Following comments on how Cyberpunk 2077wouldn’t have been better with a longer Act 1, Project Orion (aka Cyberpunk 2) creative director Igor Sarzyńskii has thrown his hat into the ring on “cut content.” He talked about how movies don’t suffer the same comparison and how there’s
During this thread on Bluesky, Sarzyński revealed that this applied to Phantom Liberty’s new Epilogue. At one point, it was completely different. “Much darker and weirder,” as he described it. However, as the main story “solidified,” the team found that it didn’t “really fit tonally, thematically,” leading to the current ending.
Another example is the dancing scene with Alex, which was actually a late addition. Regardless, it felt like a “personal lighthearted moment” was needed among all the tension, which constitutes another major part of development – “what you discover that has to be ADDED,” per Sarzyński, from assets and encounters to branches and features.
He admits that you don’t always think about “all the things you wanted to,” often because they’re on the lower priority list in the backlog. However, he considers a game to be a “collective psyche multidimensional interactive engineered art piece. A wonder. A world within a world. Super complex.
“In shaping it, things [are] added. Things get pushed down the work queue. Things get changed. The goal is always the same: to create the best possible thing – on time.” It’s worth noting that this is all a “HUGE simplification. There’s a ton of layered nuance and exceptions to everything, and there are as many methods as there are projects.”
Regardless of how players feel about Cyberpunk 2077 and how certain aspects turned out (personally, the Life Paths could have had been more impactful), it’s hard to deny that everything turned out all right. Over five years since launch and more than its share of ups and downs, the base game has sold over 35 million copies. Phantom Liberty also went on to sell 10 million copies while netting rave reviews.
𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘸𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢 𝘍-𝘎𝘟 𝘍𝘳𝘢𝘨 𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘢𝘥𝘦 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘢 𝘫𝘢𝘮𝘢𝘣𝘢𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘢 𝘱𝘰𝘵ok let’s talk ✨ cut content ✨ TL;DR: making a game is a constant management and reevaluation of priorities vs scope, vision, quality and time. throughout this process as many things get added as removed.
movies. no one calls scenes that are not in the movie ‘cut content’. you know that the director chose the scenes they chose for a reason – pacing, coherence, quality etc. a great 2h movie wouldn’t get better by being 3h long.
there’s no perfect, complete version of the game we only then reduceyou cannot design an openworld RPG game on paper. you discover what works, what’s needed and what’s redundant over the course of many iterations. lots of it are emergent properties of multiple complex systems working together
we schedule all of our – planned and discovered – work in a backlog. backlog is based on priorities and constantly iterated. items get added, removed, tweaked, reshuffled as the development continues
with every iteration you reorder your work a bit so that – constantly developing – art, narrative, gameplay, tech mesh and resonate with each other better. new things become important. old things lose value. (if you wanna know more about the method read about Agile and Product Ownership)
narrative case study: the new PL epilogue was once completely different. much darker and weirder. as our main PL story solidified we found out the epilogue doesn’t really fit tonally, thematically. we changed it to the current ‘Tower’ ending
but we did get a few cycles into the previous design. there were locations, scenes, systems. were they all ‘cut’? yes. did the game benefit from it? for sure.or our character progression system. we simplified it in a patch – and now it’s tigther and better. not always more = better
sure, sometimes more is better. but you always work within a limited scope. you cannot keep endlessly adding things (unless you’re Rockstar 🕊️)you need to choose – what benefits your vision the most? what brings most fun and value for the players? when more means diminishing returns?
and a BIG chunk of work is what you discover that has to be ADDED – assets, features, branches, encounters… another narrative example: in PL, dancing scene with Alex was added quite late. i felt we were missing a personal lighthearted moment among all this tense spy intrigue
sometimes you don’t get to realize all the things that you wanted to – but because of the constant backlog priorities management they 𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘰 (no one is perfect) be things of lower priorities / value for the experience
to sum up: a game is a collective psyche multidimensional interactive engineered art piece. a wonder. a world within a world. super complex. in shaping it things added. things get pushed down the work queue. things get changed. the goal is always the same: to create the best possible thing – on time
ps. all of this is a HUGE simplification. there’s a ton of layered nuance and exceptions to everything and there are as many methods as there are projects
