Few video game settings are as immediately recognizable as Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City. Its towering corporate architecture, overcrowded streets, omnipresent advertising, and densely layered districts create the impression of a metropolis that existed long before the player arrived. According to CD PROJEKT RED, that effect was achieved almost entirely by hand: artists placed everything from buildings and advertisements to trash containers and individual sheets of paper, using procedural tools only as starting points in a limited number of cases.

In this interview, VP and Global Art Director Jakub Knapik and Environment Art Director Kacper Niepokólczycki explain the artistic and technical thinking behind that world. They break down Night City’s four chronological visual styles, the “rule of contrast” used to keep its districts distinctive, and the challenge of creating controlled chaos without overwhelming the player. The pair also discuss why Cyberpunk 2077 required twice the texel density of The Witcher 3, how its first-person perspective transformed environmental composition, and why the studio’s physically grounded lighting pipeline made path tracing feel like a natural evolution rather than a complete reinvention.

Knapik and Niepokólczycki describe how clearer visual guidelines helped Phantom Liberty become more detailed but less noisy, while multidisciplinary teams improved communication between art, design, narrative, and gameplay. That structural change ultimately made the expansion one of the smoothest development experiences the studio’s art leaders had encountered, and provided lessons that will continue to inform CD Projekt Red’s future projects.

Cyberpunk 2077 has had an extraordinary journey since its release and has continued to evolve for years. Looking back at the game today, what are you most proud of about what the team ultimately created?

Kacper Niepokólczycki, Environment Art Director: Great question. For me personally… A lot; the whole game, if I might be honest. Moving into a whole new IP, with new features like the first-person perspective, was a huge learning process for us, and at the same time we were building new technology from scratch. I’m proud of the team on every single front, and I’m not talking about only the development team. I’m talking about every single person working in our studio — devs, back office, IT... Every single person was a huge part of the success of Cyberpunk 2077.

Going into specifics, I'm super proud of Night City and the Badlands, how the game looks and feels, and how original Night City is. The whole Art team, but also a lot of other teams, collaborated to create an incredible experience of exploration, really breathing and living in Night City. I’m still hypnotized when I watch all those YouTube videos of people walking or driving through Night City or the Badlands and just taking it all in — the atmosphere, vibes, and density. That's what I call immersion, and I think we did create an incredibly immersive world.

Night City is such a huge part of the Cyberpunk franchise and I’m proud we were able to make it feel so authentic. Even looking at Edgerunners, it takes place in this exact same, tangible world.

Jakub Knapik, VP, Global Art Director: I second every word from Kacper. At the same time, in retrospect, I wanted to bring up one element that, to me, makes Cyberpunk very memorable. From the day I joined the project, I sensed that overwhelming feeling of working on something truly special. Some could say we all say that in retrospect. Fair. But that feeling of the project being special or different was lifted to the artistic level; it was a mindset. And I believe it was so powerful and present in our minds that it actually shifted the philosophy, or the decision-making, of how this game was made.

We tried to make a believable world, one that would not just be a background for gameplay, but could be almost a sandbox for an alternate life in this Cyberpunk world. That paradigm was present in Art, in the way we created multilayered styles in the city and its history, the way characters are created and designed, and in the way we created very ambitious cinematics without cuts — decisions which led to the quests and gameplay itself. In all these moments, we tried to avoid the most obvious decisions and find our own unique approach and a coherent feel for the game. That's why I believe our players so often like to go back to Night City and just hang out. Ride in a car, listen to music, do a side quest, buy an apartment, and just breathe the air of this world.

That is also why Cyberpunk 2077 is so unmistakably Cyberpunk 2077. I am super proud of the depth of the experience and its brave uniqueness, created by our team.

What were the core visual pillars established for Night City, and which rules did environment and concept artists use to make sure every district felt different while still belonging to the same city?

