We recently got the chance to talk to CD Projekt Red about the gangs of Cyberpunk 2077. There’s eight of them, unless you count the cops - in which case there are nine. We absolutely count the cops.

You can read our full Cyberpunk 2077 gangs interview here, but we got a lot of information about how the underworld of Night City fits together - basically, everyone under the boot of the corporations. But how do the cops fit into that ecosystem? It seems that, like everyone else, they’re at the whims of the corps - a private security force for the rich.

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“The Night City Police Department is pretty corrupt,” quest director Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz explained. “One of our designers always referred to them as another one of the gangs of Night City because they kind of operate that way. Although, of course, they operate within the law that is established in Night City. But the law of Night City is dictated by the corporations and for the interests of the corporations. So their prime interest is to secure the corporate interest within the richer districts.”

Police still intervene in the poorer districts if they’re called to an emergency, but those districts are way at the bottom of the priority list. They respond with less “zeal”. That’s why gangs rule the streets. The cops of Night City are known to look the other way for certain types of gang activity, you see - especially when the gangs are running errands for the corporations.

“The corporations, gangs, and even the Nomads are all part of this one system of co-dependencies,” Tomaszkiewicz said. “You can imagine, for example, that sometimes a corporation wants some job done on the streets - maybe some sabotage on the other corporations - but they don’t want to do it openly, they might work with a gang. They might supply them with weapons in exchange for some services. With Nomads it might be similar because Nomads transport things between the states. They might smuggle things that the corporations don’t want to be on the books.”

CD Projekt Red isn’t fully pulling from the ACAB playbook, however. There are some good cops hidden away in this bustling metropolis. Even with cybernetically-enhanced eyeballs, they’ll be hard to find, but they do exist.

“We would like to make a point that, even though that’s the state of things in Night City, there are some good people there too - there are some characters that you will meet that are a little bit different in that regard - but they are like exceptions to the rule,” Tomaszkiewicz said.

Elsewhere, we also spoke about the concept of Cyberpunk 2077's "doll houses", which is where cyborg sex workers operate. CD Projekt Red also revealed that Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't feature emergent gang battles, since almost everything is hand-crafted.

Cyberpunk 2077 is releasing for PS4, Xbox One, next-gen, and PC on November 19.

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