Cyberpunk 2077 - Interview @ Metro

Metro has interviewed Cyberpunk 2077 senior concept artist Marthe Jonkers, who is in charge of the team responsible for Night City.

GC: I guess your team would’ve been one of the first ones to start doing serious work on the game? Back when the project first began.

MJ: Yeah, well we have to design the whole world. [laughs] Me and my team, we are in Kraków. We have several studios, actually, and we are really focused on creating the city and we really approached that in a holistic way, because you have to think about the composition of the city. We work with urban planners. We have an urban planner in our team and she is always thinking, ‘What’s the layout of the city and the map, and where would all the streets go?’

Because if you drive around the city we want you to have good views and we want you to always know where you are so you don’t get lost; so the layout of the city is very important. Once you have that sort of skeleton then you can start building up the city, and so we made six districts and all those areas are really different.

My team is really responsible for making these areas distinctive and we make sure that we use a different colour palette for each. It’s very subtle but you will see it in different areas and we make sure that there’s a difference in some areas where they’re really crowded and some are sort of abandoned…

That area you saw in the demo was called Pacifica and that is a district to the south of Night City and it’s very abandoned and there are not that many people living there, actually. But if you go to Watson, which is another area in Night City… I don’t know if you saw the demo last year?

GC: I did. I remember what an impression it made coming down in the lift at the beginning and seeing the whole city in front of you. I guess that was all your team’s work?

MJ: A collaboration, of course, we purely do visual designs of the buildings and interiors.

GC: Seeing the verticality of the environment was very impressive but I’m still not clear how many of those buildings or floors you can actually go into?

MJ: That’s a good question, because we have a lot of verticality in this game. But we also value quality over quantity. So we made sure that… not every building will have a hundred floors for you to explore because that would be really boring, really repetitive. So we make sure that we have the right balance in how much you can explore and it will be a lot, but it won’t be so much that it’s not fun anymore.

Note that the video they showed at E3, gamescom and Pax West should become available this Friday!

Thanks Morrandir!