Cyberpunk 2077 Dev Reveals Inspirations Behind Dogtown

thegamer.com:

Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty takes players to Dogtown for the first time, a brutal, lawless location even compared to Night City at its worst. Having been walled off from the rest of Night City, with zero semblance of rules or law enforcement, it's a pretty tough place to live and traverse, and CD Projekt Red recently went in-depth into the area's creation and inspirations.

TheGamer recently attended a panel at GDC 2024 called 'Deciphering Dogtown: How We Built The Last District of Night City', during which many features of Dogtown were broken down by the studio, which explained certain decisions that were made and what effects they wanted them to have on the player.

For example, it was explained that CD Projekt Red wanted players to feel constantly trapped as they traversed Dogtown's streets. It was revealed that the developers had originally intended for there to be abandoned cars littering the streets surrounding EBM Petrochem Stadium, but the idea had to be scrapped due to gameplay reasons.

There was also a big focus on making Dogtown feel decayed and run down, even more so than Pacifica in the base game. One of the ways in which they did this was to include the crashed aerozep in the middle of the EBM Petrochem Stadium, and turn it into a big power source for the stadium itself and surrounding buildings. That way, CD Projekt Red hoped that players would see Dogtown's struggles with power issues.

It was also explained that Dogtown was designed with four elements in mind, those being deconstruction, deterioration, devastation, and redevelopment. Each subdistrict was designed with one of these four elements in mind, while the locations' entire visual identity revolved around sand and cables. Being inspired by Las Vegas, that makes a lot of sense, but CD Projekt Red apparently loved the idea of cables a lot as "cables are cyberpunk", so they crammed them in wherever they could.

While none of this is too revelatory, it's interesting to hear about what developers