Cyberpunk 2077 dev explains its lack of police chases

A hot potato: While Cyberpunk 2077 launched with plenty of technical problems, one of the issues that players have with the gameplay is its lack of Grand Theft Auto V-style police chases. The game's quest designer has responded to the criticism, noting that not all open-world games feature such encounters and that they were planned for Cyberpunk, but developers couldn't get them to work in time for its release, so they were dropped.

In a recent livestream, Pawel Sasko was asked why a game with such a focus on vehicles and driving doesn't include car or police chase sequences---law enforcement officers simply spawn near the player, which can be very annoying. The person asking the question notes that the feature is present "in every other open-world game," something that seemed to irk Sasko.

"First of all, not every open-world game, right? Because, like, I don't think that Sonic, the chase game, will have it, or the Elden Ring open-world game will have it," he replied.

While it does appear that Sasko was just joking, kind of, some people took his comment as being quite snarky. "I'm not interested in the opinion of someone who deliberately ignores the point of the question and goes after the way it was formulated," wrote one Redditor.

Sasko adds that CD Projekt Red had intended to include police chases in Cyberpunk 2077, but various technical limitations saw them removed before development finished. Those limitations may relate to the last-gen consoles, whose lack of power was blamed for some of the game's numerous technical and performance issues at launch.

"It's not that we didn't make it because we didn't want to, it's just simply like, there are some reasons, you know, that basically prevented us from actually being able to deliver this," he said.

Cyberpunk 2077 has been in the news quite a bit this month, which marks one year since its infamous release. CD Projekt recently settled a lawsuit brought against the game for just $1.85 million, while Keanu Reeves says he's never played it, despite the developers claiming otherwise.