “From the quest designs we are deriving where the events in individual quests are taking place.”
He begins to break down the demo’s first quest, in which V and his partner Jackie face off against cyberware-
harvesting Scavengers to find a girl whose biolocator went dark, into its constituent world parts: the dingy megabuilding corridor where people poke their heads out of doors to watch V stalk past; the apartment containing kidnapped, hacked bodies in ice baths that plays host to the shootout; the terrace outside where the Trauma Team (a form of expensive medical insurance for the super-rich) lands to pick up the woman. “When working with scoping, only this granularity can provide you safety,” Borzymowski says. “If you are taking one big chunk of the game and thinking, ‘Alright, this chunk will take us 200 days,’ then this is not very accurate. But if you split it, and then ask ‘How much will it take us to build an apartment? How much time will it take us to build the pathway from the apartment to the megabuilding?’ Then you are more accurate. This is very important because it’s essentially on us, and the team needs to plan the work in such a way that it’s feasible.”
This is how Night City is made to feel truly alive. In a back alley, a holographic recreation of a crime scene plays out under the supervision of cyber-enhanced police officers while a Dirtgirl across the street leans against a door jamb, watching. The receptionist at the Ripperdoc’s surgery studies a waiting patient’s palm and chatters about his chakras. Lanterns swing wildly overhead as V hurtles underneath them in Jackie’s car during a random encounter with a vengeful Scavenger from the first mission, V hanging out of the driverside window to shoot as his partner wrestles with the wheel. Every space is designed to augment and react to a player’s presence in it. It has to: the first-person perspective means that players are nose-to-nose with the details of the world. This painstaking process starts from the top down, with specific teams for every step and sub-step of the process – a rarity nowadays, we’re told, in game development. A level design team is responsible for the basic layout. An environment team then uses that layout to work on creating the main skeleton of the city. Then there’s the open-world team that populates the streets, the staircases, the lifts, doorways and kerbsides. And it’s probably the decorations team we have to thank for those neon cherry blossoms, that gorgeous shock of imitated life sprouting from a tangle of neon signs and loose wires.
“I think it’s important, this granularity,” Borzymowski says. “The Witcher III wasn’t less complex, but it was complex in a different way. When we were world-building you had those big open spaces, which still had to be filled out. It’s not like it was easier or cheaper to build all those beautiful forests and meadows, but it is more forgiving. If one tree is a bit more off to the right, this is exactly how forests look. But if you put a building too far apart from a different one in the middle of a city, then this can’t really work, right? You have to fill this gap in between doing other things already. And you have to push
everything.” CD Projekt is now holding itself to an even higher standard than before: while at least some of The
Witcher III’s environments used procedurally generated elements to paint in basic foliage texture, for example, the studio refuses to use procedural elements in any of
Cyberpunk 2077’ s environment or quests. This time it’s not just talk – everything really is hand-crafted.
Indeed, the animation team has taken on the mammoth task of creating different sets of bespoke animations for each of Night City’s six districts. “We want to make sure that each of them has a different feeling,” lead cinematic animator
Maciej Pietras says. “So Pacifica, it’s this super-dangerous territory where you’ve got people who are basically gangsters, and the Psychogangs rule this district. So violence is more predominant there. But you’ve also got these superrich districts like Heybrook, and we vary animations in a way that are connected to the districts.”
Other technological breakthroughs have also helped: Pietras points to GI, or global illumination, which uses algorithms to light 3D environments realistically, as a crucial part of both building Night City and revamping the studio’s creative process. “We have a completely new animation system, and we completely changed the approach to handling animations,” he says. “We have a better mocap studio, we have a completely new facial animation system based on muscles. We have a new way of generating lip sync animation when people are talking. We have a completely new approach to creating environments, so instead of working on a huge world at once we are creating prefabs which are then adjusted and placed differently, so everything is scalable. Another thing is simply our engine, which we decided to push far while still working hard on optimisation to make sure the game will run on current-gen consoles. It’s a completely new way – I would say almost every single department went through this kind of evolution.”
Perhaps none more so than the narrative-focused part of CD Projekt, which now has its own dedicated quest team for
Cyberpunk 2077. While the narrative team works on the overarching story structure, the quest team comes up with the incidentals of how V progresses through it and the choices he or she must make. Any stories, characters or themes that aren’t explored in depth in the main story are taken to be fully fleshed out in sidequests. “One of the things in The
Witcher III that people responded to was the quality of the sidequests,” quest designer Patrick Mills says. We immediately think of Bloody Baron, now infamous for its deeply personal exploration of a single NPC’s family life. “We want to make sure that all of them are up to the standards of the main quest – that there’s nothing that feels like filler, just something to do while waiting for the next quest, or to get more money to buy the next thing. We don’t really like to do that. We want to make sure that every quest feels like a complete story in and of itself.”
