Cyberpunk 2077’s world looks vast—but it won’t be quite as vast as The Witcher 3’s in terms of pure square footage. The RPG’s map is a “little bit smaller” than CD Projekt’s fantasy epic, but it will be far denser, according to producer Richard Borzymowski.
“If you look at pure surface square kilometers, then Cyberpunk 2077 might even be a little bit smaller than The Witcher 3, but it’s the density of the content, taking the world of The Witcher and squeezing it right in, deleting the wilderness between,” he told GamesRadar.
It’s no real surprise, given that Cyberpunk 2077 is set largely in a city and The Witcher 3 was mostly stretches of countryside, but it’s good to know roughly what to expect.
“Obviously…in The Witcher we were an open world with vast lanes and forests in between smaller cities and larger cities like Novigrad, but in Cyberpunk 2077 we’re set in Night City,” Borzymowski said. “It’s an integral part of the setting; it’s essentially a protagonist if you want to call it that, so it has to be denser. It wouldn’t give us the end effect we wanted to achieve if the city wouldn’t be believable…so we packed it full of life.”
We already know that Night City is split into six districts with no loading screens between them. Players will also be able to explore the city’s outskirts, called the Badlands. We’ll know more about those districts when the dev team show off 15 minutes of gameplay in a livestream next week.