Cyberpunk 2077's Gangs Won't Just Be "Comic Book" Villains

If you played CD Projekt Red's The Witcher series, you will know it's not a fan of one-dimensional [...]

cyberpunk 2077
(Photo: CD Projekt Red)

If you played CD Projekt Red's The Witcher series, you will know it's not a fan of one-dimensional heroes or villains. The Polish developer, perhaps more so than any other developer, tends to rather lean into the morally gray when crafting both most of its villains and heroes. In its games, nothing is as ever simple as saying, "he's the bad guy, and he's the good guy."

That said, it's perhaps no surprise that the developer is staying true to its character design philosophy in its upcoming game, Cyberpunk 2077.

Speaking with the Official PlayStation Magazine, Stanislaw Swiecicki, a writer who's been with CD Projekt Red since 2013, provided a little bit of a behind-the-scenes stroll through the narrative design of one part of the game, divulging many details and interesting insight in the process.

"The moment when trauma team is descending – I was on the team writing that," said Swiecicki. "Trauma team and the meat wagon sort of mythos – so, you know, really tough guys in ambulances flying around, but also armed to the extent that you can't really call them health care workers, They're super-dangerous to be on par for this world. The moment when they descend it's like 'All right, yeah, this is the vibe I used to imagine.' And also the machine gang you make a deal with. With the gangs we really want to emphasize that we don't want them to be our comic book-esque villains – they're not abominations that decided for almost no reason to put cyberware in themselves. It's a dark, dangerous world and some people who aren't able to make it to the megacorps or don't want it… It's a human need to seek identity, and some people just gravitate towards the gangs. Although their faces are modified they're still human underneath, you know. It touches upon a universal feeling we all have: the need to belong to a group."

Elsewhere in the same interview, Swiecicki revealed that the game's writing team, at the moment, is ten people deep, and that it is taking the creative freedom it needs from the game's source material, Cyberpunk 2020. The writer specifically notes of "major tweaks to what the universe is, and what rules it has."

If you're a fan of CD Projekt Red, then you're a fan of story, narrative, and rich and mature storytelling. Suffice to say, perhaps more so than any other part of the game, the Polish developer and its team of writers have to absolutely nail all of the above in order to meet the incredibly high standards of its fanbase, standards it has created itself by crafting one of the best, richest trilogies from a narrative perspective to ever embrace the medium of video games.

Cyberpunk 2077 is in development for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC, and possibly next-gen systems. For more news, information, and media on the game, click here.

Thanks, Wccftech.

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