June 13, 2022 by Polar_Bear
Worldbuilding. It’s am important part of many games, especially an immersive one like Cyberpunk 2077. In this, the third Design Diary entry for the upcoming Gangs of Night City board game, we get a look at how worldbuilding plays a part in the game and how the video game was adapted to the tabletop.
Dear Diary:
Welcome back, everyone! Francesco Rugerfred Sedda here with our third Design Diary entry (you can read the first one here and the second on here!). This time, we delve into storytelling and worldbuilding in the world of Cyberpunk.
To adapt an open-world videogame inspired by a tabletop role-playing game into a board game, we knew that telling and exploring stories was important for this game. The main question we needed to ask was, “How do we convey the vibrant nuances of Night City to the players?” A board game was not going to be a sandbox game nor easily replicate a world of such a large scale. Due to the nature of a board game and the scope of the project, we wanted to avoid a thick book where players would need to stop playing just to read walls of text. This would definitely break the pacing of gang wars going on. “Quests” didn’t make much sense either from a board game perspective. Quests and missions were for Edgerunner mercenaries, not for players who manage gangs. Considering all this, we ended up with two solutions to bring the Night City experience to players in an immediate way.
Source: Tabletop Gaming News
