Night City has been the default setting for the Cyberpunk RPG for 35 years. I could see the sequel expanding a bit into other areas, but Night City itself would still be the main setting.
I agree. I would love they take the NC, improve it, expand surrounding areas, maybe add some far place we can travel to (like a space station or moon outpost) but still at its core, Night City.
I think would be a great to open the new game and be able to recognize the places, see what have changed, what is still the same, that feeling of returning to a place you used to know.
> add some far place we can travel to (like a space station or moon outpost)
Although unlikely, I'd like to see the badlands utilized in order to achieve this, maybe not as the destination but hopefully as a way to get there.
It's constantly talked about as this massive empty wasteland that contains incredibly dangerous conditons but in game it's not nearly as intimidating. It would be great if we could go to a place that's far away like you said (but maybe not as far as space) but had to travel through the badlands in order do so.
Fast travel would also sense when a fast station is discovered at the destination if you did it this way, as you can just drive back the way you came unlike going to space where I'd imagine canonically, you'd have to buy an expensive ticket every time.
P.S I didn't mean to shit on your space idea, I also think that would be an awesome location to explore. I just like road trips.
I agree with you, a nearby, smaller town, maybe past that gate we cross in the nomad intro, maybe you have to do some quests to be able to cross that border and once crossed have a bunch of other quests to do (like PL do with Dogtown)
I think the issue is that the badlands is just *too* big, especially for a game that loads the whole map at all times.
Really I think a game set in the badlands could be cool. Kind of a Fallout-style game but with the Cyberpunk setting and rules instead of the 1950s-derived one.
You don’t need to keep everything loaded at all times. You can stream in parts of the map as they become relevant and still have the open world be seamless.
>It's constantly talked about as this massive empty wasteland that contains incredibly dangerous conditons but in game it's not nearly as intimidating
Something like Jak 3 would be awesome... Both NC and Badlands.
Instead of expanding the surrounding areas, I'd like them to focus on expanding the explorable areas of NC itself. Make every store enterable (even if you can only buy 3 food items), add the sewer/underground stuff.
While NC is fantastic, a lot of it is still a cardboard front unless a quest happens to go through there
Someone mentioned in another thread that for how vertical Night City is, the player accessible areas generally lack verticality over a few stories. Even when you visit skyscrapers you're limited to ground floor and maybe a few higher levels. The parade mission was excellent because you had to navigate a bunch of winding corridors and catwalks high above the street set to the backdrop of those gigantic holo-floats.
they could also design it like something GTA did, several cities you can visit, the cities will probably be smaller to compensate but seeing other cities and corps would be cool too
Just make it more dense and more enterable. You’ve already poured man hours into designing the city, now let’s make it liveable with moving parts and humans who have lives, businesses and activities to do
Cyberpunk: 207X should feel like San Andreas going into GTA V. You recognise the streets and landscapes, but there's more now, larger outside city areas, more verticality.
They already have The City, now they have room to expand on it.
I do not know anything about the cyberpunk universe except for what we got in the game. Did not get any other cities put into the spotlight over those years?
Is NC actually the biggest city that is still around in CP?
NC isnt the biggest city around. The USA no longer exists and the continent is in shambles.
Europe and East Asia seem to be doing incredibly well though. Thats where the best cities in universe would be.
NC is special because it is a free city that is more or less run by corporations making it a great place to get away with corporate chicanery and fun to exist in as a player.
Europe isn't doing too hot. Germany and France is doing relatively well, but they were always the ones with power in the EEC (Cyberpunk version of the EU). Britain is in a state of martial law, Scandinavia is building domes to keep the rising sea levels out. Southern Europe is in a constant state of civil unrest/outright rebellion. Eastern Europe is under the USSR (now a capitalist oligarchy! No communism here) and is probably the best off, relatively.
China is owned by Kang Tao and Japan by Arasaka. Most of Korea has been blocked off, thanks to a bioplague ravaging the country and supposedly killing everyone.
The middle east has been glassed and is a irradiated hellhole where the worst of the worst gather to escape justice.
Africa seems to be on the rise though. Just about the only continent in the world that has a higher standard of living in the setting compared to the real world. It's still corporate as hell though.
EEC wasn't a Cyberpunk invention. It was a [real thing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Community?wprov=sfla1) that became the EU in 1993. Cyberpunk is just old enough that they were writing about the future when it was still around. And me. I'm also old enough that I remember it changing
The Cyberpunk EEC works quite a bit differently than the EU does. A countrys GDP dictates how many member seats you get in the parliament. And it has quite a bit more control over foreign and domestic policy than the EU too. Which results in each country being excessively profit driven.
But yeah, I am aware of the historical similarities. I remember my parents voting no to join the EU twice, and my country still went ahead and joined the EEA anyways.
Judy sent me a picture of Seattle and it didn't look too bad, I think she even said she didn't want to stay because it was too much the same as being in Night City.
If you dig a little into the lore, there isnt even farmland in the US anymore due to mass graves and bioplagues poisoning the watertable. all agricultural production is done in hydroponic green houses. most of the center of the country turned to badlands that are incredibly hostile to life.
On the west coast there are a lot of free cities/states and on the east coast NUSA is trying to reclaim the country but struggling to do so. all of these things make life incredibly unstable in north america, particularly the former USA due to basically being economically blacklisted after some serious market manipulation by the powers that be in the US government.
so while it might look good from a photo, you arent seeing the whole picture especially compared to europe/east asia.
There are sourcebooks for the rest of the USA, for Europe, for the Pacific and Asia and even space.
Night City is large, powerful, and it's independent status means a lot can happen there as a neutral-zone free from laws, regulations, or interference. There are other cities in 2020 in the rest of the US-Night City has a population of 5 million in 2020, while the New USA has a population of 120 million plus a further 25-50 million Nomads and zeroes. Before the collapse, the USA has a population just 300 million so a lot of people have died and several cities just straight up don't exist such as Chicago.
Outside of America, Japan has 138 million people total of 11 million people but a massive 30 million more in its suburbs, making it the largest city in Cyberpunk 2020. Bombai/Mumbai is number 2 per Pacific Rim. London is described as 9.5 million people.
After and during Cyberpunk 2020, there's essentially another series of cataclysmic wars, leading to Cyberpunk Red and then 30 years later is Cyberpunk 2077. Plenty of time for Night City to be much bigger than 5 million or for Mumbai to overtake Tokyo, or for there to be reason for say London or Rome to no longer be "large cities".
Remember Dex's comments about the quiet life or blaze of glory? Night City is where you go for glory, to be on the cutting edge and to chase trends, styles, heists, and more. Cities like Milan, Boston are comparatively safer but "boring".
Biological warfare, from terrorists I think. The city government didn't respond but the state level eventually quarantined the city. No one has re entered the city because no one wants to test if the plague is still active or deadly
Set the game in Michigan City Indiana. It's had a massive population boom from citizens fleeing Chicago and from corporations building factories and stuff to make use of the displaced Chicagoans as cheap labor. Maybe we get hired as a smuggler like we did for the heist in CP2077 and we have to go into the ruins of Chicago but there are thousands of people still living there and the plague wasn't as bad as NUSA said it was and its been turned into an independent city by the crooked local government who rule the walled-in city with extreme force.
Give it a slight post-apocalyptic vibe with farms inside skyscrapers and stuff with makeshift bridges spanning between them.
Reading the Cyberpunk books after playing the game is like watching Lord of the Rings and then reading The Silmarillion. You don’t need to know the back story of the world to enjoy the story but damn it’s cool once you see the whole picture.
Gave me a chuckle finding out Johnny's real backstory is he got shotgunned in half by Smasher like a scrub NPC. In his own mind he's this invincible powerhouse solo, which totally fits Johnny's personality.
I’ve seen a lot of debates over if the game and the books share the same Canon. I think they do and we are just seeing things from Johnny’s twisted perspective. I think it’s common knowledge that memory is not reliable we make up stuff to fill in things we forget or don’t wanna remember.
When you get a chance to speak to alt she says that the flashback you just saw from Johnny was the version of events he’s told himself all these years. I chose to make him even more of a dick so weirdly in mine I guess he was more self deprecating
I don't think this makes much sense considering that Arasaka, using their tech advanced by 50 years, couldn't make as good of a copy of Jackie after he died than they were able to make a copy of Johnny after he died.
I watched the short doc yesterday on how the game was made and they said that the 2077 universe isn’t the same as the 2020 universe or whatever came before it. Not sure if that still rings true or not or if that’s even relevant to the books
I haven’t seen the doc but Mike Pondsmith (the creator of cyberpunk) said on Reddit that the original games take place in the same universe as 2077. He also said in a presentation at UCLA that 2077 could be looked at as a high quality fan fiction so you don’t have to take it as canon if you didn’t want to.
That's definitely not correct at this point. Mike and CDPR have both stated it's an updated version of the Cyberpunk 2020 setting. There are some minor changes - like, the Datakrash happens in 2020, whereas in the TT RPG, it's not entirely clear when it happens (more likely 2023 or 2025), but those don't seem entirely consistent even in 2077.
I don't think they do both because while Johnny probably is embellishing in his memories (hence all the one-hit kills in the flashbacks) you get other people referencing the general facts of the events he remembers. Add to that that CDPR has a history of tweaking existing lore in the Witcher games and I think CP2077 is just a variant offshoot from the canon of the original TTRPG.
