Our Cyberpunk 2077: Everything we know about CD Projekt's next RPG roundup suggests The Witcher 3 dev's latest will be huge. The latter game's sophisticated and intricate quests were some of its most redeeming features, and it seems CDPR's next outing will follow suit.
Speaking to Samuel at Gamescom, quest designer Patrick Mills says logic was crucial while crafting The Witcher 3's DLC quests. He says he and his team would often ask themselves if certain in-game actions made sense—both in relation to quests and the game's overarching plot.
"You've got a quest giver, you've got a person over here—but you could just go straight to that second person and take the quest from them and do it that way?" says Mills. "[The process] has gotten even more complicated in Cyberpunk—there are more multiple ways to resolve individual quests. Before, there were usually a few ways, a couple of decision points. Now there are whole different ways to play the quest.
"I'll say it's a lot of work—they're very, very complicated—but we try to think: if the player says, 'an I do this?' Then, yeah, actually you can, and then you deal with the consequences. That's part of choice versus consequence—don't just have that in the dialogues, but have it in the gameplay as well."
At this stage, Mills isn't able to determine how often Cyberpunk 2077's most involving quests pop up, but does liken them to The Witcher 3.
"What I would say is I'd expect something to similar to The Witcher 3," he says. "Particularly in terms of playtime and in terms of quest complexity. Specifically, I'd even look more at the expansions than The Witcher 3 base game because that's really where the quest design philosophy that we're using now came from—it was developed later in the expansions."
Mills underscores the importance of logic in relation to said design philosophy, before offering a Witcher-related example. For the sake of reference, the following is tied to this (slight spoilers, obviously).
"There was a quest, without getting into too many details, where you had to find a guy's paint, the paint had been stolen," says Mills. "When we were developing it, I remember going into the cave where the paint is supposed to be and the paint wasn't there.
"I signalled this as a bug and said the paint needs to be there—I need to be able to find the paint before the quest begins. And then you have to rewrite the whole quest around the fact that you can in fact find the paint before the quest begins."
As we reported earlier, Mills also told Samuel CD Projekt Red has "just not been ready" to share Cyberpunk 2077's elusive E3 demo footage publicly. There's a new, similarly-structured closed door demo at Gamescom this week, too. Here's hoping the dev lifts the lid on both sometime soon.
Additional reporting by Samuel Roberts.