Cyberpunk 2077 Enemies Won’t Feel Like Bullet Sponges, Says CDPR

Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 fans were treated to a new episode of the Night City Wire series yesterday, focused on the protagonist's origin options (nomad, corporate, street) and on the weapon types that will be available once the game ships in a few months.

However, additional information came to light in a new interview published today on VG247, where CD Projekt RED Senior Gameplay Designer Pawel Kapala reassured gamers that enemies won't feel like 'bullet sponges' in Cyberpunk 2077, a common complaint of RPG/shooter hybrids.

if we’re talking about the normal NPCs that you meet on the street, they can have different rarities to them, I would say. Most of the NPCs that you will meet are normal, just goons. And if you’re continuing to level up, and if you’re on the level of the enemy, you should never experience bullet sponginess. They will feel quite fast to kill, quite fast to engage. However, they’re quite deadly as well, so you need to basically use cover, and move around a lot.

Some of the NPCs will be more armoured, or more, how do I say? Some of the NPCs would be, like at officer level, so they’re more elite enemies that deal even more damage, and they take a little bit more punishment. However, what we opted to do there is that, we basically ensure that hit reactions on our NPCs are always played. This is a big problem in most of the games that I played that have bullet sponges – that basically you don’t see any type of reaction on the NPC as you’re hitting him. It feels like you’re literally shooting a sponge, like there’s nothing there. And we never want to have that. So, we will still play hit reactions on those NPCs. You will still see that they’re getting hurt. They will stumble, they will fall from your gunfire. So, that’s still in place. And as far as boss fights are concerned, well, I think it would be best if players see it for themselves. However, I can assure you that we took the necessary steps not to have them feel like bullet sponges as well.

Cyberpunk 2077 is out on November 19th for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.