How was the Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty concert cooked up?

Bringing up Cyberpunk 2077 right now is a lot easier than it was at launch. The journey of CD Projekt Red's title has been a series of ups and downs, descending into hell and a historic video game comeback. After all its updates, it is a very enjoyable game and, although that was scarred by the bugs of the first versions, it has been a long road for the Polish company.

Almost two years ago they released Phantom Liberty, their only DLC, and it was very well received by fans. At DevGAMM in Gdańsk, we were able to talk to Maria Mazur, mission designer at CD Projekt Red, about how one of the most spectacular parts of the game, the concert with Idris Elba's character, came to fruition. In her talk "How to put on a secret concert in Night City", she discusses some of the additions to this moment of the expansion.

"Idris Elba is also a DJ and we added three of his tracks, but I also wanted to add a custom DJ set for the game," explained Maria Mazur. "I was really excited about the idea. But it was very late in the production schedule and there was no budget left." She explained that it was a great opportunity because of the exclusivity of the moment, because fans would probably not be able to attend an Idris Elba session.

He also explains the moment at the party, where we see how we play Idris Elba, as a sort of meta character. "I couldn't use his real face, because it would be weird if he was a secret spy. We use a helmet, there's like a Daft Punk reference." He further explained that the tracks are, with the exception of one by Idris Elba himself, from a Polish band, Private Press.

These are some of the topics Maria talked to us about, but there are still some more that you can discover in the full interview subtitled below.