Even more Side Activities in Cyberpunk 2077 than expected
Why Cyberpunk 2077 will have more side activities than you might expect is a logical conclusion from the character leveling system showed in the Deep Dive video and some developer interviews. Let's first start with the already announced side activities and then go to the more speculative part.
Confirmed Activities
So far CD Projekt Red opened up about three specific side activities: Boxing matches, car racing and the shooting range.
There’s going to be side activities like racing, the boxing bots… there are a lot of different activities that you’re going to be able to go through.
– Max Piers
Pawel Sasko and Lilayah both also confirmed these three activities and added that they are intended to be consecutive activities that the players can use to level up their skills. You can actually train with the fighting bot and train your rifles skill at the shooting range of a gunsmith.
More Activities
Why now should there be even more side activities than everyone expects? It's reasonable for CD Projekt Red to hold some insights back, so it's not that big of a deal when they announce another side activity.
I think there are a lot more to come and this is why:
- the leveling system can lead to a misspec of the character
- the various skills cannot be trained the same way
- player choice is encouraged and expected
How the leveling system is set up
The character has attributes points and levels them up by gaining general experience. Skills are leveled up by using the skill and get skill experience. Character attributes set the maximum level of their attached skills. Therefore, if the attribute BODY has 4 points, the attached skill MELEE cannot level over level 4.
With every leveling system that lets players level up by using specific skills (like Skyrim), to switch your playstyle is problematic. When you decide to switch from a highly leveled Two-Handed character to a Melee character, you are not skilled in Melee at a point in the game, where balancing requires a stronger character. To counter that problem, CD Projekt Red has introduced two solutions to that problem.
First, there is a level cap on your skills. Your attribute points create the level cap of the attached skill. That way if a player wants to go full size Two-Handed, all level ups go into BODY. That leads to underdeveloped other attributes. To switch later in game to Melee makes that skill very underdeveloped. Since Melee as well as Two-Handed are unter BODY, the level cap may be at 10. To get your Melee level up to 10 would take a very long time and makes the player weak at first using that skill.
In order to counter underskilled levels, players can artificially pump up their level of Melee by going to the assigned side activity for that skill - most probably boxing.
Side activities are made for the skill system
We know of 12 skills at the moment, maybe even more later in the game. If the side activities are meant to develop all those different skills, there have to be more than just three. These are the skills:
- Blades, Rifles, Handguns
- Assassination, Nerve, Sniper Rifles
- Engineering
- Melee, Athletics, Two-Handed, Shotguns
- Hacking
Some of the side activities can boost more than one skill. Let's take the shooting range, which can be used to level up Rifles, Handguns, Sniper Rifles and Shotguns. Boxing can be responsible for Melee and Athletics. Car races can be used to bolster Nerve and perhaps Engineering. That leaves Blades, Hacking, Assassination, Two-Handed and perhaps Engineering.
That would lead to a minimum of 7 to 8 side activities in total. If they diversify the guns, the sum would be even higher!
Expect 4-5 side activities more in addition to boxing, racing and the shooting range
CD Projekt Red wants the players to customize their character and ultimately their experience with a fluid class system. They always want the players to make choices and deal with decisions. Not only for dialogue, but for gameplay as well. It's important not to get stuck on something that is too difficult, therefore there has to be a solution to let players enjoy another way than they originally thought of.
The developers confirmed that there will be a way to respec your character as well. In case you put the points into the wrong attributes or skills.