I've been diving deep into the roots of Cyberpunk lately, and I noticed something that's been bugging me for a while—Night City in Cyberpunk 2077 looks and feels nothing like the Night City I saw in the old Cyberpunk TTRPG art and materials.
Like… where are the giant blimps? The low-res neon chaos? The stylized chrome punks? The brutalist buildings stacked on top of each other like a glitch in SimCity?
I get it—technology evolved, design standards changed, and CD Projekt Red wanted a more grounded, immersive world for modern gamers. But if you go back and look at the old Cyberpunk 2020 or even Cyberpunk RED artwork, Night City was this hyper-stylized, exaggerated, almost surreal place. It felt like it was drawn from a 1980s dream of a dystopian techno-hellscape—full of Japanese megacorp ads, street samurai, people wired to the teeth with chrome, and wild, sometimes comically over-the-top designs.
Now fast forward to Cyberpunk 2077, and it's all super polished. Realistic lighting, slick textures, architectural coherence. Don’t get me wrong—it’s beautiful. But it’s a different kind of beautiful. It's Hollywood cyberpunk, not tabletop punk. The grunge is still there, but it’s polished grunge. Even the weapons and vehicles feel… corporately engineered.
I think part of the dissonance comes from how the tabletop games (especially 2020 and RED) are more about ideas than detailed worldbuilding. The art was evocative—it hinted at the world. It left a lot to your imagination. 2077 fills in all the blanks.
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Idk if you’re too lost in the sauce, but the clear explanation is hardware limitations tf u talking about lmao.
If they tried to make the night city in picture number 3 with even last gen graphics, any PC would explode and forget consoles
2077 is simplified for a larger audience. It also moves the story away from a history that was actually quite horrible. We have nukes going off in cities, multinational companies acting like nations and going to war with each other, and that’s what happens AFTER most of America ends up both homeless and jobless due to politics and economics.
2077, like ghost in the shell, actually represents post-cyberpunk genre, governments are starting to reform and take some responsibility in its own name away from the corporations, the US is re establishing even if half of it is still relatively defacto independent, some sense of a wider internet is restablished after the madness of the data crash and the establishment of the black wall to keep the ai from destroying the planet. The law means something, even if it’s sketchy.
The world of 2013 is a prequel to 2020, RED is a result of the 2020 world, and 2077 is the re establishment of order. Some people can get a normal job and not die in a shootout, the 2077 world is safer than the world of 2020 and RED, in a very human world.
The game is clinical (very few heavily modified humans in the end, all very generic) as a result of simplification for the purposes of a game, but I think the way they presented the world is a realistic return to normality that chaos brings.
The giant blimps (aerozeps), have been replaced with those enormous cargo barges you see flying around in 2077. Same tech basically, just not blimp shaped.
The rest is just scope issues. It would be impossible to capture all of cyberpunk (ttrpg) in a video game format, in a way that properly represents it.
I’d tack a large part of it up to either artistic misdirection, the game simply being unfinished, or even lore reasons such as NC’s reconstruction after the bombing in 2023.
Even before the 2018 and 2019 CGI trailers showed off the hopeful vision for NC as a final product, I think the depiction most faithful to the old TTRPGs was the one put out wayyy back in 2013. That original trailer and some of its wide shots of NC showed something absolutely unique, and (in my personal opinion) should’ve been the look CDPR strived for during the whole development process from CGI to videogame.
Tragically, that one iteration ended up as nothing more than a flashy trailer… excluding the Crusher shotgun and MaxTac designs surviving into 2020.
Though, I don’t understand your point about NC’s architecture. Those crazy, illogical designs definitely made it to the final product.
When will people finally understand this simple fact: An adaptation in a different form of entertainment does not have to do things 1 to 1 like in the original.
Just like a movie adapted after a book doesnt have to do things the exact same way the book did it. It cant, at least not to 100%, because its a different medium.
And besides that, the creative person who thought it all up is also free to change things about their fiction, especially when its done years later in a completely different medium that plays by different rules.
