Despite its numerous delays, as the original release date for the game would’ve seen it get released a few months ago, Cyberpunk 2077 is probably the most anticipated upcoming release, now that major titles like The Last of Us Part 2 and Ghost of Tsushima have launched.
One of the biggest reasons why people are eagerly awaiting the release of Cyberpunk 2077 is because it’s being developed by Polish studio CD Projekt Red, who, to most, set the benchmark for open-world gaming with their 2015 release, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.
During a recent interview with EDGE, Max Pears, who is the level designer for CD Projekt Red, said that the developers feel like they’re competing with themselves after the overwhelming success of The Witcher 3, as devs at the studio also feel like they set the benchmark for open-world games with The Wild Hunt, which saw many players, myself included, spending hundreds of hours traversing The Continent.
“Coming from The Witcher 3, which was such a huge success with such a great world that people spent hours exploring, it’s very much a competition and a different understanding within ourselves as a team. We’ve set the benchmark already in one previous game, and we’re trying to always do the same. So it’s about always going through and trying to make things better, but it’s also understanding that there is a difference and asking how we push those differences to being a benefit. But yeah, we’re always trying to make genre-defining and groundbreaking games.”
While speaking about Cyberpunk 2077 to Polish site Spider’s Web, Pawel Sasko, who is the game’s quest designer, said that players will be able to complete the game without finishing its main quest. As he explained it, the game’s main story can progress in multiple ways, as subplots from side quests can trigger different events related to the main narrative.
Sasko also said that the ending and epilogue players will get when completing Cyberpunk 2077 will be completely dependent on their actions in every quest, not just the main ones. So, in theory, your ending could, and probably will be different from the ending that others get.
Also, CD Projekt Red’s quest designer said that they “built the Cyberpunk structure based on the conclusions we drew from The Witcher 3, which had the main stem of history and side threads departing from it, and this was our main structure, which we call the ear.”
Cyberpunk 2077 is scheduled to launch for consoles and PC this coming November.