CD Projekt Pink’s two largest RPG hits, The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, are each identified for large principal quests and fascinating characters, however greater than something you will hear individuals persistently carry up the little adventures they’ve between different tales. In an interview with PC Gamer at GDC this previous week, Cyberpunk 2077 lead quest designer Pawel Sasko mentioned that is largely as a result of they’re pondering of a lot of concepts and solely utilizing one of the best ones.
“A superb designer has an acceptance ratio of their concepts of between 5 to 10%,” mentioned Sasko, “If somebody has 10%, that is in all probability among the finest individuals we’ve got within the workforce.” “
Sasko emphasised that for CD Projekt the important thing to removing the unhealthy concepts was within the course of of getting quest designers pitch all of their concepts to the workforce in order that one of the best ones stood out.
“So what I do with our designers, I am like, okay here is the checklist of genres. Here is a listing of the themes that I need you to work with—checklist of subjects. Write me pitches. After which they write, yeah, 5, 10, 20 a day. Principally, a wonderful pitch is like 4 sentences of like: That is the pitch,” Sasko mentioned.
Sasko was clear that his opinion is that even one of the best individuals have a ton of unhealthy concepts and have to decide on simply one of the best to pursue.
“Nobody, no artist has solely nice concepts. All of us have shit concepts and tons of them, we choose only a high 5%,” he mentioned.
Sasko additionally wished to be clear that you may execute most concepts for aspect quests with out breaking the price range.
“I simply looked for like, articles about, you recognize, finest quests in cyberpunk or phantom liberty simply to see,” he mentioned, to be able to take a look at what gamers perceived to be one of the best quests. Lots of the articles on these lists, says Sasko, are “the hunt that had one of many smallest budgets.”
“You can also make so many wonderful issues with intelligent concepts, with working with limitations,” he mentioned.
For extra developer interviews and protection, take a look at PC Gamer’s GDC 2024 web page.