EVERY SPACE IS DESIGNED TO AUGMENT AND REACT TO A PLAYER’S PRESENCE IN IT. IT HAS TO
In the second quest we’re shown in the demo, V is summoned to Dexter DeShawn’s limousine: the golden-armed mogul offers a shard that V slots behind his ear to view a mission proposal. DeShawn needs a stolen combat bot, and if V can procure it, he’ll pass the test (and presumably unlock plenty more lucrative work opportunities). With 50,000 eddies – short for Eurodollars, Night City’s currency – on a cred chip and a few new Ripperdoc ability upgrades, V’s ready to meet corporate executive Meredith Stout. Stout is not best pleased about having her shipment ransacked by Maelstrom, and has an agenda of her own. She’ll give you the bot for free if you plug the new cred chip into the thieves’ terminal. What’s on it, she won’t say, but you can safely assume it’s probably not four seasons of her favourite Netflix show.
The Maelstrom hideout is heavily guarded, full of Militechbrand turrets and scores of swaggering Dum Dums, multiple sets of red eyes studded into their skulls. Maelstrom is a Psychogang, an extreme subset of criminals dedicated to becoming as wholly machine as possible. As V is told to sit, a Dum Dum offers a version of the inhalable drug prescribed by Ripperdocs (one puff, twice a day – and you really do have to remember to take it, it seems) to allow your body to accept new cybernetic implants. This is stronger stuff, though, evidenced by the fact that the red neon lighting on screen glows almost painfully bright after a whiff of it. The spiderbot is shown off to its potential buyer: crawling on the ceiling, activating camo armour. And then the boss turns up.
“WE WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT EVERY QUEST FEELS LIKE A COMPLETE STORY IN AND OF ITSELF”
CD PROJEKT SHOWS THAT IT HAS A FIRM GRASP ON HOW TO BUILD A BOMBASTIC SCI-FI SHOOTER
Royce’s entrance is where some of the more obvious choices begin. You can initiate a fight immediately. You can simply buy the bot with the cred chip and leave. Or you can tell Maelstrom what you know – that there’s likely a virus on that cred chip, giving up Stout and walking away with the bot trotting obediently behind you and 50 large in the bank. Or, as our demo handler decides, you can do the latter, then change your mind at the front door and go back to ruin Maelstrom’s day for the sheer, fresh hell of it.
Here, CD Projekt shows that it has a firm grasp on how to build a bombastic sci-fi shooter. Shots from a tech shotgun (styled as ‘blunderbuss’) can be charged up to blast through cover, while another gun’s bullets can be bounced off surfaces – the trajectory indicated by a dotted line – to hit enemies around corners. A Kang Tao smart rifle, one of the game’s ‘epic’ weapons, can fire shots that will trace whomever they hit. One kind of consumable allows you to slow down time in combat, each individual bullet trailing past V in mid-air, while a puff of V’s trusty inhaler tops up health. It’s hard to judge from a screen how it all feels in the hands, of course, but CD Projekt is no stranger to melee combat, and when V pulls out a katana – which vibrates uproariously as it deflects enemy bullets – then slides along the floor on his knees like a six year old at a wedding to lop off a Maelstrom goon’s legs, our fingers tingle in response.
This is a particularly fast Solo build of V, we’re told. As an RPG, Cyberpunk 2077 lets you customise him or her in myriad ways, both cosmetic and otherwise. Your chosen backstory unlocks specific sidequests from the off, while accumulated attribute points and biostats allow for a fluid class system. It’s roughly divided into the strength-focused Solo, the engineering-heavy Techie or the hack-happy NetRunner – but the class system is fluid, and V can respec at will throughout the game. It’s about remaining in control of who you are at all times, as a true cyberpunk should.
And that’s connected in large part to what the quest system allows you to do. There’s more choice to what we’ve just seen than is usually available in videogame quests: for instance, you could take DeShawn’s money and run at the very beginning, eschewing his mission but having to deal with the consequences later. You could make off with Stout’s eddies, too, although we presume you’d have to get the virus on the chip scrubbed off somewhere. “We don’t artificially limit ourselves,” Mills says. “Our philosophy for quest design is, ‘If the player can logically do it, then they can’. And if they can’t, then we have to come up with a damn good reason why.”
Cyberpunk 2077’ s quests have been designed to be kicked off at almost any point; you’ll be able to go to places and find items in Night City that are part of quests and pick up the trail of what’s going on here in a logical manner, without having to trigger the whole event sequence from a predetermined starting point. “There’s no invisible wall that says, ‘You can’t go here,’” Mills says. “We don’t like to do, ‘This door is locked… until you need to use this door.’ It does mean that our quests can become incredibly complex. One of the things that we have at CD Projekt that is different from a lot of other studios, and I can’t speak for all of them, is that we have a dedicated quest team that is responsible for just that – just the logic of the quests, building the quests and making sure that everything is coordinated.” This commitment to the coherence of the world, and your place in it as V, is paramount to making Night City feel like a real place where you can take any opportunity you can imagine.
