#getting into 2077 and beyond territory

[elvenbeard]

2076

"I'm tellin' ya, mano, this is only the beginning! A few months down the line we're gonna be Night City legends!"

"I think before I wanna be a legend I'd just like to start feelin' like myself again..."

The day Vince was sacked in November of 2076 was the newest low point of his life. He'd lost everything, from a job he was good at, financial security, to what he'd assumed had been friends. Over the course of the year his health had been on a steady decline, mentally and physically. His first so harmonious, almost too-perfect relationship with an older coworker had found an abrupt and bitter ending filled with betrayal. Jenkins' paranoia and revenge fantasies reached new heights, and several particularly precarious operations went wrong in a row. To cope with the stress, silence his depression and anxieties, and be able to keep up with his coworkers-turned-competitors' performance, Vince turned to substance abuse over the course of his last 6 months at Arasaka.

In Jackie's eyes, the termination of Vince's contract couldn't come soon enough, seeing his friend spiral and lose himself in the corporate mud more and more with each passing day.

Like many times before - even though this one had been Vince's highest fall so far - Jackie helped him back to his feet. He and his mother took Vince in and kept him company through his withdrawal from both self- and corporate-administered drugs. Slowly but surely he got better.

From the first day they'd known, Jackie had always urged Vince to consider teaming up as mercs. Together they'd be one hell of a duo, muscle and tech, street-smarts and corporate education, guns and hacking. They'd make it far in Night City's underground world in no time, or so he thought.

By 2076, Jackie was a respected Solo, particularly in Heywood, but still far from achieving his dreams of becoming a legend - and really, those had always been Jackie's dreams alone. Sure, Vince wanted to leave an impact and be remembered, not just fade away into the shadows, but who didn't? Dying in a blaze of glory though, never reaching age 30, just for the money and fame, for doing other people's dirty work? He never saw the appeal... but also, so far he'd failed to find a satisfying middleground.

By mid-December 2076 Vince had somewhat recovered, had been clean for a little over a month, but his cash started to run dry. The next time Jackie asked him to accompany him on a job - just a small one, a little favor for a choomba, nothin' dangerous or dramatic - Vince gave in and tagged along. "Just this once," he told himself, simultaneously looking for other job opportunities. He even considered going back into the corporate world, a smaller company, something less exhausting than Counterintel, maybe media, or a lowly techie position like Jenkins had intended for him originally.

But the small job went well, was fun, even. Jackie's enthusiasm had always been infectuous. After everything he'd done for Vince, he didn't think it fair to continue saying no to him and to something that indeed worked out better than he could have ever imagined... He still had no intentions of dying young, or a legend, but as Jackie put it: would be a shame to let all that Arasaka training go to waste, so why not use it to do some good with it, help themselves and others in their lives?

Vince through the years (6/9)

The set above is basically the followup to this VP comic I did a while ago, the evening after V's and Jackie's first job together.

As mentioned, Vince was never eager to be a merc, and by early 2077 he simply treats it as one of his many previous part-time jobs: a way to keep a roof above his head, food on the table, and make use of his skills somehow. Maybe do some good, or at least leave a positive impact on a single person's life after 4 years of corporate scheming.

He is sort of picky with the gigs he takes, always weighs pros and cons. Sometimes he takes a gig he usually wouldn't out of sheer curiosity. But thievery and sabotage, even rescue missions, are really his favourite things to do because they come closest to what he did for Arasaka predominantly.

It really is easy money with his skills and knowledge, and also usually non-violent. I think that would be the main reason why he decides to go on with the Konpeki Plaza Heist with Jackie in the end, despite having a bad gut feeling. With the information they have it seems like something just down his alley, and he's very confident that he did his best in setting everything up. His biggest mistake is really putting so much trust in Dex doing his part for the preparation of the heist.

Vince is really used to his superiors just supplying him with all necessary info, no questions asked - both back at Arasaka and with the fixers he's worked with at that point, mainly Regina and Wakako. Both are thorough and reliable, do their work, hold nothing back that could be useful. He is also used to his team-members speaking up if they think something feels off. But I think T-Bug is in a similar boat as him, confident that all will go as planned, in her mind already in Cyprus. And Jackie, who just really really wants this to happen so badly, does not speak up despite potentially having a bad feeling.

