If you’ve watched the trailers for No Law or the tech demo that developer Neon Giant showed off at Unreal Fest earlier this year, it would be easy to believe the game has a similar scope to CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077. After all, both games are open-world RPGs set in cyberpunk cities. Set in a beautifully realised mediterranean city that is somehow equal parts Lisbon and Kowloon Walled City – and with corner shops that are as stuffed with riches as the one down the road from my flat. But, the developers will happily tell you where they’ve scrimped and saved.

First thing on the table: Neon Giant are not as big as CD Project Red. One of No Law’s creative directors, Tor Frick told me there are just 24 people working on the game. Now that number doesn’t include the outsourcing teams helping with QA, art, and sound design, but even then, this is a smaller production. (Also, it’s hardly new for developers to talk about games in this way, as Nic pointed out around the release of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Still, Neon Giant knew their head count going into development and so it shaped a lot about the game that would become No Law.

“We picked a really, really difficult game to make, and we know that,” Frick says. No Law is an open-world immersive sim in which you’re trying to kill off the four mayors of Port Desire, a small coastal city policed by a peacekeeping force. The game is built of layered interlocking systems, allowing you to combine items to create new weaponry, like time-slowing grenades and remote exploding drones, you can approach each mission in a myriad of ways, and, as you kill off the mayors, the surviving magistrates will alter their patterns and defences to protect themselves against your rampage. And the world itself is fully open with no loading screens and many of its citizens have homes you can visit (and break into).

Essentially, it looks like too much of a game to be made by 24 people. Even if it was actually made by slightly more than that, that’s still wildly ambitious. However, as with any creative pursuit, Neon Giant recognised their limitations and designed them into the game.

“We opted out of some things really early on,” Frick explains, pointing out that while you can see cars parked on the street, you won’t be driving any of them. That both saves the team having to build out that functionality but it also reveals something about Port Desire’s open world: “This is a city that is built to be navigated on foot,” he says.

The land mass of Port Desire is significantly smaller than Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City. Where that city sprawls out across multiple city-sized districts, Neon Giant keeps Port Desire tight, instead leaning into verticality. This is a city made up of tall tower blocks and steep hills. You are forever climbing and descending, moving over, under, and through buildings, which gives you the impression of a much larger area than its footprint would suggest. “We really want the player to be distracted and explore things,” Frick says, saying they wanted to capture the feeling of being in the winding streets of a Mediterranean city where you might turn a corner and find a little alley or a staircase leading you up or down unexpectedly – “We wanted the sense of discovery as you move through the city,” he says.

They also nixed other ideas early on that would have become too much work, like being able to enter every building. “We try to focus it in areas that feel natural for the player to explore,” Frick says. Still, to give you that sense of density, you can enter some buildings, such as understreet night clubs, sleazy bars in the red light district, or apartments where characters you can find in the city live.

Though, as Neon Giant wanted to avoid any loading screens, that created its own limitation on how they build environments. “Every physical space exists as it should, so interiors of buildings match the exterior,” Frick explains. “It’s not like going into a loading screen and the building is much bigger on the inside.”

The process of picking constraints, as often happens, led to creativity. The necessity for a small dense city came before the narrative reasons for it existing. “It was very important for us that we don’t have invisible walls, so that’s why the city is surrounded by deep seas and a border wall,” Frick says. That led to the narrative setting inspired by Kowloon Walled City. “This is a lawless city set between three neighbouring countries – like no man’s land,” he adds. “There’s no invisible walls, there’s just very visible walls. And then we have populated it with the mission locations in areas where it makes sense.”

For the systems the team did choose to add in, Neon Giant are trying to make sure they thread through the world and change how the game plays – “We want all those layers to contribute so that people have different experiences,” Frick says.

Frick uses the time and weather as an example. Time passes naturally in No Law and its weather changes, both of which have implications as you’re playing. “Different districts will have different populations and characters based on the time of day and weather,” Frick says. “When it’s smoggy, almost no one goes outside. If it’s rainy, down in the party area, it doesn’t matter: it’s still full of people. But the residential area people keep inside. Night time in the slums, no one goes out at night. Night time in the bazaar, it’s full of people.” While this adds realism to the city, it also has an impact on your missions. If you need to break into a building on a busy street, you can do it in the daytime, but if you wait until night, it may well be easier.

Talk to any developer about how they made their game, and you’ll quickly learn they’re really just made of paper and the hope that players don’t look at anything too closely. We all remember Fallout’s train hat…. So No Law is not unique in that regard, but for a game that is so expansive, it’s interesting to learn where it’s actually smaller than it appears.

Travel and accommodation to Gamescom was provided by the conference organisers.