Former Cyberpunk 2077 Dev Talks About Challenges In Balancing Game Design And Storytelling

Cyberpunk 2077 is a curious game- we know very little about it, and yet the hype and anticipation surrounding the game seems to be ridiculously high. One particular former CD Projekt RED employee, Ryan Pergent, recently posted quite a few posts on his blog about his experiences with CD Projekt RED (among other things), and the stuff he wrote about gave us some interesting insight into the game’s story.

The former CDPR dev spoke about Cyberpunk 2077 and how the game’s story was initially met with quite a few issues internally within the studio. The issues mostly seemed to be that the structure and nature of the narrative was clashing with the game’s design and visual look in some cases (though specifics as to the same weren’t given), with the writing and design teams having to work to reconcile these issues.

“The team I inherit of contains almost all the positions you can find in the studio. Designers, 3D artists, Cinematic Animators, Gameplay Animators, Writers, and Coders. The job is thrilling.  The most challenging part: the Writers hate the design. I obviously can’t talk about the specificities, as the game hasn’t come out yet, but Writers straight up hate it. The most striking example is a meeting where all the Leads and Directors, including Adam, are gathered. In here, the Lead writer openly expresses his issues with the concept, echoing the opinion of his team. I keep it straight and manage to defend the idea with the promise that I won’t disappoint them. And I don’t. I rewrite the design almost entirely and come up with a better version that satisfy everyone, including the Writers. Before that, I had nightmares involving them. For real,” Ryan stated on his blog.

As it stands right now, though, it looks like the game’s story and design don’t seem to be at odds anymore, with the narrative being more engaging and having more of an impact than it did in the game’s early development years. Further, in response to a fan, Pergent said that writers didn’t have an issue with the design of Cyberpunk 2077 in general, but only with a very particular “slice” of the game. “Unfortunately, I can’t answer your question about the design that Writers had trouble with. Just to be clear, it’s not the “design of Cyberpunk” that they hated, just the one slice I am talking about here,” he stated.

Cyberpunk 2077 is currently without a release date. Recently, we reported on how it could be a cross-generation game. Read all about it here. Stay tuned to GamingBolt for continued coverage.