Jakub Knapik: Cyberpunk is all about contrast — the contrast of familiarity and social fear reflected in the mirror of technology, in the creation of some sort of dystopian vision. To create familiarity, we again used rules we know from the real world. When we walk down the street, we see multiple layers of time, creating some sort of visual storytelling about the place and the people. We read that complex encoding subconsciously. And it often tells us more about the place than words describing it. No city has just one period, one architectural style, or people dressing in one kind of clothing. All of these details tell a story about society and provide relatable context. So when crafting Night City, we looked at all the visual concepts and visual tributes we created during the preproduction phase, and tried to encode their styles into time layers that would create Night City's history. As a trio, we spent over a week on an Art Directors' offsite, where, together with the Environment Art Director Lucjan Więcek and Character Art Director Paweł Mielniczuk, we created a simple backstory of the city's progression and organized the styles into a proper chronology.

That is how we created a bleached, 80s-inspired entropy — our take on retro Cyberpunk. Newer in Night City is an almost naive, 60s-inspired, vibrant, yet very plasticky kitsch style that brought energy and a much-needed layer of color to the precious era. Then came the very corporate, intimidating, power-projecting, and utilitarian neomilitarism, which we used to highlight very modern designs and the omnipresence of corporations in the city. And finally, the super rare, fake, and pseudo-natural shape-driven neo-kitsch — a style that allows the ultra-rich to pretend they care about the world and nature. Those were the synonyms, encoded visual patterns, and connotations that we used as a vocabulary. Additionally, every district had its own story, with color coding that best matched its theme. The map was also well thought out and highly functional, with logical layers of time, communities, the most active corporations, and themes told through crafted versions of these styles used as building blocks. That created a very complex, dimensional visual storytelling maze of Night City, one you can hopefully read and understand like you would in every city in the real world.

Kacper Niepokólczycki: Exactly what Kuba said: contrast. We even used the term “rule of contrast” in our team. We really tried to, almost everywhere, put some contrast in either architecture, storytelling, or vistas — it was very important for us. An example of that would be… A house in Rancho Coronado which has an AV crashed through its roof, and NCPD is starting an investigation. Why is it a contrast? Well, it’s a regular-looking house that has an AV crashed through it! It’s interesting to see things like that — for the people of Night City, it's the bread and butter of their world, but for players it’s completely wild. So this is interesting, but it also helps ground our world. And of course, as Kuba mentioned, styles were incredibly helpful and useful in our everyday work.

On top of that, we had a world-building setup to understand what makes every district, subdistrict, and part of Night City unique. Some are residential, dirty — not pleasant to live in but cheap to own a place. Some are inspired by the Japanese expansion of corporations into the region, which would spark a lot of Japanese culture, like in Japantown. Some would be by the ocean shore, so feature industrial warehouses and harbors. And there are many more. We started by building our toolset of understanding what we wanted to build. That was our paint and brush, and we used them to paint the picture.

Using all of that knowledge, we tried our best to build districts with a main direction that would make them stand out, but all the other art rules, like contrast, styles, layers, storytelling, and so on would make them consistent across the full Night City.

Night City is extraordinarily dense with signage, advertisements, graffiti, props, architecture, crowds, and environmental storytelling. How did you build that density without creating too much visual noise, and how do you decide where the player's eye should naturally be drawn within such complicated environments?

Kacper Niepokólczycki: A great and also very tricky question. I will be very honest here. In some places we did great, in some other places, less so. Long story short, our goal was to create one of the most dense and immersive urban environments in games to date. We were learning how to build such a world, but a lot of our experience was from our The Witcher titles. So we always had a pretty good understanding of how to build incredible vistas, how to compose really well, and where to guide the player to create this golden frame opportunity… A player exploring the space can almost see a picturesque composition. However, working with fully organic environments is a bit different to fully urban environments. I still love to draw inspiration from nature, and kept a similar approach to what we had in the Witcher games, introducing verticality to create such a more interesting experience.

Now, on that lower, smaller details level — adverts, neons, trash, colors of building facades — this is a bit trickier. As mentioned, I believe we did a great job in some places, but some places lacked a bit of that “controlled chaos” that is fully composed. This means keeping some of the negative space, working with the details and colors to create good reading groups of details… We wanted to build this world that would be overwhelming, with an incredible amount of commercialism and details on every corner. And sometimes that went into noisy territory, in my opinion, making the image harder to read.

