Draft poster · the finished cut will appear here
What happened
In an interview with 80 Level, CD PROJEKT RED’s art directors say Night City was built almost entirely by hand. The interview describes artists placing buildings, advertisements, props, and small environmental details, with a road-spline tool used as a starting point rather than a final result.
How it works
The studio says each district was organized around layered visual histories and a rule of contrast. First-person development required new scale metrics, and the interview says Cyberpunk 2077 used twice The Witcher 3’s texel density. Jakub Knapik says a physically grounded lighting pipeline made path tracing a natural evolution rather than a complete rewrite.
The interview also describes a structural change after the base game’s troubled launch. For Phantom Liberty, multidisciplinary teams replaced discipline silos so art, design, narrative, and gameplay could communicate more directly. The goal was a denser world that stayed readable instead of becoming uncontrolled visual noise.
Why it matters
Large-scale game production works best when automation provides leverage without erasing authorship or isolating the teams that depend on one another. A tool can place a road or provide a blockout; the visual rules and judgment still determine whether a city feels coherent.
What we don’t know yet
This is a retrospective studio interview, not an independent production audit. “Almost entirely by hand” does not mean no procedural tools were used, and the texel-density, lighting, and organizational claims are self-reported.
Source: 80 Level, David Jagneaux with Jakub Knapik and Kacper Niepokólczycki, September 18, 2026 - original interview