In Cyberpunk 2077, the legends from Johnny Silverhand's era are few and far between. For good reason, mind, considering the dangerous operations that made them legends in the first place. However, it turns out that many more characters from the TTRPG, Cyberpunk 2020, were set to appear in the game, filling Night City with living icons.
This comes from quest designer Paweł Sasko's livestream, where he shed some light on an initial draft of the game. It mostly concerns the mission Never Fade Away, which takes players back to 2020. However, it also appears that many more TTRPG characters were set to appear in 2077 itself, doing a much better job at surviving than Johnny did, for sure.
"When we were actually looking into designing Never Fade Away, one of our angles was we really want to bring back some of those older characters. And by older I mean coming from the lore", Sasko explains. "Our first angle, which I think was incorrect, was to pick everyone [to return]. And when we did that on paper, we were like 'no, this feels a bit weird'. All of those old characters coming back felt like fan service. It didn't feel like an actual real story."
"So much time passed and nothing changed in their lives. So we were actually trying to strike [a] better balance, to have some older characters and some new characters together. So that is for instance why you have Santiago, you have Rogue, Saburo, and a bunch of others."
We still get a good amount of 2020 characters in 2077. As well as the ones Sasko mentions, we have Kerry Eurodyne, Yorinobu, Alt Cunningham, Adam Smasher, and more. However, Sasko's story implies we could have encountered Night City icons like Morgan Blackhand, who just gets the very occasional mention in the final game.
With any luck, more characters from the TTRPG will appear in future content. In the same clip, Sasko reassures fans that expansions are still in development, so that might indicate that the lore of Night City will be explored further.