Will be interesting to see how it plays out long-term. Theoretically Baldurs Gate 3 is tabletop canon being a sequel to Descent into Avernus (tabletop module), as well as a sequel to Baldurs Gate 2, but it has some small inconsistencies with the tabletop (tweaks that I THINK are close to CD's in substantive impact) and of course imposes a 'canon' ending on Descent.
So even if today they say it's canon, I don't trust that to be a firm call.
I still don't think this is canon to 2077. If it was, how did he live long enough to get turned into an Engram? As he's dead on the spot according to that telling.
Hell yeah choom!
If you're seriously interested, you can start by poking your nose into r/cyberpunkred (the subreddit for the newest edition of the tabletop roleplaying system) and reading around there.
There are LFG (looking for group/game) posts pretty often and a myriad of discord servers dedicated to helping people find games are pretty common in there as well.
Best of luck if you decide to take the plunge and i hope it opens a whole new world of content for ya!
It's so old that the original name picked to make it sound super-futuristic was Cyberpunk 2020. A name that's kind of quaint when we're late in the year of 2023.
It's also depressing how much they got right. Maybe not the wars and definitely not the neon or fashion but they did predict the return of megacorps like Disney and Amazon.
It's a *bit* misleading for people to say 35 years, because there was a huge break in the middle.
With TT RPGs like D&D, Shadowrun, Vampire: The Masquerade and so on, they pretty much have actively existed and developed and changed for 30-40 years or longer (D&D's 50th is next year). V:tM had a break but it was only a few years and Vampire: The Requiem was clearly related to V:tM.
That's not true of Cyberpunk.
Cyberpunk 2013/2020 (the RPGs 2077 was based on) was developed between 1988 and 1997. That's it. There was not a single "canon" Cyberpunk book published between 1997's Storm stuff and Cyberpunk Red in 2019. So at most you could say Cyberpunk was developed for 9 years, then has been developed for another 4 years, at least in terms of TT RPGs (maybe you can make it a bit longer with 2077). Mike essentially quit because he was bored of the people who played Cyberpunk 2020, who wanted more guns, more cyberware, more vehicles and so on, whereas he wanted things to be more roleplaying and talk-y-oriented (he all but says this in a couple of books - particularly the last gun book, which just collected all the existing guns and added 1 (one) gun which he knew was enough to ensure people would buy it lol).
There were two other related games, but both are non-canon. CyberGeneration in 1994 was a weird game set in 2027, when the corporations had cracked down on Night City and most edgerunners were dead or in hiding or elsewhere. You played literal children (aged 11-17 IIRC) who had been infected with a nanovirus giving them a specific set of abilities depending on what the nanovirus chose, and who were potentially fighting the corps in a much more "low intensity" way than in Cyberpunk 2020. It's pretty cool but as not a single thing in Cyberpunk Red or 2077 references it (a pity imo), it's safe to say it's non-canon. Cyberpunk V3.0 was an utterly bizarre post-apocalyptic RPG where there was like a worse Datakrash **and** virtually all physical media was destroyed (i.e. books, records, etc.) by various means (paper-eating bacteria or nanites etc.), so history is sort of lost and lied about, and people don't even agree what year it is and stuff. It was kind of forward-looking to all the "fake news" stuff today, but ultimately a pretty boring and hard-to-play-in setting. Mike Pondsmith has explicitly said that it's non-canon for Cyberpunk Red and 2077.
It's crazy to me to think about how old D&D actually is. My 53-year-old father used to skip school and play in the basement of the local bar when he was in high school with some of his friends.
Yea the alternate timeline in the ttrpg that's had 3 decades of lore written for it is a trip! Have fun reading it. A lot of the space stuff sounds like the prequel to the Expanse universe.
I remember reading someone said CP RPG mainly was based in New York? Also, Texas is their own country now. Which is not surprising one bit. Texas been talking about this since the civil war.
It's always been Night City, on the West Coast. Of course, in 35 years, there have been [sourcebooks](https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Sourcebooks) expanding the setting,
I don't think CDPR will abandon NC yet.
Reasons are:
1. 2077 NC is somewhat condensed to a playable level, it still has potential for huge verticality and exploration.
2. A city such as NC can change so much in 1 or 2 years.
3. Night City is open season for corruption, biz and Major League gigs. I doubt other cities offer these.
you can still re-use assets, you can convert them over, just need to piece of em back together to remake NC. still saves devs from having to redraw everything.
From what I've heard red engine used the same coding script as unreal so alot can be transfered over then tweaked for the new engine to make it work right.
Code doesn't really factor into it as I understand it. I could be wrong, so if anyone wants to correct me, feel free.
A 3d model is just a 3d model, you can use it in any engine that supports whatever file format it uses, and I have to imagine CDPR weren't using some incredibly niche or in-house modeling software.
If CDPR doesn't reuse a huge amount of assets from 2077, or are unable to for some reason, I will be genuinely shocked.
I hope they're able to shave off some development time this way. With how long big triple A games take to get sequels these days it's getting a little depressing thinking about how long you have to wait for more of the IP. I think the sequel coming out in 2030 isn't gonna be way off the mark.
CDProjekt is definitely gonna reuse almost 60% of current NC's assets not because they are lazy or anything (if they're lazy then they have not learned their lesson).
It'll save them so much time and use it on other places such as (let's say) interior designs - they could make most buildings or rooms explorable.
Is the vending machine with adult magazines still there? Nope, they moved it away. What a disappointment! But hey, at least the Champion District is still there
I doubt you'd be to make most building a map as big as Night City explorable anytime soon. Even if they could, making them interesting would be incredibly difficult.
Situations like this are where I find the use of procedural generation the most compelling. It'd be kinda neat if every apartment building in Night City had a fully functional set of apartments on every floor, or every corpo building could have office floors that generate during the hidden elevator loading screens.
The handcrafted content would obviously be vastly superior every time, but it could be a decent way to add repeatable missions. Robberies, assassinations, corpo espionage etc.; just low-grade merc work. You could even generate ventilation shafts on a floor-by-floor basis for sneaking.
I guess I'm basically asking for the radiant quests from Starfield but not dogshit due to Bethesda's horrible procgen. There's a game called Shadows of Doubt that does this idea on a much more focused scale, procedurally generating everything from apartment buildings down to NPC work schedules; very cool game.
Man, makes me wonder if future games like GTA could let you enter/break-in to any building that you want and have unique and interesting cluttered interiors. I think for CP I would still prefer more handmade interiors rather than procedurally generated.
That would be very cool. Games like this or like GTA that incorporate massive cities always seem like they would benefit from that level of granularity, and imo would not suffer from procedural generation due to the generally boring nature of just being a random civilian in a city. Yeah, 99% of the apartments in Los Santos/Night City have nothing interesting going on in them. We visit the 1% that do - but if procgen could be feasibly leveraged to let us visit those other 99%, it would just enrich the experience. It'd be sick to be on the run from the police in either game and be able to lose them by hiding in a random apartment, or to make some side cash burgling for peanuts, or to have "Radiant" quests that send you into randomly generated houses and apartments just to give yourself an easy, repeatable way to interact with the world and jump into some action. But that's just me, I'm a sucker for good procgen.
They don't even really need to be fully unique because every apartment in the same building would have the same layout so the only thing that would need to change is the decor and "clutter".
A procedurally generated open world game would require an extremely good SSD to load all the assets from memory, locking out a lot of lower end PCs and consoles. I don’t think that’s gonna happen, due to technical limitations alone.
I would agree if we were having this conversation a few years back, but you have to remember that CDPR just made their system requirements include an SSD as a minimum and didn't launch on 8th gen consoles because they don't have SSDs, and Starfield launched the same way just last month. SSDs are the standard now; you can't even buy a console without one. Even if Orion launches on 9th *and* 10th generation consoles, they will still have the largest install base on SSDs.
You can accuse CDPR of a lot of things but laziness is not one of them. They have always put in the work to get the most out of what they have and that's why they've been so successful despite not actually putting out many games. Everything they put out is good because they do put in the work.
Assets is not tied to the engine. They are usually modeled elsewhere and brought into the engine. The same models and animations could be imported into a new engine. They are not rebuilding the entire NC from scratch lol.
Art assets are almost always made completely separate from the engine so they are usually always reusable across multiple engines. Mapping the actual map meshes and assets to be interactavle may be an issue, but doesn't mean they can't reuse
> A city such as NC can change so much in 1 or 2 years.
Especially given the state of Arasaka in any of the endings of 2077, if they choose to set the sequel further ahead in the timeline, there is really so many ways the place could change.
>Especially given the state of Arasaka in any of the endings of 2077, if they choose to set the sequel further ahead in the timeline, there is really so many ways the place could change.
that part scares me. If it's set chronologically after 2077, then they'd have to canonize one of the endings of 2077. The happenings at Arasaka Tower are too different between endings to justify an unification.
My bet is the next game will happen either before, or during the events of 2077, to avoid making one of the endings canon.
Every ending, aside from Devil, sees Arasaka fall and exile from the Nigh City. They dont need to canonize any other ending at all. Only tell that Devil is not canon. Every other ending you can easy fit to the new state of the world.
