CD Projekt Red has come out and said that the main campaign length of Cyberpunk 2077 is going to be a little shorter than The Witcher 3. That's mostly due to a whole bunch of players never actually finishing Witcher 3, although we hasten to point out that might be due to the ludicrous amount of side quests rather than the main campaign being particularly long.
It looks like there might be a similar "problem" in Cyberpunk 2077.
Over the weekend, lead QA tester at CD Projekt Red Lukasz Babiel casually dropped the fact he's been playing Cyberpunk 2077 for over 175 hours. On top of that, he said he's not even close to being done.
Babiel started off his tweet with the standard "How it started, how it's going" meme that's been making the rounds on social media. Of note is Babiel's choice to play as the Nomad Lifepath, which gets recorded on your save file so you never forget.
When a Cyberpunk fan asked if 175 hours represents a completionist time, Babiel responded: "Not really, that's just one of my ongoing slow-paced playthroughs on the hardest difficulty where I play more stealthy than usual, loot everything, use every feature the game has to offer, I take my time ;)."
Babiel also noted that difficulty in Cyberpunk can be changed at any time, so there’s no reason to spend your waking hours slogging through bullets trying to see Cyberpunk’s story.
In our previous discussion of Cyberpunk 2077's length, we noted that 175 hours is basically a completionist time for the core Witcher 3 experience, although the DLCs have added many more hours to that number. If Cyberpunk can keep itself under 175 hours for the main campaign but add a litany of side quests to follow, we can see it having an ideal playthrough length.
We should note, however, that there's going to be multiple endings in Cyberpunk 2077 so you might want to play through the game more than once to see all there is to see. But with the dynamic world that Cyberpunk 2077 has promised, that might not be possible for most of us.