You might be aware of this by now, but Cyberpunk 2077 is going to be first person game. What it’s also going to have is a character customization toolset, that lets you alter the physical appearance of who you’ll be playing is- you don’t often see these two things in a single game at the same time. If you’re playing in first person, you don’t see much of your character other than their hands, so why bother with altering their appearance, right? In the past CDPR has addressed this issue but in a new interview, one of their developers has further clarified why they are going with this direction.
This question was posed to quest designer Patrick Mills in an interview with the Official Xbox Magazine (September 2018, Issue 167), who said that CD Projekt RED wants Cyberpunk 2077 to be the player’s own, personalized story, before going on to point out differences with their previous trilogy, The Witcher.
“Well, it’s an RPG,” he said. “It’s an RPG before it’s a shooter. And it’s really about making a character and inhabiting that character and living in this world and making choices from not just the point of view of that character but also of yourself. With The Witcher, you had Geralt, and Geralt had a history. He had decades of books, games, comics, and even television series, with a new one on the way, and it was about guiding him through his story. But with this, we want it to be your story. So really, putting you in first person is the only way to do that.”
This isn’t the first we’ve heard from the developers about the game being first person. Recently, Mike Pondsmith, the creator of the original Cyberpunk pen and paper RPG, also spoke on the matter, stating that viewing the world of Cyberpunk 2077 from a first person perspective was the best option, and would be the most immersive. Read more on that here.