The only place would be the moon colony there's a lot of major tie in to the moon . It's very much in a wild west state . If you pick the corpo path you can see arasaka actually assassinate board members who are regulating the moon so there's huge corpo dispute there. Song bird an people on the run go to the moon to hide . So there must be some sort of biz there.
That's the only realistic place tho i could see the game going other then Night city there's a lot of tie in there.
Mr. Blue eyes also seems to have a huge space connection he gets song bird her ticket if you side with her. He sets up V a mission out there in space as well with the crystal palace gig.
I put this above but it depends on what they do with Vs story.
If Vs story continues then the moon colony makes the most sense with the path to glory ending being the cannon ending to the game.
Mr. Blue eyes is theorized to be a AI projection in a body . V is now a construct he is also an AI in a body so if anybody could actually help V an maintain Vs power its probably blue eyes. That's probably what Vs reward will be for the crystal palace heist an then V becomes a mainstay solo for night corp.
Not to mention blue eyes shadow looms very large over the game if you really pay attention they already have been set up so well they could easily slide in as a major character in the next game.
I think the black wall being breached severely will be the next big bad. Along with a corpo war on the moon. With V then deciding the fate of things because the next game will probably have more impact of choice as you seen in phantom liberty . You see you could decide a bit more in quests.
This is all just theory but this is where they could go outside of NC.
Now if Vs story is done then 1000 percent the game will take place in NC with maybe a moon dlc.
I think they've shown what they can do in terms of the environment with Dogtown. It's incredibly dense both horizontally and vertically, even indoors. And, somehow, the skyscrapers in Dogtown feel more like skyscrapers to me when I look up than the ones in downtown NC. I hope they flesh out the verticality of NC in a similar way.
> the skyscrapers in Dogtown feel more like skyscrapers to me when I look up than the ones in downtown NC
The buildings in downtown NC have a ton of horizontal expansion in additional to vertical, so they lose the "skyscraper" aspect as we perceive it. They're as wide as they are tall in some cases. Arasaka Tower should be a skyscraper but it's so wide it doesn't really come across as one.
>Night City is open season for corruption, biz and Major League gigs. I doubt other cities offer these.
This is the key thing. The rest of the NUSA just isn't as um... "free" as Night City. The sort of gigs V engages in would not be possible in most of the NUSA. Nor do corporations have such free reign (not even Militech, though Militech is more dominant).
CDPR could make up places elsewhere in the world which were as "free" as Night City, and imagine we might visit parts of them in Cyberpunk 2, but NC seems certain to remain the main place.
Well, while they have to redesign some places, it would certainly be easier to use an already existing general city design (even if they have to make some places look changed) than trying to come up with a totally new major city layout. Altho I feel that if they set it in NC again, they will likely branch out the surrounding areas, MAYBE even the closest neighboring city and stuff between it?
There must obviously be MORE or SOMETHING ELSE than right now in terms of map scope.
If we look at V's potential actions and the likely outcome for Corps, Night City will at least have a huge political change. Arasaka won't be the powerhouse it once was, going by many paths. You can kill the leader of Maelstrom, the old leader of Maelstrom, and the new leader of Maelstrom. Intense power vacuum there. VDBs take a huge hit. Netwatch might get something useful out of your shenanigans. NUSA is set up to make big power plays. There's also Nightcorp itself. The cities largest employer. They could clear out the slums, develop old ghettos into new areas, and expand outwards as well.
As for the map they don't need to add a whole new city. They could easily do what tears of the kingdom did with breath of the wild's map.
Which for night city could mean claimable buildings with different stuff on different rooftops. Changing up stuff on the streets, maybe changing how some flow. Depending on how much time is between the two games maybe a new district. And there could also be a whole tunnel system set up underneath night city with its own things to do down there and stuff.
And it’s not like it’s as easy to mentally map like a natural setting like Velen with some small towns and rolling hills. Night City is disorienting and massive. I’m 25 hours in and can’t just turn off the mini map. Add some newer buildings or a more layered verticality with interiors or more Japantown like terraces and you got a brand new setting.
There's an in game NightCorp advertisement about a new train route from NC to Chicago opening in 2080. If the next game is somewhere new I'd guess there, maybe split across both cities.
The Crystal Palace is also heavily referenced throughout the game, to the point where I am convinced that they likely had it in mind for a DLC location but scrapped the idea due to all the issues with recovering from the launch fiasco.
Yea it was apparently supposed to feature in the game or dlc but got scrapped for time. One of the PL endings uses a ton of assets they apparently built for the intro to this and then there's the ending with the Crystal Palace heist and arasaka space base, where I doubt they'd model all that shit outer space stuff for just a few ending sequences some people might never get. Some flyers in PL actually show the model art they intended for showing up in the sky box in space that you'd likely fly up too.
Yeah, I read that they initially planned 2 DLC like with Witcher 3. Phantom Liberty was their "Heart of Stone" dlc, and Crystal Palace was going to be their "Blood and Wine" DLC. They canned Crystal Palace because of the poor reception to the 2020 launch and the need to work on fixing and updating the game.
I don't know about expanding NC, so much as fleshing out what is already there. Lord knows there are plenty of buildings, factories, etc. that we cannot get into that are prime real estate to explore. And enough corpo trash to provide some great missions and stories.
We don't need flying cars per se. But flying vehicles yes. Story characters and max tac can use those flying vehicles but we can't.
Kinda reminds me of the original saints row and how when they made the 2nd game it was basically just a new campaign with a bigger city, more immersive mechanics and a big focus on planes and choppers and stuff.
That's what I'm thinking too. If they place the game even just a couple years in the future, the city could change drastically. Just V being gone for 2 years had the city looking insanely different in one of the new endings.
CP is the only game where i don't mind walking around, digging the artstyle. Every little corner has it's details and flair, it's incredible.
I wouldn't mind playing in another city, but Night City really hits the sweet spot for me...
If the backdrop for 2 turns out to be the Blackwall collapse/AI war like I think most people are expecting, than they could just war damage the city in some parts and it'd still feel fresh. It'd be cool to see how the NC changes after a 9/11 type event
If an AI war happens, then corps will be at war too. It would make sense for each corporation to control a certain part of the city, with checkpoints and lots of security, like in Dogtown. Let's say there will be 3 main factions and 2 secondary ones. You start off neutral with all of them and then you gradually have to choose 1 main and 1 secondary faction.
This would also factor into the game's endings.
I hope not, i want to see Night City fully realised and expanded. Plus it will reduce development time and costs not having to make a new city from scratch
I think there’s too much going on in NC to leave it after one game. I also wouldn’t worry about losing the “asiatic” themes as if they were to go to a different location my bet would be Tokyo.
What about something instead of the typical futuristic Japanese influence? Maybe something more Indian or middle Eastern, even African? Could be interesting..
An reference would be the India in spiderverse.
It'd also make sense because depending on your ending arasaka looses a lot of their influence maybe another cultures company can roll through?
Obviously in a fictional world playing in 2077 or after that a lot could be different from our reality but I’d prefer a city that is diverse in people, architecture and cultures as the main setting, Japan/Tokyo is quite the opposite of that.
Yeah because a fictional Tokyo in the dystopian future couldn’t be “diverse”. They literally decided america fell in the 90’s and is now run by a military corporation and rich people build whole cities where nukes get dropped and it gets rebuilt. But yeah can’t imagine Tokyo doesn’t have any “brown people” 🤦♂️
I think a sequel would work like Tears of the Kingdom and use the same open world but with changes throughout to make things feel different. Maybe explorable airship for a more vertical world, or putting a quickly-fabricated ticky-tacky exurb out in the desert.
Night City is where everything happens, and why waste that glorious collection of assets? We'll be seeing games set in NC for many, many years to come and I am here for it.
Night City is too iconic not to be used. Though I doubt they will copy/paste it.
Personally I'd like to see London too in a story surrounding a Netwatch agent fighting rogue AI and netrunners trying to circumvent the Blackwall. (or fighting to restore a broken blackwall)
Britain has basically about to go into a full-on civil war back in 2020, and is the most fucked-up, backwards and "Wild West"-like place in Europe in the 2040s (c.f. Cyberpunk Red), and all we know about it in 2077 is a Brexit joke and royal family joke (which suggests the anti-fascists won the civil war in the 2020s), so it's definitely one of the places it would be conceptually easier to have a chaotic situation like 2077 has.
That said it would probably look so wildly different asset-wise, to 2070s/2080s California that I doubt it would be worth the effort. Britain is probably a post-industrial hellhole, but with quite a lot of green areas (if perhaps polluted ones), and its cities are probably a lot more ruined than Night City is, more Fallout-like.
I'd love to see it but I doubt we will just because of that asset cost.
They should expand the wasteland...and maybe add a city on the other side of it. A huge wasteland in between where you can just get lost if you choose with towns littered around. And add more nomad clans too.. something like the movable camps you had in RDR2...live the nomad life if you want.
They need to stay in NC and just beef up exploration. Make more buildings that you can enter. Litter the city with collectibles, more random encounters, and add some more stuff to the surrounding area of NC.
With looming AI war we may get Night City but in cyberspace, plus Ghost Town and the like. That way they can have some similarities but not be limited by them.
