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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.”
Thankfully, Sasko doesn’t seem to be of the opinion that there’s such a thing as a genius designer who always has good ideas. “No one, no artist has only great ideas. We all have s**t ideas and tons of them, we pick just a top 5%.” Apparently the best quests don’t always need the biggest budgets either, with Sasko explaining the he “just searched for like, articles about, you know, best quests in Cyberpunk or Phantom Liberty just to see,” and that many of the quests on those lists are “the quest that had one of the smallest budgets. You can make so many amazing things with clever ideas, with working with limitations.”
Cyberpunk 2077 mostly wrapped things up last year with its only bit of DLC, Phantom Liberty, but apparently CD Projekt Red is more or less done adding to it now – other than the occasional tweak.