It’s fair to say that people are expecting big things from Cyberpunk 2077, especially given that it’s from the team who gave us The Witcher 3 – one of the richest open world experiences of all time.
However, where the majority of The Witcher 3’s side quests were their own self-contained stories, it sounds like the diversions in Cyberpunk 2077 will play a much larger role in influencing the course of the main game.
In a recent interview with Gamingbolt, CD Projekt RED level designer Miles Tost suggested that your little diversions can come back in unexpected ways throughout the game.
He said:
Sidequests are great opportunities for us to tell stories of our cyberpunk world. After all, despite not being a part of the main questline, they are still connected to the world and can elaborate on certain parts of it, like the characters. So it’s all interwoven. And yes, that also means that our sidequests could affect the main story.
Meanwhile, quest designer Patrick Mills told PC Gamer earlier in the year that the basic structure of quests in Cyberpunk 2077 resemble the side missions in The Witcher 3 DLC expansions, rather than the base game.
This is great news, given that the quests in Blood and Wine and Hearts of Stone were actually much more fleshed out and would often have an effect on the world and characters in fun and unexpected ways.
Mills said:
Particularly in terms of playtime and in terms of quest complexity. Specifically, I’d even look more at the expansions than The Witcher 3 base game because that’s really where the quest design philosophy that we’re using now came from—it was developed later in the expansions.
There’s still no official word on when Cyberpunk 2077 will arrive – if it even launches this gen – but the general consensus seems to be that it’ll come to PS4, Xbox One, and PC late 2019/early 2020.
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.