Cyberpunk 2077's quest director Paweł Sasko knows that the road hasn't always been smooth for CD Projekt Red's dystopian RPG. And yet, he always tried to improve the game because he believed in it, something that was clear in a new interview with TheNeonArcade, where he spoke about how the game's expansion Phantom Liberty built on player feedback.
"We knew that players were unhappy with certain things, certain choices we had made," Sasko said. "They appreciate one thing but did not appreciate another choice, and so on. That was all taken into account. When you look at Phantom Liberty's story, I hope you can see it, because goddammit, believe me I tried. And other people obviously as well."
Sasko also spoke about how the game tried to improve from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt in terms of its storytelling. "In The Witcher 3, if you make a choice, you even have the flashback moment where Geralt comes in and tells you, 'If I had chosen this or that, then this or that would happen,'" he says. "You have this really artificial moment of that flashback telling you exactly what happened. In Cyberpunk, we wanted to make it as diegetic, as immersive as possible, as natural as possible. We were so subtle sometimes, because we wanted it to be so realistic and so natural, that we went so subtle and kind of missed the point, you know what I mean?"
This then led to the story changing in Phantom Liberty to be more telegraphed, so that the player wouldn't think their choices don't matter. All of these seem like big lessons that should also be taken to The Witcher and Cyberpunk sequels in the future.