Cyberpunk 2077’s main story may not be as grandiose as we’d imagined. According to senior quest designer Patrick K. Mills, who recently spoke on Twitch, the sci-fi RPG’s core campaign will actually be shorter than The Witcher 3’s. Apparently, a ton of people were upset at how long CD PROJEKT RED’s previous epic was, so the developer intentionally dialed down on Cyberpunk 2077’s primary narrative.
“…the difference between a completionist run and a single, main story run…we do know that the main story run in Cyberpunk 2077 is slightly shorter than The Witcher 3 because we got a lot of complaints about Witcher 3’s main story just being too long,” Mills said. “And looking at the metrics, you see tremendous numbers of people played through that game really far but never made it to the end. We want you to see the full story, so we did shorten the main story, but we have lots to do, and in terms of a completionist campaign, I just don’t have that number.”
While this sounds disappointing, we’re not too worried. Mills’s exact words were “slightly shorter,” so the difference should be negligible. And if we take a look at the statistics from How Long to Beat (a site that tracks completion times), The Witcher 3’s main story takes around 51 hours to complete. Cyberpunk 2077 presumably falls just below that, which means that it should still be an epic experience, even without the myriad side quests and inevitable DLC.
Cyberpunk 2077 will be released for the PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 on November 19, 2020. (We’re not sure when the Stadia version is coming out, but CD PROJEKT RED claims that it’ll be out this year.) You can check out two new trailers below, which premiered during yesterday’s Night City Wire event.