So, even though Vince feels like all of it sounds too good to be true, everyone else involved being so confident and presenting themselves so competent, in combination with Jackie's aforementioned enthusiasm, convinces him that his own worries may be unjustified. He's overthinking, this can't go wrong, they were all really thorough, they can count on each other... right?

He'll learn the hardest way possible that on the street the saying "every man for himself" is even more prevalent than in the corporate world in the end.

(CW below for drug abuse talk!)

Little sidenote re: Vince's substance abuse. I often put great emphasis on the fact that he neither smokes nor drinks, one of the many reasons why Johnny pisses him off so much by doing both regardless and repeatedly whenever he's in control of his body later. Not smoking is really just Vince's personal preference here, but he actually wouldn't mind drinking now and then - his body is really just against him on this. He can't process alcohol well and just gets drunk and nauseous really quickly, even from "just a beer" or "just a glass of wine". So he avoids it, not for moral high ground reasons but more "I dont wanna puke my guts out and have a headache for three days" reasons.

Since drinking and smoking are off the table when it comes to numbing himself through his worst time at Arasaka, drugs are the next best thing. Initally it was just downers and sleeping pills, but when those started affecting his performance during daytime, he picked up neuroboosters and other performance enhacing stuff. It was a constant struggle to balance this drug-cocktail out, in combination with the canonical stress-blockers Corpo!V is on during the start of the game.

In short, by the time Vince is kicked out, he's a walking pharmacy and needs some time to readjust to a life without being constantly on something. He's doing his best to remain clean once he gets there... and he hates that taking pills is the one thing he can do to silence Johnny, cause it brings back a lot of bad memories and associations. It's probably one of the main reasons why he ends up talking to him more instead of just blocking him out like he used to block out everything else for a while. And even though he never fully trusts him, this way he at least gets to understand him better and gains his trust and understanding in return.

[violetsystems]

#personal

I can’t really tell if my mood is better or worse on Sunday mornings rather than the typical Saturday.  Things have reached a point where it’s just not worth explaining how awful life can be.  My life story at this point is slightly more convoluted than a side job in Cyberpunk 2077.  It’s also seemingly just as insignificant.  That is until I realize I’ve been writing here weekly for over two years at this point.  I’ve been posting on this platform for what seems like over a decade.  The value of this kind of journaling has been impossible to gauge.  I just paid a full year for LinkedIn to keep my career contacts alive.  I post in the hashtag cybersecurity almost every day.  I have a solid list of five contacts that follow my company.  I post the zero day news as it happens.  I promote my brand and employability.  As if this is the only thing that is valuable.  A twenty year resume with management experience that gets picked over by AI and human just the same.  I also forget sometimes I’m a musician.  I was reminded last night when I posted the RP Boo “Bangin’ on King Drive” video.  I was at that video shoot.  Years ago I would just run into Bu in the street with his wife randomly.  I appear nowhere in that video as I was edited out much like I was the only artist edited out of a Pitchfork review for a footwork compilation from Japan that protested Nuclear proliferation.  If there were any more alarming trend for me it’s that most of what I try to succeed at is locked beyond a brick wall.  I sit here from week to week trying to figure out ways to keep myself from disappearing.  I worry about where I can actually pivot and when.  I lay awake at night alone in my bed calculating what my runway for cash positivity is before I have to leave this city altogether.  It sometimes feels completely futile and useless.  Everybody in America is winner take all when there’s nothing left to take.  It’s cutthroat and we’re all in this together at the same time.  The amount of bullying I have to process per day has left me broken down and angry ninety percent of the time.  And yet angry is a shitty look for me.  I lose at video games all the time.  And lately I feel as if I’m living in one.  To explain that any further gets into some territory of oversharing.  I’ve written paragraphs upon paragraphs about my life here.  And yet nobody seems to acknowledge I exist other than here.  Which leads me to believe a very few amount of people actually have the reading comprehension over 140 characters to look deeper into someone’s life, liberty and value therein.  I think sometimes that it shouldn’t be this hard.  That something is very wrong and deeply troubled about it all.  And there’s not much I can really do about the things I’m up against when it’s only me fighting it from day to day out here.  So I’ve fallen back to what I know.  We are still very much in the middle of a pandemic.  I’m happy the relief bill has passed.  I’m waiting to pay my taxes until it’s official.  Which puts me back in the same mood I’ve been in the last eight months.  A complete state of abandon.  This nefarious field of people watching you every day waiting to pin something on you.  It never comes because I know better than to fall back into that trap as much as I can these days.  

