Cyberpunk 2077 - Interviews on Design

Cyberpunk 2077 is getting alot of writeups and some interesting stuff is emerging. Gamasutra talked about quest design with Patrick Mills while VG24/7 talked to CD Projekt RED about katanas, dismembering, romance, deep RPG systems and the decision to go first person.

Players can single out particular limbs, whether chopping at arms with a katana of blasting out knees with a shotgun. This isn’t spray and pray – you approach an enemy tactically and switch up your weapons based on their defence or skillset.

“When it comes to combat we have three different types of weapons. Each are for a different approach to the gameplay,” says Pietras. “What I can tell you about hand-to-hand combat is that we will have it; where you can use the katana or other weapons. It’s a cool thing because we have a dismembering system. It’s visceral, it’s brutal.”

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Inspirations and philosophy

From a production perspective, Mills says that CD Projekt Red's general goal is to ensure quest designers have ownership over all quests they're authoring. So not only are they conceiving it and pitching it, they're designing the game logic and nursing it to life alongside other designers, programmers, artists, and QA. On his own quests, Mills says he likes to start with a high-level theme or vibrant character that can help anchor the experience, and drive the aforementioned twists he has to work in. 

When pushed to discuss inspiration outside the original Cyberpunk tabletop game, Mills jumps to a somewhat surprising reference --- the title of a Blonde Readhead album. "The title is 'Fake Can Be Just As Good,' and I go "okay, I like that, let's figure out how to do that."

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Thanks Farflame!