Here’s why Cyberpunk 2077’s main story isn’t as long as The Witcher 3

Cyberpunk 2077‘s main campaign will be shorter than that of CD Projekt Red’s previous game, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, because not enough player’s finished the latter.

Senior quest designer Patrick Mills stated during the post-show following the recent Night City Wire (via IGN) that CD Projekt Red “got a lot of complaints about Witcher 3‘s main story just being too long. Looking at the metrics, you see tremendous numbers of people played through the game really far, but never made it to the end.”

In order to avoid that mistake, Mills said that CD Projekt Red “did shorten the main story [of Cyberpunk 2077], but we have lots to do, and in terms of completionist campaign, I just don’t have that number.”

While The Witcher 3‘s main story can be finished in about 50 hours, it offers another hundred or two hours of side quests and contracts, not to mention the lengthy paid DLC. Cyberpunk 2077‘s story might not take 50 hours to complete, but CD Projekt Red has already confirmed that its highly anticipated action RPG will be getting free DLC post-launch similar to how it added non-paid content to The Witcher 3.

A shorter campaign might seem disappointing at first, but Cyberpunk 2077 is also offering three distinct lifepaths that players can choose at the beginning of the game. That means that players might not only finish the game’s campaign, but they might even have the chance to replay it.

Cyberpunk 2077 is launching for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC on November 19th, with versions for Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, and Google Stadia planned for later dates.