Cyberpunk 2077 – Night City Wire, Episode 2

The second episode of Night City Wire, CD Projekt’s livestream dedicated to sharing information about their upcoming first-person RPG Cyberpunk 2077, is now up on YouTube as a VOD.

This new episode starts with a preview of character origins and their long-term impact. It then tells us a bit about the game’s soundtrack and how Refused, a Swedish punk band, transformed into their cyberpunk alter-ago – SAMURAI. And finally, we get a detailed look at the game’s weapon types and how they deal with cover.

Check it out:

Then, you may want to follow that up with this VG247 interview with CD Projekt’s senior gameplay designer Pawel Kapala that shares some extra details about the game’s arsenal. An excerpt:

VG247: How do you balance that, because you said about recoil, right? And when I think of shooting in an RPG, and the RPG levelling making recoil better, the first thing I think of is the first Mass Effect game, where you start out and your reticule is this big, and then as you level up, it gets smaller and smaller to represent your accuracy. But that also led to the frustration where you’d be pointed straight at someone, pulling the trigger, and bullets would be going off and missing.

Kapala: Yes, absolutely. That was the biggest problem I feel like we needed to solve. So, basically, to merge those two systems like you noticed, if you start on the heavier side of the RPG, I would say. If your spread is too big, like if it envelops one fourth of your screen, it makes it impossible to hit anything. And that brings that frustration to the player. We really don’t want to create that feeling. However, you also need to have that sizable portion of all the variables to be tweakable, and to be progressive.

So, in general you have two types of variables on the weapon side. You have variables that are controllable by the player, or semi-controllable by the player, like, for example, the recoil. Recoil can be smaller or larger, so this would be the movement of the camera as you’re firing. Something like CS:GO has big recoil, right? But proficient players can still control it. However, spread is the size of the crosshair as you’re firing the gun, and that’s something that’s completely random. You cannot foresee where the bullet will go next, because it’s just a huge chunk of your screen. And what we learned during our development process is that we much prefer scaling recoil, so something that the player can control still, even at the beginning of the game, than scaling spread. So, spread will still be scalable, but it’s not infuriating at the beginning. And it scales a little bit less than recoil, which you can still control as the player. And that alleviated a lot of that frustration, at least for us. And I think that players will experience a similar thing, that basically, you can learn the guns.

And if you’d like to catch up, you can find the first episode of Night City Wire over here.