If my memory serves me correctly, it was during 2018 that someone from Electronic Arts suddenly showed-up and said the time for single player story-driven games is over. Well, probably he needs to compare the popularity of Cyberpunk 2077 before release with their last title in Battlefield series to understand that nothing has been changed for games with rich stories to tell, not series of unrelated parts that come together and get released as a story mode in some failed-to-sell-as-expected titles.
CD Projekt RED has already proved it with The Witcher series that how important the story is for them. Speaking to VG247, lead designer at the studio Powel Sasko informed all the fans that the team’s vision on story-driven titles won’t be changed in other franchise such as Cyberpunk 2077. Story has always been the highest priority for the Polish studio and in addition to this, specifically for Cyberpunk 2077, they also used the help of more teams with different skills to serve the story elements in the best way possible. Sasko said:
In our game, in our company, always story design, so the story goes first with everything. So the thing is that the quest designer and writer, they together figure out the story, the scenario. The quest designer writes the scenario, and then based on that we implement it.
When it’s implemented our writers write the first dialogues and cinematic designers start making first scenes and so on. And we work together – quest designers, cinematic designers – to implement and make it perfect.
In this game all those awesome playstyle sequences that we have seen, they’re mainly done by the encounter design team, and by the combat design team, so they’re looking into it – this is something we didn’t have to do in The Witcher, we didn’t even have the budget and the team and so on to do so.
Right now we have a separate team, a small one, that we’re working together with and they’re just adding ideas, implementing things, iterating, reviewing that part, just make sure that the combat feels good, that everything that happens just has correct rhythm and so on, because honestly it’s super easy to screw it up.
Regarding what Sasko said, the base for every scene and the whole structure of the game is heavily built up on the story, so before looking for revolutionary features in gameplay, we should first see what overhauls are going to happen in CDPR’s story-telling in Cyberpunk 2077.
The next RPG title for CD Project RED will be dropping on April 16 for PS4, Xbox One and PC.
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The video shows off the game's characters in combat.