Robert Kurvitz said during his Game Camp France speech on worldbuilding, “Make sure your world can house multiple genres of story, from detective to adventure.”
I kept thinking about this line while choosing a game. Cyberpunk 2077 may actually be the better example for worldbuilding, because Night City can support detective stories, corporate thrillers, heists, action adventures, personal tragedies, and horror stories. The Cyberpunk universe also extends across a tabletop RPG, a AAA video game, the anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, the upcoming Edgerunners 2, and many player-created tabletop stories. Worldbuilding in Cyberpunk 2077 is not only about how the game looks or how much lore it has, but also how the game portrays social roles and urban environments, as well as how players experience economic differences throughout the game.
Cyberpunk 2077 is an open-world action RPG developed by CD PROJEKT RED and based on R. Talsorian Games’ Cyberpunk setting, created by Mike Pondsmith. Cyberpunk 2077 is available for PC and multiple consoles. Its target audience consists mainly of mature players interested in dystopian science fiction, RPG progression, open-world exploration, and themes of technology, violence, and social collapse.
Night City seems unique because it does not appear to have been designed exclusively for V. To me, V entering a world already in motion is what makes Night City feel different from many other open-world games.
Fg.1 Night City.
Gabriela Pereira describes the relationship between a character and the environment through an ecological model of worldbuilding. In this model, the main character, supporting cast, immediate surroundings, society, culture, and larger landscape affect one another. After selecting the Corpo lifepath, one of the possible ways for players to begin the game, I could immediately see how my choice affected how I viewed the environment and experienced the game. The actual mechanic of the lifepath system appears relatively simple: when the player selects a lifepath, they receive a different opening and enter the story from a different social position. I began near corporate power, then quickly learned that proximity to power is not the same as owning it. I briefly belonged to the corporate world, and then I was thrown away by it.
Once players select a lifepath, however, they generally find their way down the same path toward becoming a mercenary: performing jobs, becoming more famous, seeking higher levels of enhancement, avoiding death, and ultimately being considered a “legend” of the mercenary community. This may be a design limitation, but it also shows how Night City compresses different backgrounds into the same competitive survival economy.
This connects directly to the ethical question of how games represent identity. In class, we discussed how some versions of Dungeons & Dragons mechanically represent racial traits as inherent and biologically determined. Cyberpunk 2077 constructs identity through social, cultural, economic, and technological positions rather than biological characteristics. Corpo, Streetkid, Nomad, mercenary, fixer, ripperdoc, and edgerunner describe cultural, economic, or technological positions. As a result, rather than asking, “What are you by nature?” the game pushes players to reflect on, “What has this city made you become?”
For me, Arasaka Tower is one of the clearest examples of this. Unlike an ordinary open-world location, Arasaka Tower remains heavily restricted and symbolically inaccessible, even when the player is allowed to enter parts of it. The separation between the protected corporate interior of Arasaka Tower and the density and limited resources of street-level Night City speaks directly to the class structure of the city.
Fg. 2 Arasaka Tower
Cyberware makes the tension between empowerment and anxiety more concrete by turning the body itself into an upgrade system. Ultimately, the game teaches players to view self-improvement through purchasing better versions of their bodies. This creates an interesting contradiction: becoming stronger produces pleasure and satisfaction, yet the player also begins to view the body as something that must be continuously upgraded.
The game emphasizes this contradiction by allowing players to enjoy upgrading their characters’ physical abilities while simultaneously criticizing a world in which people are pressured to upgrade their bodies because of social conditions and corporate exploitation. In my NYU summer tabletop game, we created a similar pressure loop. Cyberware made players stronger, but also pushed them closer to insanity and dependence on immunosuppressants. That rule helped me understand how Cyberpunk 2077 can turn “choice” into pressure.
Fg. 3 A cyberware card in my own tabletop game.
Cyberpsychosis creates a similar contradiction. Mike Pondsmith has explained that cyberware does not automatically make someone cyberpsycho. There are multiple contributing factors, including stress, isolation, susceptibility, a person’s Humanity, and social inequality. However, an underlying contradiction remains. Many NPCs become cyberpsychos, while V is mostly protected from the full consequences of cyberpsychosis during the storyline. Thus, the player occupies a double role: a critic of the injustices within Night City who also benefits from participating in its systems.
This is why the Cyberpunk world can hold different stories. For example, Cyberpunk 2077 offers a story about V, a mercenary who wants to survive a corporate-controlled environment while attempting to become a legend in a city known for creating legends. Cyberpunk: Edgerunners follows David, a young man living in a harsh environment with little ability to protect himself. He is sold the false belief that becoming stronger through cyberware will eventually make him safe. Although the two works tell different stories, they exist within the same universe and follow the same underlying rules: corporations exploit individuals, individuals upgrade, legends are created, and bodies become the battlefield of corporate exploitation.
Fg. 4 One of our Edgerunner character cards in my tabletop game.
I think Cyberpunk 2077 both follows and questions how the cyberpunk genre is defined. Neon lights, cybernetic implants, gangs, hackers, megacorporations, and urban violence create an immediate context that helps players recognize and understand the genre. These stereotypes are beneficial because they make the genre immediately recognizable, but they can also be harmful when poverty, violence, and bodily breakdown become exciting visual decoration. Cyberpunk 2077 is strongest when it makes the player question why these images look attractive instead of simply using suffering as atmosphere. Ultimately, it shows how a society can continue functioning even when extreme inequality is built into the environment itself.
