CYBERPUNK 2077
Miles Tost reveals the secrets to building a living Night City
“It’s always
[a] fascinating process to decide, okay, what do we do with the source material in this case, right?” says senior level designer Miles Tost. We’re talking about how he and the team at CD Projekt Red have taken the world of the original Cyberpunk 2020 tabletop RPG and turned it into a game world you can explore for yourself. “Because we always want to be respectful to [the source material], right?”
Fans of that original will recognise the tabletop’s DNA expressed in the final results. “Our city looks much more organic than the chesspattern layout that the original had. However, most of the districts that’re there – [like] with the city centre – even look similar in shape [to the original].” Deciding what to expand has been a marriage of art direction and mechanics. “The actual process is mostly driven by the gameplay that we want to do,”
explains Tost.
IT MAKES PLAYERS FEEL LIKE THE WORLD LIVES AROUND THEM.
MEATING SPACE
He tells us about an abandoned power plant that features in the game, a more traditional level you enter from the open world for a mission. “We jokingly call these locations ‘penetrable fortresses’,” Tost says. “They should look like they’re highly guarded, but the job for the player is, of course, to infiltrate these – and as a level designer, we need to make sure that the player has the options to actually infiltrate these in many, many different ways.” But these also have to tie into the worldbuilding and storytelling, like the Meat Factory we get the chance to play through ourselves. “It’s a meat factory, right? Something we don’t really have today,” says Tost. “We have butchers, right, slaughterhouses, [but] we don’t have factories where they produce synthetic meat.”
Whether it’s a level you play through, or a subdistrict in the city, Tost says the design of the environment is shaped by the stories within it. And stories aren’t only told through quests. Throughout the city, completely unmarked, are examples of environmental storytelling for you to stumble across. It could be “a corpse in an alleyway,” explains Tost.
“And then you look around this corner, only you notice that there’s a suitcase, and in the suitcase, you can loot some money. And then in another suitcase nearby you can find some drugs and another corpse and you can kind of try starting to piece together what might have happened here. Maybe it’s a drug deal that went wrong.”
DIGGING DEEPER
You learn a lot about Cyberpunk 2077’s world from the main story, but you get much more from the game simply by exploring. “All of this stuff we don’t often explicitly explain, but it’s for players to uncover and be almost like an archaeologist,” says Tost as he takes us deeper.
He tells us this approach is inspired by the real world, where there’s always something going on beyond what we’re doing. “It really helps make players feel like the world lives around them,” he reveals.
Where The Witcher 3 was broad in scope, with an expansive world and political situation, Cyberpunk 2077 is dense, crammed with characters and details to ensure every location feels purposeful and believable. There’s a lot of verticality as you move between exteriors and interiors. For this reason,
Japantown is Tost’s favourite district at the moment. “Just purely from street level, it must have our highest height differences,” says Tost – the area is a tightly built maze of staggered rooftops, walkways, and streets that you can hop between.
“I’m really happy and also amazed that we actually managed to give each district its own flavour […] everyone in the company will have a different one.” It’s an open world that’s as immersive as they come, a future city that feels different to explore than anything we’ve played before, while filled with varied spaces that all combine to make a beautiful, if sometimes oppressive, whole. “While not feeling weird and out of place, it still feels like one connected city,” says Tost.
Cyberpunk is almost here – it’s released on 18 Nov. Set your cyberwatch.