Cyberpunk 2077 – romanticising dystopias

GameCentral talks to one of the makers of The Witcher 3 about new game Cyberpunk 2077 and the politics of dystopias.

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Cyberpunk 2077 was easily one of the most impressive game reveals at E3 back in June. But unusually it was only journalists and other attendees that actually got to see the full 48-minute demo. The only footage shown to the pubic was a short teaser at the Xbox conference, but a few days ago CD Projekt did make it available for everyone to see and it immediately broke records for a video game reveal stream.

And well it might, because it is a stunning experience simply to watch. We got a second chance to see it being played live at Gamescom and while it was the same section of the game a few different options and choices were made to show other ways the story could’ve played out.



One of the main differences was meant to be playing as a male character instead of female but unfortunately CD Projekt put the choice to a vote and the audience chose the female option – so we didn’t get to see what difference that would’ve made.


The sequence towards the end of the demo, where you decide what to do about procuring the spider drone from the cyborg gang, did play out a little differently but not in significant enough a way to determine exactly how wide the range of options were, since it all still ended up in the boss fight in the garage you can see in the video below.

So we didn’t learn much new from watching the demo again, but afterwards we were able to talk to quest director Patrick Mills about his plans for the games, its approach to politics, and whether or not you can save the world.

Formats: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC

Publisher: CD Projekt

Developer: CD Projekt RED

Release Date: TBA

GC: This is going to seem an odd question, but how is it that the game looks so good? I’ve seen the demo twice now and it seems almost too good to be true.

PM: [laughs] I know exactly what you mean. It’s an insane amount of work, like it’s a huge amount of work.

GC: I guess it’s like asking how did they build the pyramids? Very slowly and carefully!

PM: [laughs] A lot of people got ground to dust under cinderblocks. [laughs] Not that that has happened here. We’ve had nobody, that I know of, crushed by rocks while making Cyberpunk 2077. But it’s a lot of work and it’s a lot of iteration and a lot of building it and seeing how it looks. And then changing it and doing all that. It is very ambitious. I didn’t specifically work on this demo very much but I do know the people that did and it’s a lot of work, yeah.

GC: How long have you being working on the game now?

PM: Well the game has actually been in development since… 2013 is when I started. There was a time where we needed to finish Witcher 3 and a lot of people were pulled off of that. There were still people working on it, but what you see here is the result of a couple of years.



GC: So you worked on The Witcher 3 as well… as a quest designer?

PM: Yeah, that’s right.

GC: What are your priorities then, for improving your work on that game? What are you looking to do differently?

PM: One of the things that I think is most different between this and Witcher 3… we consider dialogue and scenes and all of that to be gameplay. Because it is, right? You’re making decisions, you’re making choices, you’re interacting with the world. But we want that to be more seamless than it was in Witcher 3, or it is in most games.

You walk into a conversation and suddenly the camera is its own camera and you’re making choices. We wanted to be a little bit more fluid and a little bit more seamless. And it’s a huge amount of work and it’s really, really ambitious and I hope that we’re able to deliver it because it is a lot of work.

GC: When you say seamless you mean being able to walk up to people and not have it be a separate cut scene?

PM: It’s not a separate cut scene. Like, in the demo you’ve got those bits where you can take out your gun and change what happens in the scene. But, like, when you are in the Maelstrom area, for example, and you’re walking away from those guys that’s all still a scene, it’s all still happening as a scene. It’s tightly choregraphed with all those people moving around and all of that. And stuff like that is actually really difficult.

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GC: That was one of the things I was asking myself, about how much of it is just staged for the demo. Because people are always walking into frame at just the right moment to look cinematic and everything seems highly orchestrated. Is that just the demo or is the final game really going to be like that?


PM: That’s what we want the game to be. That’s what we’re building in the game right now.

GC: But how are you able to ensure that, like when the Hare Krishnas come round the corner? Are you looking at the viewing angle and waiting till they walk to a certain spot?

