author: Miriam Moszczynska
Cyberpunk 2077 Director Explains Mission Montage From the Prologue
The montage of scenes appearing in Cyberpunk 2077's prologue was intentional. Igor Sarzynski and Pawel Ochocki from CD Projekt RED explained the motivation behind such a decision.
- Igor Sarzynski and Pawel Ochocki from CD Projekt RED took part in an interview about Cyberpunk 2077;
- Among other things, we learned from it why six months of V's life was presented as a cut-scene rather than playable missions.
In the prologue of Cyberpunk 2077 there's a controversial cinematic, which, as we've recently learned, was in the plans from the very beginning. We're talking about the part where V and Jackie undertake a number of activities in Night City - some players thought it was a montage of scenes from cut content and we should have been able to play out these events on our own.
In an interview that appeared on the Story Mode channel on YouTube, Pawel Ochocki and Igor Sarzynski from CD Project RED explained that this part of the story has been presented in such a way in order to maintain the narrative pace in Cyberpunk 2077. Below is an excerpt from narrative director Igor Sarzynski's statement.
"We've always thought of the sequence that way [as a montage - ed.], and from the beginning we wanted to accelerate the story a bit to its key moment. From my perspective or the structure of the script, if we were to spend those six months with Jackie, we'd still be in the first act, before the turning point in the story and so on. So we would be dragging the game out even before it actually starts."
It's hard not to agree with the developers here. Cyberpunk, despite the fact that it creates Night City as an incredibly vivid metropolis, is still a game in which the story plays the first fiddle. So we don't have here a typical sandbox convention, in which showing this part of the story as a long series of trivial missions, not contributing much to the story, would be understandable.
This was not the only topic raised in the interview. We can also listen to conversation on the technical aspects of the game (e.g. methods of immersion creation), as well as the typical discussion about what Cyberpunk has taught the developers. In any case, it's worth listening to.
