Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City is going to be a fascinating environment to explore. It looks dense and packed with detail, it’s being brought to life with excellent technical accomplishments and vivid art design, it’s promising to be large and full of interesting things to see and do. Clearly, it’ll be the star of the show in CD Projekt RED’s upcoming RPG. But it won’t be the only explorable area in the game.
In an interview with Eurogamer, Cyberpunk 2077’s lead quest designer Paweł Sasko was asked if Night City will be the extent of the game’s open world and its explorable environments, and Sasko said that that wouldn’t be the case. For starters, the cyberspace that was teased in the trailer at E3 will also be explorable in some cases, but more importantly, the area right outside Night City, known as the Badlands, will also be part of the game’s open world. Interestingly enough, Sasko also teased “a few other surprises.”
“Cyberspace is a really dangerous place – as you saw in this year’s demo, there were multiple netrunners you needed support from to get in there, you were lying in the bathtub full of ice because your body becomes a CPU and you need a lot of transferring power,” said Sasko. “So you access cyberspace in specific story moments and in some cases you can explore it.”
“But the game isn’t only Night City,” he continued. “There’s an area surrounding it, the Badlands. You can leave the city and explore, see what the world looks like outside the city and… it looks harsh outside the city. But you have quests there, contracts you can do, and you’ll be sent there by the main story as well. And there are also a few other surprises.”
Cyberpunk 2077 will be out on April 16, 2020 for the PS4, Xbox One, and PC- but we’ll be seeing its extended E3 2019 demo much sooner than that. CD Projekt RED have also confirmed that you’ll be able to finish the entire game non-lethally.