Cyberpunk 2077

CDPR

Where has all the love gone?

With BioWare having released Anthem, which lets you vaguely flirt with but not romance any NPCs, there really have not been any AAA titles that featuring sex or romance in a meaningful capacity for a while, but Cyberpunk 2077 will arrive next year and change that.

From what appears to be a DM conversation with Paweł Sasko, a lead quest designer at CDPR, posted on reddit, we have an update about how romance will work on Cyberpunk 2077, and how it will differ from The Witcher. PC Gamer followed up and got this statement from CDPR directly:

“Romancing is something heavily present in Cyberpunk, and players will be able to form meaningful connections with other characters as well as go for one night stands…Since we’re not bound by a predefined character like in The Witcher anymore, the game will feature romance options going beyond heterosexual.”

Sasko says that because Geralt was a pre-defined character, ie. straight, as we was in the books, that was the reason there were only a handful of romance options available to him, and all of them were female, including the ever-present triangle between him, Yennefer and Triss (honestly who doesn’t choose Triss).

Cyberpunk 2077

CDPR

But Cyberpunk is different since you’re making your own character, where you can choose their gender and also their sexual orientation, deciding who to romance. This not only means presumably more options in general, but more diverse options as well.

Naturally, it would have been a controversy if Cyberpunk had this kind of character creation system and did not allow for same-sex relationships, so this is kind of par for the course in 2019. It remains to be seen how exactly NPCs will work, as if they are also technically “pre-defined” characters, if they will have an orientation, ie. some people you can’t romance if you’re interested in men or women, because they’re either exclusively straight or gay. I remember this being a controversy back in the Dragon Age days when most characters were technically bi, able to be romanced by male or female characters, rather than having an orientation of their own.

Regardless, I am glad to hear that romance is part of Cyberpunk because we simply don’t have all that many games that feature it these days. BioWare was the main producer of AAA romance plots, and The Witcher had a few, but usually most relationships in games these days revolve around shooting at or shooting with other people. No one’s romancing Zavala or Mara Sov in Destiny, for instance, if only in their own minds.

Just another reason to look forward to Cyberpunk, I guess, as if we needed more of those.

But…

But can we romance Keanu Reeves?