80.lv interviewed CD PROJEKT RED’s Jakub Knapik (VP, Global Art Director) and Kacper Niepokólczycki (Environment Art Director) about how Night City was built. The headline answer is blunt: everything is hand-placed — every building, advert, trash container and sheet of paper on the sidewalk.

The reasoning behind that is more interesting than the claim.

  • Procedural tools were tested and rejected. “They didn’t even come close to the quality and complexity that we’re aiming for.” The one partial exception is a road tool that runs a spline through the world and auto-places roads, bridges and overpasses — and artists still adjust the results by hand.
  • Four visual eras, one city. A week-long art directors’ offsite established Night City’s chronology: bleached 80s entropy, 60s-inspired plasticky kitsch, corporate neomilitarism, and rare pseudo-natural neo-kitsch for the ultra-rich. Districts differ by theme and colour coding, but they are built from those shared styles.
  • The “rule of contrast.” A named team rule: put contrast into architecture, storytelling or vistas almost everywhere. Their example is a normal Rancho Coronado house with an AV crashed through the roof and NCPD investigating — absurd to the player, ordinary to the residents, which is what grounds the world.
  • Density versus noise, admitted plainly. “In some places we did great, in some other places, less so.” The tiny-detail layer — adverts, neon, trash, facade colour — sometimes tipped into noise and hurt readability. Phantom Liberty answered with written guidelines for grouping colours, shapes and details and preserving negative space.
  • First person changed the metrics. Cutscenes became interactive 360-degree environments, level-design metrics were rebuilt from scratch, texel density was doubled versus The Witcher 3 (later bought back with heavy decal use), and scale had to be established through familiar objects — paper, bottles, benches — since there is no visible character in frame.
  • Lighting was designed as a sandbox. Probes and GI were pushed toward physical predictability and verified against offline Arnold renders before ray tracing existed, so RT and later path tracing arrived as an evolution rather than a rewrite. Under non-RT they budgeted roughly 10 active shadow-casting lights; path tracing put shadows on every loaded light to keep energy balance, forcing much more care about light placement.
  • The postmortem lesson was organisational. The base game’s weak point was communication between discipline-based teams. The fix was flattening into multidisciplinary hubs around quests and the open world, keeping department leads as the backbone so feedback landed in one room and juniors could make direction-consistent calls. Both directors credit that for Phantom Liberty being among the smoothest projects of their careers.

Two transferable takeaways: contrast rules and shared style vocabularies are what let hundreds of artists keep a decade-long world coherent, and readability at extreme density is an authoring problem — “controlled chaos” is composed, not generated.

It is a studio interview, so the failures are framed gently. But the specifics — the road tool’s limits, the shadow budget, the reorg — are concrete enough to be useful.