The worst of this mindfuck is over for me.  I don’t actually really care too deeply about how wrong things are.  Mostly because I’ve done my best to make due under impossible circumstances.  You’d think someone like me after all these years would have something to celebrate.  I kind of do.  My birthday didn’t matter to anyone really out here much last month.  It was a clear indicator that I had no real peers out here anymore.  As evidenced as how everyone in footwork I helped back in 2014 has literally just ghosted like the rest of my professional network.  I had a couple of things to fall back on.  But it’s impossible to fall back onto anything when people would rather pretend you didn’t exist.  I’m always supposed to read into these psychotic projections by society because somehow I’m supposed to realize more is expected out of me.  I can’t figure this out completely.  Like I brought all this upon myself.  That’s the vibe I get from day to day.  That because I don’t share my plans, agenda, or strategy with the real world I’m shit out of luck.  The irony is that I do share it verbatim.  Week to week.  In a very coy, oblique way this is true.  But I am also a writer.  This is another talent I’ve been taught by society that has no value.  I wrote emails for my bosses for years on my days off.  On my birthday even.  This doesn’t mean it is worthless.  The audience is out there.  If it weren’t I would have quit sharing my feelings a long time ago.  I’m fairly aware at some point I’m going to have to put this all behind me.  Hopefully when the world wakes up and returns to normal like nothing ever happened.  That’s going on as we speak and I don’t even have a vaccine in my arm.  It’s a constant state of fear and missing out projected back at you.  That the reason I’m not happy is totally because of what I choose to take on in my life.  And I’m supposed to get the message when people don’t actually communicate.  I had this strange realization yesterday when I discovered all my videos were closed captioned.  I watch movies with subtitles all the time simply because I love to read.  My videos barely get ten views if that.  I often think content is content.  If you put it out there someone will eventually find it and wonder about it’s value.  In the age of semi-spiritual machines it’s true that the algorithms seem to be the only curators out there listening.  Everything I say out loud is transcribed and mothballed somewhere on Siri’s or Alexa’s servers.  When I take a screen shot of the things I say off the top of my head, I’m often aware that something acknowledges I actually said them.  It’s just nobody human really wants to pay attention. They are hardcoded over my videos as proof of the value of my words.  Not like you can sell the speculative value of it yet.  The first tweet is being auctioned off as a NFT and you wonder how worthless I have to feel at this point.  I’m sure we all feel a little of this deep down.  Disconnected and in some sort of weird emotional exile.  I think it just makes me realize more of what I am connected to.  A history of authenticity.  A life that trades the catwalk for the streets as brutal and unforgiving as they are.  Nobody can stop talking shit about me.  But it’s almost always a hallucination.  For a person who puts it all out there, I must be a shitty fucking writer.  I can spend week to week writing the same thing.  That I’m completely abandoned and ghosted out here on my own.  And how it’s less unsafe and more simply a degraded quality of life when it comes to my rights as a human being to be happy.  I’m supposed to get the message when nobody can bother to read mine.  The writing is on the wall I guess.

