At Gamescom 2018, of the many, many details CD Projekt RED shared about their upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 was about how its side quests would be intrinsically tied to the main story, and how progress in side quests would have a major impact on progress in the main narrative as well.
That’s, of course, something we’ve come to expect from CD Projekt RED games. The Witcher 3 is more or less the poster boy for games with excellent side quests, with many of its ancillary stories being on par even with the critical one- if not even better. That, according to Cyberpunk 2077’s quest designer Patrick Mills, is going to continue in the studio’s upcoming title as well.
“Oh yeah, absolutely,” Mills told Metro when asked about whether this is a direction CD Projekt RED will continue heading in with Cyberpunk 2077. “The way that we develop side quests is very often by looking at the main story; after we’ve written out and sketched out the main story we find the characters that maybe we want to spend more time with, themes, or even bits of old main story that aren’t getting used anymore.”
“Because we iterate a lot so sometimes you wind up with something that is part of the main story and then at some point you’re like, ‘No, main story has changed but we’ll make it a side quest’,” he continued. “And because there’s not the pressure of being part of a multi-hour long story you have a little bit more freedom to figure it out. And for us, our rule for side quests is that the story has to be something that you’ve never seen before, there’s gotta be something in this story that’s different. It’s never gonna feel like, ‘Go here, do that’. It’s you go there and do that and then something happens.”
CD Projekt RED’s method of writing and re-writing their main story and side quests multiple times has proven to be a great success, and we can only hope it’ll continue to be just as successful in Cyberpunk 2077 as well. How quests’ progression will be handled and how they might affect the story is something the studio spoke more of recently- read more on that through here.