We did acknowledge that though, especially with Phantom Liberty. We all agreed we needed to create an environment that is much more controlled when it comes to noise — but at the same time, maybe even more detailed. So we created a set of guidelines: how to group colors, shapes, and details, and work with negative spaces, to keep some places where the eyes can rest. And while these could still be interpreted subjectively, we did talk a lot within our teams and aligned on the artistic language and quality we wanted to hit. 

Can you walk us through the environment art pipeline for a typical Night City location, from the earliest concept or level-design blockout through modular kits, materials, set dressing, lighting, optimization, and the finished space? What changes most dramatically between the initial blockout and what players ultimately see?

Kacper Niepokólczycki: Something we do, that could be different to other studios, is having a division between open world (think Night City or the Badlands — those non-quest or combat-light locations) and Quest Locations. The former are fully driven by Art, who are, of course, also in touch and collaborate with all the teams that are needed there, including design, quests, and so on. Their job is to make sure our open spaces are fun to explore and support our gameplay needs. As for Quest Locations, as the name says, this team creates quest locations and combat-heavy spaces. Here we start with level design, to make sure those spaces are fun for combat and support the specific quest as much as possible.

In both cases, we sometimes have concept art, or even something closer to mood art — so, visuals selling the high level vision for a district or a location — and artists build it up using references. So this is the starting point to create an understanding of what we’re building. From here, when it comes to open world locations, our level artists begin sketching the world with really big shapes, to establish the emotional tone of each district. That tone, and the high-level idea for each district, is developed by art directors, with the aim of creating a world that feels consistent while giving each district and region a unique look and feel.

Kacper Niepokólczycki: When it comes to quest locations, the process starts with level designers creating a blockout. Once it’s ready, the art team takes over, building on the designers’ intent and bringing the location to life, visually. But that doesn’t mean one team simply hands the work off to another. One of our core principles is that the teams are always collaborating and interacting with each other, from early development all the way through to shipping. 

One thing worth mentioning is that our creative process is very iterative. Even if something has technically been marked as completed, if we think we can improve it, we’ll reopen the task. Our mindset is to always be on the lookout for ways to improve our games and keep iterating until everything feels right. As a developer, you just know what works and what doesn’t, and it’s rare that the first, second, or even third try is the best. It’s more of a step-by-step process to discover the best solution, with questions and ideas emerging along the way. 

Of course, there comes a point where we have to decide which ideas to keep and move forward with them, but getting there can take time and effort, as we’re an ambitious and demanding team. The initial concept is often a strong starting point, but our ultimate goal is always to provide the best possible player experience. The path to that experience can require significant changes along the way and we sometimes end up with something completely different, but that’s okay — what matters is that the end result works better for the player.

One fascinating aspect of Cyberpunk 2077 is how much of Night City feels handcrafted despite the enormous scale of the world. Where did procedural tools and automation fit into the art pipeline, and which parts did you deliberately insist on keeping artist-authored?

Kacper Niepokólczycki: Thank you so much, glad to hear it! The team really did an incredible job on this front. And the answer to your question is simple: it is all hand-crafted. From every building and advert, to every trash container and every piece of paper on the sidewalk, it was all created by hand by our artists. This is exactly how we build our games — we want them to have this artistic, hand-crafted quality to it. 

We have tested some procedural tools, but we were never happy with the results — they didn’t even come close to the quality and complexity that we’re aiming for, which we’re able to achieve by creating everything by hand. 

The closest we came to using a procedural solution was our road tool. It allowed us to create a spline — essentially a kind of virtual path — through the world, and automatically place meshes representing roads, bridges, and overpasses along it. We could also use it to place decorations along the spline based on different parameters. In most cases, this gave us a great starting point, but our artists would still go in and manually adjust the results to achieve the artistic quality we were looking for.

Phantom Liberty's Dogtown feels visually distinct from the rest of Night City without feeling disconnected from it. What lessons from building the original game informed the art and level-design pipeline for Dogtown, and were there things you approached completely differently the second time around?

Kacper Niepokólczycki: As I've already mentioned, we learned a lot during the process of building Night City. We grew as a team, but also as artists. At the same time, Dogtown is a district unlike any other in Night City — demolished, abandoned, vandalized; in some places, maybe even on the verge of looking post-apocalyptic. Those new qualities gave us a lot of tools and ideas to build something that would feel completely different from the rest of Night City. When the player goes to Dogtown for the first time, we wanted it to feel like a journey to a different world. A bit like Alice going to Wonderland. 