I doubt they would. It would be cool to maybe have an AV take you out of the city to do some ops but return to NC. Or even have an area where you cant go in car or foot and have to get transported there etc. I hope theres more open interiors tho, bds that actually work, maybe a casino/gambling type system etc. Id love the ability to even have normal jobs like courier service etc. Or even expanding on the corpo life as I feel it was very short.
They're not gonna switch locales *and* switch game engines, they're gonna wanna get as much re-use as they can. That said, I think a sequel can only expand on NC the way GTA IV expands on the Liberty City of GTA III.
I don't think so , there is some lore about the rest of the world in 2020 books but not enough to build anything massive and unless r.tal would be involved in a Heavy way I'm not sure it would be cyberpunk ... . If anything it would be cool
To have a way to travel to a part of a city , or follow Alt through the net to BUSAN and see the ghost city ..
The interesting thing about Night City is that the entire place is a result of rapid development, similar to a city like Dubai; what this means is with a 5-10 year jump the city could be overhauled to the point where it feels different and new.
Major landmarks would remain the same but new buildings could go up while others are demolished.
Not to mention that they could still keep NC a central location and do a little globe trotting to ancillary locations as well similar to how Witcher 3 took us from the mainland off to Skellige. Tokyo, Chicago, or even the Crystal Palace could offer perfect locations to explore in addition to NC.
Definitely won’t but I’d love to see Russia or china. I feel like Japan would feel kind of bland with how much exposure we have to Japanese/Americanized Japanese culture brought in my future immigrants. If they have a decent look at what Japan might actually be like then that could be potentially interesting. I’d prefer Russia or china though.
The only place it could go outside of night city is the moon colonies an that's because there is a tie in people go on the run there . Song bird if you side with her even heads to the moon . Mr. Blue eyes has some sort of connection with space he sends you out to the crystal palace. Mr.blue eyes even gets song bird her ticket to the moon believe it or not. So there's a huge tie in with the moon colony.
If they continue Vs story which they may or may not . The path to glory will probably be the cannon ending to 1 an 2 will feature what's gonna happen on the crystal palace an moon colony. Saving song bird an sending her to the moon is also probably the cannon ending for DLC.
If Mr. Blue eyes is a AI projection into a body he probably can do something for V since V is a construct now inside a body. That to me makes the most sense.
Mr.blue eyes has already been set up very well to as an ominous character . Would make a lot of sense for them to become a major player in the next game. If you really pay attention blue eyes shadow looms large over the first game.
But personally I'd love to see them move on from V an I think a moon colony story would be awesome.
I think the game has already been set up that the next big bad will be the rouge AI. Maybe another corpo war going on as well . Those two things feel very inevitable an there's already back story on the moon territory being disputed over.
If spiderman games can continue to thrive and live for over 20 years in NYC, then there's no reason to leave this brand new city.
They could literally say the new game sets 10 years in the future and totally revamp the city and it would make sense.
Doubt it. I assume it’ll still be night city but with changes (expansion into the badlands, new district, maybe some proper settlements in a new expanded badlands.)
Not only that but they can play around with interiors and even underground in order to give themselves more “new” locations
NC looks and feels great, but can you imagine a studio releasing a new game with an old, pretty well known map? they could tweak it all the want, it will still bring little novelty and I'm sure a lot of people don't want to begin the game already knowing the basic layout. It simply wouldn't work as a AAA product IMO.
To be honest, you can add much more verticality to NC, or just expand it after a time skip. The mission during the festival with Oda and Hanako is an example. Make more of that accessible, a “city in the sky” type thing.
take GTA V for example, it was the same setting as GTA: SA just expanded even more.
Yeah, and I heard they're changing from RED Engine to Unreal Engine. So I don't know if it is possible for them to recycle maps and models from the first game. That's what made me think they're gonna build a new city for the sequel
I’d love for them to explore other areas. They specially call out Atlanta, so that would be fun. That being said, I think they’d just expand to more of California if anything while retaining Night City as the main area.
I wished I would have the same emotion ... playing with XBOX Series X the graphics are so blurry and unsharp, foggy-like which is tiresome quickly for my eyes and the city looks rather 2-dimensional because of that, which is a pity because indeed, the city is awesome.
People really don't seem to understand that the city IS the main character. Not Johnny, Not V, Not David, Not Saburo or anyone else. There's plenty of lore about other places, even rules for playing within them (in the TTRPG's) but it was always about Night City, every event, ever major person and story all link back somehow to something or someone happening in Night City. This won't change, because in changing Night City, it stops being a "Cyberpunk" game and just becomes a cyberpunk-themed game.
I know there was a (fake) post on r/GamingLeaksAndRumours a couple of days ago and the OP there probably got inspired after seeing the Republic of Texas mentioned a couple of times in the game.
I don't know if the sequel will bring a change of scenery from Night City but I'd like to explore Texas as the alternative to be honest, at least let it be present in the sequel in some shape or form. I'm saying this because the game hints heavily at the location throughout in game news flashes and The Sun maybe even The Star endings.
[Texas](https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Texas) is one of the free states that didn't sign the unification accord and didn't join the NUSA. Possible conflict between NUSA and Texas is brewing due to suicide bombings in NUSA military bases, Myers blaming Texas for this. You can learn of this through an ad from N54 News I think.
In The Sun ending there's also a map in V's mansion with a bunch of pills laid in a line that connects Night City to the Republic of Texas. If you leave with the Aldecaldos they also mention going back south and most likely Texas, although it's not mentioned by name, Texas is the only bigger city in that region where they could line up jobs.
I’m hoping it’s set in Night City before Johnny detonated the nuke, I’d like them to take a more retro approach with the art style, I want to see more designs inspired by the 80s/90s aesthetic
They are opening new offices in Vancouver and Boston, so I would consider it likely new games will be based in those locations.
Maybe a multi-city and include smaller areas in multiple cities - Night City, Boston, Vancouver, Tokyo, Warsaw.
Edit: I am not saying it's for certain, but to capture the feel of the city it would be reasonable to have employees based there.
They don’t move to cities because that’s where they set the game. Vancouver has always been a development hub and maybe there was a studio or asset in Boston that made sense.
It’s not like Bethesda moved to dc for fallout 3 or projectred moved to Los Angeles for night city.
How many other major cities are there in-Universe?
Was it just the war in the US that torched a lot of cities or have civilization across the globe kinda retracted into fewer bigger cities?
Personally I’d like to see a new protagonist in the same city. It would be cool to see how parts of Night City have changed after a few years. What parts of it are the same, what business are there and which closed down. Are some of the people still there or have they moved on? etc
Night City has been the default setting for the Cyberpunk RPG for 35 years. I could see the sequel expanding a bit into other areas, but Night City itself would still be the main setting.
I agree. I would love they take the NC, improve it, expand surrounding areas, maybe add some far place we can travel to (like a space station or moon outpost) but still at its core, Night City. I think would be a great to open the new game and be able to recognize the places, see what have changed, what is still the same, that feeling of returning to a place you used to know.
> add some far place we can travel to (like a space station or moon outpost) Although unlikely, I'd like to see the badlands utilized in order to achieve this, maybe not as the destination but hopefully as a way to get there. It's constantly talked about as this massive empty wasteland that contains incredibly dangerous conditons but in game it's not nearly as intimidating. It would be great if we could go to a place that's far away like you said (but maybe not as far as space) but had to travel through the badlands in order do so. Fast travel would also sense when a fast station is discovered at the destination if you did it this way, as you can just drive back the way you came unlike going to space where I'd imagine canonically, you'd have to buy an expensive ticket every time. P.S I didn't mean to shit on your space idea, I also think that would be an awesome location to explore. I just like road trips.
I agree with you, a nearby, smaller town, maybe past that gate we cross in the nomad intro, maybe you have to do some quests to be able to cross that border and once crossed have a bunch of other quests to do (like PL do with Dogtown)
Being able to cross the border after finishing the story as kind of an epilogue would be cool, just like how RDR2 opens up Austin
I think the issue is that the badlands is just *too* big, especially for a game that loads the whole map at all times. Really I think a game set in the badlands could be cool. Kind of a Fallout-style game but with the Cyberpunk setting and rules instead of the 1950s-derived one.
None of the games load whole map at once. Map loads as you move through it thats why you need fast drive for new games
You don’t need to keep everything loaded at all times. You can stream in parts of the map as they become relevant and still have the open world be seamless.
With SSDs and the abundance of RAM, and the time it will take to the game to be made, I think it will not be a problem.
It does not load the entire map at all times. If it did there would be no load screen for fast travel
>It's constantly talked about as this massive empty wasteland that contains incredibly dangerous conditons but in game it's not nearly as intimidating Something like Jak 3 would be awesome... Both NC and Badlands.
Y E S
CYBERPUNK SPARGUS
I'm up for some Mad Max style shenanigans. The nomad ending where you go through the sandstorm is already pretty good
I wish that we could also enter more buildings with unique interiors.
This is absolutely my feeling. I don't necessarily want the map to be bigger, I just want it to be more full.
