Cyberpunk 2077 may be marred in problems and controversy from every side, but most people seem to agree that the art direction in this game is fantastic. Celebrating this fact is the artists who worked on the game who have shared much of it for anyone to see.
Lucjan Więcek, Environment Art Director at CD Projekt Red, has introduced an ‘Art Blast’ on ArtStation. This site is used by many professional artists in the videogame industry to share their work and it’s where we got a closer look at the impressive reload animations in The Last of Us Part 2.
The Art Blast is a digital collection of hundreds of works which can be viewed right here. By our count there are 431 uploads but some of these uploads contain multiple pieces of art, so there’s a lot to get through.
“To visualize and create the look of Cyberpunk 2077, we had to adapt or totally change almost everything that we knew up to this point—and shed all the preconceptions that we’d picked up over the years. But one thing we didn’t change was our fundamental artistic approach, which is one of the greatest strengths within CD PROJEKT RED. That approach includes the entire process of creating concept art, and the incredible creative process that goes into building a world within a game engine,” Więcek writes.
Więcek also cites “vast improvements” compared to work done on the famous Witcher series of games with special mention made of the environment and concept art teams.
Below we’ve embedded a few of our favourites from the Art Blast. Click on the individual works to be taken to the ArtStation page where the artist behind it gives some additional information about the piece. You can, of course, browse the entire gallery at your leisure here. A selected portion of these picked by Więcek are also available here.
Finally, when looking at the below, it’s worth noting that some of this concept art that was either not utilised in the final game or changed before release. Case in point is a version of Johnny Silverhand that isn’t based on Keanu Reeves. There’s also a different take on the now beloved character Panam. Many other early designs like this can be found in the links above.
Lea Leonowicz – Senior Concept Artist & Coordinator
Yee-ling Chung – Concept Artist
Lea Leonowicz – Senior Concept Artist & Coordinator
Sergey Glushakov – Concept Artist
Marta Dettlaff – Senior Concept Artist
Simon Urban – Associate Lead Environment Artist
Marta Dettlaff – Senior Character Concept Artist
Marta Dettlaff – Senior Character Concept Artist