“Night City was this hyper-stylized, exaggerated, almost surreal place. It felt like it was drawn from a 1980s dream of a dystopian techno-hellscape—full of Japanese megacorp ads, street samurai, people wired to the teeth with chrome, and wild, sometimes comically over-the-top designs.”
Dont know about you but that is pretty much what I saw in the game, so what are you even talking about?
And the artwork you uploaded here looks like one would imagine Night City to look like. The color palette is more muted, and its more busy visually with more buildings.
Why the differences? Cause its an artwork, a snapshot of the creators imagination, not the depiction of an actual place. If you make buildings in a game, they have to make architectural sense, at least from the outside observed by the player as part of the scenery. Of course its not going to look like in the art that was made *decades* ago.
I think some people are misinterpreting your question because I think its a good question. Its not just about technical graphics. The game makes a lot of choices that make its visions of cyberpunk way more grounded. It depicts it’s grungy in a very realistic way.
I think the simplest answer is that Cyperpunk as a TTRPG wasn’t really confined to a particular style. Even the name suggest that its very “generalized cyberpunk”. So as we get closer to the future and it becomes clearer where we are going, the game has been grounded. Its a much more mundane version of the future in terms of technology and style. And I think thats because our perception of what the future will look has become more mundane.
I believe that the TTRPG still looks like this because it still wants to harken back to what the original TTRPG art used to look like. It wants to maintain the old whimsy and intrigue we had even for this supposedly dark future. I quite like Cyberpunk RED for that reason. It includes all the new without forgetting what makes it appealing.
It’s easier to render these environments with your imagination than with your gaming hardware
A lot of NightCity happens on the streets and outside the city. There are very few places that you can go into or even have the presence of culture. Dogcity has a lot of undertones, and it has a culture, even if the Combat Zone is very smaller than in the official maps.
To be frank, if you look at the paper map, you’ll notice that a lot of city was simply cut out and never exists in the 2077.
Eh, I like them all. Maybe I’m too huge a Marvel fan of all mediums and am use to the movies changing things from comics but I understand artworks (comics/novels) will always be pretty different in realistic forms (movies/games). As long as creators are happy, that’s all that really matters. Of course it’s fine to want more though and it seems they’ll expand on the world in the sequel which is great. It’s unfortunate hardware limitations are a thing.
I find it even funnier when people say ” I’m kinda done with NC. I wanna see a new city in the next game”.
No you’re not, we have seen in actuality a 50% version of NC so far. And that 50% is pretty amazing don’t get me wrong. On top of that, the majority of people don’t do all side quests or side content that’s available.
The next game for sure is going to introduce another city. But I really hope they expand on NC itself with a lot more RPG elements and day to day activities you can do. As was planned for the fist draft of Cyberpunk
Because it would take them another 10 to 20 years to build a world with that level of detail.
Creating static art is much easier than modeling it in 3D, adding animations, integrating all the mechanical elements to make it feel “alive,” setting up lighting, placing it into the world, and testing everything.
AI-generated post
OP is a bot.
Because they’re not the same medium.
Perhaps a curated adventure like Baldur’s Gate 3 would fit what you’re looking for lol.
It’d be cool to see, frankly. A more strict adaptation of the TTRPG, just like how BG3 is straight up just using DnD 5e rules.
I mean its just simply not practical to have it be just like the drawings due to hardware and resource limitations. You can tell they tried to include all those things you mentioned in the game.
It’s the other way around. Tech didn’t evolve. It still has to catch up. The game is already handling a *lot*. There’s just not room to add every little cool thing from the tt game.
Graphics are already really good. But Ai is the horizon. Imagine Ai generating things like npc dialog (including their voices…no voice acting). Ai could generate stories so we would not be trapped in a static universe anymore. The main barrier to this won’t be technological. Voice actors themselves are going to resist this change. But this will be the next revolution in RPGs. Not graphics or adding details from the TT game.
This process is inevitable. It’s just a matter of the tech maturing enough to be useful.
TIL Cyberpunk 2077 was a TTRPG
I don’t know why anyone would prefer the original design direction lmao.
Also it’s 50 years in the future of course it looks different.
