Repopulate Mission Areas

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TL:DR - Make mission areas accessible after completing their relevant quests and repopulate them with generic enemies to give Cyberpunk 2077 an endgame.

Cyberpunk 2077 is a beautiful cohesive game with so much potential. I found the main missions very enjoyable, but what really took my breath away was the gorgeous interiors. Konpeki Plaza, Arasaka Tower, All Foods, Clouds, Grand Imperial Mall, the list just goes on and on. Every single mission area is beautifully designed and populated with well placed enemies, stealth routes, goodies to pick up and Easter eggs to find. Unfortunately every single one of them (to my knowledge) is used once and then never used again.

As it stands, the world of Cyberpunk 2077 is much like a great novel - it has a beginning and an end. With all great novels, when you get to the end there is always a feeling of dread that its all over. Fortunately for video game developers, games don't have to end when the main story is over. Unfortunately for CDPR and the players, this fact was not taken advantage of at all.

I know that not everyone plays games the same, but if you're anything like me you get into a single player RPG and play the absolute crap out of it. If the game world is cohesive and the gameplay is tight (which CP2077's is), it becomes a place you wanna live in, get a feel for and never want to leave. This is where ENDGAME content comes in.

The current build of Cyberpunk 2077 has no endgame content. Main story missions, gigs, cyberpsycho hits, side missions and most NCPD quests are one-and-done - which is to say you complete them once and then they're done and you never get to do them again in that playthrough. This feels like a huge waste of assets. The further you get into the game, the less it becomes - the world becomes a ghost town.

I'll give an example:
I used a mod to re-enter Konpeki Plaza ages after completing the heist, and the building was exactly the same as when I'd left it - the guards I killed were still lying on the floor, the ones I snuck past were still on high alert, the restaurants were empty and the whole place just felt dead. I managed to glitch myself through a door and find one of the rooms that you sneak the spider bot through still populated with the NPCs that were in there - several Arasaka guards, a netrunner and a few businessmen. None of them could see me and I was able to kill them all except for one who was flagged invulnerable for some reason. It was just spooky and left me with a strange sense of emptiness and deja vu.

It is painstakingly obvious how much blood, sweat, tears, time and money went into designing the mission areas in the game, and it seems like such a waste to have them just sit there in a static state after the relevant mission is complete. Most of the areas aren't even accessible outside of the missions, so even if you wanted to go back to Clouds you can't without tweaking the game files (which is impossible on consoles anyway).


It probably wouldn't be too difficult for all mission areas to have 3 states each:
- "mission" state which is set before the player first enters the area
- "post mission" state which is basically the aftermath of the player's interaction with the mission area
- "open world/sandbox" state which will repopulate the mission area after mission completion in a more generic way like a dungeon with respawning level-scaled enemies and all quest related content (scripted events, dialogue and mission specific NPCs) removed.

It would be great to be able to go back to Konpeki Plaza, have to sneak past security or make a booking, enter through the main lobby and go grab a drink at the restaurant bar which by now has been repopulated with NPCs. Sneak your way into some restricted area, take out some guards, jack into a few terminals, loot some cool stuff and just generally roleplay your own heist.

I know its far fetched that something like this will ever make it into the game, I'd honestly settle for a rudimentary version where at least all the mission enemies respawn after some time, just so there's something to do in the end game, some reason to revisit old locations. Even just respawning the side mission and scanner mission enemies (while leaving the quest complete) would go a long way towards making the game world less of a ghost town.

If you want an example of what this kind of system could do for the endgame look no further than the Living_City Mod (by TheSilver) for the original Watch_Dogs. I rate that game higher than 2 and Legion purely because of this mod. I still play it regularly. It has insane replay value and just keeps me coming back whenever I feel the need to lose myself in a fictional dystopian city.

The world of Cyberpunk 2077 is incredible and I (and many other players) just want a reason to live in it.
 
I have ran into mission areas before the mission was given and there was no NPCs there, just cameras and pop-out turrets. Free to run and loot everything with no interaction with NPCs, no challenge. Unique legendary loot just free to grab which normally if epically difficult.
 
I have ran into mission areas before the mission was given and there was no NPCs there, just cameras and pop-out turrets. Free to run and loot everything with no interaction with NPCs, no challenge. Unique legendary loot just free to grab which normally if epically difficult.

So with a system like this if you stumble into a mission area before picking up the mission it could be in its "sandbox state" with generic enemies so that there is at least something for you to do there. Then if you left and picked up the mission the area can be set to "mission state" and when you go back you can complete the mission. After leaving it is set back to "sandbox" mode and gives you something to do next time you stumble into the area.
 
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