PM: I wouldn’t be able to specify specifically for that, because I didn’t set it up, but what I can say is that, yeah, it’s a matter of, ‘OK, if you’re gonna walk to the end of this area here we’re gonna capture that you’re walking there and we’re gonna know to trigger these guys to walk around the corner’. And doing that across a big open world… like, if you’re doing that and it’s a linear game it’s much easier to do because you know that the player’s going to be coming from that direction.

GC: Well, that’s why I ask, given this is open world. But I also know how it’s tempting for companies to cheat in demos…

PM: [laughs] Setting it up in an open world game is a lot more work, because you have to anticipate all sorts of things. And yes, obviously it is a demo so it’s very tightly controlled. But you can actually play that demo now, it’s real.

Even if you look at Witcher 3 in terms of how the community acts in that, you can see some of the beginnings of what we want to do here. All those characters, you go to a village and it starts to rain and everybody runs and stands underneath a tree or whatever. And at night everybody goes to bed and they all know which bed is theirs. And during the day they go to work. And we want to do the same thing here but on a much larger scale.


GC: I think most people would agree that the side missions were one of the best things about The Witcher 3, I can imagine why they kept you on…

PM: [laughs] Thank you.

GC: But how much will they evolve in this game? Because a lot of the time they almost seemed more interesting than the main plot, or at least more unpredictable and more focused on characterisation. Is that something you’re going to double down on in Cyberpunk?

PM: Oh yeah, absolutely. The way that we develop side quests is very often by looking at the main story; after we’ve written out and sketched out the main story we find the characters that maybe we want to spend more time with, themes, or even bits of old main story that aren’t getting used anymore.

Because we iterate a lot so sometimes you wind up with something that is part of the main story and then at some point you’re like, ‘No, main story has changed but we’ll make it a side quest’. And because there’s not the pressure of being part of a multi-hour long story you have a little bit more freedom to figure it out.

And for us, our rule for side quests is that the story has to be something that you’ve never seen before, there’s gotta be something in this story that’s different. It’s never gonna feel like, ‘Go here, do that’. It’s you go there and do that and then something happens.

GC: The quality of side quests varies enormously amongst role-players, even the good ones, but for me I’m always looking for them to challenge your expectations. To make it clear you don’t know everything the game can do yet.

PM: Yeah, yeah, definitely. The inspiration for a side quest can come from basically anywhere. An example that I’ve been giving is that I have a quest that I’ve been working on that’s inspired by the title of an album. And I just had this album title that’s been rolling around in my head for a couple of decades now and I’m like, ‘God, I just want to turn that into a quest!’ So I figured out, ‘What’s the story that I can tell that has this phrase as part of it?’

GC: Is it Now That’s What I Call Music! 96?

PM: [laughs] Well, here’s your exclusive because I’ve been telling everybody that story but not the album, so it’s Fake Can Be Just as Good by Blonde Redhead.

GC: [laughs] Well, thank you!

PM: So the way that it works is that the quest team make these one page proposals and then we give that to the directors and the directors say, ‘Yeah, that one sounds interesting’ or ‘Yeah, but change it a little bit’. And then we go and we make them and we iterate on those the same way we iterate on the main quest and sometimes the thing you wind up with is very different than what you started with but that’s how you make them good.

GC: Quest designer sounds like a very specific job title. Are you writing the script and designing the gameplay elements as well?

PM: So, generally the way that it works is that quest design… the way I like to think about quest design is that we are in control of the minute-to-minute story for our areas. I have a two-hour chunk of the game and I coordinate with the story team that handles the dialogue writing and helps ensure that the characterisation remains consistent across the whole game.

They’re also very heavily involved in the main story and sometimes in linking the side quests together. And then I work with level designers and gameplay designers and environment artists to build the areas and make sure that they’re fun. And then I also work with cinematic designers to make sure that the second-to-second activity, specifically in scenes when you’re talking to people, is engaging and interesting and keeps the visual interest as well.

GC: That’s so complicated. I think that further justifies my first question, I don’t know how you get anything done!

