Cyberpunk 2077 Interview Roundup: Dualshockers & GamingBolt

CD Projekt’s highly anticipated open world RPG Cyberpunk 2077 still doesn’t have even a preliminary release date, so all we can do for now is wait and maybe read whatever the developers have to say in their occasional interviews.

If that sounds good to you, Dualshockers offer this interview with CD Projekt RED’s quest designer Patrick Mills where he talks about the game’s quest and character design, the sense of urgency, destructible environments, and more, while masterfully evading the multiplayer question. An excerpt:

Giuseppe: Since you work on quests, let’s start by talking about that. Many games tend to create a rather radical divide between main story quests and sidequests. Are you making any effort to make that distinction a bit more organic?

PM: You saw what we did in The Witcher 3: we tried to make sure that our sidequests were often of main quest quality, including multi-hour-long stories. That’s something that we’re interested in doing again with Cyberpunk. We really don’t want the player to feel the difference between main quests and side quests. Maybe they’ll be marked in the UI in a different way, but we don’t want you to feel a difference in quality, particularly in terms of storytelling.

Every one of our quests needs to tell an interesting story.

G: Since you have a certain amount of freedom in designing your character, do the quests actually recognize your choices in creating your V beyond the obvious gender choice? Maybe someone could call you a “blondie” if you have blonde hair or something like that?

PM: Absolutely, and not even just your appearance, but the choices that you make will also affect things later. To make up an example — this is not an actual thing — maybe the way that you solve a quest… If you complete it without a fight, and later on you need help from some people… If you solved that quest by fighting, those people will remember it and say “Actually, you shot one of my friends last week, I’m not gonna help you out.” On the other hand, if you didn’t fight, maybe they’re going to help you out.

But yeah, also the way you dress, the way you customize your character, we want the world to respond to these things.

G: So if you dress in a certain way, NPCs will treat you differently? That’s pretty rare.

PM: It was done in a limited way before in a few other games. Alpha Protocol did it a couple of times and also going back all the way to Daggerfall.

And then, there’s GamingBolt with a few quotes from CDPR’s level designer Miles Tost that confirm that Cyberpunk’s side quests will sometimes influence the main story:

“Side quests 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,” he said. “So it’s all interwoven. And yes, that also means that our side quests could affect the main story.”