So instead of pining on and on about it which I just did for two paragraphs, I still look for solutions.  I still broadcast weekly to let people know I’m still alive.  I make funny jokes to myself and screencap them to mask deep emotional scarring that is no fault of my own.  I literally feel trapped and under duress almost all of the time.  And yet, I don’t really have the luxury of taking the shit when I’ve had the hope choked out of me until I can’t breathe.  If the answer is to keep ignoring the problem, it’s hard to be me.  Because nobody can leave me alone.  No one seems to have any sense of dignity as to what I’ve been through.  I never claimed to be a victim.  That’s not really me.  I’ve survived and been resilient.  I can see that working a six figure corporate job in New York or China is probably more worth my time in the not so distant future.  I can also see that I’m worth more than what people sell me short for.  I know we are in a dangerous time of confidence tricks.  I don’t really have much to lose other than cash positivity.  I can wait this out until the end of the summer for sure.  And then I start to think about spending another winter being hunted and shunned at the same time.  Mentally I can’t fuck with this city after what it’s done to me alone.  I can’t keep being a superhero for people who can’t be bothered to understand how painful it is to be taken for granted after all these years.  I just give up on everything in the past that isn’t working and move forward as best as I can.  Just like they threw the entire contents of my office in the trash I can let it go.  There is a very real emotional exhaustion I have to deal with from day to day.  The level of psychological torture and abuse I’ve witnessed first hand in this city is at a level that is unlawful and unhealthy.  I know too much about what it’s all connected to.  And I know I’m better than all of this.  I don’t know how to proceed.  And this is a very real and dangerous situation that I am stuck in the middle of a shark tank feeding frenzy of well meaning but rabid idiots and the pricks that prod them with a sharp stick.  I don’t have a future here in this city.  I don’t have a future in this state or country if you wanted me to be real about.  And yet I have so much potential if I just hold on for one more year.  For one more decade.  For another forty years when they turn my blog into a NFT after my death like I’m the next Van Gogh.  Everybody will talk about how they knew me and how tortured an artist I was.  I was so misunderstood and it was beautiful.  They’ll fund a school with the proceeds that kicked me out the door because I was a blight on their payroll and budget.  And I’ll be a digital ghost just the same.  I feel like that very ghost now every waking fucking moment.  It is a pain I cannot describe in words.  It is a suffering that is goaded on in the worst syndicate driven way.  I have nothing good to say about any of this shit anymore.  I have no more room to break down and make things worse for myself.  I just have to adjust my schedule and manage my emotions with it all because it’s my fault.  This is the message I keep hearing in my head projected by silent looks as I picked up my prescriptions on foot avoiding everyone who wants to see if it’s true.  If I really am the bogeyman.  The source of the problem.  Someone to blame.  The scapegoat for everything that is wrong with the world.  Convenient but ultimately not worth my time to humor.  Which is why I don’t really know what to do anymore other than to stay inside and wait for justice.  If there’s anything poetic about it, it’s that it runs pretty seamlessly at 1440p.  Much clearer resolution than what this city wants to offer me after what it’s put me through.  <3 Tim

[terryblount]

Cyberpunk 2077’s UI coordinator talks about gangs, romance, difficulty & more

Alvin Liu, UI coordinator of Cyberpunk 2077, has spoken to wccftech about their upcoming role playing game. First of all some bad news; no Lady Gaga folks. I hope Liu is toying with us, even if it sounds definite. I would love to see Lady Gaga and Keanu Reeves together in the game.

Liu claimed that each individual gang will have different characteristics and goals, meaning each encounter will most likely feel unique and decisions will probably have more weight for the player. Now that’s something I really like.

Romancing in video-games was never intriguing to me, until I played The Witcher 3 as its characters were extremely well made and fleshed out. Take Yen and Triss for example. Those two had completely different personalities and choosing between them was a very hard decision mainly because of who they were rather than simply choosing between a black-haired and a red-haired. As such, it makes me very happy reading that CD Projekt RED is following the same romancing example for this title.

Moreover, it seems that the game’s world will be… open, meaning there will be no restrictions of where you can go. Of course there will be areas with powerful enemies but the UI will help guide you. Chances are you will die painfully when you visit higher level territories, however the option will be available to players.

There will be multiple difficulty settings and the game will even have a hardcore mode which sounds similar to Metro’s ranger difficulty, where the UI is disabled for maximum immersion. I really like the sound of that.

Of course if you are not keen with shooters and you just want to enjoy the story, there will be a setting or settings for you; you can even use the smart gun we saw last year and make firefights even easier. To be honest I wouldn’t recommend it since the firefights looked awesome but I understand we all have our personal preferences here. Who knows, if the shooting mechanics are terrible (fingers crossed it won’t) maybe everyone will end up using the smart gun.

Of course, the big reveal at E3 was Keanu. Can you talk a bit about how that happened?

Absolutely. What we wanted to do is to find the right celebrity match. It couldn’t just be someone from a romantic comedy movie or something.

