Cyberpunk 2077 is using cyberspace to tell weirder and wilder stories

Cyberspace, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the UsS_Enterprise_NoScope1989. Its mission: To explore strange new reddits. To seek out new memes and lolz. To boldly go where yo momma has never gone before!

At least that’s my plan in Cyberpunk 2077. CD Projekt Red’s upcoming sandbox may have a deep focus on post-human augmentation and using those new mechanical gifts to be a bit of a bastard in a dog-eat-cyberdog world, but there’s more to the game than just a jaunt around Night City as you get up to mischief. Cyberspace awaits you, and within the digital confines of that technological universe is the impact crater of a devastating event that saw the deep web flooded with all manner of hostile malware.

Cyberspace may be too dangerous for any ordinary individual to explore, but for V? It’s just another Tuesday as he/she/they risks grey matter life and limb for a sweet payday as you battle against the anarchic influence of the Voodoo Boys and the long dick of the cyber-law in the form of Netwatch. There are layers,” lead quest designer Paweł Sasko said of cyberspace to Game Informer.

The first layer is the layer that exists in the world in social life. You can see that people have the internet, they have phones, you can check into the computers, and so on, but this is owned mostly by the military. Then you have this next level of netrunners. This specific type of cyberpunk that can go into the network, surf the network, and use it. And that last level is cyberspace – the moment the netrunner is actually inside it.

Surfing the web of the future isn’t just risky to your mind, but also your body as you run the risk of shredding your internals if the heat gets too much for you…literally. “Their body is like a computer that is overheating, so they need to cool themselves down and not overclock their brain, because otherwise they could be fried,” Sasko explained.

V gets into that bathtub, and there’s a person who just adds more ice on top of them and, and then you just get cooled down, and then you get into cyberspace.

Weird coincidence: That’s how I lost a kidney after Geoff invited me to a seedy motel in Los Angeles. The big kicker for CD Projekt RED though, isn’t just the very concept of cyberspace being a great new area to explore, but also a method for telling weirder and wilder stories. “For us, cyberspace is a storytelling tool,” Sasko said.

As a player, you will be going into cyberspace multiple times throughout the storyline, and each time something very specific happens. So it’s not that as a player you can freely explore cyberspace. This is more story-focused. You’re meeting specific beings, and uncovering more mysteries regarding how it was made, how it came to be, and how it works. That’s what I can say without just going completely into spoilers.

Juggle this gameplay concept with a need to keep a close cyber-eye on how NPCs will lie to you through their body language, and everything I’m hearin about Cyberpunk 2077 so far is just dialling my personal hype up to 11. November can’t get here soon enough.

Last Updated: July 9, 2020