How Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty Became a Survival Horror Game (For One Mission) - Art of the Level

4 days ago 36

For the majority of its runtime, Cyberpunk 2077 is an action-packed RPG. Even if you hone your protagonist, V, into a stealth ninja assassin, the neon-soaked Night City is still frequently the stage for tense combat encounters. That is, however, until Somewhat Damaged, one of the Phantom Liberty expansion’s final quests. Inside a bunker buried deep beneath the city, Cyberpunk 2077 leaves its RPG structure behind and morphs into a survival horror. A relentless robotic hunter stalks you through chambers and corridors, and there’s nothing your weapons can do to stop it.

To find out how this level and its terrifying mechanical monster were created, we spoke to staff from developer CD Projekt Red. With their insight, we examine how Somewhat Damaged makes use of logical environment design, increasingly stressful objectives, and resourceful AI scripting to manifest Phantom Liberty’s terrifying crescendo.

Phantom Liberty tells the story of Song So Mi, better known as Songbird, and Reed, two NUSA agents and former partners. Throughout the campaign it’s revealed that Songbird is on a personal mission to escape the toxic grip of her employer. If you help her, she will save you from your terminal brain virus (AKA Johnny Silverhand) using a Neural Matrix she plans to steal. As the campaign reaches its climax, you’re given a choice: work with Songbird, or betray her and let Reed take her into NUSA custody. Choosing that second option triggers Somewhat Damaged, a terrifying final quest that’s unique to this branch of the story.

Somewhat Damaged sees a devastated, mentally unstable Songbird flee to Cynosure, an abandoned facility beneath Night City. There she connects with the Blackwall, a defence network that protects the world from unknowable digital horrors, and activates a rogue AI to stalk, hunt, and kill you. Within the dark, decaying corridors of the bunker, all you can do is run and hide. It’s a bold left turn for a game normally so focused on action.

“I really wanted to do something Eldritch horror,” says Patrick Mills, CD Projekt Red’s former Cyberpunk 2077 loremaster and the person responsible for Somewhat Damaged’s initial design document. “I went to [quest director] Paweł Sasko and I said, ‘Hey, I want to do this. A lot of people aren't going to like this, but I think the people who do are really going to like it.”

From near enough the very beginning, Mills wanted to create the quest alongside Miles Tost, a senior level designer he knew would be on the same page. Tost immediately agreed to join the project. “I wanted to make something that was way out of my comfort zone,” he says, “and just pushed everything that I knew about working with our engine. We tried to come up with how we could push our technology and our encounter system to create this truly unique experience for the player.”

The Invincible Beast

Like some kind of restless spirit from beyond the veil, Songbird’s rogue AI possesses a Cerberus. It’s a maintenance robot, but don’t let that basic purpose fool you: this is a relentless, powerful beast. And, unlike any robot you’ve faced in the campaign before this point, it’s completely impervious to damage or hacking. The first thing the development team had to do, then, was to teach players that the Cerberus wasn’t a boss to fight, but a monster to avoid at all costs.

“The ideal of a great RPG boss fight is a boss that acknowledges the skills that you've chosen in order to defeat the boss,” says Mills. “But in this case, I went completely against that. None of your abilities are really going to help you here. We just have to disable all of those things because if you give a player the ability to chase the thing off or to disable the thing, if your guns do anything to this thing, that's what players are going to try to do to get through it.”

“We need them to understand the very first time it kills them there's nothing you can do,” he explains. “It's the only way to immediately communicate that idea.”

To put players in the right headspace, the development team carefully designed the path towards the initial Cerberus encounter with a focus on tone. After betraying Songbird in the previous quest, Reed and V attempt to capture her in an explosive raid on a MaxTac convoy. From that point onwards, as V follows Songbird into the bunker, things begin to veer further and further away from the experience you typically expect of Cyberpunk 2077.

“I need to make sure as you're moving through this space that there isn't any shooting,” says Mills. “There's as little traditional gameplay as possible. I'm moving you through thematic airlocks, one after the other, to just keep that sense of space between those things. The objective is to make sure that the player understands that it's a different game now.”

That different game is, perhaps rather obviously, partially informed by a landmark survival horror. “The Cerberus monster itself came from Alien: Isolation,” reveals Paweł Gąska, who took over quest design duties from Mills. “They nailed this idea of an unpredictable predator that is hunting you on the level and is keeping you tense even when it's absent. We thought ‘This is exactly what we want.’”

Achieving such an experience is easier said than done, though. The entirety of Alien: Isolation revolves around the cat and mouse gameplay between the player and the xenomorph, and so developer Creative Assembly could put significant time and resources into coding its sophisticated artificial intelligence system. CDPR, on the other hand, only needed such a hunter for one single quest… a quest that many players wouldn’t even experience thanks to the branching narrative. And so the team had to find a way to replicate that hunted feeling using craftier techniques.

