Why Cyberpunk 2077 Outperforms The Witcher 3 as an RPG

CD Projekt Red is known for two of the most beloved modern role-playing games: The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077. Both are sprawling, story-rich RPGs, but they approach the idea of “role-playing” in very different ways. While The Witcher 3 is often praised as the definitive open-world fantasy epic, there is a strong case that Cyberpunk 2077 actually delivers a purer, more flexible role-playing experience.

This article explores how each game handles player identity, character progression, narrative choice, and world design, and why those elements collectively make Cyberpunk 2077 the stronger RPG—even if you still prefer Geralt’s adventures overall.

Rethinking What “Role-Playing” Really Means

Before comparing the two games, it helps to unpack what we mean by “role-playing.” Historically, role-playing games—on paper and on screen—have emphasized:

• Player agency: the freedom to make meaningful decisions.
• Character customization: shaping who your character is, mechanically and narratively.
• Consequences: seeing your choices reflected in the world and story.
• Systemic depth: stats, builds, and mechanics that support different playstyles.

Tabletop RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons are built around those principles, giving players broad freedom to define their character and influence the world via rules, stats, and improvisation. Digital RPGs translate that concept into code, quests, and branching dialogue. Academic work on role-playing games highlights this interplay between rules and narrative as the core of the RPG experience.¹

From that perspective, the question becomes: which game actually gives you more room to inhabit a role of your choosing—Geralt of Rivia in a fixed epic, or V in the malleable chaos of Night City?

Fixed Hero vs. Custom Protagonist

One of the most important differences between The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 lies in how they treat the player character.

Geralt: A Defined Personality in a Defined World

In The Witcher 3, you play as Geralt of Rivia—a character with decades of lore from Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels and previous games. Geralt’s personality is already well established: he’s gruff but compassionate, cynical yet moral. Your choices usually nudge that persona along a spectrum rather than radically redefine it.

• Dialogue options tend to offer shades of Geralt’s established character, not a blank-slate reinvention.
• Major choices can be impactful, but they are always interpreted through Geralt’s history and relationships.
• The story treats you as a specific person with a known role: monster hunter, adoptive father, ex-lover.

This results in a highly polished narrative, but it means you’re inhabiting an already-written hero more than creating your own.

V: A Character You Actively Shape

Cyberpunk 2077 starts from almost the opposite premise. V is loosely defined, with the player determining:

• Appearance: body type, facial features, and style.
• Background (Lifepath): Streetkid, Nomad, or Corpo, each with unique introductions and dialogue checks.
• Build: where you invest attribute points, perks, and cyberware.

Beyond cosmetic customization, the lifepath and build choices influence how the world responds to you. Certain dialogue options, solutions to quests, or role-playing opportunities open up or close off based on your earlier decisions about who V is.

That flexibility aligns closely with core RPG design: your character concept is not just flavor; it feeds into narrative and gameplay in ways that meaningfully differentiate one playthrough from another.

Character Builds and Playstyles: Where Systems Meet Story

Role-playing isn’t only about dialogue choices; it’s also built into statistics and mechanics. The systems that govern combat, stealth, hacking, or negotiation are what let you express your character concept through play.

The Witcher 3: Strong Combat, Limited Build Diversity

The Witcher 3 features multiple skill trees (combat, signs, alchemy, and more) that let you specialize to some extent. You can become a heavier melee combatant, a sign-focused witcher, or a potion-enhanced mutant. Yet the overall structure keeps Geralt’s toolkit relatively consistent across playthroughs.

• Most builds still revolve around swordplay and a common set of witcher abilities.
• Encounters rarely change radically based on your build; you mostly vary in efficiency rather than approach.
• Non-combat solutions exist, but they’re usually driven by dialogue choices rather than mechanics like hacking or stealth.

The leveling and equipment systems are satisfying, but they’re not designed to produce radically different characters. You’re customizing how Geralt fights, not fundamentally redefining what he is.

Cyberpunk 2077: Builds as a Core Identity

By contrast, Cyberpunk 2077 structures many of its systems around the idea that your build is your character. Attributes such as Body, Intelligence, Reflexes, Technical Ability, and Cool open different perk paths and enable specific approaches.

