CD Project Red developers know you probably look at guides when playing The Witcher 3 or Cyberpunk 2077, and they design their massive RPGs with that in mind.
Speaking to the Flow Games podcast, Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty lead and Cyberpunk 2 associate game director Pawel Sasko explains that "one of the things" he tells new designers is that "you can't see how [the game] will be received until you've seen the full path" - or, in other words, until you've shipped the game and then watched people giving feedback in real time.
"We always take into account, and I always tell my designers: 'watch your content being played by someone live. Watch YouTubers, watch streamers, because you will see how they think.' There are so many things that we actually did in the game with a perspective of 'someone will find it, and then other people will.'" Sasko then points to Cyberpunk 2077's "very, very elaborate puzzle," FF:06:B5.
Conspiracies around FF:06:B5 had a subreddit with 38,000 theorists decoding hexadecimals and fawning over other clues left lingering in the base game - a mystery that got so tantalising, players even found clues to solve it in The Witcher 3's next-gen update. After years and years of scrambling to find what all of the connective tissues meant, players finally found an oddly creepy cutscene that'll probably have more context in the open-world sequel.
Sasko uses the above mystery hunt as an example of something "so complex that you can't [solve] it on your own, it's borderline impossible" - although he calls the dedicated clue hunters on the subreddit "incredible people" and gushed over "the way they think." "Sometimes they're incredibly close, and sometimes they're completely far away, but it makes sense," Sasko says.
"There are things that you can find and unlock, and our assumption was that when you play, some people will spend a lot of time trying to work it out," he continues. But CD Projekt Red staff apparently designed these convoluted secrets to be easily findable once they've been solved. Secrets like FF:06:B5 might have been a nightmare to unscramble in years past, but triggering the final cutscene is a piece of cake once you have a step-by-step guide that someone else put together online. "That was exactly the way we designed it," Sasko explains. "We designed it to be incredibly difficult to do, but we didn't want everyone to go through that super-difficult path, because it's a bit tedious. We wanted everyone to enjoy it. The community managed to do that, then everyone can enjoy the spoilers of war."
The Cyberpunk 2 director also recalled that making Phantom Liberty was like “group therapy” for CD Projekt Red’s developers after the disastrous launch of 2077.
