Why You Missed Cyberpunk's Sidequests - Extra Credits Gaming

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this is me just sharing my opinion, but as someone who's never lived in a large city IRL Night City made me explore because it was just entirely alien to me. It allowed small town farm boy like me to experience a truely massive city in a safe medium.

In Cyberpunk's defense, this is a game that tries to adhere to the whole concept of us being irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Night City looks beautiful but is restrictive because that's exactly what we are; a restricted citizen; we're poor, unimportant, and oppressed. Makes sense why Skyrim or Fallout would have you feel empowered to explore; they're games where you're the hero (and also, subtlety is an alien concept to Bethesda). Cyberpunk is a world that doesn't care about you, and it's entirely by design.

One angle I'm disappointed they didn't try with Cyberpunk was using Augmented Reality overlays to enhance the world. You just know that in a real cyberpunk world with A.R. being commonplace, every business would have A.R. signage. You could even get the "spot a far-off vista in the distance" effect with an A.R, pop-up showing where big landmarks are in relation to your character, even if it's otherwise hidden by buildings.

I loved Night city more than other more "open" world (like AC Odyssee for example) because, sometimes Landmarks feels like attraction park. The size and scale of it, and the rapidity you can reach it feels fake. In Night city, I had to search for the land mark, navigate my way there without seeing it, but feeling getting closer through the strong identity of the districts, and then reach it.

I'd recommend checking out the book "The Image of the City" which discusses how we remember cities. There are of course landmarks, but also Paths (the routes people travel), Edges (the boundaries that "split" parts of a city), Districts (Areas that have some commonalities), and Nodes (Focal Points? IDK how to describe this exactly).

This explains so well why Cyberpunk felt much more open-world when I switched up my build. First I was a meticulous stealth netrunner, with the hold-for-big-jump legs because it felt like I could get a good controlled high jump for accessing vantage points, and I mostly used vertical movement in situ during missions because you can't be fully spontaneous with leaps using that, you have to predict them a little bit. Then I tried a high body, high reflex build (with some cool for stealth because I couldn't resist it), with the double jump legs, and wow. Different game entirely. Getting on those rooftops made navigation by landmarks actually possible. The movement speed and stamina from those stats made running and leaping a viable movement option, the ability to shrug off most fall damage with insane health regen allowed me to do dangerous spontaneous jumps without needing to quicksave, because if I fell I could just readjust my route rather than sit through a loading screen. Traffic was no longer just an obstacle to weave around while driving, but an opportunity to switch up my traversal; I could catch up to cars with the Sandevistan and either do a highway-speed carjacking or just get on top of it and let it take me wherever. With a build that made climbing a meticulous, heavily considered mode of movement, it felt like first-person scifi GTA with a massive city and slightly more verticality, where I bring a block-wide miasma of death with me. With a build that encouraged spontaneous climbing, the city shrunk down and sunk below me, I could see everything and actually had a sense of direction when navigating, and I didn't need that miasma to reach my enemies because I could go wherever I wanted on a whim. The netrunner could also go wherever I wanted, but doing so required planning and the rooftops weren't as inviting.

This was totally not an issue for me while playing Cyberpunk. I don't navigate based on landmarks in real life either. I use maps/navigation systems/memory. Navigating in Cyberpunk felt very natural to me.

My major bugbear with "MASSIVE OPEN WORLD" games is that they actually feel empty. Flat non-accessible buildings, empty space and planets, huge walking distance in between POI... I mean, yeah, I am the type of person to spend hours fishing on my way to saving the world 😅 But like you say, a lot of the time is spent looking at a map and beelining it to the next POI, kinda takes the attachment out of the city. I guess for reference, when I do travel IRL for a holiday, I usually don't have plans, and will hit a city, look up and take photos of buildings, nip down every little alley way and find random shops 😂 Once upon a time I used to have everything all planned out, pre-booking all the major attractions with transport (quick travel hahaha) directly to it

People didn't explore Cyberpunk? Dude, I literally got lost once, found out just how much you can climb (no parkour? Oh, honey, no, it's far more than you think) and got DOUBLE lost. I also found several side quests, AND accidentally wandered into a future main quest (the parade) this way. it made the actual parade level easy, because all the mines and security were already bypassed.

I haven’t played CP2077 since it’s major updates, but I played it for well over a hundred hours after launch, and one of the things that helped me was avoiding fast travel. I just did it because driving around a cyberpunk city in a fancy car is a big setting point for me, but it ended up grounding me in the world. I learned major roads like I would in real life, and for at least a few locations like V’s building I learned street-level landmarks to get there.

Before watching the episode, I would assume the shorter sight lines make it difficult to get a quick sense of where you are in a city. So the designers need to try and make different parts of the city feel distinct in their architecture but still cohesive as a whole and that’s just a hard thing to balance.