I found that having more tools at my disposal — like sand, dust, and overgrowth — helped to create a location with a different vibe and give Dogtown a consistent visual identity. You’ll find sand and overgrowth everywhere in Dogtown, but in different amounts — there’s less of it in more populated areas, where traffic keeps the roads relatively clear. But as you move toward abandoned locations, like the old casinos and spas, the sand and overgrowth become much more prominent. Fewer people and cars pass through these areas, and we wanted the environment to reflect that. In this way, we could use these elements not only to give Dogtown its distinct look, but also as a form of environmental storytelling.

Cyberpunk 2077 has changed enormously since its original release, including major improvements to rendering, performance, crowds, systems, and the overall experience. From a developer's perspective, what was the hardest part about substantially evolving a shipped open-world game while preserving compatibility with an enormous amount of existing content?

Jakub Knapik: It will sound like marketing talk, but we are extremely ambitious at the studio, and really love the games we make. And even when I put it like this, it barely scratches the surface. That is why deciding to expand and grow Cyberpunk 2077 far beyond its initial release feels as natural to us as breathing. I would say that very often, the hardest part is deciding where to focus our efforts. What would make our players happiest while still being something we can deliver on time, bearing in mind that we’re already busy working on the next titles?

When we worked on the game, we always thought of it as a massive, living sandbox — a foundation for our characters and stories. As a result, the tools and systems we created for building that world are incredibly capable, as are the game world and engine themselves. We also involve some of the key people who worked on Cyberpunk 2077 in design decisions and assessments across art, narrative, and gameplay. Meanwhile, our lore team keeps a trained eye on our progress to make sure everything remains coherent, consistent, and true to the world we’re working with. It really is a controlled passion project for us.

Cyberpunk 2077 eventually became one of the most prominent showcases for technologies such as ray tracing and path tracing. How did increasingly sophisticated lighting technology change the way your artists actually built and lit Night City? Did moving toward path tracing require reconsidering any artistic techniques that had originally been designed around rasterized lighting?

Jakub Knapik: In retrospect, it is possible that path tracing was, coincidentally, always meant to be a thing for us and was not as big of a shock as it might seem. To put this into context, let me take a detour into my own story.

When I transitioned from my career in movies into game development and joined CD PROJEKT RED to art direct the lighting for Cyberpunk 2077, the engine and rendering pipeline were being built from scratch. In this new role, facing a project of insane size and scope, I leaned on my background as a film VFX supervisor to find solutions and develop a future-proof approach. My philosophy was simple: build a game world that behaves like a lighting sandbox. Every light change needed a predictable, physically grounded outcome, eliminating the need for tedious manual light setups across the entire map, which would need to be tailored for changing world scenarios. With Cyberpunk’s dynamic day-night cycle and weather systems, hand-crafting lighting for every location under every condition was an impossible task. Reality is the ultimate lighting sandbox, in a way. Even before ray tracing was on the table, we pushed our traditional GI and reflection probe systems as far as possible toward true Physically Based Rendering predictability. We used offline rendering tools like Arnold to measure and verify our engine systems in their early stages. Arnold, by the way, is a path-tracing offline solution used in film. 

Mid-development, we met with NVIDIA to discuss future collaboration. When I presented our sandbox lighting prototype, their team noted it was perfectly aligned with their push to bring real-time ray tracing to gaming. That meeting kicked off our RT integration for the base game. After launch, we pushed that philosophy further with full real-time Path Tracing, the elegant, accurate method I knew from offline rendering. What used to take up to 12 hours per 2K frame in film was now squeezed into 30–60 frames per second at 4K resolution, leveraging modern hardware and software stack. Because our foundational lighting was already built around physical accuracy, path tracing felt like a natural evolution rather than a complete rewrite. 

Jakub Knapik: For the teams, Ray Tracing didn't change how the Lightning team worked much, since we still had to set up the game for both RT and non-RT, but Path Tracing was, in some ways, revolutionary. Its simplicity, predictability, lack of pre-baking, and accuracy were amazing for quick lighting prototyping and creating a “ground truth” lighting setup, then verifying it against the traditional systems, which had more custom parameters. 

