Thoughts on Quest Design, and world and NPC use [spoilers]

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Hello everybody,

I am just dropping here my personal opinion about Quest Design and NPC and World Use in CP2077 after my second playthrough.

I know that many of the aspects I criticize have a very simple reason: "not enough time / money, needed to release game at a certain point." However, I want to express my thoughts here regarding story expansions and possible successors to come. Thanks in advance for reading :)

I'll emphasize quite a lot about what i enjoyed and what not, and what I think would make sense in the future. However, here the TL;DR version:

great main story is surprisingly short
great NPCs are not used enough
great Night City itself is not used enough
> more exploration of NPCs
> more detective work and investigation to create more interesting side quests
> more motivation for free roaming and exploration
> more random encounters and subplots with choice-and consequence
> more exploration of gangs etc.
> more use of Night City, careful expansion with e.g. a metro system and a parallel cyber world, maybe more outside territories
> terminal like a "billboard" for jobs instead of showing everything on the map from start
> a little more backtracking to re-visit interesting locations such as the hotel where you go for the Relic
> more Witcher 3 or Deus Ex-like quest design and world use, and less GTA/Skyrim
> an actual epilogue


And, to make it clear from the beginning - Cyberpunk 2077 is a great game for me. However, The Witcher 3 is an awesome game.

While CP doesn't reach the quest quality of The Witcher 3, it still gets many things really, really right.

The main quest and characters are, in my opinion, great. I think that almost every NPC you meet is memorable and genuinely interesting.

What was weird for me, however, is that they are not explored more. The game world is massive and would provide tons and tons of opportunities to provide even more side stories with the people who kinda build up the story. I'd have loved to have 2 or 3 more quests with either of those NPCs. And, maybe, maybe, also run into a certain Adam Smasher more than just twice in the whole storyline. And what about that Militec lady? Also she got introduced in a way that you might have expected to have more contact with her, or at least with her employer. But it never happend. it is a pity because the moments in the game where all the attention goes to the NPCs are for me the strongest aspects of the game. Just think about the remembrance ceremony for Jackie - a work of art! And I really liked all the moments of conversation with Johnny. That was a great, great aspect of the game, too.
It is ok for a story not to explore every detail. It is also ok to show certain fractions etc. only once or twice. That's alright, but it doesn't give them the attention they deserve. There could have been so much more.

It is also ok to have random encounters on the map, like the hostage situations and shootouts with gangers. That stuff fits quite nicely into Night City. However, what I really disliked were not only the nonsensical "buy my car" quests, but also the cyber psycho and general fixer quests. I also didn't find the brawling really enjoyable. And why? After playing a little The Witcher 3 again, I must say - the problem is the lack of exploration, detective work and story linking in these quests, and a lack of minigame tournaments etc.

While in The Witcher 3 almost every monster hunter contract provides a certain mini-plot and a choice-and-consequence mechanic, this doesn't exist at all in CP. This angered me especially regarding the Cyberpsycho quests. You have quite a lot of more or less challenging fights but there is no actual story that links those incidents together. Why is that, if you could have built there some really huge plot?

Witcher 3 surprised me in the past a lot with the fact that it was for me the first game to manage to both offer a rich, stunningly beautiful open game world, but still a story with a "drive" you could feel. Especially it was nice to explore the story in a kind of "modularity", like, the bloody baron quests, the novigrad quests, the skellige quests... and there were quite a lot of things to find when you roamed around. Taverns, where you could play a LOT of Gwent, whorehouses, underground concerts, you name it. In fact, Witcher 3 had quite a lot of minigames to offer, and who didn't enjoy that Gwent Tournament in Novigrad?

This modularity exists in CP, too, regarding the side stories of Judy, Panam, River and everybody else - but these story modules are, in my opion, way too short because they don't make enough use of the game world, and they don't trigger an ardour of exploration In fact in both playthroughs it didn't make "sense" to me to go around exploring the world, it had no actual benefit for me. As listed above, stuff like that Gwent Tournament, stuff that shows that there is something going on besides random crime and some brawling matches, are sitll missing in night city. so I think that CP offers a little too much GTA and too little Witcher - a problem in a game that definitely isn't a sandbox.

