Cyberpunk 2077 was one of the many games that caught the delay bug earlier in the month. Originally slated to release in April, the game was pushed back to September. Regardless, it’s still probably going to be one of the year’s biggest games, if not the biggest. Part of that is the gritty cyberpunk world it will create. Filled with danger, drugs and sex, it’ll be a grand old time. It also seems that it could go to some really dark places some people may not be ready for, but with promises it won’t be “tasteless.”
In a long interview with ONMSFT, Producer John Mamais discussed the content of the game, specifically in relation to the notoriously strict Australian rating board. He seems to hint the game could have some type of “sexualised violence,” though assures that the player character won’t have direct involvement in that.
“We have a big list of things that could be bad for us in Australia,” Mamais said. “The two big things are sexualized violence and drugs with rewards but you can’t really do cyberpunk without drugs, right?
“We’re not going to water it down but I don’t think there are any situations where you can take any real street-named drug and get a reward from it. And there definitely aren’t going to be any tasteless sexualized violence either.
“In the real-world, there’s lots of sexualized violence, right? It happens. So it might exist in this world but the player will never be involved with something like that.”
He goes on to explain that the distinction between tasteless and non-tasteless sexualized violence is how the player involvement is.
“It’s an art form, or we want it to be an art form, and we want to talk about difficult subjects like that but, yeah, we won’t… We’re not going to make a game where the player can do those kinds of things. It would be awful and tasteless,” he said.
Sexual violence is something games haven’t tackled much, at least on the mainstream level. Whether or not we’ll see anything significant in relation to that in Cyberpunk 2077 remains to be seen, but CD Projekt RED have proven themselves strong storytellers and, at the very least, it seems like they have enough sense not to let the player go there.