Believe it or not, but this December they will two years since the release of Cyberpunk 2077. Since its release, we have already seen versions for next-gen consoles, several major updates, and a ton of smaller fixes. The fact that Cyberpunk, despite all this, is still not in perfect condition even after two years, is something that we will not talk about today. Because we’ve probably cursed this game enough already. Instead, we would like to look at Night city, i.e. the city in which the game takes place. A beautiful creation with many flaws, but still unique among open world games.
Why all of a sudden? Because we had the opportunity to listen to a lecture in Game Access this year. Katsper Nepokolchitsky, who has been with CD Projekt RED for 11 years and currently holds the position of Lead Environment Designer. He worked on The Witcher and Cyberpunk, and it was on Game Access that he explained to us in his lecture and later in the interview how Night City was actually designed. So let’s take a look at this.
WHAT MAKES THE NIGHT CITY SPECIAL?
The first thing that catches your eye when entering Night City is how everything is glued together. As you have to drive on different overpasses and in the city center, climb scaffolding and crawl through narrow streets. Except verticality, which plays a big role here, you have a lot of small corners, billboards and basically classic urban infrastructure in the form of benches, baskets, sidewalks, fences and so on. There is everything here to make the city look as believable as possible.
Night city too divided into several districts. The center is where you’ll find the richest cream of the city and towering skyscrapers. On the other hand, Haywood is occupied by gangs and the inhabitants live in slums. We also have Little China, Kabuki and Japantown. They, in turn, enliven the city with their Asian culture.
So Night City is unlike any city that has ever existed in the game or in reality. Therefore, we asked where the developers drew inspiration from when creating it. Were they real cities, or rather something from books and films?
WHERE DID YOU GET THE INSPIRATION FOR THE NIGHT CITY?
“Cyberpunk is really closely connected to the real world. When I was working on an area called Kabuki, the inspiration came from cities like Hong Kong and Tokyo, a lot from Los Angeles and all those big cities. Mainly from USA or Asian parts of the world. I think we were trying to find something that would be easy to use and implement. So we took things piece by piece, put them together, and then just tried to see if they worked. And if not, then we either redid them or completely changed them.“
HOW TO BUILD A BIG CITY EFFECTIVELY
So there are a lot of variations in Night City. Therefore, the developers had to create a bunch unique models and buildingsso that each area has the right atmosphere. However, it is not possible for every building and object to be unique in any given game. Mostly in open games that take place in citieslike GTA, Watch Dogs or even Spider-Man. Thus, you will often come across the same apartment buildings and shops over and over again. So how did they solve this problem in Cyberpunk?
HOW MANY MODELS HAVE YOU REWORKED?
“We created a lot. I don’t even know how many, but there are really a lot of models that our team created, and we had to recycle them as much as possible, because it’s impossible to make everything unique. In general, everything was cut into pieces You can think of it like Lego bricks and we could build what we imagined with them We could also change the colors of the pieces which sounds like a small thing but is actually very important because then everything always looks a little different.Also, we had a lot of decorative models.Then we created very specific styles for different buildings.We had to be smart and come up with ways to make it not all look the same.So yeah, a lot of models are recycled because there is really no other way to do it.“
And we think CD Projekt has succeeded. Night city seems real varied. And this despite the recurring patterns. Of course, the themed city districts we mentioned at the beginning help in this, thanks to which everything seems to be more diverse. Despite the reworking of models, you will come across unique places in Night City. Mostly the ones that are important to the story in some way, but sometimes you’ll find a corner or a building that just jumps out at you.
DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE PLACE IN THE NIGHT CITY?
“There’s a little place where you can find a cyberpunk bike, and that’s where I got my inspiration from Ghost in the Shell. So I just hope people notice. Some have actually already noticed this, I found two videos on Youtube. Like I said, we’re trying to tell a story around every corner and I’m pretty sure people can explore it a little more and find something new and interesting that they haven’t seen before.“
Source: CD Project REDCyberpunk 2077 Finally Got the Right Modding Tools
IT’S TIME TO SHOW AMBITION
So when Night City is so diverse, big and unique, it begs the question, why are so many closed. And now we are not talking about the Pacific Ocean, which has a whole closed section and it seems that the creators simply did not have time to finish it. We mean individual buildings in the town. Many players have certainly looked forward to exploring every store, skyscraper or mega-structure, but in Night City you can only enter a very limited number of buildings in the finale. And these are almost always places that are important for the plot or some side quest.
WHY DID YOU NOT MAKE ALL THE BUILDINGS IN THE GAME AVAILABLE?
“Of course, I know that there are people who can have such huge ambitions, and we had them from the very beginning, but then again at some point you realize that it would be too much for the players. Therefore, only buildings that make sense are now available. There’s either a quest, or a maniac, or something you might want to explore. There are also places that just add depth to the city, but at some point the content was too much for us. Also, if you look at how many players are actually finishing these big games now, it’s a small percentage. Of course, there is a large group of people who really want to learn everything, which is great, but at some point you start to think how much it is superfluous. And this is not an easy question.“
DID CD PROJEKT RED LEARN FROM MISTAKE?
Let’s face it, CD Projekt RED made a lot of mistakes with Cyberpunk. Either the promise of something that didn’t end up in the game, or some damn terrible optimization and countless bugs. Of course, a lot of time trouble is to blame for this, but also the fact that Cyberpunk 2077 is a really ambitious project and many of the technologies used in it were developed on the fly. So we asked directly if the studio would do anything differently if they could start developing Cyberpunk from scratch.
IF YOU COULD REUNION CYBERPUNK 2077, WOULD YOU DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT?
“If I said that we will build it exactly the same, I would say that we have learned little – and we have learned a lot. There were some decisions that we thought were right at the time and probably still are, but we were in a big time crunch, and again, our technology was being created at the same time as the game itself, so we had to learn how they went. So I think the development process itself is still good. Surely something will be corrected here and there. But the only question is how far we need to go with the changes, because this learning process will be used for other projects. Right now we’re trying to fix Cyberpunk as best we can, and I think the game has changed a lot for the better in almost 18 months, which is a long time.“
And it’s true, Cyberpunk has been around since its release moved a lot. We’ve improved the game’s graphics, added most of the missing features, and even added a few new dialogues. As for the planned multiplayer mode, it was canceled a long time ago, and the big story DLC will not appear until next year.
So what is CD Projekt RED working on now? In addition to improving Cyberpunk and creating DLC for it, the company is currently focused on a next-gen version of The Witcher 3, which should be released later this year. Then there’s the yet-to-be-announced game from The Molasses Flood, which has been part of the CD Projekt Group since last year, and last but not least, we’ve got work on Gwent and of course others. Witchers. By the way, it is supposed to run on Unreal Engine 5, which we talked about in detail in our recent video.
For the rest, perhaps, there is nothing left but to wish CD Projekt RED and all its developers good luck. Let us know in the comments if you’d like to see a full overview and comparison of how Cyberpunk 2077 has progressed since release.
Source :Indian TV
