Cyberpunk 2077 is shaping up to be a massive game but its main story will actually be shorter than The Witcher 3. During the post show for the latest Night City Wire, senior quest designer Patrick K. Mills explained that complaints about the length of The Witcher 3's campaign led to the team shortening the campaign for Cyberpunk 2077.
He revealed that while a lot of people play through The Witcher 3's campaign, not everyone made it to the end. He also assured that while the campaign is shorter, there's still a lot for the completionist gamer to do in the game.
"The difference between a completionist run and a 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. "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 Mills couldn't put an exact number to how long Cyberpunk 2077's campaign will be, the website How Long To Beat, which tracks the length of games, has The Witcher 3's main story taking about 51.5 hours on average to beat. When played leisurely, it could take upwards of 85 hours. So it's hard to really gauge what Mills means when he says Cyberpunk 2077's main story will be shorter.
A completionist run of The Witcher 3 took around 173 hours. In addition to all of the content at launch, Cyberpunk 2077 will also feature free DLC alongside paid expansions, similar to The Witcher 3. In other words, there should be plenty of content to keep fans busy for quite a while, despite a shorter main story.
Cyberpunk 2077 will release for PC, PS4 and Xbox One on November 19. It's also coming to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X.