To be blunt here, there were many problems with Cyberpunk 2077 when it launched in 2020, and the gaming world knew it. You could argue that CD Projekt Red knew it, and they released the game anyway. The backlash over the launch is legendary even by gaming standards. After all, the game was getting refunded so much that stores refused to sell it until some of its problems were fixed. However, gamers still talk about some “lesser issues” today, and you have to wonder if the dev team saw the backlash coming. For example, the entire game is first-person.
Why is that bad? Well, technically, it’s not, as numerous titles embrace the first-person experience. But Cyberpunk 2077 is an RPG, and a shooter title, and past CD Projekt Red games had all been in third-person to great success. So, does the team regret making that shift? Well, no.
As reported by VGC, CD Projekt Red had an investor meeting/Q&A yesterday, and quest director Paweł Sasko was asked if the team regretted the idea of switching to first-person, and he replied:
“That’s a great question, but there are no regrets on our part. I was one of the people who started developing the first prototypes of this system for Cyberpunk using the Witcher technology. What we wanted to do was for Cyberpunk to have its own identity and to be noticeable as this different thing. The first-person perspective is the main characteristic for Cyberpunk and its perception by the players too. It’s also noticeably different from The Witcher, and this helped us craft the product identity as such.”
Ironically, he also cited how other companies DO stick with “what worked for them before” and thus make “copies” of past games instead of trying to make unique titles:
“This is also what [CD Projekt chief creative officer] Adam Badowski told us a long time ago when we were discussing the first-person perspective in Cyberpunk. As creatives we also need to shift the mindset, not stay in a rut. I don’t want to give you examples, but you know there are many companies or IPs out there that are a bit like line production or copy and paste production. We didn’t want that to happen to us.”
To their credit, it didn’t. The “identity” of the game wasn’t the title’s problem at launch. That was a bunch of other things. Will we see the first-person perspective in the sequel? We’ll find out when it arrives.
