Unsurprisingly, CD Projekt Red had to pull off a total 180 when it announced it would be working on Cyberpunk 2077 back in 2012. Up to that point, the studio was mostly known for its work on The Witcher series, which followed a monster hunter in a distinctly European take on medieval fantasy. Designing a world in a completely different genre, it turns out, is a very different experience.
In an in-depth interview for The Gamer, Cyberpunk 2077's lead quest designer Pawel Sasko told the outlet that development on back-to-back Witcher titles had left the team in a pretty comfortable spot with the series and the feeling of making a fantasy world. However, the "novelty" of making a whole new world with new tools was "just exciting."
"It was like, 'Oh my god, I can have a car in the game now. I can have a gun in the game. I can have a phone," Sasko shared. As it turns out, it's really easy for us as players (and people of the modern world) to take these things for granted, but these constraints radically shaped CD Projekt Red's approach to quest design over the years.
As Sasko points out, "In the Witcher world, it's so difficult to give you a quest as a player. You always have to have someone that you met, or you found something, or there is a messenger that keeps running your way and you bump into them." That sounds…quite exhausting to design around if I'm being honest, but it was CD Projekt Red's bread and butter by the time that the studio had begun developing Cyberpunk 2077.
By comparison, Cyberpunk 2077 appeared to give the team brand new toys to play with that expedited things quite a ways, like a cell phone. While players will sometimes mock how often characters in the game try to get V on the phone, it must have been a miracle to the team to be able to cut down on all the traveling and precise maneuvering needed to get Geralt anywhere. In Cyberpunk, as Sasko puts it, a character, and more importantly a quest giver, can instead just "text you, they can send you a picture."
It will be a wonder to see how CD Projekt Red now takes its learnings from Cyberpunk 2077 and not only bolsters them for the upcoming sequel, but also adapts them for The Witcher 4. Just don't expect Ciri to suddenly have a magic pad that connects her to everyone she's ever met, though.
