Marcin Momont (CDPR's Community Manager) confirmed it here: https://forums.cdprojektred.com/ind...markers-and-immersion.10980680/#post-11098790
EDIT: In other news - https://metro.co.uk/2018/09/05/cybe...t-willing-to-say-is-what-were-saying-7916829/
GC: This is going to seem an odd question, but how is it that the game looks so good? I’ve seen the demo twice now and it seems almost too good to be true.
PM: [laughs] I know exactly what you mean. It’s an insane amount of work, like it’s a huge amount of work.
GC: I guess it’s like asking how did they build the pyramids? Very slowly and carefully!
PM: [laughs] A lot of people got ground to dust under cinderblocks. [laughs] Not that that has happened here. We’ve had nobody, that I know of, crushed by rocks while making Cyberpunk 2077. But it’s a lot of work and it’s a lot of iteration and a lot of building it and seeing how it looks. And then changing it and doing all that. It is very ambitious. I didn’t specifically work on this demo very much but I do know the people that did and it’s a lot of work, yeah.
GC: How long have you being working on the game now?
PM: Well the game has actually been in development since… 2013 is when I started. There was a time where we needed to finish Witcher 3 and a lot of people were pulled off of that. There were still people working on it, but what you see here is the result of a couple of years.
GC: So you worked on The Witcher 3 as well… as a quest designer?
PM: Yeah, that’s right.
GC: What are your priorities then, for improving your work on that game? What are you looking to do differently?
PM: One of the things that I think is most different between this and Witcher 3… we consider dialogue and scenes and all of that to be gameplay. Because it is, right? You’re making decisions, you’re making choices, you’re interacting with the world. But we want that to be more seamless than it was in Witcher 3, or it is in most games. You walk into a conversation and suddenly the camera is its own camera and you’re making choices. We wanted to be a little bit more fluid and a little bit more seamless. And it’s a huge amount of work and it’s really, really ambitious and I hope that we’re able to deliver it because it is a lot of work.
GC: When you say seamless you mean being able to walk up to people and not have it be a separate cut scene?
PM: It’s not a separate cut scene. Like, in the demo you’ve got those bits where you can take out your gun and change what happens in the scene. But, like, when you are in the Maelstrom area, for example, and you’re walking away from those guys that’s all still a scene, it’s all still happening as a scene. It’s tightly choregraphed with all those people moving around and all of that. And stuff like that is actually really difficult.
GC: That was one of the things I was asking myself, about how much of it is just staged for the demo. Because people are always walking into frame at just the right moment to look cinematic and everything seems highly orchestrated. Is that just the demo or is the final game really going to be like that?
PM: That’s what we want the game to be. That’s what we’re building in the game right now.
GC: But how are you able to ensure that, like when the Hare Krishnas come round the corner? Are you looking at the viewing angle and waiting till they walk to a certain spot?
PM: I wouldn’t be able to specify specifically for that, because I didn’t set it up, but what I can say is that, yeah, it’s a matter of, ‘OK, if you’re gonna walk to the end of this area here we’re gonna capture that you’re walking there and we’re gonna know to trigger these guys to walk around the corner’. And doing that across a big open world… like, if you’re doing that and it’s a linear game it’s much easier to do because you know that the player’s going to be coming from that direction.
GC: Well, that’s why I ask, given this is open world. But I also know how it’s tempting for companies to cheat in demos…
PM: [laughs] Setting it up in an open world game is a lot more work, because you have to anticipate all sorts of things. And yes, obviously it is a demo so it’s very tightly controlled. But you can actually play that demo now, it’s real. Even if you look at Witcher 3 in terms of how the community acts in that, you can see some of the beginnings of what we want to do here. All those characters, you go to a village and it starts to rain and everybody runs and stands underneath a tree or whatever. And at night everybody goes to bed and they all know which bed is theirs. And during the day they go to work. And we want to do the same thing here but on a much larger scale.
