How No Law's Developers Are Making One of the "Densest" Open Worlds in New Cyberpunk FPS
Neon Giant showcased No Law during State of Unreal, revealing how UE5 technologies like Nanite, Lumen, MegaLights, and Mass Framework are powering its densely detailed cyberpunk city.
Neon Giant pulled back the curtain on its upcoming immersive first-person shooter No Law during State of Unreal, showcasing how the studio is leveraging Unreal Engine 5 to create an incredibly dense, reactive, and visually rich cyberpunk city without relying heavily on procedural generation.
The presentation was led by Creative Director and Neon Giant Co-Founder Tor Frick, who described No Law as the natural evolution of the team's work on The Ascent, but with a dramatically different scale and ambition. Rather than chasing the industry's obsession with ever-larger maps, Neon Giant went in the opposite direction by focusing on density and depth within a defined region.
"We didn't want the largest world, but the densest," said Frick. "A city that feels lived-in at every scale, where every corner carries history, and every surface tells a story."
Set in the unregulated city of Port Desire, No Law aims to create a world where every environment tells a story. According to Frick, the team's goal was to build a city that feels lived-in at every scale, filled with environmental details that reflect the people who inhabit it.
The studio describes Port Desire as being shaped by "human clutter," featuring cramped market alleys, layered graffiti, worn stickers, aging infrastructure, and densely packed environments designed to feel touched and re-touched by generations of residents.
Achieving that level of detail presented a significant challenge for a relatively small team.
"We knew that our best starting point would be building a game around the core feature set of Unreal 5, because a small team like ours needs to work with the engine, not against it. We realized early on that “out of the box” wouldn't be enough. We had to push beyond the defaults and build our own workflow within UE5 to make the world we wanted.
As a relatively small team, that ambition came with real challenges. We wanted extreme detail everywhere, but we also needed stability and performance without hand-optimizing each location. For us, the answer wasn't a single system, but a shift in how we built the world. We prioritized density over scale, and we built a pipeline that lets artists handcraft spaces without constantly stripping detail back and without relying on procedural generation. Nanite is what made that approach viable. It lets us keep a high level of detail across surfaces without treating every asset as a tradeoff between fidelity and performance."
- Neon Giant Creative Director, Tor Frick
According to Frick, there are more objects visible in a single frame of No Law, than in the entirety of The Ascent. That's a wild stat to consider.
The studio also highlighted its use of Lumen and MegaLights to power a fully dynamic day-night cycle and weather system. Rather than requiring artists to manually optimize every light source, the technology allows them to focus on building believable spaces filled with hundreds of individual light emitters, from flickering warning lights to massive neon advertisements.
The dynamic lighting system also extends directly into gameplay. Players can manipulate environmental lighting by destroying street lamps, using flashlights, or plunging areas into darkness, with AI systems responding accordingly.
"Players can shoot out a streetlamp, flood a space with a flashlight, or leave an area in darkness and have the AI NPCs react to light and shadow," Frick said.
The team is also using Epic's MetaHuman tech with a custom randomization system to create thousands of unique citizens rather than relying on repeated character models.
Beyond crowds, No Law's environments are designed to react physically to player actions. Using a combination of Chaos Physics, Niagara Data Channels, PCG systems, and custom GPU-driven solutions, the city continuously responds to gameplay interactions.
According to Frick, building No Law has largely been about discovering where Unreal Engine's built-in systems end and Neon Giant's custom tools begin.
For more on the latest with Unreal, check out our recap of Unreal 5.8's release and coverage of what the future of Unreal Engine looks like with UE6.
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