No Law is an ambitious project. It’s a Cyberpunk-style sci-fi action adventure set in a city packed with thousands of NPCs and buildings you can enter. But it’s not on the same scale as CD Projekt’s sprawling Night City. Rather, Port Desire goes for density and fidelity over sheer scale.
That’s a choice Neon Giant co-founders and co-creative directors Tor Frick and Arcade Berg made early on in development of this promising follow-up to cyberpunk twin-stick shooter The Ascent, which won plaudits for its attention to detail. Now, with the perspective shifted to first-person and an open world city to explore, No Law doubles down and expands on everything that made The Ascent so good.
No Law showed up at this year’s Unreal Fest (it’s being made using Unreal Engine 5), with an impressive tech demo, below. Ahead of the reveal, I spoke to Frick and Berg to get more insight into what they’re trying to achieve and what it all means for the player. There’s plenty of talk about Port Desire being the “most alive” open world city ever created, but how will this relatively modestly sized developer manage it? With physics that don’t reset, multiple interconnected systems that govern the behavior of its over 3,000 NPCs, and careful consideration for the buildings the player can and cannot enter, the developers tell me. And yes, you can kill everyone in the game and it will still work.
IGN: How are you using technology like Unreal Engine to make No Law?
Tor Frick: We don’t want to focus on, “Oh, it has the scale of a large city.” That’s not what interests us, and that’s not the kind of world we want to build. We want to build something where it’s more like, what is in your nearest surroundings? This building feels like a genuine building. This street feels like a genuine street. This apartment feels genuine.
Arcade Berg: I mean, it’s a cliche to say, but it’s quality over quantity. That’s a great example of us having to make a choice. What’s more important for us? Is it the scale or is it the fidelity? The fidelity we deliver on, it’s a really high fidelity, and we have pushed technology to achieve that fidelity, or what we want to do in the game with day and night and open world and all of this. Those are thanks to choices we made and investments we made into technology. We could not do that and at the same time deliver on a massive scale beyond what we’re already doing with Port Desire.
Make no mistake, Port Desire is still a large city and there are a ton of areas to explore. But of course it’s easy to imagine a city that is twice as big or 10 times as big or possibly a hundred times as big. We don’t want to do that, but also we couldn’t. We just couldn’t. We could have met that scale, but then we would have to bring down or not aim as high with the fidelity, and we just opted for fidelity in that case. And that’s usually what happens when we have to make a choice of where we go.
And that’s also where the game and the gameplay needs to follow, just make sure that everything is heading in the right direction. So us knowing that the city is more intimate and that the city has higher fidelity, we don’t do flying jet bikes that travel at the speed of light because you wouldn’t have a city large enough to travel around with it. So we make sure that the gameplay is utilizing the scale that we do deliver on the most. So we slowed it down so that you get to enjoy and explore the individual apartments, the office spaces, the buildings, climbing the facades of the buildings, because every building has a real scale because of the interiors. So it all needs to fit together.
IGN: Fidelity and density are your trademarks really after The Ascent, but what exactly is it about No Law that will make it feel like the most alive game ever?
Tor Frick: I think that’s one of the things that is so many little ingredients that play together. So for example, one of the things that I think is pretty unique to this game is, the buildings have an inside and an outside. They are not separate levels. If you go into an apartment, you climb up the fire escape, in through a window, you’re in the apartment, you look out through the window. The guy in the kiosk selling stuff is still out there. You can still see the people walking outside. You don’t go into an interior and we turn off the outside world. It’s always one thing. And we try to use that as much as possible, so you get this feeling like I am in a place where it doesn’t just stop because I loaded into a mission location. It’s always there. That’s just one part of it.
Other things are like, shops and bars will open and close as time passes, people will take shelter from the weather. The ebb and flow of people in the city will change throughout the day.
Arcade Berg: When we design interior spaces, we need to be mindful that people outside might actually hear this. It will lead to consequences. They could be good, they could be bad depending on what you’re doing and what you’re getting up to. We can’t level the sign and system design in isolation because everything is always connected.
They actually seek shelter. So if it’s raining, you will see AI actually heading under roofs to make sure that they don’t get wet. That also affects where they are, which also affects where they will hear you from. We’re really trying to have it be systems interacting, and hoping that players will play the game and do things and use the tools that we provide you with in ways we haven’t necessarily planned. That’s where we get the most enjoyment. So it’s always running that simulation and being consistent with what they offer basically.
IGN: Most of the time when I’m playing these open world games, there’s a lot of window dressing, but a lot of the time you can’t go into all the buildings you see. You go to a door, you can’t open it. There’s only certain buildings that you can go in. But it sounds like with No Law that you’re making a conscious effort to try and make that not be the case for this game. Is that a fair assessment?