I've had the opposite experience with Night City. I've played hundreds of hours of Skyrim, but I'm pretty sure I've still only seen like 20% of it. Whenever I open an online map of the country, I can point at any part of the map and there will be 10 locations within close proximity of that point, that I've never heard of or visited. However, I've had multiple Cyberpunk characters where I completed every single job and every single side mission. I've got a video about it on my channel, and the tl;dw of it is, I think it's because Skyrim uses "location markers", while Cyberpunk uses "quest markers". A typical Skyrim map marker would be something like "cave": the game doesn't tell you whether you'll be fighting vampires, draugrs, hags or bandits, only that there's a location over there and that adventures can be had there. But in Cyberpunk, the markers don't tell you "this is an abandonned microchip factory", it tells you "the NCPD is offering a bounty for any merc who can clear this area of its maelstrom squatters". The marker tells you what to expect. I think it goes back all the way to bartle's taxonomy: Skyrim focuses on teasing your curiosity, if you're an explorer. Cyberpunk focuses on challenging you to clear all of the content it has to offer, if you're an achiever. In Skyrim, the more you explore, the more markers will be on your map. As soon as you wander close to an abandonned tower or a druidic grove, pop, something new on your map. A level 1 character's map looks empty, but a level 40 character's map looks messy and confusing. But in Cyberpunk, the quest markers disappear after you finish the mission. A level 1 character's map is full of danger and confusing, but a level 60 character's map is neat, empty, peaceful. Plus, it fits the narrative of that game. You start as a young upstart merc, who wants to become a legend and own the entire city. By the end of the game, you have succeeded - V is a legend, they can take on Arasaka Tower by themselves and come out alive. Really, I don't think Cyberpunk's map design was worse than Skyrim's - they just tried to accomplish different goals. You still get some amount of exploration, it's just not the point of the game. And it's not like the game is fun or a good open world "despite" not being about exploration - it's just a great open world game that happens not to be about exploration. Because apparently, those exist, and they're a whole load of fun!

Another problem with games like cyberpunk is that you mainly explore the cities there by car, so your gaze is already more drawn to what is happening on the road than the environment, and further you are also more incentivised to just stick to the main roads rather than taking a detour to something that looks interesting nearby (that also happens in non-city-based open world games, to a lesser degree, if they put hard to traverse mountains or forests everywhere).

An added complication in '77 is how much content exists conditionally. You have to be in the right area to get a call to tell you to go do a thing, but also meet other requirements: rep, level and/or other flags having been set. You can see a building that is a major tiger stronghold, but it's completely empty until it's quest has been activated. And then there's the ones that are just intentionally very subtle and easy to miss, requiring you to notice an object in a back alley or whatever to start. Though most such things are generally placed between other things. One interesting thing '77 does is clue you into content via environmental sound. You're walking down the street and hear gunfire and screams that you didn't cause. Or you overhear an unusual conversation between some NPCs, etc. Nobody phones in a gig, you don't get a marker, and notable, there's no neon sign saying "quest here". The city is a visually busy place, making visuals harder to use, but it's audioscape is still very usable, and they do use it.

I was recently in Tokyo for a while and I approached exploring it much the same way as I would explore an open-world game. I noticed that it actually 'works' in real life. At least in Tokyo it does. There really is a high density of stuff to 'encounter', both in the street and indoors. And you can use the same 'mechanics' to find these things that you would use in a hud-less open world rpg. However, in Tokyo many interesting indoor places aren't at street level. You have to take an elevator or stairs up to the so-manieth floor to find most of them. And for me as a European that's a weird thing to do. Where I live, you usually have no business going up the so-manieth floor of any building. All public places you're intended to explore are at ground level most of the time. So there's a social hurdle to take. And if you ARE meant to go up floors, the design of the building will make this apparent. So there's an architectual 'language' that tells the local culture "it's ok for you to go here" or the opposite. I imagine that for games there's also such an architectual 'language' but perhaps this language is under-developed for city-scapes in games.

It occurs to me that for a modern or later urban environment, relying on the 80s staple exposition tool "the TV shop with news channels in the store window" would be a pretty good way to seed sidequests and points of interest - the player walks past a shop, and a news report plays about "Zero Ethics Corporation unveiling its latest cybernetic enforcer drone later today", or an ad for "Honest Zeke's Reliable Cyberware", accompanied with an address to head for...

I just realized why I love European towns. They usually have the biggest building in the middle of the town, which you can follow if you look up to the sky and end up literally in the central square of the whole town where they have open spaces, cafes and statutes

Cyberpunk 2077 is an interesting case because Night City feels like a city in ways that other games don't. At ground level, layouts are distinct enough that I can reasonably navigate on foot. I can often recognize individual streets and districts while driving too, which is not an experience I've had before in a video game. Also, the newly implemented subway is legitimately amazing as a partial fast travel system and I would love to see more urban games try it. That said, there is still a lot of room for improvement, and the Yakuza series is a great place to start. Night City should be able to feel that unique on a map the size of 2077 from a lore perspective. It's just a matter of the hardware, the engine, and the dev time allowing it to happen.

I think everything said in this video is true, but I think it works for CyberPunk because that fits exactly what a dystopian city feels like to me. Having lived in a big city for most of my life myself, I pretty much never explore, even though I've probably been to less than 5% of all the places around me. Generally I just plug something into my GPS (even though I already know where it is) to find the most efficient route there through the traffic and chaos. I do have a few favorite places I go to, which exactly fits having stand-out memorable places like the Afterlife.