From the robot’s perspective, it's never actively actually hunting the player, sorry!

The first section of the level, known internally as the outer bunker, is a collection of five rooms linked by a T-shaped corridor. “The game does a check of where V is,” explains Tost. “Is V in this room? No. Okay. Is V in that room? No. Okay. Is V in that room? Yes. And then it basically sends the Cerberus into that room.”

It’s a fairly straightforward process, but there are layers to the programming that ensure the robot feels authentically autonomous. For example, there are multiple different patrol paths that the robot can follow. When the system completes its room check and discovers where you are, it randomly assigns one of those paths to the Cerberus. The robot then follows that circuit, which will by design eventually lead it to the room you were discovered in.

“From the robot’s perspective, it's never actively actually hunting the player, sorry!” laughs Tost. “It happens to walk within the area that V is in. So that coincides, which is a bit of a problem for V, but really the robot is just on a walk.”

It may be just an illusion, but that doesn’t keep the terror from feeling very real. That result is partly thanks to Tost and the team realising that “the horror really lives in the absence of the robot compared to its presence.” That’s why close attention was paid to the Cerberus’ distinct audio signature. Its six metal legs thud against the flooring with a regular pattern, allowing you to approximate its position even when it’s far out of view. You can hear the whine of its servo motors as it climbs into the air vents that snake around the facility – a signal that the corridors are now free of its presence.

But making this hunter operate as intended was a much more difficult task than making it sound right. Before the final Cerberus was a prototype based on Royce, the cybernetic psychopath from the main Cyberpunk 2077 campaign, but his programming “had the issue of not really understanding when to stop running after you and fighting you,” says Tost. Royce was later replaced with another enemy, the Blood Ritual cyberpsycho, who “was less of what we wanted in the final version, but functionally worked a bit better.” Finally, after a less than ideal length of time, the final Cerberus mesh was given to the design team. “He worked even worse than both [Royce and the cyberpsycho]!” laughs Tost. “He would just glitch in animations. Most of the time he didn’t have animations!”

These difficulties almost saw the entire idea of a stalking enemy scrapped. “There were quite a few moments throughout development where we were this [close to] just making it a combat encounter,” Tost reveals. “There was actually a long time where we did have a fight with the robot planned, but we really couldn't get it to work. That basically forced us to really commit to [the hunter idea].”

The Haunted Bunker

The Cerberus is an important part of Somewhat Damaged, but avoiding it is not your primary task. Instead, this predator is a constant threat as you attempt to fulfil your main goal of venturing deeper into the Cynosure facility and finding Songbird at its core. Accessing the core first requires opening the colossal bulkhead door that connects the inner and outer bunker, done by disabling four different data terminals: Alpha, Bravo, Sierra, and Victor. Each is located in different rooms around the facility. It’s hardly a scary prospect for a horror-themed level, but a smart shift in how the world is presented makes the simple act of finding computers much more interesting than you’d first expect.

“The belief that I had back then, together with Patrick and the rest of the team, was that in order to really put the player into this horror mindset, we need to get their attention and their eyes on what was happening as much as possible,” says Tost.

The solution was to eliminate the minimap. When you enter Cynosure, Songbird hacks your GPS link. This removes the distraction from your screen, but also cuts you off from your location data and objective markers. That manifested a whole new challenge – the bunker had to be designed as a space that clearly communicated its pathways through architecture and in-game signage. While the majority of Night City’s geography does adhere to some level of real-world logic, this was a new and unfamiliar approach for Somewhat Damaged. Thankfully, Tost had recently conducted a deep-dive analysis on how immersive sim developer Arkane Studios approaches its best-in-class level design. The findings of that investigation formed the bedrock of Cynosure’s layout.

“What we came up with was that we gave each room a name, and we put the names very visible on the level,” explains Tost. “We needed to have an in-game map. We needed to have this terminal where you can look at the status of the door and for it to be really, really clear that it has four locks and these locks are linked to these data terminals that you need to get to them.

“How does the player understand which data terminal is activated and which one isn't and all that? We worked with the UI team in a collaboration and they really helped us with that.”

The inner bunker tends to be much more stressful. The rooms are smaller, the spaces are more claustrophobic.

This meticulously designed, easy-to-read environment is just one of the components that make this whole level work as intended. The second is the Cerberus and its clever AI behaviour. The final piece comes in the form of objectives. With the Cerberus inflicting so much pressure, the mission’s tasks had to be carefully balanced. They couldn’t ask players to do anything overly-complex. And so opening the bulkhead door is simply a case of activating four data terminals. The resulting challenge is not the terminals themselves, but the tense exploration required to find them.

