Cyberpunk 2077 quest designer Pawel Sasko has highlighted the importance of sustaining the development team after a project.
Speaking during an interview, Cyberpunk 2077 quest designer Pawel Sasko stated that developer sustainability is incredibly important. He explained that a studio should, upon finishing up a project, have a team in a state where they haven’t been doing crunch or overtime, and have them be able to go into the production of a new project. Ultimately, he said that this leads to a product worth selling and to having money to sustain the team. According to Sasko, this requires production to be structured in a way where it does not require spikes and moments when there’s suddenly an all-hands-on-deck approach. He mentioned that CDPR achieved this by switching from an “old-fashioned” style of production to “agile” project management. He said that some of the decision making is moved to the team. “At the beginning when you’re creating the content, you’re giving a lot of power to the team like ‘Those are your boundaries, this is the genre, this is the theme, those are the main threads that we need to tell the story because it’s part of a bigger whole, but the rest — all the decisions — is up to you. Just make something awesome that you would want to show us.'”
The Cyberpunk 2077 quest designer explained that, before in Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, the designers thought about genre and themes, but never defined them. “We never called it out and said, ‘This is exactly what it is.”
Sasko is now an Associate Director on the Cyberpunk 2077 sequel. He mentioned that most managers and most directors who worked on the game and its expansion, Phantom Liberty, are working on the next title. He talked about the need to make sure that the “whole DNA” is preserved and still in the game.