Yes. I mean, there were rumors about Lady Gaga!

She’s pretty cyberpunk, so she could fit in! But um, yeah, no Lady Gaga. A lot of people in studio love The Matrix, Johnny Mnemonic, Speed and all that stuff and he was just a really good match for our game genre and what we’re trying to do. When we approached him he was like ‘Yeah, I understand the artistic vision behind this, I can get behind it.’ He was just on board with it, which was great.

I’m wondering whether this is something you have been planning for quite some time, or is it more recent?

We’ve been keeping it a secret for definitely many months. I don’t recall exactly when, it’s hard to pick an exact time when it first started. But everything was very smooth. And it was great. I think keeping it a secret was super hard. I remember the first time I heard someone told me and I was like ‘Really?!?’

Keanu’s character, Johnny Silverhand, is also deeply rooted in Cyberpunk lore, correct?

Yes. Johnny Silverhand, he was like a super rebellious Rockerboy who is very against mega-corporations, he would happily run in and torch the lobby of a mega building, just throw the torch in the grounds and go ‘Screw you guys!’. He’s very different than real life Keanu Reeves.

He actually represents what we call Rockerboy from the tabletop Cyberpunk game. That was one of the classes, basically a rockstar. That’s a lot harder for us to do in the game we’re trying to make, you know, you can’t spend eight hours talking about preparing for a tour and going across, but we wanted to keep the spirit of the lore, so that’s what he represents.

He’s also supposed to be long dead in Cyberpunk 2077, right? So he’s kind of a digital ghost.

Exactly. So this is like 50 years from when he disappeared. I don’t want to spoil it, but being a digital ghost allows him to not be you know, like 80 or 90 years old. But there’s a lot more for you to discover about what’s happened to him.

I noticed that in the E3 2019 demo, the dominant theme was attempting to upload human consciousness into machines to attain immortality. Is this going to be prevalent throughout the whole Cyberpunk 2077?

There’s a lot of things we’re trying to do. The Voodoo Boys specifically are very obsessed with that, but other gangs such as the Maelstrom gang we showed last year, they want to be like, the ‘perfect humans’. So their theme is like making them solve this, you know, like replacing an eyeball or something, because, you know, it’s better to see the doctor. And they’re the most the best in the Superman realm. And it really depends on which gang you talk to. But we explore it all, it’s going to be a very big game, we’re going to go to look at different storylines, different characters, and we’ll talk about, you know, transhumanism, we’ll talk about what it means for a company to come in and be very greedy. And you can have romances in the Night City, for example.

Since you mentioned it, can you talk a bit about how romances are going to work in Cyberpunk 2077?

I don’t want to do spoilers, but we want to write very strong characters. We want to have personalities that you can interact with. If you remember from The Witcher 3 where Yennefer and Triss had very different personalities, it was interesting navigating how you would talk to one or the other. So to that effect, we’ve selected some NPCs who’ll have very rich relationships. But we also have, since it’s a modern world, you know, one-night stands exist, so something like that is also possible. And also like in the real world, you can also just exchange money for sex.

Earlier we were talking about corporations. Can you tell me how many will be in the final game?

That’s a good question. I don’t think anyone stopped to count because we have both big and small corporations. We have Militech, they’re kind of like the American military kind of corporation because the government military doesn’t really exist anymore. But people sell them, you know, name, tags and security. So this company kind of represents that. We also have Arasaka and in our history, those companies had a huge fight and that resulted in someone setting up a nuclear bomb in the city. That’s a large Japanese company, very secretive, they do a lot of secret projects. There’s also Orbital Air, they handle space, airplanes and stuff like that. There are so many companies in Cyberpunk 2077.

Right. And of course, beyond the corporations, you also have the gangs in Cyberpunk 2077. Are there any other factions in the game, though, beyond the corporations and gangs?

Yeah, we also have, obviously, the people just trying to live and you know, stay alive in Night City. We also have what we call the Nomads. Outside the city, we have people who just don’t want to live in the city for whatever reason. Maybe they have some very strong family ties in their community, or maybe they hate the idea of, you know, being a corporate slave, working for gangs, and they want to be strong and independent instead.

