Cyberpunk 2077 Interview

This year's E3 brought us a fair share of Cyberpunk 2077-related news and articles, and by the looks of it, they're still coming. Like, for example, this VG247 interview with the game's lead cinematic animator Maciej Pietras where he talks about the game's first person perspective, romances and mature themes, but more importantly, its prominent RPG elements. An excerpt:

Part of that fear of turning Cyberpunk first-person is that it will lose its role-playing elements. People don’t want to lose what makes The Witcher 3 and the Cyberpunk pen and paper RPG so popular. But if first-person is usually associated with ‘shooter’, the development team are looking to blend is with RPG. Hit someone with a shotgun and they’ll take damage to multiple body parts. Blood spatters on the wall, but numbers rise off the body too.

“This is still an RPG, right? It has to be a stats driven gameplay system,” says Pietras. “You want to reflect those damage options and how they’re connected to your stats and your skills and attributes in general. You can then adjust your weapon type to the situation.”

Players can single out particular limbs, whether chopping at arms with a katana of blasting out knees with a shotgun. This isn’t spray and pray – you approach an enemy tactically and switch up your weapons based on their defence or skillset.

“When it comes to combat we have three different types of weapons. Each are for a different approach to the gameplay,” says Pietras. “What I can tell you about hand-to-hand combat is that we will have it; where you can use the katana or other weapons. It’s a cool thing because we have a dismembering system. It’s visceral, it’s brutal.”