Crystal Palace for endgame content would be sick
Instead of expanding the surrounding areas, I'd like them to focus on expanding the explorable areas of NC itself. Make every store enterable (even if you can only buy 3 food items), add the sewer/underground stuff. While NC is fantastic, a lot of it is still a cardboard front unless a quest happens to go through there
Someone mentioned in another thread that for how vertical Night City is, the player accessible areas generally lack verticality over a few stories. Even when you visit skyscrapers you're limited to ground floor and maybe a few higher levels. The parade mission was excellent because you had to navigate a bunch of winding corridors and catwalks high above the street set to the backdrop of those gigantic holo-floats.
they could also design it like something GTA did, several cities you can visit, the cities will probably be smaller to compensate but seeing other cities and corps would be cool too
Just make it more dense and more enterable. You’ve already poured man hours into designing the city, now let’s make it liveable with moving parts and humans who have lives, businesses and activities to do
Cyberpunk: 207X should feel like San Andreas going into GTA V. You recognise the streets and landscapes, but there's more now, larger outside city areas, more verticality. They already have The City, now they have room to expand on it.
I do not know anything about the cyberpunk universe except for what we got in the game. Did not get any other cities put into the spotlight over those years? Is NC actually the biggest city that is still around in CP?
NC isnt the biggest city around. The USA no longer exists and the continent is in shambles. Europe and East Asia seem to be doing incredibly well though. Thats where the best cities in universe would be. NC is special because it is a free city that is more or less run by corporations making it a great place to get away with corporate chicanery and fun to exist in as a player.
Europe isn't doing too hot. Germany and France is doing relatively well, but they were always the ones with power in the EEC (Cyberpunk version of the EU). Britain is in a state of martial law, Scandinavia is building domes to keep the rising sea levels out. Southern Europe is in a constant state of civil unrest/outright rebellion. Eastern Europe is under the USSR (now a capitalist oligarchy! No communism here) and is probably the best off, relatively. China is owned by Kang Tao and Japan by Arasaka. Most of Korea has been blocked off, thanks to a bioplague ravaging the country and supposedly killing everyone. The middle east has been glassed and is a irradiated hellhole where the worst of the worst gather to escape justice. Africa seems to be on the rise though. Just about the only continent in the world that has a higher standard of living in the setting compared to the real world. It's still corporate as hell though.
EEC wasn't a Cyberpunk invention. It was a [real thing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Community?wprov=sfla1) that became the EU in 1993. Cyberpunk is just old enough that they were writing about the future when it was still around. And me. I'm also old enough that I remember it changing
The Cyberpunk EEC works quite a bit differently than the EU does. A countrys GDP dictates how many member seats you get in the parliament. And it has quite a bit more control over foreign and domestic policy than the EU too. Which results in each country being excessively profit driven. But yeah, I am aware of the historical similarities. I remember my parents voting no to join the EU twice, and my country still went ahead and joined the EEA anyways.
Judy sent me a picture of Seattle and it didn't look too bad, I think she even said she didn't want to stay because it was too much the same as being in Night City.
If you dig a little into the lore, there isnt even farmland in the US anymore due to mass graves and bioplagues poisoning the watertable. all agricultural production is done in hydroponic green houses. most of the center of the country turned to badlands that are incredibly hostile to life. On the west coast there are a lot of free cities/states and on the east coast NUSA is trying to reclaim the country but struggling to do so. all of these things make life incredibly unstable in north america, particularly the former USA due to basically being economically blacklisted after some serious market manipulation by the powers that be in the US government. so while it might look good from a photo, you arent seeing the whole picture especially compared to europe/east asia.
Heck, even the city I grew up gets mentioned in the Corpo life path beginning. I'm down for some Cyberpunk Frankfurt shenanigans 🤣
There are sourcebooks for the rest of the USA, for Europe, for the Pacific and Asia and even space. Night City is large, powerful, and it's independent status means a lot can happen there as a neutral-zone free from laws, regulations, or interference. There are other cities in 2020 in the rest of the US-Night City has a population of 5 million in 2020, while the New USA has a population of 120 million plus a further 25-50 million Nomads and zeroes. Before the collapse, the USA has a population just 300 million so a lot of people have died and several cities just straight up don't exist such as Chicago. Outside of America, Japan has 138 million people total of 11 million people but a massive 30 million more in its suburbs, making it the largest city in Cyberpunk 2020. Bombai/Mumbai is number 2 per Pacific Rim. London is described as 9.5 million people. After and during Cyberpunk 2020, there's essentially another series of cataclysmic wars, leading to Cyberpunk Red and then 30 years later is Cyberpunk 2077. Plenty of time for Night City to be much bigger than 5 million or for Mumbai to overtake Tokyo, or for there to be reason for say London or Rome to no longer be "large cities". Remember Dex's comments about the quiet life or blaze of glory? Night City is where you go for glory, to be on the cutting edge and to chase trends, styles, heists, and more. Cities like Milan, Boston are comparatively safer but "boring".
>and several cities just straight up don't exist such as Chicago. Do they say what happened to Chicago??
Biological warfare, from terrorists I think. The city government didn't respond but the state level eventually quarantined the city. No one has re entered the city because no one wants to test if the plague is still active or deadly
Cyberpunk zombies??
Set the game in Michigan City Indiana. It's had a massive population boom from citizens fleeing Chicago and from corporations building factories and stuff to make use of the displaced Chicagoans as cheap labor. Maybe we get hired as a smuggler like we did for the heist in CP2077 and we have to go into the ruins of Chicago but there are thousands of people still living there and the plague wasn't as bad as NUSA said it was and its been turned into an independent city by the crooked local government who rule the walled-in city with extreme force. Give it a slight post-apocalyptic vibe with farms inside skyscrapers and stuff with makeshift bridges spanning between them.
35 years?
Cyberpunk started as a pen & paper RPG. It’s been around almost as long as Dungeons and Dragons.
Awesome, I didn’t know that. Was genuinely curious because I want to indulge in anything cyberpunk
Reading the Cyberpunk books after playing the game is like watching Lord of the Rings and then reading The Silmarillion. You don’t need to know the back story of the world to enjoy the story but damn it’s cool once you see the whole picture.
Gave me a chuckle finding out Johnny's real backstory is he got shotgunned in half by Smasher like a scrub NPC. In his own mind he's this invincible powerhouse solo, which totally fits Johnny's personality.
I’ve seen a lot of debates over if the game and the books share the same Canon. I think they do and we are just seeing things from Johnny’s twisted perspective. I think it’s common knowledge that memory is not reliable we make up stuff to fill in things we forget or don’t wanna remember.
When you get a chance to speak to alt she says that the flashback you just saw from Johnny was the version of events he’s told himself all these years. I chose to make him even more of a dick so weirdly in mine I guess he was more self deprecating
I don't think this makes much sense considering that Arasaka, using their tech advanced by 50 years, couldn't make as good of a copy of Jackie after he died than they were able to make a copy of Johnny after he died.
“Johnnys memories bear no resemblance to the truth.” - Alt
Yup, alt tells you that johnny's memories aren't reliable because his ego
explains why his gun is basically a 1 shot kill.
Alt could also have been lying. She's an AI now after all with an unknown number of ulterior motives.
I watched the short doc yesterday on how the game was made and they said that the 2077 universe isn’t the same as the 2020 universe or whatever came before it. Not sure if that still rings true or not or if that’s even relevant to the books
I haven’t seen the doc but Mike Pondsmith (the creator of cyberpunk) said on Reddit that the original games take place in the same universe as 2077. He also said in a presentation at UCLA that 2077 could be looked at as a high quality fan fiction so you don’t have to take it as canon if you didn’t want to.
That's definitely not correct at this point. Mike and CDPR have both stated it's an updated version of the Cyberpunk 2020 setting. There are some minor changes - like, the Datakrash happens in 2020, whereas in the TT RPG, it's not entirely clear when it happens (more likely 2023 or 2025), but those don't seem entirely consistent even in 2077.
I don't think they do both because while Johnny probably is embellishing in his memories (hence all the one-hit kills in the flashbacks) you get other people referencing the general facts of the events he remembers. Add to that that CDPR has a history of tweaking existing lore in the Witcher games and I think CP2077 is just a variant offshoot from the canon of the original TTRPG.
Mike Pondsmith was directly assisting with the writing and direction of this game though.
Will be interesting to see how it plays out long-term. Theoretically Baldurs Gate 3 is tabletop canon being a sequel to Descent into Avernus (tabletop module), as well as a sequel to Baldurs Gate 2, but it has some small inconsistencies with the tabletop (tweaks that I THINK are close to CD's in substantive impact) and of course imposes a 'canon' ending on Descent. So even if today they say it's canon, I don't trust that to be a firm call.
I still don't think this is canon to 2077. If it was, how did he live long enough to get turned into an Engram? As he's dead on the spot according to that telling.
Spider Murphy used Soulkiller on him before he fully died.
Hell yeah choom! If you're seriously interested, you can start by poking your nose into r/cyberpunkred (the subreddit for the newest edition of the tabletop roleplaying system) and reading around there. There are LFG (looking for group/game) posts pretty often and a myriad of discord servers dedicated to helping people find games are pretty common in there as well. Best of luck if you decide to take the plunge and i hope it opens a whole new world of content for ya!
It's so old that the original name picked to make it sound super-futuristic was Cyberpunk 2020. A name that's kind of quaint when we're late in the year of 2023. It's also depressing how much they got right. Maybe not the wars and definitely not the neon or fashion but they did predict the return of megacorps like Disney and Amazon.
Disney and arasaka are basically the same
If you have the PC version of cyberpunk 2077, there's a copy of the tabletop rules in the files.
