Cyberpunk 2077's quest design has more in common with The Witcher 3's expansions than the base game
Cyberpunk 2077's quests utilise The Witcher 3 DLC's "design philosophy".
CD Projekt's quest designer, Patrick Mills, has likened quests in Cyberpunk 2077 to The Witcher 3's expansions, saying that the two are similar "in terms of playtime and...complexity," in an interview at Gamescom with PC Gamer.
"You've got a quest giver, you've got a person over here—but you could just go straight to that second person and take the quest from them and do it that way? [The process] has gotten even more complicated in Cyberpunk - there are more multiple ways to resolve individual quests. Before, there were usually a few ways, a couple of decision points. Now there are whole different ways to play the quest," he explained.
The quests are very much designed from the perspective of the player, with Mills giving an example of the logic we see in some games, that can be missing in others, where the player is tasked with finding an item in a certain location. His point is that the item shouldn't magically appear only when the quest is accepted. If the player stumbles into the location before finding the quest giver, they should still be able to find the item in question.
"I'll say it's a lot of work — they're very, very complicated — but we try to think: if the player says, 'can I do this?' Then, yeah, actually you can, and then you deal with the consequences. That's part of choice versus consequence — don't just have that in the dialogues, but have it in the gameplay as well."
Mills says players should "expect something similar to The Witcher 3...in terms of playtime and in terms of quest complexity," adding that they have more in common with the expansions than the 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."
The studio is yet to share gameplay footage with the general public, but we did get a slew of screenshots earlier this week that feature sidekick Jackie Welles, from the game’s behind-closed-doors E3 demo.
For more on Cyberpunk 2077, you can check out everything we know so far right here.
The game is currently in development for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.