CD Projekt REDYou’ve probably heard by now that Cyberpunk 2077 predominately takes place in the sprawling neon metropolis of Night City, but you might not know that CD Projekt RED have actually built a world that offers respite from the hustle and bustle of city life.
As it turns out, Night City is surrounded by a wasteland-like area known as the Badlands, which will all form a part of Cyberpunk 2077’s seamlessly open world.
So, if you want to travel from the centre of town to the edge of a barren wasteland with no loading screens, you can simply boot up Cyberpunk 2077. It’ll save you getting the train from Manchester Piccadilly to Alfreton for the same experience.
CD Projekt REDLead quest designer Pawel Sasko described the Badlands to VG24/7 as an area that’s been ravaged droughts, riots, conflict, and all kinds of other unpleasant things over the last few decades. Much like Night City, the Badlands will have its own quests, characters, and secrets to track down.
Sasko explained:
The Badlands are the surrounding district around the Night City. Players can leave Night City and just explore that area—an area that is mostly sort of destroyed basically after all the droughts and everything that happened in the 50 years from 2020 to ’77. And you can explore that, there are specific quests prepared for that, also open world content, so that’s definitely covered. It’s not only the city that you’re visiting.
The Badlands are controlled by the Nomads, who essentially live on the road but will occasionally settle near cities for periods of time. Whether or not you make them friends or foes is up to you in Cyberpunk 2077, just like pretty much everything else.
The true scope and size of the world of the still in-development Cyberpunk 2077 hasn’t been settled on yet, but we know that there’ll be at least six main districts, as well as a couple of sub districts. Given the size of The Witcher 3’s various maps, I can’t imagine it’ll be on the small side.
CD Projekt REDWe also know the game will boast some pretty substantial endgame content and offer a ton of replayability, so I doubt content will be much of an issue, either. Oh, and Keanu Reeves is in the game. That’s been mentioned to death, but I’m still not fully over 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.