Of all the mechanics that we have heard about for Cyberpunk 2077, the one that seems most innovative and exciting to me is the "interactive scene system." To really understand it, you have to start by understanding conceptually where "scenes" fit into the game design process. As explained by Patrick Mills in an interview with metro UK: "So, generally the way that it works is that quest design… the way I like to think about quest design is that [quest designers] are in control of the minute-to-minute story for our areas. I have a two-hour chunk of the game and I coordinate with the story team that handles the dialogue writing and helps ensure that the characterization remains consistent across the whole game. They’re also very heavily involved in the main story and sometimes in linking the side quests together. And then I work with level designers and gameplay designers and environment artists to build the areas and make sure that they’re fun. And then I also work with cinematic designers to make sure that the second-to-second activity, specifically in scenes when you’re talking to people, is engaging and interesting and keeps the visual interest as well."
So managing the individual scenes is a key component to how CDPR is designing the narrative of Cyberpunk 2077, and they're definitely evolving this system from how it's been done in the past. Again, Patrick Mills to metro: "One of the things that I think is most different between [Cyberpunk 2077] 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."
One of the people in charge of how these scenes work is Lead Cinematic Animator Maciej Pietras. “From my perspective, we’re trying to blend cinematics and gameplay. The way it works is that since we’re creating a first-person perspective open-world RPG we want to keep the player as immersed in the game as possible. We’re using the directive scene system as a way of pulling you into this world and keeping you in the scenes.” Pietras to vg247 "[W]hat we do is tell a story in an open world that is also an RPG. At the end of the day, [it] is still a heavily narrative driven game, and just because of that we just redefine how we approach 'Cinematic-ness'. How we tackled story in The Witcher, of course, is we utilize the camera work; we worked with editing, character composition, with framing and editing very much as a cornerstone of the dialogue and cutscenes in The Witcher. For Cyberpunk what we are doing is using the open world and RPG experience, splashing them together and wrapping them in this interactive scene system overcoat.
So, because of that overcoat, what we think about storytelling and how to create this narrative experience always involves thinking about how the player will experience that from the first-person perspective. One of the ways we think about designing is around the experience of cinematic moments. For example, we are just talking right now, you’re sitting here and let’s say I am the player. So I, as a player, would Point at your bag and ask you why is it grey and you could react to that or not, because you might not be interested, or you may just nod and wonder why we are talking about your bag.
This is kind of how we approach this cinematic storytelling and transforming the experience with it; thinking that this is a living breathing world. The NPC’s set in that world are fully fleshed out characters [and] not just templates, because we approach design like that. It means that you somehow got here. You’re here, you’re doing your job, you’re working, and I approach you and we have a discussion. The outcome is mostly dependent on the player choice. I could pull out the gun and the conversation will go in a very different direction. This example outlines how we think about cinematics and narrative content. So obviously it’s a huge challenge when compared to The Witcher. It’s an open world, one big city that you can explore. There are no loading screens, except for fast travel, and because of that, we have to keep the player as immersed and focus on what’s happening as possible." Pietras to cg magazine
There are examples of how it works in the demo. "In the demo you can see some examples of that, with Royce in the deal, you could give him a chip with the money on it. You can choose to tell him that it has a virus — or not. So at that moment, you’ve either aligned yourself to the cyberpsycho gang or if you don’t say anything at all, you’ll probably get a better standing with the megacorporation. It’s not a black or white choice, it’s more of a grey one — but those choices matter." Pietras to Fandom "It’s not a separate cut scene" reiterated Patrick Mills to metro UK, "when you are in the Maelstrom area 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 choreographed with all those people moving around and all of that. And stuff like that is actually really difficult."
It's especially difficult because of the open world nature of Cyberpunk 2077. "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 ... 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." Mills to metro UK
This of course has a lot of consequences for how the game will play out from minute to minute, since all conversations will have to be thought of as "scenes." Understandably, this probably means that many of the persons we see milling about in Night City wont have deep dialogue trees to explore. "Obviously, when you encounter anyone in the street — not even in the game — most of the people won’t talk to you, no matter how much you bug them. If you bug them a lot, they’ll probably run away scared, or call the police.
In a certain way, we’re aiming to recreate that. It’s a natural common-sense approach. You’ll be able to talk to a certain amount of NPCs and people with which you have interactions are obviously connected to the story itself of the game — as this is the narrative, story-driven [type of] experience that we are proud of making.
