Cyberpunk 2077 News

Cyberpunk's quest director says CD Projekt Red has experimented with generative AI, but there's still a 'gigantic, really long way to go' before AI NPCs are as good as scripted characters

Numerous game companies are currently experimenting with NPCs powered by generative AI, from Nvidia's Convai-powered ramen connoisseur, to Ubisoft's GDC showcase of its "Neo NPCs". There is potential for interesting game design using these technologies, with Ubisoft boldly claiming the tech could "transform the way players interact with non-playable characters". Yet the quest designer involved in creating some of the best handcrafted NPCs in existence—CD Projekt Red's Pawel Sasko—believes there's a "gigantic, really long way to go" before AI NPCs will match the quality of scripted characters...
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Still haven't gotten round to Cyberpunk 2077? You can try it out for free very soon, but not for long

If everything you've heard about Cyberpunk 2077 over the years has you uncertain about it, an upcoming free trial can let you try it out without financial regrets.

It would be pretty understandable if you've been waiting for the right time to play Cyberpunk. We all know how bad a launch it has, we don't need to get into that here, but it also released more than three years ago, meaning a whole bunch of other good games have come out since then. So, even if you wanted to try it out, maybe you couldn't justify the purchase (I can fully appreciate that in a stacked year like 2023, and also just because of how expensive games are now). Well, if you can manage to get yourself away from Dragon's Dogma 2 this weekend, CD Projekt Red is offering a free trial, no strings attached.

The trail will be available on both PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and offers up to five hours of playtime. You also don't need a subscription of any kind, so don't worry if you aren't a PlayStation Plus or Game Pass subscriber, it's available to all. However, it's not around for all that long. You'll be able to start the demo this Thursday, March 28, at 8am PT/ 3pm GMT, and it will be available until March 31, 11:59pm PT/ April 1, 7:59am BST (the clocks change for us over in the EU this coming Sunday, in case any Americans are confused by the time zone designation change).

Cyberpunk 2077 has plenty of good side quests, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the road to get there is paved with a whole lot of rejections.

Earlier this week, Cyberpunk 2077 lead quest designer Paweł Sasko spoke with PC Gamer at GDC, where he shared what it took to make the side quests as good as they are. Turns out, all you need to do is reject a whole bunch of them. "A good designer has an acceptance ratio of their ideas of between five to 10%," Sasko said. "If someone has 10%, this is probably one of the best people we have in the team." Obviously that means a whole lot of pitching has to be done, as even 10 pitches would result in only one side quest being developed.

Sasko went on to explain that part of weeding out the bad ideas at CD Projekt Red is by simply having quest designers offer all of their ideas, no matter the quality - that way, the best ones will stand out even more. "So what I do with our designers, I'm like, okay here's the list of genres. Here's a list of the themes that I want you to work with—list of topics. Write me pitches. And then they write, yeah, five, 10, 20 a day. Basically, an excellent pitch is like four sentences of like: That's the pitch."

CD Projekt Red's two biggest RPG hits, The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, are both known for big main quests and engaging characters, but more than anything you'll hear people consistently bring up the little adventures they have between other stories. In an interview with PC Gamer at GDC this past week, Cyberpunk 2077 lead quest designer Pawel Sasko said that's mostly because they're thinking of lots of ideas and only using the best ones...
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Cyberpunk 2077 quest lead says early access wouldn't work for CDPR the way it did for Larian, and the studio prefers 'to have a banging release where everything is as close to perfection as can be' like Phantom Liberty's

Cyberpunk 2077 is good now. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's great. One of the most calamitous launches in videogame history finally made good after a bevy of updates and the meaty Phantom Liberty expansion, a journey that's had some of us at PC Gamer asking if the game was actually just in a kind of warped early access for three years. Given that Baldur's Gate 3, our Game of the Year for 2023, had a long (and formal) early access period, we asked Phantom Liberty quest director Paweł Sasko at GDC if Cyberpunk might have benefited from the same thing...
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