A leaked Cyberpunk 2077 map has popped up online, purporting to show players a top-down view of Night City. This first possible look at Night City shows what looks like a smaller map that expected, but it doesn’t quite tell the whole story.
Cyberpunk 2077 has been building up hype for its upcoming November 2020 launch. CD Projekt Red has launched a special website that tells players about Night City, the fictional setting for this new cyberpunk RPG. While some players are concerned about the crunch time developers have to endure, just as many players are hungry for more details about the game. Now, a leaked Cyberpunk 2077 map may have given players the first full look at Night City from the top down.
The leaked Cyberpunk 2077 map doesn’t tell the whole story
When players look at the leaked Cyberpunk 2077 map, it may seem small, especially in comparison to massive open-world games like GTA 5. However, the map of Cyberpunk 2077 is an entirely different beast than what has been seen before; CD Projekt Red is building a robust world that will be used for everything from the game to an upcoming anime series on Netflix.
“If you look at pure surface [in terms of] square kilometers, then Cyberpunk 2077 might even be a little bit smaller than The Witcher 3,” Cyberpunk 2077 producer Richard Borzymowski told GamesRadar.
“[Night City is] an integral part of the setting; it’s essentially a protagonist if you want to call it that, so it has to be denser,” he continued. “It wouldn’t give us the end effect we wanted to achieve if the city wouldn’t be believable […] so we packed it full of life.”
What does this mean for the player? CD Projekt Red has already shown off some of the game’s expansive setting; considering what Richard Borzymowski has said, the natural assumption is that many buildings will have multiple floors accessible to the player. So while the game’s map may seem small, there is set to be more verticality there than in many comparative open-world games, making it larger than a birds-eye view of its setting would suggest.
Players should take the leaked Cyberpunk 2077 map with a grain of salt; as always, it’s difficult to judge the veracity of a leak without independent confirmation. If this is the map for CD Projekt Red’s next game, don’t be fooled by its small surface area — players will likely be able to explore a lot more than the ground floor of this dense futuristic city.
