175 Hours Is A ‘Slow-Paced, Hard Difficulty’ Cyberpunk 2077 Playthrough

The final size of Cyberpunk 2077 remains to be seen, but even though it’s supposed to be “smaller” than The Witcher 3, it is looking to be much “denser.” Also what “small” means for a CDPR game is on another plane of existence, given that even the DLCs from the studios are larger than most full-size games.

Now we may have a glimpse at how much there is to extract from Cyberpunk 2077 in terms of total playtime. I’m not sure if these tweets will end up deleted, but Łukasz Babiel, QA lead for CDPR, just posted that he spent 175 hours with the game:

According to him this was a “slow-paced” playthrough on Hard difficulty, where “I play more stealthy than usual, loot everything, use every feature the game has to offer, I take my time.” In short, kind of how the game was mostly meant to be played.

Of course, there are factors to consider here. If you’re playing on Normal difficulty you may fail encounters less time and get through things faster. If you don’t play stealthy and go in loud you can probably clear rooms more easily and quickly, if most video games where that’s an option are anything to go by.

And yet I would be amazed if doing most of what Cyberpunk 2077 has to offer doesn’t at least take 100 hours even if you’re not a QA lead digging into every inch of the game.

This would, of course, make Cyberpunk 2077 the largest game in terms of playtime of the season, probably more so than Assassin’s Creed Valhalla which currently has that title. And here we can get into a debate about how $60 for Cyberpunk is offering 100+ hours while Godfall’s campaign is like, seven, for $70, but that’s an argument as old as time.

Cyberpunk 2077 will not suffer any more delays as that ship has sailed, and units are already at retail in many instances (with some even leaking). It was always destined to be one of the biggest, longest games of the year but to see it quantified by someone at the studio is new. You could easily put 175 hours into The Witcher 3, and even if a lot has changed from that game to this one, we are still getting what we expect from CDPR. Whether the game receives the same amount of praise and accolades remains to be seen, but everything shown and previewed looks excellent so far, and now we’re just over two weeks away from experiencing it ourselves.

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