I am disappointed and curious about this news. The reasons are the same as others listed:
- For anyone to operate longer periods of time outside the law, one needs multiple safe houses. To not have them is illogical. What is illogical ingame is immersion breaking.
- As mentioned by others, one great reason for a character to have multiple apartments is to show progression in the world. Get money, rent/buy better apartment. This piece of news also makes me wonder about the length of the game and how much of it actually IS open world (once again) as opposed to short and strict main-story only, moving from scene to scene.
Even Adam Jensen, in Deus Ex which is VERY MUCH very strict, linear, singular story, has an apartment (granted, only one, but Jensen doesn't operate outside the law the way V does). In Vampire the masquerade: bloodlines which was released in poor shape, one player character could have up to 3 apartments during a single playthrough (Santa Monica, downtown apartment, clan-specific haven).
- If there exist hotels or something like that, those are not really that different from an apartment and I would find it strange if you couldn't use those either. I would have imagined that hotels would've been mentioned if using them was possible ingame. Apartment is just a base of operations...
And there's another concern. When asked, Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz only listed hacking, racing, martial arts and shooting range as mini-games. With the sprawling, beautiful world of Night City I sure hope there will at least be a few casinos.
But the way he talked about it made me wonder if he misunderstood the question.