Since video games are inherently restricted by hard-coded mechanical systems, what is it like having to mold your quests around those features?



It starts out as a bit of a challenge to see how we can tell our stories with the systems we have, but it ends up being really fun. Cyberpunk as an example has many different gameplay options, so naturally there’s always many different tools a player can use to solve problems.



At the beginning, we might feel like these features are a bit like shackles, so we sometimes can’t do all the things we want to in our quests, but with time, we usually find that despite these hard-mechanical systems, basically anything is possible. We can always be a bit creative to bend the systems or come up with different solutions to let us do whatever we want, so in the end, it feels like we’re molding the systems more around our quests than the other way around.



Most importantly, sometimes having restrictions can also make you more creative. If we could do anything in the world, we might get paralysed always thinking about a thousand possibilities, but with some restrictions, you know what to do, but you can still think of clever ways to circumvent these restrictions.





How are the approaches to designing main quests and side quests different?



The quests in our main storyline usually have a short outline from our story team. Sometimes these can be a few sentences that explain where we start and where we should roughly get to - the main beats. As a quest designer, it’s then my task to turn this into a quest design, together with our writer.



Of course, most focus lies on the main storyline when we develop the game, so these quests usually are made first and will get the most feedback throughout development, with directors playing them a lot.



With side quests we have a bit more freedom, because they are often based on pitches we wrote ourselves and they don’t necessarily have to fulfill a specific purpose in our grander story (but sometimes they still do!).



I’d say we don’t have a hard difference in quality though with full sidequests. We never say that this quest can’t have custom characters or cinematics just because it’s a sidequest. We want to have the best quality everywhere in the game, so as quest designers we approach them in a very similar way.





What’s your favorite side quest or contract you worked on in TW3 and why is it you favorite?



I’d probably say that it’s “A Warble of a Smitten Knight”, the quest in Blood and Wine where I got to stage a whole knight’s tournament. This is actually one of the quests where the end result is still very similar to my original design, so reading it mostly gives you the same quest as you can play today. I was given lots of freedom (and a big budget) to create this quest, so I was able to create the tourney grounds with all the knights and visitors. So I didn’t just implement the quest, but I also filled the place with life, gave little stories to each knight (The Redanians and Nilfgaardians don’t like each other, so they might get up to some mischief at night).



But the best part for me were still the main characters Guillaume and Vivienne that I got to work on with our writer Magda Zych, who gave them some real depth. We were trying to tell a story that’s maybe a bit deeper than it seems. You can just play the quest, get a “happy ending” and be done with it, but if you really get to know the characters, you might also come to different conclusions. So I was happy to see that players got many different endings and are arguing to this day which one might be the best!



To be honest, it is hard for me to pick a favorite though. I also really enjoyed bringing back the lady of the lake (I won Aerondight in the modding competition and really wanted to bring it back into the games) and even my main quest like “Beyond Hill and Dale” was an optional one, so it’s almost a bit like a sidequest. There are players who finished Blood and Wine and never even saw the land of fairy tales.



So in the end, I think quests are a bit like children - you love them all equally (but the one with the sword is probably still the coolest)!





What lesson(s) have you taken to Cyberpunk 2077 from your experience with open world quest design in TW3?



We’re not doing a completely different approach with Cyberpunk, but we want to use some of the lessons we learned to improve our design. We still focus on telling really interesting stories you can find anywhere in the world, but this time, we really try to make everything you find meaningful in some way.



On Wild Hunt, most of the open world content like our communities, bandit camps and yes, even Smuggler’s Caches, were implemented by quest designers as well. But towards the end of Wild Hunt and with our expansions, we founded a new Open World Team that can fully concentrate on bringing the world to life. So they created lots of new ideas for things you can do that aren’t classic quests, but they also implement a different kind of quest that we call “Street Stories”. We really want to connect the open world content with the actual logic of Night City so it feels really immersive. Everything that is going on really has a place in this city, and even a simple encounter can tell its own story.







We’ve heard that Cyberpunk 2077 will have main quests, side quests and street stories. Can you explain how these quest types are different?



Main quests are usually the largest quests in the game and are the ones players have to play to get to the end of the story. Of course we make a nonlinear game, so not all main quests are always required, but those are usually the ones that have the main characters and themes in them that we want to convey. If you wanted, you could only play the main quests and should still get a really good experience.



Side quests are all other quests we put into the game. They can be as large or even bigger as a main quest, or just very short. They are based on all the ideas and stories we want to tell that don’t have a place in our main story. Sometimes they also have a specific purpose, like introducing a new theme to the game, or telling the story of a specific community or location.



Street Stories are the bread and butter of a street merc like V, a bit like monster hunting for a witcher like Geralt. These are the jobs that V gets from fixers like Dexter DeShawn, and doing these jobs gives V more street cred, so she gets a reputation around the city. These jobs can be very varied and of course also benefit a lot from our different playstyles, so there’s often many creative ways to solve them. Street Stories are designed and implemented by our Open World Team, so as a quest designer I’m actually really looking forward towards playing them myself, because I don’t know them as well as other quests in the game and I’ll be able to play them almost as any other player.



We also have minor quests, which is just our term for short or smaller side quests. Sometimes they can just be a few minutes long, but they all should tell an interesting story nevertheless. This is often where we can be the most creative, because there’s not a lot of pressure. Many cool moments that people remember from Wild Hunt are from these smaller minor quests.





How do side quests impact the main quest in Cyberpunk?



Side quest can of course be completely separate stories, but they can also continue the story of a main quest or even set up a new branch in the main storyline.



As an example, many people didn’t even realize that by the time they were finishing the storyline of the Bloody Baron in Wild Hunt, they were already playing a side quest that continued this story thread from our main quests. The main quest was over once Geralt found information about Ciri, but the Baron’s story still continued as a side quest.



We of course like to make the game so anything you do could possibly have an impact on the main story of the game. Characters you only meet in a side quest would then suddenly show up in the main story. This way, the player never knows what to expect. Sometimes a small quest can turn into something much bigger and then change the whole main story of the game. So it’s absolutely worth playing every quest in the game and to see how they interact with each other.





What sort of consequences are there if I “fail” a quest?



There can be many different story consequences that of course always depend on what the quest was about, but one thing that’s part of our design philosophy is not to have a game over screen other than player death.



This means that for many different cases, we have to come up with solutions how the quest can continue, even if the player makes a big stupid mistake. It’s especially important for our main quests, because those can’t be “failed” in the classical sense, because the player should always be able to get to his ending of the story. But of course we can make these decisions, but then have to live with the consequences, which sometimes can feel like we failed someone.



But of course, if we get a job and it’s specified that we shouldn’t go on a rampage, we simply fail our job if we do it and won’t get paid. So we just always try to find what makes sense and offer as many different possibilities and consequences as possible, but sometimes we also have to balance how much we can realistically do.