Cyberpunk isn’t really a genre that’s all that popular in video games, but Mateusz Tomaskiewicz, quest director for CD Projekt RED’s upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 game, isn’t letting that stop him from developing the game. He’s apparently been using Deus Ex as Cyberpunk 2077 inspiration, right down to the sunglasses that are worn by protagonists.
Cyberpunk 2077 presents a unique challenge for the CD Projekt RED crew, which has made its entire name and reputation on the open-world sword and sorcery medieval setting of The Witcher and its own various games. Going from that to the vastly different Cyberpunk setting, with its flying cars, genetic and cybernetic modifications, and most importantly guns, is going to present a huge change.
Deus Ex isn’t the only bit of Cyberpunk 2077 inspiration that Tomaskiewicz used either. He also made use of narrative cues from games like Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines and The Elder Scrolls as well, where sidequests were just as big of a part of the game as the main plot, in contrast to Witcher 3’s strong central story.
Both games, however, will have a massive open world in common. While Night City won’t be as pastoral as any of the Witcher’s environments, it will still provide a huge number of stories and sidequests for players to embark on, each one with multiple methods of solving it.
Each of these sidequests will have resources and storytelling close to the bar set by the critical path according to Patrick Mills, another quest designer, and will do their best to include things that we’ve never seen before.
Whether CD Projekt RED will be able to live up to these promises remains to be seen, but hopefully we’ll be seeing actual gameplay and a release date of Cyberpunk 2077 when E3 comes around, where we can see all of this Cyberpunk 2077 inspiration in the flesh.