“It's a high stress environment so it's difficult to make complicated decisions,” explains Tost. “So we make the [objective] difficult through the Cerberus being around, but we keep the things themselves simple.”

“A lot of this is really inspired by other horror games and looking at what they're doing,” Mills reveals. “What is it that you have to do in Soma or Alien: Isolation to progress? Well, the gameplay comes from you're being hunted. You need to go and press this switch and operate this device and when you're doing it, you can't see behind you, and there’s that fear of this thing lurking.”

While much of the objective design was fuelled by the quest’s horror approach, the team still had to ensure that some element of Cyberpunk’s RPG design remained. “Your objective has to give you some chance [against the indestructible Cerberus],” says Gąska. “You are not a passive person here. You are disempowered, you cannot do what you've been doing before, but bits of [your character build] remain. If you invested in the stealth tree, your footsteps will not be as loud, so you have more room to check stuff out.”

To allow all players, not just those with high stealth stats, to successfully avoid the Cerberus while exploring the outer bunker, a number of hiding spots were built into the design of each room and corridor. Such areas of cover are signposted through lighting, with flashing bulbs indicating safe havens. “One benefit of having the fixed patrol lines [for the Cerberus] was that I could predict for each patrol point where cover should be to make each and every one of them fair,” says Tost.

With all four data terminals activated, the door to the inner bunker opens and you can continue your search for Songbird. The next task is to shut down the facility's core, which requires you to sabotage three key systems: the Neural Network, the Datafront’s firewall devices, and the Thermic Control. Similar to the outer bunker, you once again need to cautiously explore the environment to find these objectives, but this time each task involves more risk and danger. With the Cerberus still very much on your tail, the section ratchets up stress and panic levels.

“The idea was always to have the outer bunker be the tutorial area, and the [inner bunker] was where we wanted to switch it from just the sheer terror of being in this space to you being confronted by that thing much, much more often,” Tost reveals. “So this section tends to be much more stressful. The rooms are smaller, the spaces are more claustrophobic.”

We're really forcing the player to interact with the robot in a way that they know will end badly for them.

“The objectives are no longer just you hooking yourself to the system and shutting it down,” says Gąska. “You have to be more visceral, you have to rip the cables, you have to destroy stuff.”

That destruction always, without fail, summons the Cerberus. “We're really forcing the player to interact with the robot and the environment in a way that they know will end badly for them,” says Tost with a smile.

With all three objectives complete, the facility goes into emergency lockdown, trapping you in the observation room. It makes you a sitting duck for the Cerberus, which of course turns up for one final hunt. Thankfully the room is arranged in a circle, allowing just enough space for you to stay out of the patrolling robot’s vision cone provided you keep moving. It makes for a white-knuckle finale to Night City’s most terrifying game of hide-and-seek.

“We have this issue of balancing how often the robot should be there,” explains Tost. “In this particular section, which generally is smaller, we had moments where the player would be able to simply speed run it without the robot having any chance to show itself. So the decision was made to just lock the door and you have to endure the robot being in there.”

With the objective locked in, Tost settled on using the observation room as the Cerberus’ final hunting ground, as no matter what order you complete the inner bunker objectives, it's always the last room you progress through. To suit the envisioned gameplay, the room was increased in size to create a large, circuit-loop environment.

“The patrol there is basically just an ‘O’, and what the player needs to do in order to hide is basically either tail him or be ahead of him,” Tost says. “But you can’t stay static.”

Successfully avoiding the Cerberus here isn’t the final showdown, though. That comes as you head back to Core Control to shut the system down for good. But rather than an explosive battle, the Cerberus is instead defeated thanks to an emotional heart-to-heart with Songbird. Convinced by your words and worn down by the world, she finally calls off the hunt and powers down the robot.

As previously mentioned by Tost, an early draft of the quest involved a traditional boss battle with the robot. Its temporary inclusion was an admission of defeat – a blip in the design timeline that marks a period when the team just couldn’t get the Cerberus to work correctly. But it wasn’t just the team’s determination to realise their ambition that saw the boss battle wiped from the level.

“We decided that [defeating the Cerberus in a boss battle] would give you a sense of victory,” says Gąska. “But we don't want you to have that sense of victory. We want you to be in the stage of, ‘Okay, damn, I survived this’ and not ‘I finally killed that bastard.’ And then we let you settle down, and after all this we hit you with the big question at the end.”

