Arguably Cyberpunk 2077‘s most famous date scene – the underwater scuba dive with tech wizard Judy Alvarez – was made with smoke and mirrors, according to one lead developer.
In PC Gamer’s lengthy roundtable chat with RPG developers, at around the 35:00 minute mark, CDPR‘s acting lead quest designer Sarah Gruemmer talked about a limitation that soon turned into a creative solution. “We have the quest where we go diving with Judy in Cyberpunk,” Grummer says, which then turned tricky when the team didn’t “have diving [animations] for NPCs in our game.”
CD Projekt Red developers still “really wanted to make this quest where you have this moment with her underwater,” so they opted to use their “scene system to do the entire thing and we just worked around it.” That process involved putting “everything on animation and then just had to chuck everything in shorter sections, so she waits there in an idle animation and you can do ‘gameplay things’ around her.”
The trick is that Judy is still “close enough that you can actually talk and then, you know, move to the next section. Everything is, again, just an underwater animation. Our cinematic team wanted to kill me,” Gruemmer jokes.
Cyberpunk 2077 developers have been sharing plenty about their redeemed open-world romp recently, with another environment artist explaining that creating Night City posed a “significant challenge” when it came to “adjusting to the scale and characteristics of American settings,” especially since CDPR is primarily a Poland-based studio.