VG247 conducted a lengthy interview and follow-up with Pawel Sasko, CD Projekt Red’s lead designer for Cyberpunk 2077, during and after E3 last month.
E3 showed us the game begins in the Badlands area around Night City. But there’s apparently more than one beginning players can experience.
Sasko said the player can create a custom character that has one of three origin stories, called lifepaths: Nomad, Corpo, or Street Kid. Each origin story has its own separate starting point and background prologue as well, meaning it’ll take multiple playthroughs to see everything Cyberpunk 2077 has to offer.
It’s not certain whether the rest of the story will branch depending on which lifepath players choose, as Sasko only said revealing anything else would spoil too much of the story.
It wouldn’t be too surprising if it does end up with branching story paths, though, as Cyberpunk 2077’s file size will likely be larger than The Witcher 3’s and possibly even come close to Red Dead Redemption 2’s.
Several days ago, a Reddit user spotted a PlayStation Store entry listing the game’s file size as 80GB; TW3’s file size with all DLC included is 51GB. Another Reddit user, PhoOhThree, said the Cyberpunk 2077 team already mentioned on the game’s Discord server that the file size is only a placeholder — meaning the final product, even before DLC, could well be much bigger.
For context, The Witcher 3 takes roughly 50 hours to complete, while finishing everything the game has to offer could take upwards of 150 hours or more; while RDR2, with its 100GB+ file size, might not take quite as long to beat, it’s still a massive and richly realized world.
Regardless of the recently-announced New Game+ mode, it looks like there’s going to be plenty of content in Cyberpunk 2077 when it launches in April 2020.
