Cyberpunk 2077 was announced by CD Projekt Red with the release of a reveal trailer all the way back in 2013. The company would go on to receive critical acclaim for The Witcher 3 in 2015, but the release of the final game in the Witcher trilogy was not exclusively affirmative for the studio.
CD Projekt Red has looked closely at The Witcher 3’s reception, and the way fans reacted to different features has had a big influence on Cyberpunk 2077. The developer has already confirmed some changes which were made in Cyberpunk over the course of its long development as a direct response to feedback and analysis of how fans played The Witcher. However, not all of these changes will be ones many RPG fans will be happy with.
CD Projekt Red has already announced that the main quest for Cyberpunk 2077 will be shorter than the main quest in The Witcher 3. Patrick Mills, a senior quest designer with the studio, explained that the “main story run in Cyberpunk 2077 is slightly short than The Witcher 3.” He went on to “We got a lot of complaints about The Witcher 3’s story just being too long,” adding that “looking at the metrics, you see tremendous numbers of people played through that game really far but never made it to the end.”
This might come as a concern to some RPG fans. The Witcher’s main story could be completed in roughly 50 hours, which could mean that Cyberpunk 2077’s main story length is more similar to another first-person RPG like Skyrim. Skyrim’s main quest came in at about 15 to 30 hours.
The reason this might come as a concern to some fans is that while The Witcher 3’s main quest was long and not completed by many players, that statistic doesn’t necessarily speak to many player’s experiences of playing the game, even those who did not complete the main story. Part of what made The Witcher 3 feel like an epic conclusion to the trilogy was that its sprawling plot took the player all over the world of The Witcher. The search for Ciri always felt like Geralt’s main motivation, but the fact that the main quest couldn’t be quickly or easily completed was part of what made the other missions make sense.
Some will enjoy it being shorter, so this is more of a middling change to the overall game. But with this in mind, it’s worth looking at why The Witcher works and how some changes could hurt Cyberpunk in the long run.
By having such a huge main quest, the game actually made completing side missions and Witcher contracts feel far more immersive. For example, near the start of The Witcher 3, Geralt has to help the Bloody Baron in order to learn more information about where Ciri might have gone. In a game like Skyrim, it can feel immersion breaking for some players to take on side quests once the player has already found out they are the Dragonborn and has been given a very clear goal they need to achieve – stopping Alduin – which makes getting involved in many of the side quests feel unjustifiable in a roleplay sense.
In The Witcher 3, the sense of scale in the main quest makes the game more immersive by allowing the player to complete side missions and Witcher contracts to survive without it feeling like a diversion, but instead a necessary part of Geralt’s long journey to save Ciri from the Wild Hunt. Indeed, one of the likely reasons many players never actually reached the end of the main quest is because this set up made completing the side quests in The Witcher 3 a uniquely immersive and enjoyable experience compared to many other RPGs.
CD Projekt Red has claimed that every side mission in Cyberpunk should feel like a full story, but it remains unclear exactly how this would be manifested in-game. Many Witcher contracts were short but compelling and enjoyable, and there is a risk that Cyberpunk’s narrative will feel spread thin over too many short stories without one big epic main story to tie it all together and focus the player character’s motivation.
While many players did not finish the main quest of The Witcher 3, it seems unlikely that many RPG fans would complain about getting more value for their money with such a huge amount of content to enjoy that they practically couldn’t finish all of it. Not only that, but if Cyberpunk 2077 has been heavily influenced by perceived problems with The Witcher 3, there are other changes which could have been made which could also be worrying to some RPG fans.
The comments made by CD Projekt Red regarding the length of Cyberpunk 2077‘s main quest could imply that the game will have more stories, but will feel less like a single consistent narrative than The Witcher 3. The trouble is that one of the most successful aspects of The Witcher 3 was its ability to make its narrative feel like one single unfolding story. When Geralt travels to Skellige, for example, he does so because of the overarching narrative of the main quest, which makes the Witcher’s side quests he completes there still feel like a part of the main story as a necessary means to his final goal.
With Cyberpunk potentially focusing more on making side missions feel like full stories, and with all of the game taking place in Night City instead of spread across the world in the same way as The Witcher, this could cause Cyberpunk’s open-world design and its blank-slate protagonist V to clash with CD Projekt Red’s desire to give its game a strong main story.
Cyberpunk 2077 is without a doubt an extremely ambitious game, however, and it is a good thing that CD Projekt Red is willing to risk experimenting and making changes from The Witcher despite that game’s huge success. Whether or not the studio is able to make Cyberpunk 2077 a next-generational RPG experience which fuses open-world freedom with strong storytelling remains to be seen, and fans will be keenly awaiting the game’s release in November to see just what the world of Cyberpunk has in store.
Cyberpunk 2077 will be available November 19th on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, with PS5, Stadia and Xbox Series X versions in development.
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