Cyberpunk 2077 – Notable Cut Features

Following Cyberpunk 2077’s release, PC Gamer’s editors have put together this list of nine notable features that were mentioned during the promotional stages, but never made it to the game for whatever reason. Here’s one example, and you take things from there:

Police could be corrupt, and NPCs will react to you killing civilians

The police system in Cyberpunk 2077 has been heavily criticized. Do crime, and police simply spawn in near you. You can watch it happen. The system doesn’t depend on your crime being witnessed, and the cops don’t use vehicles to approach your location or give chase. They just spawn in, guns blazing.

In a 2019 interview, CD Projekt Red’s Alvin Liu vaguely described a much more ambitious approach to the police, though it doesn’t touch on how they would actually attack players.

“[The police] are basically up for hire,” he said. “The laws exist to take bribes from corporations. So a corporation might pass a law that you can’t sell medicine anymore, and they’re going to enforce it. The only reason they got that law passed was that they bribed the government and they’re only using it as a proxy. So it’s not a place where you want to trust the government necessarily. There probably are some good people out there also, but it’s a city of people trying to constantly get one up on each other.

“We have a system that we’re still iterating upon. People will, you know, not be nice to you if you start killing many people. There are some people you can’t kill because that might have blocked a quest and that’s just by design, but it’s not what our game is based upon. So I would compare it to The Witcher 3 where if you chopped off the head of a villager in the middle of nowhere the guards wouldn’t show up out of nowhere. But if you’re in a big town and someone from the guard sees you and the people nearby run away screaming for help, people will come and try to stop you and they’re going to be usually pretty powerful.”

In the final game, police will come after you even without witnesses, and killing civilians doesn’t affect how NPCs treat you in any way that we’ve seen.