CD Projekt Red Shouldn’t Waste Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City
When it comes to open-world video games, we’ve been all over the world and across the multiverse, from the relatively small cities of Skyrim to the vastness of Los Santos and Assassin’s Creed’s take on Paris. One of the biggest games in this space, though, needs to take a page from one of the most compact. That is, as CD Projekt Red looks to the future of the Cyberpunk series, it should look to Like a Dragon–formerly called Yakuza in Western territories–and its hyper-detailed world of Kamurocho.
Sega and its RGG Studios team have been developing this series since the release of the original entry in the early 2000s. They looked at Tokyo’s red light district, Kabukicho, and brought it to life in startling detail–you can quite literally navigate your way around Kabukicho if you know the Kamurocho map well enough. Including the Like a Dragon main series, its spin-off games, and the two Judgment games, there are at least 15 games set primarily or partially in Kamurocho.
CD Projekt Red announced Cyberpunk 2077 in 2012, and then unveiled the game–or something intended to look like it–in 2018. The game finally released in 2020, and received its massive 2.0 overhaul update in 2023. When you look at the resulting game, it’s easy to see where a lot of that time was spent. Night City and its outlying areas make for some of the most expansive and detailed areas you can explore in a video game. In terms of first-person games, Cyberpunk makes its next-nearest siblings like Fallout and Elder Scrolls look sparse in comparison. If we factor in third-person games, it’s only when we look at Assassin’s Creed’s version of Paris and GTA V’s Los Santos that we see comparatively vast and detailed cities.