CD Projekt wants Cyberpunk to be more accessible to newcomers, but doesn’t want to dumb it down either. For this, they are applying the lessons they learned from the critically acclaimed, The Witcher series.
They want to provide more context and ease players into the story without overloading them with too much info. “What we learned from The Witcher series is that we need to attract people with a smoother learning curve when it comes to the storyline,” CD Projekt’s Adam Badowski told Gamasutra.
The studio’s co-founder Marcin Iwinski chimed in: “In The Witcher 1, for example, we were throwing people in the middle of the story, and we assumed that players would know what is happening! But a lot of players told us that they didn’t really understand this relationship or that relationship.
“With our future games, we want the player to be able to get more context, and we need to introduce the game and its characters to people more properly.”
The main goal of this is to reach a much wider audience without simplifying their games. Usually when a developer talks about accessibility and about having to target a bigger market, the quality of the product suffers, but CD Projekt wants to avoid that.
“And that’s what we want to capture. In [Cyberpunk], we want to create a story that is very profound, but the novice players should be introduced to [the world] better than they were in The Witcher 2,” Iwinski said.
“Just to make sure we’re understood correctly by our fans, this does not mean that we are going to simplify our games. That’s definitely not the case. But for some audiences, the learning curve should be improved, and particularly the introduction to the world needs to be better.”
It’s also about providing options to players to get into the story as they want. “Players should be able to choose how deep they want to enter the story or the plot,” said Michal Platkow-Gilewski, who is behind marketing for the studio.
“If they’re really hardcore, they can really dig deeper and deeper and deeper, and if they’re just casual, they can still learn about the characters and the story, but they’ll do that by going in another direction.”
We do not have much information on Cyberpunk, but we do know that it will be a realistic and brutal RPG for ‘mature’ audiences, along with an “intelligent” non-linear story.
