As ‘Fleshed out’ as Implants Will Allow
Another day with a little more news about Cyberpunk 2077, this time pertaining to in-game characters. Every open world game comes with NPCs and side-quests—a must—but not every open world has NPCs that matter. For developer CD Projekt RED, realistic characters and interactions are essential to Night City. That’s why they took the world and spent some extra time fleshing out the people in it.
In an interview with CG Magazine, lead animator Maciej Pietras talked about the teams over at CDPR and how they’ve built the world of Cyberpunk 2077. Specifically, he mentioned their approach to cinematic storytelling and the importance of a living, breathing world.
“The NPC’s set in that world are fully fleshed out characters not just templates, because we approach design like that,” said Pietras. “It means that you somehow got here. You’re here, you’re doing your job, you’re working, and I approach you and we have a discussion. The outcome is mostly dependent on the player choice. I could pull out the gun and the conversation will go in a very different direction. This example outlines how we think about cinematics and narrative content. So obviously it’s a huge challenge when compared to TheWitcher. It’s an open world, one big city that you can explore. There are no loading screens except for fast travel, and because of that, we have to keep the player as immersed and focus on what’s happening now as possible.”
Pietras also briefly touched on optimization of Cyberpunk 2077. From the get-go, CDPR focused on development for PC, Xbox One, and PS4. As they’ve built their RED Engine over the years, every design team has built their own toolsets. Basically, the studio’s methodology has involved iteration and reiteration that ultimately resulted in the demo we saw.
Finally, the lead cinematic animator jumped back to the topic of characters. While Cyberpunk 2077 will offer freedom of choice, it’s also a game full of pre-defined personalities. The world will react to the player, and the player can only take so many liberties with NPCs. It all starts with the character you create, your iteration of V.
“Of course, this is an RPG, and because of the character creation process, you’re defining your body type at the beginning right here, and just because of that you take that as a choice and you as a player plays a role-playing game you’re taking a role right?” Pietras added. “Because of that, we are introducing certain aspects of those traces and what we’ve shown is only a slice of the game. Yes you can try and do anything, but it is not always up to you, it is also up to the NPC’s in the game world. As I said before we treat characters as characters, so that means they’re predefined people. They are predefined characters who have different sexual orientations and wants. So simply because of that you might as a male or female gender player in the game cycle romance with a person or might not happen because of that character’s orientation and their preferences. This is a conscious design choice that we want to give the player as much freedom as they want to make sure that the game they play regardless of their body type choices to befit to their approach and be free to go as a V as a mercenary, a cyberpunk mercenary.”
SOURCE: CGMagOnline