Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most anticipated releases of the decade, with its initial reveal trailer released by developer CD Projekt Red all the way back in 2013. The studio’s last huge title, The Witcher 3, was critically acclaimed and extremely commercially successful, but it seems that CD Projekt Red is making one change that the studio learned from the development of its last game.
The main story of Cyberpunk 2077 will not be as long as The Witcher 3’s, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the player experience with the game will be shorter. Indeed, there are some good reasons why CD Projekt Red has made this decision, as well as some interesting implications that it could have for the design philosophy of Cyberpunk 2077 overall.
Patrick Mills, senior quest designer with CD Projekt Red, has confirmed that the “main story run in Cyberpunk 2077 is slightly short than The Witcher 3.” The main story of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt took roughly 50 hours for most players to complete, and with side quests would usually take closer to 100 hours. As a result, however, CD Projekt Red found that many players never made it to the end of Geralt’s story.
“We got a lot of complaints about The Witcher 3’s story just being too long,” said Mills, “and looking at the metrics you see tremendous numbers of people played through that game really far but never made it to the end. Fans should not expect to be finishing Cyberpunk 2077 quickly, however. It appears there has been a significant design shift between the Witcher series and Cyberpunk.
There are 3 major Life Path backstory options for the player to choose from and a great deal of character customization options. In other words, while The Witcher 3 lacked the unique replayabilty of a game like Skyrim, Cyberpunk 2077 could see far more players explore the world through multiple playthroughs to experience all of the content in the game.
If CD Projekt Red is serious about cutting down the length of the main quest, then fans can expect Cyberpunk 2077’s main quest to run around 30 hours, based upon the fact that Skyrim’s main quest took around 15 to 30 hours for players to complete. As almost any Skyrim player will know, however, first-person open world games usually lean into player freedom as their greatest asset, and many players do not play the main quest at all.
Indeed, CD Projekt Red has claimed that every side mission in Cyberpunk should feel like a full story in and of itself, and the game will be truly successful if players can explore the streets of Night City and experience dynamic environmental storytelling and side quests that feel just as legitimate and well developed as the main questline itself. It is likely that the game will avoid placing a particular urgency on the start of the main quest in order to encourage that sense of freedom, compared to other games which present the player with a world-ending threat from the outset.
Whether or not CD Projekt Red is shortening the length of the main quest in order to focus on engendering player freedom, however, remains to be seen. With Skyrim as the undisputed reigning champion of the first-person RPG genre and still selling well on Steam to this day, Cyberpunk 2077‘s shorter story may be able to achieve similar longevity with that focus on freedom and replayability rather than a single main questline.
Cyberpunk 2077 releases on November 19th for PC, PlayStation 4, Stadia, and Xbox One. The game is backwards compatible on the PS5 and Xbox Series X, with a version optimized for those consoles coming later as a free upgrade.
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