Cyberpunk 2077 will feature in the upcoming November issue of Edge magazine; the UK-based gaming publication. The game appears on the magazine’s cover, even though CD Projekt Red has yet to announce a release date. We now have an idea of what content the magazine plans to publish in the November issue. In addition to an interview with producer Richard Borzymowski, who discusses the new challenges posed by Cyberpunk 2077, the magazine also includes an interview with the game’s Lead Cinematics Animator. In the interview, he discusses the Cyberpunk 2077 animation system.
The “Completely New” Cyberpunk 2077 Animation System
Maciej Pietras is CD Projekt Red’s Lead Cinematic Animator, and a senior developer for Cyberpunk 2077. Speaking with Edge magazine, Pietras explains that the studio’s animation system is completely new; “We have a completely new animation system,” he says; “and we completely changed the approach to handling animations. We have a better mocap studio, we have a completely new facial animation system based on muscles. We have a new way of generating lip sync animation when people are talking. We have a completely new approach to creating environments, so instead of working on a huge world at once we are creating prefabs which are then adjusted and placed differently, so everything is scaleable.”
Players have already seen something of these new systems in the recent gameplay demo. However, it’s important to note that the demo did not represent the game’s final visuals. Indeed, the game could look even better when it does eventually launch. Pietras went on to discuss the game’s engine, which has received some major changes since the days of The Witcher 3; “Another thing is simply our engine,” he explains; “which we decided to push far while still working hard on optimisation [sic] to make sure the game will run on current-gen consoles. It’s a completely new way – I would say almost every single department went through this kind of evolution.”