Interview: What Unreal Engine means for the next Cyberpunk and The Witcher games

While CD Projekt Red worked on upgrading its in-house RPG engine for Cyberpunk 2077, the developers strapped GoPro cameras to their chests to imagine a sci-fi world played from the first-person perspective. A controversial decision in the lead-up to launch, this switch in perspective from the studio’s previous game – the third-person RPG The Witcher 3 – was key to the themes it wanted to explore.  Cyberpunk 2077 takes place in a future world where people purposely lop off limbs and tear away their flesh to replace their God-given bodies with man-made tech. It wants you to question what makes us human, and whether the soul is caged to our physical form. Questions best pondered while embodying someone else entirely, where you can look down at your limbs and see how much you’ve changed.  “When you click a chair to sit, you never see [protagonist] V sit with the camera,” associate game director Paweł Sasko tells me when I chat with him at Gamescom LATAM. “You see the arm goes first, then you see the body, then t