Because we control those situations we know that “oh, this guy has to have a certain backstory,” he’s selling weapons but he’s depressed because of X, Y, and Z etc. You may pass him by and know he’s a vendor, but until you start a conversation with him, you might not know that he has something for you to do. Because in this game you’re playing as V, a cyberpunk, and as a mercenary you will get different jobs … I can’t get into spoilers, but like in the demo certain jobs open the door for V to pursue a career as a cyberpunk further." Pietras to Fandom
So yeah, it sounds different than anything I've ever heard of in a cRPG (or really any video game) before. So what do you think about it?
So managing the individual scenes is a key component to how CDPR is designing the narrative of Cyberpunk 2077, and they're definitely evolving this system from how it's been done in the past. Again, Patrick Mills to metro: "One of the things that I think is most different between [Cyberpunk 2077] 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."
One of the people in charge of how these scenes work is Lead Cinematic Animator Maciej Pietras. “From my perspective, we’re trying to blend cinematics and gameplay. The way it works is that since we’re creating a first-person perspective open-world RPG we want to keep the player as immersed in the game as possible. We’re using the directive scene system as a way of pulling you into this world and keeping you in the scenes.” Pietras to vg247 "[W]hat we do is tell a story in an open world that is also an RPG. At the end of the day, [it] is still a heavily narrative driven game, and just because of that we just redefine how we approach 'Cinematic-ness'. How we tackled story in The Witcher, of course, is we utilize the camera work; we worked with editing, character composition, with framing and editing very much as a cornerstone of the dialogue and cutscenes in The Witcher. For Cyberpunk what we are doing is using the open world and RPG experience, splashing them together and wrapping them in this interactive scene system overcoat.
So, because of that overcoat, what we think about storytelling and how to create this narrative experience always involves thinking about how the player will experience that from the first-person perspective. One of the ways we think about designing is around the experience of cinematic moments. For example, we are just talking right now, you’re sitting here and let’s say I am the player. So I, as a player, would Point at your bag and ask you why is it grey and you could react to that or not, because you might not be interested, or you may just nod and wonder why we are talking about your bag.
This is kind of how we approach this cinematic storytelling and transforming the experience with it; thinking that this is a living breathing world. The NPC’s set in that world are fully fleshed out characters [and] not just templates, because we approach design like that. It means that you somehow got here. You’re here, you’re doing your job, you’re working, and I approach you and we have a discussion. The outcome is mostly dependent on the player choice. I could pull out the gun and the conversation will go in a very different direction. This example outlines how we think about cinematics and narrative content. So obviously it’s a huge challenge when compared to The Witcher. It’s an open world, one big city that you can explore. There are no loading screens, except for fast travel, and because of that, we have to keep the player as immersed and focus on what’s happening as possible." Pietras to cg magazine
There are examples of how it works in the demo. "In the demo you can see some examples of that, with Royce in the deal, you could give him a chip with the money on it. You can choose to tell him that it has a virus — or not. So at that moment, you’ve either aligned yourself to the cyberpsycho gang or if you don’t say anything at all, you’ll probably get a better standing with the megacorporation. It’s not a black or white choice, it’s more of a grey one — but those choices matter." Pietras to Fandom "It’s not a separate cut scene" reiterated Patrick Mills to metro UK, "when you are in the Maelstrom area 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 choreographed with all those people moving around and all of that. And stuff like that is actually really difficult."
It's especially difficult because of the open world nature of Cyberpunk 2077. "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 ... 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." Mills to metro UK
This of course has a lot of consequences for how the game will play out from minute to minute, since all conversations will have to be thought of as "scenes." Understandably, this probably means that many of the persons we see milling about in Night City wont have deep dialogue trees to explore. "Obviously, when you encounter anyone in the street — not even in the game — most of the people won’t talk to you, no matter how much you bug them. If you bug them a lot, they’ll probably run away scared, or call the police.
In a certain way, we’re aiming to recreate that. It’s a natural common-sense approach. You’ll be able to talk to a certain amount of NPCs and people with which you have interactions are obviously connected to the story itself of the game — as this is the narrative, story-driven [type of] experience that we are proud of making.
Because we control those situations we know that “oh, this guy has to have a certain backstory,” he’s selling weapons but he’s depressed because of X, Y, and Z etc. You may pass him by and know he’s a vendor, but until you start a conversation with him, you might not know that he has something for you to do. Because in this game you’re playing as V, a cyberpunk, and as a mercenary you will get different jobs … I can’t get into spoilers, but like in the demo certain jobs open the door for V to pursue a career as a cyberpunk further." Pietras to Fandom
So yeah, it sounds different than anything I've ever heard of in a cRPG (or really any video game) before. So what do you think about it?
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