No Loading Screens Between Areas In Cyberpunk 2077

Cyberpunk 2077 won’t be weighed down with loading screens as players navigate Night City’s six distinct districts, according to associate design director at CD Projekt Red Kyle Rowley.

The news was revealed on Cyberpunk 2077 dedicated Discord channel. A user asked whether travel between districts would necessitate loading, to which Rowley responded ‘No loading screens after the initial load into the game’.

The absence of loading screens is a departure from the studio’s last game, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

, where traveling from one, albeit expansive, area to another would require players to access the world map and sit through a loading phase, effectively acting as travel time.

The feature suggests Cyberpunk 2077’s districts are permanently linked, which is all the more impressive if we consider the action RPG is set to be heavily focused on verticality. Meaning a majority of buildings can be explored from top to bottom, and players are believed to be able to fly around the city unobstructed.

From the E3 trailer, Night City appears a vibrant, and more importantly, a cramped, densely populated place with numerous types of buildings from gargantuan skyscrapers to habitable hovels. That’s not even mentioning the NPCs seen roaming around, moving vehicles, impressive draw distance, and the plethora of immersive environmental lighting effects. Exploration of all this without loading screens is nothing short of remarkable.

In other Cyberpunk 2077 news, CD Projekt Red released the specs of the machine used to run their closed-doors demo of the game at E3. Not so surprisingly, the PC is somewhat of a beast with a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, i7 8700K, and 32GB of RAM. I would be remiss not to mention that the demo is clearly not the final version of the game and represents a build specifically rendered for E3. The emphasis being on dazzling attendees with 4K and a steady frame rate on CD Projekt Red’s proprietary REDengine 4. With that in mind, the performance is clearly impressive.

I fully expect some serious optimization for less powerful setups. It’s also worth considering that the game is nowhere near release and as such, when it does hit stores, a 1080 may be viewed as the 1060 of today, and thus an affordable option for players.