Indeed, Cyberpunk 2077 is a continuation of the timeline of ‘80s pen-and-paper roleplaying game Cyberpunk 2020. Its creator, Mike Pondsmith, has worked as a consultant on
2077 from the get-go. At first glance it seems a little odd that CD Projekt would choose to work with a prefabricated universe rather than make one of its own. There’s no trademark on Cyberpunk – well, apart from the one the studio has now registered to its game’s title, that is – and nothing stopping it making its own version of it apart from, presumably, its conscience. “You know, when I first got this job, I thought it was a little bit strange, too,” Mills says. “But it turns out that Cyberpunk…” He trails off. “So, this studio was founded by guys who were localising western CRPGs into Polish, which was a market that nobody thought anybody would ever buy any videogames in. And what’s interesting is Cyberpunk 2020 was one of the few pen-andpaper games that had been localised into Polish.” Pondsmith’s game was huge in Poland, and many of CD Projekt had fond childhood memories of playing it, imagining the smell of acid rain on city streets, the glint of cybernetic limbs under neon lights. During discussions of the studio’s post- Witcher goals, Pietras says, “All of us realised, ‘Holy shit, we played those games and we loved them, and no one even tried to do that.’”
It seemed unthinkable. “One of the most illuminating things for me was trying to figure out why cyberpunk went away,” Mills says. “It was a huge thing in the ‘70s and ‘80s – and then in the ‘90s it seemed like a joke. Why was that? And I’m thinking, what was happening in the ‘90s? You had the end of the Cold War. America won. And here’s the internet: here’s this beautiful thing that’s going to bring world peace, right? And now you look back and you’re like, ‘Oh my god. How wrong we were.’ And cyberpunk suddenly comes back like a memory from the distant past – and they were right. They were right the whole time, and we were living a delusion.”
Part of the attraction to, and the re-emergence of, cyberpunk is down to its darkness, now even more resonant in 2018 – not that the stories of corporations that oppress the masses through the distribution and control of technology
are anything new. But Borzymowski is confident that his team on Cyberpunk 2077 can provide a more modern, CD Projekt-style take on the well-worn tropes of the ‘80s subgenre. “Mike Pondsmith always tells us that cyberpunk stories are personal,” he says. “They are never about saving the world. So our story is very personal: it’s about identity, it’s about finding yourself in the world and literally surviving.”
It’s about politics, in other words: not just the politics of rich versus poor, but the politics of the self and of the body. “One of the things about the ‘Keep politics out of my videogames’ crowd is that I think that there’s sometimes a misunderstanding about what politics is,” Mills says. “And I think that’s because of the nature of this industry. We make consumer products, and to make consumer products people need to buy consumer products. To make people want to buy, they have to like consumer products. There’s also been an unwillingness to even admit that something political – but cyberpunk is political. It’s about people who have power, people who don’t have power and why that is.”
Politics, particularly identity politics, has changed drastically since cyberpunk first reared its head. Nowadays, in an age where we’re starting to understand that people
can change their bodies with technology to better reflect their identities and improve their quality of life, the anti-transhumanist messaging in a lot of cyberpunk futures – including Cyberpunk 2077 – runs the risk of feeling dated. Indeed, a vision of the year 2077 in which we’re still limited to choosing a plain male or female avatar feels a little too ‘80s to be true. But it certainly seems from our discussions with the devs that CD Projekt is willing and able to take on the challenge of exploring a modern cyberpunk vision with grace and nuance.
“One of the things about this company has always been we want to show the game industry how to do things,” Mills says. “We want to change the game industry. We want to say ‘We can do things differently, we don’t have to do things that way.’ It’s in our motto: ‘We are rebels’, right? So when you’ve got other studios saying, ‘Oh, no no no, there’s nothing political here’, we say ‘Yeah, there is’. It’s not necessarily what you’re expecting, and we’re not going to talk about what exactly we’re going to say – it’s for you to decide when you play it. But Cyberpunk is relevant to today, extremely so. To pretend like it’s not? Come on. Mike wouldn’t let us. Mike would throw a fit if we tried to say, ‘This is just about cool hairstyles and cool guns, and that’s all.’” Perhaps that’s why there’s been no cyberpunk game with this kind of scale and ambition before: it’s an intricate balancing act on a number of levels. But maybe that’s why the time feels so right to return to Night City, to build what had only ever existed in the imagination, and at CD Projekt Red, where there is now the drive and the means to make it happen.
It’s a romantic idea, yes – and a dangerous one. A vertical slice of Night City, no matter how revolutionary it may appear, is still no more than a sliver of what is being promised here. Whether Cyberpunk 2077 can truly represent the complex themes in a hugely popular and politically contentious genre with the care that the world will expect of it is another thing. But there can be no doubt that CD Projekt is poised to deliver the most advanced open world ever seen in games, the next giant leap into the future of interactive entertainment. As we watch the cherry blossoms fall, for one fleeting, uncontrollable moment of wonder, we’re convinced by the illusion entirely.
PART OF THE ATTRACTION TO, AND THE RE-EMERGENCE OF, CYBERPUNK IS DOWN TO ITS DARKNESS