Now on my third playthrough I take things differently, try to walk almost all distances, to see more of the city... but that's when besides the gorgeous appearance you notice the lack of substance in many places. There are not enough random, meaningful encounters and subplots, and the fact that all the fixer quests are shown already on the map is annoying, too. There should be some kind of terminal that gives you your jobs, like the billboards in The Witcher 3, so that you don't know already before what awaits you. This would also make it possible to get a job via mail - go meet the client, explore his/her intentions in a dialogue, follow certain hints or not, offer more meaningful, different ways to finish the quest. It was strange for me to see this concept get "lost" in CP while it had worked so well int he while Witcher trilogy! And let's remember how the main story of Witcher 3 basically led you through the whole game world - something that unfortunately doesn't happen in CP. That's also weird, because I see all the passion that went into the game world... and then there are so many places that you don't visit a second time, although it would be so interesting. For example the Hotel where you go for the Relic, or AllFoods again in an aftermath mission for or against Maelstrom... etc, etc, etc.

However, this also makes me think of something else - that for successors to CP it might not make much sense to create a new game world. With Night City being as massive as it is, while at the same time being so little used for storytelling as it is now, I think that Story Expansions and even whole successors like, let's say, Cyberpunk 2078 or however you might call it, should use the same set, carefully expanded with more buildings to enter, more external places to explore (the ones that so far throw you back, telling you that there is nothing to see there... yet).

Adding a metro system, more vertical exploration of those massive buildings and maybe a parallel cyber world (which is kinda only hinted at in the pacifica quests) or even some trip(s) to space would make the world even bigger and richer. So all that's missing is... more going on, more stories to explore, more random clubs to enter, with people to speak with, who might pop up 2, 3 or 4 times more, to make everything feel more alive and showing a little "semi-global" stuff happening. For example, you can't support any gang in its struggle against its opponents. There is no dijkstra- or radovid-like subplot, you are kinda in the middle of somethig big, but what you do has little impact (besides the different ending paths when you are already in the endgame). But I am sure many, many players would have loved to explore the world of the Moxx or Maelstrom more and take decisions that create an actual epilogue to the game. Yes, an epilogue is definitely missing.

I mean, Night City is what it is , a huge city, in which kinda every mini market, every building has the potential to tell in itself masses of stories like in the game "Observer" by bloober team (just to remind us how far tech has come). It offers countless possibilities to continue V's story in the existing setting, or telling completely different stories without changing the location.

Cheers, merry Christmas and a happy new year everybody :)
 
Agree 100% with every sentence here since a lot of these points had come to me before also and it was a pleasure to read it all so condensed and articulate.
To point out definitely here here for the future of the franchise using and expanding upon this amazing setting so more complex content can be added to it. A parallel cyberworld is a much missed oportunity too.
But without going into all of the OP points, that I really agree with all, these are the reasons I had for the disapointment I felt in this otherwise great game; more than the bad state it came out on ps4 pro, where i play.
But I also agree with OP accessment of the reasons behind these things lacking in the game. I would add one of the reasons is it being a new franchise new mechanics along with the engine being built; it's almost everything from scratch.
About the Gigs, I went to the point of dedicating some game sessions to record all the phone calls from characters so I would play one when I felt like doing a gig and be in, say Watson, and get a call from Wakako to go do something in Japantown for example. Already made a lot of difference in immersion and the whole game world and hud to seem less mechanical.
About the complexity of boxed content with branching conquences, that I too expected a lot more of, I believe they could have managed that and still maintain that cyberpunk feeling they successfully, in my opinion, conveyed which is to make the protagonist feel just like another piece of these big and corrupt systems, not really being able to make much difference in the big picture. Actually they could deepen ways to explore the subject in the quest's narratives. They could be more focused on how V can change his surrounding and that's where the branching works; on the other hand the way stories like the Peralez' questlines end openly happen so often that it becomes predictable when going through one of those quests that it will end like that. So giving more clarity (V peeking behind some actual curtains) on some missions would add to the unpredictability of the game without taking anything away from that helplessness.
Thanks a lot for that post. Happy new year all.
 
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