According to lead quest designer Pawel Sasko, Cyberpunk 2077 will let players beat the game without finishing the main quest. The upcoming action-adventure RPG from CD Projekt Red has been gaining hype for years due to its immersive open-world, attention to detail, and the wide away of choices and customization it will grant players.
The game was originally announced way back in 2012 and players have been waiting to hop into the world ever since, wanting to explore the vast world however they see fit. CD Projekt Red's last RPG, The Witcher 3, was incredibly well received for its expansive world and depth of choices, and it seems the studio will take the experiences learned from The Witcher 3 and improve upon them. Visually, characters will be fully customizable, and players can choose their own backstories which not only affect players' abilities, but who they meet in the story as well.
In an interview translated by VG247, Sasko states that the game will have a, "wheat spike," structure as opposed to The Witcher 3's, "main stem of history and side threads departing from it." Elaborating on the system, Sasko added:
"Those subplots allow us to do something that we have never done before – they change the main plot of the game and they are doing that in such a way that you may not even finish the main plot, but still finish the game and get a completely different epilogue than the player with a different lifepath who made different choices, met different characters and formed relationships with them.”
The lifepaths Sasko mentioned are the different backstory options a player can choose when making their character. The choices include Corporate, Nomad, and Street Kid and, as Sasko also adds, they can drastically change gameplay, and the dynamic the player has with different characters. Sasko uses the character Jackie as an example:
"You may have noticed that depending on which history of origin you chose, Jackie’s story changed. This is one example of the fact that depending on the chosen path of origin – as a character you were born in a different place, you have a different story, and therefore both Jackie’s story and your relationship with him was different."
The freedom of choice has been a big selling point of Cyberpunk 2077 so far, and CD Projekt Red is continuing to lean into this decision, as it sounds like no two playthroughs will be exactly alike, even for the same player. Sasko did not detail the different subplots, nor how they could play out but, of course, that is supposed to be the fun of Cyberpunk 2077, players making their own choices that impact the world around them in meaningful ways.
Cyberpunk 2077 has unfortunately faced several delays for a variety of reasons lately, missing its original April launch and now releasing this November. However, CD Projekt Red has assured everyone that they have been using this extra time diligently, polishing and refining the finer details (but also, unfortunately scrapping others) to make sure players' time in Night City is as immersive and smooth as promised. This extra time, combined with the incredible degree of freedom players will have in controlling their own playthrough, all look to make Cyberpunk 2077 one of the most talked about games of both current and next gen consoles.
Source: VG247