PM: [laughs] It’s a lot of talking to people and a lot of sitting with people and explaining things and figuring things out. And building it and scrapping it and building it again.

GC: You’re obviously American, the last guy I interviewed was British, it seems a very cosmopolitan set-up at CD Projekt.

PM: It is, definitely.

GC: So what were you doing before this?

PM: Before this I was actually at university, but before that I was at Obsidian Entertainment [makers of Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars Of Eternity – GC] in California.

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GC: Ah, I can see how that would be relevant experience. So when you’re thinking of a new quest what are your priorities? I imagine the main impetuous is usually you either want to explore a new gameplay angle, a new story theme, or play around in the game world?

PM: Those are generally the main three things. Or even just a scene that you wanna have… like you have this image in your head and you wanna figure out how to make that happen. You might have seen something in a movie and thought, ‘Oh, I wish that had been a little bit different and I want to do that in our game’.

GC: Apart from the obvious what kind of movies are you looking at? Because there’s not really that many cyberpunk movies.

PM: No. Well, there’s a decent number, especially if you go to Japan and there’s a lot of very strange live action movies. But the inspiration can come from anywhere and cyberpunk is a very interesting genre with a lot of visual diversity. If you compare the new Blade Runner to the old Blade Runner they both feel like they are part of the same thing but many parts of it… in the most recent one there’s this spartan-ness to some of the scenes that I don’t feel was in the first one.

GC: The original was very dense but the new one has a lot of very empty spaces.

PM: Right, there are moments where it sort of pulls back and lets you see this sort of spartan landscape. But we’ll look at anything, anything can be inspirational.

GC: Like all science fiction, cyberpunk is really a critique of the modern world but how does that work now that Trump and Brexit are a reality? The post-truth era. Because that itself is a very cyberpunk kind of concept. Not to mention things like privacy issues when people are going around downloading each other’s memories. It’s already been said that the game is going to address political issues, but that is very rare for games.

PM: I mean they do, but they’re just not willing to talk about it. But I’ve been really glad that this company has let us, as developers, do so relatively freely. I mean obviously we have to be careful because this is a big company and we’re selling consumer goods and we want people to like our stuff, for sure. But at the same time these are games made by people. And people have opinions.

So all of these games that say they aren’t political, those games are made by people. That makes them political. They’re made by people, they’re made by corporations. That makes them political.

GC: I always rankle slightly at the use of the term ‘politics’, which to me just brings to mind boring bureaucracy. What people are usually really talking about when they use the term is society itself and big issues like morality and tolerance.

PM: We’re talking about who has power and who doesn’t have power, and why that is. The world didn’t spring fully formed into existence with, in the case of Cyberpunk, corporations in charge of the world and everybody else scrounging to get by on the streets. That didn’t just happen overnight. It happened somehow and there’s a system to keep it in place.

And it’s impossible to make a game, particularly based on Cyberpunk 2020 – which was itself a critique of Reaganism and Thatcherism – and you can’t look at that and say oh, well…That said, it’s dressed up in this gonzo sensibility that we absolutely want to keep.

GC: You want it to be entertaining, but you also want it to say something.

PM: Exactly! What I’m not willing to say is what we’re saying. And I don’t want to. Even if I knew, because I don’t – because we’re still making it and I’m one guy. But we’re gonna make this, we’re gonna release this, and you guys are going to tell us what it’s saying.

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GC: I would imagine there’s not some grand political point at the heart of it all.

PM: No, absolutely not.

GC: It’s just a world in which the problems of the modern day are underlined and exaggerated.

PM: Exactly, exactly. We’ve taken something where everyone looks around and you can see the issues. And you might have different perspectives on them, and even within our development team the game is being made by huge numbers of people with very different opinions. I have co-workers – colleagues, good friends – that I disagree with very, very strongly and they very strongly disagree with me. And all of us are making this together.