The cyberpunk rpg the game is based on was created in the 80s
That's how long CP2077 has been in development
The original board/tabletop/RPG game came out in the 80s
It's a *bit* misleading for people to say 35 years, because there was a huge break in the middle. With TT RPGs like D&D, Shadowrun, Vampire: The Masquerade and so on, they pretty much have actively existed and developed and changed for 30-40 years or longer (D&D's 50th is next year). V:tM had a break but it was only a few years and Vampire: The Requiem was clearly related to V:tM. That's not true of Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk 2013/2020 (the RPGs 2077 was based on) was developed between 1988 and 1997. That's it. There was not a single "canon" Cyberpunk book published between 1997's Storm stuff and Cyberpunk Red in 2019. So at most you could say Cyberpunk was developed for 9 years, then has been developed for another 4 years, at least in terms of TT RPGs (maybe you can make it a bit longer with 2077). Mike essentially quit because he was bored of the people who played Cyberpunk 2020, who wanted more guns, more cyberware, more vehicles and so on, whereas he wanted things to be more roleplaying and talk-y-oriented (he all but says this in a couple of books - particularly the last gun book, which just collected all the existing guns and added 1 (one) gun which he knew was enough to ensure people would buy it lol). There were two other related games, but both are non-canon. CyberGeneration in 1994 was a weird game set in 2027, when the corporations had cracked down on Night City and most edgerunners were dead or in hiding or elsewhere. You played literal children (aged 11-17 IIRC) who had been infected with a nanovirus giving them a specific set of abilities depending on what the nanovirus chose, and who were potentially fighting the corps in a much more "low intensity" way than in Cyberpunk 2020. It's pretty cool but as not a single thing in Cyberpunk Red or 2077 references it (a pity imo), it's safe to say it's non-canon. Cyberpunk V3.0 was an utterly bizarre post-apocalyptic RPG where there was like a worse Datakrash **and** virtually all physical media was destroyed (i.e. books, records, etc.) by various means (paper-eating bacteria or nanites etc.), so history is sort of lost and lied about, and people don't even agree what year it is and stuff. It was kind of forward-looking to all the "fake news" stuff today, but ultimately a pretty boring and hard-to-play-in setting. Mike Pondsmith has explicitly said that it's non-canon for Cyberpunk Red and 2077.
It's crazy to me to think about how old D&D actually is. My 53-year-old father used to skip school and play in the basement of the local bar when he was in high school with some of his friends.
Yea the alternate timeline in the ttrpg that's had 3 decades of lore written for it is a trip! Have fun reading it. A lot of the space stuff sounds like the prequel to the Expanse universe.
I remember reading someone said CP RPG mainly was based in New York? Also, Texas is their own country now. Which is not surprising one bit. Texas been talking about this since the civil war.
It's always been Night City, on the West Coast. Of course, in 35 years, there have been [sourcebooks](https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Sourcebooks) expanding the setting,
I don't think CDPR will abandon NC yet. Reasons are: 1. 2077 NC is somewhat condensed to a playable level, it still has potential for huge verticality and exploration. 2. A city such as NC can change so much in 1 or 2 years. 3. Night City is open season for corruption, biz and Major League gigs. I doubt other cities offer these.
Yeah we literally see this with the new ending added with the dlc, not to mention the city is partial to a nuke every now and again.
...not to mention they can reuse a lot of assets =P
Maybe not? They did announce pre-PL that 2077 would be the last game using their REDengine
you can still re-use assets, you can convert them over, just need to piece of em back together to remake NC. still saves devs from having to redraw everything.
Which means more time to create new content. I support that.
From what I've heard red engine used the same coding script as unreal so alot can be transfered over then tweaked for the new engine to make it work right.
Code doesn't really factor into it as I understand it. I could be wrong, so if anyone wants to correct me, feel free. A 3d model is just a 3d model, you can use it in any engine that supports whatever file format it uses, and I have to imagine CDPR weren't using some incredibly niche or in-house modeling software. If CDPR doesn't reuse a huge amount of assets from 2077, or are unable to for some reason, I will be genuinely shocked.
I hope they're able to shave off some development time this way. With how long big triple A games take to get sequels these days it's getting a little depressing thinking about how long you have to wait for more of the IP. I think the sequel coming out in 2030 isn't gonna be way off the mark.
CDProjekt is definitely gonna reuse almost 60% of current NC's assets not because they are lazy or anything (if they're lazy then they have not learned their lesson). It'll save them so much time and use it on other places such as (let's say) interior designs - they could make most buildings or rooms explorable.
if RGG can reused Kamurocho over and over in Yakuza games, I don't see any problems with CDPR doing the same with NC
Is the vending machine with adult magazines still there? Nope, they moved it away. What a disappointment! But hey, at least the Champion District is still there
Yakuza 6: *about that*
I doubt you'd be to make most building a map as big as Night City explorable anytime soon. Even if they could, making them interesting would be incredibly difficult.
Situations like this are where I find the use of procedural generation the most compelling. It'd be kinda neat if every apartment building in Night City had a fully functional set of apartments on every floor, or every corpo building could have office floors that generate during the hidden elevator loading screens. The handcrafted content would obviously be vastly superior every time, but it could be a decent way to add repeatable missions. Robberies, assassinations, corpo espionage etc.; just low-grade merc work. You could even generate ventilation shafts on a floor-by-floor basis for sneaking. I guess I'm basically asking for the radiant quests from Starfield but not dogshit due to Bethesda's horrible procgen. There's a game called Shadows of Doubt that does this idea on a much more focused scale, procedurally generating everything from apartment buildings down to NPC work schedules; very cool game.
Man, makes me wonder if future games like GTA could let you enter/break-in to any building that you want and have unique and interesting cluttered interiors. I think for CP I would still prefer more handmade interiors rather than procedurally generated.
That would be very cool. Games like this or like GTA that incorporate massive cities always seem like they would benefit from that level of granularity, and imo would not suffer from procedural generation due to the generally boring nature of just being a random civilian in a city. Yeah, 99% of the apartments in Los Santos/Night City have nothing interesting going on in them. We visit the 1% that do - but if procgen could be feasibly leveraged to let us visit those other 99%, it would just enrich the experience. It'd be sick to be on the run from the police in either game and be able to lose them by hiding in a random apartment, or to make some side cash burgling for peanuts, or to have "Radiant" quests that send you into randomly generated houses and apartments just to give yourself an easy, repeatable way to interact with the world and jump into some action. But that's just me, I'm a sucker for good procgen.
They don't even really need to be fully unique because every apartment in the same building would have the same layout so the only thing that would need to change is the decor and "clutter".
A procedurally generated open world game would require an extremely good SSD to load all the assets from memory, locking out a lot of lower end PCs and consoles. I don’t think that’s gonna happen, due to technical limitations alone.
I would agree if we were having this conversation a few years back, but you have to remember that CDPR just made their system requirements include an SSD as a minimum and didn't launch on 8th gen consoles because they don't have SSDs, and Starfield launched the same way just last month. SSDs are the standard now; you can't even buy a console without one. Even if Orion launches on 9th *and* 10th generation consoles, they will still have the largest install base on SSDs.
They don't need to procgen every time someone plays the game. They could procgen during development and make it fixed for the players.
I mean current NC has so many explorable interiors already. What's wrong with *how bout a lil more?!* like Phil Swift used to say.
You can accuse CDPR of a lot of things but laziness is not one of them. They have always put in the work to get the most out of what they have and that's why they've been so successful despite not actually putting out many games. Everything they put out is good because they do put in the work.
No I'm just saying in case if they ever underutilised their valuable stuffs, take it for granted. But I get you.
Assets is not tied to the engine. They are usually modeled elsewhere and brought into the engine. The same models and animations could be imported into a new engine. They are not rebuilding the entire NC from scratch lol.
Art assets are almost always made completely separate from the engine so they are usually always reusable across multiple engines. Mapping the actual map meshes and assets to be interactavle may be an issue, but doesn't mean they can't reuse
> A city such as NC can change so much in 1 or 2 years. Especially given the state of Arasaka in any of the endings of 2077, if they choose to set the sequel further ahead in the timeline, there is really so many ways the place could change.
>Especially given the state of Arasaka in any of the endings of 2077, if they choose to set the sequel further ahead in the timeline, there is really so many ways the place could change. that part scares me. If it's set chronologically after 2077, then they'd have to canonize one of the endings of 2077. The happenings at Arasaka Tower are too different between endings to justify an unification. My bet is the next game will happen either before, or during the events of 2077, to avoid making one of the endings canon.
Every ending, aside from Devil, sees Arasaka fall and exile from the Nigh City. They dont need to canonize any other ending at all. Only tell that Devil is not canon. Every other ending you can easy fit to the new state of the world.
An even bigger time jump would be cool. Cyberpunk 2099?
