Neon Giant on No Law, shopping-cart cyberpunk, and manly men with moustaches

One thing that immediately strikes you about No Law – the cyberpunk-fuelled open-world shooter that was unveiled at The Game Awards last night – is the fantastic upper lip foliage sported by the game’s protagonist, grizzled military veteran Grey Harker.

Disco Elysium aside, it’s rare to see a main character with a moustache these days. But Arcade Berg, co-founder and creative director at developer Neon Giant, says the lip caterpillar was in there from the very beginning. “The vast majority of our references when designing this character were moustached, manly men from the seventies, eighties, and nineties,” he says.

Harker is built like an ox – although in earlier designs he was a lot pudgier. Disappointingly for fans of middle-aged spread, his pronounced belly was trimmed down after poor feedback in focus testing: clearly the world isn’t quite ready for a pot-bellied action hero. But the moustache thankfully remains, and in today’s ever more crowded market, anything that makes your game stand out is something to be clung onto and cherished.

Taches aside, Tor Frick, who like Berg is co-founder and creative director at developer Neon Giant, says they’re hoping the design of No Law will be a key attraction. “We wanted to craft a very, very dense and high-fidelity cyberpunk world with its own unique flair, and I think [in terms of that], it’ll stand out. I don’t think there will be another game that looks like this when it ships. And on top of that, […] I don’t think there is another game that will play like this one.” The “cybergrunge” city of Port Desire certainly looks intriguing, and Harker’s ability to boot enemies off rooftops, Anger Foot-style, is an eye-catching addition. The game also promises to allow the freedom to choose between stealth and all-out action, with decisions made along the way leading to alternative outcomes.

Still, the gaming market isn’t exactly short of cyberpunk-themed titles. But equally, that’s a reflection of what the audience wants – and what Neon Giant wants. The studio is more than happy to continue its love affair with the genre, coming off its 2021 cyberpunk hit The Ascent, with work on No Law beginning right after that game was completed. Perhaps most importantly, the team is very good at making cyberpunk worlds, and wants to keep doing what it does best. Berg adds that it’s important to be enthused about whatever you’re working on. “If we are not excited about making this game, you will notice when you play it.”

Frick says that they wanted to go back to their first-person shooter roots with No Law (both he and Berg worked on the Wolfenstein series at MachineGames), but stick with the aesthetic. “Cyberpunk is one of the genres where we can tell the most interesting stories, because we can pick how grounded we want to be. But at the same time, it leaves plenty of room for the fantastical and over-the-top stuff that we love to do.”

Yet whereas The Ascent was pure sci-fi, dealing with aliens, arcologies, and super-high-tech gadgetry, No Law is far more based in reality. “There’s vegetation, there’s rocks, there’s stone, there’s wood. All of these things we didn’t have in The Ascent,” says Berg. “We’re building a completely new world again.” Frick adds that it’s the kind of game where a shopping cart wouldn’t look out of place; something that would have definitely jarred in the more abstract realm of The Ascent. “This game is all about immersing yourself in the world in a much more intimate fashion,” he says. “It’s fantastical and different, but it is still grounded.”

When it emerged in the 1980s, cyberpunk felt excitingly futuristic. But now, in a time when many of its dystopian predictions came true in disappointingly anodyne ways – sans flying cars and cybernetic eyes – the genre feels almost nostalgic. Neon Giant is playing into that: Frick says No Law is aiming for the “comfort food feeling” of 1980s action heroes, citing Judge Dredd, Robocop, and The Running Man as influences. “We want that tongue in cheek humour. This is not grimdark and depressing: it’s a rough world, but it’s a fun world.”

In particular, the studio has homed in on the tactile technology of the past with “chunky weapons” and “chunky gadgets,” says Frick. “They don’t have smartphones, they have the latest chunky flip-up phones. Everything should be tactile.” Berg adds that there’s something inherently appealing about this kind of tactility, arguing that Iron Man’s suit “stopped being cool” when it changed into a magically appearing liquid.

Indie spirit

It’s tough out there in the games industry right now, where it seems a week barely goes by without another round of layoffs or a studio closure. How has Neon Giant survived?

Berg says the secret is keeping a very small team. “So when we’re talking risks and budgets, it’s nothing.” A core group of just 30–40 people worked on No Law, and it was a deliberate decision to keep the team numbers low. “We have had every opportunity in the world to grow however large we would’ve wanted, and especially after the success with The Ascent, the world was our oyster,” says Berg. “We chose to remain small.”

The studio did scale up a little in order to meet its greater ambitions for No Law – Berg says the team is double the size of the one that worked on The Ascent – but they chose to avoid any unnecessary expansion in order to keep the risks low and provide some flexibility. “We can change the way we’re working, we can adapt, we can move around in a way where if you have a company of a hundred or even a thousand people, it just takes so much effort and time to steer that ship.”

He adds that maintaining only a small team also means they don’t have to spend time making their internal systems foolproof. “We just have to make sure we don’t hire fools. We can use tools and processes and pipelines that can be a bit finicky, and if you don’t treat them right, things will break. But since we’re so small, we can just have a face-to-face and figure it out. If you’re going to have 200 people using this tool, the expectations on the pipeline stuff are completely different.”

Fricks adds that the kind of game they’re trying to make is “a very complicated beast” that “requires people to talk to each other” – which is much easier to do with a small team.

But how was Neon Giant able to make such an ambitious game with so few people? “Part of it is that we have to be very pragmatic with how we build things and what we build,” says Frick. That’s why the studio chose to make a cyberpunk-set first-person shooter: “We can be very ambitious, because these are the kind of skills that the team has. If we were doing something we didn’t know how to do, we couldn’t be very ambitious. So that’s why we like to lean into our passions and skills as individuals.”

Technology also plays a part in helping the studio achieve lofty goals with a small team: Frick namechecks Unreal Engine 5. But it was also a case of “leaning on what we learned from The Ascent and then taking that further, trying to avoid the things that were time sinks.”

“We are a very technology and tools driven studio,” he adds. “We like tinkering with things, we like embracing new technology, and that allows us to be more ambitious and work faster.”

Berg makes another point: as an independent studio, Neon Giant can control the scope of the game. “That’s key,” he says. “We can cut features, we can cut entire chunks of the game world if we see that that’s the right thing for the game.”

But Neon Giant isn’t really an independent studio. It was bought by the Korean publisher Krafton in 2022.

Frick says it was a deliberate decision to seek out a buyer after making The Ascent. “We were in a pretty good position, so we could have picked any number of routes. And what it boiled down to was that we like being very ambitious […], but we wanted to focus on the game-making part. […] We didn’t start a studio because we were like, ‘We want to drive a business’. No, we wanted to start a studio because we wanted to make ambitious games in the way that we thought they should be made.”

“We were just looking for rocket fuel,” chips in Berg. “We were already heading there, but we wanted to be able to head there faster.” He describes the nitty gritty of running a business as “boring” and something they wanted to get away from. “Making games is fun. Running a corporation, however small, that’s not the fun bit.”

Now, Krafton takes care of that stuff. But Berg says Neon Giant still acts “wholly independently,” albeit with a few financial safety nets in place.

But how independent are they? When Krafton repositioned itself as an “AI-first” company in October, did that extend to Neon Giant?

Berg says it’s something that hasn’t affected the Swedish studio. “Since we are working independently, we don’t partake in those conversations. We pride ourselves in the way we’re making games.” Aside from the usual publishing milestones, he says, Krafton has remained very much hands off with Neon Giant. “They’re not putting their finger in the pie at all.” And judging by the footage of No Law shown so far, it’s cooking rather nicely.