Examples of how builds change gameplay:

• Netrunner: Invest heavily in Intelligence and related perks to solve encounters through hacking, disabling enemies and systems from a distance.
• Stealth specialist: Focus on Cool to sneak, assassinate, and avoid direct conflict.
• Bruiser: Put points into Body to rip doors open, intimidate NPCs, and dominate in close combat.
• Tech-savvy tinkerer: Use Technical Ability to craft, upgrade gear, and exploit environmental advantages.

Cyberware further differentiates these paths, enabling non-human feats that reshape both combat and traversal. Crucially, these choices often intersect with story content: a high Body score can unlock new dialogue options, while strong hacking skills might provide alternative quest resolutions.

That kind of systemic integration aligns with broader trends in RPG design, where player builds are expected to offer distinct playstyles and narrative hooks.² In this area, Cyberpunk 2077 simply gives players more tools to inhabit their chosen role.

Quest Design and Player Choice

Both games are frequently praised for their quests, but they emphasize different strengths. The Witcher 3 excels at tightly written stories, often framed as folklore-inspired investigations. Cyberpunk 2077, especially after patches and the Phantom Liberty expansion, leans harder into branching decisions and long-term consequences.

The Witcher 3: Narrative Quality Over Flexibility

The quests in The Witcher 3 are often held up as some of the best in the genre for a reason:

• They feature moral ambiguity, complex characters, and memorable twists.
• Even small contracts can turn into rich stories with unexpected stakes.
• Side quests frequently affect local outcomes, such as who lives, dies, or holds power.

However, the branching structure tends to be narrower: you typically choose between a few key outcomes in a quest, and the effects are localized. The overarching main story—Geralt’s search for Ciri and confrontation with the Wild Hunt—remains relatively fixed, with multiple endings based on a known set of decision points.

Cyberpunk 2077: Branching Paths and Long-Term Fallout

Cyberpunk 2077 takes a more systemic and cumulative approach to quest design. While it also has linear story arcs, certain lines—especially character-focused ones—can dramatically reshape the conclusion of the game and your relationship with key allies.

Some hallmarks of its approach:

• Side quests can influence which ending routes are available to you.
• Dialogue checks tied to attributes, lifepath, and prior choices can alter outcomes.
• Multiple playthroughs genuinely feel different if you pursue different questlines and builds.

The expansion Phantom Liberty further emphasizes these RPG aspects, adding new endings that hinge on choices made within its storyline and beyond. Critical coverage of the expansion has noted how it leans into player agency and alternate conclusions as a key design goal.³

While The Witcher 3 often tells better individual stories in a traditional sense, Cyberpunk 2077 is more committed to letting your decisions carve out divergent futures.

Worlds That Respond: Fantasy Realms vs. Night City

World-building is another area where comparisons get interesting. One game has a densely detailed fantasy continent; the other offers a towering, neon-drenched metropolis. Both settings are rich, but they engage the player differently.

The Witcher 3’s Continent: A Storybook Come to Life

The open world of The Witcher 3 is varied and atmospheric—windswept islands, war-torn villages, haunted swamps. It excels at environmental storytelling, letting you infer history from abandoned settlements, monster nests, and political tensions.

However, the world is less interactive in systemic terms:

• Most encounters are handcrafted rather than emergent.
• NPCs are flavorful but limited in interactivity.
• Urban areas like Novigrad feel alive but mainly function as quest hubs and markets.

It’s an extraordinary backdrop for narrative, but it often feels like a stage set—beautiful and thematic, but not deeply reactive to your identity beyond specific quest lines.

Night City: A Vertical Playground for Role-Play

Night City, the setting of Cyberpunk 2077, is designed from the ground up as a vertical, dense, and layered environment. Official materials describe it as a “massive open world” where players can explore “varied districts” and engage with multiple factions driven by their own agendas.⁴

What distinguishes Night City as an RPG space:

• District identity: Each area feels like its own culture and power structure, influencing the tone of quests and encounters.
• Systemic affordances: Hacking cameras, disabling enemies, navigating rooftops, or using cyberware to open new pathways ties the environment to your build.
• Ambient opportunities: Gigs, dynamic events, and fixers’ calls arise as you explore, reinforcing your role as a merc navigating a living economy of jobs.