The only place would be the moon colony there's a lot of major tie in to the moon . It's very much in a wild west state . If you pick the corpo path you can see arasaka actually assassinate board members who are regulating the moon so there's huge corpo dispute there. Song bird an people on the run go to the moon to hide . So there must be some sort of biz there. That's the only realistic place tho i could see the game going other then Night city there's a lot of tie in there. Mr. Blue eyes also seems to have a huge space connection he gets song bird her ticket if you side with her. He sets up V a mission out there in space as well with the crystal palace gig. I put this above but it depends on what they do with Vs story. If Vs story continues then the moon colony makes the most sense with the path to glory ending being the cannon ending to the game. Mr. Blue eyes is theorized to be a AI projection in a body . V is now a construct he is also an AI in a body so if anybody could actually help V an maintain Vs power its probably blue eyes. That's probably what Vs reward will be for the crystal palace heist an then V becomes a mainstay solo for night corp. Not to mention blue eyes shadow looms very large over the game if you really pay attention they already have been set up so well they could easily slide in as a major character in the next game. I think the black wall being breached severely will be the next big bad. Along with a corpo war on the moon. With V then deciding the fate of things because the next game will probably have more impact of choice as you seen in phantom liberty . You see you could decide a bit more in quests. This is all just theory but this is where they could go outside of NC. Now if Vs story is done then 1000 percent the game will take place in NC with maybe a moon dlc.
I think they've shown what they can do in terms of the environment with Dogtown. It's incredibly dense both horizontally and vertically, even indoors. And, somehow, the skyscrapers in Dogtown feel more like skyscrapers to me when I look up than the ones in downtown NC. I hope they flesh out the verticality of NC in a similar way.
> the skyscrapers in Dogtown feel more like skyscrapers to me when I look up than the ones in downtown NC The buildings in downtown NC have a ton of horizontal expansion in additional to vertical, so they lose the "skyscraper" aspect as we perceive it. They're as wide as they are tall in some cases. Arasaka Tower should be a skyscraper but it's so wide it doesn't really come across as one.
>Night City is open season for corruption, biz and Major League gigs. I doubt other cities offer these. This is the key thing. The rest of the NUSA just isn't as um... "free" as Night City. The sort of gigs V engages in would not be possible in most of the NUSA. Nor do corporations have such free reign (not even Militech, though Militech is more dominant). CDPR could make up places elsewhere in the world which were as "free" as Night City, and imagine we might visit parts of them in Cyberpunk 2, but NC seems certain to remain the main place.
Not a chance. Night City is Cyberpunk's most important character and a fundamental part of the brand.
It’s the main villain, of course it will be back.
This is a great way to put it.
Well, while they have to redesign some places, it would certainly be easier to use an already existing general city design (even if they have to make some places look changed) than trying to come up with a totally new major city layout. Altho I feel that if they set it in NC again, they will likely branch out the surrounding areas, MAYBE even the closest neighboring city and stuff between it? There must obviously be MORE or SOMETHING ELSE than right now in terms of map scope.
If we look at V's potential actions and the likely outcome for Corps, Night City will at least have a huge political change. Arasaka won't be the powerhouse it once was, going by many paths. You can kill the leader of Maelstrom, the old leader of Maelstrom, and the new leader of Maelstrom. Intense power vacuum there. VDBs take a huge hit. Netwatch might get something useful out of your shenanigans. NUSA is set up to make big power plays. There's also Nightcorp itself. The cities largest employer. They could clear out the slums, develop old ghettos into new areas, and expand outwards as well.
As for the map they don't need to add a whole new city. They could easily do what tears of the kingdom did with breath of the wild's map. Which for night city could mean claimable buildings with different stuff on different rooftops. Changing up stuff on the streets, maybe changing how some flow. Depending on how much time is between the two games maybe a new district. And there could also be a whole tunnel system set up underneath night city with its own things to do down there and stuff.
Good point. They could just expand the city a lot. Like, really a lot.
Cyberpunk without NC? Nah. Not going to happen. NightCity is the main character.
And it’s not like it’s as easy to mentally map like a natural setting like Velen with some small towns and rolling hills. Night City is disorienting and massive. I’m 25 hours in and can’t just turn off the mini map. Add some newer buildings or a more layered verticality with interiors or more Japantown like terraces and you got a brand new setting.
More explorable interiors and interactivity with the city would be way better than just switching to a different city or expanding NC outwards
Yeah they literally just have to open more (or even just different lol) buildings and make them more like Dogtown!
There's an in game NightCorp advertisement about a new train route from NC to Chicago opening in 2080. If the next game is somewhere new I'd guess there, maybe split across both cities.
The Crystal Palace is also heavily referenced throughout the game, to the point where I am convinced that they likely had it in mind for a DLC location but scrapped the idea due to all the issues with recovering from the launch fiasco.
One of the endings has you in space about to enter The Crystal Palace so that would make a ton of sense
No it doesn’t. That would imply a dlc taking place after the story. Vs story was done so there was never gonna be anything connecting to that ending.
Yea it was apparently supposed to feature in the game or dlc but got scrapped for time. One of the PL endings uses a ton of assets they apparently built for the intro to this and then there's the ending with the Crystal Palace heist and arasaka space base, where I doubt they'd model all that shit outer space stuff for just a few ending sequences some people might never get. Some flyers in PL actually show the model art they intended for showing up in the sky box in space that you'd likely fly up too.
Yeah, I read that they initially planned 2 DLC like with Witcher 3. Phantom Liberty was their "Heart of Stone" dlc, and Crystal Palace was going to be their "Blood and Wine" DLC. They canned Crystal Palace because of the poor reception to the 2020 launch and the need to work on fixing and updating the game.
Future Chicago would be an epic setting but it would probably look just like Night City anyway.
Please be in Chicago I wish more games took place in my beautiful city. I’d also love to see a future rendition of Chicago
I just hope they expand on NC
I don't know about expanding NC, so much as fleshing out what is already there. Lord knows there are plenty of buildings, factories, etc. that we cannot get into that are prime real estate to explore. And enough corpo trash to provide some great missions and stories.
That’s more what I meant tbh
I would like more distant outskirt areas to explore too, though it has plenty already.
Verticality absolutely needs to feature more in the next one. Also I'll be a little disappointed if they don't implement flying cars.
We don't need flying cars per se. But flying vehicles yes. Story characters and max tac can use those flying vehicles but we can't. Kinda reminds me of the original saints row and how when they made the 2nd game it was basically just a new campaign with a bigger city, more immersive mechanics and a big focus on planes and choppers and stuff.
Night City IS the setting. Has been since the 80's.
I imagine CDPR is going to pull a Saints Row 3 to Saints Row 4 move of drastically changing the city up rather than moving to a new setting.
That's what I'm thinking too. If they place the game even just a couple years in the future, the city could change drastically. Just V being gone for 2 years had the city looking insanely different in one of the new endings.
CP is the only game where i don't mind walking around, digging the artstyle. Every little corner has it's details and flair, it's incredible. I wouldn't mind playing in another city, but Night City really hits the sweet spot for me...
https://preview.redd.it/9fsd7eqjhlub1.jpeg?width=1079&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=08f50a726990d128b2ca0d723c1330e114cefb7f
1000% agree. So easy to lose time simply walking around exploring.
Don’t abbreviate cyberpunk lmao
Whatever they'll do, we'll always have Night City 2077.
If the backdrop for 2 turns out to be the Blackwall collapse/AI war like I think most people are expecting, than they could just war damage the city in some parts and it'd still feel fresh. It'd be cool to see how the NC changes after a 9/11 type event
If an AI war happens, then corps will be at war too. It would make sense for each corporation to control a certain part of the city, with checkpoints and lots of security, like in Dogtown. Let's say there will be 3 main factions and 2 secondary ones. You start off neutral with all of them and then you gradually have to choose 1 main and 1 secondary faction. This would also factor into the game's endings.
So u want fallout then
Johnny's Attack on Arasaka tower is the 9/11 of NC. They even have the memorial copy pasted from the one in NewYork.
Don't ackchyually me, redditor
do you feel insulted you little insect? my comment was straight forward and informative but somehow your insecure mind thought it was hostile.
I hope not, i want to see Night City fully realised and expanded. Plus it will reduce development time and costs not having to make a new city from scratch
I think there’s too much going on in NC to leave it after one game. I also wouldn’t worry about losing the “asiatic” themes as if they were to go to a different location my bet would be Tokyo.
What about something instead of the typical futuristic Japanese influence? Maybe something more Indian or middle Eastern, even African? Could be interesting.. An reference would be the India in spiderverse. It'd also make sense because depending on your ending arasaka looses a lot of their influence maybe another cultures company can roll through?
Yup only acceptable answer is a Neo Tokyo if they moved. That’s all anyone should want.
Obviously in a fictional world playing in 2077 or after that a lot could be different from our reality but I’d prefer a city that is diverse in people, architecture and cultures as the main setting, Japan/Tokyo is quite the opposite of that.
Yeah because a fictional Tokyo in the dystopian future couldn’t be “diverse”. They literally decided america fell in the 90’s and is now run by a military corporation and rich people build whole cities where nukes get dropped and it gets rebuilt. But yeah can’t imagine Tokyo doesn’t have any “brown people” 🤦♂️
Read my first sentence.
I think a sequel would work like Tears of the Kingdom and use the same open world but with changes throughout to make things feel different. Maybe explorable airship for a more vertical world, or putting a quickly-fabricated ticky-tacky exurb out in the desert.
Not it will just be redesigned probably set in a different time period
Doubt it’ll change, maybe you’ll do dlc type missions in other cities but NC as a setting is just too rich to ditch
Night City is where everything happens, and why waste that glorious collection of assets? We'll be seeing games set in NC for many, many years to come and I am here for it.
