While development is currently ongoing for Cyberpunk 2, Cyberpunk 2077 is still getting updates from CD Projekt Red. Amid conversations around the latest, Edgerunners-themed addition, the lead developers champion how prominent mods are, to the point that a significant amount of the current team have been plucked from the modding scene.
As part of one of the company's RedStreams, the discussion turns to modding and how it's helped leadership sculpt both Cyberpunk 2077 and its follow-up. The company has partnered with mod.io, major creators have been consulted on various ways to improve the RPG, and Pawel Sasko, the current Cyberpunk 2 associate game director and former quest design lead on Cyberpunk 2077, reveals that many of his colleagues came straight from making mods.
"A lot of modders, they were players who actually first played and actually got experience with customizing the game with the mods," he explains.
"For me, this is a foot-in-the-door technique, and a gateway into game dev," he continues. "You can see, and you can learn how things are made, how things can be built. We actually hired so many modders. I would say, at this point, half of the quest team is all former modders."
I'm not surprised in the least. What better talent to draw from than those who have intimate knowledge of playing the game, and literally building things for it? The ingenuity and understanding required for mods can't be understated - these are truly educated fans who not only understand something can be improved or added, but learn how to do it through making it themselves.
The depth of the Cyberpunk 2077 mod community speaks for itself; you can find everything from visual upgrades to whole new missions if you search through fan-made creations. CD Projekt Red is following the likes of Valve and Krafton here by hiring these people. Don't forget Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2 and PUBG all started as mods, then became their own respective creations.
CD Projekt Red hasn't gone as far as publishing original games by these people yet, but they're definitely making Cyberpunk 2077 and its follow-up better. If you fancy working on The Witcher 4 or Cyberpunk 3, this might be the way you manage to do that.