The main technical shift was managing shadow distribution. In non-RT mode, we worked under a strict shadow budget of roughly 10 active shadow-casting lights, split between static and dynamic geometry. With Ray Tracing, we simply converted those specific lights to cast RT shadows. But with Path Tracing, every loaded light in the game, even those never intended to cast shadows, was enabled to cast them. PT’s indirect lighting accuracy simply required this to maintain energy balance. To handle the surge of active shadow casters, we devised clever tricks to prevent artifacts when light sources were placed too close to walls or geometry, but the new feature still forced us to be much more mindful of general light placement. I would say it wasn't a massive production shift, since the final, proper version of PT landed very late. Our amazing Lighting team was deeply involved in the engine's development, gained a deep understanding of the physics of light, and found the whole process very transparent. When it comes to building Night City, the traditional probes were definitely the challenging ones. They needed a ton of careful work and planning, so shifting to PT was never a problem here and was barely a noticeable change for the Environment team. Still, flying through a remarkably large city, with all the lights on screen casting shadows and creating film-like lighting accuracy, plus the ability to edit world architecture and lighting in real time, was very impressive and useful in Alpha and Beta lighting of Phantom Liberty.

One of the most interesting things about Cyberpunk 2077 today is how well its art has held up despite the rapid evolution of rendering technology. When creating assets for a project that may be played for a decade or longer, how do you distinguish between visual techniques that are temporarily impressive and artistic choices that will actually age well?

Jakub Knapik: I think it is a complex question, one that I imagine connects multiple layers. One is the philosophy I mentioned earlier. We always look for our own unique design language. Art is full of inspirations, visual codes, and reconstructed patterns. While we aim to create a design that will feel very much our own, it also needs to be very thoroughly thought out and grounded in both world-building and narrative. Constantly asking “why” obviously adds process time, but it pushes art away from the most obvious choices and shortcuts. Depth and sophistication keep the visuals relevant for longer. We treat our art processes very seriously and rely heavily on the pride every team takes in their craft. That respect for what they do gives them proper confidence and inspires them to dig deep into every task. That is the foundation, regardless of the technological layers, although those are also very important. I always point to the fact that we produce our games over long periods of time, so every technical decision also carries weight for a long time over a project's lifespan. That is why we pay close attention to creating the most flexible, technically advanced solutions we can in our games. I would go so far as to say that we always push way beyond the horizon of the present. That was the case with REDengine 3 and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, that was the case with REDengine 4 and Cyberpunk 2077, and this is the case with how we tailor our tech in the projects we’re working on now. All that to keep the game content relevant for as long as we can.

The city is designed around both first-person gameplay and cinematic storytelling, which means environments need to work from unusually close distances. How did the first-person perspective affect decisions around texture resolution, prop density, architectural scale, animation, and environmental detail compared to The Witcher series?

Kacper Niepokólczycki: Yeah, switching to FPP was a challenge for all of us. I remember when we made that decision as a team, there was some uncertainty at first. We had never worked in FPP before, so there was a lot for us to figure out. Looking back now, though, I think it was absolutely the right decision. It brought the player right into the action and made the whole experience so much more immersive. It was a challenging direction to take, but I think we can all agree that it ultimately worked incredibly well.

And yes, we had to rethink pretty much everything. Scripted scenes are one example — in The Witcher those are usually cutscenes, in Cyberpunk 2077, they’re interactive environments, where in most cases players can move, turn their head, and interact with objects. The way we built and decorated the scene was much more complex. In The Witcher, we would decorate and compose a nice frame for Geralt to be in, whereas in Cyberpunk, we had to build a full 360-degree environment that would accommodate all the NPCs taking part in the cutscene. We needed to decorate it, so that it would feel rich and well-composed from the player’s perspective. We had to compose the background for the NPCs in a way that would elevate and support that scene, and of course light that scene as well. So it made for a much more complicated process — but when done right, it also turned out to be extremely satisfying.

When it comes to texel density, we made it twice as high in Cyberpunk 2077 compared to The Witcher 3. Over time, though, we became a bit more flexible with it. Our engine allowed us to use a lot of decals — which we love and use extensively — so we were able to address many potential texel density issues that way.

