Recently, a number of outlets got to go hands-on with the first three or four hours of Cyberpunk 2077, and it seems some aspects of the game’s in-depth character creation have changed. Most notably, the way you determine your character’s backstory has been simplified – previously, CD Projekt Red indicated you’d craft you backstory yourself by taking a short multiple-choice survey, but that’s no longer the case. Now you simply choose between three backstories, Street Kid, Nomad, or Corpo, which will determine what intro missions you get, and may be referenced from time to time throughout the rest of the game.
So, why did CD Projekt Red opt to simplify the process? Cyberpunk 2077 quest designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz explained the decision in an interview with VG247…
Having players shape V’s backstory through a series of choices, like selecting your childhood hero, a key life event, and the reason for choosing to go to Night City, was one of the ideas we were looking at and iterating on earlier in development for character creation. However, the longer we talked about it, the more we felt we wanted to make these choices more meaningful and impactful. This is how we came up with the idea for life paths.
We felt it’d be really cool for players to be able to not only choose V’s origin, but let them experience its events first-hand as a participant. So when players first start the game, they’re presented with a choice of the three life paths — Street Kid, Nomad, and Corpo. Each one starts you off in a completely different place and features an alternative set of prologue quests.
The characters you meet on your adventure will also take notice of where you hail from, with your life path sometimes giving you access to certain dialogue options unique to this background. Our goal was to equip players with as many customization and roleplay options while also fleshing out these totally different perspectives on Cyberpunk 2077’s world for V as a character. I think the life paths system is something that helped us do just that.
So, basically, by limiting the options somewhat, they were able to delve deeper into each one of the backstories offered. Cyberpunk 2077 certainly isn’t the first RPG to make a similar trade off.
Cyberpunk 2077 launches on PC, Xbox One, and PS4 on November 19. A Google Stadia release is also in the works, and enhanced Xbox Series X and PS5 versions of the game are expected in 2021. You can check out all new trailers and footage of the game here and here.
