Miles Tost works at CD Projekt Red as a Level Designer at Cyberpunk 2077. However, this is not his first project - Tost started working for the Polish developer in January 2013, right after completing his game design studies at the SAE Institute in Berlin. His first mission: to accompany The Witcher 3 from the first drafts to the finished game. We grabbed Miles Tost for a talk at the E3 2018 in Los Angeles, where we surprised him with a real German salt liquorice sweet.
PC Games Hardware: How does a studio, which is at home in classic fantasy role-playing games, get into the science-fiction world of Cyberpunk 2077? Could you no longer see dwarfs and elves at some point?
Miles Tost: Many of our developers have been around since the first or second Witcher. In particular, some conceptual artists, Who have drawn only swords for years, were glad to be able to do something else. We also have a lot of fans of the cyberpunk pen and paper game in the studio - right up to the bosses making the decisions, and that's when the new project came along.
PC Games Hardware: Then all the places, people, and so on come one to one from the pen and paper template?
Miles Tost: Yes, which is something like The Witcher 3. The places and persons all come from the source material, but we allow ourselves artistic freedom here and there. Because the pen-and-paper system goes on until the year 2020, but we are on the road 57 years later, we can almost create a kind of parallel world in which some events from the template did not run or something else. That's why you see us figures, in which hardcore cyberpunk fans would say: Hey, they should all be dead!
PC Games Hardware: The E3 demo gave us a glimpse into the everyday life of a hacker - what's the long-term nature of the game? Are we expecting a sandbox world where we can do what we want to do? Or are we moving along a sometimes more, sometimes less linear story?
Miles Tost: For us, the story is always in the foreground. Internally we call Cyberpunk 2077 a "narrative-driven open-world RPG" - and in the sequence we go to the development: first the story, then the open game world, packed into a role-playing game.
Again, what is very important to us is the principle of "Choices & Consequences": drastic decisions have significant consequences that go beyond "Do I go to the left or to the right, but then arrive at the same place?" go out. And we want to significantly expand this compared to The Witcher 3.
PC Games Hardware: Could you give us an example?
Miles Tost: In Cyberpunk 2077, you can freely create your main character. This includes your gender and the background story of your character, both of which will affect the story of the game. Also in 2077, for example, there are some people who do not want to admit women the same rights as men - because we do not want to talk nicely, but approach the issue realistically.
PC Games Hardware: In that case, your new dialog system will also be used?
Miles Tost: Exactly. Here too we want to give you the greatest possible freedom. Suppose I got up during our conversation and overturned the table here, then you would react - and we try to do that in the game as well. You can, for example, draw your weapon whenever you want - which will cause the corresponding reactions to your opponent.
But we will not show you a countdown within which you have to or can do anything. You regulate this now out of context as in a real conversation. It helps the ego perspective, from which you see more immediate, for example, if your friend makes a deal with someone.
PC Games Hardware: This camera choice is not entirely undisputed ...
Miles Tost: It's easy to look critically at the ego perspective, and I can understand that. But who sees the game and gets involved, understands why we made that decision. And that's why the game works so well - see implants, scans, and so on. And of course you see your character right at the beginning, when you create it, and later in the inventory, if you give him new cool clothes. But on the other hand, of course, we do not want you to spend most of the game in inventory, so we have cut scenes or things like mirrors, V's closet, or even the scene at the Ripperdoc, where you can see yourself from your not quite implanted eye. When driving we change as the only exception in the third-person perspective - then you see UI not on your retina, but on the windshield. Because everything is anchored in the game world, you do not have to fight through menus.
The shooter faction has taken this perspective, we hope to bring it back to the role players. The perspective helps us developers immensely, not only in conversations, but also in combat. Weapons like the one where the projectiles bounce off the environment would otherwise be much harder to visualize and assess. But Cyberpunk 2077 is not a 3D action title, but remains a role-playing game with shooter elements. And because it's our first game in this perspective, we can go a little fresher and unused to the development and try out some new things as well. I think she fits in well with us as a studio that specializes in gripping role-playing games, and just hope your readers can trust us a bit. The shooter faction has taken this perspective, we hope to bring it back to the role
In the ego perspective, the problem is completely eliminated. You enter the room when the character enters the room. This makes the environments and perception of the player very different. For example, I can work with much more realistic proportions. Incidentally, due to the increased mobility of the player, the average room size is higher - just like the running speed. And then you get the chance to sprint, do a double jump, walk along walls, drive vehicles - all of which has a massive effect on the open game world.
In general, however, like in The Witcher 3, we want to allow players to move freely through the game world as fast as possible.
For this reason, distances you could bridge in The Witcher 3 in half an hour have left you behind in Cyberpunk 2077 in ten minutes or less. Anyone who would go through the game world with a tape measure would find that scaling is far more unrealistic than in real life: a 60-square-meter room in the game still feels like a ten to twelve square meter due to the ego's perspective big room.
PC Games Hardware: How do you assemble the pieces of such a big game world, especially if we can move around in it so freely? May our character go everywhere at the beginning of the game? Do some of the six neighborhoods open later?
Miles Tost: We're still working on that. Perhaps particularly strong bandits block some areas, but ultimately you decide where to go - but then you have to live with the consequences. In general, however, as in The Witcher 3, we want to allow players to move freely through the game world as fast as possible.
