One of the hallmarks of Cyberpunk 2077, particularly after its Phantom Liberty update, is its dynamic police chases. In these, a player committing crimes might find themselves quick surrounded by cops and, a few crimes later, the extra spicy MaxTac. But what you might not have caught onto is that when trying to avoid this massive swarm of cops, you’re essentially playing a really, really sophisticated version of a very, very old arcade game: Pac-Man.
At the Game Industry Conference in Poznań, Wielkopolska, I attended a talk by CD Projekt senior AI programmer Maciej Celmer entitled “Heat, MaxTac, and Blockades: Police System, in Cyberpunk 2077 and more.” In the talk, Celmer went into a lot of interesting detail about how exactly Cyberpunk 2077’s police chase system was revamped following criticism from players that at launch, the system was way too forgiving and unengaging.
The new system, implemented in 2023, was far more dynamic and popular with players. And according to Celmer, it had an unusual inspiration: Pac-Man.
“Remember the game of Pac-Man, and the fact that every ghost had a different approach on how to catch the player?” Celmer said during his talk. “We did a similar thing in our car chases. For instance, one of them can try to reach the player on the shortest possible path, while the other can try to flank him or intercept on the intersection. There are seven different strategies that we applied to our cars with that part of the chase.”
We reached out to CD Projekt following the talk to get a little more detail on what Celmer meant. Over email, he confirmed that Pac-Man was one of “many” inspirations for the police chase update, “especially for the designers who came up with the idea. We wanted to surround the player with chasing vehicles but, at the same time, always try to leave at least one ‘road to freedom’ — basically, a way to escape. However, the situation in Night City, especially during a chase, can be very dynamic, so ‘try’ is definitely the right word here.”
Celmer broke down the aforementioned seven “strategies” that police cars would take in a chase for us too. Each strategy combined a mix of logic for where the vehicle would spawn with its behavior after spawning, and which strategy was used was dependent on the heat level, the state of the police system (relaxed, alerted, or combat) and other factors. From there, cars could also perform different maneuvers depending on the situation, such as ramming, shooting, blocking, overtaking, or aligning with the chased car. The seven strategies were, in Celmer’s words:
- Drive towards the player — Move directly toward the player in a straight line. Used in the Alerted state.
- Drive away from the player — Move directly away from the player. Used in the Alerted state.
- Patrol the quadrant — Patrol the area around the player.
- Intersection trap — Try to flank the player at the next intersection.
- Get to the player from anywhere — The aggressive one.
- Search for the player — Perform an initial search around the crime scene. Used in the Alerted state.
- Search from anywhere — A fallback strategy used when we can’t find a suitable spawn point for strategy 6, so the car simply spawns anywhere and begins searching for the player.
The result was, if you look at Cyberpunk 2077’s roads from the top down, something like a game of Pac-Man where the ghosts are the police cars chasing the player. In Pac-Man, each ghost has its own strategy it will typically perform, such as Pinky trying to ambush the player or Blinky chasing him directly. “We simply wanted to do something a bit different from other games with similar systems,” Celmer said. “The combination of a classic game AI design inspired by Pac-Man seemed like a great fit for implementing police chases in Cyberpunk 2077.”
Cyberpunk 2077’s turnaround is one of the most dramatic in video game history. After its disastrous launch in December 2020, CD Projekt continued to update the game, and now, as it nears its fifth birthday, it’s sitting on an incredible 35 million copies sold. Indeed, Cyberpunk 2077 is currently CD Projekt’s main source of revenue.
In a recent financial briefing, CD Projekt said it was “laying the foundations” for Cyberpunk 2, outlining plans to scale up its development teams in Boston, Warsaw, and Vancouver and through to the end of 2027. 135 people were working on Cyberpunk 2 as of October 31, 2025, up from 116 at the end of July.
At GIC Poland, I also chatted with the director of Valor Mortis about difficulty options in Soulslike games and whether Valor Mortis should count as a Soulslike. I also went hands-on with the dog secret agent game Barkour.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
