Cyberpunk 2077/The Witcher 2 Interview

PC Gamer offers an interview with CD Projekt RED PR specialist Agnieszka Szóstak on Cyberpunk 2077, the Witcher 2 and more. Earlier they posted a snippet with her comments on the letters the company sent to pirates, so here’s some bits about Cyberpunk 2077.

PC Gamer: Since Cyberpunk will be using RED Engine, is there the possibility of introducing REDKit compatibility, making it moddable?

Agnieszka Szóstak: You know, we got lots of questions like that before we’ve actually said that REDKit will be available, and we are doing this toolset. So, it’s like, we did that with The Witcher 1, we’re doing this with The Witcher 2, so there’s a high, high, high possibility we are going to do this with Cyberpunk, but since it’s in a very early stage of development, it’s too early to talk about that.

That will be a logical step, and knowing our team how ambitious they are, and how supportive we are in terms of our community it’s something we’d like to do. Will that happen? It’s too early to say, but it’s a great idea to consider and I know we would love to. It’s all about things like timing, doing it right, because releasing the tool is one thing, and then making it as accessible and working well and all those stuff, it’s more difficult.

(…)

PCG: How different is it in the open world respect? There’s still a central narrative, right?

AS: Storytelling is really important to us, so that’s one of the key features for each and every of our games. On the other hand, Cyberpunk, from definition, should allow you to do different kind of stuff. It should allow you to have a real choice between the main plot and just exploring the world and doing different side quests. So, this is one of the greatest challenges we will have to face, because we do believe that we can actually create a great story within the whole world that people will enjoy and would like to follow, so we have to think how to create a world that will be consistent in terms of what you can do outside the main story, and how those side quests are connected to the main story itself. How to make it approachable and immersive enough so gamers don’t get lost in the whole thing.

So if they’re like, 100s of hours into the gameplay and they’ve left the main plot at some point and just started exploring the world how to make sure that after several hours they won’t be lost and saying, (So where was I? What was I supposed to do? What’s the main story all about?) So it is totally challenging, though the plan for now is to create a really gripping and immersive story that will drive the whole world, and side quests around it will be very connected and kind of, the best thing we could possibly do is actually have those side quests connected one with another, all of them with the main plot.

So, let’s say if we reveal some things in the main plot, or if you reveal some side information regarding what’s going on in the main story. So that’s very, very hard to achieve, but we do believe we will with Mike’s help and the great team working on it.