Kacper Niepokólczycki: We had to completely rethink our level design metrics and gameplay, as the same environment in TPP (so, metrics from The Witcher) didn’t look great in FPP. We needed to find new metrics that felt right for a first-person experience, and we worked closely with the Level Design team to build those metrics from scratch. 

As for propping and decorating the world, it came naturally. At one point, we felt we didn’t have enough detail in the world and we had to add more, to make the world feel more grounded, but also to establish the scale. In third-person games, the scale is easier to establish, since you can see your character in the scene. In FPP, it can be more of a challenge, and it’s important to get it right. We used a range of objects whose scale is immediately obvious to players — everyday things like sheets of paper, bottles, benches, and so on. When the player sees these next to buildings and other structures, it’s easier for them to imagine the scale of those buildings.

CD PROJEKT RED showed more of Cyberpunk 2077's early blockouts and level-design process last year. What do those rough versions reveal about how the studio works? Is there a particular Cyberpunk location that changed dramatically through iteration before reaching the version players know today? CDPR's recent Blocktober material specifically emphasizes exposing the transition from early blockouts to finished locations, so this could yield some excellent WIP material for the eventual article.

Kacper Niepokólczycki: In our studio, the Environment Art and Level Design teams collaborate very closely — we’re building a world together, after all. Our sub-goals differ sometimes — Environment Art focuses on making the best-looking game and experience, Level Design wants to make the best gameplay spaces. But ultimately, we’re all working toward the same goal: building a game that, first and foremost, is fun to play. 

We usually pair level designers with artists so that from the beginning, they can discuss what they want to build. They share ideas, brainstorm, and share constructive feedback to find the best solution.This is the kind of process we try to cultivate in our studio — our developers, building the world together. 

Iteration is key to our process — we change, tweak, improve, and then do it all over again until we’re happy with the result. As development progresses, new questions emerge, often ones that were impossible to foresee in the beginning. Answering those questions can require anything from small tweaks to bigger changes to improve the experience. Often we start with A and end up with Z. Sometimes we start with A and end up with A — you never know where the process will take you. We had plenty of locations that we had to rebuild entirely because of changes to the narrative or gameplay, or simply because some of the initial ideas were not working. We’re comfortable trying something to see whether it works and changing it if it doesn’t. That's our iterative process: fail fast and learn faster. 

Finally, after years of building Cyberpunk 2077, Phantom Liberty, and then continuing to refine the game, what is the single biggest production lesson the team learned that you wish you had known when development on Cyberpunk 2077 first began?

Jakub Knapik: After the troubled release of the base game, we dug deep to rebuild ourselves from the inside out, bring forward the best of what makes us great, and fix the areas that needed improvement. I believe scale becomes a challenge for every growing company or team, and communication is often one of the first things to suffer as a result. So, in the base game, one clear area for improvement was communication between departments. Initially, we had teams structured around disciplines. This approach has its advantages — it allows people to develop their craft and build a strong culture within the team. But at the same time, game development is a multidisciplinary effort, one that needs many minds to align around one common thing: the player experience. 

And so, the main change was flattening the structure and creating multidisciplinary team hubs around quests and the open world, while maintaining a strong backbone of department leads and directors. It was a much-needed revolution that opened up a channel of communication during planning and reviews, enabling easy flow of information all the way from junior devs to the game director. It gave everyone a voice and a sense of empowerment, and it helped us align on the vision faster and plan work more efficiently, with all the voices and feedback in one room. That brought phenomenal comfort to the production and made Phantom Liberty, one of the smoothest and most enjoyable development experiences in my memory.

Kacper Niepokólczycki: Kuba put it very nicely. Our game-making process needed to change. We make such huge, complex, layered, and demanding games that literally every developer working on the project needs to be able to make decisions, by themselves, that fit the overall direction of the department and the game itself. So, building the necessary environment and structure in our studio to help with that was incredibly important. It took us some time to get used to it and figure out our own way of collaborating, and ultimately, Phantom Liberty turned out to be the smoothest project for us. 

CD PROJEKT RED, Developers of Cyberpunk 2077