Cyberpunk 2077 Has A Surprising Reason For Why Its Side Quests Are So Good

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has been largely praised for its engaging storyline and main characters, but as with many of the best RPGs, it's the side quests that bring the world of the game to life. These smaller interactions and unrelated adventures make Night City feel truly lived in, learning the plights of citizens from all walks of life, including a seemingly sentient vending machine.

It isn't compulsory to complete 's side quests, and some can even be missed entirely, but the ones that involve major characters can have more of an impact, as players can build relationships with specific characters who they can ask for assistance later, potentially influencing the type of ending the player can have. Aside from these, many of 's side missions are simply full of great rewards and can lean further into both the horrors and the absurdity of life in Night City, making it worth playing them anyway.

's side quests are marked on the game's map by a question mark icon, and others can be unlocked by just roaming around Night City.

's lead quest designer Paweł Sasko explained why the game's side quests are so good in an interview with at the 2024 Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. According to Pawel Sasko, it seems to come down to the sheer number of quests being pitched, with quest designers encouraged to constantly pitch all of their ideas to the team, even the bad ones, so that only the best stood out, with only the top 5 to 10% being taken forward to the game.

According to Sasko, the designers will be provided with a list of genres, themes, and topics, and will write anywhere between five and twenty pitches a day, each consisting of four brief sentences. While the idea of so many pitches being rejected may sound disheartening to some, Sasko's opinion is that even the best people have a ton of bad ideas and so the team just has to choose the best to pursue, going on to explain that a good designer has an acceptance rate that's between 5 to 10%, and if someone reaches the higher end