Does that mean we’ll get to explore the outskirts of Night City, too?

Absolutely. You’ll be able to go out in the desert of California and view things like power plants, abandoned highways and stuff like that. So you’re not just limited to Night City. It’s a really cool place to use our cars and drive them fast, as it’s hard to go super fast in the city. We do have street racing, though.

If you commit crimes, is the police coming after you? How does your ‘outlaw system’ work?

The way that works is that they are basically up for hire, basically, the laws exist to take bribes from corporations. So a corporation might pass a law that you can’t sell medicine anymore, and they’re going to enforce it. The only reason they got that law passed was that they bribed the government and they’re only using it as a proxy. So it’s not a place where you want to trust the government necessarily. There probably are some good people out there also, but it’s a city of people trying to constantly get one up on each other.

We have a system that we’re still iterating upon. People will, you know, not be nice to you if you start killing many people. There are some people you can’t kill because that might have blocked a quest and that’s just by design, but it’s not what our game is based upon. So I would compare it to The Witcher 3 where if you chopped off the head of a villager in the middle of nowhere the guards wouldn’t show up out of nowhere. But if you’re in a big town and someone from the guard sees you and the people nearby run away screaming for help, people will come and try to stop you and they’re going to be usually pretty powerful. We also have what we call the Trauma Team.

Oh yes, I recall them from that memorable trailer.

Yes, they are a sort of police/medic ambulance. They come in and help save you as long as you have their coverage plan, then you’re taken to a medical facility.

Is it possible to get arrested and go to jail after committing enough crimes?

Sorry, I can’t spoil anything about that.

Okay, sure. I assume you’ll have dynamic weather in Cyberpunk 2077, right?

Yeah, we’ve got acid rain as well. Night City is a very polluted city and we’re also exploring that kind of stuff, pollution and global warming and everything.

The NPCs will scatter around when that happens, I reckon…

Yep, that was happening in The Witcher 3 too. When the rain came, people would seek shelter. Generally, we’re trying to make the NPCs very believable, we want it to feel like this is a world where people actually live in, which would make players want to spend time in the world as well.

I imagine the NPCs have daily routines, too.

Indeed. Of course, if you followed someone for fifteen hours, you might see the same thing repeated a few times. But we’re trying to make them do interesting stuff. Again, I think the best comparison would be Novigrad from The Witcher 3.

In terms of the overall scope of Cyberpunk 2077, what are the main tenets you laid out for yourselves during development?

Three things, we’re going to do a really awesome open world that players just want to live in and we’re going to do a very strong story. In Cyberpunk 2077 we’re going to add this new layer of how you make your character and how you want to play the game. So you can play as a hacker person from the outskirts and you learned how to hack you know, from like, scavenged devices. And they really want to hack with a vengeance because they want to, you know, avenge someone or something. Or you can play as like a someone who loves swords and just loves running in and chopping people off with swords. That, I think, will add a whole other layer of how you experience the game yourself. Right? You’re going to be able to live in this world, play how you want with your character but also be involved in this really deep and engaging story.

Sounds great. Is the whole of Night City open from the start? Or is it like unlocked over time?

We’re not going to have this locked, invisible wall where you can’t go past it because we show a message on the screen saying you must go back. It doesn’t make sense, right? It’s like I just crossed the street, what’s the issue? So we won’t have anything like that.

But you might venture into some places where enemies are way tougher than you can handle.

Yep. We have UI to help lead players. Actually, in the demo, you can see the NPCs levels and that will give you a quick gauge of how to make sure that you want to engage. We are an RPG after all and that’s one of the implications of an RPG, you want to do progression. But like in The Witcher 3, you could always just run to Novigrad, you could have skipped the Baron quest, you could even go to Skellige if you managed to get enough money to pay for the boat. That freedom in an open world is pretty awesome and I think Cyberpunk 2077 is going to be very similar. But of course, you know, in The Witcher 3 when you were like level one and went to Novigrad you didn’t have a very fun time. You might expect something similar here, but you can still go if you want to.

Will there be multiple difficulty settings as in The Witcher 3?

