Cyberpunk 2077 – CD Projekt RED Still Working on Melee Combat, “Not 100 Percent Happy”

CD Projekt RED revealed quite a bit about Cyberpunk 2077 in today’s Night City Wire, from how the Life Paths would differentiate V to the various tools of destruction available. In the latter, we saw a variety of guns and Cyberware but only one melee weapon in the Thermal Katana. Interestingly, the development team is still working to refine melee combat and said it’s not “100 percent happy” with it.

Speaking to VG247 in an interview, senior gameplay designer Pawel Kapala said that, “We’re still a couple of months before release, and I’m actually right now working on melee. We’re spending a lot of time trying to perfect that, and we basically, we’re not 100 percent happy, mostly with visual feedback on the hits, on the melee. So, we’re still working on it.

“I’m happy to say that, even right now, it’s much better than it was. And it’s going to get even better. And we acknowledge that this is something that we need to perfect, basically. But as you said, melee in a first-person game is extremely difficult, from the get-go. So, it wasn’t an easy task, since we basically come from a pedigree of creating third-person perspective games. It was also a big part of our development to actually figure out, how do you do melee in a first-person perspective? We’re working on it.”

Whether it’s vastly improved or only somewhat better, there will doubtless be players who opt for melee-only runs. The question: How viable will those be? Kapala notes that you can go for just melee combat but there will be a number of challenges involved. “We put a lot of emphasis on the fact that enemies in our game exist in the game world. And if you take out a katana, and the encounter, for example, has two snipers, they will not oblige you. They will still shoot at you with their sniper rifles.

“So, you need to basically think about your approach. Yes, it’s technically possible to run around everywhere with a katana. However, if you see a helicopter, would you charge at it with a knife? I don’t think so. It might not be a very good strategy.”

Essentially, if you’re going to pull the “I am one with the Force and the Force is one with me” routine, then you might end up dead. It should still be interesting to see if it’s possible, even if some trickery is needed.

Cyberpunk 2077 is currently set to release on November 19th for Xbox One, PS4 and PC. CD Projekt RED confirmed another episode of Night City Wire is on the way so stay tuned for more details in the coming weeks.