Still grumpy about Cyberpunk 2077’s delay from April to September? Even grumpier about the revelation that multiplayer – the thing we care about around here – has now been pushed off until more like 2022? Keep on being grumpy. There’s nothing in this article that will make you less grumpy. But it might make you more intrigued.
What is on deck today is a new interview from On Microsft (OnMSFT) with CD Projekt Red’s John Mamais, which touches on everything from the hope that the game would launch in 2019, the source of the lore, how much has changed in the game’s design over time, censorship over drugs and sexualized violence – even efforts to avoid making gamers motion-sick. There’s also a bit about playing as a pacifist and the game’s open world.
“We don’t have any simulator stuff or gameplay. In Witcher 3, we did the open-world elements very late in the development process when we only had two or three people working on it or something. Now there’s, like, 15 people doing these open-world quests. There’s a couple of layers. There’s a passive layer, which is the vendors, then there’s the STSs, which are the street stories. I think there’s around 75 street stories. Then there’s minor activities as well. The street stories are like little quests. There’s story but there’s not, like, advanced cinematic storytelling sequences so much. They’re a way to explore the world and level-up your character.”
What grabbed our attention was the mention of multiplayer – and why it will take so much longer to complete, chiefly because it’s not gonna be just a tacked-on version for the main game. “We’re not mixing the two things,” Mamais says. “Totally focusing on single-player.” But when asked about the type of multiplayer mode we’ll see, he’s mum on the subject. “That’s going to be talked about a year from now or something. I wish I could say more.”