The city’s density and verticality amplify the sense that you are not just moving through a static world, but actively exploiting and surviving within it according to your chosen skillset.

Living With Your Decisions: Endings and Consequences

Endings are one of the clearest measures of how seriously a game treats player agency. Both titles offer multiple conclusions, but they differ in how those outcomes are reached and what they communicate about your role in the story.

The Witcher 3: Emotional Payoff Within a Fixed Arc

The Witcher 3 delivers several major ending variants for its main story, particularly regarding Ciri’s fate and the geopolitical state of the world. These outcomes depend on key choices, some of which are emotionally subtle and easily misunderstood.

The result is compelling: your decisions feel weighty, and the game’s final hours pay off long-running character relationships. Yet the structure is still that of an epic you’re steering from within, not an identity you’re crafting from scratch.

Cyberpunk 2077: Identity, Mortality, and Player Ownership

In Cyberpunk 2077, endings revolve around existential questions of identity, control, and survival. Who V becomes, which allies they trust, and how they confront their situation all flow from a combination of:

• Earlier questlines you completed or ignored.
• How you resolved those questlines.
• Certain climactic decisions at the end of the game.

Because your version of V is more malleable from the outset, those endings feel more tied to the role you chose to inhabit. With Phantom Liberty in the mix, the range of outcomes and thematic resolutions expands, reinforcing the sense that the story is about your specific incarnation of V rather than a single canonical arc with minor variations.

Is Cyberpunk 2077 a Better RPG, or Just a Different One?

When you compare the two games as overall experiences, it’s easy to see why players might still favor The Witcher 3. Its pacing, character writing, and fantasy setting come together in a way that feels timeless. But if you zoom in on role-playing in a strict sense—agency, customization, systemic depth, and reactivity—Cyberpunk 2077 has distinct advantages.

Areas where Cyberpunk 2077 pulls ahead as an RPG:

• More flexible protagonist, shaped by lifepath, stats, and cyberware.
• Greater build diversity with mechanical consequences for playstyle.
• Questlines and endings that more heavily factor in player-driven identity.
• A world designed to be exploited and navigated differently based on character choices.

Meanwhile, The Witcher 3 remains a benchmark for narrative design, emotionally resonant quests, and world-building. You might consider it the superior narrative adventure, while recognizing that Cyberpunk 2077 leans more fully into the possibilities of player-defined role-play.

Ultimately, these two games showcase different strengths of the RPG genre. Together, they illustrate how the same studio can explore contrasting philosophies: one centered on telling the best possible story about a beloved character, the other on giving players the tools to define their own.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Cyberpunk 2077 still have technical issues that affect the RPG experience?

At launch, Cyberpunk 2077 was widely criticized for bugs and performance problems, particularly on last-generation consoles. Subsequent patches and updates have significantly improved stability and performance on supported platforms. While minor glitches can still occur, the core RPG systems—builds, dialogue, and quest branching—are now generally accessible and stable for most players, according to updates and communications from the developer.⁵

Can you role-play very differently in multiple Cyberpunk 2077 playthroughs?

Yes. Choosing different lifepaths, skill distributions, and cyberware setups can substantially change how you approach missions and conversations. Some quests and endings also depend on which character arcs you pursue, making multiple playthroughs meaningfully distinct from a role-playing perspective.

Is The Witcher 3 less of an RPG because Geralt is a fixed character?

Not at all. Fixing the protagonist allows the game to deliver a more focused narrative and character development. You still make important choices that affect outcomes and the world around you. However, in terms of player-authored identity and build-driven playstyles, it’s not as flexible as Cyberpunk 2077.

Which game should new players start with if they care most about story?

If your priority is a coherent, emotionally powerful narrative with a strong central character, The Witcher 3 is likely the better starting point. It offers a complete saga that stands on its own even if you haven’t read the books. Cyberpunk 2077 also has a compelling story, but its strengths lean more toward player-driven role-play and multiple interpretations of V’s journey.

Do you need to play earlier Witcher games or know Cyberpunk tabletop lore?

The Witcher 3 is designed to be accessible to newcomers, though familiarity with earlier games or the novels enriches the experience. Cyberpunk 2077 is similarly approachable without knowledge of the original tabletop RPG, with in-game codex entries and environmental storytelling filling in key setting details.