One of Cyberpunk 2077’s most controversial quest lines had even members of the game’s development team raising concerns, but the game’s lead quest designer says that’s all part of making art.
The Sinnerman side quest has become one of Cyberpunk’s most notorious side-missions, culminating – assuming you do everything ‘right’ – in a choice that allows you to crucify a criminal, potentially nailing him to the cross yourself. Cyberpunk doesn’t pull any punches in what’s an incredibly graphic cutscene, but senior quest designer Philipp Weber thinks that it says something important about the nature of what CD Projekt Red was creating.
Speaking to GamesRadar+ about The Witcher 3 in celebration of its tenth anniversary, Weber touched on the fantasy RPG’s iconic Bloody Baron quest. “We look at the emotional strength of that quest, and this is something we like to hit,” he says. But it’s not just about copying the themes of that quest when it comes to future games, he says. What’s more important is “to have the knowledge that you can afford to touch subjects that are very difficult.”
CDPR doesn’t “do heavy things for the sake of edginess,” Weber explains. “We do heavy things if we have something meaningful to say, and then we also dare to go there.” He says ‘dare’, because he acknowledges how easy it is to step over the line with heavier subject matter, at which point the entire quest fails. “The Bloody Baron, for us, really is the benchmark,” he says, but that was before Sinnerman.
Asked about that story, Weber says that “that quest in Cyberpunk also had people in the studio who had problems with it.” To those people, he reiterated that it wasn’t in the game just to be “showy,” but because “there’s an actual interesting question we want to delve into.” Perhaps the team doesn’t have an answer to that question, but regardless, “we think it’s really worth it” to explore.
“I would say that if you never have that discussion, you’re probably not making art, if there’s never a question of ‘maybe we actually have to be brave, dive deeper’. Maybe there’s something that could also touch people the wrong way. Are we ready to do that? And I think, you know, those are discussions that we have to this day, but I think it’s important to have them, because otherwise you’re never able to do something like this.
I’m playing Cyberpunk 2077 for the very first time, and it’s making me question everything I knew about how an RPG should look and feel.