Yes, of course, of course. The most fun one I think will be the Hardcore setting where we turn off the UI you live as well. And that will be a real challenge for a lot of players. Also, at the same time, if you want to play more casually for the story and maybe you’re not experienced with shooters, which was a real big concern for us. We want to tell a story and maybe you’re a big fan of The Witcher and you’re not comfortable playing a shooter, we have settings available for that. We even have weapons for that. If you recall from last year’s demo, we had a weapon called the smart gun, which helps you aim. The bullets were much slower and usually a bit weaker. But if your aiming isn’t your forte, you can always pick up the smart gun.

There was a bit of negative feedback regarding your choice to go with a first-person view only for Cyberpunk 2077. Some people also have issues with nausea and similar medical conditions.

We’re going to have many settings for that, starting with a Field-of-View (FoV) slider. We’re also considering accessibility at a very strong level, including stuff like subtitles for people who might have trouble reading some of the text in our game. That’s very important for us. But with the first-person perspective, we are able to do a lot of new stuff, we can do much more immersive dialogue for example compared to the last game (The Witcher 3) where it was kind of obvious when you were going into combat because you saw the black bars, the camera would move… But in this game, since it’s first-person, literally you can shoot someone within a second. You pull the gun and you’re immediately shooting people. That to us is really important and really immersive because it feels like danger. It was one of the big reasons why we actually switched from third-person.

There are still times when you see your character though, right?

Yeah. Even in the demo we saw today, a lot of people might have missed it, but driving was in third-person and the transition was very seamless.

Of course you can look in the mirror and see yourself through reflections, right?

Yeah, yeah, that’ll be really cool. I think the character customization is going to be really well received. When you go unlock the super rare outfits you get because you have super high street grad and you have a high reputation with a local gang, we want to make sure that you can see that. Since you can customize and create your character you will see that as well, if you take a different skin tone you’ll see that on your hand.

Our items have RPG stats, you can craft them and feel rewarded for that. You’ll also be able to modify the weapons a lot, be able to attach things like a suppressor or a scope and also craft and modify those as you wish. You can change a gun’s type to maybe start shooting thermal bullets, which can actually light on fire because they’ve just built up so much heat. But you can also shop for strictly cosmetic items, such as shirts and jackets.

We can justify that because you look super cool, so you get more street cred game. It’s like, hey, you get more street cred experience because you looked cool killing someone. And that to us is a cool balance for items that might make no sense combat wise but because of that, you earn more reputation doing it, which actually makes sense gameplay-wise.

Cool indeed. What can you tell us about the implementation of real-time ray tracing on PC? Also, can you reveal the hardware that ran this E3 2019 demo?

Ray Tracing was on [in the demo]. We were showing off Ray Traced Emissives, Sky Light, and Ambient Occlusion. However, I’ve seen super impressive screenshots internally about raytracing (they get sent out in a digest e-mail), so we’re clearly still working on it as they looked more impressive than what I remember seeing in the demo. Especially at night and with neon reflections. NVIDIA also has representatives and work with our studio to continue to improve and utilize this technology, similar to The Witcher 3 and Hairworks.

The game was running on Ultra, but we are continuing to improve our visuals.

The game demo was running at 1080p, but our trailers and publically released assets are at 4K. The UI is designed mostly at 4K (eventually it will entirely be at 4K native), but we have the technology to swap assets and do intelligent scaling to handle 1080p, widescreen, 720p, 1440p, and so on. We can also design specific UI at 1080p and other resolutions, on a need by need basis, such as on a screen or graphics with heavy icons that might look bad otherwise.

A lot of people, after seeing last year’s debut gameplay demo and the hardware it was running on, have become a bit wary of how Cyberpunk 2077 could look and run on consoles and low-end PCs. Is that a challenge in terms of optimization for lower-end hardware?

Actually no, we have a very custom engine, the RED Engine. And actually, we’re targeting consoles as first-class platforms and it looks amazing there. So obviously, if you spent, you know, $2,000 building your PC rig, it’s going to look better on that. But the graphics are quite amazing for what you’re going to get from Cyberpunk 2077 on consoles and low-end PCs.

Cyberpunk 2077 will be released on April 16th, 2020.

Thanx wccftech

Cyberpunk 2077’s UI coordinator talks about gangs, romance, difficulty & more published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/