Cyberpunk 2077 - The Making of Cinematic Trailer and Developer Q&A

CD Projekt announced the April 16, 2020 release date for their highly-anticipated open world RPG Cyberpunk 2077 during this year's E3 with the help of a flashy cinematic trailer. And now, they bring us a brief behind the scenes look at the making of that trailer. Check it out:

Then, you might also be interested in this recent community-driven Q&A with CDPR's quest design coordinator Philipp Weber. As you might expect, the Q&A revolves around the topic of quest design and what it means for Cyberpunk 2077. Here's a couple of sample questions:

How do side quests impact the main quest in Cyberpunk?

Side quest can of course be completely separate stories, but they can also continue the story of a main quest or even set up a new branch in the main storyline.

As an example, many people didn’t even realize that by the time they were finishing the storyline of the Bloody Baron in Wild Hunt, they were already playing a side quest that continued this story thread from our main quests. The main quest was over once Geralt found information about Ciri, but the Baron’s story still continued as a side quest.

We of course like to make the game so anything you do could possibly have an impact on the main story of the game. Characters you only meet in a side quest would then suddenly show up in the main story. This way, the player never knows what to expect. Sometimes a small quest can turn into something much bigger and then change the whole main story of the game. So it’s absolutely worth playing every quest in the game and to see how they interact with each other.

What sort of consequences are there if I “fail” a quest?

There can be many different story consequences that of course always depend on what the quest was about, but one thing that’s part of our design philosophy is not to have a game over screen other than player death.

This means that for many different cases, we have to come up with solutions how the quest can continue, even if the player makes a big stupid mistake. It’s especially important for our main quests, because those can’t be “failed” in the classical sense, because the player should always be able to get to his ending of the story. But of course we can make these decisions, but then have to live with the consequences, which sometimes can feel like we failed someone.

But of course, if we get a job and it’s specified that we shouldn’t go on a rampage, we simply fail our job if we do it and won’t get paid. So we just always try to find what makes sense and offer as many different possibilities and consequences as possible, but sometimes we also have to balance how much we can realistically do.