NPCs in Cyberpunk 2077 will move differently depending on their factional affiliations. That’s according to Maciej Pietras, cinematic animation acting lead at developer CD Projekt Red.
Pietras worked on The Witcher series too, and at E3 this week we took the chance to ask him how characters and NPCs move differently in a cyberpunk universe versus a fantasy one. What does an animator do to make them behave like someone who would fit into their respective worlds?
“In Cyberpunk, we aim to create the open-world community animations as diverse as the communities themselves are,” Pietras says. “Members of psychogangs, people from corporations, police, and others will behave and move according to their archetype. You will be able to observe their behaviours and their routines and recognise them by their animations.”
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The question came up because we were interested in how you make a character fit into their world through the way you animate them. The way a character walks, stands idly, and moves generally says a lot about them. Clearly that’s on the mind of Pietras and the rest of the animation team, as the game is full of groups from different walks of life who live on top of each other because of the overpopulation fo Night City.
We still don’t know Cyberpunk 2077’s release date, but there has been a ton of information pouring out about CD Projekt Red’s first-person RPG:
We now know more about the city and its six districts, some of the characters you will meet and deal with, and a great deal about the combat and how the stats of the pen & paper game factor in.
So, now we just have to play the waiting game. I mean, we’ve waited five years already, we can keep going, right? Right?