One thing that immediately catches your eye No law – an open-world cyberpunk shooter that debuted last night at The Game Awards – is the fantastical foliage on the upper lip worn by the game's protagonist, grizzled military veteran Gray Harker.
Outside of Disco Elysium, it's rare to see a main character with a mustache these days. But Arkad Berg, co-founder and creative director of developer Neon Giant, says the lip caterpillar has been there all along. “The vast majority of our inspiration for this character were mustachioed, masculine men from the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties,” he says.
Harker is built like a bull, although he was much plumper in earlier models. To the disappointment of middle-aged fans, his pronounced belly has been trimmed after poor reviews in focus testing – clearly the world isn't quite ready for a pot-bellied action hero. But the mustache, thankfully, is here to stay, and in today's increasingly crowded marketplace, anything that makes your game stand out is something worth clinging to and cherishing.
Beyond that, Thor Frick, who like Berg is co-founder and creative director of developer Neon Giant, says they hope No Law's design will be their key attraction. “We wanted to create a very, very dense and high quality cyberpunk world with its own unique style, and I think that [in terms of that]it will stand out. I don't think another game will ever come out that looks like this. And on top of that, […] I don't think there is another game that can be played like this.” The cybergrunge city of Port Desire certainly looks intriguing, and Harker's ability to throw enemies off rooftops… Anger Leg-style is an attractive addition. The game also promises to give you the freedom to choose between stealth and all-out action, with decisions made along the way leading to alternative outcomes.
However, the gaming market has no shortage of cyberpunk-themed games. But it's equally a reflection of what the audience wants – and what The Neon Giant wants. The studio is more than happy to continue its love affair with the genre with the release of its 2021 cyberpunk hit. ClimbingMoreover, work on No Law began immediately after the completion of this game. Perhaps most importantly, the team is very good at creating cyberpunk worlds and wants to continue doing what they do best. Berg adds that it's important to be enthusiastic about what you're working on. “If we're not excited about making this game, you'll notice it when you play it.”
Frick says that with No Law they wanted to return to their first-person shooter roots (both he and Berg worked on the Wolfenstein series at MachineGames), but stick to aesthetics. “Cyberpunk is one of the genres where we can tell the most interesting stories because we can choose how grounded we want to be. But at the same time, it leaves a lot of room for the fantastic and incredible things that we love to do.”
However, while Ascension was pure science fiction, involving aliens, arcology, and ultra-high-tech gadgets, No Law is much more grounded in reality. “There is vegetation, there are rocks, there is stone, there is wood. We didn’t have all that in Ascension,” says Berg. “We are building a whole new world again.” Frick adds that a shopping cart won't look out of place in this game; something that would definitely be jarring in the more abstract realm of The Ascension. “This game is designed to be more immersive,” he says. “It’s fantastical and unusual, but still grounded.”
When cyberpunk emerged in the 1980s, it seemed excitingly futuristic. But now, at a time when many of his dystopian predictions have come true in disappointingly bleak ways—without flying cars or cybernetic eyes—the genre feels almost nostalgic. “The Neon Giant” plays on this: Freak says “No Law” strives for the “comfort food feel” of 1980s action heroes, citing Judge Dredd, RoboCop and The Running Man as influences. “We need that ironic humor. It's not a dark and depressing world: it's a rough world, but it's a fun world.”
In particular, the studio focused on the haptic technologies of the past, creating “chunky weapons” and “chunky gadgets,” says Frick. “They don't have smartphones, they have the latest massive flip phones. Everything has to be tactile.” Berg adds that there's something appealing about this tactility, arguing that the Iron Man suit “stopped being cool” when it turned into magical liquid.
Indie spirit
It's tough in the gaming industry right now: it seems like not a week goes by without another layoff or studio closure. How did the Neon Giant survive?
Berg says the secret is that we have a very small team. “So when we talk about risk and budget, it's nothing.” No Law had a core team of 30–40 people working on it, and it was a conscious decision to keep the team size low. “We had all the opportunity in the world to grow as much as we wanted, and especially after the success of The Ascent, the world was our oyster,” Berg says. “We decided to stay small.”
The studio has expanded slightly to meet its larger ambitions for No Law (Berg says the team is twice the size of the one that worked on The Ascent), but they decided to avoid any unnecessary expansion to reduce risks and allow for some flexibility. “We can change the way we work, we can adapt, we can move in a way that if you have a company of a hundred or even a thousand people, it takes a lot of effort and time to operate that ship.”
He adds that keeping the team small also means they don't have to spend time ensuring the reliability of their internal systems. “We just need to make sure we don’t hire fools. We may use tools, processes and pipelines that can be a bit finicky and if you don't treat them right, things will break. But because we're so small, we can just talk face to face and figure things out. If you're going to have 200 people using this tool, the expectations on the pipeline are completely different.”
Fricks adds that the game they're trying to create is a “very complex beast” that “requires people to talk to each other,” which is much easier to do with a small team.
But how did Neon Giant manage to create such an ambitious game with so few people? “Part of it is that we have to be very pragmatic about how we build things and what we build,” Frick says. That's why the studio decided to create a cyberpunk first-person shooter: “We can be very ambitious because that's the skill set of the team. If we were doing something we didn't know how to do, we couldn't be very ambitious. That's why we like to rely on our passions and individual skills.”
Technology also plays a role in helping the studio achieve lofty goals with a small team: Frick name-checks Unreal Engine 5. But it was also a case of “building on what we learned from The Ascent and then moving on, trying to avoid things that take up time.”
“We are a technology and tools focused studio,” he adds. “We like to make things, we like to learn new technologies, and this allows us to be more ambitious and work faster.”
Another point Berg makes is how an independent studio, Neon Giant, can control the scale of the game. “This is the key,” he says. “We can cut features, we can cut entire chunks of the game world if we see it as right for the game.”
But Neon Giant isn't actually an independent studio. It was purchased by Korean publishing house Krafton in 2022.
Frick says it was a conscious decision to look for a buyer after making Ascension. “We were in a pretty good position so we could take any number of routes. And it all came down to the fact that we like to be very ambitious. […]but we wanted to focus on the gaming part. […] We didn't open a studio because we thought, “We want to run a business.” No, we wanted to open a studio because we wanted to create ambitious games the way we think they should be.”
“We were just looking for rocket fuel,” Berg adds. “We were already heading there, but we wanted to get there faster.” He describes the nitty-gritty details of running a business as “boring” and something they wanted to get away from. “Making games is fun. Running a corporation, no matter how small, is not the most fun.”
Now Crafton will take care of it. But Berg says Neon Giant still operates “completely independently” although it has few financial safety nets.
But how independent are they? When Crafton positioned itself as an artificial intelligence-focused company. did this cover Neon Giant in October?
Berg says this did not affect the Swedish studio. “Because we operate independently, we are not involved in these conversations. We take pride in the way we create games.” Beyond the normal publishing stages, Crafton remained aloof from Neon Giant, he said. “They don’t have their hand in the pie at all.” And judging by the footage of the film “No Law” shown so far, they are preparing quite well.
