Interview with Cyberpunk 2077 Principal Gameplay Animator Daniele Duri

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An interview had appeared with the Cyberpunk 2077 Principal Gameplay Animator, Daniele Duri. The interview covers numerous topics including inspirations, the “classes” in the game, the delay and more.

This interview is in Italian, but thankfully, it’s been translated and key points have been highlighted by Redditor MasterDrak97. The interview summary is as follows, and if your Italian is  up to scratch, you can watch it below.

Inspiration

  • Night City is a multi-cultural city so there are monks, peddlers, scavengers, Corpo, Japanese Corpo, American Corpo etc.
  • Kowloon Walled City was an inspiration. It was a lawless enclave and ungoverned with a sense of oppression. Check out that Wikipedia link, it was an unbelievable place.
  • Movies were used as a reference to direct the actors in mo-cap.
  • Such for Corpo yakuza they saw Takeshi Kitano movies. For nomad Mad max and Hardwire.

Animation

  • First-person weapon animations were taken from experts who know how to use the guns and weapons to convey realism.
  • All first person animations are made frame by frame, so traditional animation. Daniele  says transposing motion capture in first-person doesn’t feel right/good so used video reference using a go pro attached to their head/torso,
  • NPCs were motion-captured but needed to be edited to make them faster or extreme.
  • Everything you see with Night City NPCs C is made and set by animators.
  • There are little animations in first-person like moving your head when you get up or stop to make it more realistic.
  • An animator recreated all the animations with a basic 3D model just to make the shadows right when a light source hits the head of V because in first-person, the character’s head is the camera view.

Pondsmith and Classes

  • Mike Pondsmith was involved during pre-production to help adapt the game to a videogame.
  • CD Projekt has tried to keep the same names that appeared on the pen and paper game which includes NPCs, skills, factions. weapons etc
  • Not all classes could be added so they could create a specific story. Too many classes would mean they would have to create different gameplay for all the classes. The solutions was a single mercenary, V.

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