In the past, CD Projekt RED has made clear its desire to offer players as many options as possible in Cyberpunk 2077. This, of course, will translate to the character creation system. But there’ll be more to it than giving the player character, V, a compelling background and cool facial features. In striving to make a fully inclusive experience, CD Projekt’s character creation tools for Cyberpunk 2077 will blur the lines, abandoning gender options typically on display in RPGs.
During an interview with Metro, the title’s Senior Concept Artist, Marthe Jonkers, provided an example as to how the studio is approaching inclusivity. For one, when players begin creating their V, choosing male or female won’t be an option. Jonkers told Metro the following,
[With Cyberpunk 2077] we really want to make a video game that’s really inclusive. Of course, if you tackle certain subjects then you will expect people to have an opinion about it and we respect that. And it’s good that people give us feedback. And our character creation menu, for instance, compared to the last demo we now give you so many more options. For instance, you don’t choose your gender anymore. You don’t choose, ‘I want to be a female or male character’ you now choose a body type. Because we want you to feel free to create any character you want. So you choose your body type and we have two voices, one that’s male sounding, one is female sounding. You can mix and match. You can just connect them any way you want. And then we have a lot of extra skin tones and tattoos and hairstyles. So we really want to give people the freedom to make their own character and play the way they want to play.
Jonkers added that these decisions and more like it are informed by feedback. The studio takes everything to heart, as it simply wants to make the best game possible. He continued,
Our team is very international and very diverse but we have asked for a lot of feedback. We always ask for feedback and even when we show these demos, we still ask people to tell us what they think. We just wanna know what we can improve on because we want to make a really good game [with Cyberpunk 2077] and we really wanna make a game that everybody is comfortable playing. But at the same time we’ll tackle difficult issues. It is a cyberpunk world after all.
The studio has teased this in the past, with Quest Designer Mateusz Tomaszkiewicz speaking of how players will be able to create transgendered characters. Jonkers’ statement seemingly represents the first time the team has gone into any detail on the matter. Because these new character creation options have yet to be shown, it’s hard to know just how intricately this system will function. Perhaps CD Projekt will show something on this front during the upcoming gameplay livestream.
Cyberpunk 2077 will release next spring for the PS4, PC, and Xbox One on April 16, 2020. Shortly thereafter on April 21st, Dark Horse is slated to release a lore book, The World of Cyberpunk 2077.
[Source: Metro GameCentral via Wccftech]
