I have wondered how Cyberpunk 2077’s sequel would work if we’ve already explored essentially all of Night City and its surrounding areas. Turns out there’s an intriguing answer for that.

Speaking at Digital Dragons in Poland, CDPR’s Mike Pondsmith addressed the question. Turns out that Cyberpunk 2078 (I’m just going to start calling it this) will have two cities, Night City and a second one that is “a new city inspired by a dystopian Chicago.”

“There is one more city which we are visiting – Night City is still there,” Pondsmith said. “I remember how I looked at it and thought ‘yes, I understand the climate you’re going towards and it realistically works; you can’t feel Blade Runner, it’s more like Chicago, which went the wrong direction.”

This is interesting as it’s unclear if this is a city “inspired” by Chicago or if it’s…literally Chicago in the universe. My guess is the former for a few reasons.

First of all, Chicago itself exists in the Cyberpunk 2077 universe. Effectively all real-world cities do. Night City is its own thing, but the game references LA, Vegas, DC, Denver, and yes, Chicago.

The second reason is how Chicago is referenced in the game. Lore you may have missed indicates that Chicago is dealing with a “bioplague” that quarantined the city which has become lawless and cut off from the world after its mass contamination from a weaponized biological weapon test. It is also dealing with destroyed technical interfaces like the Net.

I mean, that sounds like exactly the sort of dystopia that Pondsmith is referencing here. Maybe that has some sort of other, Cyberpunk-ish name for the city after all, but a walled-off, contaminated, lawless city sounds like a great contrast to Night City where yes, it’s filled with crime, but as Pondsmith says, it’s more Blade Runner-esque, run by corpos.

This sounds…amazing? Cyberpunk 2077 is my favorite game of all time (no exaggeration), and this seems like it would solve the “return only to Night City” problem that I was worried about and introduce an entirely different dynamic to the game and world that we haven’t seen before (though perhaps a bit like Dogtown). I hope we don’t have to deal with “contamination zones” with poison gas that require oxygen-depleting masks or something, as I find that mechanic pretty annoying (looking at you, The Division), but whatever it is, I’m sure it will be great. You know, provided it launches well…

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.