Cyberpunk promises 'smoother learning curve' over The Witcher

CD Projekt RED is moving from swords and arcane runes to neon and future-tech with Cyberpunk. While it may be a drastic shift, the developer is using lessons learned from The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.

"What we learned from The Witcher series is that we need to attract people with a smoother learning curve when it comes to the storyline," said CD Projekt's Adam Badowski.

"In The Witcher 1, for example, we were throwing people in the middle of the story, and we assumed that players would know what is happening! But a lot of players told us that they didn't really understand this relationship or that relationship," co-founder Marcin Iwinski told Gamasutra. "With our future games, we want the player to be able to get more context, and we need to introduce the game and its characters to people more properly."

Iwinski compared the task to Game of Thrones, the popular TV adaptation from a series of novels. The show trims out pieces of the story or takes liberties to streamline it, but that's all in service of making the plot easy to digest in that format. "And that's what we want to capture," he said. "In [Cyberpunk], we want to create a story that is very profound, but the novice players should be introduced to [the world] better than they were in The Witcher 2." At the same time, he says this doesn't mean the team is going to "simplify" the game experience.