Cyberpunk 2077 Map Is Smaller But More Tightly Packed Than Witcher 3

The world of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is massive. Geralt's adventure takes him to four distinct fantasy locales (five if you include the Blood and Wine expansion), from White Orchard through to Velen and the Skellige Isles. There are small towns, sprawling cities, and miles of countryside, forests, and rivers between them. The map in Cyberpunk 2077 is smaller by comparison, but developer CD Projekt Red says its latest open-world is much denser.

In an interview with Gamesradar, Cyberpunk 2077 producer Richard Borzymowski explains how the studio built the setting of Night City. "If you look at pure surface, right--square kilometres--then Cyberpunk 2077 might be a little bit smaller than The Witcher 3," he says. "But when it comes to the density of content, you basically take the world of The Witcher and squeeze it right in, deleting the wilderness between this.

"Obviously this is what we had to make because in The Witcher we were an open-world with vast lanes and forests in between smaller cities or bigger cities like Novigrad, but in Cyberpunk 2077 we're set in Night City. 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."

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This density has already been showcased in numerous gameplay videos and trailers leading up to Cyberpunk 2077's release, including the added verticality afforded by skyscrapers and other buildings.

In other Cyberpunk 2077 news, the game is expected to have a new game plus mode, and will feature a harder difficulty that turns off the game's UI. In terms of additional modes, CD Projekt Red says it is looking into multiplayer. Producer Richard Borzymowski told GameSpot that while nothing could be confirmed, the team will "think [about expansions]" after game development is done.

CD Projekt Red is also hosting a stream on August 30 at 2pm EST // 11am PT // 6pm GMT // 8PM CEST, that will unveil a 15-minute edit of what was shown to attendees at Gamescom.

Cyberpunk 2077 launches April 16 2020 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, with an unannounced release date for Google Stadia.