Neon Giant used Gamescom to give a closer look at No Law, its cyberpunk first-person immersive sim. The neon streets got attention, but the most interesting part of the showing was something far less flashy: how you earn XP.
In No Law, experience is tied to bigger accomplishments. Completing an objective or reaching an important location pays out. Individual small actions don’t.
The example used in the presentation was simple. Say there’s a locked room with more than one way in. You get rewarded for getting inside the room. You don’t get a separate bonus just because you chose to pick the lock instead of finding another route. The reward sits at the destination, not on the tool you used to get there.
Plenty of games in this genre hand out XP for specific actions: hacking a terminal, knocking out a guard, popping a lock. It works, but it also quietly tells players how to behave. If stealth pays better, the loud build feels punished. If every lock is worth points, you start picking doors you already have the code for.
Neon Giant’s approach is meant to flatten that. A stealth player shouldn’t lose out for avoiding fights. A combat player shouldn’t have to sneak around to top up their XP bar. And nobody should feel the urge to backtrack through a level just to touch every alternate entrance.
There’s a second progression layer too. According to the presentation, skill-specific collectible magazines are scattered around the world, letting players push into particular specializations. The previewers were told about them rather than shown them, and how exactly they feed into skills, points, unlocks, and permanent boosts, hasn’t been spelled out yet.
No Law comes from the Swedish studio behind The Ascent, the 2021 isometric cyberpunk action RPG praised for its absurdly dense city. Neon Giant was picked up by Krafton, and the studio is now trading the top-down view for a first-person perspective with immersive sim structure.