It’s very likely that when you play this game, just like Witcher 3… there are contradictions in Witcher 3. There’s scenes that say one thing and there’s scenes that say something else. And they may be a contradiction but that’s great, that’s wonderful. These are not just mass market consumer goods they are also these collaborative… god this sounds pretentious but they’re collaborative art pieces at the same time. Just like movies, just like television.

GC: That’s not pretentious. If they’re not art they’re just… products. And your games are more than that.

PM: I like to think so.

GC: I always think about how horrible it would be to live in a world like this, and a lot of video game worlds that in context seem so entertaining. It is a dystopia and a dystopia is not a good thing.

PM: Yeah, yeah. But then on the other hand you have people that believe they should be the people at the top, and that they would be the people at the top. And for them it seems very seductive.

GC: So from that point of view this could still be a comfortable world to live in?

PM: If you don’t think you’re one of the people that’s going to wind up on top there is a seductive energy where you look at this world which is so rippling with texture and life. And you say, ‘You know what? This is a miserable place but I want to live there anyway’. I want people to play Cyberpunk 2077, walk around Night City and maybe be a little bit conflicted: ‘Is this a place to visit or is this a place to stay?

And, you know, I played Cyberpunk 2020 as a kid and some part of Night City has been in my head since I was 13-years-old and when I was much younger I thought, ‘Oh wow, this would be amazing to live in’. But I’m getting a bit older now and I’m thinking, ‘I don’t know if I’ve got the energy for this.’ But if you’ve got that energy maybe it is the place for you.

GC: But is there not a danger of mixed messages, because I have to ask about the tweet that seemed to be transphobic. I’m sure that was just some low level schlub that wrote it, but that kind of illustrates why other publishers don’t want to touch anything political. Because just one comment, from someone that wasn’t even a developer, can suddenly become all anyone talks about.

PM: I think what it is, is the worst thing you can do is to say something without knowing that you’re saying it. And then it blows up and then you say, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean that! I don’t stand behind that’.

GC: Cyberpunk seems to have a lot more nudity and sexual references than is normal for games , so does that imply you’re going to address issues like sexuality and transgenderism – as well as transhumanism? Because again they’re issues that games usually shy away from.

PM: They’re certainly things we’ve talked about and will be present in the game in some way.

GC: Games are usually so sexless, but sci-fi in general can be like that too. I grew up reading Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke and that stuff is very dry. And yet attitudes to sexuality is one of the things that changes the most as you go through the decades. And when you add sci-fi technology in there, that makes for a lot of interesting subject matter.

PM: One of the things about Cyberpunk is that it’s kind of a cynical take on transhumanism. So you have sort of utopian transhumanism were ‘technology will liberate us from our flesh, from our foibles, from all of our failings’. And then in Cyberpunk there is a certain kind of liberation but because the structures in place don’t really allow true freedom you’re just a slave of another kind. You’re turning yourself into a commodity in a different way.

And so those are things that will be present in the game. What we’re going to say about those I couldn’t tell you if I knew. But they’re implicit in the franchise.

GC: What kind of bigotry exists in the Cyberpunk world? It seems to be that cyborgs are accepted, but is racism still the same as it is now? It’s a disquieting subject but I guess these are important details you must already have discussed in detail.

PM: These are actually things we’re still talking about, so I’d be very hesitant to talk about specifics. But it is something that we’ve thought about and we’ve been talking about a lot.

GC: Is there an overarching theme to the game? Is there a clear goal for the character or are you just trying to get by? Or is there maybe a Robin Hood element where you’re trying to fundamentally change the world?

PM: What I can say is that one of the aphorisms that Mike Pondsmith has about Cyberpunk is that in Cyberpunk you can’t save the world, you can only save yourself. So I would look for something like that. This is not a game about revolution, this is a world where that isn’t possible.

(A PR person appears to tell us our time is up.)

GC: I hate to end with such an unimaginative question but I should ask it: can you say how many quests are in the game as a whole?

PM: I can’t talk about numbers but I’d look at Witcher 3. Something like Witcher 3 is what we’re aiming for.

GC: OK, well I better stop there but it’s been great to talk to you.

PM: You too, great questions.

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