Cyberpunk 2077’s Quests Will be More Intertwined Than The Witcher’s
The Witcher III: Wild Hunt was widely lauded at its launch for the sheer amount of content which the game featured. The base game, even before DLC, included an enormous amount of story and side-quests. However, these quests existed largely independent of one another. When it comes to Cyberpunk 2077, however, CD Projekt Red is aiming to intertwine their quests more than ever before.
Quests in Cyberpunk 2077
In The Witcher III, there were some instances where quests caused others to fail. For the most part, these quests had to be completed before a certain major point in the game’s story. However, the two quests did not actually interact. While choices could sometimes be made within a quest; most quests were fairly linear or simply had steps which could be completed in any order. Speaking in a recent interview, CD Projekt Red’s quest designer, Patrick Mills, explained how choice will be at the heart of Cyberpunk 2077’s quests.
To explain his point, he described the gameplay shown at CD Projekt Red’s journalists-only gameplay demo. In this demo, the player had the choice to attend a meeting with a crime boss, or visit a cybernetic augmentations doctor first. “Those scenes pretty much play out more or less the same,” stated Mills; “but there are little bits of reaction, little bits of differences, even something as simple as that, you want to make sure they reference once another.”
He explained that CD Projekt Red carefully broke down roles within their development teams. This helped the quest writers to coordinate their projects; “This is the first place I’ve ever had this specific breakdown of responsibilities. It’s how we make our quests, by having dedicated quest designers who are, in essence, directors of the many individual stories that a story is made up of.”
Given the introduction of hacking and other futuristic elements; it seems likely that there will be more ways than ever to complete any given quest or objective. As Geralt of Rivia, you could specialise in certain skills, but your core skill-set was always mostly the same. In Cyberpunk, players will likely have a lot more freedom to build a different protagonist than other players.