'Cyberpunk 2077' Was Originally Third-Person, And Had Flying Cars

Cyberpunk 2077 once had the potential to be one of the greatest video games of all time. Hopes were high. Probably a little too high. As I'm sure you're painfully aware by now, things didn't quite work out for developer CD Projekt RED.

It's strange to consider, what with everything that has happened around the open-world sci-fi RPG in the last few months, but there was once a time when the biggest concern about the game was that it would be first-person. For some reason (I never really understood why), people felt the game was going to be much better if CDPR added some kind of third-person option, akin to the one in games like Skyrim and Fallout 3.

We now know such an option would have been unlikely to have solved Cyberpunk 2077's larger problems, of course, but you have to wonder what the game would have looked like in third-person. Modders have already done incredible working imagining the game in just such a perspective, but it turns out that CDPR was at one point considering making the game an entirely third-person RPG.

In an incredibly detailed new piece from Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier, Cyberpunk 2077 started life as a third-person action game with many features that would only have been possible in that view. Schreier explains that back in 2016 the game had (or was going to have) a lot of things that many of the fans expected/wanted to see. Third-person, wall-running, and even flying cars were all cut or changed during development. This is perfectly normal for a video game, of course - especially one that's been in development for such a long time. Still, it's interesting to consider what might have been.

Elsewhere, Schreier explained why the game's Night City police feel so, well, broken. The answer is simple: they were added at the very last minute.

Schreier wrote: "If you're wondering why the police system in Cyberpunk 2077 is so janky: well, it was all done at the last minute. As is evident by the final product, it was unclear to some of the team why they were trying to make both an RPG and a GTA with a fraction of Rockstar's staff."

It seems clear at this point that Cyberpunk 2077 didn't quite end up the way anyone wanted it to. CDPR recently released a roadmap of fixes and new content for the game, so here's hoping the studio can make the improvements it needs to and win back the fans it might have lost.

Topics: News, Cyberpunk 2077