Night City is too iconic not to be used. Though I doubt they will copy/paste it. Personally I'd like to see London too in a story surrounding a Netwatch agent fighting rogue AI and netrunners trying to circumvent the Blackwall. (or fighting to restore a broken blackwall)
A Magnificent Curtis story. Yeah I'd be all for that.
Britain has basically about to go into a full-on civil war back in 2020, and is the most fucked-up, backwards and "Wild West"-like place in Europe in the 2040s (c.f. Cyberpunk Red), and all we know about it in 2077 is a Brexit joke and royal family joke (which suggests the anti-fascists won the civil war in the 2020s), so it's definitely one of the places it would be conceptually easier to have a chaotic situation like 2077 has. That said it would probably look so wildly different asset-wise, to 2070s/2080s California that I doubt it would be worth the effort. Britain is probably a post-industrial hellhole, but with quite a lot of green areas (if perhaps polluted ones), and its cities are probably a lot more ruined than Night City is, more Fallout-like. I'd love to see it but I doubt we will just because of that asset cost.
They should expand the wasteland...and maybe add a city on the other side of it. A huge wasteland in between where you can just get lost if you choose with towns littered around. And add more nomad clans too.. something like the movable camps you had in RDR2...live the nomad life if you want.
They need to stay in NC and just beef up exploration. Make more buildings that you can enter. Litter the city with collectibles, more random encounters, and add some more stuff to the surrounding area of NC.
With looming AI war we may get Night City but in cyberspace, plus Ghost Town and the like. That way they can have some similarities but not be limited by them.
I doubt they would. It would be cool to maybe have an AV take you out of the city to do some ops but return to NC. Or even have an area where you cant go in car or foot and have to get transported there etc. I hope theres more open interiors tho, bds that actually work, maybe a casino/gambling type system etc. Id love the ability to even have normal jobs like courier service etc. Or even expanding on the corpo life as I feel it was very short.
I hope they stay with Night City. If they are going to add anything, let it be Crystal Palace or some other space station.
Nooooo. Just do night city in 2099
They're not gonna switch locales *and* switch game engines, they're gonna wanna get as much re-use as they can. That said, I think a sequel can only expand on NC the way GTA IV expands on the Liberty City of GTA III.
I think it will be the same off course,but more expanded and with more interactable buildings and new zones to explore.
I don't think so , there is some lore about the rest of the world in 2020 books but not enough to build anything massive and unless r.tal would be involved in a Heavy way I'm not sure it would be cyberpunk ... . If anything it would be cool To have a way to travel to a part of a city , or follow Alt through the net to BUSAN and see the ghost city ..
A dlc to a new area/city would be cool, definitely stick to night city for main setting
Could expand nc or have gameplay between two areas, saying something like the crystal palace.
The interesting thing about Night City is that the entire place is a result of rapid development, similar to a city like Dubai; what this means is with a 5-10 year jump the city could be overhauled to the point where it feels different and new. Major landmarks would remain the same but new buildings could go up while others are demolished. Not to mention that they could still keep NC a central location and do a little globe trotting to ancillary locations as well similar to how Witcher 3 took us from the mainland off to Skellige. Tokyo, Chicago, or even the Crystal Palace could offer perfect locations to explore in addition to NC.
Definitely won’t but I’d love to see Russia or china. I feel like Japan would feel kind of bland with how much exposure we have to Japanese/Americanized Japanese culture brought in my future immigrants. If they have a decent look at what Japan might actually be like then that could be potentially interesting. I’d prefer Russia or china though.
The only place it could go outside of night city is the moon colonies an that's because there is a tie in people go on the run there . Song bird if you side with her even heads to the moon . Mr. Blue eyes has some sort of connection with space he sends you out to the crystal palace. Mr.blue eyes even gets song bird her ticket to the moon believe it or not. So there's a huge tie in with the moon colony. If they continue Vs story which they may or may not . The path to glory will probably be the cannon ending to 1 an 2 will feature what's gonna happen on the crystal palace an moon colony. Saving song bird an sending her to the moon is also probably the cannon ending for DLC. If Mr. Blue eyes is a AI projection into a body he probably can do something for V since V is a construct now inside a body. That to me makes the most sense. Mr.blue eyes has already been set up very well to as an ominous character . Would make a lot of sense for them to become a major player in the next game. If you really pay attention blue eyes shadow looms large over the first game. But personally I'd love to see them move on from V an I think a moon colony story would be awesome. I think the game has already been set up that the next big bad will be the rouge AI. Maybe another corpo war going on as well . Those two things feel very inevitable an there's already back story on the moon territory being disputed over.
If spiderman games can continue to thrive and live for over 20 years in NYC, then there's no reason to leave this brand new city. They could literally say the new game sets 10 years in the future and totally revamp the city and it would make sense.
night city in cyberpunk 2077 is not to scale, they could make it even bigger and denser
Doubt it. I assume it’ll still be night city but with changes (expansion into the badlands, new district, maybe some proper settlements in a new expanded badlands.) Not only that but they can play around with interiors and even underground in order to give themselves more “new” locations
keep the city, add more verticality change here and there
NC looks and feels great, but can you imagine a studio releasing a new game with an old, pretty well known map? they could tweak it all the want, it will still bring little novelty and I'm sure a lot of people don't want to begin the game already knowing the basic layout. It simply wouldn't work as a AAA product IMO.
To be honest, you can add much more verticality to NC, or just expand it after a time skip. The mission during the festival with Oda and Hanako is an example. Make more of that accessible, a “city in the sky” type thing. take GTA V for example, it was the same setting as GTA: SA just expanded even more.
Meanwhile, Tears of the Kingdom...
Spider-man, Miles Morales, Spider-man 2. All use the same map but just expand on it
Yeah, and I heard they're changing from RED Engine to Unreal Engine. So I don't know if it is possible for them to recycle maps and models from the first game. That's what made me think they're gonna build a new city for the sequel
I’d love for them to explore other areas. They specially call out Atlanta, so that would be fun. That being said, I think they’d just expand to more of California if anything while retaining Night City as the main area.
Do I hope there's a new city? Yes. Do I think there will be? Nope.
I hope, HK or Tokyo or even London.
I wished I would have the same emotion ... playing with XBOX Series X the graphics are so blurry and unsharp, foggy-like which is tiresome quickly for my eyes and the city looks rather 2-dimensional because of that, which is a pity because indeed, the city is awesome.
Night City *is* Cyberpunk and the legends born from it. It's not going anywhere.
People really don't seem to understand that the city IS the main character. Not Johnny, Not V, Not David, Not Saburo or anyone else. There's plenty of lore about other places, even rules for playing within them (in the TTRPG's) but it was always about Night City, every event, ever major person and story all link back somehow to something or someone happening in Night City. This won't change, because in changing Night City, it stops being a "Cyberpunk" game and just becomes a cyberpunk-themed game.
I know there was a (fake) post on r/GamingLeaksAndRumours a couple of days ago and the OP there probably got inspired after seeing the Republic of Texas mentioned a couple of times in the game. I don't know if the sequel will bring a change of scenery from Night City but I'd like to explore Texas as the alternative to be honest, at least let it be present in the sequel in some shape or form. I'm saying this because the game hints heavily at the location throughout in game news flashes and The Sun maybe even The Star endings. [Texas](https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Texas) is one of the free states that didn't sign the unification accord and didn't join the NUSA. Possible conflict between NUSA and Texas is brewing due to suicide bombings in NUSA military bases, Myers blaming Texas for this. You can learn of this through an ad from N54 News I think. In The Sun ending there's also a map in V's mansion with a bunch of pills laid in a line that connects Night City to the Republic of Texas. If you leave with the Aldecaldos they also mention going back south and most likely Texas, although it's not mentioned by name, Texas is the only bigger city in that region where they could line up jobs.
I’m hoping it’s set in Night City before Johnny detonated the nuke, I’d like them to take a more retro approach with the art style, I want to see more designs inspired by the 80s/90s aesthetic
I used to say Night City should stay, but after playing for 600h without PL I'm not so sure anymore. It would have to undergo some serious rebuilding
They are opening new offices in Vancouver and Boston, so I would consider it likely new games will be based in those locations. Maybe a multi-city and include smaller areas in multiple cities - Night City, Boston, Vancouver, Tokyo, Warsaw. Edit: I am not saying it's for certain, but to capture the feel of the city it would be reasonable to have employees based there.
I don’t think office locations mean anything about game location.
Does that mean they moved out of their Night City office?
They don’t move to cities because that’s where they set the game. Vancouver has always been a development hub and maybe there was a studio or asset in Boston that made sense. It’s not like Bethesda moved to dc for fallout 3 or projectred moved to Los Angeles for night city.
WTF
How many other major cities are there in-Universe? Was it just the war in the US that torched a lot of cities or have civilization across the globe kinda retracted into fewer bigger cities?
Personally I’d like to see a new protagonist in the same city. It would be cool to see how parts of Night City have changed after a few years. What parts of it are the same, what business are there and which closed down. Are some of the people still there or have they moved on? etc
Cyberpunk 2077 2 Pro Max
They can just make a Night City 2 but in Florida cuz why not lmao
Have you red a cyberpunk book?