Arcade Berg: It was a fair assessment because that’s exactly where we started. Our initial goal when we started this years and years ago was that every building interior should be explorable. And what we noticed even at the smaller scale, that is just too much. It’s too much to ask of any player. It is simply not fun, because it gets exhausting and overwhelming.
Our job as well as creators is to make sure that when you do go into interiors, that there’s something for you. There needs to be some interesting art. There needs to be a piece of fiction or some actual gameplay reward. There needs to be something, right? And we noticed that exploring too much dead space is actually a detriment to the gameplay experience. So we do not let you into every building for your own good!
But what we then make sure is that we make it abundantly clear visually and in fiction of why you can’t. So we don’t want you to ever go up to a door and go, “Oh, I couldn’t open it.” So we made it much, much clearer. So what we instead do is that we have concentrated it into what we loosely refer to as pockets. So once you’re in maybe a plaza or a cool city block or something, nearly everything there is interiors. This is when you put on your explorer hat and you start running wild. But then maybe if you want to run a couple of hundred meters that way, we might have closed off buildings on the way just for the sense of scale, but we don’t expect you to check every apartment in every building along the way, because it turns out that isn’t fun.
Tor Frick: Pretty much every mission location has multiple entrance points for the player. And as the player is looking for, is there a rooftop entrance? Is there a back entrance? How do I get in here? We want the player to stumble upon things as much as possible, right? When you are navigating around these interesting points, that’s where we want the player to get distracted by like, “Oh, wait, I can see an open window over here. I want to get in and see what that is about.” So we want to invite the player into exploring things as much as possible rather than going and pulling every door handle.
IGN: No Law has over 3,000 characters fill the streets. That sounds like a huge number. How are you able to achieve that, not just technologically speaking, but also how people go about their daily lives in a believable way?
Tor Frick: Yeah, a lot of iteration and work! No, it’s definitely a challenge to make something feel genuine. Just having many characters for the sake of it also doesn’t really bring anything. We want to make sure that people wear different clothes, different outfits. You should be able to tell where you are, what time of day… If you go to a bar at night, you should be able to tell like, “Oh, these are people who are out to party in the streets.” There’s a great variety of people, and that also takes a lot of work to just make sure that it’s not just a bunch of copy paste people that is there as a layer. We have a lot of characters, but that is not the goal of the player either. They are there to give the city a sense of believability more than anything.
Arcade Berg: It’s multiple systems running in parallel. So it’s not just one system deploying these 3,000 characters. Most of the characters are not like our main mission characters that have a bunch more dialogues. Every character that you can interact with, they actually have an apartment. They have a fixed address. We have everything documented on our end. They have somewhere in the city where they live, so we’ve done a lot of work… He can live over there. She wouldn’t live in the poor area because she actually has a pretty good job. So she gets to live over there. So we make sure that they all have somewhere to live.
So if you talk to the receptionist at the morgue, for example, and you remember her name, you can find her name or next to the door in one of the apartment buildings. It’s like, “Oh wait, that’s the lady from the morgue.” And then we try again to just have a little… maybe a diary or just something more for that character here. So we try to connect everything. Even the bad guys. So not only the good guys that you talk to, but also the named baddies, they live somewhere, right? So we make sure that that’s also part of the believability in the city. That’s obviously a different system than Joe Schmo along the street. And that impacts several systems because then we have a system for apartments in particular, and we have one to keep track of character states.
And for example, if we do this receptionist at the morgue, well, if you shoot her — don’t! — but if you shoot her while she’s at work, obviously then she will never appear back in her apartment either because now she’s dead because every character has persistent life. So if you kill them — you can kill anyone in the entire game — then you can’t bribe her. Then she’s persistently dead. So same thing, if you were to go there when she’s off work, she wouldn’t be behind the reception. She would be at home, you go home, she’s there. If you shoot her at her again — don’t, but you can! — so if you shoot her at home, then she will never show up for work.
So they all have this persistent thing going as well, that’s a separate system. So now we’re up to four systems. So we just have a bunch of systems that handle this for us. But then we feed that machine with people and addresses and all of that. So after a while it gets really cool when that all starts working together.
IGN: So, over 3,000 characters, they all have homes? You’ve worked out where everyone lives?
Arcade Berg: No, everyone you can talk to that has anything to do with the narrative or the missions, like the guys working in the bazar in the different booth, they all have homes. Then we also fill the city with even more people. But every apartment in the game, every home in the game — as I said, a lot of people own houses in Port Desire! — they will have a dedicated character with a dedicated name living in that apartment. If you kill that person, he or she is persistently dead. The person you will meet inside the apartment has the name matching to the exact sign by the door. All of that is interconnected.
