Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t going to be short on things to do. When we’re not customising our character, exploring Night City, or pursuing one of the game’s many romance options, it turns out that there are plenty of fun little minigames to divert our attention.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was of course famous for its Gwent minigame, as the fantasy card game was basically an entire title in its own right that people sank dozens of hours into. I personally never really “got” Gwent, and opted to run around slicing up fools with my swords instead, but each to their own.
I don’t know if any of the minigames on offer in Cyberpunk 2077 will be quite as robust as Gwent, but a fan over on Tumblr recently asked just how many minigames we can expect, and it certainly sounds like there are gonna be a good amount of ones to get stuck into.
Senior level designer Miles Tost started off by diving into the hacking minigame, which will essentially involve breaking you into systems to unlock doors, vaults, and all kinds of other things that you ought not to be able to get into. Tost promised that these sections will be more challenging and engaging than simply wiggling a stick, or guessing a string of numbers.
He explained:
A cool thing about this minigame is that it’s not a binary thing, it’s not so much about success and failure so much as how big you win. The fantasy behind it being that the better you are at this hacking procedure, the more control you get over the actual network that you’re hacking. And that manifests in additional rewards on top of your main objective, being added to you and maybe your inventory.
Another confirmed minigame involves going to the shooting range to polish and hone your skills. There’ll also be races to win, and even boxing matches to get involved with – both of which were in The Witcher 3, although obviously those races involved horses, not hover cars.
Tost said:
Another thing you might do – because vehicles play a big part in our game, and you are in Night City, the city of neon – so of course you’re invited to engage in some car racing activities. So you’ll be able to race your car through the city. On top of that, you can also do boxing matches. I don’t know if you remember the first trailer we had shown, there was the big dude getting broken by this robot. So you can actually fight it in a boxing minigame. It’s like a series of matches that you can attend.
While that already sounds like plenty to be getting on with, it’s worth noting that Tost didn’t confirm that the above minigames were the only ones we’ll be seeing when Cyberpunk 2077 launches in April. Does that mean we’ll see Gwent in some form? I honestly don’t know, but I wouldn’t actually bet against it.
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Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.