Cyberpunk 2077 Dev Explains How CDPR Changed While Working On Phantom Liberty

Whatever you think about Cyberpunk 2077 four years on, one thing is undeniable – CD Projekt Red is in a much better position now than it was in 2020.

For those of us who loved Cyberpunk 2077 from the get-go, it’s been a great few years. Thanks to the studio’s quest to win back goodwill, we’ve seen years of hotfixes and patches which fixed bugs and brought the game more in line with what we were promised. Eventually, around the time of the next-gen update, those of us trying to convince everyone to give the game another go had a much easier time of it. Now, the Cyberpunk 2077 we saw at launch is a distant memory.

The final stop in CD Projekt Red’s victory lap was its expansion, Phantom Liberty, which launched to widely positive reviews last year.

“The process of creating Phantom Liberty was how we would have wanted to do Cyberpunk,” says Maria Mazur, quest designer on the expansion, as we speak at the Game Industry Conference in Poland.

As Phantom Liberty overhauled Cyberpunk 2077’s entire combat system and RPG mechanics, so too did it change CD Projekt Red. Mazur tells me that the studio restructured, forming an internal team made up of “representatives from each area”, so each department had a voice.

“When you have people close to you that are all working on a specific part of your story, you know that everyone, like your audio specialist, your environment artist, even if they are not directly involved in writing the story, they understand why they’re doing certain things,” she explains. “That was a great experience, and for sure, that’s something that will stay with us.”

She adds that this gives developers a sense of “ownership” over what they work on, as decisions can come from the bottom, rather than being dictated by those at the top who are not working directly in that area. This worked well for the expansion, and now, it continues with CDPR’s future project.

Bringing Cyberpunk 2077’s Story To A Close

Perhaps the best thing about Phantom Liberty is that, with better foundations to work from, it was able to focus on something that was largely left out of the conversation at launch: Cyberpunk’s story. To that end, Phantom Liberty told a new narrative, focused on two new characters while also giving us a new way to wrap up the base game’s story.

To get that new ending, however, you have to delicately navigate your way around those new characters, Solomon Reed and Song So Mi, or Songbird. Both of them lie and endear themselves to V in equal measure, but the DLC doesn’t just ask you who you trust. In some way, it’s about who you let lie to you. It’s a balance of taking away player agency and feeding it back to them, accumulating in a finale that sees one of the two lose. But Mazur tells us that this wasn’t always the way it shook out.

“To be honest, there were many, many scenarios on the table,” says Mazur. “There was a period of time when we were just exploring a lot of paths to the very end. It just felt like the story needed that punch. […] Sadly, one of them had to go.”

“It definitely wasn’t like we were sitting there thinking, ‘How can we break these people?’ It felt right”

Another thing that came in mid-development was allowing players to walk back on their previous decision to side with either Reed or Songbird. “When the final confrontation in this spaceport came together, we definitely felt like you [had] to have the choice, even though you might have gone in the other direction,” says Mazur. “There is that groundbreaking moment right before when you learn the whole truth about Songbird and her motivations, and your situation. So it felt like we had to provide a pass for players who will feel differently on the matter. Personally, I also wouldn’t betray Songbird in the end, but it just felt completely natural to provide for those who will.”

Betraying Songbird in this final moment of the game is heart wrenching, and also the only way to get the new ending in the base game. That ending is – in both mine and Mazur’s opinion – absolutely soul-crushing in itself, and probably worse than any of the endings that were available to you before.

I joke that it’s amusing this came about after fans were asking the devs for a happier ending, and she laughs: “I am one of those people”. In fact, as a quest designer, she injected a little levity into Night City whenever she could, as we see in her mission Dazed and Confused. Originally, this wasn’t going to have a happy ending, but in a show of boundless mercy, she made it so we could keep everyone happy, if only just this once – and about something as trivial as BD production.

“I just insisted that this side quest is going to be positive,” she says. “There is a happy ending in my side quest. I don’t care. Sure, the whole game will end sadly, one way or another, but my quest has to be fun.”

But as she says, the main story does end sadly. Whatever you do, there is no perfect scenario where both V and Johnny can live. Before the DLC, it wasn’t even possible for V to be completely cured. The new ending added in Phantom Liberty lets you achieve this, but at a huge cost – Songbird’s freedom, your cybernetics, and all of the relationships you’ve built up over the game.