GC: I think most people would agree that the side missions were one of the best things about The Witcher 3, I can imagine why they kept you on…
PM: [laughs] Thank you.
GC: But how much will they evolve in this game? Because a lot of the time they almost seemed more interesting than the main plot, or at least more unpredictable and more focused on characterisation. Is that something you’re going to double down on in Cyberpunk?
PM: Oh yeah, absolutely. The way that we develop side quests is very often by looking at the main story; after we’ve written out and sketched out the main story we find the characters that maybe we want to spend more time with, themes, or even bits of old main story that aren’t getting used anymore. Because we iterate a lot so sometimes you wind up with something that is part of the main story and then at some point you’re like, ‘No, main story has changed but we’ll make it a side quest’. And because there’s not the pressure of being part of a multi-hour long story you have a little bit more freedom to figure it out. And for us, our rule for side quests is that the story has to be something that you’ve never seen before, there’s gotta be something in this story that’s different. It’s never gonna feel like, ‘Go here, do that’. It’s you go there and do that and then something happens.
GC: The quality of side quests varies enormously amongst role-players, even the good ones, but for me I’m always looking for them to challenge your expectations. To make it clear you don’t know everything the game can do yet.
PM: Yeah, yeah, definitely. The inspiration for a side quest can come from basically anywhere. An example that I’ve been giving is that I have a quest that I’ve been working on that’s inspired by the title of an album. And I just had this album title that’s been rolling around in my head for a couple of decades now and I’m like, ‘God, I just want to turn that into a quest!’ So I figured out, ‘What’s the story that I can tell that has this phrase as part of it?’
GC: Is it Now That’s What I Call Music! 96?
PM: [laughs] Well, here’s your exclusive because I’ve been telling everybody that story but not the album, so it’s Fake Can Be Just as Good by Blonde Redhead.
GC: [laughs] Well, thank you!
PM: So the way that it works is that the quest team make these one page proposals and then we give that to the directors and the directors say, ‘Yeah, that one sounds interesting’ or ‘Yeah, but change it a little bit’. And then we go and we make them and we iterate on those the same way we iterate on the main quest and sometimes the thing you wind up with is very different than what you started with but that’s how you make them good.
PM: [laughs] I know exactly what you mean. It’s an insane amount of work, like it’s a huge amount of work.
GC: I guess it’s like asking how did they build the pyramids? Very slowly and carefully!
PM: [laughs] A lot of people got ground to dust under cinderblocks. [laughs] Not that that has happened here. We’ve had nobody, that I know of, crushed by rocks while making Cyberpunk 2077. But it’s a lot of work and it’s a lot of iteration and a lot of building it and seeing how it looks. And then changing it and doing all that. It is very ambitious. I didn’t specifically work on this demo very much but I do know the people that did and it’s a lot of work, yeah.
GC: How long have you being working on the game now?
PM: Well the game has actually been in development since… 2013 is when I started. There was a time where we needed to finish Witcher 3 and a lot of people were pulled off of that. There were still people working on it, but what you see here is the result of a couple of years.
GC: So you worked on The Witcher 3 as well… as a quest designer?
PM: Yeah, that’s right.
GC: What are your priorities then, for improving your work on that game? What are you looking to do differently?
PM: One of the things that I think is most different between this and Witcher 3… we consider dialogue and scenes and all of that to be gameplay. Because it is, right? You’re making decisions, you’re making choices, you’re interacting with the world. But we want that to be more seamless than it was in Witcher 3, or it is in most games. You walk into a conversation and suddenly the camera is its own camera and you’re making choices. We wanted to be a little bit more fluid and a little bit more seamless. And it’s a huge amount of work and it’s really, really ambitious and I hope that we’re able to deliver it because it is a lot of work.
GC: When you say seamless you mean being able to walk up to people and not have it be a separate cut scene?
