Cyberpunk 2077 is one of CD Projekt Red’s most ambitious games so far, aiming to bring the pen-and-paper RPG’s Night City to life as a huge open-world. The player character, V, poses some huge challenges, with CD Projekt Red having to balance immersion and flexibility with the sort of character-driven stories the studio specializes in.
The Witcher 3’s Geralt provides a key lesson which V’s writers will need to have learned if they want the character to be a success in Cyberpunk 2077. While the character should not be modeled after Geralt himself, there is one major aspect of the way his character operates in tandem with the player which V could adopt.
Cyberpunk 2077’s protagonist V is performing a high-wire act that very few RPG protagonists have been able to succeed at. V is an attempt to create a character who is, in one sense, a blank slate, totally customizable down to their fingernails. On the other hand, V is the center of a character-driven story, with their own voice and line delivery. Cyberpunk 2077 is attempting to create an RPG protagonist who the player can fully immerse themselves in but who will also necessarily be a character in their own right.
It’s a far cry from the PC in Skyrim, the Dragonborn. Without a voice or any backstory to speak of, the Dragonborn is the archetypical blank-slate protagonist, one which the player can completely immerse themselves in one-for-one. This gives the player a lot of roleplaying flexibility and the game itself a lot of replay value. It’s a very different experience to play through Skyrim as a Khajiit, for example, and to have to imagine how differently that character would deliver their lines compared to a Nord.
On the other end of the spectrum, there’s characters like Shepard from Mass Effect. Mass Effect is Shepard’s story, and though players can choose between Paragon and Renegade morality options, almost all Mass Effect players choose the Paragon route. No matter what, there are key aspects of Shepard’s personality which run through the original Mass Effect trilogy which the player cannot change. Though Shepard’s backstory can be chosen, there is no way to play through the Mass Effect trilogy as anyone other than a space commander in the Alliance Navy.
By bringing together these two schools of RPG protagonist design for a character like V, CD Projekt Red is taking a huge risk. It’s possible that V’s voice and personality will not mesh with who a lot of players want to play as in Night City. It’s also possible that, in order to try and make the character more flexible, V has a voice but the story ends up being less character-driven than one might expect.
If there’s any studio which can tackle this synthesis, however, it’s CD Projekt Red. Geralt of Rivia is the studio’s best demonstration of this, allowing the player to immerse themselves in the character and make decisions for him in an open-world while still being a character in his own right. Although Geralt is likely far more specific a character than V will be, the ways CD Projekt Red achieved this synthesis with Geralt can provide great lessons for Cyberpunk 2077.
Geralt may have his own personality, but his goals subtly align with the goals of the player. For example, many players want to spend open-world RPGs exploring and completing every little side-quest. In games like Skyrim or Mass Effect, this can seem strange with the world at stake, but with Geralt, the desires of the player and the desires of the player character align even though they have different origins. The player wants to explore every contract and side-mission while on the path to find Ciri, but Geralt also needs to take every odd-job he can find along the way to pay for his bed and board.
In order to make V a compelling character to explore Night City as, V themself needs to have a good reason to be exploring and taking the same risks as the player. For the Street Kid Life Path, the angle could be that, like Geralt, V constantly needs to take on new jobs to make enough money to survive. If recent surveys are anything to go by, the Street Kid will be the most popular origin choice for Cyberpunk players. Figuring out how to make player and player character interests align across all three Cyberpunk Life Paths, however, could be one of CD Projekt Red’s greatest challenges to date.
One of CD Projekt Red’s most ambitious goals is to make every side quest feel like a full story in Cyberpunk 2077. This could also go a long way to making V an immersive protagonist, as if the stakes are constantly high even in smaller missions, it makes sense that V would move between the main quest and other narratives without it seeming like their priorities were skewed.
V cannot be modeled on Geralt too closely. For one thing, Geralt’s personality is not flexible enough for a blank-slate protagonist like V. While players can make decisions for Geralt, they cannot fundamentally change who he is in the story, a gruff, sarcastic monster hunter. However, if CD Projekt Red can find other ways to make the actions of the player make as much sense as possible for V as well, then the game won’t just achieve a synthesis of blank-slate and characterful protagonists, but could also achieve a synthesis between the motives of the player and the motives of the player character that makes V an immersive protagonist even when their own distinct personality shines through.
Cyberpunk 2077 is out December 10, 2020, for PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One, with a free next-gen upgrade planned for the PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
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