Cyberpunk 2077 is one of the most hotly anticipated games of 2020, and for good reason. Not only is it the next project from the award-winning team behind The Witcher trilogy, but delays to CD Projekt Red’s Triple-A title have only served the title, not hampered it.
What is clear already is that Cyberpunk 2077 is an incredibly ambitious project, with the developer claiming that it will mark a leap forward in video game immersion. However, the game will need to take one big lesson away from The Witcher 3 if it is to match or surmount its achievements.
Cyberpunk's Ambitions
Last year, CD Projekt Red stated that Cyberpunk 2077's level of immersion would be “better, bigger, [and] more revolutionary” than The Witcher 3. The developer’s co-founder Marcin Iwinski drew comparison between the growth between The Witcher 1, a far more traditional RPG, and the easier learning curve and greater immersion of The Witcher 3.
Iwinski pointed to the developer’s acclimatization to American gaming culture as one catalyst for the change, stating that “in the U.S., which we had to learn the hard way, it’s 'If it’s like that, then I’m not playing it; see you, thanks.'” To drive home the ambition of Cyberpunk 2077, the studio has also claimed that it wanted to make sure every quest in Cyberpunk feels like a full story, stating that no side missions should feel like “filler” and that “every quest feels like a complete story in and of itself.”
While these are exciting glimpses behind the scenes of The Witcher's developer, The Witcher 3 was not a great and immersive RPG experience simply because the game was more mechanically simple and because the side quests felt like stories in and of themselves.
Why The Witcher Works
The side quests in The Witcher 3 don’t always feel like complete stories in and of themselves. Indeed, some missions are so peripheral to anything resembling a full plot that the quests are missed by most Witcher 3 players. The immersion factor doesn’t come from the quests always having their own completely fleshed out stories to tell, but rather the fact that they don’t take away from the player’s immersion in the main story.
That might seem obvious, but there are plenty of RPGs where completing the side missions and exploring the world feels inappropriate in the context of the broader narrative. Both The Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 have plots driven by extreme urgency – in both cases the protagonist’s child (in Geralt’s case adopted) is missing and needs to be found.
Even the most fun side quests in Fallout 4, like the Silver Shroud quest-line, stick out as bizarrely inappropriate diversions for the main character to go on, even if they are complete stories in and of themselves. It is the very fact that some of these stories feel completely self-contained that makes them feel immersion breaking to many players.
If the player’s Sole Survivor finds themself at the end of the aforementioned Silver Shroud missions trying to rescue Kent, the ghoul who put them up to it, from vicious gangsters, the elephant in the room is how on earth a parent with a missing child could find themself going down such a deep and tangential rabbit hole when the life of their only child is on the line elsewhere.
In The Witcher 3, even completing every side quest in sight feels utterly immersive. The RPG gameplay behavior which the game encourages is ingeniously aligned with Geralt as a character, with his constant travelling and taking contracts being the only way he is able to survive, and so the only way to continue and fund his quest to save Ciri. This alignment of character and gameplay outside of dialog is one of the reasons Geralt remains one of the most immersive video game protagonists of all time.
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Cyberpunk's Future
Cyberpunk 2077 will need to ensure that its side missions don’t feel like complete stories at the expense of immersion by confusing the priorities of V, the player character. To compare V to Geralt, players will need their out-of-game motivation to complete side quests to align with the in-game motivation of their character. Only then will the side quests feel like a part of one overarching story about the character, not a series of independent and self-contained, but complete, stories which could be played in any order.
CD Projekt Red has stated that it doesn’t want side missions to feel like “something to do while waiting for the next quest, or to get more money to buy the next thing.” The Witcher 3, however, demonstrates that connecting narrative motivation to in-game needs like currency is a great way to increase immersion.
In an ideal world where CD Projekt Red achieves its goal of bringing RPGs into the next generation with its upcoming game, side quests would be indistinguishable from the main story regardless of the Cyberpunk lifepath the player chooses in-game, and would not be "side" quests at all, but rather aspects of the entire story which can be skipped or completed to varying effects on the world.
One issue that may arise is that, unlike Geralt, it is not certain that V will have a clear single character motivation. With CD Projekt Red emphasizing character customization in Cyberpunk, it remains to be seen what overarching motive all of these side quests could be tied into, without which it will certainly not achieve its goal of making the game more immersive than The Witcher.
Nonetheless the world of Cyberpunk 2077 will need to be one that motivates the side quests with a sense of equal urgency to Cyberpunk's main story, as in Geralt’s case where, narratively, even optional quests are part of his survival and Witcher work on his journey to save Ciri. The completeness of the side quests themselves is not the issue – what remains to be seen is how CD Projekt Red integrates player’s in-character reasons for completing the game’s side quests into a single consistent narrative.
Cyberpunk 2077 is set to release November 19th, for PC, PS4, and Xbox One, with a PS5, Stadia, and Xbox Series X version planned for the future.