Over the years, there has been a lot of discussion around Cyberpunk 2077 but from our perspective, it’s the next-generation technology powering the game that is perhaps most exciting. Since The Witcher 2, developer CD Projekt Red has focused on delivering cutting-edge visual experiences across multiple platforms but in moving away from the rolling hills of The Witcher onto the streets of Night City, we have something far beyond the scope of anything in the studio’s past.
In that sense, Cyberpunk is one of those rare games that fully embraces the latest in PC technology to deliver a true leap in fidelity – a modern day Crysis, if you like. Night City is a dense, multi-tiered, vertical city built using the latest in graphics technology alongside smart visual design. But let’s be clear from the outset – it’s always been our contention that this a next generation game, and our concerns have always been around the challenging but necessary base console versions. We’ll be covering those very, very soon but let’s be clear here: this is a demanding game that simply doesn’t work well on seven-year-old console hardware. Give Cyberpunk 2077 the horsepower it demands though – and you’re in for something special.
At its core Cyberpunk 2077 is powered by CD Projekt Red’s proprietary Red Engine. This set of tools and technology served as the foundation on which The Witcher series was built but the shift from its previous game to Cyberpunk is one of the largest leaps we’ve seen. The Witcher series focuses on natural environments – rolling hills, dense forests and eerie marshland define the landscape and it’s beautiful in its own right but Cyberpunk’s move to an open world city demands a different approach and the team has delivered. The latest iteration of Red Engine running fully unleashed is truly something to behold.
From top to bottom, the fully realised vision of Night City delivers meticulous granularity alongside a vast sense of scale. The Blade Runner aesthetic is essentially the stuff of legend at this point but few, if any, games have managed to capture the sheer level of clutter and detail – but CD Projekt RED has delivered just that. Presented in first-person, the city offers a vast, multi-tiered design. Highways on top of walkways on top of shopping streets on top of markets – there is so much packed into both the vertical and horizontal design of the city. Each alleyway is packed with clutter and detail while thick smoke and fog fill the air. Unlike most open world cities, you can get utterly lost in the world of Cyberpunk and that is a good thing – at least in my opinion. No longer is navigation reduced to holding forward towards an objective, you’ll instead push your way through these busy streets, navigating alleys and towering high-way structures alike.
The fidelity of the rendering can be extraordinary and that starts with the lighting. Light and the way it interacts with the environment remains one of the most important yet most demanding elements in real-time graphics rendering today. The nature of light in the real world is expensive to simulate – something that has yielded many creative solutions both offline and real-time. Cyberpunk takes a multi-pronged approach to this problem. On PC, you have the option to enable hardware accelerated DirectX ray tracing features including global illumination, diffuse illumination and ambient occlusion but the game retains much of its visual splendor even without these features.