“Story goes first with everything”, but CD Projekt never had combat designers until Cyberpunk 2077
Traditionally in triple-A game development, a story was simply a thing to wrap around a series of events. In games such as Uncharted, the story would tie the set-pieces together. As our medium evolves, this is becoming an archaic way of working and writers are embedded on projects from the outset.
At The Witcher 3 developer CD Projekt Red, story is king. That’s how it was for The Witcher and that’s how it’s been for Cyberpunk 2077 as well.
“In our game, in our company, always story design, so the story goes first with everything,” lead quest designer Pawel Sasko explained during our E3 chat. “So the thing is that the quest designer and writer, they together figure out the story, the scenario. The quest designer writes the scenario, and then based on that we implement it.
“When it’s implemented our writers write the first dialogues and cinematic designers start making first scenes and so on. And we work together – quest designers, cinematic designers – to implement and make it perfect.”
From here a new key part of CD Projekt Red takes over: encounter and combat designers. These roles didn’t even exist at the Polish studio during development of The Witcher 3.
“In this game all those awesome playstyle sequences that we have seen, they’re mainly done by the encounter design team, and by the combat design team, so they’re looking into it – this is something we didn’t have to do in The Witcher, we didn’t even have the budget and the team and so on to do so,” Sasko said.
“Right now we have a separate team, a small one, that we’re working together with and they’re just adding ideas, implementing things, iterating, reviewing that part, just make sure that the combat feels good, that everything that happens just has correct rhythm and so on, because honestly it’s super easy to screw it up.”
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Cyberpunk 2077 won’t let you manually fly, but you can swim
While there will be a full suite of cars and motorcycles that you can ride, flying vehicles will be left for more scripted sequences. “There are flying vehicles that are like the story elements, and so there will be moments when V is in the flying vehicle, but they’re always story-focused,” lead quest designer Pawel Sasko explained during our E3 interview.
“I would have to spoil you a bit of the story, I don’t want to, but there are moments when you are in the flying vehicle but you cannot drive it yourself over the city. For that you have all kinds of cars, all kinds of motorcycles. It feels pretty good, actually, to be honest.”
There are also a bunch of boats, though these won’t be driveable either. You will be able to swim, however.
“There are boats in the game, definitely, and there are even some story elements focused around the boats – don’t want to spoil the story too much,” Sasko said. “But definitely boats are a part of the game but you cannot drive the boat. You can swim, but I would like not to disclose anything! We had some quests in The Witcher that were focused around water and doing stuff around the water, and we have something here as well.”