Show less, randomise more: a Cyberpunk 2077 designer on how to stop open worlds feeling exhausting

In the first post for my series on "saving" open world design, I complained that many of today's open worlds feel like checklists of formulaic tasks and rewards, their geography a vaporous staging ground for itemisable, cycling content-gathering opportunities, which flies in the face of the sense of freedom and wonder they're supposed to inspire. My interviewees, Elder Scrolls veterans Matt Firor and Nate Purkeypile, argued that this reflects the expense and scale of today's open world productions, which constrains experimental design both at a practical level and in terms of overall direction.

CD Projekt open world designer Jakub Tomczak doesn't, as far as I know, have an answer to the issue of production bloat, but he does have a disarmingly obvious solution to the 'checklist problem', based on his time creating missions for Cyberpunk 2077 and its Phantom Liberty expansion: get better at hiding the checklist. Weave it into the landscape and setting more artfully, with an elegant balance of randomisation and responsiveness to the player's behaviour which keeps everything fresh.

"The most important thing in an open world is that the player, when travelling, is not looking at, you know, the next waypoint or the next objective on their minimap," Tomczak told me during a chat at the Digital Dragons conference in Poland this summer. "It's that they're looking around the world, that they can find something cool that's not marked [for them] already."

Tomczak is a newcomer to the Cyberpunk team. He joined CD Projekt RED in 2022, a year or two after the disastrous initial launch of Cyberpunk 2077, and right in the middle of the gruelling redemption march that culminated in last year's 2.0 update and the release of Phantom Liberty. But he's been tinkering with open worlds for the best part of a decade, having worked as game director on the much-liked Gothic 2 total conversion mod The Chronicles Of Myrtana.

"I personally don't like the idea of to-do lists in open world games," he began, when I shared my feelings of exhaustion with the genre. "And I think that's the biggest problem we currently are seeing, that we're just focusing on 'opt-in' content, and we're doing much less 'opt-out' content. We're focusing on people who want to do 100% and complete everything, and maybe thinking that they're getting their value back, and you're less thinking about immersive exploration and 'opt-out' content."

Cyberpunk 2077's vehicle contracts - in which you steal cars for fixers - are an example of 'opt-out' content. They're left for you to stumble on, rather than being relentlessly itemised for your attention. Similarly to other "gigs" in the game, they manifest spontaneously as you roam. "You don't see a marker on every corner of the map, even though the vehicle contracts can spawn anywhere, almost anywhere," Tomczak continued. "They have, like 150 predefined spots across Night City, so there's a lot, and you can try to get all of them, but it's not a list. There's only one spawning at a time, and it spawns nearby." Each vehicle contract is a fleeting opportunity, but the chance to carry out a contract isn't gone forever if you hurry past.

Tomczak's hope is that there's a sense of interacting with a coherent body of activities, but without any oppressive feeling of obligation to clean them all out. "I think that's why we find ourselves feeling exhausted in open worlds, because, OK, I did one of those, and you already see it's one of 60 and you go OK, I will try to do every one of them, because they are cool and I like them. And halfway through, you say OK, I'm exhausted."

In addition to being offered in a more organic way, Cyberpunk's vehicle contracts are also partly randomised, with an unpredictable secondary objective to fulfil in passing. "It might be enemies, maybe a time limit, maybe it's delivering the vehicle without any damage." The randomised flourishes needn't be dramatic to create a feeling of vitality, Tomczak explained. "They don't have to be huge things. It's enough to change the placement of enemies. It's enough to add some animations, maybe some very small, generic dialogues. But every little bit that changes makes the world more believable."

The game's randomisation systems are also guided by your behaviour, to stop them feeling too, well, random. "So for example, in vehicle contracts, we base a lot of what's happening on the previous actions of the player - if the player failed the previous mission, maybe we should spawn fewer enemies, or maybe if the player already did 20 of those missions, we can pump up our difficulty."

Night City takes less time to traverse than many open worlds, but it's visually denser, jutting from the desert like a clump of fulgurite decked in Christmas tree lights. Again, Tomczak wasn't involved with the world's original incarnation back in 2020, but this is the kind of open world he favours. "Personally, as a player, I much more prefer if the world is a little bit smaller, but more condensed and filled with things that are more unique," he commented. "And I have the feeling that I'm exploring something new, something custom, handmade. And, yeah, I think this is something that we have to think as as players and developers - are we trying to achieve the biggest possible playable area, and maybe the quality of things we have there will be a little bit lower, or maybe we should focus on something smaller, but, you know, fully embracing how it works."

Echoing Purkeypile and Firor's thoughts in my previous article, Tomczak also feels that open world designers should spend more time looking to the past - or rather, experimenting with "obsolete" design philosophies that still command a following. Citing his work on The Chronicles Of Myrtana, he suggested that there's a "huge wave" of interest among players in older open world RPGs such as the Gothic series, which began life in the early noughties.

"I see that there is a big push for more immersive worlds, for more handcrafted worlds, and I feel those were the things we were playing in the 90s and early 2000s," he said. "We are seeing that people still want that kind of game again. I feel that there is huge potential in rediscovering things we used to do as an industry 20 years ago, and redoing those things with the new tools we have, with new technology in new games."

Specifically, and to expand on the point about leaving the world's activities unlisted, Tomczak reckons that today's open world designers can get away with hiding more. "I think that there is a kind of feeling that players should see everything we have in store for them," he told me. "And I think it doesn't have to be like that. We shouldn't be afraid to make some things hidden in the world, because that's the great thing for me as a player - I love the idea that I found something that almost nobody else has found. It's a great thing. And if you see a video on YouTube that only has a few views, and you see, wow, that person also found that - you can share that with other people."

My chat with Tomczak left me a little wiser about how open world designers minimise the feeling of checking boxes while, inevitably, giving me more to ponder. One thing this interview doesn't fully address is that many open world landscapes are their to-do lists - they exist to serve their activity design, which means there isn't really a distinction between the HUD and the geography. Everything from the choice of flora to the play of elevations is an exercise in content delivery.

An urban open world game such as Cyberpunk 2077 makes that more obvious, because modern western cities are, after all, designed worlds themselves, which aim to stimulate or accommodate flows of people, things and commodities. Avoiding feelings of futility and burnout, and encouraging the enthusiastic motion of bodies through the crannies is a central facet of not just open world design, but urban planning and tourism. Consider this paper on how to stop sightseers experiencing cognitive or affective fatigue, for example.

We could carry that forward into an analysis of the quintessential urban open worlder, Grand Theft Auto. Next time, I'd like to get beyond questions of execution, and think about the conceptual underpinnings of the open world genre - the notions of space, time, curiosity, exploration and discovery these games facilitate, and how all that is bound up in the material circumstances of game development. In the meantime, I'd love to know what you think of Cyberpunk 2077's open world (Graham liked it back in 2020, complaints about bugs and "baggy" RPG fixtures notwithstanding, and even more so in 2023), and whether there are any particular forgotten approaches to the genre you'd like developers to revisit.