At the moment, most of the gaming community seems to be wrapped up in the breathtakingly-long wait for CD Projekt Red’s highly-anticipated Cyberpunk 2077. Keanu Reeves confidently unveiled the game’s April 2020 release date at E3, but with that date nearly a year in the future, the interim time will feel all the more agonizing.
That said, news and leaks about the game have started to ramp up now that an official release date has been confirmed. While there isn’t much gameplay footage for the public to go off of at the moment, we’ve been blessed with quite a bit of information from those behind Cyberpunk’s development.
Specifically, lead quest designer Pawel Sasko recently spilled the beans about a number of gameplay and story elements in the upcoming game. Most crucially, he revealed that Cyberpunk 2077 will feature a romance system that’s “very similar” to what we’ve seen in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, CD Projekt Red’s previous major outing—a game which was, somewhat controversially, just announced for the Nintendo Switch.
According to a Reddit post on the Cyberpunk sub, Sasko, a man who seems to end most of his sentences with "winky faces", said that the romance system in the upcoming RPG will follow the structure seen in The Witcher in that unique options and questlines will become available to the player depending on a variety of factors. These elements were certainly robust in The Witcher, but Cyberpunk may well take the groundwork done in CD Projekt’s previous game and expand upon it.
Most crucially, fans have been clamoring to find out if non-heterosexual relationships will be possible in Cyberpunk 2077. This was a notable absence from The Witcher 3, though Sasko explained that, because Geralt was a predetermined character, the player wasn’t granted access to options that would have been outside of the character’s personal tastes. Given that players can design their own characters in Cyberpunk 2077, that likely won’t be an issue, and Sasko did seem to imply that more dynamic romance options will indeed be a part of the far-future inspired game.
Player choice certainly seems to be at the forefront of Cyberpunk 2077, and we’re not talking about the buy-in-game-currencies-or-grind-for-forty-hours sort of “player choice” that other, less reputable publishers like to include in their games. Of course, there was a bit of a dust-up concerning transgender representation in the game, and it’s hard to determine exactly how that kind of backlash may factor into what’s ultimately possible in the game at release.
Still, the aforementioned capstone on the Witcher trilogy was an undisputed high water mark for RPGs this generation, and fans are keeping their fingers crossed in the hope that CD Projekt Red will somehow manage to outdo themselves come next April. Romance options will, at the end of the day, only serve as one small aspect of an otherwise overwhelmingly-massive game, but it’s nice to know that attention is being paid to every last detail of the experience.