PM: It’s not a separate cut scene. Like, in the demo you’ve got those bits where you can take out your gun and change what happens in the scene. But, like, when you are in the Maelstrom area, for example, and you’re walking away from those guys that’s all still a scene, it’s all still happening as a scene. It’s tightly choregraphed with all those people moving around and all of that. And stuff like that is actually really difficult.
GC: That was one of the things I was asking myself, about how much of it is just staged for the demo. Because people are always walking into frame at just the right moment to look cinematic and everything seems highly orchestrated. Is that just the demo or is the final game really going to be like that?
PM: That’s what we want the game to be. That’s what we’re building in the game right now.
GC: But how are you able to ensure that, like when the Hare Krishnas come round the corner? Are you looking at the viewing angle and waiting till they walk to a certain spot?
PM: I wouldn’t be able to specify specifically for that, because I didn’t set it up, but what I can say is that, yeah, it’s a matter of, ‘OK, if you’re gonna walk to the end of this area here we’re gonna capture that you’re walking there and we’re gonna know to trigger these guys to walk around the corner’. And doing that across a big open world… like, if you’re doing that and it’s a linear game it’s much easier to do because you know that the player’s going to be coming from that direction.
GC: Well, that’s why I ask, given this is open world. But I also know how it’s tempting for companies to cheat in demos…
PM: [laughs] Setting it up in an open world game is a lot more work, because you have to anticipate all sorts of things. And yes, obviously it is a demo so it’s very tightly controlled. But you can actually play that demo now, it’s real. Even if you look at Witcher 3 in terms of how the community acts in that, you can see some of the beginnings of what we want to do here. All those characters, you go to a village and it starts to rain and everybody runs and stands underneath a tree or whatever. And at night everybody goes to bed and they all know which bed is theirs. And during the day they go to work. And we want to do the same thing here but on a much larger scale.
GC: I think most people would agree that the side missions were one of the best things about The Witcher 3, I can imagine why they kept you on…
PM: [laughs] Thank you.
GC: But how much will they evolve in this game? Because a lot of the time they almost seemed more interesting than the main plot, or at least more unpredictable and more focused on characterisation. Is that something you’re going to double down on in Cyberpunk?
PM: Oh yeah, absolutely. The way that we develop side quests is very often by looking at the main story; after we’ve written out and sketched out the main story we find the characters that maybe we want to spend more time with, themes, or even bits of old main story that aren’t getting used anymore. Because we iterate a lot so sometimes you wind up with something that is part of the main story and then at some point you’re like, ‘No, main story has changed but we’ll make it a side quest’. And because there’s not the pressure of being part of a multi-hour long story you have a little bit more freedom to figure it out. And for us, our rule for side quests is that the story has to be something that you’ve never seen before, there’s gotta be something in this story that’s different. It’s never gonna feel like, ‘Go here, do that’. It’s you go there and do that and then something happens.
GC: The quality of side quests varies enormously amongst role-players, even the good ones, but for me I’m always looking for them to challenge your expectations. To make it clear you don’t know everything the game can do yet.
PM: Yeah, yeah, definitely. The inspiration for a side quest can come from basically anywhere. An example that I’ve been giving is that I have a quest that I’ve been working on that’s inspired by the title of an album. And I just had this album title that’s been rolling around in my head for a couple of decades now and I’m like, ‘God, I just want to turn that into a quest!’ So I figured out, ‘What’s the story that I can tell that has this phrase as part of it?’
GC: Is it Now That’s What I Call Music! 96?
PM: [laughs] Well, here’s your exclusive because I’ve been telling everybody that story but not the album, so it’s Fake Can Be Just as Good by Blonde Redhead.
GC: [laughs] Well, thank you!
PM: So the way that it works is that the quest team make these one page proposals and then we give that to the directors and the directors say, ‘Yeah, that one sounds interesting’ or ‘Yeah, but change it a little bit’. And then we go and we make them and we iterate on those the same way we iterate on the main quest and sometimes the thing you wind up with is very different than what you started with but that’s how you make them good.
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