CYBERPUNK 2077

CYBERPUNK 2077

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PROJEKTING THE_FUTURE

_Cyberpunk 2077’s art team talk to Oscar Taylor-Kent about creating the hot looks, fast rides, big guns, and slick cyberware that defines Night City

Every city has its soul: Liverpool’s cheek, London’s edginess, Madrid’s non-stop sociability, New York’s drive. Building an RPG world as vibrant and dense as Cyberpunk 2077’s is some undertaking, especially if you want it to feel like a living, believable space that’s faithful to the ’80s techno-futuristic style of the tabletop RPG it’s based on, Cyberpunk 2020. How do you give a virtual city a real soul – put the ghost in the machine?

“The first stage was just looking for the actual art style, and it was this kind of problematic question – are we making a futuristic game, or making some kind of retro-futuristic game, or are we completely leaving the game in the ’80s?” explains Pawel‚ Mielniczuk, the game’s art director, responsible for characters, vehicles, and weapons. He explains that part of the pre-production process was creating hundreds of pieces of concept art looking for the perfect style. “We ended up with some kind of a blend. We definitely decided that we don’t want to make a futuristic game that is an expansion of our reality. [It’s] this kind of dystopian future where things went kind of wrong, where humanity never stopped emitting carbon […] and destroying nature – erasing nature – from the face of the planet and just didn’t stop expanding. Which led to the corporate wars and disasters, you know, tossing meteorites at the planet – there’s this kind of story in Cyberpunk in the original rulebook.”