I always saw Night City as closer to Altered Carbon really. High tech but all grungey n shit, I wouldn’t want to fucking live there.
It’s one thing to make scale super extreme in a painting or animation, like Akira for example, but it’s another to implement that into a functioning game (that also had to work on the ps4). Verticality in general is very lacking in the game in terms of access to buildings or multi level places, and I think this is simply a technical issue.
I see a lot of posts of people being like “Why doesn’t X final product look like the concept art?” And it’s almost always because the realities of game dev or movie creation etc create limitations.
You touched on it at the end there. When we’re left to fill in all the blanks ourselves, the worlds can feel vast and endless. 2077 HAS to fill in those blanks because of its medium. An open world demands everywhere be explorable to some degree. You can’t just make an evocative background for a certain scene. The whole thing has to be physically created.
Half the city got nuked and rebuilt bro
They made the game more vertical that Witcher 3 but it would be hard to implement the true verticality of NC where I imagine you could have a foot chase across the city without even going to street level with the skybridges and walkways. We see a peek during the parade mission, but that was still only like half a dozen stories of verticality and only partially filled out. Maybe when tech allows more populated and larger levels, they could make the city feel a bit bigger by allowing many buildings to be at least partially explorable.
Hardware limitations, mostly. We’re talking about a city which is canonically twice densely populated as Manila (as a side note, this makes Rancho Coronado, which is depicted as a suburban area, make no sense).
I would say it’s height.
In cyberpunk it’s formatted to much like a standard city and standard heights, the art makes the city not only massive but in the first one you can see many layer interactions with those bridges.
Others have already said it, but majority boils down to scope issues. Don’t get me wrong, id ADORE a more cyberpunk Red aligned night city, but from a gameplay aspect alot of the content you mentioned just either insent viable or would have very little use. Sure id love to have a more vertical height in NC with the crazy walkways and building ontop of buildings, but that would also be kinda awful to navigate after a while. Imagine looking for a crime in progress for half an hour only to realize it’s 4 stories above you through 5 elevator rides. The stuff like blimps and flying cars while cool looking would also kill performance quickly. The only aspect I think CDred skipped on that could have been implemented in was more crazy and diverse individuals. More chromed out gang members with crazier aesthetic, a deeper dive into the gangs especially ones that just don’t show up like the bozos,street samurai and more explanation of the weirder augments like the people who get different animalistic augmentation like fur, claws, fangs, ect. Hopefully at least some of these aspects will be built apon in Orion given now they have a more solid base to work off of.
I mean as a former 2020 tabletop player, I would love to see a prequel set in the classic 2013-2023 timeline that’s far more directly influenced by the tabletop.
That means a grittier vibe, much more lethal and unforgiving combat mechanics, and an overall much more ’80s inspired vision of the Dark Future.
dude.. the ttrpg has no single style or feel in its visuals… thats the problem with being mostly relegated to text. 2077 is by far the largest interpretation and on a technical scale is absolutely amazing. Cyberpunks city scape up until now is something only experienced in movie cgi and most of those in the past probably used 2d plates. (In the final fantasy the movie, the cityscape shots were animated plates instead of full cgi, much easier to do for a shot that does not need a fly through)
Not exactly what you’re post is about but I really like the way pondsmith and the game depicts cyberpsychosis vs how the anime depicted is like schizophrenia. I like the creators approach of how much meat can you remove from yourself and gain these amazing abilities while you lose your humanity and self.
Is OP saying the pics are somehow different than what we got in the shipped game? It’s the same style and aesthetic
Just within hardware limitations and also design scope. A hundred buildings that each have a hundred floors that have generic npcs and/or randomized loot won’t really enhance a player experience. Please elaborate on how this is “different” from the tabletop
I feel like the medium matters.
It’s like asking why an oil painting doesn’t look like a water colour.
Honestly looking at those three images, I get vibes from all three of them in the game in a way I can’t get anywhere else. It’s only specific things that are “missing” but I wouldn’t call it the grit or grime tbh.
The videogame is a terrible RPG that’s why. Decent first person shooter tho.
AI post detected, someone peel his scrotum off