The two most important games for the Polish developer CD Projekt Red are Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, but they differ not only by their setting.
Where is the difference? The way in which Witcher 3 tells the story to players and how Cyberpunk 2077 does it differs significantly, which caused a lot of head-shaking during development.
Witcher 3 was for many players a masterpiece of storytelling, perfectly staged scenes in which Gerald interacts with other characters in the game. The developers agree, as they talk about it in an interview by voice actor Luke Dale on YouTube. Here Maciej Pietras, the animation director, says:
For me, the development of “The Witcher 3” was like staging a play. In a way, you have a stage where many things can happen or not. And we want players to focus on what they see, but only within that specific frame. We want something specific to happen, and at the same time, we “fade out” other things [that are less relevant to the plot].
Maciej Pietras on YouTube
But even though this very staging made Witcher 3 so great and well done, the same developers did everything quite differently in Cyberpunk 2077.
Here you can see the trailer for Cyberpunk 2077:
Away from the play
What have the developers changed? In Cyberpunk 2077, the way “cutscenes” unfold changes. The player retains control over their character and can also examine the NPCs when they have already disappeared from the frame or are about to appear in the “scene”.
This completely changes the way the RPG is told, and posed a much greater challenge for the developers at that time when creating the scenes. Accordingly, the work of the developers was very demanding.
As Maciej Pietras explains in the interview, other industry colleagues considered the developers from “Red” to be crazy when they heard that the entire RPG would be told from the first-person perspective.
Why did the developers choose this method? Although Witcher 3 already had success with the usual narrative style, the developers wanted to make everything even more immersive in Cyberpunk 2077. Players should be able to dive even deeper into the story through the consistent perspective.
One problem was also finding models that could well show how to implement such a game. There were only a few movies and games that had successfully implemented this technique and could serve as a template.
Whether Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk 2077 has the better narrative style, fans could probably argue about that endlessly. Nevertheless, it is clear that the developers took a risk and won something with their new RPG. But not only the narrative style makes Cyberpunk 2077 special, but also the NPCs: “No shoes, no shirt, no mercy” – the wildest NPC in Cyberpunk 2077 has no implants, yet terrorizes the streets of Night City
