One game folks just can’t stop talking about these days is CD Projekt Red’s upcoming RPG Cyberpunk 2077. Based on Mike Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk 2020 series of tabletop RPGs, Cyberpunk 2077 promises to take players on a neon-filled adventure like never before. The hype is real, so are the stakes, especially since CDPR’s last game- The Witcher 3 raised the bar very high in terms of quest design and narrative. CDPR is fully dedicated to making Cyberpunk 2077 bigger and better from their past titles in almost every way imaginable.
The latest issue of EDGE magazine, which has been summarized by Reddit user Jackjackea, revealed some additional details on Cyberpunk 2077, especially the side quests. According to this, CDPR wants to make sure that every side quest in the game will feel like a complete story in and of itself.
Any stories, characters or themes that aren’t explored in depth in the main story are taken to be fully fleshed out in sidequests
“We want to make sure that all of them are up to the standards of the main quest – that there’s nothing that feels like filler, just something to do while waiting for the next quest, or to get more money to buy the next thing. We don’t really like to do that. We want to make sure that every quest feels like a complete story in and of itself.”
Cyberpunk 2077 also brings back the Witcher series’ tradition of having consequences to player actions not instantly apparent and manifest at a later point in time.
There’s more choice to what we’ve just seen than is usually available in video game quests: for instance, you could take DeShawn’s money and run at the very beginning, eschewing his mission but having to deal with the consequences later. You could make off with Stout’s eddies, too, although we presume you’d have to get the virus on the chip scrubbed off somewhere. “We don’t artificially limit ourselves,” Mills says. “Our philosophy for quest design is, ‘If the player can logically do it, then they can’. And if they can’t, then we have to come up with a damn good reason why.”
That’s the CDPR we all know and love. We sincerely hope that Cyberpunk 2077 will take RPG quest design and narrative to a whole new level.