“I feel like the loss of your cybernetics, obviously it’s a problem, but the loss of the people… that hits harder in that ending,” she says. “I can see how someone could say a clean slate is nice, but after a full game of creating those connections, then you just learn that it’s all gone…”

I ask Mazur why the new ending, which is much harder to achieve than anything in the base game, is so much worse for V, but there’s no clear answer. “It was always a conversation,” she says. “It definitely wasn’t like we were sitting there thinking, ‘How can we break these people?’ It felt right, and that’s why it’s there.

“I feel like if you would put all our narrative designers and writers in one room, you would get a million opinions. It’s a joint process between different disciplines.”

Mazur has plenty of strong opinions on both Cyberpunk 2077 and other CD Projekt Red games, but tells me that everyone on the team has their own, too. For starters, she says the best ending for V is the Nomad one, which sees them leave Night City with Panam. However, she admits that in a “sick way”, she loves the Corpo ending – because it’s so cruel.

How CD Projekt Red Handles Romance

It wasn’t all doom and gloom while working on Phantom Liberty though. Through various updates, Mazur also got to expand upon the romances in the base game.

“When we realized how much people want to incorporate those romantic partners into their playthroughs, we [wanted] to be able to add that content,” says Mazur. “Things needed some updates [first], but I feel like it was always in our heads that we wanted to improve those romances as much as we can.”

Initially, this came in the form of adding more text conversation between V and their love interest. Or, as Mazur and the team realised, love interests, plural. Turns out, some of us were two-timing.

If you ever wondered if the new romance content was subtly calling you out on that, turns out that yes, it was. “That’s intentional,” she laughs, as I tell her about how I felt that the game acknowledged me juggling Judy and River. “That’s something that when I was working on the messages, I immediately knew that I needed to cover that […] I felt like we had to. So that was my opportunity.”

Don’t worry, there’s not long term consequences to cheating – just a potentially awkward text message.

With this attention to detail in mind, I expected Mazur to tell me that this will be a heavy focus for the devs going forward. However, it turns out that they’re keeping their options open, and have an interesting philosophy when it comes to adding romances to their games.

As she puts it, she’s never been part of a conversation about romances where the team has set an arbitrary number to hit. “It’s more like, what are we trying to do here? Who is that? How does that person connect to the player and to the main character? What can we do with it?

“From our perspective, it’s not about the numbers. You will notice that with different romantic partners in Cyberpunk, they are not copy paste. They each have their own characteristics, and the connection built between V and the partner is different in each case, because it’s just a different person, it’s a different story.”

With that said, Cyberpunk has put romance on the agenda. “Obviously, we’ve learned a lot from Cyberpunk, but in terms of building those connections and relationships, I feel like it was always in our heads. We always knew that we wanted to make it very rich and realistic. […] we definitely will keep writing in-depth connections for our characters.”

Before we can move on from romance, I have to bring up the fact that a lot of players wanted to get with Johnny.

“I get that,” Mazur laughs. “He’s already inside you, so…”

Alas, it was never meant to be: “If it was ever on the table, I feel like it would require a lot of changes to Keanu’s contract.”

Moving Ahead With The Witcher And Cyberpunk

In any case, Cyberpunk 2077 is over now. As of May of this year, developers have been moved onto other projects. But Cyberpunk has not been forgotten. Even with Phantom Liberty, lessons were still learned. Mazur tells me that if she could go back, even just to her side-quest, Dazed and Confused, she would “change so many things”.

“Personally, I learned everything [on Phantom Liberty],” she rounds off. “I learned a lot about designing from the get-go, with the intention to build a very branching and unique experience for each player.”

But now, she’s looking back on the small things, like the romance hangouts and other repeatable activities which added lifestyle sim elements to Cyberpunk. On the other hand, another thing she’s proud to have snuck in is a note called “Last ‘ish’” during the final part of Phantom Liberty. Yes, this is a reference to the Yennefer romance in The Witcher 3, because, as Mazur and I both agree, “that is the right choice”.

We’ll have to see if CD Projekt Red’s new structure can bring us another hit like Phantom Liberty, and we’re likely in for a bit of a wait before we hear about any of the studio’s upcoming projects. But in the meantime, Cyberpunk 2077 can now stand alongside The Witcher 3 in the team’s back catalogue, in a way few of us would have thought was possible at launch.