IGN: Can you kill mission critical NPCs?
Arcade Berg: Yes. Everyone!
IGN: And then what happens?
Tor Frick: You can still finish the game. You can’t fail at the game, as in, “Oh, game over, you did the wrong thing.” But you can make it very difficult for yourself. You could kill all the main characters and then while you can still finish the game, this is very difficult.
Arcade Berg: What am I supposed to do now? Well, she was going to tell you, but you shot her in the face, so you figure it out.
IGN: So you can still finish the game even if you just went on a mad murder spree and killed everyone who was important?
Arcade Berg: Correct. Again, we don’t recommend it. Don’t kill innocent people, but you can.
Tor Frick: The player is allowed to do whatever they want with the tools that we give them. There’s no wrong way to play the game. There is maybe the suboptimal way. If you care about narrative, don’t shoot everyone! But there’s no wrong way to approach it. If you want to go guns blazing, if you want to play really stealthily… how you want to play it, that’s up to the player. In what order, how you want to tackle things, that’s completely up to the player.
Arcade Berg: A lot of the content’s also completely optional. We’re not talking how many hours of game is there, because right now we don’t even know. But also that really depends on, well, how much of the content do you want to opt into? Because obviously there’s a main narrative and then there’s side narratives and then there’s exploration. So it really depends on what you want to do. We want as many people as possible to be able to enjoy this game. So if you’re really into the story stuff, well then get out there, read all the email correspondence and stuff like that, or really get into talking to the characters. If you don’t care as much and you want more of a linear single-player shooter, you can play it more in that way. Okay, then just do what the main characters tell you to, and you’ll get to the end. But I think most players will be people that just enjoy a broad amount of content and want to just enjoy all of it.
And then I think, not everyone will want to opt in on all of the story and the lore. Some people do, but it doesn’t really matter. The game will always work and the game will always cater to you and try to make it as good of experience as possible.
IGN: I know I’m starting to sound like a maniac asking about killing people, but the physics don’t reset in this game. If you can go around killing everyone, can you essentially put the game world into a state where everyone’s dead and only you’re alive and the bodies are just littering the streets because they don’t reset?
Arcade Berg: So remember when we talked about, we invest in technology that we need to make the game, we’re not trying to make that game you’re describing!
Tor Frick: You can kill a lot of people and you’re going to have a bounty on you. Everyone maybe shoot on sight and it’s like… Life will be hard. At that point you’d better just stick to the rooftops and not go down to the street level, right? But you can kill a lot of people and there will be a lot of empty buildings.
Arcade Berg: I mean, in theory, yeah, every store could be closed because you killed all their staff, so you can’t do any shopping anymore in gun stores or clinics or convenience stores, or bars. You killed all of them and you killed the bartenders and you killed all the mission givers and all the characters along the way for the missions. Yeah, they could all just be dead.
Tor Frick: So it’s like the opposite of a pacifist run where you murdered everyone. It is possible!
Arcade Berg: Thematically in the city as well, so much of this city is driven on tourism. There are so many people visiting the citizens. Since Port Desire is completely unregulated, people from all over the world always visit. So we always have people on streets, an influx of just visitors as well. It’s not a closed bubble, it’s not a gated community. So it wouldn’t make sense to have it completely void of people. So that’s going to be my narrative explanation for it!
IGN: Finally, on the physics not resetting — broken grass stays on the carpet, smoke lingers after a gunfight. I’m trying to get a sense of the extent to which the physics don’t reset because that just sounds incredible to me.
Arcade Berg: Stuff like that can reset. We looked at some things, for example, if we do doors, you can destroy doors, you can destroy glass. And honestly today I don’t know what we will ship, because again, it will come down to a decision we will have to make. We wanted to leave destroyed doors destroyed forever, because you want that persistence in the world. But since we also have day and night and time progresses, it also felt weird that the city didn’t react to that. Why would they just let the city decay over time?
So then we started talking about ideas like, well, maybe they should put up an ill-fitting temporary door, a brand new door instead of ones worn out. We’ve just been exploring different spaces for how best to do it. But this is another example of where the thing that was obvious for us in the beginning that would make the most sense, one) might not, and two) it doesn’t play the best. Because then after a while there will be no doors to open or windows, for example. Because you might want to revisit spaces. So now we actually started resetting that for gameplay reasons. We will see what we ship, to be honest, because we’re not quite there yet. It’s one of those things where we need to just playtest as much as we humanly can.
No Law is due out on PC, PlayStation 5. and Xbox Series X|S.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