The Final Choice

Two missions prior, Phantom Liberty serves up the campaign’s biggest choice: will you stand by Songbird, or betray her? During Somewhat Damaged, in the very heart of the Cynosure bunker, you reach the campaign’s most important choice. You betrayed Songbird to get here, but will you stick by your decision? Will you force this devastated woman into the clutches of the people who broke her, or will you allow her one final mercy and end her suffering – knowing full well that if you do, your chance to cure your own terminal illness will be lost forever? It’s a duology of decisions that demanded a huge amount of work to ensure they felt both challenging and satisfying for players to navigate.

“Do I help So Mi or do I betray So Mi?” asks Mills. “And if you help So Mi, you learn things that make you doubt your choice. And then in the other path, where you decide to betray So Mi, you're going to learn things that make you doubt your choice. And that's really important because then we offer you another choice at the end of those two paths. Do you regret your decision now? How do you feel about this? So it was really necessary to get So Mi's story in there once we had a better idea of who she was, what her backstory was, and what those dilemmas were going to be.”

To reveal the final, vital pieces of Songbird’s story, a series of flashback visions were added to V’s journey through the bunker. Each one shows a key moment of So Mi’s life, pulling the curtain back on her mistakes and misfortunes.

“The bunker was a metaphor of going deep into Songbird’s mind,” says Gąska. “But there are two sides of Songbird. One is this caged bird. We wanted to tell you that ‘Okay, she did betray you and all that, but while she's wrong, she was also a victim of circumstances.

Those circumstances are depicted through each flashback. The first shows Songbird meeting with Phantom Liberty’s villain, Kurt Hansen, during the events of the expansion itself. Each subsequent flashback winds the clock further and further back. “You have her operation, so you see her still without cyberware,” explains Gąska. “You have her oath to Myers, just like you had your oath. You have her first encounter with Reed.

“And then you jump into Brooklyn, where it's an even happier time,” he continues. “This is the core of her identity, her happy place, where she's safe from whatever else was happening in the world. Where she had friends, where she had relationships. Relationships that she herself failed and when it all went down she was forced into this life. We wanted you to have this knowledge because you would soon be choosing what to do with her. If you just see her as this crazy person who betrays you, you will just be antagonistic towards her. You already chose [to hand her over to] Reed once, so there is no reason for you to not choose him again unless we give you additional information.”

I'm not that concerned if people are having fun. Am I engaged? That's the important thing.

While the flashbacks tell a very sympathetic story, CD Projekt Red prides itself on moral ambiguity. Its narrative branches are rarely, if ever, a choice between good and evil. To communicate the two sides of the upcoming choice, the visions of Songbird’s troubled life are delivered while her broken, current-day self is trying to kill you with a deadly robot. “She is an unstable individual that is packed with top cyberware and has an active connection to AIs from beyond Blackwall,” says Gąska. “She is like a cyber nuke in this world, and left alone she's extremely dangerous. If you think that running away from one maintenance robot in one small area of the world was scary, think of what would happen if she hacked the whole of Arasaka headquarters!”

Armed with that knowledge, you can make your final decision: will you hand Songbird over to the NUSA, the organisation that ruined her life and turned her into a cybernetic weapon? Or will you grant her wish of death, finally allowing her some peace?

“Killing So Mi felt to me like the mercy option,” says Mills. “Returning her to the people who effectively tortured her should feel gross. It should feel really icky.

“She's broken, she's pathetic,” he says. “She is someone who has been tortured. She's been mistreated, and whatever your feelings about her, I want you to feel sympathy. I want you to feel that nobody deserves this. That whatever she's done, that's wrong. This is too much. This is not okay. I want you to really be torn up when you make that decision whether to mercy kill her or give her back to Reed. I want the player to find that place in themselves that has sympathy for broken things.”

“I'm not that concerned if people are having fun,” Mills admits. “Am I engaged? That's the important thing. Are my emotions being played with? How am I doing it? And I don't want you to feel manipulated either. I want you to just go with it, feel the vibes, go with the vibes.”

Somewhat Damaged is, arguably, not a very fun mission – at least in the traditional sense of the word. It’s an incredibly stressful experience in which you must face Phantom Liberty’s most terrifying foe using a set of unfamiliar gameplay tools. It forces you to confront one of Cyberpunk’s most depressing storylines and then asks you to permanently pull the plug on one of its best characters. It is, in almost every way, a bad time. And yet that’s what makes it one of CD Projekt Red’s finest ever creations. It is undeniably engaging thanks to its complete commitment to the vision; a vision that jettisons many of the game’s fundamentals in the search for something special. The result is a truly unique mission. This is a horror level through and through. Of course it isn’t meant to be fun. It’s meant to be terrifying. And that’s exactly what Something Damaged is.

Matt Purslow is IGN's Senior Features Editor.