Cyberpunk 2077 Quests Will be Similar in Length to Quests in The Witcher 3
At present, fans still know almost nothing about Cyberpunk 2077‘s story or quests. CD Projekt Red has yet to show any gameplay demo to the public; despite showing a demo behind-closed-doors at both E3 and Gamescom. However, Patrick Mills, the game’s Quest Designer, has now given fans some insight into what the Cyberpunk 2077 quests will be like; especially when it comes to length and complexity.
Cyberpunk 2077 Quests: Playtime & Complexity
Patrick Mills recently spoke to PCGamer at Gamescom, wherein he described the development and design process behind the Cyberpunk 2077 quests. According to Mills; quest layouts in Cyberpunk 2077 will be even more complicated than previous CD Projekt Red games; “You’ve got a quest giver,” he explains; “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.”
Decisions and Consequences in Quests
According to Mills, decisions and consequences will play an even larger part in the Cyberpunk 2077 quests than ever before. With more ways to play each quest, there is greater potential for player-driven decision-making. As a result, there are also more potential outcomes. Mills compared the quests to those from The Witcher III: Wild Hunt; “What I would say is I’d expect something similar to The Witcher 3,” he states; “particularly in terms of playtime and in terms of quest complexity. Specifically, I’d even look more at the expansions than The Witcher 3 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.”
Mills used the example of a quest from The Witcher 3 to illustrate his point; “There was a quest, without getting into too many details, where you had to find a guy’s paint, the paint had been stolen. When we were developing it, I remember going into the cave where the paint is supposed to be and the paint wasn’t there. I signalled this as a bug and said the paint needs to be there; I need to be able to find the paint before the quest begins. And then you have to rewrite the whole quest around the fact that you can in fact find the paint before the quest begins.”